Midnight and the Meaning of Love

by Sister Souljah

  We collected our belongings and exited. Immediately the bus U-turned and sped away.

  Standing on a dirt road at 10:30 a.m. surrounded by cornstalks not yet ripened, I looked at Chiasa.

  “We’ll catch a ride from out here. There are no more buses on this route,” she said. I pulled out my compass as I began looking around for directional signs. There were none. “We are headed north, so let’s walk this way,” I told Chiasa. We began walking, while strapping on our backpacks. Hers was heavier than mine since she couldn’t part with a lot of her stuff. I had easily left several items in lockers.

  “Give me your backpack,” I told her. She looked at me like she wanted to refuse. Then she softened and handed it over. Still she had a pack strapped around her waistline and her canteen strapped across her shoulder and riding nicely on her right hip.

  “You see the truck tracks,” she said, pointing at the dirt road. “Someone will come along soon.”

  Forty minutes in, a pink pickup truck appeared. It was approaching us as we both walked backward watching it. Chiasa began waving her hands to slow it down, and bowed her head when it halted three feet in front of her. There were two Japanese men inside a cabin that fit three persons. The driver was old, but the man seated beside him was much older. Riding in the back of the truck was one goat and a stack of caged animals that I could not view closely from where I was standing. Chiasa spoke as I stood still behind her, watching. The Japanese driver stepped out and ran around and opened the passenger door for Chiasa to be seated beside them. I grabbed her hand before she made one move.

  “They will take us up forty-five miles. I think we should get in,” she advised.

  “You sit in the back,” I told her as she stared at the elderly man holding the passenger door open.

  “They’re probably very afraid of you,” she said softly.

  “We’ll both sit in the back,” I told her.

  Chiasa moved toward the passenger door bowing her head nonstop. She spoke very politely. I recognized her apologizing in between every other sentence. “Sumimasen, Sumimasen …” The driver seemed to accept, walked to the back of his truck, and lowered the bed. I helped her into the bed. She got on and I handed her her backpack and then mine and climbed on also. The driver closed the bed and returned to his position. They pulled off.

  There were chickens each in an individual cage. There were five rows of five of the birds pushed against the wall behind the front cabin. The bearded and horned goat stared at me shamelessly with his huge dark-brown eyes. The driver was suspicious of me; I was suspicious of the driver. The passenger was suspicious of me. I was suspicious of the passenger. The goat was suspicious of me, and I was suspicious of him too. This is how it goes with the male species. But the goat was roped around the neck and anchored to the truck floor. In many ways I understood that trapped feeling. Yet he was in a much more critical battle than I was, a type of animal heaven or hell. Either he was being taken to mate with the lady goats, or he would end up sliced and sizzling on the grill.

  “You see, my school uniform worked,” Chiasa announced. “It has neutralizing powers. I don’t think you realize how strong you look with your height and those shoulders and that chest and these arms and your eyes …” She was using her hands to gesture. “All I know is that without this costume, we would have been walking forever,” she concluded, exhaling. I didn’t speak on it. I thought that she also did not know how powerful her body looked in that tiny uniform. Or maybe she did and that was her point.

  It was a rough ride, at about forty-five slow miles per hour for a forty-five-mile distance. The Hokkaido spring air was less warm than in Kyoto and Tokyo but was not cold or uncomfortable. As the breeze soothed me, I watched Chiasa plucking feathers off one of the chickens, her slim fingers working rhythmically right through the cage opening. After she gathered them, she pulled out some napkins and gently laid the feathers inside and carefully placed them right in her waist pack.

  When the truck slowed and then pulled to the side of the road, the older guy in the passenger seat got out instead of the driver. He lowered the back door and I jumped off. Chiasa handed me both backpacks and then she jumped off the bed. The elder man began speaking to her, never changing his eye contact from her face. He didn’t seem to even acknowledge or notice my presence. However, I was growing accustomed to their brand of ignoring. He had to be about 109 years old with skin like leather and tobacco-stained teeth. Gazing through slightly clouded eyes, he pointed into the forest, speaking slowly and carefully.

