“That seems good,” said Erin smiling.
• • •
In Louisiana, two days later, Paul and Erin were in a Best Buy, early in the afternoon, to buy an external hard drive, because their MacBooks from storing their movies were almost out of memory. Paul was walking aimlessly through the store with a bored expression, holding the Smashing Pumpkins’ double CD below him, at waist level, where he scratched its plastic wrapping in an idle, distracted, privately frustrated manner. After finally tearing it off and lodging it, with difficulty, because it kept clinging to him by static electricity, behind some Beck CDs, he used “brute force,” he thought instructionally, to pry open the locked case and get only the blue CD, which had “Tonight, Tonight” and “Zero” on it, to listen to in the rental car.
In Best Buy’s security room, which was module-like and dimmer than the store, the sheriff of Baton Rouge shook his head in strong, earnest, remarkably unjaded disappointment when Paul, asked why he was here — he had a Florida driver’s license, a New York address — said a college had invited him to speak to them, as an author.
“I felt ashamed,” said Paul in the parking lot to Erin. “I feel like I was on shoplifting autopilot. I wasn’t thinking anything. I was just already doing it.” In Barnes & Noble, a few hours later, he stole Nirvana’s second “greatest hits” collection. They ate watermelon and pineapple chunks in Whole Foods, then drove downtown and rode an elevator to the sixth floor of a darkly tinted building, where Paul read to LSU’s graduate writing program for around twenty minutes (“from a memoir-in-progress that’ll be more than a thousand pages,” he said half earnestly) about a night he watched Robin Hood with Daniel at the Union Square theater, then went to a pizza restaurant, where Fran, who had whiskey in a Dr Pepper bottle, got drunker than Paul had ever seen her and the next day quit her job, after two days, as a waitress in a Polish restaurant. Paul felt self-conscious whenever mentioning a drug, in part because none of his previous books had drugs — except caffeine, alcohol, Tylenol Cold, St. John’s wort — but the audience laughed almost every time a drug was mentioned, seeming delighted, like most of them were on drugs, which was probably true, Paul thought while reading off his MacBook screen. He imagined stopping what he was reading to instead say “Klonopin,” wait three seconds, say “Xanax,” wait three seconds, etc. He didn’t notice until the word “concealment” that he was reading a sentence from something else he’d been working on that had been pasted apparently into the wrong file. He continued reading the sentence—
The transparency and total effort, with none spent on explanation or concealment or experimentation, of what the universe desired — to hug itself as carefully, as violently and patiently, as had been exactly decided upon, at some point, with gravity — was [something].
— until getting to “[something],” which he remembered using as a placeholder after trying combinations of synonyms for “affecting” and “confusing” and longer descriptions like “an actualized ideal, inside of which any combination of parts could never independently attain.” He stared at “[something]” and thought about saying “Klonopin” or “Xanax.” He thought about explaining the bracket usage. “The sentence I just read wasn’t supposed to be there,” he said. “I pasted it there by accident, I think. I’ll stop here, thank you.”
He sat next to Erin in the front row, then Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, a woman in her 60s, whose introduction included that she was married to Richard Tuttle — the artist Gabby said Daniel resembled — read poems for thirty minutes.
• • •
At a flea market, the next afternoon, after drinking the equivalent of six to eight cups of coffee — in the form of 24x condensed coffee, which they bought from Whole Foods and had never seen before, in containers reminiscent of toilet-cleaning liquid — they pretended to be Wall Street Journal reporters and recorded themselves interviewing strangers about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1. Erin meekly asked a large, young, thuggish-looking man and his smaller friend, both wearing backward caps, if they thought Darth Vader would “die in this one.” After a long pause the large man laughed and said “man, I don’t know,” and looked at his friend, who appeared expressionless, like he hadn’t heard anything that had been said.
“Darth Vader is Star Trek, not Harry Potter,” said Paul in a weak form of the “the voice,” feigning he was remembering this aloud.
“No, no,” said Erin grinning. “Really?”
“Star Wars,” said Paul laughing a little.
“Oh, I don’t know, never mind, never mind, I need to check my notes,” said Erin shaking her head and grinning as she and Paul walked away mumbling to each other, attempting to parody, Paul felt, a stereotypical comedy in which two high-level professionals are egregiously demoted into positions where they struggle to regain their jobs while nurturing between them an unlikely romance and mutually learning the true meaning in life. Erin said she felt “a strong need to be on more drugs.” Without MDMA it was difficult to use “the voice,” without which they felt uncomfortable talking to strangers, improvising, feigning behavior, trying to be witty.
• • •
After ingesting their remaining Xanax, and more condensed coffee, they decided to drive to New Orleans, an hour away, because their flight to New York, from Baton Rouge, wasn’t until the next morning. It became dark suddenly, it seemed, during the drive. Erin expressed concern about Paul’s driving speed in residential-seeming areas. Paul encouraged her to nap (they’d both said they were sleepy, due to Xanax) and said he would be careful and, a vague amount of time later, became aware of a car that was parked, for some reason, on the street. After a few seconds of vague, unexamined confusion Paul realized the car, in the near distance, was stopped at a red light and abruptly braked hard, then harder, curling his toes with a sensation of clenching a fist. The screeching noise and forward thrust startled Erin awake, but she remained silent, seeming mostly confused. Paul drove sheep-ishly into a shopping plaza and parked near the middle of the mostly empty parking lot and turned off the car.
“I started feeling anxious before like where were we going and we were going fast and it was dark and you were running into things a little bit and I was scared and anxious and afraid,” said Erin in one breath of wildly fluctuating volume and inflection and affect that seemed out of control and arbitrary, then in retrospect like she’d virtuosically sung a popular melody faster than anyone had ever considered trying.
“Sorry,” said Paul with a worried expression.
“And I felt scared,” said Erin with a slight tremble.
“Sorry,” said Paul. “I’m really sorry.” After he apologized more times they walked holding hands across the parking lot. Erin said she only felt slightly interrupted when she woke, that she had been like, “wait, I don’t care, right now, about dying, but in the future I might not want to die.” In a confused, intrigued voice Paul said “in. . the future?”
“In the future I’ll—” said Erin.
“But if you’re dead you’ll be dead,” said Paul in a loud, murmurred, strangely incredulous voice that he felt aversion toward and confused by.
“What?”
“But if you’re dead you’ll die,” mumbled Paul in a quieter, slurred voice like a stroke victim.
“But I didn’t really want to die right then,” said Erin.
Around midnight, on the drive back to Baton Rouge, Erin said her father seemed to enjoy giving her Xanax and Adderall and that she used to get angry at him for smoking marijuana every night because it affected his memory and he would repeat himself — and, if stopped, would become defensive, argumentative — but now she didn’t try to change him anymore. Paul said his father’s default name for him, what he’d unconsciously say to get Paul’s attention or to reference Paul in conversation, was “baby” until high school, or maybe college, when it became “old baby”—in Taiwanese, where both words were one syllable — which was what he now called almost all people and animals, including Dudu, the toy poodle, Paul remembered, that his parents had bought sometime in the past year, after he visited in December.