At the apartment, around 1:30 a.m., they got a charger and Paul wrote a note to his mother that he and Erin were at McDonald’s or downstairs. They somehow didn’t remember they were on LSD, so didn’t discern and attribute the effects of LSD until, on their way to a different McDonald’s, crossing a street, Paul realized he was repeatedly becoming conscious of things in medias res, like the information he received from sensory perception wasn’t being processed immediately, but at a delay sometimes, resulting in microseconds to seconds of partial — but functioning — unconsciousness.
At the McDonald’s where five employees had stood outside with megaphones and banners they sat in a corner on the second floor — the only two customers on the floor — and recorded more footage, using their iPhones, for their science-fiction movie. They regularly reminded each other that the LSD would soon start weakening, as it continued intensifying, to a degree that Paul could sense the presence of a metaphysical distance, from where, if crossed, he would not be able to return, therefore needed to focus, with deliberate effort, against a default drifting in that direction. Around 4:30 a.m. they walked twelve blocks to the apartment, holding hands and concentrating on and reminding each other of the task — to walk to the apartment without getting lost or hit by a car.
They looked at the internet in a downstairs area until Paul’s parents woke, then showered and went outside to a sunny, warm morning. They lay on a suburban area of grass in front of a stadium by the apartment building, no longer excited or interested in their science-fiction movie, having forgotten or become tolerant toward its most exciting, beginning elaborations — discussed most intensely after Paul’s MacBook stopped recording. If they existed only in abstraction, as an unconscious aside in someone’s brain, this forgetting, indicative of decreasing interest, would be exactly what he would predict to happen, he weakly thought with predictably less interest and clarity, on his back, with eyes closed.
• • •
The next two times they ingested ecstasy they both felt what they termed “overdrive,” which for Paul was a whirring, metallic, noise-like presence that induced catatonia and rendered experience toneless — nullifying humor, irony, sarcasm, intimacy, meaning — so that he became like a robot that could discern (but not process, consider, or interrelate) concrete reality. Both times, after forty talkative minutes, Paul became silent and thoughtless and expressionless and suddenly disinterested in Erin and intensely — only sexually — interested in strangers and he tried masturbating in public bathrooms and couldn’t orgasm or feel pleasure, to any degree, as if lacking the concept, but felt continuously aroused “somewhere,” including sometimes, it seemed, outside his body, a few feet in front of him, or far in the distance, in a certain store or area of sky, or in an overlap, shifting in and out of his chest or head or the front of his face.
Their brand of ecstasy, Erin learned from the internet, contained MDA, which they attributed — unconvincingly, because they’d previously enjoyed the same brand — as the cause of “overdrive.”
One night, while sober, they were at a red light at a busy, quiet — unnaturally muffled, it seemed — intersection of a four-lane street and an eight-lane street, into the X of which a two-lane street asymmetrically stopped, as if the intersection had been built to memorialize where a traveler, by choice or not, had stopped going somewhere.
Paul felt an oppressive sensation of being confined by the most distant things he could see in any direction, like after Michelle had walked away and he’d stood motionless in the rain, except then there’d also been a feeling of possibility, a glimmer of eagerness as he walked over the shiny, wet street, to return to the party. In an effort to distract from this feeling he asked, somewhat unexpectedly, what Erin was thinking — they’d stopped asking because it was always something depressing — and, with a slight grin, he saw peripherally, she said she’d been thinking that Paul needed to return her, like a broken appliance to a store, because she needed to be replaced with a newer, upgraded model. Paul stared ahead, wishing she hadn’t said that. “No,” he said grinning vaguely, unsure exactly how — but suspecting strongly that — their relationship due to what she’d said had changed in some notable, irreversible manner.
The next night in a bookstore near Taipei 101, the third-tallest building in the world, an hour after ingesting MDMA, walking aimlessly with held hands, Paul “grimly,” he earnestly felt, asked what Erin was thinking about, and she said she was having paranoid thoughts again, “like maybe it’s not the drugs, maybe we just don’t have anything to talk about anymore.” Paul thought she was right, but argued against her by saying they had been spending too much time together — that, in his other relationships, one or both people would have work or school. They sat holding each other on the floor in the fiction section and decided to not ingest their remaining two ecstasy and to be apart from each other four hours a day. Paul was wearing a striped sweater he and Erin bought, a few days ago, solely because it was comically not his normal style.
Manually descending a down escalator, about an hour later — holding Erin’s hand, leading them past people standing in place — Paul realized he was (and, for an unknown amount of time, had been) rushing ahead in an unconscious, misguided effort to get away from where he was: inside himself. Concurrent with this realization was an awareness of himself from a perspective thousands of feet above, plainly showing he was doing what he logically knew he did not want to do (that he dreaded doing, in the same way he dreaded the remaining seconds on the down escalator, the minutes walking to the MRT station and waiting for the train, the six-minute walk from the station to the apartment, waiting for the elevator and lying in bed until an instantaneous transport to the next day’s minutes — was there no reprieve even in sleep? — he’d always felt comforted by sleep and now felt confused by it) and yet, even now, discerning this, kept doing what caused this realization.
On Christmas Eve, when Erin returned from the bathroom and lay on the bed, ready to sleep, it seemed, Paul asked if she’d had any thoughts, since arriving in Taiwan, about showering.
“Not really,” she said after a few seconds.
“I noticed you don’t shower at night anymore. Or haven’t the last two nights.”
“I don’t shower every night.”
“You did. . before Taiwan.”
“I only shower at night if I noticeably smell,” said Erin. “There’ve been nights I haven’t, with you.”
The next few minutes, sensing something combative and offendable in her — that he hadn’t before — Paul felt increasingly careful of his word choice and tone of voice. Erin stood, at some point, and was moving around the room. Paul said something about an area of the bed smelling bad, and Erin said “I’m stinky, all right, you’re right, I’ll go shower, I have stinky feet” loudly, and left the room, closing the door with force. When she returned, maybe ten minutes later, Paul’s heart was still beating considerably harder than normal and he immediately left the room. In the nearly pitch-black hallway Dudu’s wet nose softly touched the back of Paul’s leg, when they apparently moved in the same direction, toward the bathroom. In the shower Paul earnestly thought about how to extricate himself from the marriage — what to do about their film company, how to behave the next ten days, what he and Erin would separately do each day, what to say to his parents — but when he returned to his room Erin apologized, which he hadn’t expected, and he reiterated that they’d happily agreed, a month ago, that if either person wanted the other to shower or brush their teeth, or anything like that, they’d state it immediately and directly and impersonally, instead of accumulating resentment.