Taipei

by Tao Lin

  As Michelle became smaller, then out of view, Paul distantly sensed the implication, from his previous thoughts, which he’d mostly forgotten, that the universe in its entirety was a message, to itself, to not feel bad—an ever-elaborating, languageless rhetoric against feeling bad—and he was troubled by this, suspecting that his thoughts and intentions, at some point, in April or May or years ago, in college or as a child, had been wrong, but he had continued in that wrongness, and was now distanced from some correct beginning to a degree that the universe (and himself, a part of the universe) was articulately against him.

  In his tiredness and inattention these intuitions manifested in Paul as an uncomplicated feeling of bleakness—that he was in the center of something bad, whose confines were expanding, as he remained in the same place. Faintly he recognized in this a kind of humor, but mostly he was aware of the rain, continuous and everywhere as an incognizable information, as he crossed the magnified street, gleaming and blacker from wetness, to return to the party.

  Michelle’s absence in Taiwan was mentioned once, at dinner with eight to twelve relatives, a week into Paul’s visit, when Paul’s father, 61, characteristically without prompting or context, loudly joked that Paul’s girlfriends always left him, then laughed in an uncontrollable-seeming, close-eyed, almost wincing manner. Paul’s mother, 57, responded with aggravation that the opposite was true and that Paul’s father shouldn’t “lie recklessly,” she said in Mandarin.

  Paul hadn’t seen his parents since they sold their house in Florida a year and a half ago and moved back to Taiwan, after almost thirty years in America, into a fourteenth-floor apartment, in a rapidly developing area of Taipei, with two guest rooms that his mother had repeatedly stressed were Paul’s room and Paul’s brother’s room. Paul thought his parents looked the same, but he viewed his mother, who had been diagnosed as “prediabetic,” a little differently, maybe as finally past middle age, though not yet elderly. Her emails, the past eight months, had frequently mentioned, as sort of asides, or reminders, to herself mostly, that she was using less sugar in her daily coffee, but really shouldn’t be using any—her most emphasized message to her family, the past two decades, in Paul’s view, was the importance of health to a happy life—though her doctor had said the amount she used was okay, and on days without sugar in her coffee, which was decaf, she felt “empty, like something is missing,” she had said in one email.

  When, one afternoon, Paul saw her putting sugar in her coffee, it seemed to them both like she’d been “caught” doing something wrong. She blushed and briefly focused self-consciously on stirring her coffee with a little spoon, then she looked at Paul and her mouth reflexively opened in an endearingly child-like, self-concious, almost mischievous display of guilt and shame and repentance that Paul recognized from the rare times he’d seen her do things she’d told him not to do, such as eat food that had fallen on the floor. After a grinning Paul obligatorily said something negative about sugar, that everyone, not only diabetics, should avoid it, his mother’s expression resolved to the controlled, smirking, wryly satisfied demeanor of an adult who is slightly more amused than embarrassed to have been caught idly succumbing to a meager comfort that they’ve openly disapproved of for themselves and others. Paul unintentionally caught his mother using sugar two more times, the next two weeks, resulting in similar—but less intense—reactions and outcomes. The 24oz organic raw agave nectar he had mailed her, believing it was the safest sweetener for diabetics, had been opened but not used, it seemed, more than once or twice.

  His fourth week in Taiwan, one more week than planned, his mother began encouraging him two or three times a day—with a slightly affected, strategic nonchalance, Paul felt—to move to Taiwan for one year to teach English. She mentioned Ernest Hemingway more than once while saying Paul would benefit, as a writer, from the interesting experience. Paul said he would benefit by being in America, where he could speak the language and maintain friendships and “do things,” he said in Mandarin, visualizing himself on his back, on his yoga mat, with his MacBook on the inclined surface of his thighs, formed by bending his knees, looking at the internet. His parents encouraged him to stay a fifth week, which with some difficulty he decided against, thinking it “excessive,” after which—his last few days in Taiwan—his mother began to stress that he should visit every December from now on, stating it as a fact, then making a noise meaning “right?” Paul’s responses ranged from “maybe,” to neutral-to-annoyed noises, to an explanation of why the more she pressured him the less influence she’d have on his decisions.

