Free Taipei by Tao Lin Page A

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 enteredthe 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 onthe 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.