Fog Island Mountains

by Michelle Bailat-Jones

  “Stay here,” he tells his friend, looking around the hospital again, searching for a purpose, then he sees one—there is relief in his lurch forward. “I’ll get you something warm to drink, you are all wet.”

  And crossing the room toward a row of vending machines, Ken’ichi moves far beyond the hospital, he lets his world expand, he sees his father on a bridge, in a car, or at a pharmacy buying medicines, he sees his father with a knife, a gun, but where would he get a gun, so then he sees his father standing at the edge of a steep cliff—and how many different ways are there to end a life? And how would you choose? And this is where he is stopped, this is where he cannot find a way to let each vision complete itself, because he is shocked really, shocked to acknowledge the breadth of it all, shocked to see he has invented such life, such possibility for his father.

  * * *

  The phone is out, of course, and cell phones are no longer receiving any signal, but still the old woman does not want to let Alec leave her inn. It is much too dangerous, she tells him, and Sensei you are not well, and so Alec pulls himself up to his full height and he look down on her gray head and the neat bun at the nape of her neck and he becomes, for the first time in many years, an uncompromising foreigner, he will do as he pleases and what it pleases him to do now is find his family, and the woman is staring at him, and she is not bowing, and she is turning from him and he can tell he has frightened her a little, and the power this gives him becomes a hard little pit inside his stomach.

  Here is this man before him, too, and Alec is thanking him, waving away his concerns as well, telling our gentle Fumikaze that he is sorry to have caused him so much trouble, and Alec does not see Fumi turn away, does not see this other man’s stricken look, and Alec cannot know, cannot even imagine what this man knows, how his body is still wearing the skin imprint of Kanae’s own body, her breath, her anger, and her failed escape.

  “Be careful . . . and I . . .” The words are trailing away, nothing is suitable, Fumikaze is leaving the foyer now, quickly quickly quickly on his bachelor feet, up away from this dying man, like a thief he is practically running up the stairs.

  Alec does not watch him leave, has already forgotten about him, because already he must go, out into the rain, out into the storm—only, the rain has let up, the wind has calmed, and Alec walks a little more quickly because maybe the storm is over, and maybe it will be a simple matter to right all of the wrongs of the last few days; but what a mess, the car is covered in debris, Alec must wipe away the leaves and pine needles and bits of paper with a cloth, and his breathing grows hard, and every few minutes he is checking his cell phone, watching his battery drain away while the little device searches unsuccessfully for a signal, and now into the car, seated behind the wheel and catching his breath. He runs a hand across his abdomen, a soothing pass of palm and fingers that does not soothe, and he can only grit his teeth and try not to cry out when he turns the key in the ignition and absolutely nothing happens.

  Just wait, keep calm, relax your arms, the storm is passing, you have gone too quickly, give your old car a moment and think of where you will go—home, of course, there is no shame in returning home, admitting your flight from the hospital nothing but an old man’s pride, a way to avoid what is about to happen to your body, and what were you trying to prove anyway, leaving the care of trained professionals, hiding out in this lonesome valley in this tattered inn . . . oh, but, Alec, and this is the part that hurts, this is the part that is nearly too hard to bear, because yes, and you know this, everyone will forgive you, but not because you’re a foreigner this time, not because we expect you to do things differently, but because no one believes you have very much time.

  Out of the car and opening the hood, here is a task that will make Alec feel useful, and he pushes at some of the cables, fiddles with their connections, and he peers into the confusion of metal parts and rubber parts and tubes and wires and nothing seems amiss, and the air has grown still and is warming, warming quickly, heat is rising up off the pavement again, rising up around his trouser legs and there is even a little sliver of blue sky streaking across the sky, so back into the car now and hands hovering over the steering wheel for just another minute, thinking. Where could she be? Where could she be?