  At the airport Paul’s mother stayed with Paul until she wasn’t allowed farther without a ticket. She pointed at her eyes and said they were watery. Paul was “required,” she said in Mandarin with mock sternness, to visit next December.

  In the terminal, sitting with eyes closed, Paul imagined moving alone to Taipei at an age like 51, when maybe he’d have cycled through enough friendships and relationships to not want more. Because his Mandarin wasn’t fluent enough for conversations with strangers—and he wasn’t close to his relatives, with whom attempts at communication were brief and non-advancing and often koan-like, ending usually with one person looking away, ostensibly for assistance, then leaving—he’d be preemptively estranged, secretly unfriendable. The unindividualized, shifting mass of everyone else would be a screen, distributed throughout the city, onto which he’d project the movie of his uninterrupted imagination. Because he’d appear to, and be able to pretend he was, but never actually be a part of the mass, maybe he’d gradually begin to feel a kind of needless intimacy, not unlike being in the same room as a significant other and feeling affection without touching or speaking. An earnest assembling of the backup life he’d sketched and constructed the blueprints and substructures for (during the average of six weeks per year, spread throughout his life, that he’d been in Taiwan) would begin, at some point, after which, months or years later, one morning, he would sense the independent organization of a second, itinerant consciousness—lured here by the new, unoccupied structures—toward which he’d begin sending the data of his sensory perception. The antlered, splashing, water-treading land animal of his first consciousness would sink to some lower region, in the lake of himself, where he would sometimes descend in sleep and experience its disintegrating particles—and furred pieces, brushing past—in dreams, as it disappeared into the pattern of the nearest functioning system.

  On the plane, after a cup of black coffee, Paul thought of Taipei as a fifth season, or “otherworld,” outside, or in equal contrast with, his increasingly familiar and self-consciously repetitive life in America, where it seemed like the seasons, connecting in right angles, for some misguided reason, had formed a square, sarcastically framing nothing—or been melded, Paul vaguely imagined, about an hour later, facedown on his arms on his dining tray, into a door-knocker, which a child, after twenty to thirty knocks, no longer expecting an answer, has continued using, in a kind of daze, distracted by the pointlessness of his activity, looking absently elsewhere, unaware when he will abruptly, idly stop.

  2

  Something staticky and paranormally ventilated about the air, which drifted through a half-open window, late one afternoon, caused a delicately waking Paul, clutching a pillow and drooling a little, to believe he was a small child in Florida, in a medium-size house, on or near winter break. He felt dimly excited, anticipating a hyperactive movement of his body into a standing position, then was mostly unconscious for a vague amount of time until becoming aware of what seemed to be a baffling non sequitur—and, briefly, in its mysterious approach from some eerie distance, like someone else’s consciousness—before resolving plainly as a memory, of having already left Florida, at some point, to attend New York University. After a deadpan pause, during which the new information was accepted by default as recent, he casually believed it was autumn and he was in college, and as he felt that period’s particular gloominess he sensed a concurrent assembling, at a spe
cific distance inside himself, of dozens of once-intimate images, people, places, situations. With a sensation of easily and entirely abandoning a prior context, of having no memory, he focused, as an intrigued observer, on this assembling and was surprised by an urge, which he immediately knew he hadn’t felt in months, or maybe years, to physically involve himself—by going outside and living each day patiently—in the ongoing, concrete occurrence of what he was passively, slowly remembering. But the emotion dispersed to a kind of nothingness—and its associated memories, like organs in a lifeless body, became rapidly indiscernible, dissembling by the metaphysical equivalent, if there was one, of entropy—as he realized, with some confusion and an oddly instinctual reluctance, blinking and discerning his new room, which after two months could still seem unfamiliar, that he was somewhere else, as a different person, in a much later year.

