by Kaz Morran
“I don’t follow.”
“Dawn in one eye, dusk in the other.”
“Pardon?”
“I played docile like they’d broken me. I marched with glossed over eyes right out and into the cage they had set up in the back of the jeep, pretending I didn’t notice the sun on my face for the first time in three years. But the second that one of them weakened his hold on my arm to open that cage—pow-pow! Like a motherfucking mantis shrimp. I had all kinds of time to rehearse that shit in my head. No hesitation. Pow! I got two down and a third on the run before they could get a shot off.” Aro stopped and stiffened his back. An awkward silence passed, where Aro stared into his drink and Sumida tried not to show his fear and confusion. When Aro continued, he gestured wildly but kept his gaze on some inconspicuous spot in the background. “I can still feel the shots, you know. The rat-tat-tat skimming my head. But I’m doing evasive moves. Belly on the ground, up quick, down behind a car, around a corner and another wall, and up the steps of a mosque. … I think, they aren’t going shoot me at a mosque.” His breathing intensified. “But they do. Rat-tat-tat. There must be dozens of them now. Sirens and jeeps. Dust is flying from blasted walls. People screaming. It’s a whole war—on just me. I run. I duck. I run. I hide. The same pattern. It’s wearing me down.”
Coco leaned into him lustfully. “You’re so brave.”
Aro was panting hard.
“Did people die?” said Sumida.
Aro snapped his head to look at Sumida. “Huh?”
“There must have been casualties.”
“I didn’t stick around to find out.” He looked down at Coco’s wrinkly hand in his lap. “Must have been.” He nodded softly to himself.
Coco handed Aro a stick of gum from the basket on the table. “And then you ran away into the desert? I don’t like the desert.”
“Why is that?”
“In Kuwait. How do you say it in English? —A kind of storm that is sand.”
“Sandstorm,” said Sumida.
“Yes. Six weeks, only inside the buildings.”
“You went to Kuwait?”
“Just before here. For working. I cleaned rooms, but I wasn’t good. I broke the contract— twenty months, not two years—so I could come to Japan.”
Sumida felt his eyebrows form a V. “Why would you leave a job there to come here where you’re not allowed to work?” What a stupid woman, Sumida thought. He should report her to the immigration bureau.
“It is a sad story. We should talk about happy things to make you happy in my sister’s bar. I don’t want to bother you with my sadness.”
“Good plan,” said Aro.
“I’d kind of like to know,” Sumida said. The immigration bureau might ask for details.
“I have one son. He is in the Philippines of course. Twenty-nine years old. Computer programmer. He paid for me to come to Japan. And one daughter.” Coco looked up at the ceiling. Her eyes were glossy in the spinning lights of the disco ball. “She did suicide.” Coco took her hand from Aro’s and counted on her fingers. “August thirteenth. So, almost six months ago. It is because of—I got the divorce from my husband. Her father. She told me, ‘No, no. It’s okay. No problem that you go to Kuwait.’ I needed to work, of course. She knew it. She said, ‘It’s okay, Mom. I know you have to go. It’s okay.’ Thirteen years old. And I thought she should be okay, too. With her brother there. … But it’s my fault.”
“You couldn’t have known,” Sumida offered.
“She is my daughter.”
“Was,” Aro corrected.
“A mother must know. But I didn’t. So she is dead, and I am here with nothing.”
“Why wouldn’t you go back to the Philippines instead of Japan?”
“Nothing there. Only the vigilantes. You know the squads, right? You see the news. On motorcycles, they clean up the streets. They do a good job. I like the president now. But I think if I go they will shoot me, too. So I am here in Japan. You know I never worked before Kuwait. So what job can I do? No Japanese speaking. And my English is not good. I’m fifty years old next year. Nobody can give me a visa. So what can I do? Only look for a Japanese husband. But my sister has a Japanese husband, and he is not good for her. So terrible. … Oh, I am so sorry. Such a bad hostess. This is my sadness. I don’t want to spread to you.” She grabbed the bottle off the table and refilled Aro’s glass. “Please. Drink more. Drink. Cheers. Kampai!”
