“What,” said Paul.
“Now I feel myself being chill, or something. Or I don’t know. I didn’t know what was going on. I thought it seemed like you weren’t feeling anything.”
“Really?” said Paul with earnest wonderment.
“Yeah. Let’s just go back and do more, then come back.”
“All right,” said Paul in a voice as if reluctantly acquiescing.
“Do you want that?”
“Yeah. I’ll take two, you take one.”
“Okay,” said Erin.
“But. . now I’m going to have it stronger than you.”
“I’ll take one and a half,” said Erin.
After both ingesting two ecstasy and, almost idly, as sort of afterthoughts, because it had been very weak the past few times, a little LSD, they exited Paul’s room, and Erin went to the bathroom. Paul’s mother asked Paul what clothes he bought. Paul said he didn’t yet and his mother said he should buy thicker clothing and they discussed where, at this time, around 10:30 p.m., to find open stores. When Erin exited the bathroom Paul’s mother asked if she bought any clothes.
“No,” said Erin smiling. “Not yet.”
“Okay,” said Paul in Mandarin. “We’re going now.”
“Cell phone,” said Paul’s mother in Mandarin.
“I’ve got it,” said Paul in Mandarin.
“Bring a cell phone,” said Paul’s father in Mandarin from out of view, watching TV.
“Why are you bringing your computer?” said Paul’s mother in Mandarin.
“We, just,” said Paul in Mandarin.
“Oh, you’re going to record again,” said Paul’s mother in Mandarin in a slightly scolding voice, but without worry, it seemed, maybe because she could see that Paul was the same as last year. “The ‘video thing,’ isn’t it better?”
“What video thing?”
“I sent it to you. I bought it for you. For your birthday. Did you already sell it?”
“No. I have it in my room.”
“What’s it called?”
“Flip cam,” said Paul.
“Dad went to many different places asking which was the best. Why don’t you use it?”
“What are you all talking about?” said Paul’s father idly in Mandarin from out of view.
“My mom probably knows we’re on drugs, or something,” said Paul after they’d walked around two minutes without talking. “She sounded suspicious when she saw us recording. But she seemed okay with it. I searched my emails with her earlier and. . she said something like ‘it’s okay to experience new things but don’t overdo it,’ or like ‘it’s probably good for a writer to experiment,’ and she was talking about cocaine, I think.”
“I thought your mom was completely against drugs.”
“Me too,” said Paul. “I forgot an entire period of emails where she seemed okay with it. My brother, I think, told her, at one point, that I had too much self-control to become addicted to anything. My brother told her not to worry, I think. I don’t know.”
“I haven’t swallowed the LSD yet,” said Erin at a red light a few minutes later. “My throat won’t push it down to my stomach, it’s weird.” Paul distractedly pointed at a billboard of disabled people, then looked at Erin’s tattoo of an asterisk behind her earlobe as she looked at the billboard. “In Taiwan only disabled people, I think, can sell lottery tickets,” said Paul slowly while imagining being heard by thousands of readers of a future book, or book-like experience, in which Erin’s name had an asterisk by it, indicating the option of stopping the narrative to learn about Erin, in the form of a living footnote, currently pointing the MacBook at the three-lane street, on which hundreds of scooters and motorcycles passing, in layers, with more than one per lane, at different speeds, appeared like a stationary, patternless shuffling.
“Swarming,” Erin was saying. “Swarm. Swarm.”
“My mom warned against getting hit by a car,” said Paul.
“Does it happen a lot?”
“I don’t know,” said Paul as a car honked. “I don’t know.”
“I kind of have to pee again,” said Erin crossing the street.
“You have to pee? We’ll find somewhere.”
“In my public-speaking class, on the last day, this guy spoke about how he has kidney failure and can’t pee. At all. He poops his pee.”
“He doesn’t even have a tube?”
“No,” said Erin.
“How old is he?”
“Twenty-four,” said Erin.
“Whoa,” said Paul.
“Yeah. And he has a big thing in his arm — his dialysis machine.”
“From drinking alcohol?”
“He didn’t say why,” said Erin, and a man wearing a motorcycle helmet in the near distance walked briskly across the sidewalk, seeming “too comfortable in his motorcycle helmet,” thought Paul with mock disapproval, into a 7-Eleven.
“What if we just moved here,” said Paul.
“Let’s move here,” said Erin with enthusiasm.
“Since we don’t have friends. What would we do all the time?”
“Work on writing,” said Erin. “We’d have to go back, to do promotion things.”
“We can pay people to pretend to be us.”
“Interns,” said Erin.
“Backpacks,” said Paul a few minutes later about a vat-like container of generic-looking backpacks, outside a foot-wear store. “What do you think of these?”
“They seem good. Simple.”
“Your red backpack. . is really dirty,” said Paul, and laughed nervously.
“It only looks dirty. I clean it a lot.”
“Backpack,” said Paul touching a black backpack.
“I would buy one but my mom said she’s buying me one for Christmas,” said Erin.
After peeing in an MRT station they decided to find a McDonald’s and improvise Taiwan’s First McDonald’s. Paul’s MacBook had seventy-two minutes of battery power remaining. They couldn’t find a McDonald’s, after around five minutes, but two Burger Kings were in view, so they decided to do Taiwan’s First Burger King, then crossed a street and saw a McDonald’s, six to ten blocks away. “Let’s not talk until we get there,” said Paul. “But start thinking.”
“Let’s not think of what to say, let’s just do it,” said Erin.
“Just as an experiment, let’s not talk until we get there.”
“Oh,” said Erin. “Okay, okay.”
Paul stared at her with an exaggeratedly disgusted expression, which she reciprocated. They ran diagonally across three lanes to a median and held their open palms out to motorcyclists advancing in the spaces between slow-moving and stopped cars, as if by vacuum suction. Two people on one motorcycle shouted “hey, hey, go, yeah!” and slapped Erin’s palm. Paul and Erin, both smiling widely, crossed to a sidewalk and turned toward McDonald’s. Paul took the MacBook and stared in earnest fascination — feeling almost appalled, but without aversion — as Erin ran and leaped stomach-first onto the front of a parked car, then speed-walked away with arms tight against her sides, crossing Paul’s vision, supernatural and comical as a mysterious creature on YouTube, before calmly taking the MacBook. Paul stared angrily at the sidewalk with his body bent forward, imagining a powerful magnet dragging him by a strip of metal at the top of his forehead. He began hitting his head with balled fists. Erin hit his head, and he instantly stared at her in mock disbelief. Erin grasped the floor of an invisible opening midair with both arms extended, not fully, above her. Paul, staring with earnest astonishment, imagined a ventilation-system-like tunnel and pulled her arms down while trying to feign an expression of “feigned disgust unsuccessfully concealing immense excitement,” as if Erin had unknowingly discovered the entrance to a place Paul had recently stopped trying (after a decade of research, massive debt, the inadvertent nurturing of an antisocial personality) to locate. He laughed and continued ahead and — two blocks later, nearing McDonald’s, which had a suburban-seeming front yard of quadrilaterals of grass, a sidewalk, gigantic Christmas tree, lighted menu, driveway for the drive-thru — he accelerated and entered McDonald’s saying “let’s get a shot with a lot of background activity to lure them back with the rewatches,” and after a few seconds, because the first floor had only an ordering counter, was ascending stairs, to the second floor, where eight to twelve people were in forty to sixty seats.