Taipei (2 page)

“Wait,” said Paul. “Can we stop walking for a minute?”

They stopped, facing the same direction, on the sidewalk.

“What’s wrong?” said Paul after a few seconds, slightly accusatorily.

“You’ve been ignoring me all night,” said Michelle.

“I moved close to you and hugged you, when we were sitting.”

“Once we got inside you walked away and started talking to other people.”

“You walked away from me,” said Paul. “I felt confused.”

A deli worker standing under an awning was looking into some unspecific distance, honestly uninterested. “I’ve never felt you act this way before,” said Michelle unsteadily, looking down, suddenly tired and scared, the protest of her having dispersed to something negotiable. For a few days, two or three months ago, she had considered studying abroad in Barcelona next spring, which would’ve meant four months apart. Paul thought of how they’d kept delaying buying plane tickets to visit his parents in Taiwan—in December, which was next month, he knew—as if in tacit understanding that their relationship wouldn’t last that long. Paul felt himself trying to interpret the situation, as if there was a problem to be solved, but there didn’t seem to be anything, or maybe there was, but he was three or four skill sets away from comprehension, like an amoeba trying to create a personal web-page using CSS.

“I’m just naturally losing interest,” he finally said, a little improvisationally, and Michelle began quietly crying. “I didn’t expect this at all,” she said. “I’ve felt good about us the past two weeks. I thought we’ve been closer than we’ve ever been.”

“I think I was affected by the study-abroad thing,” said Paul nearly inaudibly, confused how she’d thought they’d been close the past two weeks.

“Go back to the party. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

“Wait. I don’t think we should leave each other now.”

“Have a good time with your friends,” said Michelle sincerely.

“Wait. What friends?”

“We’ll talk tomorrow,” said Michelle.

“If we leave each other now it’s over.”

“It doesn’t have to be like that.”

“I only go to things to find a girlfriend,” said Paul paraphrasing himself, and they stood not looking at each other,
for one or two minutes, as rain from faraway places disappeared into their clothing and hair. Paul felt surprised by the friendly tone of his voice as he asked if Michelle wanted to eat dinner with him, in a restaurant.

“I don’t want to talk to you right now,” said Michelle.

“I don’t want to be in a relationship where it’s like this.”

“I don’t either,” said Michelle.

“I’m going back if you don’t want to do something.”

“I want to go home. Good night.”

“Okay,” said Paul, and turned around, aware they hadn’t parted like this before. He crossed 22nd Street and turned to cross 10th Avenue and saw Michelle disjunctively running and walking toward him, stopping at a red light with the posture of a depressed teenager. Paul thought of how she liked Nirvana a lot, and she crossed the street, slowing as she neared and stopping within arm’s reach. “Paul,” she said after a few seconds, and touched his upper arm, as if to offer a way back, through her, to some prior intimacy, from where they could tunnel carefully elsewhere, or to the same place, but with a kind of skill this time, having practiced once. Paul remained still, unsure what to say or think. Michelle lowered her hand to her side. “What are you doing?” she said, somewhat defensively.

“What do you mean?”

“Aren’t you going back to the party?”

“Yeah. I said I was.”

“Fine,” said Michelle.

Paul felt passively committed to not moving.

“Why are you standing here?”

“You came back,” said Paul feebly, and four to six people approached from the direction of the party. Michelle stepped into a soil-y area, lower and darker than the sidewalk, and leaned between spires on a metal fence, with her
left profile—obscured by her long, dark hair—toward Paul, who stared dumbly at the gently convex curve of her back, thinking with theoretical detachment that he should console her and that maybe the discomfort of her forearms against the thin metal of the fence had created a location, accessible only to herself, toward which she could relocate, away from what she felt, in a kind of shrinking. “Do you—” said Paul, and coughed twice with his mouth closed. “Do you want to eat dinner with me somewhere?” Michelle turned toward him a little, moving her head to see through her hair. “What are you doing?” she said in a tired, distracted voice, and leaned back on the fence without waiting for an answer. After a vague amount of time Paul heard himself asking again if she wanted to eat dinner with him, at the Green Table, one of the few restaurants they wanted to but hadn’t tried, then she was walking away, her long legs scissor-like in their little, orderly movements. It would take her thousands of steps to get anywhere, but she would get there easily, and when she arrived, in the present, it would seem like it had been a single movement that brought her there. Did existence ever seem worked for? One seemed simply to be here, less an accumulation of moments than a single arrangement continuously gifted from some inaccessible future.

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 specific 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.