  Home, he is thinking, but why would she be there now when she hadn’t come for days, and although he knows it would be the sensible thing to do, Alec does not want to drive himself into town and find the hospital or the police station, because there is guilt in this, there is the childish shuffle forward and avowal of wrongdoing, no, no, he wants to find his wife, he wants to sit with her and with this everywhere, just the three of them, a couple and an uninvited guest that cannot simply be asked to leave.

  Engage the clutch and turn the key again, now the car is chugging to life, and Alec is breathing quickly through his nose, little breaths of triumph and relief, and that sliver of sky has widened, is becoming a trough, and Alec flicks his gaze from sky to road, from road to sky. It seems the storm has finished, and so what matters is driving carefully, watching for debris, avoiding any flooding—it would not do to prove the town correct by accident.

  * * *

  Don’t move, Jun is thinking, don’t move, don’t move, don’t move, and his fat sticky finger is rubbing at his nose to keep the dust from tickling, and he worries he is going to sneeze, and his whole body tenses with this fear but he keeps rubbing and the sneeze stops threatening, he can relax his little head, lets his lips fall against his hands which are now flat on the hardwood floor, feeling the dust beneath Mrs. Kenta’s sofa where he has been hiding for some minutes now—he could reach his hand out and touch Mrs. Kenta’s ankle, and wouldn’t she be surprised, wouldn’t she jump and squeal, but he doesn’t move his hand because this isn’t fair, because she will find him eventually and she will fuss and laugh and slip him another chocolate and tell him he is the best at hide-and-seek, better than any of the other children she minds during the week, and Jun will laugh and agree, because no one is better at finding the perfect hiding space than he is, even Jī-chan says so. Jī-chan says, “Jun, little man! Jun is the winner!” And Jun puffs and smiles because Jī-chan says this in English, Jī-chan always speaks English to him, and his mother has been teaching him, too, and he knows the words, even if he forgets sometimes, and Jī-chan loves to play hide-and-seek, letting Jun hide just about anywhere and then pulling him out from beneath a pile of sweaters in Bā-chan’s closet, and reminding him they must put it all back the way they found it, and Jun doesn’t mind, he likes helping Jī-chan, he likes laying the sweaters out flat on the floor and folding each arm across the chest, like a soldier being put into a coffin in the picture Mr. Kenta showed him once, and then Jun pats the sweater, making it smooth and flat, then folded once more into a little square flag, so straight and soft, and together they stack the sweaters again.

  “If Jī-chan gets medicine he won’t be sick,” he told his mother, “but maybe they don’t have any, or maybe it won’t work, so then he will go to the doctor and we’ll say good-bye, we’ll give him two kisses, just like we did with the cat.”

  But his mother just said that Jī-chan wasn’t the same as neko-chan and Jun laughed because it was so funny to think of Jī-chan dressed as a cat. Jun will meow at him tomorrow, he’s decided, he will meow and rub his ears and here under the sofa with his twitchy nose and his fingertips soft with the dust, Jun starts practicing his best meow, at first just a little and then loud once he’s sure of the sound and then Mrs. Kenta’s ankles are turning and she is laughing her loud laugh, swiping her hand down the back of the sofa and tickling the nape of his neck.

  “Caught you, my handsome boy, now come out and let’s do a puzzle, my legs are too tired for more hide-and-seek.”

  At the table now with Mr. and Mrs. Kenta and they have given him more puzzles than he can do in an hour, and most of them are too difficult for a child of three, but Jun will never admit this, he will only squint up his eyes and make a joke, or ask for
a piece of paper and pretend to write a letter, but for now there are these puzzle pieces and Jun is happy to move them around, lining up the edge pieces and sorting them by color.

  “We’ll get very little of it up here, now it’s for sure.”

  “This is bad rain, we still have to be careful.”

  Mr. Kenta drops his hand. “If we didn’t know this was a typhoon, we’d call it a summer shower.”

  “You saw the news, there’s bad flooding . . .”

  “There’s always bad flooding, and Komachi is . . .”

  Here Jun is paying attention again, and his face scrunches at knowing something and so he says it, he says, “Komachi is a tiny useless town.”

