They lay on their backs on a padded seat continuously lining one side of a cafeteria with no restaurants open yet. When Paul woke, drooling a little, he moved into a sitting position with his elbows on a table, and saw that Erin was gone. Before forming any thoughts, or discerning any feelings, he saw her, in the distance, outside the cafeteria, walking parallel to a moving walkway with her iPhone to her ear, becoming out of view. Paul noticed a scrap of paper on his lap, from Erin, saying she was going to the bathroom and calling her friend and would be back by 9:15 a.m. Paul saw her at 9:08 a.m. hurriedly enter a store outside the cafeteria. She approached with pineapple chunks and bottled water, smiling at Paul’s neutral expression. “I got you this,” she said, and Paul mutely held the container of pineapple chunks a few seconds before placing it distractedly on the table.
“Where did you go?” said Paul self-consciously.
“I went to the bathroom and called my friend Jennika. Did you see my note?”
“I didn’t until like five minutes after I woke,” said Paul with aversion toward himself, aware he saw the note within a minute maybe. He asked why Erin didn’t stay within view to talk on the phone. Erin said she hadn’t thought of that and Paul said it was okay and — finally, self-conscious at the delay — thanked her for the pineapple chunks and opened the container and moved a chunk, with a fork, toward Erin’s mouth. Erin shook her head. Paul moved the chunk into his mouth and, after his mouth stopped moving, asked what Erin talked to Jennika about on the phone.
“I told her I got married and was going to Taiwan, and she got angry and just started sobbing and yelling at me,” said Erin, and without noticeable change in her slack posture, facing the empty cafeteria, began crying a little. Paul carefully held her — weakly, tiredly “hating himself,” he felt — and, after she stopped crying, asked why Jennika had been angry. “She was angry I didn’t tell her sooner. She kept saying she would never do that to me and that I was a bad friend.”
Paul continued asking questions and was slightly affected by Erin’s extrasensitivity, it seemed, in not relating unsolicited information. Erin said Jennika had previously always been okay with periods without contact — with respecting the other person’s availability — and that after Jennika she had called her mother to say she felt scared that Paul didn’t want her to go to Taiwan with him.
“Why do you think that?”
“I started feeling paranoid. I felt like you didn’t want me around and I’m bothering you just by being around.”
“No,” said Paul shaking his head.
“You’ve been so quiet,” said Erin.
“I’m quiet from being depleted. I said I felt zombie-like.”
“I know, but I still felt paranoid. I thought ‘what if he’s just tolerating me. I’m going to be around him for the next three weeks.’ And things like that.”
“We’re depleted big-time. Don’t trust what you feel now.”
“I felt all this even after factoring in depletion,” said Erin, and Paul eased her into a lying position, on her side with her head on his lap, and alternated feeding her and himself pineapple chunks.
On the fully booked, thirteen-hour twenty-nine-minute flight to Narita, where they would transfer to a three-hour fifteen-minute flight to Taiwan, they had middle seats in consecutive, three-seat rows. Before takeoff, standing in view of the four relevant passengers, Erin asked if “anyone” wanted to trade seats for $40 so she could sit with her husband and was egregiously ignored except by the middle-aged woman, to Paul’s left, who said “no thanks” cheerfully, as if she’d misconstrued the situation to believe she was doing a favor by declining. Paul sometimes stood to lean forward and hug Erin’s head, massage her shoulders, or grin at her after certain lines of dialogue during Eat, Pray, Love, which they excitedly agreed to watch together and both felt nearly continuously amused by.
After the movie they stood hugging by the “lavatories.” Erin said she felt better than when she’d been paranoid, but seemed reluctant to reciprocate Paul’s enthusiasm when, with a child-like sensation of wanting to be encouraged to believe a fantasy, or that an aberration was the norm, he said, for the third time since getting on the plane, as if stressing the unexpected discovery of something worth living for, in an existence in which most things were endured, not enjoyed, that it seemed good they used “all those drugs and energy drinks” and hadn’t slept and still felt “okay.” Paul was surprised and confused when it occurred to him that if they felt almost anything other than happy, or at least content, Eat, Pray, Love (with its montages and fortune cookie — like monks and unacknowledged but knowing, it had seemed, usage of clichés) would’ve been incredibly depressing. He felt self-consciously, annoyingly optimistic when Erin reacted to this information, which had felt to him like an epiphany, with little interest and no enthusiasm, seeming less glad or curious than troubled, as if the message was to retroactively not enjoy the movie.
Before Paul visited his parents twelve months ago (which had been his first time in Taiwan in almost five years, during which most of the Taipei Metro, or Mass Rapid Transit, had been completed) he had no concept of Taipei’s size or shape or layout, only an unreliable memory of how many minutes by car separated certain relatives’ apartments and department stores. After using the MRT and idly studying its maps on station walls and Wikipedia, then walking between stations — to and from different routes, one night to six continuous stops, some days while far from his parents’ apartment to illuminate a distant area, placing a candle there for perspective, or as a reminder that there was more — he had, with increasing interest, begun to view and internalize Taipei less like a city than its own world, which he could leisurely explore, he imagined, for years, or maybe indefinitely, as it reconfigured and continued to expand, opening new MRT stations until 2018, according to Wikipedia.
To Paul, who’d stayed mostly in his uncle’s sixteenth-floor apartment on previous visits, the vaguely tropical, consummating murmur of Taipei, from his parent’s fourteenth-floor apartment, had sounded immediately and distinctively familiar. The muffled roar of traffic, hazily embellished with beeps and honks and motorcycle engines and the occasional, looping, Doppler-effected jingle from a commercial or political vehicle — had been mnemonic enough (reminding Paul of the 10 to 15 percent of his life on the opposite side of Earth, with a recurring cast of characters and no school and a different language, almost fantastically unlike the other 85 to 90 percent, in suburban Florida) for him to believe, on some level, that if a place existed where he could go to scramble some initial momentum, to disable a setting implemented before birth, or disrupt the out-of-control formation of some incomprehensible worldview, and allow a kind of settling, over time, to occur — like a spaceship that has exhausted its fuel and begun falling toward the nearest star, approaching what it wants at the rate it’s wanted, then easing into the prolonged, perfectly requited appreciation of an orbit — it would be here.