If you are a puker like Elizabeth you can drink Ice Dew or tea for appetite-suppressing liquid bulk and you are one step closer toward recovery. Elizabeth is such a frequent barfer the enamel of her teeth is coming off. Her grandfather left her a trust and she plans on spending every dime to beautify herself. She wants to take a little trip down to Tijuana, where she can go eyetooth to eyetooth for one of those Gary Busey 750-watt smiles. In Tijuana she can also get her crooked pugilist stump of a nose streamlined. Then, with a blinding smile and an irresistibly beautiful nose, her big head notwithstanding, Elizabeth will be swept right off her size 12, triple-X wide feet by Prince Charming. Once she bags her man, she will never have to lift another finger.

“You foolish girl,” I told her after suicide attempt number four, “consider how seldom things turn out the way we expect them to.”

Meanwhile Elizabeth makes do with Quinny, who stands in at five foot two, carrying one hundred and eleven pounds of nervous energy. As you may have guessed, Quinny is no Brad Pitt. His flat snake eyes are as black as obsidian and color-coordinated to go with his black upper-incisor cavities. He’s got extra-special bad breath because he’s always dipping his food into some rancid fish-sauce concoction. This is breath that can buckle your knees at a distance of fifteen yards. It could fell a herd of oxen.

Quinny is the antithesis of Prince Charming. He’s a hyped-up ADD, Adderall-doesn’t-work, walking nervous breakdown. What a pair they make, the alpha and omega of social dysfunction. Late into the night I hear them screwing on Elizabeth’s futon, stopping in the middle of it so Quinny can tie her up and spank her fat ass with a stolen rec-center Ping-Pong paddle. But I shouldn’t complain. For so many highly strung types, sexual release is the last of the bleed-off valves. Without sexual relief, both of them would sink into the black psychic abyss of manic psychoses and probably take me with them, as insanity can be infectious. Both of these nutcases are on maximum-strength Paxil. Sometimes their shrill craziness permeates the humid rice-paper walls of the cramped apartment, infiltrating even the synthetic fibers of the shag rug that smells like a wet dog. E’s got dirty clothes lying all over the place, dirty dishes, laundry hanging to dry on strung-up ropes, and on top of that there are a hundred fifty Quinny messes as well. I sometimes want to take a knife to both of them. Or maybe just get my hands around their necks, bonk their pumpkin heads together, and then just shake the living hell out of them both. And to think I actually “liked” Elizabeth back in the States, before we came to Chengdu as roommates.