Death at the Parking Lot

Meiko Ko

The month is August. I have been writing invitations earlier at home. It is to one person, I’m not planning a party. She should come. See my apartment and how it is, the aloe vera plant on the windowsill, leaves thick as green eels. My rocking chair beside, facing east and rattan. I’ve set a cushion on it, charcoal gray squares alternating with white. This makes me seem like a grandmother. But I am not. My daughter’s still single. It does not matter what I am. Each time I come to the supermarket, two men at the parking lot would shout, “Grandma!” This’ll be the last call. The supermarket needs their protection. That’s why they loiter. Near any food source there’s always a congregation of men. He wears a jacket, long legs in matte black. His friend has on a cherry red singlet, same jeans. They’ll be staying on in this town where I will die—“You are a foreigner!” Then there’s a loud, sharp bang, thunder-like, the oranges in the recycled paper bag I am holding fall out. Skip on the asphalt like tennis balls. My car, a Jeep Wrangler, is ten feet away. Sandwiched between a Chrysler and Tesla. They seem ownerless. Lost orphaned cars, wheels abandoned. Above shines the sun. Its reflection multiplies into two on the windowpanes, each a spot of sparkling gold. The chassis melts into a metallic sea, swirls of ruby woven with black, but the suns hang on the glass. It is time to say goodbye. A car doesn’t last forever. 

Rules change in times of emergency. Gravity loses its footing I get up from the ground and walk away. Back through the entrance of the dying supermarket. The cashier had large, watery eyes and the story of Dalmatians on acrylic nails. The items in the pushcart I had been rolling down the aisles were unpaid. To the time I had not yet bought anything, credit card unswiped. People said, do not question death, it returns no answers, owes no explanations. But if my life is taken away from me rudely by the men in the parking lot, after that explosive shout, “Grandma!” I should construct my own. Everything makes sense now. It has not when I was in the supermarket, in a zone of semi-knowledge. They’ve run away, after firing one shot. They always do, drift back into their lives under the hulls of good men, till nightmares drive them to the next body. The disease goes on. In broad daylight or darkness, where there’s only fluorescence flickering into the past for me. In the supermarket, the only unusual thing I saw, like a game of spot the difference, was a display of ginger biscuits. It wasn’t here the last time I shopped. Now it was, newly arrived products at the end of the snack aisle. Beside it a placard read:

SPECIAL OFFER NEW TASTE. 
A BLEND WITH THE OLD. 

It was strange. Christmas was far away, but the packages were wrapped as though for it, glittery and stacked like a turret. Overdone and out of place and time. When usually they’d be sitting quietly on the shelf waiting for a lover to reach out a happy hand, now it had its own niche. Away from the assortment of Oreos, Chips Ahoy!, belVitas, Digestives, space around the stack. Behind it the deli with meats, sausages and salami, hams and bacons vacuum-packed. To its left few aisles down was the dairy section. Each package was triangular and wrapped in silver foil, no picture on it. No traditional photographs of ginger biscuits in rope piping borders to remind of homeliness, afternoon teas by a window of meadow green. But sparkling like a mystery gift, ready for a birthday or celebration. As though a woman in a wrong dress, if that was ever possible. Or a wealthy person displaced in this working class supermarket. It’d be difficult to guess its contents, if not for the placard on the stanchion that wrote, TRENDY GINGER SNAPS! Each was $4.99. Not twenty-two or more, not from Sweden or Denmark, where distance and longing caused a price jack. But locally produced, Minneapolis. 

In that moment it occurred to me the world had changed. Overnight a swarm of insects had arrived, ants, spiders, grasshoppers, crawling through gaps and flapping wings against the supermarket’s windows, that’d cause an emergency if known. On the news, internet. How many clicks and like harvests, ad companies as busy as flies. Surveys for Kill ✓, No Kill ✗, sympathizers or those who found them abhorrent. Talk of why they came, to warn, prophesize, or feed on human food? If they did they might turn into people. A dream for them, there’d be no more insecticides, soles never to step on them again. Just like the people of the colonies, sick and tired of being called animals for centuries, their children cats and dogs, white men’s pets. To lick a foot, sniff an apple. Kicked when a man had a temper, blamed when he failed. This was after all the fate of those who could not speak, the tongues of insects worse than dogs’. He only understands English—a system. But revenge is sweet and a cliché turned true…no, these were lies. When men liked participating in wars especially those with guaranteed victories, exterminators would be called in. Fire guns to end infestation. End those who brought the cockroaches of the east. I stood there remembering my grandmother, Michiko, who said, “They mean no harm. They see us as one of them.” At that time, in the eighties, there were insects in her house of kawara tiles. Every day, even during winters. Living there was like in a cocoon. She’d refused to be rid of them, the roaches too, only brushing them off the stove or catching them to let out of the house. 

