Taipei

by Tao Lin

  “Eight tacos,” said Paul absently.

  “I said six tacos,” said Daniel.

  “Six tacos,” said Paul. “Was it, like . . . a taco platter?”

  “No. This place has small tacos.”

  “It wasn’t a taco platter?”

  “It wasn’t a taco platter,” said Daniel.

  “I don’t get it,” said Paul without thinking.

  “Bro,” said Daniel grinning.

  Paul asked Fran what she had eaten.

  “Enchiladas,” said Fran.

  “I can never remember what those are,” said Paul, and went to the bathroom. When he returned Lindsay invited everyone to her Cinco de Mayo party—in five days, at her apartment—then everyone, except Fran, who Daniel said was an undergrad at Columbia and had left to do homework, walked eight blocks to a bar called Harefield Road to meet a group of people Paul knew as acquaintances from his involvement in poetry. Seconds after sitting in the outdoor area Paul openly said “I want to comfort myself with food” without looking at anyone, in a relatively loud voice, with a bleak sensation of unsatisfying catharsis from having accurately, he felt, expressed himself. “I’m just going to eat whatever tonight,” he said, and stood, asking if anyone knew about food options at this bar. Two acquaintances said there were, at this time, around 2:30 a.m., only paninis. One of Daniel’s two suitemates, who said she’d written an article about Paul and reviewed books anonymously for Kirkus, went with him to order a panini. Paul asked if she liked a baseball book, which she mentioned having reviewed, and she talked without pause for what seemed like ten minutes, during which Paul, staring at her calmly, thought “she’s definitely drunk” and “normally I would be interested in her, to some degree, but currently I’m obsessed with Laura” and “she seems maybe focused on not appearing drunk, which is maybe affecting her perception of time, of how long and off-topic and incomprehensible her answer has become.” Paul carried his panini outside and “openly exchanged witty banter while feeling severely depressed,” he thought while speaking to various acquaintances. One said she’d met Paul, when he lived with Shawn Olive, at least three times. Paul said he didn’t recognize her, but also had forgotten that he’d once lived with Shawn Olive. He ate half his panini and said it was unsatisfying and left the bar and returned with Tate’s cookies and Fig Newmans, which he offered to each person. He asked Lindsay what her roommate, whom she’d been talking about, was doing. Lindsay said “sleeping, watching TV, or smoking weed” and Paul said “we should go to your apartment,” aware he was somewhat desperately, if maybe sarcastically, trying to direct his interest away from Laura, toward any girl he had not yet, but still could, meet tonight.

  “This bar’s special feature: ‘paninis until really late,’ ” said Paul to a drunk-looking acquaintance on the way out.

  • • •

  In Lindsay’s apartment’s common room Paul sat eating Fig Newmans on one side of a five-seat sofa with Mitch and Daniel on the other side. Lindsay’s roommate was sleeping. Paul was vaguely aware, as he reread texts from Laura, of people pressuring Matt to smoke marijuana. Matt was standing alone in a corner of the room—seeming in Paul’s peripheral vision like a figure in a horror movie—saying things, as explanation for his choice not to smoke marijuana, about his grandfather’s alcoholism. Paul half-unconsciously mumbled something—to himself, he felt—about feeling thirsty and within a few seconds Matt was standing above him asking if he wanted water. After bringing him a glass of water Matt asked if Paul wanted to use his MacBook to look at the internet. Paul felt endeared to a degree that—in combination with his distraught emotional state, and as he dwelled a few seconds on how Matt’s behavior was like the opposite of pressuring someone to smoke marijuana—he felt like crying. Matt returned with a large MacBook from the room he was sleeping in while on vacation.

  “Thank you,” said Paul smiling.

  “You’re very welcome,” said Matt.

  “You’re being really nice to me.”

  “You’re the guest here,” said Matt, and Paul gingerly asked if he “by chance” had an iPod cord, sensing he would enjoy further indulging an appreciative subject with his gratuitous helpfulness. Paul accepted Matt’s iPod cord with a sensation, he felt, of daintiness, which remained as he transferred mostly pop-punk songs from Matt’s MacBook to his iPod nano. Around 4:30 a.m., in his room, Paul bit a piece of a 150mg Seroquel and listened to songs he hadn’t heard since high school, mostly the EP Look Forward to Failure by the Ataris. He woke at night fifteen hours later and, while showering, felt like he lived in a module attached to a spaceship far enough from any star to never experience daylight.

