I first met Paul not long after my car and I split up. Technically it had been my aunt’s, but I loved it dearly and had lost it in a rendezvous with a speeding tree. I’d been wandering the streets without it when, one night, uptown, Paul came tumbling out of the entrance to some sort of gala. He was drunk and staggered toward me for a cigarette. I pulled one out of my case and lit it up for him. He took a drag.
‘God, I’m thirsty,’ he said, and licked his lips.
Paul’s father and grandfather had made money in grocery stores, hotels and pharmaceuticals. When Paul turned eighteen, his father had sat him down and said, ‘Son, we worked so you don’t have to.’ And so Paul had all this time on his hands, an endless stretch of it, and he spent that time scrounging around trying to find something to do to keep the black dog at bay.
At first Paul tried to get an art history degree, but he was on coke half the time and hanging out at bars slipping K into girls’ drinks. His dad got him an internship at a leading auction house to encourage his art hobby, but it didn’t stick. In the end he dropped out of school. He started to take an interest in collecting historical documents, drawing up the family tree. It turned out there was a suspected Nazi on his mother’s side, and somewhere on his father’s a connection with Lord Elgin—the seventh or eighth, I don’t remember which.
One day at the family’s weekend house in the Hamptons, Paul was telling his dad about how he was going to write a book about their family history. His dad’s response was that Paul should forget about the whole thing.
‘This is not the time, Paul,’ his father had said, flicking through a contract at his desk. ‘Things aren’t good right now and you know how I feel about historians. They all want to get famous proving you’re complicit in some sort of evil regime when you’re just a savvy player in a system.’
They got into a screaming match about it. Paul sobbed about having the one hobby that gave his life meaning taken away from him.
‘What about our bunker in Australia?’ his dad said. ‘You begged for it and I gave it to you. Wasn’t that supposed to be a hobby too?’
‘Fuck the bunker!’ Paul picked up a hot poker from the fireplace and charged right at his dad, who dodged it. Then Paul went to his room and gathered all his historical research papers, ran out onto the tennis court and made a bonfire with them. He stood next to the tiny mound as it burned, staring up at the white sash windows of his father’s study with eyes full of thwarted love. His father, expressionless, stared back at him for a few seconds before turning to leave for a meeting with his legal team.
Paul was so angry and so bored he wanted to be dead, but at the same time he wanted to live. Which is why he turned up that same day at my aunt’s shithole in New Jersey in a blue French work jacket and said, ‘Jules, my guy, it’s time to get away from it all and meet that open road.’
What could I do? I was tired of living with my aunt, trying to butter her up for cash, and Paul had this way about him—a glint in the eye. He’d left the bonfire as it was shriveling into black, and stole his old man’s red jalopy, a piece of sentimental junk, ripping off down the road just as the chauffeur was patting his pockets for the key.
It didn’t take long for me to pack a bag. I was going to be the most revered writer of the counterculture. I was going to write books that burned like the sun. And my first book was going to be about Paul and the story of this road trip, and I was going to share it with the world via that agent I met once at that party who said I had just the right face to sell books.
I got in the jalopy and Paul started it up. The car rattled but soon we were flying. Paul was humming Macklemore, the one about the thrift shop, and the sun was setting and it was goddamn glorious. Keeping one hand on the wheel, he reached into the glove compartment and pulled out a bunch of orange prescription bottles. We swallowed some uppers. Paul gunned the jalopy up to sixty, then sped to eighty, then to one-twenty. Dusk fell around us, deepening into the color of eggplant, as the jalopy hugged the curves of the cornfields, following that hard, true line that unrolled eternally by our side. It was a straight, winding, lovely, ugly, holy, cursed road, which would soon give its secrets up to us. I felt clean and pure and reborn.
We picked up a homeless guy in Harrisburg and a hipster in DC, then stopped in Pittsburgh, where we ate bread and cheese and donuts and downed more uppers. We lost the homeless guy in a diner. Then the hipster and I traded seats, and we pushed on, past creaky little towns and big brash cities with their sparkling lights—through Denver, LA, Tucson, Chicago, SF and New Orleans, then up to Cincinnati, taking the I-75 to Toledo then Detroit. In Detroit, the hipster ran off to take a piss on a wall somewhere. We didn’t wait and left for Houston, where we met a businessman who wanted to go with us to Des Moines. After dropping the guy off, we roared through New York, Salt Lake City, LA, Denver, New Orleans, SF, DC, Denver, DC, Chicago, New Orleans, LA, Denver, Chicago, Denver, New York, Denver and Denver, sleeping along the way in poky, dank little hotels that Paul’s dad owned, where the valets regularly took more than three minutes to retrieve our car. Outside Cheyenne, sirens came for us. Paul tried telling the cop a sob story about his dad branding him with a poker, but he got a speeding ticket anyway. The cop moseyed off and I slid into the driver’s seat. We had some pinks from one of Paul’s bottles, pills shaped like eyes, then we were on our way again, on our long drive to nowhere.