She raised her own near-empty glass, and Sumida guessed from her wavering arm that she’d been drinking since well before he and Aro had arrived.
They all clinked drinks, then sung a few happy songs of karaoke.
Aro leaned forward, elbows on his knees, eyes on the low table and drinks, and he resumed his story. “I didn’t run into the dessert yet,” he said. “There was too much going on. I see a police booth. They won’t think to look there if I act calm, but I’ve got the orange gulag suit on, so I duck on over to this pharmacy counter sticking out of the wall of a building, and I tell the pharmacist, ‘Give me drugs to kill me or give me your jacket,’ and the guy—a big Uyghur—shoves his lab coat and fez hat through the wicket. Maybe he understood my words, maybe not, but he knew the situation. Give that man a Nobel if you can find him.” Aro’s excitement dropped as fast as it had risen, and his face drained of blood. “If the cadres didn’t already find him. … But they probably found him. I hadn’t thought about that. … They found him, didn’t they?”
“Sorry, I wouldn’t have any way of …” Sumida let himself trail off upon seeing Aro’s change in posture.
Aro had dropped his head, brushed the ponytail aside, and was now rubbing his scalp with the tips of his thumb and forefinger. Coco massaged Aro’s massive shoulders.
Sumida had to look away when Coco began to stroke Aro’s ponytail. “You want me to leave you two alone for a bit?”
But Aro’s mind was trapped in the adventure of his past.
“I get over a fence in back of the police booth. Turns out the booth is a gate going into the same compound as the prison.”
“The schoolyard?”
“But it wasn’t only a schoolyard. They had the prison tunnels under the school, but now I saw more buildings. Bigger ones I didn’t see when they brought me in.”
“Like a university complex?” said Sumida. “Did you get the name of—”
“Listen, and I’ll tell you.” His words were brash, but for the moment his voice remained calm.
“Sorry.”
“Imagine my luck! All around me are people wearing white lab coats like the one I got on. I go in a door, down through another basement—a normal basement with water heaters and all that—and I come up in some hallway with school kids doing a tour. Happy, giggly school kids. I can’t believe it. It’s like—” He was choked up again. “Up until then, I almost thought the real world had rotted away for good. But there they are in front of me. Kids crowded around a lab-coat-wearing guy while he points at posters of satellites and rockets and all kinds of Chinese space hardware.”
“A museum?”
“Do you want to know?”
“Please.”
“Then shut the fuck up already,” Aro told Sumida.
Aro pressed the balls of his hands to his eyes and then snatched his glass off the table. He sat back in the sofa, let Coco rub his thigh, and he slowly swirled the ice in his wine glass. “I walk past like I own the place and into this room at the end of the hallway. I don’t turn the lights on. Instead, I let the door shut behind me and take in the darkness. It’s dark like the dungeon cell.” He swallowed hard. “But that’s fine. I keep my head in the game. I go for the darkest corner and crouch there, not moving. Hardly breathing. Just waiting in the dark. And I wait. And wait. And nothing happens. Hours pass. I wait some more. Still nothing. So I crawl. Quiet. Slow. I feel across the cement floor. I feel around wires and tubes, and the metal legs of big cabinets and machinery. The floor is spotless. Not even dust. I crawl, searching for the perimeter
, searching for another way out. I feel what must be a door—it’s got rubber going around the frame, so not a crack of light is coming through, but it feels like a door, and it’s got a big crossbar handle thing. I don’t know if it’s going to set off the alarm, but I’m ready to run. I push it open a bit at a time until a light comes on. A sensor light mounted over a second door. And in between the two doors are plastic overalls and hair nets and all that. If I keep going, I’m just going to end up down another hallway. Then I see it. Up in the ceiling, a camera. It’s blinking red. Then the alarm comes on. Not nearby, and not loud, but I can hear it coming from somewhere on the other side of the second door. From the security room. So I open the first door all the way and let the light in. And I see what’s there. I’m frozen. I can’t run. I’m locked in place just staring up at it, like holy shit! The light’s not enough to see more than the bottom bit of what I’m looking at, but I know what it is. I can’t believe I was hiding under it all those hours without knowing.”
