Fog Island Mountains

by Michelle Bailat-Jones

  He sips his bowl of tea, he can still feel the tightness in his abdominal muscles and biceps from two nights before, and he knows it was hard on him, this lovemaking at his age, he should take care to get more exercise, and he is thinking that she enjoyed it, he believes she was not simply out of her mind with grief, because she was with him, she was in that room with him, she touched him, too.

  Idiot, he is saying, placing his tea bowl back on the tray with a forceful click, no, he is thinking, no, he cannot understand, would a wife who loved her husband do such a horrible thing, he wants to be sure, he wants to make a firm judgment and file these thoughts away, but there is so much uncertainty, it is said that love will make you crazy, make you imbalanced, he has never wanted this, he has only ever wanted to feel safe, to spread his safeness across another pair of shoulders.

  The wind has shifted and the rain is now splashing his slippered feet, adding its wetness to his empty tea cup, and across the garden the owner stops and lifts her head, looks at the sky. It’s now, isn’t it? The storm is here, she says, and then she is yelling out for the kitchen boy to remove Fumikaze’s tray, and the wind is scooping through the garden now, pushing at the flaps of his yukata robe and sending his napkin into the pond and a bright white koi is already dragging it down beneath the water and he stands there, getting wet, thinking of Kanae again, wondering where she is and if she’s out now again with the police, looking for her husband, and everyone must be getting so worried, maybe they have found his body, but here minds himself it is none of his business, he must leave Komachi as soon as the storm blows over, and he hopes it will all go quickly.

  The doorbell is ringing suddenly, and the owner looks up from her busy work, cocking her head as if she isn’t sure what the sound is, but she stands then, brushing her hands down her apron and bowing to Fumikaze once more, leaving the tree she’s been wrapping so carefully, and so he walks over and leans down to finish it for her, getting all wet now, but wraps the twine around and around, pulling it tight, and when he’s finished, he closes his eyes, her skin was not as soft as he thought it would be, not as he had imagined it—he hadn’t imagined it often, but enough, a few times over the years he had thought of her, pictured her face, dreamed of a chance meeting, but this is what old bachelors do, they make things up, then they make the best of things.

  * * *

  When Kanae wakes in the morning, she goes out into the garden directly, still in her nightgown, and the rain is coming down hard and fast—typhoon rain is thick and unforgiving, like the ocean has been sucked up into the wind and hurled back in strings of hard silver beads toward the earth; Kanae just stands and lets these thick ropes of water lash at her, and when she’s cold enough, when her skin is turning red, then blue, and she is shivering and her heart is racing because of the force of the storm, she stumbles back inside.

  There is a note for her in the kitchen, written in Megumi’s hand, the ink is always very dark because she presses so firmly with the nib of the pen, and she wonders how Megumi got back here so quickly this morning, and then she wonders again about Jun and why Megumi hasn’t brought him—but the note doesn’t tell her about her grandson, the note only reads: Naomi and I went to the store. Be back soon.

  Her daughters have teamed up to take care of her and the idea makes her cringe a little, because they have decided that she needs their help, and while there is love in this gesture, there is also pity and there is the fact that no one will experience Alec’s loss the way Kanae will, and already her children have understood this, and so she crumples the note. Also, in Megumi’s toughly-scribbled lines there is an uncomfortable reversal, for the first time in her life Kanae isn’t the first to worry whether the family will have candles if the electricity goes out, if there is enough food prepared and stored, if the hot water tank is full, she isn’t the first to think and plan for all these sundry details of an impending typhoon, because her daughters have taken over so completely, there is no room left for her.

  She slides to the floor of the genkan, kneeling beside the neat stacks of shoes and slippers, near the welcome Buddha on his little podium with his beatific smile and protruding belly, and quickly, with just a little snatch of her arm out and back, she takes a pair of Alec’s shoes from his side of the shelf and stuffs them inside her nightgown, against her skin, pressing the leather and the stiff shoelaces, and little clods of dirt from the soles scratch her skin but she cradles this pair of shoes as her sorrow takes over.

