Taipei

by Tao Lin

  Daniel wrote “best wishes, from Charles” in the book.

  Charles’ six weeks in Mexico and Guatemala, related in emails and Gmail chats, traveling hostel to hostel, spending much of his time in internet cafés feeling alienated from Americans doing what he was doing, but in groups, had taken on the tone and focus, after two weeks, of a comedic sitcom, which he’d named Avoiding Jehan, because his primary concern, most days, was to avoid or endure or try to permanently escape a person named Jehan, who had repeatedly—almost always inadvertently, obliviously—thwarted Charles’ few romantic prospects and, in social situations, caused Charles to become “the third wheel” or “the fifth wheel.” In one email Charles had wished Jehan would “become invisible.” After getting stalled in Guatemala, on the way to South America, two weeks ago, Charles had returned cashless to his girlfriend and Seattle, where they now shared “a smaller, shittier apartment,” he said, than when he left America, around two months ago.

  The sky had begun to colorfully darken, a few hours later, with reds and purples and pinks that drifted away, like cotton candy, from an unseen horizon, as if something there was changing and releasing energy, when an Asian girl, who had slowed and passed a minute ago while talking into an iPhone, returned and said she recognized Paul from the internet and distractedly asked if Daniel was a cop.

  “No,” said Daniel, and the Asian girl said she was buying marijuana from someone with a business card, which she showed Daniel, at his request. She bought two books and three Adderall and kneeled and asked if Daniel or Paul had a driver’s license, to move her friend’s car from Crown Heights to the Graham L train station for money. They discussed the car for what seemed like fifteen minutes, without resolution, then the girl, whose name was Annie, which Paul heard initially as Addy, removed a Chinese magazine from her bag and asked if Paul was good at translating. Paul said he couldn’t read Chinese or speak Mandarin fluently, and had an American accent sometimes, he’d been told. “I’m going to pee,” he said, and went to Verb, two blocks away. In line, behind two people, he thought that, from a certain point onward—beginning with his book tour, maybe—he would only appear in public if he’d ingested sufficient drugs to not primarily be a source of anxiety, bleakness, awkwardness, etc. for himself and/or others.

  When Paul returned to Daniel and Annie they were talking about Annie’s boyfriend, who had attended the same college as Daniel, in Colorado. Annie’s boyfriend had gone to India after college. When he returned to America, three years ago, he died for a reason that Paul, who was thinking of how spring was to summer like a morning was to an entire day, brief and lucid and transitional, didn’t hear. Annie said her boyfriend’s funeral, due to a request he’d made in India, had been organized and promoted like a party and was “weird,” because it had been exactly like a party except everyone was wearing black.

  • • •

  In mid-July, a few weeks later, at a party that, instead of ending, had moved outside, through a window at the back of someone’s bedroom, onto an eighth-floor roof, Paul and Daniel were on an additionally elevated platform—corner-set, wall-less, square, smooth—like a landing pad for tiny helicopters.

  Daniel was standing with limbs and neck uncoordinatedly extended, slightly striding in place—the pre-predatory stance of a chained thing that had broken free and didn’t yet know where to direct its vengeance, or what to do generally. His vision was focused horizontally, as if across a flat expanse. Then, with his back to one of the two edges dropping to the street, he approached an already fearful Paul—sitting cross-legged at the platform’s center, aware Daniel had been drinking steadily for hours and was probably on two or more drugs—who reacted preemptively, against what seemed like a purposeless entity unreasonably desiring his involvement, with defensive movements of his arms and hands, causing the situation, in Paul’s panicked state, to immediately seem like an unrestrained wrestling, though it probably looked more like an exaggeratedly confused handshaking. Paul tried to concentrate on flattening himself—on retaining a low, stable center—while repeatedly telling Daniel to “stop,” because it was “dangerous,” he heard himself say in a gravely serious, faintly humorous voice of uncertainly suppressed fear, but was distracted by how most of his thoughts were based on a reality in which he had fallen off the building. Should he close his eyes? What should he try to see? What would his mother do/feel? Could he grab things to disrupt his fall like in movies? Could one of these be his final thought? What would that mean? Why couldn’t he comprehend this? Should he think other things?

