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Jason has never ridden a train before.
When he was small his father would drive him to the depot to watch the Indian Creek RR pass, its boxcars heavy with grain and fertilizer. For a long time there would be nothing. Just dark gravel and green leaves and the thick gray sky of Indiana in August. Jason never squirmed. He was patient. Then the thin high whistle would breach his eardrum and the pinhole vision of the locomotive would loom larger and larger until it seemed so big, bigger than a bear or a pickup truck or an angel, and it would roar as the wind whooshed the cornsilk hair from his brow and bent back the green leaves and scattered the gravel with its terrible invisible power, the cars slashing past in hypnotic stripes of red green blue red green blue and you almost felt you could tip over onto the tracks its power was that mighty. Then it would be over.
There were other pretenders. Like the small gas-powered thing which ran a loop around the corn maze at the pumpkin patch in October, but that was just a tractor outfitted in a train costume. And besides it was for babies.
In Taipei, nobody owns a car except taxi drivers and the father of the ward. His name is August and he gives Jason and Richie rides back to their small apartment on Ai Kuo road sometimes if choir practice runs late. August is proud of his car because it’s a Ford which means you can trust it. But when the Ford is spoken for, Jason takes the train.
It’s like math, which suits him. If Jason is traveling from Banqiao Station to Da’an, and the train travels at 20 MPH with one five-minute connection at Taipei Main Station, how long will it take Jason to travel 9KM? Be sure to remember your conversion chart! He likes the ticket machines, with their sensible buttons and plastic change dispensers, and he enjoys the smell of sweet sesame buns baking at the small commuter stands. He appreciates how everybody keeps to their appointed side of the escalator, and the fine painted lines on the platform indicating where passengers should line up to not cause disorder while embarking. The MRT does not arrive with a hurricane’s swoop of force. It glides in as softly and silently as a sigh. Jason has never been in a place which runs so smoothly.
When he feels a gentle tap on his shoulder in the station, he assumes he is being asked for directions. He’s been here two weeks now and strides with confidence from turnstile to exit. He puffs out his shoulders but deflates at the stern expression on the face of the man addressing him. He points to the open orange juice in Jason’s hand and shakes his head. He holds up a small plastic bag and hands it to Jason, indicating with a scolding open palm at a nearby garbage can. There is even adhesive to seal the offending beverage inside the plastic before its disposal, which strikes Jason as rather excessive. Why sell juice in the station if you can’t drink it? he thinks. But that’s the sour-grapes rationalization of a loser. His face glows red until well into the evening.
Jason and his mission partner Richie completed the mandatory twelve week course of Mandarin, even if they can’t quite get the tones right. Richie complains that the tenses are impossible and that everybody should be speaking English anyway. Jason shakes his head at his ignorance. There is something bracing and true about struggling with another tongue. It makes Jason sit up and take notice. It stops his soul from gathering fat.
He’s not fluent, but gathers enough that they are able to knock on apartment doors to spread the good news. Every morning, Jason scrubs his feet with Madame Heng’s soap and spritzes them with Arm & Hammer so they won’t stink when he and Richie are invited in and must remove their shoes, as they’ve been taught is customary. But so far they have not been invited in. Mostly people seem to find them cute. They’re asked to greet cats and children. Once somebody took their photograph. They report their lack of success back to their mission leader who urges them to maintain faith and good cheer. Others are more lucky. David and Daniel bring in five baptisms before Labor Day which they don’t even celebrate here.
Every night, Jason brushes his teeth and reminds himself: it’s not the message. It’s the messenger. It’s not the message. It’s the messenger.
May turns into June, which brings heat like Jason has never known. Richie eschews his wool suit coat from the jump, citing with his pointer finger the perspiration beading on his brow as if that means anything in the eyes of Heavenly Father. Jason often wishes Richie was stronger. But of course that’s hubris and it will be punished because six days later Jason dozes off in a wet-bulb of 90 degrees on the G line. He means only to make it to Xiaonanmen, where Francis and the boys will be performing barbershop quartet to a small group of expats hungry for the sounds of home. Except Jason dozes off. Jason hasn’t napped since he was four years old. He wakes up at the end of the line, dazed and disoriented, with an elderly woman in a floral bucket hat clucking over him with a damp handkerchief. Blearily, he comes to understand that the difference between dozing off and passing out is largely one of semantics and posture. She lifts the lid of a thermos to his lips, and he sips hot tea he will later come to recognize as buckwheat. He tries to mumble an apology in Mandarin, but the woman replies in Hokkein which Jason does not speak. The woman escorts him firmly to a bench and makes Wait here hands as she fetches a conductor. From the edge of earshot, Jason knows they are laughing at him. He has never felt so meager.