Paul started telling me a story about the time he took a solo trip after a fight with his dad. He’d picked up two sixteen-year-old schoolgirls in Iowa and drove naked with them on his lap, and they all smoked cigarettes while Paul expounded on Proust and Nietzsche and the Stoics until one of the girls threw up the dozen bad oysters he’d fed her, and she’d looked up at him with big, sad eyes, and in that moment he sort of fell in love with that skinny little kitten with puke dripping off her chin. And then Paul started talking to me about the eyes being windows to the soul, that Modigliani knew this, that Modigliani was the greatest artist of all time, that Paul had seen on TikTok that Modigliani insisted on painting blank eyes because you need to know the soul to paint the eyes, and the only non-blank ones that he ever painted were in pictures of his wife. Paul went on and on—Modigliani this, Modigliani that—and I was, like, ‘Yeah, Paul, maybe we should go see some Modiglianis in some goddamn museum,’ and Paul said, ‘No need, I just bought one. Well, I didn’t strictly buy it—Dad set up a trust for me in the Virgin Islands and the trust bought the Modigliani. It’s an epic way to hide your wealth offshore, untouched by the tax man.’
Paul said he was also really into Khmer relics, like those heads of gods that people lop off at temples. He was also fond of anything that came out of Nepal and India, and some of the vases and shit from China and that old Summer Palace. He’d had a taste of buying this sort of art during the internship his dad had got him at that auction house, before he was sidetracked by the family history stuff. His dad was a bit of a connoisseur of Asian art and collected it, so Paul was going to follow in his footsteps. But offshore trusts were getting too much media attention lately, especially since his dad’s main art dealer got fucked in that big leak, stuff about how he used former child soldiers to loot Cambodian temples, so things were dicey.
Paul had decided his own life calling was to be a neo-minimalist: ‘Just art and pussy and floorboards. That’s all a guy needs in life.’ He was maybe going to get into 3D printing his family’s Asian relics, make some NFTs, evolve into a philanthropist.
‘I went to Thailand a while back, you know,’ Paul said. He’d followed his poet pal Richard L. Whain, the fast-fashion heir, over there because Richie had a gig at the time performing his poetry, about Asians being the metaphorical children of the world, to expats and probable expat pedos in an expat literary cafe in Bangkok. That’s where Paul met up with his dad’s art dealer, a crusty old British guy, and they all flew together to Angkor Wat and stood among the ancient tree roots growing down over the temple buildings. Paul went and touched one of those roots and felt the awesome depths of that culture rush into his veins, and that’s when he realized he was going to make a real difference in the world. He told Richie about his epiphany. But Richie said, ‘You can’t change the world, man, your family is the world.’ And Paul said, ‘Fuck you, man,’ and threw his Best of Gandhi into the dirt and ran back to their resort and lay by the pool and cried.
So Paul wanted to know, did I want to come and see the bunker his dad had given him, out in Tasmania? Because that’s where he thought his next project would be. ‘I’m gonna be a custodian of Asian culture,’ he said.
I didn’t really know what he meant, but I said, ‘So fire,’ and we started making plans to go.
As we drove through Sacramento, Paul asked if I was going to invest in some art too, with all that money my family had made through tear gas and drones and private armies. If so, he could give me the details of the law firm that drew up his trust.
‘Well, Paolo,’ I said, ‘fine art isn’t really my bag and I don’t have liquidity right now. But maybe I’ll do defense contracts on the side so I can pursue my dream of being one of the greatest writers of all time. The sort of guy that makes people wanna reach out and grab life by the throat and really fuckin’ murder it, you know, slit that throat and drain every last drop of blood, tie the corpse to iron weights and drop it in the ocean so no one ever finds it.’
At the end of that day, as the fat moon rose and squatted above the clouds, we rolled back into Sacramento and heard a tenor sax wailing out of a bar, infusing the city with an intricate Bo Burnham cover. We pulled up near the bar and went in. Some locals shouted us a few rounds of beer. I had my eye on a darling little exotic black-haired wench of about seventeen who was standing out the front of the bar. I went out and followed her up the road. I tailed her for streets and streets, finally getting a hold of her at a crosswalk, but she wriggled out of my grasp and ran away.
