by Kaz Morran
The group had, over the past week, become more accustomed to Ronin’s behavior and the stories he told. Taiyo had fielded several questions about his thesis advisor’s mental fitness and the integrity of the stories, but Taiyo never knew how to answer. He’d noticed something, however. The shared eye rolls and half-hidden snickers that Ronin induced in the candidates had actually helped to bond everyone as a team.
“Can I finish?” Dr. Wilson said curtly, and Ronin put away his hands. She gave her head a shake and took a deep breath before continuing the coms briefing.
Taiyo locked the body cam she gave him onto his utility belt as demonstrated. Once affixed, the camera began recording and transmitting everything it heard and saw to a what Dr. Wilson called a “monitoring station,” and what Taiyo suspected was the dude with a laptop sitting on the next porch over.
“The body cams both livestream and record, and there’s no off switch.” The body cams were tamper-proof, but any attempt to alter, remove, or interfere with their function before the end of the mission would be cause for disqualification.
“How about in a medical emergency?” asked Ronin. “Or during private time?”
“You should feel honored that NASA wants to watch you poop,” Walter told Ronin.
Kristen reminded them the cam aimed forward. “Nobody’s watching that end.”
“You don’t know how I poop,” said Ronin indignantly. He added, “And what about intercourse? Where are they livestreaming that to, I wonder.”
Dr. Wilson assured them that as long as they stuck to their assignments, they’d have no reason to be concerned.
***
The Aviator pulled himself up to sit on the railing but quickly changed his mind after the wind licked his face and sunglasses with mist. He shuffled past the backpacks and chairs and went over to lean against the wall by the bungalow door instead.
It was already 06:07, but T3’s higher-ups had yet to call in with the all-clear for departure, so all eyes shot toward the Aviator when his phone let out a chime from his pocket. In trying to simultaneously pull the phone from his pocket and dry his sunglasses on his shirt, however, the Aviator dropped the phone.
From his seat, Taiyo kicked out a foot to break the phone’s fall but instead wound up knocking it across the slatted porch floor. It banked off a chair leg. He made a spectacular dive to try and save it from slipping between the floorboards. He saw in slow motion his own fingers fumble the lustrous device. End over end, it flipped free from his fingertips, glinting in the red dawn light, landing on one edge just out of reach, teetering, and at last succumbing to gravity and plummeting through the gap in the floorboards, down into the abysmal depths beneath the porch.
“Better hope that wasn’t your wife texting you, sir,” Walter told the Aviator.
Taiyo defused the Aviator’s cursing by jumping to his feet and running down the steps to where the blinking notification light drew him to the phone. He picked the phone up out of the mud. In wiping it off on his pant leg, he accidentally turned on the screen and revealed the subject line of a message in the notification bar:
re: 06:00dep. –delay?? (weather alert)
After getting the phone back, the Aviator took several minutes to reply to the message before addressing the candidates.
“Just the weather forecast,” he finally said, and he stuffed it back into his pocket.
“What about the weather forecast?” Taiyo said.
“Huh?” The Aviator adjusted his sunglasses. “Com team’s seeing mixed forecasts.”
“Mixed, meaning... ?”
“Probably nothing. A bit of rain and wind. Nothing you need to—”
The sound of ripping velcro interrupted him as Nel pried her own phone off the chest of her jumpsuit. “Sorry,” she said, and then while checking something on the screen added, “Doesn’t look good.”
“They’ll relay updates as you go,” continued the Aviator.
Kim asked Nel, “Does it say how much rain?”
“What do you want?” The Aviator’s voice had hardened, and he tightened his face at Nel. Then to everyone: “You’re in the jungle. You want to be astronauts, right? The Right Stuff aren’t going to let a little rain ruin the party, are they?”
Taiyo leaned back in his plastic chair and closed his eyes to avoid rolling them; NASA had given up that space cowboy mindset decades ago.
Anton had reservations as well. “What about the earthquake? We aren’t worried about landslides or aftershocks?”
