“Look,” he told the counselor in Utah, twenty years into the future, “obviously I’ve had some time to think about this, and of course I realize that that line of thinking was insane and self-centered, but she was so beautiful, and I thought, She’s my ticket out of this, meaning my ticket out of feeling like a failure—”
It’s now or never, Paul thought, and he approached the bar in a blaze of courage.
“Hey,” Theo said. “You. You’re that guy.”
“I took your advice!” Paul said.
“What advice?” Charlie asked.
“System Soundbar on Tuesdays.”
“Oh right,” Charlie said, “yeah, of course.”
“Good to see you, man,” Theo said, and Paul felt a flush of warmth. He smiled at all of them, with particular focus on Annika.
“Hi,” she said, not unkindly, but still with that irritating wariness, like she expected everyone who looked at her to ask her out, although of course that was exactly what Paul was planning to do.
Charlie was saying something to Theo, who leaned down to hear him. (Brief portrait of Charlie Wu: small guy with glasses and a generic office-appropriate haircut, dressed in a white button-down shirt with jeans, standing there with his hands in his pockets, and the light reflecting off his glasses so that Paul couldn’t see his eyes.)
“Listen,” Paul said, to Annika. She looked at him. “I know you don’t know me, but I think you’re really beautiful, and I wondered if you’d let me take you to dinner sometime.”
“No thank you,” she said. Theo’s attention had shifted from Charlie to Paul, and he was watching Paul closely, like he was worried that he might have to intercede, and Paul understood: their evening had been fine until Paul came along. Paul was the problem. Charlie was cleaning his glasses, apparently oblivious, nodding his head to the music as he polished the lens.
Paul forced himself to smile and shrug. “Okay,” he said, “no problem, no hard feelings, just figured it couldn’t hurt to ask.”
“Never hurts to ask,” Annika agreed.
“You guys into E?” Paul asked.
“—I don’t know,” he told the counselor, twenty years later, “to tell you the truth I don’t know what I was thinking, in memory my mind is like this terrifying blank, I didn’t know what I was going to say before I said it—”
“It’s not really my thing,” Paul said, because they were all looking at him now, “I mean, no judgment, I’ve just never been that into it, but my sister gave these to me.” He flashed the little packet in the palm of his hand. “I don’t really want to sell them, that’s not my thing either, but I feel like it’d be kind of a waste to flush them down the toilet, so I just wondered.”
Annika smiled. “I think I tried those last week,” she said. “Same exact color.”
“You can see why I’ve never told this story before,” Paul told the counselor, twenty years after System Soundbar. “But I didn’t know the pills were bad. I thought I’d maybe just had a bad reaction, you know, like maybe my system was kind of messed up from coming off opioids or something, like not a thing where every single person who tried those pills would automatically get sick or whatever, let alone—”
“Anyway, they’re yours if you want them,” he said, to this group that like all of the other groups he’d ever encountered in his life was going to reject him, and Annika smiled and took the packet from his hand. “I’ll see you around,” he said, to all of them but especially to her, because sometimes no thank you means not at the present moment but maybe later, although the pills, the pills, the pills—
“Thank you,” she said.
“Well, just the way she reacted,” Paul told the counselor. “I can see the way you’re looking at me, but I really thought she’d tried the same pills, the previous week, like she said, and the way she smiled, it made me think she’d had a good trip, she’d obviously really liked them, so what happened to me when I tried them seemed like definitely just a weird reaction, like I said, not something that would necessarily…look, I know I’m being repetitive but what I need you to understand is that I couldn’t possibly have predicted, I mean I know how it sounds but I seriously had no idea—”
After Paul walked away, Annika took one pill and gave the other two to Charlie, whose heart stopped a half hour later on the dance floor.
2
It’s easy to dismiss Y2K hysteria in retrospect—who even remembers it?—but the risk of collapse seemed real at the time. At the stroke of midnight on January 1, 2000, the experts said, nuclear power plants might go into meltdown while malfunctioning computers sent flocks of missiles flying over the oceans, the grid collapsing, planes falling from the sky. But for Paul the world had already collapsed, so three days after Charlie Wu’s death he was standing by a pay phone in the arrivals hall at the Vancouver airport, trying to reach his half sister, Vincent. He’d had enough money to flee Toronto, but there wasn’t enough left over for anything else, so his entire plan was to throw himself on the mercy of his aunt Shauna, who in hazy childhood memory had an enormous house with multiple guest bedrooms. Although he hadn’t seen Vincent in five years, since she was thirteen and he was eighteen and Vincent’s mother had just died, and he hadn’t seen Shauna since he was, what, eleven? He was running through all of this while the phone rang endlessly at his aunt’s house. A couple walked by wearing matching T-shirts that said PARTY LIKE IT’S 1999, and only then did he remember that it was actually New Year’s Eve. The last seventy-two hours had had a hallucinatory quality. He hadn’t been sleeping much. His aunt seemed not to have an answering machine. There was a telephone directory on the shelf under the phone, where he found the law firm where she worked.
“Paul,” she said, once he’d cleared the hurdle of her secretary. “What a lovely surprise.” Her tone was gentle and cautious. How much had she heard? He assumed he must have come up in conversation over the years. Paul? Oh, well, he’s in rehab again. Yes, for the sixth time.
“I’m sorry to bother you at work.” Paul felt a prickling behind his eyes. He was extremely, infinitely sorry, for everything. (Try not to think of Charlie Wu on the stretcher at System Soundbar, an arm dangling limp over the side.)