  When the talking between them ceased, I held out a 10,000 yen note to pay him for his trouble. That caught his eye. Chiasa looked at me and began bowing to the elderly man. Gently, she took the note from my hand and used both her hands to present it to him with her head bowed again. I could see that there was even a ritual that a person needed to perform just to make a payment. I was glad that she was there to do it. I wouldn’t. Chiasa was still bowing when the truck pulled off.

  “He said that it’s through there,” Chiasa pointed at the forest. “He said that we should ‘walk and walk and walk some more.’ Then he said that we should ‘climb and climb and climb some more.’ After climbing, he said we should ‘walk and walk and walk some more until we get there.’ ”

  I was pressing the numbers of his license plates into my mind before writing them down in my notebook for no known reason.

  “He’s from this area. I believe him,” Chiasa said, completely assured.

  “Did you ask him if this was the only route?” I questioned.

  “Of course. He said that this is the quickest route on foot and that we shouldn’t expect anyone to show up out here to offer us a ride. He said that his son had already driven us much further out than they had planned to travel. He said sometimes foreigners come this far out because they’re crazy and looking for adventure or because they’re just lost.”

  “We’re not lost,” I said confidently. “But it’s good if he thinks we are.”

  Chiasa removed her backpack and leaned it against a nearby tree. Then she unzipped her waist pack and pulled out her zukin. She shook it like a woman shakes sheets before placing them on a clothesline.

  “Here, hold this up just like this,” she asked me. I held her two meters of black material.

  “Now look the other way until I say hai, okay?” she requested.

  “Okay,” I told her, turning my head from her direction. I heard her moving around feverishly, unzipping her skirt, unbuttoning her blouse, digging through her backpack. I was glad to know she was doing away with the schoolgirl uniform. Then I felt her fingers as she placed them beside mine as I held up her zukin.

  “Hai!” she finally said. “Okay, I said you could look now!”

  She was dressed in an olive-green long-sleeved T-shirt and green cargo pants, which she tied at her ankle with a drawstring over her long tube socks. She was wearing beef and broccoli Timberlands and looked like the leaves of the tree that she stood in front of. “Now my backpack is much lighter,” she announced as she wrapped her green Champion hoodie by the sleeves around her waist just below her waist pack.

  “Seven minutes more, that’s all I need,” she said, as she spread her zukin over some scattered grass like a small picnic blanket and went back into her backpack pockets, removing a pocketknife, a leather tube, some cylinder-shaped film containers, a small, flat rectangular case that could fit in the palm of her hand, and three different types and sizes of string all nicely tied into very loose knots. She also had a three-inch pair of scissors, a few swaths of linen, and her chicken feathers. She laid each of the items on her zukin like a surgeon might lay his tools out before performing surgery.

  As she unzipped her circular leather tube, I remembered how Akemi used to carry her artwork slung over her shoulder and rolled inside a tube twice the length of the one Chiasa had. But Chiasa didn’t have artwork in hers. I watched intently as she pulled out seven thin one-and-a-half-foot-long, sturdy bamboo sticks. As she sliced
them slightly at both ends using her pocketknife, she said, “You know there are bears here in Hokkaido. I know I told you that there were bears in Yoyogi Park back in Tokyo. There have been a couple of sightings over the years, but I was mostly joking. This time I’m not.”

  She opened the small rectangular case. Inside were needles. She removed them one at a time and placed these needles in the top of each of the seven bamboo sticks. With the three-inch pair of scissors, she cut the linen. She opened a film canister and dipped the linen into a liquid it held. She wrapped the linen in a way that now concealed one of the needles and tied some string to hold it on. She repeated the same process for each of the seven sticks. Next she placed one chicken feather on the back end of each of the sticks, into the slot that she had sliced with her pocketknife, and used more thin thread to tie and hold it on. As she removed a sturdy and buffed and glossy mahogany stick from the leather tube, I was certain that she was constructing a bow for her arrows. The bow was small, much smaller than her seven-foot kyudo bow that she had cased up in Narita Airport when we first met, and that I later saw standing in her storage shed at her grandfather’s home. But as she strung it just right, I knew it was still a deadly weapon. She placed the completed bow onto her zukin and placed the arrows back into the leather tube.

  “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.