Taiyo doubted a quake as small as last night’s would have aftershocks, but even a tiny trembler could, in theory, could knock loose a hillside. He wondered how legit the danger really was. Landslides often followed quakes in Japan, but usually because the hillside had been cleared of the trees whose roots has once helped lock the soil in place. But didn’t jungles have thin soil? He really didn’t know. It certainly wasn’t crazy of Anton to bring it up.
“Good point,” Taiyo told the medic.
But The Aviator disagreed. He gave them all a hard, vindictive smile. “If you all want to back out, that’s fine with me. Just say the word, and I’ll call Team-B to tell them they can start their simulation early.” He looked down at everyone over the rims of his shades. “What’s it going to be?”
Nobody would say it, but Taiyo knew how his teammates felt. They didn’t want to back out, but they preferred to base that decisions on objective information. Though NASA was famously risk-averse, Taiyo knew better than to assume that as the agency took on a greater role as a broker for commercial partners, it could enforce its ethic across all its contractors. Taiyo knew what happened when incentives misaligned, as had occurred with Fukushima and so many other government-industry tie-ups.
The Aviator exaggerated a sigh and made a show of swiping and tapping his phone. “God knows when we’ll be able to reschedule you all,” he said. “You might get bumped altogether if we can’t fit you in before—”
“Ya cunts going all right there?” Ethan came skipping up the steps, the high-strung khaki-clad Jiminy Cricket that he was. He tipped his head forward and let the rainwater run off his hat and down to the floorboards.
Ronin pointed a thumb at the Aviator and said, “This ultracrepidarian here thinks our berries are bigger than our twigs.”
Taiyo didn’t know what that meant, and judging by the faces of the others no one did.
“Easy, buddy.” The Aviator pulled in his chin and held up his palms. “I just need to know if you all are still in or not?”
Ronin stood and slammed his open thermos on the table, spouting water all over himself. He whipped his ponytail around and thrust his fist into the air. “All systems go,” he screamed into the Aviator’s face then sat back down, suddenly calm.
The Aviator slinked away while an uneasy round of chuckles settled in amongst Ethan and the candidates.
The six candidates hoisted their packs up onto their shoulders and tightened the straps, and Ethan led them down the steps to see them off.
At the edge of the clearing, behind the toilets, they gathered at the trailhead, a dark tunnel of foliage that ascended steeply up the hillside.
Walter asked Ethan, “Sir, are you sure you can’t come with us?”
“Sorry, mate. That’s not what T3 has planned for me.” Ethan shook each of their hands and slapped their shoulders and backpacks. Then he looked around to be sure nobody else was nearby before offering some parting words: “The forecasts round here are about as useful as an arseshole on your elbow, so keep a lookie on the sky for shifts in weather. Storm patterns are all wonky these days.” He brought them in for a team huddle. “If you get to pushing shit uphill on a hot day, you tell these T3 tossers they can suck a fart out your arse, ay, mates?”
“Yessir.”
“No worries, mate,” replied Taiyo.
11
“They were reasonable with me at first. No cattle prods yet. They were fascinated with my story—how I got there, and all that.” Ronin Aro spoke more
to the hostess saddled up dutifully on his left than to Director Sumida on Aro’s right.
“How you got to where?” the Filipina woman said in English without attempting to mask her nicotine-mauled voice. She had one hand on Aro’s knee and held a cigarette in the other.
The hostess reminded Sumida of a poem about a winter tree that refused to let its last leaf drop in spite of the leaf having dried up months earlier. Aro and Sumida were the only customers in the living-room-size bar, and Sumida wondered if Aro had arranged it that way. In total, three hostesses lounged about checking their phones and oscillating between apathy and feigned interest. All three were over-the-hill Filipinas, each wore a miniskirt and low-cut top of a different primary color, loopy jewelry, trashy red lipstick, and bedazzled high heels that sparkled in the ceiling-strung garland and disco ball.
“They took me to a place under a school,” said Aro.
