“Yeah,” said Paul thinking he wasn’t going to mention the pigeon illusion. “I’ll add it to your tab.”
Daniel stood near the center of Paul’s room quietly saying that he felt “fucked” about his financial situation and generally, in terms of his life, then kneeled to a low table to organize two lines of cocaine with the last of what he had from Mitch’s bag. Paul, stomach-down on his mattress, asked what music he should play and clicked “Heartbeats” by the Knife. They both laughed a little and Paul clicked “Last Nite” by the Strokes and said it sounded too depressing. He clicked “Such Great Heights” by The Postal Service and said “just kidding.” He clicked “The Peter Criss Jazz” by Don Caballero. He clicked “pause.”
Daniel said to put The Postal Service back on and snorted half his line. Paul moved a rolled-up page of Shawn Olive’s poetry book in his right nostril toward the cocaine and exhaled a little after snorting half his line, causing the rest and some of Daniel’s to spread in a poof on the table. Daniel lightly berated Paul, who sort of rolled toward his mattress’s center, then — liking the feeling of unimpeded motion on a padded surface — moved his MacBook to the floor and lay in a diagonal on his back with his limbs spread out a little, which felt interesting because, he knew, it was probably the second or third time he’d lain on this mattress, while awake and alert and not impatient toward himself, without reading a book, looking at his MacBook, or aware of his MacBook’s screen.
At a certain age, he remembered, he had often lain motionless on carpet, or a sofa, feeling what he probably viewed, at the time, as boredom and what now seemed like ignorance of — or passive disbelief in — his forthcoming death, which would occur regardless of his thoughts, feelings, or actions in the unknown amount of remaining interim, upon a binary absorption from some incomprehensible direction, taking him elsewhere. Briefly, without much interest, Paul intuited that if he were immortal, or believed he was, he might feel what he’d felt as a child, which seemed less enjoyable than obscurely unsatisfying, something he’d want to be distracted from feeling. After a few minutes an out-of-view Daniel continued to say he felt depressed, but in a calmer voice that Paul felt was “soothing,” for him, to hear, from his bed.
They sat facing south at Bedford and North 1st with thirty to forty books on a rollout carpet and, in a few hours, sold around $25 of books and $60 of Paul’s Adderall, which he received monthly by mail at slightly-better-than-drug-dealer price from a graduate student at Boston College. Four fashionable black teenagers appeared and, Paul thought, “the leader,” who was much more interested than the others, asked if he could “sample” Charles’ book.
“I’ll take it,” he said after laughing loudly at something in the book, which included poetry and prose about alienation, boredom, science fiction, depression, confusion.
Daniel asked if the teenager liked Adderall.
“What is it?”
Daniel described it in a few sentences.
“So, it’s like ecstasy?”
“Sort of,” said Daniel. “But without the euphoria. It’s good for doing work. It helps you focus.”
The teenager asked if his friend was “in.”
“No,” said his friend. “But I’ll watch you do it.”
“Do you want your book signed? The author is here,” said Paul pointing at Daniel, who had been pretending he was Charles, with Charles’ approval gained by text.
Daniel wrote “best wishes, from Charles” in the book.
Charles’ six weeks in Mexico and Guatemala, related in emails and Gmail chats, traveling hostel to hostel, spending much of his time in internet cafés feeling alienated from Americans doing what he was doing, but in groups, had taken on the tone and focus, after two weeks, of a comedic sitcom, which he’d named Avoiding Jehan, because his primary concern, most days, was to avoid or endure or try to permanently escape a person named Jehan, who had repeatedly — almost always inadvertently, obliviously — thwarted Charles’ few romantic prospects and, in social situations, caused Charles to become “the third wheel” or “the fifth wheel.” In one email Charles had wished Jehan would “become invisible.” After getting stalled in Guatemala, on the way to South America, two weeks ago, Charles had returned cashless to his girlfriend and Seattle, where they now shared “a smaller, shittier apartment,” he said, than when he left America, around two months ago.
The sky had begun to colorfully darken, a few hours later, with reds and purples and pinks that drifted away, like cotton candy, from an unseen horizon, as if something there was changing and releasing energy, when an Asian girl, who had slowed and passed a minute ago while talking into an iPhone, returned and said she recognized Paul from the internet and distractedly asked if Daniel was a cop.
“No,” said Daniel, and the Asian girl said she was buying marijuana from someone with a business card, which she showed Daniel, at his request. She bought two books and three Adderall and kneeled and asked if Daniel or Paul had a driver’s license, to move her friend’s car from Crown Heights to the Graham L train station for money. They discussed the car for what seemed like fifteen minutes, without resolution, then the girl, whose name was Annie, which Paul heard initially as Addy, removed a Chinese magazine from her bag and asked if Paul was good at translating. Paul said he couldn’t read Chinese or speak Mandarin fluently, and had an American accent sometimes, he’d been told. “I’m going to pee,” he said, and went to Verb, two blocks away. In line, behind two people, he thought that, from a certain point onward — beginning with his book tour, maybe — he would only appear in public if he’d ingested sufficient drugs to not primarily be a source of anxiety, bleakness, awkwardness, etc. for himself and/or others.
When Paul returned to Daniel and Annie they were talking about Annie’s boyfriend, who had attended the same college as Daniel, in Colorado. Annie’s boyfriend had gone to India after college. When he returned to America, three years ago, he died for a reason that Paul, who was thinking of how spring was to summer like a morning was to an entire day, brief and lucid and transitional, didn’t hear. Annie said her boyfriend’s funeral, due to a request he’d made in India, had been organized and promoted like a party and was “weird,” because it had been exactly like a party except everyone was wearing black.
• • •
In mid-July, a few weeks later, at a party that, instead of ending, had moved outside, through a window at the back of someone’s bedroom, onto an eighth-floor roof, Paul and Daniel were on an additionally elevated platform — corner-set, wall-less, square, smooth — like a landing pad for tiny helicopters.
Daniel was standing with limbs and neck uncoordinatedly extended, slightly striding in place — the pre-predatory stance of a chained thing that had broken free and didn’t yet know where to direct its vengeance, or what to do generally. His vision was focused horizontally, as if across a flat expanse. Then, with his back to one of the two edges dropping to the street, he approached an already fearful Paul — sitting cross-legged at the platform’s center, aware Daniel had been drinking steadily for hours and was probably on two or more drugs — who reacted preemptively, against what seemed like a purposeless entity unreasonably desiring his involvement, with defensive movements of his arms and hands, causing the situation, in Paul’s panicked state, to immediately seem like an unrestrained wrestling, though it probably looked more like an exaggeratedly confused handshaking. Paul tried to concentrate on flattening himself — on retaining a low, stable center — while repeatedly telling Daniel to “stop,” because it was “dangerous,” he heard himself say in a gravely serious, faintly humorous voice of uncertainly suppressed fear, but was distracted by how most of his thoughts were based on a reality in which he had fallen off the building. Should he close his eyes? What should he try to see? What would his mother do/feel? Could he grab things to disrupt his fall like in movies? Could one of these be his final thought? What would that mean? Why couldn’t he comprehend this? Should he think other things?