David and Daniel bring in two more to the fold that weekend, and the converts are not even Taiwanese, they’re Canadian, here on student visas from McGill! Nobody else seems to think this is unfair so Jason keeps his mouth shut.
One night the boys decide to visit a night market. The phrase sends cold adrenaline all through Jason. At first he declines, but then he decides they might benefit from him as a bulwark against temptation. He bucks himself up in the mirror, rehearsing in Mandarin, “No! I am not interested in THAT kind of thing!” over and over.
It turns out to be just food, though. The market is the misery of jet lag given physical form–the air barbed with countless buzzing electric bulbs, heavy charcoal smoke floating in low belching clouds, a thousand sounds of sizzling and shouting and pans clattering and metal scraping and endless Cantonese pop music sputtering through static on cheap radios. Jason has never seen this many people in one place in his life, not even at Christmas Eve services in Salt Lake City! The stands are packed cheek to jowl, and at one point he nearly (it feels like) loses a piece of his elbow when a cleaver lands too close in an attempt to decapitate a freshly-plucked pullet.
The food shimmers with oil and the scents make his head spin. He recognizes every third item–that’s a noodle, surely, and that over there is broccoli although the stems are long and strange. A few things he’s learned in his time in Taipei. There seem to be endless different ways meat can be stuffed into dough and sauteed or boiled or steamed. Daniel and David and even Richie dive recklessly into the fray, drinking from raw coconuts and inhaling the strange scents with gusto. They opt for unwelcome, uncomfortable things–salted deep fried egg yolks unnaturally preserved, or dried shrimp the size of fingernail clippings over slippery wet rice rolls that remind Jason horribly in color and sheen of gristle stripped from steak. It’s hotter than ever in these crowded alleys despite the fact that the sun set hours ago. Even Jason has stripped down to his bare sleeves, but not before carefully reaffixing the black nametag which reads ELDER CARVER in proud sturdy letters. He opts for a bowl of simple beef and rice, shaking his head at the foolhardiness of his companions.
But there is something wrong–with the meal or with Jason, he cannot say. He alone spends the night curled around the toilet bowl like a python trying to strangle prey. He sweats and retches and vomits first the beef and rice and then–for hours–nothing but thin yellow bile as his stomach cramps and convulses. He cannot shake the idea that his body is trying to squeeze out the very essence of him, a purge designed to leave behind omebody pure, somebody clean, somebody smooth like porcelain. He soils his pajamas many times over. He hand-washes them in the tub so Richie will not see.
When he comes to, August is standing over him with August’s beautiful and faithful wife Kirsten. They’ve brought him Saltines from the military PX and a can of Apple Sidra because they couldn’t find ginger ale. The gentility with which they explain that mission work can sometimes challenge the strongest followers the most is like a needle under his fingernail.
The letter arrives the following week.
Taroko Gorge is only four hours away by train. This, to the young Taiwanese ticket taker, seems unfathomable. “So long!” she exhales in Mandarin, and Jason is proud and pleased to be able to reply in kind, “Not so bad.” How to explain that, as a boy, his father would drive him ninety minutes across the state just to go receive sacrament? Nobody outside of America seems to grasp its size.
The ride is pleasant enough, a caterpillar crawl along the volcanic spine of the island. From the window Jason spies rice paddies and roosters and bicycle rickshaws and once even a real live monkey (!), sights which seem so ostentatiously foreign that it’s hard to remember they exist not just for his benefit and will continue to endure once they pass from his gaze. Jason tries to imagine what somebody might see if taking a train ride through Hawkins, and what they might find strange–above-ground pools and brick ranch houses and Weber grills and basketball hoops and tomato trellises. But there are no such routes through his home. He eats a purchased lunchbox of pork dumplings and stewed turnip greens from his seat, and nobody chastises him because for once he has followed the rules exactly right. Heavy walls of tropical green succumb to bursts of bright blue which increase in size and frequency, until suddenly blue beats green and they are coasting along the sea.