“What kind of place?”
“A prison. But underground, dug out of the raw bedrock. Call it a secret camp, or gulag, or whatever you want.”
“A dungeon?”
“A dungeon. Yes.”
“Where, for the record, exactly was—”
“None of this is on the record.” Aro accepted the glass of overpriced wine cooler the hostess poured for him, and then took his hand off her thigh and pointed at Sumida. “You got that, Captain White-collar?”
“Of course,” said Sumida, undeterred by Ronin Aro’s vulgarity or by the bubblegum pop beat pulsating the narrow confines of the eight-table hostess bar. In Japanese, he told Aro to proceed, but since the hostess had only been in Japan a month and hardly spoke the language, Aro insisted they continue in English.
“So …” Aro looked over at one of two wall-mounted screens, which flashed karaoke recommendations, and then he called to the hostess behind the bar to turn down the music. “I told them about running,” he said while looking down at the small knee-high table. “About getting out of Cambodia and running as a kid—a teenager—and how I’ve been running since, but to them, I was just some stray. I wasn’t Han Chinese, but not a Muslim Uyghur or reactionary, so they didn’t know what to do with me. Not that being Japanese would’ve saved me. Shit, I didn’t even think of myself as Japanese back then.”
“What did you think you were?” said Sumida.
“I don’t know. I didn’t think about it. A space alien, it felt like. All I know is everywhere I go except Japan people want me dead or caged for no reason except they don’t like how I got there.”
“Sneaking across international borders is a crime.”
“I’m breaking free from one prison state to another. It’s not as if I’m in a position to stop and apply for travel papers on the way out.”
“Are you going to tell me how you got home?”
“To Japan?”
“You do consider this home, right?”
“If home is where they have to take you back.” Ronin took a breath, sipped his wine cooler at the request of the hostess, and leaned back against the vinyl cushion of the sofa. “So they take me from the cage and down the tunnel to their office, and there’s this English speaker there to translate—a Chinese cadre in green with the red star like the guards—not a Uyghur in chains and rags like the inmates. Him and these older cadres and me, we all get talking. Three, four, five days this goes on. And they’ve got this big, black, old school rotary phone on the desk. I’m looking at the phone—not to make a call, because who the hell do I know anyway, right? And by then they kind of trust me. We’ve been joking and eating together. But I’m thinking maybe I can bash one of them with the receiver and grab his rifle. But they see me looking, and they beat me for it, and I fight back with the chair and fire extinguisher and even the pen off the desk. Whatever I can grab. They don’t like that. Out come the electric cattle prods, and they put me in chains back in a cell with Uyghurs.
“Must have been three years that passed after that. From spring, back around and around and around to spring again. Of course, I couldn’t have conversed with the Uyghurs anyway, but even a tap-tap-tap of attempted cell-to-cell communication would get us all a good beating, so I learned fast not to try.”
The hostess took Aro’s hand in hers and told him, “You’re so mature and handsome.”
Aro and Sumida both ignored her.
“You weren’t allowed any form of communication for three years?” Sumida asked. He didn’t know how much of this tale he could believe, though the passion and fear in Aro’s eyes left little doubt that Aro believed every word.
Aro locked fingers with the hostess and turned to look at her. He scanned her up and down, and then asked her name.
“Coco,” she said.
“Coco,” repeated Aro. “Like the dead gorilla?”
“Sorry, I don’t know about such things.”
“Have you ever gone three years where nobody’s allowed to touch you?”
“I can touch you.”
“Three years where the only human voices you hear are either denouncements or screams of agony?” Aro’s voice faltered. He turned to face Sumida. “Ever been in a struggle session?”
“I don’t know.”
Aro slammed his fist on the table. “It’s not something you’d forget, Captain White-collar.”
“It was an off-the-cuff remark.”