  Let us give her this moment, let us turn away, because the relief in letting herself cry will be ugly for us to look it, we can step outside the door so as not to hear her whimpering, we can stand here a moment feeling the force of the wind and the sound of the crashing up in the forest, and when she’s ready, it won’t be long, Kanae has always been the stronger one, we can step back inside and see that she has already gotten herself up off the floor, she has dropped Alec’s shoes to the floor and she is dashing through the house to her bedroom.

  She will need to be dressed appropriately, she is thinking, safely is what she means, and I am happy now, this is the Kanae I have always known, now watch her leave her wet nightgown in the bathtub, watch her strip off her sodden underwear and camisole and now she is racing back to the closet, a whir of flesh and determination, and she is pulling on clean, dry underwear, a sturdy bra, an undershirt, she is taking one of Alec’s old shirts, a flannel he used to wear to work in the garden, and it’s incredibly soft, and she puts it over a cotton sweater and pulls on a pair of her jeans—upon a shelf with the winter clothing, she finds a hat and a scarf and then back to the genkan for her raincoat, and then she is pushing candles and plastic bags and a flashlight into her pockets, and before she leaves she fills a small backpack with a change of clothes for Alec, just in case.

  She is standing a moment, hesitating, but then she decides, watch her now as she rolls her bicycle out of the garage, leaving her car in the driveway so that her children will first believe she is just lying down somewhere in the house, they will not go looking for her right away, and now she is tying the strings of her raincoat hood firmly around her neck and heading out into the relentless wall of rain. The wind is strong and she must push against it, and at the edge of the neighborhood, she passes her daughters driving back home but they don’t recognize her, they don’t even look twice at her small hunkered shape behind the handlebars, and she gets a brief glimpse of their tense faces through the windshield, Megumi is driving, squinting against the rain, and Naomi is holding a small hand to her mouth, eyes wide.

  This is the moment when Kanae begins speaking to Alec again, the moment she forgives him for leaving her, the moment she accepts that she has wasted some of the short time they will have together, and in her careful progress down the road, she begins a dialogue with him in whispers; in the familiar hushed tone of their intimate conversations, (isn’t this how they spoke when the children were sleeping, or when in public and something private must be said), she explains what she is doing, she gives him a litany of her smallest actions—how she must push on the pedals, hold the handlebar with a firm grip, change gears for a slight rise—she speaks to him as though he were right beside her on his own bike, she speaks to him as though giving him these details of her movements is what will get them through the storm.

  * * *

  Alec is thanking the old woman but she continues to hover at the door, she is still astounded by his Japanese, giving him compliment after compliment, and she does not remember him, surely she would not still be staring at him if she knew who he was, knew that he has lived his entire life here in these mountains, and so he wants to snap at her, he wants to show her his passport, tell her that he’s practically as Japanese as she is, that this is his home and he is tired of being told in gestures and glances that it isn’t, he wants to tell her to get herself out of this small place, to see the world, to know that travel isn’t so difficult anymore and there is nothing so special about him, but instead he says:

  “I don�
��t want to be any trouble.”

  “Oh, you’re no trouble. It’s just with the storm . . . the wiring in this old house is terrible. We may not have any hot water this evening. Our food may not be up to standards.”

  And she is bustling from the night table to the window, back to the dresser to wipe at an invisible speck of dirt and then over to the closet, and the whole time the lights are flickering a bit, the lamps are humming over their heads. She smoothes the sleeves of his jacket on its hanger, slides the door closed and then she is finally bowing to him and shuffling away out the door, her back hunched, her head tipped to the side as if her ears were leading her down to the first floor and the other guests, to her small staff and into the kitchen.

