Midnight and the Meaning of Love (57 page)

“I like bears. This won’t kill them, but it will stop them and drop them into an instant hibernation. While that sucker is asleep, we’ll make our getaway,” she said softly.

Chiasa began removing more items from her backpack, including my wife’s diary, which she slid into her back pocket. Some panties, which she folded tightly to keep them out of my eyesight and placed into her front pocket. Some handcuffs, two tight tees, one bra, and her slingshot. She held four rocks like they were coins, then stuffed them in her front pocket. When finally her pack was almost empty, she pulled out a new folded plastic trash bag, dropped her entire backpack inside, and said, “Let’s bury it here.”

Yo, I was laughing on the inside but I didn’t crack a smile. With her portable shovel, I dug her a quick ditch.

She washed the dirt off our hands with water from one of her two canteens. She picked up her bow and leaned it on a tree, grabbed her
zukin
off the grass, shook it out one more time, folded it nicely, and unzipped her waist pack. She removed a small can from her waist pack and put the folded
zukin
back inside, zipping the waist pack closed. She marked the tree where her pack was buried with a wicked-looking kanji in pink fluorescent spray paint.

“What does it say?” I asked.

“Tree,” she responded. “It doesn’t give away any information, but still we’ll know we’ve marked our trail. It glows in the dark,” she said. She picked up her bow and wore it on her back. She slid her knife into a rough leather case and strapped it around her calf. “I’m ready now,” she said. She had gone from traveling heavy to traveling light. Now her hands were completely free. I liked that she anticipated a war. Maybe she even craved it, welcomed it, and needed it.

“Do you want to navigate or should I?” She asked me comfortably, like she was good either way and just as happy to follow.

“I’ll navigate, you translate,” I told her. After all, that was our original arrangement. I opened our map. She had already placed a mark on our destination area.

“It’s twenty-three miles away. Eight of them are wilderness, ten are mountains, and five are fields. Come close,” I instructed her. “We’ll follow this trail.” I pointed on the map. I was reading the map by measurements, colors, and symbols. Chiasa of course could decipher the name of each area by reading the kanji. I checked my compass.

As I folded the map back up and put it in my front pocket, Chiasa said, “Did you know that snakes can’t close their eyes?”

“Never thought about it,” I told her truthfully.

“But they can sleep. So if you see one with his eyes open, he could be asleep or awake.”

“True, but the art of the snake is to make sure that you don’t see him, and even if you think you can see him, he’ll camouflage and bend to fill your head with doubts as he either strikes or slips away.”

She had a thoughtful look on her face. Then she smiled and stared at me simultaneously. “I’m wearing indigo; snakes don’t like indigo. So they will stay away.”

“Oh yeah? It would be best to hope they stay away, while expecting them to appear.”

“Snakes don’t like people. They’d rather not encounter any of us,” she said. Then she asked me, “Did you grow up in the countryside or something?”

“I have a little experience with the wilderness.” I was vague while reminiscing on my summers in my Southern Sudanese grandfather’s village, the best training a young, young male could receive. We were accustomed to the cobra and the mighty lion, but we did not fear them. Neither did our father or our father’s father.

“Me too, comrade,” she said. We walked at an even pace.

Previously Chiasa had said that her goal was to be a mercenary soldier. I had looked up the word
mercenary
and found that Chiasa wanted to be a soldier who fights for hire. She wouldn’t mind being dropped in the middle of a war. Fully trained and equipped, if the mission paid properly, she was game for it. She felt like more than a mercenary in it for the money to me. She might be a soldier, I thought to myself, but still she is a woman, and women are ruled by their emotions, my father had taught me long ago.

“Comrade, let’s move. If we keep a swift pace, we can get through the forest and climb up and then down the other side of the mountain by sunset,” I told her.