It looks nothing like the sea at Aunt Bea’s condo in Ocean City. There the surf is the color and texture of concrete in a mixer, and about as appealing. Here it looks like the picture on the side of a bottle of suntan oil. The water is blue in a shade Jason doesn’t feel should exist in nature. It should be limited to plastic pool toys and blue raspberry gum. And yet, inarguably! There it is! The sand is pale and fine, studded with pebbles of jade and coral. There are real palm trees dropping real coconuts. Honestly? It’s all a bit much. But there isn’t time to think about that now because Jason’s shouldering his backpack from the luggage rack and walking towards the sea, where a bright red platform which bridges wave and shore has been erected that beckons Jason like home.
Hideki is pleased with his times. He didn’t place first in the open-water crawl, but his overall ranking qualifies him for this half-marathon in Sweden, the name of which rolls so fluently off the tongues of Hideki and his coach that Jason is embarrassed to ask him to repeat it. Jason feels strangely shy around Hideki and his teammates, who clown on the hot sand in the kind of loose, relieved, jock horseplay that teases Jason’s mind like a half-remembered song. Coach Oto invites Jason into the group photo. He demurs. The rest of the team will swim and sun for the remainder of the afternoon before flying back to Osaka on Tuesday. But Hideki is twitchy with a victor’s adrenaline. He asks Jason if he has energy. Jason says Have You Met Me and Hideki laughs.
They rent bikes from a squat woman with sleepy eyes at a roadside shop guarded by a dog with no interest in guarding. The boys almost miss the proprietress entirely, but Hideki spies the handwritten sign at the abandoned front desk which reads “DON’T SEE THE BOSS? BOSS OVER HERE →” and they find her sequestered behind an oscillating fan the size of a tractor tire. The bikes are thin with fixed gears and nearly-bald tires, but Hideki is off before Jason can make further comparisons to his prize Huffy stashed on a weather-proof rack back in his father’s garage.
Jason has changed from his wool pants and shirtsleeves to a spare t-shirt and pair of old basketball shorts. He reasons that Heavenly Father wants him always equipped appropriately for such situations. They race along the sea, laughing, passing temples clouded with drifting incense and adorned with golden bells and pagan gods in garish Crayola colors—Cobalt Blue, Brick Red, Goldenrod—which Jason remembers from childhood. Locals have tried to tell him that the local gods each honor a concept such as mercy or abundance, and how can Jason even begin to explain the glory of a Heavenly Father within whom all such things are contained in a single form? But there isn’t time to dwell on this as the sun beats hot and the palms are green and sweat dries at last on his brow from the speed at which he races.
Jason knows he is at best in his body. This is true now. The ride up Taroko Gorge is steep and swift. Jason laughs as he meets and then passes Hideki, who cusses playfully in his perfect English and doubles his speed to try and catch up. And for a time he succeeds, because Hideki was not lying in his letters about his athletic prowess, and his honesty is something Jason respects almost more than his strength. But Jason is an optimized machine and his legs pump with pneumatic efficiency, restrained not at all for once by the humidity or the altitude. A hand he cannot see is guiding him and he allows it. He steers his bicycle past the marbled bluffs and the far-away river coursing through the gorge’s basin like a turquoise serpent like some forgotten Biblical curse. The air is fresh and dry as they pass groups of hikers puffing in the heat. He and Hideki outstrip them easily, equal in their speed and might and glory. Jason’s sweat glistens as he heaves and hefts his knees left right left right left, lifting from his perfect glutes as his father taught him, Hideki ringing his bell and laughing from the rear.
At last they reach their resting place, a scenic vista where a branch of the river cascades fifty sheer feet of broken marble arranged by Heavenly Father’s hand in a shape that the locals swear resembles a fish jumping upstream. Jason—who has never even been able to see the man in the moon—is astonished to find that he understands this image perfectly. Hideki pulls out rice balls stuffed with salted plums and Jason is so relieved that he enjoys the taste. He is pleased to be able to offer Hideki barley tea from his own thermos, and more pleased still when Hideki drinks two capfuls. They rest in the shade of strange trees.