  The rain is still beating against the roof of the ryokan but it seems to be softening a little, and Alec listens to the steady thrumming, noting everything about the spare room about him, the neat rectangles of tatami and the shadows thrown by the flowers and this tall thin vase in the alcove, the way the bottom of the hanging scroll taps lightly against the wall as the house sways just a bit in the wind. The furniture is simple and sturdy but everything has faded and one of the pillowcases of the cushions is much too bright, altogether in the wrong taste, much too modern for this run-down inn, and he takes it up and crushes it between his hands while he paces the room, looking for somewhere to hide it, to get it out of his sight, what a horrible object, he won’t be forced to look at it, no, how tacky, how cheap, and he jumps toward the closet, stuffing it toward the back beneath the extra futon and when it is good and hidden, when he is no longer touching the stiff fabric, he can sit down and breathe a little easier.

  Alec cannot remember if this was their room, it could have been, this could have been the small space they shared for three days, the length of honeymoon they could afford at the time, going only so far as this steep hill outside Komachi and this traditional ryokan, now fallen out of style compared to the bigger onsen hotels that draw tourists to our mountains each year. They did not put a foot outside the inn, took all their meals in their room, crept down into the guest house’s cavernous bathing room in the early hours of dawn before any of the other guests were awake and only once went out onto the balcony to watch a meteor shower, and so Alec should be able to remember whether this was their room, he should remember its corners and shadows, should remember what it looked like with the futon spread out across the floor and the window half-cracked open, and the color of his new wife’s skin lit with sun through the glass, and the taste of her and the slide of their bodies and the shape of their happiness, yes, he should be able to feel the hard permanent edges of their happiness as it grew between them in this small space.

  “I am still strong,” he is saying, testing the sound of his voice now in the dusty air, how it rumbles below the rattling sound of the window and the knock of a branch at the side of the wall, and then the sound of a crash reaches him from outside, and he is on his feet, only wincing a little at the pain that ignites in the trunk of his body at this swift movement, he is pushing back the drapes and sliding open the window, and down in the courtyard the old woman is hovering over a young man in a cooking apron who is trying to right a trash can that has fallen over. The old woman’s kimono is soaking wet, sticking to the back of her legs and keeping her from walking properly, and she is shouting to the young man to tie the cans with rope to a tree in the center of the garden, and the rain is dripping off her face and her eyes are fluttering against the water and the wind.

  And Alec is shouting in English now, shouting down to these two figures below him, his arm stretched out into the rain, his face fixed in a grimace, and he is telling them that he’s still strong, that he’s stronger than they think, and they are staring back up at him, faces frozen, mouths gaping, arms and hands thrown up to block the rain—and for just a second too long all three of these people stay perfectly still and they could be statues, or carved puppets, petrified, silent, unmoving.

  ORGANIZED CONVECTION

  Kanae holds her legs still, letting the bicycle carry her forward with its momentum, it isn’t so hard really, pushing herself through the wind, the storm feels like it is slowing, maybe it is beginning to run through its course, and so she pedals again, and her legs strain less, and the flats of her thighs and her wrists are soaked with water where her raincoat offers no protection, and the air against her face is still cold, but she’s warm, her damp underclothes are pressed against her and are humid from her exertions.

  Our Komachi is not so big and there are not many opportunities for doing what the hospital and the authorities suspect that Alec has done—a train, the bridge, the river—and so she has ridden out toward the big bridge that connects old-town Komachi with its modern neighborhoods on the other side of the swift Komachi River.

  “He wouldn’t,” she is saying, as we’re all saying. “He wouldn’t.”

  Still, she peddles on, and she doesn’t check the train station because the inter-village trains are not running today anyway, not until the storm passes, and if there had been an accident this morning, she would already know, the whole town would know by the flashing light above the train relay cables. In all the years she has lived in Komachi there have been four suicides by train, and each time there is a piercing wail and a flashing light at each track interchange, a modern incantation for the departed soul, for the few hours until the tracks are cleared and it is safe for the trains to run again.