By the time I returned to the jalopy, Paul was sitting in the back seat, entwined with another girl he’d lured with his flaming charisma. They were naked, his jeans around his ankles. She looked like a baby and had had a lot to drink.
‘Get in,’ Paul said. ‘I was just telling the young lady about my travel philosophy.’
I got in the front and slammed the door shut.
‘The thing is,’ he said to the girl, ‘I’m not just a tourist, I’m a traveler. I see the people. Like, don’t take me to the tourist traps, take me to an underground bar where I can chug spice-bomb mojitos, get my photo on the wall for chugging the most spice-bomb mojitos, really get fucked up on spice-bomb mojitos, you know, babe? I’m here to experience the world.’
By the time his mother called, the girl was straddling him. He put his mother on speaker. One of his hands was tweaking the girl’s nipple and the other was sliding up and down his wang.
‘Where are you? Why haven’t you been picking up?’ His mother was shouting. ‘The lawsuits are coming in, there’s bad press, and in the middle of it all, you’ve vanished! They’ve taken our name off that university in Georgia and that art gallery your dad loves so much. He’s going to sue them both for breach of contract. To top it off, I got snubbed from the Foundation luncheon.’
‘Yes, Mother,’ Paul was murmuring. ‘You’re right, Mother.’ But I could see in the rear-view mirror that he was not really hearing any of it. He was breathing hard and had gone glassy-eyed, thirsting for that magnificent tit.
‘Are you listening to me, Paul?’ his mother said. ‘Ours is a legitimate drug for people in real pain. “Oh,” they moan, “my son died after these drugs were prescribed for a wrist injury!” If addicts want to destroy their lives, that’s their problem. And what about my child? Who is thinking of my child, whose good name is being destroyed? We’ve only ever helped people and look how they persecute us!’
Paul hung up as she was still talking. He lifted the girl off him then pushed her head down into his crotch so she could finish him off, telling her that he wanted her to choke on his big fat cock. As they went at it, I vaped and watched a drunk pass out in the gutter across the road, and I wondered if the girl would let me hit it later when Paul passed out.
In the end, he couldn’t stay hard and the girl gave up, and he said it was probably the side effects of some of the pills he’d been popping.
‘You’re lucky,’ he said to the girl. ‘You really would’ve choked if I wasn’t on drugs.’
He checked his smartwatch and texted a guy back about the head of a Buddha he was interested in. Then he snorted something off the girl’s thigh and finished up with blues from one of his orange bottles.
‘Hey, man,’ I said. ‘I don’t know if you should be getting into those. Your mom would have a fit.’
‘Not your business,’ he said.
I watched him in the rear-view mirror for some time. He began to yawn and his breathing seemed to slow. He nodded off. The girl was becoming drowsy too. I got out of the car and did thirty push-ups on the sidewalk to make my chest look good. Then I went around to her side and knocked on the glass. She opened her peepers a little to look at me, made a face, then closed them. So I dropped my jeans and started jacking off, right there, looking at her through the window.
Paul was still knocked out, so I went for a walk and found a 24-hour waffle joint. I had a Classic Breakfast and started talking to the waitress at the counter about an idea I’d just had for a feminist story that I could write.
‘Okay,’ she said.
I explained it to her. It was about a girl who’s looking through a window.
‘And?’ she said.
I told her I hadn’t decided what was going to happen next. It was complicated. What kind of window would it be? Would the frame be aluminum or wood? Was she outside looking in, or inside looking out?
The chick at the counter said, ‘Well, why don’t you get into the mind of the girl? Figure out how she’s feeling. What her circumstances are.’
‘But great writing,’ I said, ‘is about the outer things that point to the inner. Staring through a piece of glass, now that’s full of meaning. That’s how you write classic literature that stands the test of time.’
And she said, ‘But don’t you need to know what the inner is, so you can point to it? I mean, what’s going on inside my head right now? Do you have any clue at all?’
Well, I did, but I wasn’t going to say it. She wanted me bad, but that wasn’t going to happen—I wasn’t going to lay pipe in a waitress who didn’t know how to comprehend great literature.
‘Dude,’ she said. ‘Maybe you should try writing with AI.’ She handed me my check. ‘Might give you some ideas.’
