“Thank you,” said Paul smiling.
“You’re very welcome,” said Matt.
“You’re being really nice to me.”
“You’re the guest here,” said Matt, and Paul gingerly asked if he “by chance” had an iPod cord, sensing he would enjoy further indulging an appreciative subject with his gratuitous helpfulness. Paul accepted Matt’s iPod cord with a sensation, he felt, of daintiness, which remained as he transferred mostly pop-punk songs from Matt’s MacBook to his iPod nano. Around 4:30 a.m., in his room, Paul bit a piece of a 150mg Seroquel and listened to songs he hadn’t heard since high school, mostly the EP Look Forward to Failure by the Ataris. He woke at night fifteen hours later and, while showering, felt like he lived in a module attached to a spaceship far enough from any star to never experience daylight.
Three days later Paul exited the Graham L train station carrying beer and guacamole ingredients in a paper bag from Whole Foods for Lindsay’s Cinco de Mayo party. Sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk against a Thai restaurant was a girl with dyed-black hair. As Paul approached she looked up knowingly with an innocent, wary gaze.
“Hi,” said Paul. “Are you Fran?”
“Yeah,” said Fran.
“I’m Paul.”
“I know,” said Fran, and slowly closed her notebook.
“Are you doing homework?”
“My friend’s homework.”
“Nice,” said Paul staring transfixed at Fran’s delicate and extreme gaze, like that of a skeleton with eyeballs, or a person with their face peeled off. Paul began talking — slowly, before accelerating to a normal speed — about how Daniel had sounded “really drunk” on the phone but had sent witty, insightful, elaborate texts of mostly long, elegant sentences. Fran said Daniel was like that when on Klonopin. Paul asked if he could have a Klonopin and Fran gave him one and looked to his left, where he was surprised to see Daniel standing in place, a few feet away, looking at Fran with the fixed, discerning, earnest gaze of a three-year-old processing information without considering utility or personal relevance. Paul asked Daniel how many Klonopin he had taken.
“Five,” said Daniel.
“Jesus,” said Paul.
• • •
When Paul entered the party, ahead of Daniel and Fran, Lindsay wreathed a plastic snake around his head and pulled him toward a hallway designated for photographs. Paul mumbled the word “bathroom” and walked away grinning into the kitchen, where Matt was standing alone, not apparently doing anything. Paul asked about his vacation. Matt said he drove a rental car without a plan to Maine and ate seafood in a restaurant alone, did other things alone. “It was really good,” he said, and briefly displayed a haunted and irreducibly unenthusiastic expression before reaching for chips. Paul walked out of the kitchen and looked at Fran sitting alone on the sofa where he’d eaten Fig Newmans five days ago and returned to the kitchen and, while peripherally aware of a self-conscious Matt slowly creating guacamole, asked Daniel what he’d meant — in one of his dense, interesting texts — when he said he felt like there’d been “strange occurrences lately.” Daniel said he read all of Paul’s books last autumn while in San Francisco and told his friends he had a feeling that when he came to New York City he would meet Paul and they would become friends. Daniel was alert and expressionless as an advanced cyborg as he explained that he’d gone to Paul and Frederick’s reading because Amy didn’t want to be alone with Lucie and that none of them had known Paul was reading.
“I’ve felt similar things,” said Paul. “Since Kyle’s party, when I met Laura. Or, I mean, actually, the night before that, at the reading near Times Square, when we met.”
“How do you feel about it?”
“About what?”
“It,” said Daniel vaguely.
“It seems good. New things keep happening, which seems good. I just felt right now like it’s going to end tonight.”
“You’re pessimistic about it,” said Daniel as a neutral observation, staring intensely at Paul with a serious, almost grim expression.
“We haven’t referenced it until now.”
“I’m sorry for talking about it and causing you to think it might end,” said Daniel earnestly.
“It’s okay,” said Paul, a little confused. “Maybe it won’t end. But I wonder if we need to make an effort, for it to continue.”
“Well,” said Daniel hesitantly. “Don’t you think it just needs to happen naturally?”
“Yeah,” said Paul.
“Well, then we wouldn’t make an effort, then, huh?”
“I mean if we need to keep doing things, instead of staying inside,” said Paul.
“You said you only go to like one party a month. But you’re at almost every party.”
“This isn’t normal at all,” said Paul. “Before we met I probably did less than one thing a month.”
“Why do you think that is?”
“Probably because I met people I like.”
Daniel hesitated. “What people?”
“You, Mitch, Laura. . Amy,” said Paul. “I’m going to the bathroom.” When he returned Fran and Daniel were making guacamole energetically, with spoons and a mashing strategy, adding onion and cilantro and salsa and garlic powder, having apparently replaced Matt, who was very slowly, it seemed, moving a beer toward his mouth. Paul began eating guacamole as it was being made, with chips, to no discernible opposition. In a distracted voice, without looking at anyone, he asked if Daniel and Fran wanted to go to a “book party” tomorrow night at a bookstore in Greenpoint and they seemed interested. Fran gave everyone vodka shots. Matt moved into a position facing more people and, with an earnest but powerless attempt at enthusiasm, resulting in a a weak form of sarcasm, asked if everyone wanted to go to the roof.
On the fourth-story roof Paul said he wanted to run “really fast in a circle,” vaguely aware and mostly unconcerned, though he knew he didn’t want to die — less because he had an urge to live than because dying, like knitting or backgammon, seemed irrelevant to his life — that due to alcohol and Klonopin, in a moment of inattention, he could easily walk off the building. He collided with an unseen Fran — who seemed already confused, before this, standing alone in an arbitrary area of the roof — and felt intrigued by the binary manner that his movement was stopped, though how else, he vaguely realized, could something stop? He texted Laura, inviting her to “come eat Mexican food at a party,” then went downstairs and indiscriminately moved refried beans, guacamole, three kinds of chips, cucumber, salsa, beef onto his plate until he had a roughly symmetrical mound of food, on top of which — on the way out of the kitchen, as a kind of afterthought — he added a fluffy, triangular wedge of cake. After carrying the Mayan-pyramid-shaped plate of food, with some difficulty, up the ladder, onto the roof, where he silently ate it all, he belligerently directed conversation toward Laura-related things, then said he felt cold and was going inside. He descended the ladder until his head was below the opening to the roof and tried to hear what Fran and Daniel — who remained outside smoking — were saying, while unaware of his presence, but couldn’t, and also didn’t know what could possibly be said that he would want to secretly hear, so returned inside the apartment and lay on his back on the sofa in the common room.
He woke to flash photography, then to Lindsay’s voice, in another room, loudly saying “get out.” Lindsay entered the common room and said, to a blearily waking Paul, something about “your friend” looking inside her purse, trying to steal her shoes. Paul stared blankly, a little embarrassed to have slept on his back, for an unknown amount of time, on the apartment’s only sofa. He looked at his phone: no new texts. After saying “sorry” a few times to Lindsay, who seemed unsure if she felt negatively toward Paul, he put a half-eaten onion, beer bottles, other trash into his Whole Foods bag and descended stairs behind Daniel and Fran, who was quietly murmuring things vaguely in her defense. They decided to go to Legion, a bar, one and a half blocks away, with an outdoor area on the sidewalk.