Looking around there was no one. It was Thursday, my Seiko watch read 2.30 p.m. Life in the supermarket went on, a clerk walked past. She wore a blue apron and had disheveled hair, was oblivious to the display of ginger snaps. I held a package, the silver of the foil seeming to spread into my hands. They were cold but warm. Then I whispered to myself, surprised, “I am going to die.” 

I’ve not believed when people said, death was audible. Lying now on the asphalt, I do. The bluest cloud above. Eclipse of a bright shadow. A broom sweeping the sky. Falling suns. It is hot. Every August it is so. My shoe, an Adidas, has come off my foot. My sock is gray. Hard, sharp heat burn into my left heel. From the tires drift the smell of rubber. Globes of oranges rolling on the same spot. There is a quiet. 

I first heard it in the aisles. As though the AC machines had shut down, a keen, dense, timeless quiet. No watch could measure it. The moment elastic, the seconds and minutes grew alive like little prostrate people getting up and diving off my wristwatch. Was it true? The utterance I made about my life. But quick as lighting I dropped the thought. No—I don’t want to die. No one out shopping for groceries wanted that. What was it then? The unease, unsettling feeling of a thousand insect wings buzzing, swarming, a warning from Michiko, or like a person covered head to toe with flies, left with a pair of eyes. Soon to lay a kingdom of maggots. I shivered. Should I buy these ginger snaps? They looked good. Even though there were no pictures of its contents. My teeth had gone bad, it was the memory of eating my feet had stopped for. The hiss and sweet crunch laced with slight bitterness. It took a while for teeth, like rationality, to answer—“You won’t be able to eat them, Addie.” I put the package back on the stack. Years ago I had sworn off snacks as though they were cigarettes. It was only natural to quit favorites, they were not important anymore. A favorite tree, a song outgrown. A favorite person, like a walking tree, a pair of cowboy boots, meters of sheets. Of cloth or paper. Shed each one by one like scabs of skin, simplify my life, leaving behind a plant and rocking chair. When I left my apartment at 1.40 p.m., the final view through the sash windows had been sparrows perched like staccato notes on the power lines of the utility poles. 

I pushed the cart down the snack aisle. The quiet receded. Slid off like hands passing silk, air and sounds circulated again, like a never-ending story. As though someone had turned on the AC machines again. Three weeks ago they’d really broken down. Heat rose to eighty-six, a killjoy that made the shoppers grouchier. I’d gotten another lousy shout in the parking lot that day: “Grandpa!” Old folks seemed genderless, weather changed people. Passing by the bags of popcorn, potato chips, pretzels, rice krispies, a song from the eighties played overhead. “If you need a friend,” it sang. 

Don’t look to a stranger
You know in the end
I’ll always be there
But when you’re in doubt
and when you’re in danger
Take a look all around
and I’ll be there

The song had not come true. Thirty years later I was alone in a supermarket. Life like a sieve, people came and went, most of the time they weren’t friends, it was about something else. Larger, like fear. Conquering each other and few came without motives, spoke to me out of loss or nostalgia, void or unfulfilled desire. Someone enthusiastic about ramen that had nothing to do with me. Explained to me how chopsticks worked against his fingers as though it had nothing to do with me. Nothing had to do with me, myself too, eventually my fingers were like chopsticks. Pairs of cheap bamboo. I knew I was out to fill in a world of equality. But it was a cold equality, just a Japanese, a number, a dollar sign, slices of sashimi in a boat serving tray. I said I was from nowhere anymore than a fish was from the waters. Some took offense and told me I wasn’t the only Asian around, but I really was the only asian around, and that term, the word, lost its meaning. And like fishermen would start searching for other koi in the pond—Japanese, Koreans, Russians. Nowadays, strangers shoot strangers. The shooters were friends who couldn’t confront each other. It’d ruin business. 

