Taipei Read Free Page A

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 ofa 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