  Three days later Paul exited the Graham L train station carrying beer and guacamole ingredients in a paper bag from Whole Foods for Lindsay’s Cinco de Mayo party. Sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk against a Thai restaurant was a girl with dyed-black hair. As Paul approached she looked up knowingly with an innocent, wary gaze.

  “Hi,” said Paul. “Are you Fran?”

  “Yeah,” said Fran.

  “I’m Paul.”

  “I know,” said Fran, and slowly closed her notebook.

  “Are you doing homework?”

  “My friend’s homework.”

  “Nice,” said Paul staring transfixed at Fran’s delicate and extreme gaze, like that of a skeleton with eyeballs, or a person with their face peeled off. Paul began talking—slowly, before accelerating to a normal speed—about how Daniel had sounded “really drunk” on the phone but had sent witty, insightful, elaborate texts of mostly long, elegant sentences. Fran said Daniel was like that when on Klonopin. Paul asked if he could have a Klonopin and Fran gave him one and looked to his left, where he was surprised to see Daniel standing in place, a few feet away, looking at Fran with the fixed, discerning, earnest gaze of a three-year-old processing information without considering utility or personal relevance. Paul asked Daniel how many Klonopin he had taken.

  “Five,” said Daniel.

  “Jesus,” said Paul.

  • • •

  When Paul entered the party, ahead of Daniel and Fran, Lindsay wreathed a plastic snake around his head and pulled him toward a hallway designated for photographs. Paul mumbled the word “bathroom” and walked away grinning into the kitchen, where Matt was standing alone, not apparently doing anything. Paul asked about his vacation. Matt said he drove a rental car without a plan to Maine and ate seafood in a restaurant alone, did other things alone. “It was really good,” he said, and briefly displayed a haunted and irreducibly unenthusiastic expression before reaching for chips. Paul walked out of the kitchen and looked at Fran sitting alone on the sofa where he’d eaten Fig Newmans five days ago and returned to the kitchen and, while peripherally aware of a self-conscious Matt slowly creating guacamole, asked Daniel what he’d meant—in one of his dense, interesting texts—when he said he felt like there’d been “strange occurrences lately.” Daniel said he read all of Paul’s books last autumn while in San Francisco and told his friends he had a feeling that when he came to New York City he would meet Paul and they would become friends. Daniel was alert and expressionless as an advanced cyborg as he explained that he’d gone to Paul and Frederick’s reading because Amy didn’t want to be alone with Lucie and that none of them had known Paul was reading.

  “I’ve felt similar things,” said Paul. “Since Kyle’s party, when I met Laura. Or, I mean, actually, the night before that, at the reading near Times Square, when we met.”

  “How do you feel about it?”

  “About what?”

  “It,” said Daniel vaguely.

  “It seems good. New things keep happening, which seems good. I just felt right now like it’s going to end tonight.”

  “You’re pessimistic about it,” said Daniel as a neutral observation, staring intensely at Paul with a serious, almost grim expression.

  “We haven’t referenced it until now.”

  “I’m sorry for talking about it and causing
you to think it might end,” said Daniel earnestly.

  “It’s okay,” said Paul, a little confused. “Maybe it won’t end. But I wonder if we need to make an effort, for it to continue.”

  “Well,” said Daniel hesitantly. “Don’t you think it just needs to happen naturally?”

  “Yeah,” said Paul.

  “Well, then we wouldn’t make an effort, then, huh?”

  “I mean if we need to keep doing things, instead of staying inside,” said Paul.

  “You said you only go to like one party a month. But you’re at almost every party.”

  “This isn’t normal at all,” said Paul. “Before we met I probably did less than one thing a month.”

  “Why do you think that is?”

  “Probably because I met people I like.”

  Daniel hesitated. “What people?”

