I was eight the first time I saw my mother cry. She was a strong woman-she had to be, to give up her life and career in America to become my father’s wife-and, until the moment I learned otherwise, I had assumed that she was incapable of tears.
One day, Mrs. Suzuki, our neighbor, came and picked me up in the middle of the afternoon at school, telling me only that I was needed at home. It was June and the air on the train ride back was close and hot and sticky. I looked out the window during the trip, wondering vaguely what was going on but confident that all was well and everything would be explained to me shortly.
My mother was waiting at the door of our tiny Tokyo apartment. She thanked Mrs. Suzuki, who held an extra low bow for a long moment before silently departing. Then my mother closed the door and walked me to the upholstered couch in the living room. Her manner was possessed of a ceremony, a gravity that I found odd and somehow ominous. She took my small hands in her larger ones and looked into my eyes. Hers seemed strange-weak and somehow frightened-and I glanced around, uncomfortable, afraid to look back.
“Jun,” she said, her voice unnaturally low, “I have bad news and I need you to be very brave, as brave as you can.” I nodded quickly to show her that of course she could always count on my bravery, but I sensed as children do that something was terribly wrong and my fear began to unfold, to spread out inside me.
“There’s been an accident,” she said, “and Papa… Papa has died. Nakunatta no.” He’s gone.
I wasn’t completely unfamiliar with the concept of death. My paternal grandparents had a dog that had died when I was four, and my mother had explained to me at the time that Hanzu, Hans, had been very old and had gone to Heaven. But the concept that my father could be gone, gone, was too enormous for me to grasp. I shook my head, not really understanding, and it was then that my mother’s composure buckled and her tears came flooding through.
And so that afternoon I made my first real acquaintance with death, as the thing that could make my strong mother cry.
I cried with her then, terrible tears of hurt and fear and confusion. And over the weeks and months that followed, as the lack of my father, previously such a commanding figure in my life, began to take root, my acquaintance with death deepened. I came to conceive of it as the wild card in a previously ordered universe, the sudden disrupter, the leering, lurking thief.
It took about five more years for me to complete my understanding that there was no more Papa, that he was represented now only by increasingly remote memories, like a series of crude cave paintings left behind by some long-vanished people. Now death was a place, a place to which people disappeared forever when they died, a place that gradually sucked away the clarity of memory afterward for a similar one-way journey.
At nineteen, I received the military telegram informing me that my mother had gone to that place, as well. Losing her was easier. I was older, for one thing. And at that point I had seen, indeed I had delivered, a great deal of death, as a soldier in Vietnam. Most important, perhaps, I was familiar with the process, the outcome of loss. Grief held no more mystery for me than did the bleeding, stanching, and eventual healing that accompany the infliction of a survivable bodily wound.
But familiarity diminishes only fear. It does considerably less for pain.
Midori isn’t dead. Only gone. Maybe that’s why I find myself thinking of her, more often than I should. I picture her face, and remember the sound of her voice, the touch of her hands, the feel of her body. I have no such power of recall for scent, but know I would recognize hers in an instant and wish that I could breathe it in even once more before I die. I miss her conversation. We talked about things I’ve never talked about with anyone. I miss the way she would kiss me, gently, on the forehead, the lids of my eyes, again and again after we had made love.
I still say her name, my sad little mantra. I find in those incanted syllables all that I can tangibly conjure of her, and that sometimes the conjuring contents me, however briefly. Even if I can’t talk with her, I can at least talk to her. Something like that. Some consolation like that.
No, Midori isn’t dead, but I deal with her memory by approaching my feelings as those of grief. My world is paler and poorer by her absence, but isn’t this the case whenever we lose a loved one? I knew even as a teenager that my life would have been richer had my father survived my boyhood. I learned to accept this fact as immutable and, in the end, as perhaps not all that relevant. Midori wasn’t dead, but she was an impossibility, and, for the imperatives of my grief, what was the real difference?
I rubbed my hands over my eyes, wishing for sleep, for sleep’s temporary oblivion. It wouldn’t come. I would have to wait some more.
I sit in the dark of these empty rooms, and sometimes I think I can feel the presence of all the others who have done the same before me. Certainly the marks are there. The depression in the mattress, the line worn in the carpet between the bathroom and the door. Or the stains of sweat or saliva on the pillow, if you look beneath the case; or maybe of semen, of tears; sometimes of something darker, something like blood. I sit, the dark around me close but also boundless, and as my imagination slips into the vastness of that featureless bourn, I realize these marks are signs, artifacts of lives and moments that were but are no longer, like ashes in an empty hearth, or bones cast aside from some long ago supper, or a tattered shape that might have been a scarecrow in a field grown over with weeds. All just physical graffiti, unintentionally scrawled by other solitary travelers, detritus deposited by random men on their way to that common destination, and not just the marks of someone else’s passage, but portents of my own.
The hours passed. A growing weariness finally suppressed my restless ruminations. I got back in bed, and, eventually, I slept.
I TOOK the train to the airport the next morning. I called Crawley at home shortly before boarding the 12:10 flight. It was 9:45 the previous night in D.C.
Three rings. Then a nasal voice: “Yeah.” It sounded as though I might have woken him.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said in a fake falsetto. “I think I’ve dialed the wrong number.”
“Christ,” I heard him say. He hung up.
I smiled. I would have hated to fly all the way to Washington, only to learn that he was out of town.
The nonstop was a luxury. Ordinarily I prefer a more circuitous route, but this time I judged the imperative of catching Crawley while I knew where he was to be worth the risks inherent in a predictable route. Likewise, although business class was the usual compromise between comfort and anonymity, the constant travel was beginning to wear me down, and this time I flew first class. The east coast of the United States was over twelve hours away, and I wanted to be fresh when I got there.
I had already conceived the broad outlines of my plan, and now I needed to visualize the details. Once the plane had reached its cruising altitude and the annoying safety and entertainment announcements had ended, I closed my eyes and began a mental dress rehearsal of the entire operation: approach, reconnaissance, entry, waiting, action, egress, escape. Each stage of this mental walk-through revealed certain tools that would prove useful or necessary for the task at hand, and each tool became part of a growing mental checklist. Of course, additional items would be revealed during actual investigation of the target site, but those additional items would only properly present themselves in the context of an existing, organized plan.
Twenty minutes later I emerged from a deeply reflective state, knowing as well as I could, in the absence of further intelligence, what I would need and how it would work. I put the seat all the way back, covered myself with the first-class down quilt, and slept for the rest of the flight.