“A rocket?” said Sumida.
“Man, fuck you. This is my story.” Aro sat back and crossed his arms. “Yes, it was a rocket. But don’t say it like that. It was more than a rocket. These nozzles—this array of seven or maybe nine engines—it’s wider than this room.” He made a sweeping gesture to encompass the breadth of the bar. “So even though the alarm is ringing and guards are coming any second, I have to see more. It’s still pretty dark in there, so I need the light switch. Where is it? There it is!”
“You are so brave,” Coco said again.
“Weren’t you worried about getting arrested? Or worse?”
“That’s why I had to do what I did quickly.”
“Which was … ?”
“I flip the switch, and the whole high bay is lit, but still the nosecone is too high up to see. But I see the gantry hook hanging from the ceiling. There’s fog up there. Actual clouds in this building, it’s so big. This rocket is a skyscraper in a skyscraper. A Tin-Tin looking spaceship built to break free from tie-wearing geezers like you. The light casting through the fog onto the rocket makes me fall back on my knees like a religious experience. It wouldn’t be Mecca those folks prostrate to if they all could see this bad boy.”
“Is that what you did? Did you pray to the rocket?”
“No, you infidel, I destroyed it and stole the blueprints.”
“So brave.”
“Mr. Aro?” Sumida asked.
“What?”
“Forgive my skepticism, but—”
“I don’t forgive easily.”
Sumida’s closed his eyes and sighed. “Please continue,” he relented.
“That’s all.”
Sumida flicked open his eyes. “That’s all? What do you mean?”
“You wanted to know how I got the plans. That’s how. And keep your voice down. This is supposed to be a secret meeting.”
Sumida grimaced. “On the phone” —He leaned forward and whispered— “you said you had sensitive material essential to the agency and the security of the nation.”
“Yep.” Ronin raised his glass.
“Care to divulge a little more detail, Mister Aro?”
“How about five hundred gigabytes of details?”
“Wow. So brave.”
“Hey, Coco?”
“Yes?”
“You want me to marry you?”
12
Summer is the season of inferior sledding.
—Inuit proverb
Dealing with a bully required patience and strategy, and it helped to have an ally.
“So where’d you hide the summit, hafu?” Ronin called.
Ignoring the squish of mud, Taiyo took a knee to brace himself against the wind and rain, and he stared up the hill. Fog obscured the top. “Up there,” he replied, and he pointed to where the thirteen-hundred-meter summit should have been.
“Is that your expert opinion as team navigator?”
Taiyo wanted to admit to Ronin that he was no more qualified for his role than any of them were, but silence often countered Ronin best. Giving Ronin the title of “payload commander” seemed like something a dad would do to get his son to help bring in the groceries.
Taiyo kept his eyes on the slippery trail. With each footfall, he felt the jungle darken around him and the hymn of cicadas turn into chants of mockery. He labored forward, always uphill, farther into the mountains, deeper into the mist and mud. For all the power of the lush canopy to wick away water one instance and funnel it down Taiyo’s back another, it did remarkably little to stop the flow of mud from amassing around his legs. He and Nel roped together and took turns falling and helping each other up. Their boots made a suction sound with each dredge, emulating the sucking dry of the troop’s collective energy.
They stopped for a breather partway up an endless incline and questioned their life choices.
Panting, Ronin dropped his pack in the muck. Over the torrent of rain patter, he yelled, “I’ll bury that Aussie varlet in mud if I ever see him again.”
According to Ethan, the first fifteen kilometers of the trek should’ve been easy. He’d said it before the weather warning, though.
Taiyo looked up and back down the mountain and asked Nel if T3 had been in touch. They hadn’t. “I guess we keep going up then, eh Commander?” he said to Walter.
Walter’s shoulders rose and fell as he struggled to catch his breath, even though the team had been resting on the hillside for several minutes. He wiped the water from his face with his sleeve, but he was powerless against the cascade of rain soaking his clothes. “Sir, a rest might be good,” replied Walter. He sounded weak and looked like a drowned pig.