That evening, Hideki steers a willing Jason to a noodle shop near a motorcycle repair garage. Jason nearly balks at the gritty floor and filthy white plastic chairs, but Hideki walks in with such ease that Jason cannot do anything but mirror him. Jason is proud (he forgets to be ashamed of his pride) that his Mandarin is strong enough to order for them both. Hideki chooses the dish and Jason makes the command. It's so easy. His friend wants fat hand-pulled noodles dressed with grilled pork and green onions and slick with chili oil. Jason discovers with zeal it is delicious. He is hungry enough for seconds and thirds, which causes the owner to laugh and ask for a Polaroid. Behind the boys a cathode-ray television broadcasts an incomprehensible soap opera in tones of static blue as Jason unloads everything burdeoning his soul to his friend. His loneliness. His homesickness for peanut butter. His desire for spiritual victory, which is too shameful to refer to as victory to anyone but this patient wise person across from him now.
He even tells Hideki (only in response to Hideki’s inquiry, because Hideki remembers everything from their letters) of Jason’s humiliation at being dumped so unceremoniously by a girl to whom he would have given the world. For whom!!!! And for what!!!!! Even across the world, it sounds totally made up!!!! Sometimes, Jason tells Hideki, it feels like the whole world has gone crazy. Hideki nods sensibly and dresses his noodles with more chili oil. Jason feels a warm and unfamiliar pleasure at being able to express this thought without needing to express the unspoken caveat: the whole world except for you. The whole world except for us.
With their bellies full, the boys walk slowly along the oceanfront. The speed of their stride is the same. They do not need to wait. The water sparkles with reflected neon and headlights. The air is gentle and dusted with salt. The palms whisper. They do not speak. They do not speak.
A shoulder is not a mouth so it may be kissed.
Jason’s hotel room is small but clean. They take off their dusty sneakers and pair them like lovers by the door. The air conditioning is so crisp it causes a rash of goosebumps to break out across their chests and arms. There is no time for Jason to reflect on how he hates not knowing the rules. There is no time to feel embarrassed that he does not know what to do. He trusts the body.
He awakens to the sound of Hideki flushing the toilet. He realizes with shock that his friend has just gone number two. That such an efficient and tidy and sensible person as Hideki is capable of such an act produces disquiet in Jason at such a level that he cannot fall back asleep for a long long time. He has exchanged one fall for another, it seems. The thought disturbs him further.
Hideki stirs again at dawn, dressing himself with such care that Jason knows he wants to generate no disturbance. His friend is also considerate. He saves his shoes by the door for last, lingering—Jason cannot say this for sure as his eyes are squeezed shut, pretending to sleep—perhaps out of some hope that Jason will rouse so they can say goodbye. But Jason cannot bring himself to open his eyes. To say goodbye will be to admit that it happened and worse still by a factor of millions to admit that it is over. He squeezes the fresh white pillow to his bare chest and tries to breathe unconsciously.
“I’ll write,” Hideki says before he departs. Jason does not know if he would have said it to his waking face. He does not know if he will ever find out. Or if the promise is true. He clutches the pillow to his chest for twenty further minutes, as he did when he was boy, thinking that perhaps the slashing razor man from his dreams was somehow still in his room, beneath his bed, waiting for a sign of wakefulness from his intended victim. Then he feels silly and gets up to brush his teeth. Heavenly Father has mighty plans and thus so does he. He does not shower for reasons he does not interrogate. There is something new about his skin.
His return ticket to Taipei is set for 11:15AM. It has been less than 24 hours. Richie and August will not even know he has been gone. Tomorrow Jason will don freshly-starched shirt sleeves, fasten his name-tag to his lapel, and press buzzer after buzzer to ask his neighbors in Mandarin if they have heard the news which is Fragrant and Auspicious! Jason had time enough now for a final walk to the sea. The bright blue sea which will color his dreams for years to come. But he does not take it. Instead he walks to the station and sits on the plastic bench. He watches the flip board tiles click and clatter into endless permutations to announce arrivals. Departures. Delays. He watches the commuters come and go, hauling their wheeled shopping carts and shoulder bags. The tourists with hiking clothes and deflated beach toys. Sunburned and happy. Chatting loudly in Mandarin with their loved ones. He does not know which he envies more—the sweet words or the arguments. If he tries to turn off his new ears, he can imagine they all sound the same. A stream of understanding tells him how pointless this is. He cannot unlearn what he knows now.
The 11:15 comes and goes. This is alright. There will be another. There will be another.
Jason sits and watches the trains go by for a long time.