  “You, Mitch, Laura . . . Amy,” said Paul. “I’m going to the bathroom.” When he returned Fran and Daniel were making guacamole energetically, with spoons and a mashing strategy, adding onion and cilantro and salsa and garlic powder, having apparently replaced Matt, who was very slowly, it seemed, moving a beer toward his mouth. Paul began eating guacamole as it was being made, with chips, to no discernible opposition. In a distracted voice, without looking at anyone, he asked if Daniel and Fran wanted to go to a “book party” tomorrow night at a bookstore in Greenpoint and they seemed interested. Fran gave everyone vodka shots. Matt moved into a position facing more people and, with an earnest but powerless attempt at enthusiasm, resulting in a a weak form of sarcasm, asked if everyone wanted to go to the roof.

  On the fourth-story roof Paul said he wanted to run “really fast in a circle,” vaguely aware and mostly unconcerned, though he knew he didn’t want to die—less because he had an urge to live than because dying, like knitting or backgammon, seemed irrelevant to his life—that due to alcohol and Klonopin, in a moment of inattention, he could easily walk off the building. He collided with an unseen Fran—who seemed already confused, before this, standing alone in an arbitrary area of the roof—and felt intrigued by the binary manner that his movement was stopped, though how else, he vaguely realized, could something stop? He texted Laura, inviting her to “come eat Mexican food at a party,” then went downstairs and indiscriminately moved refried beans, guacamole, three kinds of chips, cucumber, salsa, beef onto his plate until he had a roughly symmetrical mound of food, on top of which—on the way out of the kitchen, as a kind of afterthought—he added a fluffy, triangular wedge of cake. After carrying the Mayan-pyramid-shaped plate of food, with some difficulty, up the ladder, onto the roof, where he silently ate it all, he belligerently directed conversation toward Laura-related things, then said he felt cold and was going inside. He descended the ladder until his head was below the opening to the roof and tried to hear what Fran and Daniel—who remained outside smoking—were saying, while unaware of his presence, but couldn’t, and also didn’t know what could possibly be said that he would want to secretly hear, so returned inside the apartment and lay on his back on the sofa in the common room.

  He woke to flash photography, then to Lindsay’s voice, in another room, loudly saying “get out.” Lindsay entered the common room and said, to a blearily waking Paul, something about “your friend” looking inside her purse, trying to steal her shoes. Paul stared blankly, a little embarrassed to have slept on his back, for an unknown amount of time, on the apartment’s only sofa. He looked at his phone: no new texts. After saying “sorry” a few times to Lindsay, who seemed unsure if she felt negatively toward Paul, he put a half-eaten onion, beer bottles, other trash into his Whole Foods bag and descended stairs behind Daniel and Fran, who was quietly murmuring things vaguely in her defense. They decided to go to Legion, a bar, one and a half blocks away, with an outdoor area on the sidewalk.

  “Were you trying to steal her shoes?” said Daniel.

  “No, I wasn’t,” said Fran quietly. “Our shoes look the same.”

  “I’m asking because you’ve told me you like to steal things when you’re drunk.”

  “I wasn’t stealing her shoes,” said Fran in a loud whisper.

  They were walking toward Paul’s room, after ten minutes in Legion, when it became known, in a manner that seemed sourceless, as if they realized simultaneously, that Fran had “accidentally,” she then said, stolen a leather jacket, which she was wearing. They agreed it would be inconvenient for the owner to not have their phone, which was in the jacket, but continued walking and each tried on the jacket, which seemed to best fit Paul, who found two gigantic vitamins in one of its pockets. In his room he put the phone on the table beside his mattress and, saying he didn’t want to be near it, sort of pushed it away. He opened his MacBook and played “Annoying Noise of Death” and saw that Daniel was calmly observing himself, in the full-length wall mirror, as he exercised with Caroline’s five-pound weights that were usually on the floor in the kitchen. Fran said to put on Rilo Kiley. Paul said it was Rilo Kiley and, after a few motionless seconds, Fran slowly turned her head away to rotate her face, like a moon orbiting behind its planet, interestingly out of view. Paul grinned to himself as he lay on his back and propped up his head with a folded pillow, resting his MacBook against the front of his thighs, both knees bent. Daniel sat on the mattress in a position that a robot in a black comedy about a child with two fathers, one of whom was a robot, would assume to recite a bedtime story, looking at Paul however with a slightly, stoically puzzled expression. “When you asked me if I liked Rilo Kiley, the night we met, I thought you were joking,” said Daniel.