Nel crouched beside Taiyo, unaffected by the mud that pooled around their legs. She backhanded Taiyo on the chest to get his attention and then pointed with her chin at Ronin, who was using a stick as a lever to lob loosened patches of muddy grass and moss down the mountainside. She frowned and looked at Taiyo for an explanation.
He could only offer her a shrug, which the backpack mostly hid anyway. So he and Ronin were both Japanese. So what? That didn’t make him Ronin’s mother. He’d tried putting Ronin in his place once, and it hadn’t gone well.
Taiyo had been the only hafu at Miyagi Prefecture East-Sendai High School, and the only student with a five o’clock shadow and self-inked tattoos. The school district prohibited any form of self-expression, so he’d kept his tattoos covered—except when his sleeves accidentally-on-purpose rode a little too high. But nobody ever called him out for his tattoos. Probably because his intellect and physical stature intimidated the teachers. Alas, however, like Capone getting done in for tax evasion, he did get nabbed—for violating the hairstyle restrictions.
Schools in Japan, public or private, barred students from dyeing or styling their hair in any way that stood out. Miyagi Prefecture East-Sendai High School made one exception: If you didn’t have naturally black hair you had to dye it black. He fought the rule, and his father fought it with him, but it only made the teachers resent him more. His hair became a magnet of torment and exclusion by students and teachers alike, and more so when the many failed attempts at dyeing it made him break out in a painful rash.
The school also forbade getting to class by bicycle or scooter. Taiyo wasn’t the only kid to dodge that rule by parking down the road at 7-Eleven, but he was the only one doing it with a bike he’d built himself.
Shota Nichiba’s parents had been overly optimistic when they’d ordered him a uniform several sizes too big. The Japanese school year began in April, and here it was January, but Shota Nichiba had yet to grow into the blue blazer and slacks. He liked to talk big, though. Every morning, Shota would coast into the cramped, ten-car 7-Eleven parking lot on his oversized all-gray bicycle, drop the kickstand, and park with the neat row of other wayward youths’ bicycles off to one side of the store’s automatic doors, past the row of recycling bins. When alone, Shota Nichiba never gave Taiyo much trouble, but Shota usually traveled in a pack.
The kids in that pack liked to loosen their slacks to show off the waistbands of their underwear—the only non-prescribed item of clothing. They had a habit of walking or peddling three or four abreast, giving the impression they didn’t plan to move aside for elderly people. Of course, they always did move, and they greeted almost everyone they passed. But they did it with a swagger, and they snickered once the person had gone out of earshot.
With Taiyo, however, they gave a comically wide berth while they held their noses, laughed, and yelled that his blistered scalp stank like something dead had washed ashore from overseas. They called him “foreign kelp” and asked why he had weird hair, why it had brown streaks and not green like an alien. He stopped leaving his bicycle at 7-Eleven because he’d often find it after school in the empty lot next door, the tires deflated or with mean drawings of him left in the front basket.
One crisp sunny morning in January, a day after Taiyo’s sixteenth birthday, while Shota Nichiba’s posse basked in the secondhand smoke of suit-and-tie businessmen, Taiyo tore into the 7-Eleven parking lot on a 50cc, four-stroke, chrome-rimmed, dual exhaust, fat-tired, flame-decaled mini chopper. He’d designed and built it himself, starting a year before he was old enough to ride it legally.
He wore a skullcap helmet and jet black shades, and in spite of the near-freezing weather, he had his school blazer off, and the sleeves of his shirt rolled up to the shoulders to reveal his tattoos. He’d never been a showman, and he wouldn’t make it a habit, but just this once it felt pretty damn good.
The posse absorbed an eyeful while Taiyo took his time dismounting. The foot of the wide-angle kickstand was a polished steel bear paw Taiyo had repurposed out of his grandfather’s ashtray, and the leather seat had been an actual horse saddle.
As if entering a saloon, Taiyo sauntered in through the automatic doors and came back out with a can of Boss Coffee featuring the face of Tommy Lee Jones and the slogan, The Boss of Them All. Taiyo drank it like Tommy. He drank it like a boss: sitting sideways on the saddle with his free arm at rest on the high-rise handlebars.
