Taipei Read Free

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 wasdecaf, 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