Our wilderness walk was peaceful and natural. For Chiasa it was home, I imagined. She had experienced this for a while living inside Yoyogi Park. However, the forest we found ourselves in now was not tame. No company or government had rolled through with its team of loggers, mowers, and pruners to make this area into a beautiful picnic
place. Every plant, tree, bush, and creature did what Allah set it to do. We did not encounter other humans. We listened to the sound of our own breathing, the songs of the cicadas, and birds of every colorful amazing kind. We heard and caught glimpses of the sneaky swift steps of the squirrels, the shake of the trees when the monkeys played and leaped. The gorgeous eyes of the deer mesmerized us. We were startled by the elk’s antlers, as they moved away from the branches that had shaded them. For a while Chiasa watched the path of our feet for sudden streams and water holes. I watched straight ahead and side to side. Then we would switch duties.

“Her father must’ve really wanted to hide her from you,” Chiasa said suddenly, after more than seven miles of silence. “I’m happy that you allowed me to read her diary. If I hadn’t by now, I would’ve believed that you were concealing something from me. I would’ve doubted you. With her father reacting this way, I would have thought that you had hurt her somehow and were here in Japan trying to make up. But I read her diary. Every word was from a woman’s hand and heart. And every woman wants to be loved the way that Akemi writes that you were loving her.” Chiasa was speaking as we walked. Our eyes did not meet. I did not respond, but it was sweet to hear her voice and listen to her thoughts being added to nature’s chorus in an otherwise silent and unpopulated place.

Eight miles through the wilderness took us three hours to complete. As we approached the clearing at the foot of the mountains, I calculated it would take us five hours to clear the climb, which would be much different from walking an old trail through the untamed but level woods.

“I think you should consider drinking some water,” I told Chiasa.

“It’s not even hot here in Hokkaido. The breeze is nice,” she said.

“That’s because we’re standing in the shade of all these trees,” I explained. “The mountain will be different.”

“I’ll drink when you drink,” she challenged. We both refused and began our climb up the mountains and into the pulse of the sun. As we got higher, the air thinned out. Our pace was slower than when we were in the woods. The climb was more rigorous; our breathing patterns changed. When Chiasa’s steps paused, I turned to her. We were hundreds of feet in the air on a narrow path that could only accommodate two people walking side by side. Two droplets of blood
fell from Chiasa’s nose. She placed her fingers beneath her nostrils and drew them back.

Her eyebrow lifted and both eyes widened at the sight of her own blood, but only for a fraction of a second. Rapidly, she unzipped her waist pack and pulled out a piece of folded brown paper bag. She ripped it into strips. She wet it with water from her canteen and folded it over, wetting each fold. She placed the moist, folded brown paper underneath her top lip and laid over her gums. By this time, I was pressing her nostrils together to stop the slow bleed.

“I’ll be fine. Aunt Tasha taught me this way,” she murmured through her papered lips. “The bleeding will stop in less than one minute. You’ll see.”

We were face to face, her big eyes staring into mine with full determination, her long eyelashes nearly grazing my skin. Her mouth was closed now, with the brown paper placed inside. I released her nose.

“Drink water,” I scolded her. She refused with a simple blank stare and no attitude. Her nose ceased bleeding a minute and a half later.

“Do you feel dizzy?” I asked her as she soon removed the soaked strip of paper from her mouth.

“No, I’m not dizzy,” she answered. Somehow I knew she wouldn’t tell me even if she was.

“Let’s go,” I told her, but I was bent on locating a place for her to rest.

It was the seventh day of Ramadan. Circumstances had taken away my chance to return to my Umma, my opportunity to play in last night’s game at the Hustlers League, my scheduled flight home, and perhaps had even caused me to be fired from my job at Cho’s, where I had built up a flawless trust. Still, Allah gave us rain on a sundry mountain. Although the sky remained white with sunlight and with barely any visible darkened clouds, the rain began as a mist and turned into a shower, the droplets cooling our skin and moistening Chiasa’s lips. As we looked at each other in mutual amazement, we both smiled, then laughed.

Thankfully, I located a ledge. We both squatted beneath it as the shower thickened. We were shielded but she was probably as concerned as I was about what now would be five remaining miles of slippery rocks over steep cliffs in what had evolved into a downpour.

“When I open my company, I’ll remember to charge more if the mission involves mountains.” She looked at me and smiled. “I’ll make a menu, like the ones you get in an expensive restaurant. It will list every possibility: mountains, murder, avalanche, glaciers, kidnapping, and whatever else.” She laughed lightly. I laughed too. “Since you are my first customer,
you got the greatest deal.
No one else will get from me what you’re getting. In fact, your mission involves everything on the menu, doesn’t it?” she asked me. I didn’t answer. We just looked at one another.

