How did United have so many flights? I turned my head left and right, not knowing which way to go. Al had at least done us the favour of dropping us off in the right place, everything I could see was United blue, but I'd never been in an airport without Mom and Dad before. OK, common sense, right? Follow the crowd. I pulled Eliza into the long line that was forming, leading towards the self-service kiosks.
For this flight, we didn't need to have our passports to check-in yet, but I made Eliza take hers out anyway. That was the one thing I'd worried we'd forget, because we hadn't gone outside the US very much, just the occasional trip to Canada or Mexico, and I probably wouldn't have kept mine with me if I wasn't about to go into the military. The check-in machine told us exactly what to do, which was great because nobody needed to know how clueless we were.
Getting to gates B with the underground train was something we could accomplish by paying attention to the signs, and we got there in good enough time for me to pick up some coffee and breakfast, though my efforts to entice Eliza to eat resulted in a few bites at most. There were nineteen pills she needed to take every morning, and she swallowed them dry like a pro, only washing them down with water from the bottle I'd bought after the very last round.
We had an uneventful flight from Denver to San Francisco, chasing the morning light. The plane disgorged us at 7:30 AM local time, dumping us into a labyrinth of passageways, through which we blindly followed the crowd until we got to a row of identical baggage carousels. Thankfully I knew my numbers, and besides, an external-frame hiking backpack was easy to spot in an ocean of cookie-cutter black roller suitcases. All the signs pushed us out the door, into a bustling mass of taxi lines and airport shuttles. Shouldering my rucksack and pulling Eliza's roller bag behind us, I grabbed Eliza's hand with my free one and wove through all the chaos, hoping I'd find the signs for Singapore Airlines somehow. Luckily for me, the terminal wasn't a cryptic A or B or 1 or 2 but was clearly marked "International"; and there were exactly four hours between the two flights, enough for us not to need to run. Even walking at a relatively sedate pace still tired Eliza out, although she flatly refused to draw more attention to herself than necessary by asking for a wheelchair. SFO International Terminal G looked like a zoo, with a long snaking security line visible in the glass-panelled space just behind the check-in counters. By the time we navigated that line and got to our next gate, Eliza was sweating and panting, and I led her to a seat, setting down both our school backpacks with her before going off in search of a concession stand to buy drinking water. Keeping her hydrated while we were in the air was one of the topmost priorities that I'd noted down in my planning checklist.
SQ31 pushed back from the gates at 11:30 AM, with a safety video that promised to take us all over Singapore. Already, I'd noticed all the flight attendants wore figure-hugging uniforms in an ethnic floral print, they all looked a few years older than us at best, with their black hair slicked back into neat chignons showing off their graceful necks. I never dreamed I'd end up on a plane that pretty much resembled a beauty pageant, and I knew I'd have a fine time telling Al about it after I got back.
"Hey," Eliza smacked me, harder than I thought she had the strength to. "Stop ogling that flight attendant's butt."
"I wasn't!" I protested. "I can't help what's at my eye level." Neither could they, I realized, in their long, tight skirts with the high slits. Ever since we were five, I'd only had eyes for Eliza, but still, I couldn't un-see what was right in front of me when I'd never been in the presence of so many beautiful women before in my life. Seeing was just seeing, anyway, it didn't mean I had any kind of action in mind.
Peranakan, apparently, was what they called the cultural inspiration behind the styling of those flight attendant outfits, for the first scene of the safety video was captioned as the Intan Peranakan Home Museum and showed a lady slipping on a pair of ornate floral brocade shoes and putting her purse into an intricately carved wooden overhead box. That video felt more like a tourist ad than a flight safety presentation, and by the end of it, the Singapore Zoo, Sentosa and Mount Faber made a deeper impression in my mind than where the emergency exits on the aircraft were.
We'd made a pact before we left, that the minute our plane got off US soil, we wouldn't do anything we could do at home. That meant we wouldn't watch any of the Hollywood movies on the in-flight entertainment system, not when we could binge on the eclectic international selection instead. Even though we had literally hundreds of movies, TV shows and music albums at our disposal, we wanted this trip to be a shared experience, and part of that would mean we'd agreed to watch the same movies at the exact same time, so we could feel all the emotions together as part of our lived experience of this journey.
"Let's watch this," said Eliza, picking a thumbnail with a debonair middle-aged man and a young lady with curly hair who looked almost like a Chinese Vivien Leigh. "It seems interesting."
And of course, it would've been R-rated if it wasn't edited for watching on planes. None of Eliza's choices had the power to shock me anymore, not when for the past two years, ever since her relapse, she seemed to be in a race to lose as much of her innocence as she could. And, it had often felt, she'd been determined to leave me behind. But now I could catch up; I'd been her soul mate from kindergarten all the way through middle school, and if this was the last chance that I'd ever have to be that to her again, I'd take it.
Lust, Caution was about kids trying to play at being more grown-up than they really were. A bunch of college students attempting to seduce and assassinate a seasoned middle-aged spy, and almost succeeding. Wasn't that what we were now, a pair of seventeen-year-olds packing a dream honeymoon and a lifetime's worth of wanderlust into a single week?