  3

  Eight people were in Erin’s five-seat car, which had gotten lost on its way from Paul’s book-release reading in Brooklyn to DuMont Burger, also in Brooklyn, when it was stopped by a police car, in Manhattan, around two hundred feet from the Williamsburg Bridge. The officer shined a flashlight through the driver’s window at the backseat without bending to see what was there, then asked Erin, 24, who had driven four hours that day from Baltimore to attend Paul’s reading and visit friends, to step outside the car. Paul, in the front passenger seat, hadn’t seen Fran, who was sitting partly on him, or Daniel, in the backseat, in five or six weeks, except once, briefly and separately, at a Bret Easton Ellis reading three weeks ago, when they’d avoided each other, and Fran, without context, had shown Paul a text from Daniel insulting her in a strangely formal, almost aristocratic tone. Paul had communicated regularly, the past month, only with Charles, by email or Gmail chat, mostly about what food they had eaten, or were thinking about eating, to “console” themselves. After being more social, April to July, than any other period of his life, Paul had returned to his default lifestyle, which varied, to some degree, but generally entailed (1) avoiding most social situations (2) not wanting to sleep most nights and not knowing why—he’d wanted since 2006 to title one of his books I Don’t Want to Sleep but I Don’t Know What I’m Waiting For—resulting usually in four to ten hours of looking at the internet, reading, masturbating, etc. until morning, when he would eat something and sleep until night.

  Erin, back in her car, said the officer had looked at her two-months-expired, out-of-state driver’s license an abnormally long time, like he’d forgotten what he was doing, before quietly saying “be careful” and allowing her to continue driving, in what seemed to be an egregious oversight, without a ticket or decreasing passengers.

  Paul first learned of Erin twenty months ago, in January 2009, when she commented on his blog and he clicked her profile and read her pensive, melancholy, amusing accounts, on her blog, of her vague relationships and part-time bookstore job and nights drinking beer while looking at the internet and classes at the University of Baltimore, where she’d reenrolled after a two-year break. Paul found and read—and reread, with high levels of interest—three long stories, each focused on an unrequited or failed relationship, that she had published in online magazines. Erin, being an attractive and adventurous-seeming person, was probably almost always, Paul imagined, entering or leaving—or, in some way, maneuvering—one or more relationships, but probably, between relationships, as a person who seemed to enjoy being alone sometimes, would become more active on the internet, for weeks or months, which over months and years would overlap with Paul’s nearly continuously high levels of internet activity. They would gradually communicate more and maybe begin emailing and—if neither died, entered long relationships, or left the internet—eventually meet in person. Paul viewed this process as self-fulfilling, not something he wanted to track or manipulate, so after one or two weeks had mostly internalized Erin’s existence—as a busy person with a separate life, in a different city—and had stopped thinking about her by mid-February, when he met Michelle, with whom he was in a relationship both times, before tonight, that he met Erin in person.

  The first time was in July, when Erin visited New York City for the release of Charles’ poetry book. The day after the release Paul was amused and excited for them, at a BBQ, when Charles said he had kissed Erin.

  Th
e second time was in September, one year ago, when Erin attended Paul’s reading in Baltimore. At a restaurant, with a large group of people, but talking only to each other, Paul asked about Charles, whom Erin had visited in August. Erin said she had changed her plane ticket and left earlier than planned because Charles had become gradually less affectionate, culminating with a night when, after sex, he said he didn’t feel anything for her, then consoled her, as she cried, in his kitchen. Paul liked Erin’s forthright, unhesitant, nonjudgmental answers and that she was able—already, despite what seemed like strong disappointment—to view and describe what had happened as at least partly amusing. When Erin asked about Michelle, as they walked to her car, Paul automatically said Michelle was “good” while distinctly recalling a recent night when he complained he always offered her food or drink before himself, then after Michelle said she’d be happy to do that, now that she knew it mattered to him, said it didn’t matter to him and she shouldn’t change. Exiting Erin’s car, at the hotel he was staying in for one night, because a mysterious Johns Hopkins professor, whose Face-book name was “Cloud Bat,” had bought him a room, Paul thought that if he weren’t in a relationship with Michelle he would ask Erin upstairs, where they would, he vaguely imagined, continue talking.

