“Try to find a celebrity face to stand in front of,” said Erin.
“I’m going to wash my face, I can’t appear like this,” said Paul grinning, and went to the bathroom. When he returned Erin was picking at her hair, with elbows locked above her head, hands moving inward in a kind of puppetry, or to cast spells on her head. She left for the bathroom. Christmas music played on a loop, repeating every forty or fifty seconds. Paul looked at what seemed to be a group of mute people in a separate, attached, somewhat private room and thought of a documentary about a woman who became deaf and mute as a teenager and remained on her bed feeling depressed, she said, for fifteen years before devoting her life to traveling across Germany teaching the deaf-mute language and “bringing out” those, born deaf-mute, with whom communication had never been attempted. Paul was absently drumming the table with his hands when Erin returned. He stood and said they should start the documentary outside, pointed at the attached room, said “look, those people are mute, I think.”
Erin seemed confused and slightly frightened.
“Mute,” said Paul. “It’s a group of mute people.”
“Oh, mute. Jesus, I thought I was having a drug thing.”
“Jesus,” said Paul.
“They’re like how we were,” said Erin.
“Oh yeah,” said Paul.
“When we couldn’t talk, I felt like I had to talk,” said Erin descending stairs. “But I had nothing to say. I just felt encompassed by the limits.”
They sat on a grassy area of the median — after deciding to begin Taiwan’s First McDonald’s “in the middle of traffic”—and criticized their own, while complimenting each other’s, hair and faces for three minutes until Paul abruptly stood and said “let’s go inside” with a sensation of “surveying” the premises, though his eyes were unfocused.
“I started feeling things big-time,” said Erin.
“Me too,” said Paul.
“Big-time style,” said Erin, and they ran across the street into McDonald’s, to the second floor. “We’re back. . here. . again,” said Paul, and laughed a little while feeling the situation was hilarious.
“Yeah,” said Erin laughing, and they returned outside.
“You be the host,” said Paul pointing the MacBook at Erin, who stood in front of the lighted menu the size of a blackboard.
“For Bravo,” said Erin.
“Use ‘the voice.’ Just don’t grin.”
“Okay, okay,” said Erin.
“Just don’t grin,” said Paul.
“Well, here’s the flagship, uh, Taipei’s fir—”
“Let me try,” said Paul giving Erin the MacBook.
Erin made noises indicating failure, self-disgust.
“So this is the first McDonald’s to open, in, um, well, Taiwan,” said Paul. “It opened on. . Tuesday. They had the grand opening special of three patties.” He moved his ear to an image of a Double Filet-O-Fish on the menu and said “it doesn’t want to be filmed” to Erin, who said “the camera is not on” with exaggerated enunciation to the Double Filet-O-Fish. “Here is. . this is Hillary Clinton’s hairstyle,” said Paul pointing at lettuce protruding from a chicken sandwich.
“Tactical, um,” said Erin.
“Explosions,” said Paul after a few seconds.
“Well, yeah,” said Erin.
“Jesus,” said Paul, and they both grinned a little. “All right. Now we’ll go inside for a closer look. . at the conflict, the controversy.” Through the glass front a deliveryman, wearing a motorcycle helmet, peeked around a corner at the ordering counter. “It’s been said that he’s actually the founder of McDonald’s,” said Paul. “They stole his idea, now he just looks. I actually just heard someone talking about it over there. That guy!”
Erin pointed the MacBook at a man scurrying away from McDonald’s.
“He won’t go ‘on the record,’ ” said Paul. “He’s too afraid.”
“Let’s move inside,” said Erin, and pointed at a PUSH sticker. “Oh, this is actually—”
“They had to add that. Because people actually were trying to, um—”
“Pull,” said Erin.
“Yeah, pull,” said Paul grinning, and didn’t move for two seconds, unsure if there was more to say about the PUSH sticker, then took the MacBook and entered McDonald’s. “Now, this,” he said about a tall structure obscured by colorful balloons.
“It’s been said that this is actually a performance art piece. It’s meant to represent. . just universal peace,” said Erin, and an employee walked between the structure and the MacBook with an expression like everything but his mouth was grinning.
“I noticed this employee is running a little,” said Paul following him to the second floor. “Does that mean something?”
“Well, it’s sort of characteristic of our times,” said Erin.
“Who are these people?” said Paul pointing at one of four preadolescent Caucasian girls in a blown-up photo on a wall.
“These are all Cameron Diaz’s children,” said Erin.
“Why are there spaces between this one’s teeth?”
“Well, the meat fills in, then they put it into one burger.”
“And the rest is just hair and stuff?”
“That’s — actually, we shouldn’t reveal that,” said Erin.
“And this is for. . ten thousand chicken nuggets?” said Paul pointing at the space of a missing tooth. “The gelatin required from the teeth.”
“Yeah,” said Erin. “And actually for some. . if you pay extra you can get a little bit of a tooth, from an actual child, and you can also get it memorialized, in a locket.”
“If a country pays extra, their nuggets get more gelatin?”
“Yes,” said Erin. “The quality is just slightly raised.”
“I heard that Canada did that,” said Paul.
“Um, just the Saskatchewan. They’re the prime testing markets. Because they eat. . they primarily eat teeth there. That’s their diet, I didn’t know if you knew that.”
“The Weakerthans wrote an album about that, right?”
“Yeah, they—” said Erin.
“Fallow?” said Paul.
“Fallow,” said Erin confidently.
“That was about the teeth—” said Paul.
“The Saskatchewan teeth crisis,” said Erin.
“This is where the district managers have their weekly meetings,” said Erin a few minutes later in a circular room — wallpapered with blown-up photos of children on bikes, and pogo sticks, in the foreground of a playground, at dusk — with a padded floor and, at its center, a playground of two slides, monkey bars, a pole, a tiny bridge. Paul said a girl had different eye sizes because she was on a “McFlurry-only diet” and asked Erin about a Hispanic girl wearing giant, padded headphones. “She’s actually producing right now,” said Erin. “She’s a producer.”
“What’s her favorite McDonald’s meal?”
“She just gets a side salad,” said Erin.
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah, that’s her thing,” said Erin pointing at what seemed like an Ash Wednesday marking on her forehead. “See? She’s Zen.”
“Let’s go to the opposite side of the spectrum: this girl.”
“She gets six Big Macs,” said Erin about a pale, red-haired girl sitting in a sandbox. “She puts it all in the McFlurry machine. And the Oreos come down.”