  Silence rolls over the table, and Mr. Kenta raises his eyebrows and Mrs. Kenta’s face flattens out, so now Jun is excited, he pushes five red puzzle pieces into his fist and gets ready to repeat what he’s just said, only Mr. Kenta is standing now, looking around for his newspaper Jun thinks, or his math puzzles, the small ones he likes to do in the afternoons and sometimes even lets Jun help, even if Jun can only make hash marks and pretend with his numbers.

  “She’s an empty person. That’s all I can say about it.”

  But Mrs. Kenta is saying shhh, that’s enough, and smiling at Jun, and Jun wants to smile but his hands have started to twist, and now he’s pushing those pieces right off the table and then taking some more, a whole handful this time, and he’s flinging them in Mrs. Kenta’s face, and her eyebrows are coming together and her mouth has opened and one of those little puzzle pieces has landed right inside and now Jun is frozen because he’d never thought it possible, to aim quite so perfectly, and the puzzle piece vanishes as she closes her mouth, then she spits it out onto the table and there is nothing to do but laugh, because Mrs. Kenta cannot believe for a second that Jun understood what her husband was saying about his mother, and so she chooses to think he’s just played a joke on her, and of course he’s a little rascal, so clever for his age and we all know that clever comes with mischievous and so she is telling him to help her pick up the mess, and our Jun is a sweet child and he’s already under the table and hunting out those little red pieces and gathering them into his closed fist, and the edge of each piece presses into the flesh of his hand, and there’s something about this edge that appeals to him, so he’s picking up faster and tightening his fingers even harder.

  * * *

  It is so quiet now, and I am sitting here with my tea bowl, still holding the warm ceramic although the matcha is long gone down my throat and has warmed me, has warmed us all, and we need this warmth because the eye is passing over, passing quickly now, in just a few moments the wind will begin again, slowly at first but slowly only for a moment; the second eye wall is vertical and dense and it is racing up the Oyodo River, working its way up from the coast and toward our little mountain town, and while we still have time, while we have this pause, this breath, while Kanae’s bicycle is moving more quickly along the footpaths and through our streets, while Alec’s car is moving, slowly still, but moving down the road from the inn, I will tell you of another typhoon that came many years ago.

  The first word of any story is always the most difficult—how to hold the pen, how to form the characters, how to get it right. Grandfather told me to sit up straight, that the words would come from my belly, and that hunching over would only make it more difficult for them to move out and so I straighten now, still in the tea room but with my papers and my pen and ready to trace the first dark line of this first word.

  kaze. wind.

  See that roof, that gentle two-stroke roof that frames this word, and that roof is the most important part of any wind storm—you see, because without a roof, none of us would have anything to lose.

  So I begin with wind, and with a roof, and there is a young girl in her bed, listening, she is always listening—down into another room of the house, where the wind can only beat against the windows, and there sits her father between his two parents, and the words between them are as loud and ripping as the claws of the wind at the roof above her head, and there is another sound stronger than all of us, it is the black sound of a missing body, a perforation in the vibrations of the household, a blank space where there should be a mother.

  Now a drop of rain has fallen onto the girl’s face, fallen from the ceiling while the first shingles are ripped from the roof—they will slowly peel away throughout this night, pulled away like teeth from a rotten mouth, until the roof beams are bare, until the soft inner parts of this house are exposed to the storm—but our girl doesn’t move an inch, she doesn’t try to avert her face from the drops of the water because this water is coming from the sky that stretches over the entire town and somewhere out there, beneath that same sky, the water is maybe falling on her mother’s head, because this is what they’re saying downstairs, they’re saying that she has gone, that she has vanished off into the storm, and her father is weeping, unable to make real words this night, and turning already to the bottle of spirits that will eventually silence him completely.

