Taipei (8 page)

“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 friendlier 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.”

Before becoming unconscious Paul was aware of a man wearing a cowboy hat being carried out of a drugstore by four people and of himself thinking that, if the people dragging the man were invisible, the man would look like he was gliding feetfirst on a horizontal waterslide, steadily ahead, with out-of-control limbs and a crazed, antagonistic expression, as if by experimentally self-directed telekinesis.

 • • •

A week later Paul had organized plans to see
Trash Humpers
and was waiting for Fran and Daniel at the theater. He had first asked Laura, who seemed to be in a relationship with her ex-boyfriend—pictures had appeared on Facebook in which they looked happily reunited in what seemed to be a faux-expensive hotel—to see the movie and she’d said she wanted to but not tonight. Fran gave Paul six 10mg Adderall for her and Daniel’s tickets and a disoriented-seeming Daniel, who had no money left, asked if Paul had any snacks. Paul gave Daniel a sugar-free Red Bull he got from a Red Bull–shaped car parked outside the library and Daniel drank it in one motion with a neutral expression.

“Fran said she’ll pay you back if you give me one of the Adderall she gave you,” whispered Daniel a few minutes into the movie. “I don’t think I can stay awake without it.” In the movie costumed actors made noises in parking lots and inside houses while destroying and/or “humping” inanimate objects. Paul woke, at one point, to Fran laughing loudly when no one else in the small, sold-out theater was laughing. When Paul wasn’t asleep he felt distracted by a feeling that Daniel had eerily turned his head 90 degrees and was staring at him, but each time he looked Daniel was either asleep or looking at the screen. The last ten minutes of the movie Paul was peripherally aware of Daniel’s unsupported head continually lolling in place and twitching to attention in a manner reminiscent of a middle/high school student struggling and repeatedly failing to remain awake in a morning class. Daniel seemed fully alert seconds after the movie ended. Paul asked how he slept despite Adderall and Red Bull.

“Susie-Q,” said Daniel with a smirk-like grin indicating both earnest disapproval and a kind of fondness toward Seroquel and its intense, often uncomfortable tranquilizing
effects—as if, believing Susie-Q wasn’t malicious, he could forgive her every time she induced twelve hours of sleep followed by twelve to twenty-four hours of feeling lost and irritable, therefore she functioned, if inadvertently, as a teacher of forgiveness and acceptance and empathy, for which he was grateful.

They were the last three people, after the movie, to leave the theater. They stood on the sidewalk, unsure what to do next. Fran had planned to go to Coney Island tonight and stay until morning for her birthday, which was today—she’d created a Facebook listing, which Paul remembered seeing—but none of her friends wanted to go, because she didn’t have any, she said. Paul said he also had no friends and that they should celebrate by “eating a lot of food.”

At Lovin’ Cup, a bar-restaurant with live music, Fran and Daniel ordered drinks, went outside to smoke. Paul laid the side of his head on his arms, on the table, and closed his eyes. He didn’t feel connected by a traceable series of linked events to a source that had purposefully conveyed him, from elsewhere, into this world. He felt like a digression that had forgotten from what it digressed and was continuing ahead in a confused, choiceless searching. Fran and Daniel returned and ordered enchiladas, nachos. Paul ordered tequila, a salad, waffles with ice cream on top.