“Were you trying to steal her shoes?” said Daniel.
“No, I wasn’t,” said Fran quietly. “Our shoes look the same.”
“I’m asking because you’ve told me you like to steal things when you’re drunk.”
“I wasn’t stealing her shoes,” said Fran in a loud whisper.
They were walking toward Paul’s room, after ten minutes in Legion, when it became known, in a manner that seemed sourceless, as if they realized simultaneously, that Fran had “accidentally,” she then said, stolen a leather jacket, which she was wearing. They agreed it would be inconvenient for the owner to not have their phone, which was in the jacket, but continued walking and each tried on the jacket, which seemed to best fit Paul, who found two gigantic vitamins in one of its pockets. In his room he put the phone on the table beside his mattress and, saying he didn’t want to be near it, sort of pushed it away. He opened his MacBook and played “Annoying Noise of Death” and saw that Daniel was calmly observing himself, in the full-length wall mirror, as he exercised with Caroline’s five-pound weights that were usually on the floor in the kitchen. Fran said to put on Rilo Kiley. Paul said it was Rilo Kiley and, after a few motionless seconds, Fran slowly turned her head away to rotate her face, like a moon orbiting behind its planet, interestingly out of view. Paul grinned to himself as he lay on his back and propped up his head with a folded pillow, resting his MacBook against the front of his thighs, both knees bent. Daniel sat on the mattress in a position that a robot in a black comedy about a child with two fathers, one of whom was a robot, would assume to recite a bedtime story, looking at Paul however with a slightly, stoically puzzled expression. “When you asked me if I liked Rilo Kiley, the night we met, I thought you were joking,” said Daniel.
“No,” said Paul. “Why did you think that?”
“You’re more earnest than I thought you’d be.”
“I wouldn’t joke about something like that.”
“Like what?” said Daniel.
Paul said he wouldn’t pretend he liked something, or make fun of liking something, or like something “ironically.” Daniel sort of drifted away and began looking at Paul’s books with a patient, scholarly demeanor — in continuation, Paul realized, of a calm inquisitiveness that had characterized most of his behavior tonight, probably due to the five Klonopin he’d ingested, though he was always inquisitive and would continue asking questions, in certain conversations, when others would’ve stopped, which Paul liked. Twenty minutes later Daniel was reading pages of different books and Paul was looking at methadone’s Wikipedia page (“. . developed in Germany in 1937. . an acyclic analog of morphine or heroin. .”) when Fran returned from outside with cuts on her face and neck from a group of girls, she said, that called her a bitch and said she tried to steal shoes and attacked her, pushing her down. Daniel asked how the girls opened the gate to the house’s walkway. Fran repeated, with a vaguely confused expression, that she was attacked. Paul, who hadn’t realized she had left the room, asked how she reentered the gate without a key. Fran stared expectantly at Daniel with her child-like gaze, then quietly engaged herself in a solitary activity elsewhere in the room as Daniel and Paul began pondering the situation themselves, to no satisfying conclusion. Fran said she wanted to go dancing at Legion before it closed in less than an hour and Paul thought he saw her put a number of pills into her mouth in the stereotypically indiscriminate manner he’d previously seen only on TV or in movies. Fran and Daniel did yoga-like stretches on Paul’s yoga mat and snorted two Adderall — crushed into a potion-y blue, faintly neon sand — off a pink piece of construction paper. Daniel briefly hugged a supine Paul, then stood at a distance as Fran lay flat on top of Paul with her head facedown to the right of his head. Fran didn’t move for around forty seconds, during which, at one point, she murmured something that seemed significant but, muffled by the mattress, was not comprehensible. She rolled onto her back and Daniel pulled her to a standing position. Paul was surprised to feel moved in a calming, tearful manner — as if some long-term desire, requiring a tiring amount of effort, had been fulfilled — when, before leaving for Legion, both Daniel and Fran affected slightly friendlier demeanors (rounder eyes, higher-pitched voices, a sort of pleasantness of expression like minor face-lifts) to confirm meeting at the book party Paul mentioned earlier and had forgotten.
Paul realized after they left that he’d gotten what from elementary school through college he often most wanted — unambiguous indications of secure, mutual friendships — but was no longer important to him.
The book party, like algae, feeling its way elsewhere, moved slowly but persistently from the bookstore’s basement to its first floor, to the sidewalk outside, converging finally with other groups at a corner bar, where Paul failed more than five times to recognize or remember the faces or names of recent to long-term acquaintances — and twice introduced people he’d already introduced to each other, including Daniel and Frederick, both of whom however either feigned having not met or had actually forgotten — but due to 2mg Klonopin remained poised, with a peaceful sensation of faultlessness, physiologically calm but mentally stimulated, throughout the night, as if beta testing the event by acting like an exaggerated version of himself, for others to practice against, before the real Paul, the only person without practice, was inserted for the actual event. Fran left for her apartment, which she shared with a low-level cocaine dealer majoring in something art related at Columbia, to prepare a kind of pasta, “with a lot of things in it,” that was her specialty, it seemed. Paul and Daniel arrived ninety minutes later and Fran served a giant platter of cheese-covered, lasagna-like pasta — attractively browned in a mottled pattern of variations of crispiness — in small, colorful plastic bowls with buttered toast on which were thin slices of raw garlic. They ate all of it, then arranged themselves on Fran’s three-seat sofa and watched Drugstore Cowboy on Daniel’s MacBook. Paul was unable to discern the movie as coherent — he kept thinking the same scene, in a motel room, was replaying with minor variations — but was aware of sometimes commenting on the sound track, including that it was “really weird” and “unexpected.”
Before becoming unconscious Paul was aware of a man wearing a cowboy hat being carried out of a drugstore by four people and of himself thinking that, if the people dragging the man were invisible, the man would look like he was gliding feetfirst on a horizontal waterslide, steadily ahead, with out-of-control limbs and a crazed, antagonistic expression, as if by experimentally self-directed telekinesis.
• • •
A week later Paul had organized plans to see Trash Humpers and was waiting for Fran and Daniel at the theater. He had first asked Laura, who seemed to be in a relationship with her ex-boyfriend — pictures had appeared on Facebook in which they looked happily reunited in what seemed to be a faux-expensive hotel — to see the movie and she’d said she wanted to but not tonight. Fran gave Paul six 10mg Adderall for her and Daniel’s tickets and a disoriented-seeming Daniel, who had no money left, asked if Paul had any snacks. Paul gave Daniel a sugar-free Red Bull he got from a Red Bull — shaped car parked outside the library and Daniel drank it in one motion with a neutral expression.