At the cash register, the two men. Paying for beef jerky and beer. The taller one, in a leather jacket, had his hands tucked in his pockets. Posture birdlike, hunching slightly. The other had long hair drawn back in a man bun. I remembered them on the day they mistook me for my grandpa. They gave off the aura of ruffians, trying to look bigger than they were as birds puffing feathers, but were not. Nearby was the university, from their faces it was clear they attended. In this town it had become a castle, in there kings and queens, princes, princesses, wealthy kids masquerading as ruffians. Needing a Halloween and thrill every week, drove out here to dangle like puppets. No one would stop them. Their parents did business and did not love them. When they did someone else was fired, or a scapegoat went to prison. They were encouraged, “You can be anything you put your mind to.” For now, they’d chosen to be ruffians. It was a luxury they could afford. 

There were other ruffians in the neighborhood. Sometimes I saw them here to get loaves of bread. On their arms tattoos as though growing out of skin color, spades or cock-eye birds or flowers of the south, Raymond with an arrowed heart. Serious looks on the faces, they’d been badly hurt by truths, many came to America on humanitarian aid but found themselves penned by an invisible cordon separating Americans from Americans. A temporary parcel of land carved out according to god/charity’s will—here is utopia, do as you wish. Set aside to breed and die, in an enclave of black neon where consistent bad luck had caused them to shut their doors. Like Raymond and his father, driven off lands by a war for American to prove its might, but could not get proper work, loans, documentation. Decades passed, lives like none. Becoming ruffians was a solution, there might be life there yet, if America was a land of criminals deeds quickly passed from white hands, which knew sins like gifts, one day Raymond shook a hand and that was it. He was angry. His wrath a wall, when time after time he’d wanted to believe in this country but could no longer, things would strangely turn into his fault, a societal scapegoating, which was what these parking lot men came to do. 

The man in the leather jacket tried to hold my gaze. There was nothing in it. Nothing, as holes. I doubted if he knew what was in it too. A gaze—colonial, possessive, mine, yours, wanting to take life yet petrified, loneliness a germ. When a person didn’t know what was in his own eyes there was no need to look at him, I thought, and I moved, pushed forward the cart. Onto the aisle of canned foods. It was better to look at green peas, corn kernels, pinto beans, button mushrooms, sliced carrots, and if choice was in my hands and I must die, would I rather have a senseless death—a killer who killed out of peer pressure—or one who understood the meaning of solitude? Which death was more cruel? The question was as nonsensical as the gaze. Eye color unsure—I had not paid attention to these things. 

I took a can of Heinz baked beans from the shelf. 

When I came to the end the display was still there. Sparkling and cascading like a gush of silver pom poms. Then for a reason I was unsure of, as though nonsense had turned into reason and trash became gold, I felt angry. A rage as silvery as the packages, that death was something I could not choose just as I could not choose to come shopping at this hour—what should I do, whether I knew it or not? That, lying now as I am on the asphalt, seeing the sun bake in the sky and its reflections on the windowpanes of the cars fusing into one, as though the compound eyes of a fly, should I have confronted him? Walk up to the man in the leather jacket and say,

“Why do you want to take what don’t belong to you? From people just trying to shop and live? Why are you so greedy?” But he’d not have answered.  

Or should I have gone to Mr. Brown, the manager, who was at the dairy section left to the display, and whose skull was black and thick and shiny, but had a heart like a marshmallow’s, melting through his throat when he spoke and if I said, 

“A crime is coming for me in the parking lot.” He might frown.

Frown then say, “Are you thinking too much, Addie?”

He had seen the men loitering. But they had not done anything to give him cause to say, “Leave our premises.” That, if I spoke, I would be the one with the problem. This was how it worked: Peace. Till someone lay dead on the asphalt. And the absolution of these men who’d run to their mother and father who’d say, “Don’t worry, nothing will happen to me or you.” Tomorrow it’d be, “What did I do?” A forgetting, a laughter, the next hunt for the new thrill, and if feet were to be free as the speech in this country, natural as broad daylight to walk wherever they wished, but not for me, to be shot in a parking lot as though I was a rebel for violating age, there was nothing Brown could do too. Death was freer than anyone and disregarded venues, but it was inconceivable. Especially here when food was for life and time was eternal in a supermarket, like in heaven. 

They had been afraid of Brown. The fear of him was ancient and vast, unknown and seemingly none today but lurking, the fear of revenge, reprisal, poverty and remorse, spreading like a virus to me. 