  “No,” said Paul. “Why did you think that?”

  “You’re more earnest than I thought you’d be.”

  “I wouldn’t joke about something like that.”

  “Like what?” said Daniel.

  Paul said he wouldn’t pretend he liked something, or make fun of liking something, or like something “ironically.” Daniel sort of drifted away and began looking at Paul’s books with a patient, scholarly demeanor—in continuation, Paul realized, of a calm inquisitiveness that had characterized most of his behavior tonight, probably due to the five Klonopin he’d ingested, though he was always inquisitive and would continue asking questions, in certain conversations, when others would’ve stopped, which Paul liked. Twenty minutes later Daniel was reading pages of different books and Paul was looking at methadone’s Wikipedia page (“. . . developed in Germany in 1937 . . . an acyclic analog of morphine or heroin . . .”) when Fran returned from outside with cuts on her face and neck from a group of girls, she said, that called her a bitch and said she tried to steal shoes and attacked her, pushing her down. Daniel asked how the girls opened the gate to the house’s walkway. Fran repeated, with a vaguely confused expression, that she was attacked. Paul, who hadn’t realized she had left the room, asked how she reentered the gate without a key. Fran stared expectantly at Daniel with her child-like gaze, then quietly engaged herself in a solitary activity elsewhere in the room as Daniel and Paul began pondering the situation themselves, to no satisfying conclusion. Fran said she wanted to go dancing at Legion before it closed in less than an hour and Paul thought he saw her put a number of pills into her mouth in the stereotypically indiscriminate manner he’d previously seen only on TV or in movies. Fran and Daniel did yoga-like stretches on Paul’s yoga mat and snorted two Adderall—crushed into a potion-y blue, faintly neon sand—off a pink piece of construction paper. Daniel briefly hugged a supine Paul, then stood at a distance as Fran lay flat on top of Paul with her head facedown to the right of his head. Fran didn’t move for around forty seconds, during which, at one point, she murmured something that seemed significant but, muffled by the mattress, was not comprehensible. She rolled onto her back and Daniel pulled her to a standing position. Paul was surprised to feel moved in a calming, tearful manner—as if some long-term desire, requiring a tiring amount of effort, had been fulfilled—when, before leaving for Legion, both Daniel and Fran affected slightly friendli
er demeanors (rounder eyes, higher-pitched voices, a sort of pleasantness of expression like minor face-lifts) to confirm meeting at the book party Paul mentioned earlier and had forgotten.

  Paul realized after they left that he’d gotten what from elementary school through college he often most wanted—unambiguous indications of secure, mutual friendships—but was no longer important to him.

  The book party, like algae, feeling its way elsewhere, moved slowly but persistently from the bookstore’s basement to its first floor, to the sidewalk outside, converging finally with other groups at a corner bar, where Paul failed more than five times to recognize or remember the faces or names of recent to long-term acquaintances—and twice introduced people he’d already introduced to each other, including Daniel and Frederick, both of whom however either feigned having not met or had actually forgotten—but due to 2mg Klonopin remained poised, with a peaceful sensation of faultlessness, physiologically calm but mentally stimulated, throughout the night, as if beta testing the event by acting like an exaggerated version of himself, for others to practice against, before the real Paul, the only person without practice, was inserted for the actual event. Fran left for her apartment, which she shared with a low-level cocaine dealer majoring in something art related at Columbia, to prepare a kind of pasta, “with a lot of things in it,” that was her specialty, it seemed. Paul and Daniel arrived ninety minutes later and Fran served a giant platter of cheese-covered, lasagna-like pasta—attractively browned in a mottled pattern of variations of crispiness—in small, colorful plastic bowls with buttered toast on which were thin slices of raw garlic. They ate all of it, then arranged themselves on Fran’s three-seat sofa and watched Drugstore Cowboy on Daniel’s MacBook. Paul was unable to discern the movie as coherent—he kept thinking the same scene, in a motel room, was replaying with minor variations—but was aware of sometimes commenting on the sound track, including that it was “really weird” and “unexpected.”