  As Erin’s car slowly accelerated away from the police car, onto the Williamsburg Bridge, one person, then another, said they were illegally carrying drugs. After a peculiarly awkward, car-wide silence that became comical when someone asked if every person in the car was illegally carrying drugs, eliciting three affirmations and a sort of confirmatory announcement that every person—Erin, Paul, Daniel, Fran, Mitch, Juan, Jeannie, Jeremy—was illegally carrying drugs, there was the immediately space-filling noise of a small crowd laughing, which continued for around five seconds, during which Paul (who, in sharing his seat with Fran, was partly turned toward the driver’s window) watched the police car, or a police car, zoom past in the left lane, with emergency lights on and sirens off, quick and soundless as an apparition or the hologram of itself.

  In DuMont Burger’s bathroom Paul swallowed half of half a 30mg Oxycodone and .5mg Xanax, feebly amused to be already deviating, in moderate excess, from his plans to ingest specific amounts of drugs at certain times during his book tour, September 7 to November 4. To determine what amount of what drugs—MDMA, LSD, any benzodiazepine, amphetamine, opiate—he should ingest, on what days, to minimize anxiety and boredom for himself and others, he’d edited the seven-page itinerary from his publisher to fit on one page and, in an idle process he’d enjoyed, the past few weeks, studied each event in context, writing notes on the paper. He’d printed a final draft, currently in his pocket, that said he should ingest something—specified, in most instances, by type and amount—before twenty-two of his twenty-five events and some miscellaneous things such as the day a writer from BlackBook was writing an article about “hanging out” with him while doing that.

  Paul splashed water on his face, which he dried, then returned to his seat, next to Juan, who was talking to Jeremy about whether a horse could win “best athlete of the year.” Erin, the only person Paul felt like talking to, at the moment, was out of range, so when two acquaintances who didn’t know anyone else arrived Paul sat with them at a four-person table, where he felt self-conscious about the tenuousness of his situation—he hadn’t ordered food because he was nauseated from the Oxycodone and long car ride and he didn’t have anything he wanted to say to anyone. When a friend of the acquaintances arrived, sitting at the table’s fourth seat, Paul fixated on her—maybe partly to justify his increasingly pointless, idle presence—in an exaggerated manner (asking her questions continuously while sustaining a “concentrating expression” with such intensity, muddled by the onset of the drugs he’d used in the bathroom, that he sometimes felt able to sense the weight of the microscopic painting of the restaurant’s interior, decreased by a dimension and scaled down to almost nothing, resting on the top curvature of his right eyeball) that felt conducive to abruptly stopping and leaving, which he did, after around fifteen minutes of increasingly forced conversation, walking six blocks to his room.

  After blearily looking at the internet a little, then peeing and brushing his teeth and washing his face, he lay in darkness on his mattress, finally allowing the simple insistence of the opioid, like an unending chord progression with a consistently unexpected and pleasing manner of postponing resolution, to accumulate and expand, until his brain and heart and the rest of him were contained within the same song-like beating—of another, larger, protective heart—inside of which, temporarily safe from the outside world, he would shrink into the lunar city of himself and feel and remember strange and forgotten things, mostly from his childhood.

  Paul’s book tour’s fourth reading—after another in Brooklyn and one at a Barnes & Noble in the financial district—was in Ohio, on September 11. Calvin, 18, and Maggie, 17, seniors in high school who’d been friends since middle school and were currently in a relationship, had invited Paul and Erin and other “internet friends” to read at a music festival and stay two nights in Calvin’s parents’ “mansion,” as Paul called it.

  The day after the reading Paul and Erin ingested a little LSD and shared a chocolate containing psilocybin mushrooms and sat in sunlight in Calvin’s backyard, which had a hot tub and swimming pool and skateboard ramp and basketball hoop, “working on things” on their MacBooks. When Calvin returned from school they got in his SUV to go to Whole Foods, where Maggie was meeting them after work at American Apparel, and shared another chocolate. Calvin, who hadn’t wanted any, meekly asked if maybe he’d feel good if he ate only a small piece, seeming like he wanted to be encouraged to try.

  “We already ate it,” said Paul, and laughed a little, in the backseat.