  She is only little but she knows already that without her father’s words, this night will be written by her grandparents, and she can hear them downstairs, and they are more angry than this storm, they are fighting it out, hurling words across the room, each one already decided upon what has happened and here is Grandmother so sure now, no longer only suspicious thus no longer careful, no longer content with only hints she is speaking of an enchantment and rubbing her poor son’s head, she is telling him he could never have known, she is reminding him that this is the risk of meeting a woman from another village, because you can never be sure, it isn’t his fault that he didn’t see her for what she really was, and that we must be grateful to have discovered the trick so early on, that this vanished being is not worth her son’s tears. And Grandfather is howling now, cutting her off with the slam of his fist on the table, telling her to give up this ignorant superstition, you are taking this too far, he is yelling, shut your mouth, he is yelling, remember the child, he is yelling.

  “Oh, there is nothing to be done about her, anyway. We will keep her, we cannot help it, oh, this poor half-creature, this black magic soul.”

  And then her father’s roar and the crash of the table, the breaking of the glass, and now our girl is up out of her bed, she is sliding the door open, she is creeping down the stairs, her face wet from the rain and from her own crying, and there is silence below her and the shingles are still popping off the roof and the trees are banging against the windows, and this is when she hears it, her first animal, the only fox that has ever called to her, she hears the hoarse yelp and cry above the howl of the storm, and she has no idea what it is, she knows only that she cannot ignore it, so she is sneaking down through the house, past the closed kitchen door and out into the garden. There it goes again and she stands in the rain, already missing her mother, this half of her now gone, and the injured animal cries again and the girl follows the sound, eyes closed and head down, arms in front of her face for protection, here is another scream, and then she sees it, the fox kit trapped beneath the fallen tree, all mixed up in the mud and the roots, its leg stuck in the earth gap made when the tree fell, and this girl is so quick and her body so small, she can fit herself between these roots and her arms wind easily to untangle this little creature, her hands passing over its fur as she works, and she has got it out in a matter of seconds and it is racing, limping just a little, shaking its leg out, but no longer crying. She has calmed it and given it freedom.

  And that last word is all that matters, and I trace it out for the first time in real ink, not water, and now everyone will know this story, and wouldn’t Grandfather be proud—but this is all just practice because my story has been long finished, there is another story that needs me now and another storm, and we are getting there, we are almost ready.

  * * *

  Kanae is riding in circles now, taking one street north, then two streets east and one street south, then one str
eet west and two streets north, and so on and so forth, moving northward and eastward through town, methodically, not even sure what she’s doing anymore except moving, pushing her body forward and holding her eyes open, searching and thinking, wondering, worrying, almost in a trance now because Alec isn’t going to be standing out on one of these streets just waiting for her to ride up beside him, or is he? Maybe he is, she thinks, maybe he’s walking around just like her because she cannot imagine he’d settle for sitting out this problem, she cannot imagine he could sit still with this death-thing they must consider now, surely he must be moving, circling her as she is circling him, turning slowly and tightening their circle, to contain what must be contained, to squeeze it tighter and tighter until they can stand together and maybe there will be no more room for anything else.

  The trance is broken suddenly and she almost steers her bicycle down the path toward the cemetery; at the last moment she stops because the police car is too close to be ignored, a sleek black and white shape at the curb, its alarm lights turning but silent, and the gray-haired police officer waves her over and she doesn’t run away, she brakes at the bumper, politely descends from her seat, ready to answer his questions: What is she doing out on her bicycle? Does she need a ride? Where is her family? She is nodding and polite, and the more he speaks, the more she is filled with a nervous energy, because he has not recognized her, has not connected her to the story of the missing English teacher, she is simply an older woman out on her bicycle, someone who has made a bad decision and must be scolded into returning home.

  “Miyakonojō is reporting major wind damage as the second eyewall hits, it’s coming now, you must return home.”

  She stares at him a little too long—how curious that his warning to her sounded so feeble, not even the slightest inflection, not the least tremble of concern, he could have been telling her anything, that he just bought a pair of new socks, but she is nodding as she should, she is bowing to him and apologizing for not being more careful.