When the ingenue Wang Jiazhi lost her virginity to a buffoonish classmate, who wasn't even the guy she loved, I wound my arms around Eliza and grabbed her tight, hiding my face against her frail shoulder. There was no doubt in my mind that Al had been her first, and even though I knew Al would have the technique to make that experience better for Eliza than what was happening onscreen, I still couldn't bear to witness the loss of innocence without love. It was a travesty.
"C'mon, it's OK," said Eliza, in a voice that sounded like she was coaxing a toddler to eat carrot mush. She put a hand under my chin and tried to gently manoeuvre me back to face the screen. "You have to watch this part, it's a turning point in the story. It's how she gets enough experience to attract a secret agent who's almost old enough to be her father."
"It's sad," I said, shaking my head. "She deserves better."
"Maybe it isn't," said Eliza nonchalantly. "Maybe all she wanted was just to check that box."
The beverage cart trundled by, interrupting our conversation. "Sir, what would you care to drink?" asked the flight attendant in a bright, lilting voice.
Really? She'd just called me "sir"? I glanced quickly around the cabin, wondering exactly how old she thought I was. Maybe I could pass for twenty-one; those Asian guys certainly looked impossibly young, or perhaps eighteen would be old enough because I'd read that was the drinking age in Singapore. I could just open my mouth and ask her for a can of beer, or a glass of wine, and I might actually get it without any questions at all.
"I'd like a Coke, please," I said, hoping I was doing passably at looking distinguished and dignified. Taking the plastic cup from her and letting her hand me Eliza's to put on her tray table too after that, I made sure I looked her in the eye and gave her an appreciative nod. "Thank you."
I needn't have stocked up on bottled water to bring on the plane, not when they came round offering us water, juice and snacks every couple of hours or so. They were treating us practically like royalty, which was strikingly refreshing when I'd come from a place where United Breaks Guitars was a real song. Eliza was getting comfortable too, leaning her head on my shoulder in a way she hadn't done since middle school. I'd missed her terribly, and I thought I could go on like this forever, which probably wasn't a bad thing since we'd be in the air practically forever anyway. Sixteen and a half hours on a plane was a concept I wasn't quite able to wrap my head around, but if it meant I could stay suspended in time like this with Eliza, that didn't seem too bad, at least not until my legs started falling asleep.
Eliza didn't cry at the end of the movie; maybe she'd already shed so many tears over all the other things that she didn't have any left by now. I swallowed mine because men didn't cry. Deep down inside, a part of me wanted to scream and bawl, because it wasn't fair for a girl barely out of her teens to have to gamble her virtue and her life to save her country, only to lose everything. Eliza didn't have such compunctions, though; she simply declared, "Tony Leung is so hot, I wish I could have a middle-aged man like that too," and then settled down with her head in my lap with a sigh; she'd lifted the armrest between our seats out of the way long ago.
I wasn't sure which part of the Pacific we were flying over when I fell asleep. Eliza had been out like a light long ago, snoring lightly while curled up in my lap, and I'd been thinking about Hawaii and Japan and all the places we wouldn't get to visit, when they switched off all the lights to match the dark sky outside and I slowly drifted into nothingness, the drone of the plane's engines having anchored itself into the background like white noise.
The hours blended into each other as we dozed intermittently, then tried semi-successfully to watch more movies when we awoke because of the flickering light from other people's screens. I took over the job of choosing our movies, sticking to feel-good teen flicks in every conceivable Asian and European language. In any case, we ended up dozing off again halfway through anything we watched, partly because the light hurt our sleepy eyes when we tried to focus enough to read the subtitles.
It felt like we'd been stuck in the Twilight Zone for an eternity when they started to switch on all the lights again. The moving map told me we were about two hours away from landing, and our current location was somewhere off the coast of Vietnam. That meant we were starting to get into the territory we'd been aiming for, not quite yet the East Indies but places with names we'd remembered from all the old British literature books we'd read all the same. Siam. Burma. All of those were part of the huge land mass just off to our plane's right, adding several more to the list of places we'd brushed past without quite being able to touch.
"Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin our descent into Singapore Changi Airport," came the announcement from the cockpit. In the couple hours since they'd woken us up, we'd been served a hot meal and lined up to use the bathroom, then buckled ourselves in as the plane wended through a bunch of thick tropical clouds. Now, we were breaking through the cloud cover with a view of the ground below, a murky muddle of green and brown. The land ended, we flew low over a small strip of water, dotted with teeny islands like chocolate chips in a cookie, and then we circled around a sliver of land filled with tall buildings. I'd never seen so much concrete in such a small space before; the view out of the airplane window made me think of the times Eliza and I used to play SimCity when we were in fifth and sixth grade. With amazing precision, the pilot flew back out over the water, then touched down on the runway that seemed like it was mere yards away from the sea.
"Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Singapore Changi Airport," said a female voice on the PA system, probably that of a flight attendant. "The local time is 6:19 PM, and the ground temperature is 31 degrees Celsius. You will be disembarking at Terminal 3 shortly."
I nudged Eliza to make sure she was fully awake. "We're here," I said to her incredulously. "We're actually here."