Paul began to sometimes laugh uncontrollably, with his face at the back of Erin’s neck, unsure what was funny. When he saw her frowning, a few minutes later, she burrowed her head against his chest and he said “what are you thinking about?” and she didn’t answer and, in an increasingly incredulous voice, like he mostly wanted to express how amazingly difficult it was to know — sometimes pausing after each word for emphasis — he repeatedly stated the question. “This isn’t what I expected at all,” he heard himself say, at some point, without knowing what he was referencing. He’d obviously wanted something good to happen, but what was happening wasn’t expected, based on what he’d said, therefore it must be bad. He was yawning, so was factually bored of Erin. “I feel like I can’t breathe,” he said, and suddenly stood and felt confused and unreal. He repeatedly fell onto his mattress, which every time seemed much less substantial than expected, dropping his body with increasing force and desperation, then lay on his back, unsatisfied and worried. “Sleeping, waking,” he said frustratedly. “Is there a difference? Am I dead?”
“You’re not dead,” said Erin.
“I think I’m dead,” said Paul distractedly, and covered his face with a blanket. He was thinking of how people say that when you die you experience your last moments for an eternity, when Erin yanked away the blanket and began tickling him and pulling him from the mattress as he giggled and intensely struggled, with confusion and frustration, to hide beneath the blanket. After succeeding, facedown with Erin sitting on his back, he seemed, while hidden, to not be thinking anything, then when he absently shifted to expose his face, to breathe, he believed he was insane. He asked if he was and Erin said no, which proved he was, because if he were he would ask and Erin would say he was not. He would never be sane, now that he was insane, he knew, then moved directly past that conclusion — unable to stop there, or anywhere — and believed again that he was dead and remembered hearing the word “bag” and thought of heroin and said “did we overdose?” He realized he would be alone if he was dead, even if Erin had also died — death would seal them into their own private afterlives — and, in idle correction, quietly said “did I overdose?”
“I just have to deal with it,” he said in reference to being permanently alone, with only his weak projections of Erin and his room — requiring an amount of effort to sustain that was immense and debilitating, which was probably why, he realized, he couldn’t sate his breath, feel comfortable, think coherently — to occupy himself forever. “It’s okay,” he said, to begin some process of consolation, but felt only more despair and a panicked suspicion that he’d barely comprehended the terribleness of his situation. “This will go on for twenty years,” he said vaguely, and stood and slapped his thighs with both hands, then held the bathroom door’s frame with his arms in a V and his head hung down and repeatedly said “oh my god” while thinking “I can’t believe I OD’d” and failing to view his death — the horrible, inexcusable mistake of it — as interestingly absurd or blackly comic or anything except profoundly troubling. He fell facedown on a mound of blankets and pillows and rolled onto his back, suddenly contemplative. “I don’t remember that at all,” he said of the months, or years, when their drug use increased and they began injecting heroin, crudely visualizing a stereotypical montage of downward-spiraling drug use. “I don’t remember. . that. But it must have happened. . I just can’t believe I overdosed.”
“You can’t overdose on mushrooms,” said Erin meekly.
“I forgot we used mushrooms,” said Paul in a curious voice, but didn’t consider the information and immediately forgot again. “I think I am where you were twenty minutes ago, so you need to console me,” he said while thinking “that’s exactly what I would tell a projection to do if I were dead.” He tried to fondly recall a memory of his life, of life generally — he would need to learn to be satisfied with his memories, which was all he had now — and said “kissing is good” and “remember Las Vegas?” He said “Taiwan was good” knowing it hadn’t been, aware he was openly trying to deceive himself, then thought of tracing back his life to determine what caused the sequence of events leading to his overdose. “The book tour. . after the summer. Two trips to Taiwan. Remember Arby’s? In Florida?” He heard Erin say they never went to Florida and realized he was talking to himself while sustaining an imaginary companion and that he wasn’t saying what he was thinking. “Why do I keep thinking about RBIs, runs batted in? And something about Hank Aaron?” Paul believed again, at some point, that he was in the prolonged seconds before death, in which he had the opportunity to return to life — by discerning some code or pattern of connections in his memory, or remembering some of what had happened with a degree of chronology sufficient to re-enter the shape of his life, or sustaining a certain variety of memories in his consciousness long enough to be noticed as living and relocated accordingly. Lying on his back, on his mattress, he uncertainly thought he’d written books to tell people how to reach him, to describe the particular geography of the area of otherworld in which he’d been secluded.
Paul was on his back on his mattress thinking “faces are circles,” and of cutting a face into four parts, as his room slowly brightened with indirect sunlight. Erin held his hand and he stood and went with her to the window and focused on the metaphysical area where he anticipated hearing her voice, wanting to be surprised, or to hear something consoling — apportioned from himself to his projection, to ventriloquize back to himself — about death. Erin was pointing at the sky, asking if Paul saw “that thing”—a pale, logo-like silhouette of antennae, or leafless plant, rising from a sixth-floor roof ’s corner, foregrounding a pink sky. Paul said he did, and that it looked pretty, he felt like a sleepy child willingly distracted from worries about a lost pet by a mother pointing at a star saying “everything will be okay, just focus on the twinkling — that’s where we came from and where we’ll be again, no matter what happens here, yes, I promise.”
He held Erin’s hand and wandered somewhat aimlessly into the bathroom and picked up a tongue scraper. “You bought me this,” he said with dull, unfocused eyes. “I never used it. But I really appreciated it. I liked getting it. I never told you.” He put it down and disinterestedly thought “it’s not going to work,” as his hand idly turned a knob, and was surprised by the rupture and crackling of water, its instantaneous column of binary variations. He moved his hand into the water and was surprised again. “I didn’t expect that. . to feel like that,” he said with a serious expression. “That’s really weird.” Realizing he had no concept of what water felt like until he touched it — cold, grasping, meticulous, aware — he felt self-conscious and said he wanted to pee alone. Sitting on the toilet, with the door closed, Paul realized he felt less discomfort and could breathe easier and that the surface of things was shinier and more dimensional from greater pixilation, all of which he viewed as evidence he was successfully convincing himself — through an increasingly elaborate, skillful, unconscious projection of a reality he would eventually believe he was exploring — that he wasn’t dead. With an eternity to practice, he realized, he would forget everything he had thought or felt while dead, including his current thoughts and feelings; he would only believe, as he once had, that he was alive.