“Fran said she’ll pay you back if you give me one of the Adderall she gave you,” whispered Daniel a few minutes into the movie. “I don’t think I can stay awake without it.” In the movie costumed actors made noises in parking lots and inside houses while destroying and/or “humping” inanimate objects. Paul woke, at one point, to Fran laughing loudly when no one else in the small, sold-out theater was laughing. When Paul wasn’t asleep he felt distracted by a feeling that Daniel had eerily turned his head 90 degrees and was staring at him, but each time he looked Daniel was either asleep or looking at the screen. The last ten minutes of the movie Paul was peripherally aware of Daniel’s unsupported head continually lolling in place and twitching to attention in a manner reminiscent of a middle/high school student struggling and repeatedly failing to remain awake in a morning class. Daniel seemed fully alert seconds after the movie ended. Paul asked how he slept despite Adderall and Red Bull.
“Susie-Q,” said Daniel with a smirk-like grin indicating both earnest disapproval and a kind of fondness toward Seroquel and its intense, often uncomfortable tranquilizing effects — as if, believing Susie-Q wasn’t malicious, he could forgive her every time she induced twelve hours of sleep followed by twelve to twenty-four hours of feeling lost and irritable, therefore she functioned, if inadvertently, as a teacher of forgiveness and acceptance and empathy, for which he was grateful.
They were the last three people, after the movie, to leave the theater. They stood on the sidewalk, unsure what to do next. Fran had planned to go to Coney Island tonight and stay until morning for her birthday, which was today — she’d created a Facebook listing, which Paul remembered seeing — but none of her friends wanted to go, because she didn’t have any, she said. Paul said he also had no friends and that they should celebrate by “eating a lot of food.”
At Lovin’ Cup, a bar-restaurant with live music, Fran and Daniel ordered drinks, went outside to smoke. Paul laid the side of his head on his arms, on the table, and closed his eyes. He didn’t feel connected by a traceable series of linked events to a source that had purposefully conveyed him, from elsewhere, into this world. He felt like a digression that had forgotten from what it digressed and was continuing ahead in a confused, choiceless searching. Fran and Daniel returned and ordered enchiladas, nachos. Paul ordered tequila, a salad, waffles with ice cream on top.
When the food arrived Paul ordered tater tots and more tequila. They ate silently in the loud bar. Paul felt he would need to scream, or exert an effort that would feel like he was screaming, to be heard. He was aware of Fran, to his left, quietly eating with her mouth near her plate, as if to hide something, or probably to reduce the distance to her enchiladas, which in Paul’s peripheral vision appeared shapeless, almost invisible. After Fran left to “do homework,” she said, Paul and Daniel decided to try watching Drugstore Cowboy again, in Paul’s room.
On the walk to Daniel’s apartment, to get Drugstore Cowboy, dozens of elderly, similarly dressed Asian men were standing in a loosely organized row, like a string of Christmas lights, seeming bored but alert, on a wide sidewalk, across from Bar Matchless. Daniel asked one of them what movie they were in and the Asian man seemed confused, then said “Martin Scorsese” without an accent when Daniel asked again.
Around forty minutes later Paul said “that looks like the group of Asians. . we saw earlier,” realizing with amazement as he saw Bar Matchless that they had unwittingly walked to the same place.
Daniel’s two suitemates were seated at a round, thin, foldable table on chairs Paul immediately viewed as “found on the street,” talking to each other, it seemed, after returning from a concert. Except for a broom and what Daniel confirmed — grimly, Paul felt — was a giant plastic eggplant of unknown origin, there was nothing else in the common room.
Daniel’s room had a dresser, mattress pad, wood chair, tiny desk. Within arm’s reach, outside his window, was a brick wall covered with gradients of gray ash. Daniel showed Paul, who felt self-conscious and crowded, standing in place, a candle shaped like a lightbulb and said it was from his sister. Paul stared at it, unable to comprehend, in a way that made the behavior seem unreal, exactly why Daniel was showing it to him, with a feeling that he’d misheard, or not heard, something Daniel said a few seconds or minutes ago.
Paul woke sitting on his mattress with his back against a wall, beside Daniel, who seemed asleep and was also sitting. The room was palely lit by a cloudy, faintly pink morning. Paul’s MacBook, in front of them, showed Drugstore Cowboy’s menu screen. Paul shifted a little — his right leg was numb — and Daniel began talking in a clear voice, as if he’d been awake a few minutes already. Daniel wanted to ingest Adder-all instead of sleep. Paul, who couldn’t remember if they’d watched the movie, distractedly asked what they would do “all day.”
“What we normally do. Walk around. Fix my computer.”
“I feel. . sleepy,” said Paul.
Daniel said something about Adderall.
“I feel like I’ll still be sleepy,” said Paul.
“You’ll be awake, trust me.”
“I’m not sure if I want to.”
“I feel like you’re eight years old or my girlfriend,” said Daniel around five minutes later.
“I really don’t know what I want to do,” said Paul grinning.
An hour later, after each showering at his own apartment, they met and ingested Adderall and walked to Verb, a café without internet, where they drank iced coffee and ingested a little more Adderall, then went in an adjacent bookstore, where Daniel showed Paul a translated book of nonfiction with a similar cover — off-center black dot, white background — as Shawn Olive’s poetry book.
“That’s funny,” said Paul grinning, and they got on the L train, then walked to the Apple store on Prince Street. Daniel’s MacBook, which had files he needed for his job as a research assistant to an elderly ghostwriter (of sports autobiographies) who owed him $200, would require two weeks to be fixed. Daniel asked if Paul would go with him to Rhode Island, in three hours, to stay with Fran’s family for a weekend. Paul declined, saying he hadn’t been invited. Daniel said he confirmed last week but didn’t want to go anymore and that, a few minutes ago, Fran texted she couldn’t, against expectation, get any Oxycodone — without which it was going to be “unbearable,” Daniel felt, for both himself and Fran, to be around Fran’s family. Paul declined again, saying it seemed stressful. It began raining from a partly sunny sky, and they went in an Urban Outfitters. Daniel walked to a table of books and stood without looking at anything, like a tired child waiting for an overbearingly upbeat mother to finish shopping.
“You seem worried,” said Paul.
“Sorry. I’m trying to think of an excuse to tell Fran.”
It was sunny and cloudless, around twenty minutes later, when they sat side by side on a bench in Washington Square Park. Daniel swallowed something and mutely handed Paul a 20mg Adderall, which Paul swallowed. Two preadolescent girls ran around the fountain area repeatedly. Paul said he felt like he hadn’t run as fast as possible in probably five or ten years. When the Adderall took effect Daniel began to praise Paul’s writing without restraint or pause for twenty to thirty minutes and asked about Paul’s IQ. Paul said it was either 139 or 154. Daniel was quiet a few seconds, then with a slightly troubled expression said his IQ was higher, seeming like he felt more complicatedly doomed, as a person, with this information. Paul said his mother always said that his and his brother’s IQs were exactly the same, but sometimes also said she was required, as a parent, to say that.