  Erin, in the front passenger seat, was still holding a piece. Hearing Calvin she had seemed to slow its movement toward her mouth. She made a quiet, inquisitive noise and glanced slightly toward Paul, then resumed a normal speed and placed it inside her mouth. Paul lay on his back for most of the drive, sometimes sitting to noncommittally mumble something relevant, including that he liked Stereolab and Rainer Maria, to what he could hear of Calvin and Erin’s conversation. Walking toward Whole Foods, across its parking lot, Paul said he was “beginning to feel the LSD, maybe.”

  “Really?” said Erin. “I feel . . .”

  “I don’t know,” said Paul.

  “I can’t tell what I feel,” said Erin, and automatic doors opened and they entered the produce section, where they held and examined different coconuts. Calvin stood looking back, seeming tired and a little afraid, like a reclusive uncle supervising his unruly niece and outgoing nephew.

  “You should get one,” said Paul. “It’s refreshing.”

  “I’m . . . allergic,” said Calvin a little nervously.

  “Shit,” said Paul grinning. “I forgot. Again. Sorry.”

  The next few minutes, while Paul and Erin went to three different sections—butcher, pizza, sushi—to get their coconuts opened, Calvin remained at a far distance, randomly and inattentively picking up and looking at things and sometimes glancing at Paul and Erin with a worried, socially anxious expression. Something about Calvin, maybe a corresponding distance or that they had similar body types, reminded Paul of Michelle, the night of the magazine-release party, waiting with slack posture at a red light, before she touched his arm and leaned on the metal fence. Paul, in line to pay, considered saying the word “Kafkaesque” to describe getting their coconuts opened, but was distracted by an eerily familiar actress’s smiling face on a magazine cover and remained silent, then paid and maneuvered to a booth and sat by Erin, across from Calvin, who stared at them with wet eyes and a beseeching, insatiable, inhibited expression that alternated between Paul and Erin to keep both, Paul thought, locked into his meekly laser-like gaze. Paul held his left hand like a visor to his forehead and looked down and sometimes said “oh my god.” Whenever he glanced at Erin, who seemed to be e
njoyably displaying an unceasing grin, he laughed uncontrollably and, due to the contrast with Calvin’s alienated demeanor, felt more uncomfortable. Unsure how to stop grinning, or what to do, he left the booth for straws. When he returned, after feeling mischievous and Gollum-like for two to three minutes while trying to secretly record Erin and Calvin with his iPhone, he lowered himself skillfully, he felt, in a 180-degree turn, like that of a screw, to a seated position, flinging a straw at Erin while connecting the awning of his left hand to his forehead. He moved his coconut to his lap and heard a partially metallic, imaginary-sounding noise. He stared without comprehension, but also without confusion, at Calvin’s body, which was hunched close to the table with demonically jutting shoulder blades rising and falling in rhythm to what sounded like a computer-generated squawking. The cube of space containing Calvin seemed to be reconfiguring itself, against passive resistance from the preexisting configuration of Calvin, mutating him in a process of computerization. Paul thought he was witnessing a kind of special effect, then realized Calvin was imitating a pterodactyl.

  “I feel so much better now,” said Calvin. “Just doing what I want . . . what I want to do . . . yeah. Before, I was holding back, so I felt bad. I feel so much better now.”

  “You were making pterodactyl noises,” said Paul in disbelief.

  Maggie appeared as a desultory object, rapidly approaching the booth in a horizontal glide, seeming unnaturally small and eerily low to the ground. “LSDs, LSDs,” she was saying in a high-pitched, taunting, witch-like voice. Paul, who was laughing and repeatedly saying “oh my god” and variations of “I can’t believe this is happening,” heard Calvin say “they’re not on LSD.” Maggie said “magic mushrooms” and seemed to be imitating an elf as she entered the booth behind Erin and Paul, who heard Erin say “we’re on LSD and mushrooms,” and briefly visualized the main character from Willow, the dwarf with magical powers. Things seemed defectively quiet, like before an explosion in a movie, the five to ten seconds before Maggie rose in the booth behind Paul, who turned and saw a faceless mound: Maggie, with her entire head inside a black beanie, saying “is this the front of me or back.”