Free Taipei by Tao Lin

asked Daniel how many Klonopin he had taken.
    “Five,” said Daniel.
    “Jesus,” said Paul.
     • • •

    When Paul entered the party, ahead of Daniel and Fran, Lindsay wreathed a plastic snake around his head and pulled him toward a hallway designated for photographs. Paul mumbled the word “bathroom” and walked away grinning into the kitchen, where Matt was standing alone, not apparently doing anything. Paul asked about his vacation. Matt said he drove a rental car without a plan to Maine and ate seafood in a restaurant alone, did other things alone. “It was really good,” he said, and briefly displayed a haunted and irreducibly unenthusiastic expression before reaching for chips. Paul walked out of the kitchen and looked at Fran sitting alone on the sofa where he’d eaten Fig Newmans five days ago and returned to the kitchen and, while peripherally aware of a self-conscious Matt slowly creating guacamole, asked Daniel what he’d meant—in one of his dense, interesting texts—when he said he felt like there’d been “strange occurrences lately.” Daniel said he read all of Paul’s books last autumn while in San Francisco and told his friends he had a feeling that when he came to New York City he would meet Paul and they would become friends. Daniel was alert and expressionless as an advanced cyborg as he explained that he’d gone to Paul and Frederick’s reading because Amy didn’t want to be alone with Lucie and that none of them had known Paul was reading.
    “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 neutralobservation, 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 aa 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,