‘It should be fifteen ninety-nine,’ I said. ‘Not sixteen ninety-nine.’
Back in the jalopy, Paul was still passed out, but the girl was gone. I jerked off again in the driver’s seat at the thought of tweaking the politically correct tits of that waitress from the waffle joint and pushing her politically correct head into my crotch, teaching her a lesson about being such a dirty little tease like her dirty little mother brought her up to be.
I squirted all over the steering wheel and fell asleep.
At sunrise, Paul woke me up. The girl had come back and the three of us made our way toward Fresno. We stopped at a charging station and plugged the jalopy in, then Paul and I went for a movie and chow mein nearby. We bought frappuccinos and headed back to the car, only to see the girl gunning the jalopy down the avenue, her arm raised high out the window, middle finger up.
We saw another movie. Paul seethed in his reclining chair, gripping the armrests. He’d wanted to call the cops, but I had to remind him we didn’t know how young the girl actually was. During the closing credits, Paul told me we were down to our last seven hundred grand. Things were dire.
In the foyer, I called my aunt and told her to send money. She started telling me off, saying that my parents would be turning in their graves at my behavior and that I should get away from that good-for-nothing Paul. I knew in my heart that he was trouble, but what could be done? I had a book to write, and two hundred pages to fill. As I listened to my aunt, who was now in the middle of a full-blown rant, I watched Paul shove handfuls of popcorn into his mouth while looking for something else to get from the snack bar. It was then that I really saw him. He was wild and troubled, and I was the same—victims of a sad society. And yet we roared on, trying to find our authentic selves among the mess—wild to live, wild to exist, digging the whole wild, wild world full of the wildest wildness.
Paul, fingers now jammed into a pack of gummies, started talking about the bunker again. His granddad had bought it cheap in the seventies. It had been built by a paranoid American who’d died young of a heart attack. The bunker went nine floors down.
‘There’s a spiral ramp through the whole thing, like the Guggenheim,’ Paul said. He was planning to gut the decor and make it a museum of Asian art for the end times. ‘No one wants to know us now, so we need a gallery to display our art. It’ll be a massive legacy for the family. A full-on rebrand.’
‘Paolo,’ I said, ‘you’re a goddamn genius.’
We hitched a ride to Van Nuys in an Uber and chartered a jet leaving in five days for Hobart then Launceston, with a stop in Honolulu. Soon enough we were in sunny Tasmania driving along fields of white poppies, which were tinged blue.
‘Specially engineered variety,’ Paul said. ‘We make these into blues. Paid all these farmers to grow them. Offered them luxury cars and shit too.’
We went off-road and eventually stopped next to a barbed wire fence. A guy in fatigues appeared out of nowhere and let us in.
‘We’ll be here for a while,’ Paul told him. ‘See you in the morning.’
A big steel door led into the side of a hill. The guy let us through and the door slammed shut.
It felt like a tomb. A tomb with a floor plan like an old-school keyhole. Every floor had a round bit and a rectangular bit that jutted off it. The round bits together formed a cylinder. Paul led me down the spiral ramp he’d been telling me about, which curved around the outer part of the cylinder, all the way to the bottom. From where we were, I could see a pool on the ground floor. It was surrounded by stone relics and was part of a fake beach scene.
‘We’ll go for a swim later,’ Paul said.
The first thing he showed me was a grocery store full of cans of food. Then we kept going down through the spiral to all the different levels and I saw that the place was packed with art. Random pieces, coated in dust, were lying around everywhere. Frames were stacked all over the desk in the medical clinic and on the faded pink tables in the restaurant. Stone gods were lined up in front of the screen in the cinema. In the hair salon, a golden Buddha reclined on a chair. In the chapel was a statue in a glass box of Jesus on the cross, though this, Paul said, was clearly for worship, not exhibition. It was like the family was using the place as a storage facility. There wasn’t going to be anywhere to sit in the end times.
We came to a shooting gallery. Paul took a gun off the wall and aimed at the jade goddess sitting next to one of the targets. He fired five shots and missed.
Next stop was the residential floor. It was a scene out of the seventies, made up of a pale-brick bungalow with a front yard made of fake grass. We went up the path to the front door, passing fake palm tree trunks that disappeared into the ceiling. The walls around the whole scene were painted with hills, blue skies and clouds.
In the living room, more frames and old Chinese vases were crammed on the coffee table. More relics sat above the TV and at the foot of the four-poster in the master bedroom. Next to the bed, Paul had put up a framed photograph of James Dean in a long coat walking through bad weather in Times Square.
