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 was decaf, 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 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 of a 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 door-knocker, which a child, after twenty to thirty knocks, no longer expecting an answer, has continued using, in a kind of daze, distracted by the pointlessness of his activity, looking absently elsewhere, unaware when he will abruptly, idly stop.