  She bumps along the bike path on the left bank of the river, watching carefully for areas where the river may be overflowing and twisting her handlebars to negotiate the gusts of wind, several times she is blown sideways and must stop her fall with a foot dropped to the ground, and there are places her bicycle crosses through a few inches of water as the level of the river continues to rise, and so she keeps her eyes on the rough concrete, checking for debris that could knock her off her bike, checking the choppy surface of the water until she is stopped in surprise by the fat silver bodies of fish suddenly jumping up and into the air, the flash and arc of their bodies rising sharply and then twisting and plunging back into the muddy tangle of swollen river.

  “Alec is not here,” she says, speaking aloud because it calms her, because the sound of her voice reminds her that she is here, right now, she is on this bike, despite her cold slippery hands, despite the risk of falling, despite the risk of something falling on her, and she is no longer running away from Alec, but toward him. “Alec would not do this to me.”

  There in the river is a piece of red plastic, maybe a rain coat, but it doesn’t matter because it isn’t Alec’s, it is the wrong color, and once she sees this first item, she notices a wash of other personal items, pitching and rolling through the churning water: a baseball cap, an umbrella, a cardboard box, what looks like a book—she watches the water rising even further, these items coming toward her, the water coming up to touch her pedals and she knows she will have to get away from the river now, and Kanae bows her head, says a prayer for the first time in years, an honest prayer, focused and careful, her physical body turning inward, turning away from the storm, and for a few seconds she is calm.

  But the feeling is instinctively addictive and she gets her bicycle moving forward and away from the river path, out toward the wide street, now with renewed hope, because isn’t this what generations of Komachi citizens have done in their own private moments of terror? And why should she be any different? Why shouldn’t she call on these gods?

  “I am no longer like them,” she once said, in the early years of her marriage. “I have moved off-center, I am somewhere in between. I can’t be exactly like you, Alec, but I have stopped being like everyone else.”

  “We’re in our own crazy boat, aren’t we? Rowing alongside them but in a parallel river.”

  Once they even considered leaving Japan, moving to England or America because they wondered if their children deserved this kind of opportunity, wondered how it would change them, and now Kanae cannot remember which of them, w
as it her, was it Alec, eventually kept the plan from going forward, but she does know one thing, she knows they are being punished for the way they secretly enjoyed feeling a little different from everyone else.

  “That isn’t true,” Alec would surely say. “I cannot believe that people would be punished for their happiness, what a hideous god that would be.”

  Years ago, a month ago, a week ago, she would have agreed with him, and they would have discussed this guilt and these religions and why the two were such eager partners, and they would have compared notes on the way they were each raised, descriptions of family traditions and conversations with parents and friends, and they might have even discussed their own children and whether that legacy of thinking might have been passed along, they would have asked each other, as they often have, how their mixed culture household had influenced Megumi, Naomi, and Ken’ichi, and how now, as adults, these three were different from their peers.

  Kanae is heading toward the other bridge now on the east side of town and is cutting through Komachi’s entertainment district, a gray and shadowy place of unlit neon signs and narrow streets, windows boarded up to wait out the storm, and this is when she hears the crash, and at first she thinks she is imagining it, that she has created this noise in her mind from a cache of worry that is suddenly too big to carry within, that she has somehow tossed it from herself, thrown it down onto the street and can now watch her anger and fear explode. But then she sees the tipped signboard hanging from the side of a karaoke bar and she sees the traffic light smashed on the ground, and there are still sparks shooting up into the air, splutters of light and energy, and all she can do is jerk her handlebars to the left and turn down into an alley where the wind is blocked, where only papers are blowing; when she reaches the other side of this alley, she stops—the town is silent, no one is out on the streets, there are wet papers, flyers, and other debris, being flicked from lamppost to tree trunk to mailbox, the electrical lines are swaying in the sky above Kanae’s head, and she watches them, watches the big box of another traffic light sway forward and backward and she steadies herself on the alley wall, legs burning from the exercise, and she knows that in a very short amount of time all of her conversations with Alec will be just like the one she’s just finished—one-sided and pretend. Without answers.