Page 22 of Taipei Story

“It was so crazy,” I said. “I was lying in bed and then I felt the apartment floor moving, and then things started falling off the shelf in my bathroom.”

JC frowned. “I didn’t feel anything.”

“Maybe it was just in my neighborhood?”

“Let’s check.” JC took out his phone. “There’s a government website that tracks earthquakes.” He showed me his screen—the last reported earthquake had been more than two months ago. “Yeah, nothing.”

“Weird,” I said. “Maybe they haven’t updated it.”

“Or maybe you dreamed it?”

“I can’t have,” I said. “My stuff fell off the bathroom shelf. I saw.”

“Huh.” JC watched me for a while, then shrugged.

I leaned forward on the bench, staring at my knees.

Why was I the only one who cared about this earthquake? Didn’t anyone want to know the truth?

I felt very unsettled. Several events had occurred in rapid succession, all of them unexpected, and I didn’t know what to do with that. This day was veering out of control. I had no say in anything. Things would end up how they would end up and I would just accept the consequences.

I was having a hard time processing that this was real: that I was on a train next to JC, that we were going to spend the next two days together, alone. I thought of the party scene in Lost, when the protagonist makes eyes at the Western flapper girl, and then they go off to have sex, just like that. I felt suspended in a state of narrative disbelief, as if by virtue of being in Taipei, my life had become a film where anything could happen at any time. I could make eyes at someone, and that would be it; no deliberation, no fretting about whether he liked me back or even knew I existed. We would just go off and have sex, and then we could sit in separate corners and ponder what this meant about our national identities, our relationship to modernity, and our complicity in colonialism.

“Do you think we should write in and ask for an excused absence?” JC asked.

This was a joke. He had used the Chinese term for taking a leave of absence: 請假. A funny phrase, because 請 could also mean to invite someone. So in one sense, you weren’t asking for leave, you were inviting someone to give you a break.

“Ha ha,” I said.

“No but actually, should we tell the teachers we’re going?”

“Probably?” I felt a surge of anxiety. I’d never broken the rules with such brazen indifference. I didn’t know what the consequences would be. Suspension? Expulsion? Death?

What were we doing here? JC and I had met only a month ago. We were not close friends. I worried that this trip was in fact a mutual dare that neither of us could back out of, a fifty-dollar sunk cost, and we were only going along with it because the booking already existed, and to not go would be more socially destabilizing than just accepting our fates.

But what were those fates? What was scripted to happen in Beitou? The obvious promise of sex hung between us, but so far JC had made no indication that he liked me that way. When boys wanted to have sex with me, I had learned, they would initiate proceedings by finding excuses to touch me: hand to hand, skin to skin, an arm creeping around my shoulders. But JC just sat next to me, hunched over his phone as if we were strangers. It looked like he was playing a game involving slingshots. I pulled out my own phone and started going through my vocabulary flash cards for the week.

“Hello!” I didn’t realize the old woman sitting across from us was talking to me. She said it again, more forcefully, and I glanced up.

She pointed to my water bottle. “You can’t eat or drink on the subway.”

I had known about the no eating or drinking rule. I just assumed it had to do with a mask mandate, which no one was obeying at this point, or with cleanliness, which seemed to exclude water.

“Even water?”

She sighed loudly—more loudly than I felt the situation warranted—and stood up. I shrank back—I thought she was going to grab my bottle from me—but she walked over to the middle of the car and rapped her knuckles against a poster on the wall. “See here. There’s a fine.”

I wasn’t even drinking anymore. “Okay.”

“So you have to put that away.”

People were staring. Even the woman’s husband seemed embarrassed about this exchange. He kept glancing up at us and then down at his shoes.

JC squeezed my wrist. I tugged my arm away. I felt everyone was being a bit overfamiliar today.

“Hey.” The woman was waving to me again. Reluctantly, I glanced up. She asked, “Where are you going?”

I looked over at JC, who said, “Beitou.”