  He kept his eyes pressurelessly closed and didn’t move, wanting to return—without yet knowing who or what he was—to sleep, where he could intensify and prolong and explore what he residually felt and was uncontrollably forgetting, but was already alert, in concrete reality, to a degree that his stillness, on his queen-size mattress, felt like a kind of hiding. He stared at the backs of his eyelids with motionless eyeballs, slightly feigning not knowing what he was looking at—which also felt like a kind of hiding—and gradually discerned that he was in Brooklyn, on an aberrantly colder day in late March, in the two-person apartment, in a four-story house, where he had moved, a few weeks after returning from Taiwan, because Kyle and Gabby had wanted more space, to “save their relationship.”

  It was spring, not winter or autumn, Paul thought with some lingering confusion. He listened to the layered murmur of wind against leaves, familiarly and gently disorienting as a terrestrial sound track, reminding people of their own lives, then opened his MacBook—sideways, like a hardcover book—and looked at the internet, lying on his side, with his right ear pressed into his pillow, as if, unable to return to sleep, at least in position to hear what, in his absence, might be happening there.

  That night—after leaving his room at dusk, then “working on things” in an underground computer lab in Bobst Library, as he did most days—Paul became “completely lost,” he repeatedly thought, in a tundra-like area of Brooklyn for around twenty minutes before unexpectedly arriving at the arts space hosting the panel discussion, on the topic of self-publishing, he’d agreed to attend with his literary acquaintance Anton, 23, who was visiting from Norway. Paul began, at some point, during the ninety-minute discussion, to feel a mocking, sitcom-like conviction that, for him, “too many years had passed” since college—that without education’s season-backed, elaborately subdivided, continuous structure, traceable numerically backward almost to birth, connecting a life in that direction, he was becoming isolated and unexplainable as one of those mysterious phenomena, contained within informational boxes, in picture-heavy books on natural history, which he would’ve felt scared, as a child, if he was alone in a dark room, to think about for too long. After the ninety-minute discussion, which seemed unanimously in favor of self-publishing, the audience was instructed, somewhat anticlimactically, to bring their folding chairs to another room and lean them against a wall, then Paul and Anton stood waiting for Juan, 24, an MFA student in fiction at NYU, who’d wanted to eat with them but was talking to an attractive woman.

  “What should we do?” said Paul.

  “I don’t know,” said Anton in a quiet monotone.

  They decided to leave in three minutes, at 9:01. This was Paul’s second or third social situation involving more than one person, excluding himself, since returning from Taiwan, two months ago. His only regular communication since his relationship with Michelle ended three and a half months ago was emails and Gmail chats with Charles, 25, who lived in Seattle with his girlfriend and who had sold most of his belongings, the past few months, in preparation to leave America indefinitely to travel alone in Mexico—and eventually South America—because he felt “alienated,” he’d said.

  “It’s 9:04,” said Anton.

  “What should we do?”

  “We could wait until 9:10.”

  “I don’t know,” said Paul grinning. “I don’t know. Let’s just leave now, I think.” He didn’t move for around ten seconds. “We should go,” he said, and after a few seconds moved toward the exit, feeling slightly oxygen deprived.

  “Hey,” said Juan running. “Are you guys going to eat now?”

  “Yeah,” said Paul, and glanced, for some reason, at Anton, whose eyes, behind medium-thick lenses, appeared farther away but of higher resolution than the rest of his face.

  “Sorry,” said Juan looking at Anton.

  “It’s called Pacifico,” said Paul outside. “The address is 97 Smith.”

  “I think Pacific is this way,” said Juan.

  “Pacifico,” said Paul looking at Anton, who seemed to be grinning.

  “This way,” said Juan rolling his bike beside him.

  “Wait,” said Paul. “The restaurant is called Pacifico.”

  “I kept thinking it was on Pacific,” said Juan with a serious expression.

  “No,” said Paul. “But it’s probably near Pacific.”

  In Pacifico, a dungeon-like Mexican restaurant, Paul stared at his menu, waiting for his eyes to adjust in the diffuse lighting. He was aware of Anton and Juan, across the table, also holding and staring at menus. When their burritos arrived he noticed, with preemptively suppressed interpretation, that his, of the three, appeared slightly darkest. Then a large group of males from the panel discussion entered and seated themselves in a swarming and disorganized manner, which Paul experienced as a parody of surrounding a heterosexual, single male with a variety of ethnicities and ages of males.