“My business cards will be so fucking cool,” she continued. “I’m not going to have my name printed on them. They will be made of expensive black paper with just a few tiny silver drawings—an airplane, a boat, a motorcycle, and a truck—and a contact number and a motto,” she said, as though she was making all these creative decisions right then beneath the mountain ledge in the rain.

“What’s the motto?” I asked.

“Fighting!” she said eagerly.

“I think you’re gonna confuse your customers.”

“How?”

“First of all, a potential customer sees a beautiful girl,” I said instinctively. Then I stopped. She was looking directly at me with an emotion in her eyes.

“Nah, I’m saying … when a customer sees a woman, he isn’t going to think of fighting. When he looks at your card and sees an airplane, he’s not gonna put two and two together and know that you’re the pilot. A man is not gonna look at you and connect up these things. So you need a better business card,” I explained, knowing I wasn’t sounding too smooth.

“What will a man think then, when he looks at me?” she asked.

“Here comes the sun. Hopefully the rocks will dry out quickly so we can get moving,” I said.

“Hopefully,” she said softly.

Half an hour later, we were still squatting there waiting.

“Why ‘Chiasa’?” I asked her. I had been curious about her name since I first heard it on the flight from New York. I didn’t ask her sooner because I didn’t want her to start asking me the same kind of questions. Now I felt much more at ease, so I asked.

“It’s a bitter reason,” she said.

“Bitter?” I repeated.

“Yes. I wish my name was given to me for a sweeter purpose,” she said softly. “It was my grandmother who first spoke this name. When my parents were in love and planned to marry, my Japanese grandmother was completely against it. She had a way with words. You could say she was like a mean-ass evil poet.” Chiasa frowned. “Before I was born, she told my parents, ‘Your marriage will never last even one thousand mornings.’ Well, one thousand mornings is about—”

“Two years and two hundred and seventy days,” I interrupted her. “About two and three-quarters years.”

“So Okasan, my mother, decided to name me Chiasa, the kanji meaning ‘one thousand mornings.’ My mom thought she would prove her mother’s words and prediction wrong.”

“And your father agreed on that name?” I asked.

“Chiasa came from my grandmother. Hiyoku came from my grandfather—it’s his last name—and Brown came from my father. That’s his last name …” She spoke proudly and then her voice trailed off, I suspected because in her excited recall she had revealed more to me than she had planned to.

“What’s the meaning of Chiasa Hiyoku?” I asked, still curious.

“One thousand mornings, wings of fire,” she said, as she pretended she was drawing the kanji midair with her finger. “And Brown, of course, is an African-American surname, which we both know has no meaning. Although Aunt Tasha would say that ‘it is a reminder that we were slaves, and it is the name of the motherfuckers who were previously our white owners.’ ”

“Chiasa Hiyoku Brown,” I repeated slowly. “It might have started off bitter, but the name is dope. It fits you well,” I assured her. She smiled. I wondered if her Japanese grandmother was still alive and if so where she was living. I didn’t ask though.

“Me and my grandmother are having
hankouki.
So we don’t speak to one another. When I see her, I just bow respectfully, that’s it,” she said without seeming regretful. “You saw her, you know,” Chiasa informed me.

“Where?” I asked. “And when?”

“Remember my grandfather’s bicycle shop?” she asked me.

“Yeah.”

“Well, she owns the candy shop next door. It’s so small you could
miss it, but I went inside and you waited for me outside the door. She was the old woman in there in that cubicle, surrounded by sweet candy on her left and right and sweets hanging over her head. She’s only seventy and she’s got a hundred wrinkles already. Japanese elders usually keep smooth skin because we eat well. I think her wrinkles got nothing to do with her age. It’s just her wickedness. She doesn’t even have a cash register in her store. But kids come in and buy thirty things and her little wrinkled fingers move swifter than a wizard on her abacus, the same one she’s been using for sixty years.” Chiasa was working herself into an angry memory, so I didn’t add to it.