Taipei (Vintage Contemporaries) by Tao Lin

Author:Tao Lin [Lin, Tao]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780307950185
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-06-04T00:00:00+00:00

Around midnight, after everyone in the café had gone to a concert, Paul was alone in the Drawn & Quarterly bookstore’s manager’s apartment. He looked at Twitter for what felt like twenty minutes, alternating hands to hold his iPhone ten to fifteen inches above his face. He emailed Charles—

I’m lying in bed on a sofa

Feel strongly like I simply want to relate my feelings of bleakness in this email

My legs feel cold

—with “Feeling bleak” as the subject. He was looking at Twitter again, a few minutes later, when for the fifth or sixth time since getting it in August he dropped his iPhone on his face, which did not register in its expression that anything had happened until after impact. He considered emailing Charles that his iPhone fell on his face. Then he tried to do what he couldn’t specifically remember having done since college—he chose one of his favorite songs and, with a meekly earnest sympathy toward himself, listened to it on repeat at a high volume and tried to focus only on the drums, or bass guitar, until he was drowsy and decontextualized and memoryless, when he would half-unconsciously remove his earphones and turn off the music, careful not to be noticed and assimilated by the world, and disappear into the reachable mirage of sleep.

But he couldn’t focus on the music. He couldn’t ignore a feeling that he wasn’t alone—that, in the brain of the universe, where everything that happened was concurrently recorded as public and indestructible data, he was already partially with everyone else that had died. The information of his existence, the etching of which into space-time was his experience of life, was being studied by millions of entities, billions of years from now, who knew him better than he would ever know himself. They knew everything about him, even his current thoughts, in their exact vagueness, as he moved distractedly toward sleep, studying him in their equivalent of middle school “maybe,” thought some fleeting aspect of Paul’s consciousness, unaware what it was referencing.

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