  While idly eating the salad-y remains of his burrito with a fork, around twenty minutes later, Paul became aware of himself analyzing when he should’ve left. He vaguely traced back the night and concluded he should’ve left when, on his way to the venue, he had been “completely lost.” He allowed himself to consider earlier opportunities, mostly for something to do, and discerned after a brief sensation of helplessness—like if he’d divided 900 by itself and wanted the calculator to answer 494/494 or 63/63—that, in terms of leaving this social situation, he shouldn’t have been born. He suppressed a grin, then channeled the impulse into the formation of what he thought of as a nervous smile and stood and mumbled “I’m going to sleep now” and “nice seeing you” until he was outside, where it was windy and cold.

  He walked toward an F train station, aware of the strangeness of clouds at night—their enveloped flatness and dimensional vagueness, shifting and osmotic as some advanced form of gaseous amoeba—and remembered when he got lodged in an upside-down wood stool, as a small child, in Florida. His father had sawed off two rungs with an enormous, floppy, serrated blade while his mother, alternately grinning and intensely focused, careful not to allow her personal experience of the event impair its documentation, photographed them from different angles, sometimes directing their attention to the camera, like in a photo shoot.

  The next two weeks Paul gradually began to view the five months until September, when his second novel would be published and he would go on a two-month book tour, as an “interim period,” during which he would mostly be alone, “calmly organizing things,” he said in an email to his mother. He had already been mostly alone, he knew, since returning from Taiwan, but in a vague way, often wondering if he should’ve gone to whatever social gathering. Now if he felt urges to socialize, to meet a romantic prospect, he would simply relocate them, without further consideration, beyond the “interim period,” when he would be extremely social, he envisioned. Until then he would calmly focus on being productive in a low-level manner, finding to-do lists and unfinished projects in his Gmail account and further organizing, working on, or deleting them, for example.

  In early April he got an email from Traci asking if she could email-interview him for
a website. After a few emails Paul asked Traci, whom he now reasonably, he felt, viewed as a romantic prospect, if she wanted to meet for dinner. At an Asian fusion restaurant, which Traci had suggested, they talked for around fifteen minutes, during which Paul’s interest steadily increased, before Traci mentioned living with her boyfriend. Paul was aware of the ice hockey game on the flat-screen TV attached to a wall, of the disparity between Thai food and ice hockey, as he slowly said “is, um, is it a studio apartment?”

  Walking alone, to his room, an hour later, he realized he was deriving comfort from the existence, in his life, of a “backup prospect.” There was a specific girl he liked who liked him back, but he couldn’t remember who, it seemed. When he realized he’d been thinking of Anton, that he’d unconsciously de-gendered and abstracted Anton into a kind of silhouette, which he’d successfully presented to himself as a romantic prospect, he grinned uncontrollably for around thirty seconds, almost getting hit by a minivan when, rerouting to a darker street to better hide his face, he jogged somewhat recklessly across an intersection.

  Paul felt more committed, after that, to viewing the time until September as an interim period, and didn’t have an in-person conversation for more than a week, during which, to his own approval, he seemed to be settling, if precariously, with two days spent mostly eating, into a somewhat productive, loneliness-free routine. He remembered while peeling a banana one night that he had committed, months ago, to a reading in April—in three days, he learned from the internet, in a building near Times Square.

  At the reading, after arriving ten minutes early by accident and talking to the organizer, then sitting alone and, to appear occupied, holding a pen and staring down at what he’d printed in the library—an account of his visit to Taiwan, four months ago—where he planned to return immediately after he and Frederick, an author in his early 40s, finished reading, Paul began to feel sleepy, in his seat. Yawning, he looked up and recognized Mitch, 26, a classmate from middle/ high school in Florida, where they had mutual friends but had never spoken to each other, that Paul could remember, approaching from a conspiratorially far distance, like an FBI agent but slower. Mitch had messaged on Facebook, a few weeks ago, that he might attend this reading.