Back in the living room, I touched one of the relics—a huge stone head. Paul said it was really good karma to give that sort of thing a permanent place to live.
‘They say the spirits are still in there. One day, for a fee, I could even take Asian apocalypse survivors through this room to connect with their culture.’
Then Paul started laughing because he had a foot fetish but so many of his statues were cut off at the ankles. I had a vision of all the shit those footless spirits would watch when the annihilation of the world came to pass and Paul really settled into the bunker. All the naked, K-infused honeys crawling across the carpet, bruising their thighs on fine art.
‘Beach time,’ said Paul. He opened a cupboard stuffed with historical outfits that looked like they belonged in a museum. Armor and dresses and so on. He rummaged through and found some towels. We went down to the fake beach. The water was a bright aqua. We sat on our towels on the sand and took a couple of reds and some purples from Paul’s bottles. He held up his last bottle of blues and shook it so it rattled.
‘Made by the best,’ he said. We emptied it. I had a bit and he had the rest. We lay back. It felt good.
He pulled a remote control out of his pocket and the building went dark. On the ceiling of the building, at the top of the spiral, stars appeared, spattered across the darkness. Then everything turned shades of blue, purple, pink, yellow and green.
‘Aurora australis,’ said Paul. ‘An installation from an artist out of Boston. Helps me sleep when I’m here.’
We lay there for a while. I watched the colors swirl around us and realized how small we were in this gigantic universe. I began to think about our road trip—how much we had grown to love each other as men, and how we would cherish this moment for the rest of our lives.
Then Paul said, ‘You can also project porn on this thing.’
And into the colored sky came tiny images of genitals and nipples and fingers and parted lips, arranged like a picture in a kaleidoscope, touching and separating and touching and separating. Paul turned to me in the dim light cast by the genitalia and said, ‘Jules, you know what I really want out of life? I want to feel deep, deep love. I want to be deeply, wildly in love with a girl.’
He started to scratch his arms, then reached out and took my face in his clammy hands, gurgling weirdly as he talked. ‘You and me, though. In my museum. Transcendental.’ Tears streamed down his face. He was flushed. ‘We’re on the edge of a new world, man. We’re on the edge of a new world.’
He wiped his cheeks with the backs of his hands and began to nod off. I thought he was going to sleep, but then he got up suddenly and sprinted away.
‘Paul?’
Macklemore began echoing through the bunker and Paul tottered back in an ancient-looking costume that looked like it was made of straw and cloth.
‘Shaman’s get-up,’ he shouted over the music. ‘Can’t remember where from.’ He tried to pull me onto my feet. ‘Vibe, dude!’
But my eyes were now kaleidoscopes. I blinked twice but still couldn’t see right. Paul had ten swirling faces and a hundred angry eyes and a thousand tongues and a million arms, and my entire body felt like it was in slow motion, weighed down by an invisible force. All I could do was watch the shaman dance, split into swirling fragments in my mind. He was spinning and lurching and staggering, chanting nonsense in a voice I couldn’t recognize. The scream of a wild animal came out of him. He began to convulse. Puke launched from those thousand tongues.
He stumbled into that aqua water. Went under.
‘Hello?’ I tried to say. ‘Hello?’
He was floating, face down. I waded in but felt like I was going to black out. I fumbled in my pocket for my phone to call someone, anyone, but I dropped the thing and the water swallowed it up.
I dragged him out. He was tinged blue and limp. I wanted to breathe air into his lungs, but which of the ten mouths was the right one? I tried to pick him up, get him on my back, but fell over. I thought about running up to find the guy in the fatigues, but I couldn’t leave Paul alone—I just wanted to hold his hand. So I kept dragging him, dragging that heavy body up that endless spiral, up from the center of the Earth, and the tears and snot dripped off my chin, and I got him as far as the chapel before I knew I couldn’t go on.
I hauled him down the aisle. The carpet was red with yellow dots and the pattern swirled in front of me. I left him slumped against the side of the pew, his head upright and his limbs sprawled.
On my hands and knees, I turned to face the altar. Raised my hands to pray. They were still wet. Fluff from the carpet was stuck to my palms.
In that silence, I begged for Paul to live. I promised that if we made it out, I’d do more meaningful things with my life than writing, like start that groundbreaking poddie on venture capital. Just as I was about to pass out, I raised my eyes to Jesus, who stared down at me through the glass. I searched those big, sad eyes and all I heard Him say was, ‘My child, I thirst for you.’