“Eleven.” Aro’s eyes and nostrils flared. “I was the center of eleven struggles sessions, and I did the denouncing five times more than that. They drop you in a pit in the dark—in an old dank-ass sewer—while the other inmates circle around shouting every made up accusation they can think of at you. Reactionary! And they spit in your face. Radical! Capitalist extremist! They punch you in the gut. Terrorist! They swarm with fists, feet, elbows, teeth, bricks, pipes. Islamist! And anyone not screaming and beating you with enough vigor and conviction to satisfy the guards is the next one in the middle. Confess to your crimes! they scream until you think of something believable to tell them that won’t get you in even more trouble.”
After a moment of silence, the hostess stuck her tongue in Aro’s ear. He pushed her away and asked if she knew what he was talking about, and she said life was hard, and everyone has to struggle.
“What’s your struggle?” Aro asked her.
“I came here just one month ago. No work for me here. No visa.”
Sumida leaned forward so Coco could see him. “Why would you come to Japan without a visa? Isn’t that illegal?”
She shook her head. “Only tourist visa. I cannot work so I will go back to the Philippines in two months.”
“You’re working right now, aren’t you?”
“I only help my sister.” She looked at the bar, to where another hostess sat on a stool, slumped over the counter, probably asleep. “Not for money. I stay in her home with the kids and husband. Babysitting and helping here is my rent.”
“Your kids and husband?” Aro asked.
“My sister’s. I had a divorce. But you …” She squeezed Aro’s arm, moaned gently, and rubbed his leg. “You must be married of course.”
“Of course not.”
“And children? Do you have any?”
“Oh, probably.”
Sumida wanted no part of this charade. A hostess was trained to say all the right things—anything to keep her customers drinking and eating the little packaged snacks and other offerings with hidden prices. He called for the other hostess to bring him a bottle of shochu. He made sure to ask the price before letting her pour him a cup, and turned her away when she tried to sit down with them.
“So the other inmates spoke English then?” Sumida asked Aro.
Ronin’s gaze stayed from Coco, and he stared off into the distance toward the wall of liquor behind the bar, his eyes unfocused, and he shook his head. “The translator joined in the beatings, too.”
“I can’t imagine.” Sumida knew his words came out insincere.
“They used psychological torture, too. They liked to turn us against each other.” His
spine went straight, his face lost color, and the shakiness in his voice turned into a tremble. “I was special, so the guards liked to taunt me most. They made me slaughter the pigs and dump the blood on the Muslims.” He scrunched his face and squeezed his eyes shut and open several times. “Some of these guys—I bet they’ve been in there for decades. They’d have killed themselves if they’d had any will left.
“I …” Sumida didn’t know what to say. He took a long drink and wiped his mouth on a napkin while he watched Aro blink away puffy eyes.
Coco asked if Aro was okay, and he nodded. She refilled his glass with the bottle of wine cooler on the table.
“There’s one day when they come and unchain me and take me to the office,” Aro continued. “No beating this time. They were patient. I hadn’t walked in so long, and the only thing that hurts more than shackles is getting them off. So I needed help walking, and they gave me that help. Down the long rocky tunnel to a new office, and they told me to be good and eat lots and exercise for three weeks, and if I do they’ll take me to the embassy.”
“Japan embassy?” said Coco.
“I wasn’t so dumb to ask. But as far as I can tell, whatever embassy they think I belong in is three thousand kilometers away in Beijing, and every kilometer of the ride would be one kilometer farther from an international border. If I was getting away—away from China—it was going to be then and there, and it’d be by running through the desert. Nobody’s going to bother chasing a guy across the Gobi, right?”
Sumida said, “You presumed.”
“I presumed right,” Aro snapped. “And I presumed right that you’d be an asshole if I brought you here. Your mouth even looks like one—like the puckered pink one of a cat with its tail in the air.” Aro made a lewd noise with his mouth and tucked his ponytail behind his shoulder.
“Did you wish to meet to insult me, Mister Aro? Or would you like to get down to business?”
“Stay out of my litter box, Captain. And keep your head in the game. That’s what I do. That’s how I got away.”
