Tao Lin - Taipei

“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.