Maybe there was such a thing as final feast. Maybe this was not ginger biscuits, but fortune cookies. With a slip in one that said, “This is unfortunate. You will die on August, 12th, 3.10 p.m., when you exit Engles’ Foods.” Or like the shoga senbei Michiko had homemade, also ginger biscuits but different, coated with sugar frosting and the taste of ginger biting and raw. We had sat on the tatami, six mat, in the living room half the size of my American one, our legs slotted under the kotatsu table. Cold there was creepy in winters, walls thin but a house spider spun its web at a corner, on the table the plate of senbei. “It is too spicy,” I had said, lifting the futon every now and then to check what was crawling up my legs. Michiko said, “Daijyoubu.” It was fine. “Some bites are good for you.” She said, “Tabete.” Eat. And she took the thermos kettle beside the kotatsu table and poured hot water into teapot with green leaves, pushed the porcelain plate to me. The tv was on. A mystery drama was playing. Someone got killed, it was the cruelest crime of the decade when he sealed the mouth of the husband and child and made them watch while he abused the body and with a rope, lynched the woman. Because she was a Chinese. The murderer was not Japanese and he was angry for not being one, after calculations it was easier to kill a Chinese. The detective was pained by the case. He drove on highways and went into an office, he exited and went on the streets. He paced for a solution, because the murderer would be free. At dusk he went into a bar with a green neon sign that said, Nanako. Someone in there said, “Life’s better off without people,” the detective shouted, “Konoyaro!” and threw a punch. There was beauty in the living room then.  

Michiko had not told anyone she was sick, years later when she died. A growth had lodged in her for a long time, but she would not pay it mind or speak. One night on the futon she had woken and grabbed my grandfather’s arm, saying, “Chotto.” That meant a little, which meant a lot. She fell back to sleep but Arata, my grandfather, stayed up all night. He’d known something was amiss, but knew her well too, just let nature be. Mess with it and it’d cry or scream. Michiko did not wake next morning. I was in America then, already living in this town, teaching intermediate Japanese. I supposed the insects of the house mourned that dawn. Chirped a dirge. 

She should come. See my apartment and how it was. Ever since she passed two years ago I had been writing invitations to her. I could not forgive that I wasn’t in Japan, by her side. A person’s final moment, I did not get to see it. One who was strict but knew each time when I felt ill, and would try to distract me with something brighter. Her ways undetectable, opaque but firm, that before I knew it, I was well again, that I had not seen her as an old woman. Michiko was eighty-five years old. 

I should not have, but I put a package of ginger biscuits into the pushcart. I thought, Dana, my daughter, might like it. She lived in a city out east working in a bookstore, right after college that was what she wanted. Busy with her life, seeing the world, coming back only during the holidays. Christmas was still far away these ginger snaps wouldn’t be fresh by then, but I’d just buy them in memory of Michiko. Time, like the suns, has fallen into a warp and gone two ways, backward or forward, up and down. Broadening and narrowing like the eye of a camera, as though someone’s watching me, and like the reflected suns on the windowpanes of the cars split into two—it’s the eye of the tall man in the leather jacket trying to play god, it’s the cold lenses of the coroner coming for a photograph of the deceased. The biscuit display has stopped my shopping for ten minutes. Made sure I exited the supermarket at 3.10 p.m. But even now, as I lay dying, remembering in a distance this was a title of a book I read, wondering why it must be a premature death for me when even a natural one was not a small thing, what a scourge these parking lot men are for Dana to grieve and be called: 

“Hello, is this Dana Akiyama? Your mother, Addie Akiyama, has passed away. Unfortunately, the circumstances for her death requires you to come to the police department.” 

Even now I don’t think the slip in the fortune cookie, if it were written, is accurate about the time, 3.10. I’m sure the parking lot men would have waited to 3.20, 4.30. Or to an eternity just for laughter and thrill of seeing another dead. They are bored. They have nothing to do. They are proud lynchers. I would not have escaped August 12th, as the day of my death. 

It is getting harder to breathe. The pain is larger than me, transcendent. A vertigo fills my head, sternum, where a hard thing, like a screw, is lodged, and I choke a wet mess. What is this foreign object doing in me, when it should belong to its holder, the gun, which should fire elsewhere, not at me, at anyone. The senselessness is insane, this is a public matter and somewhere, if the news is kind, a survey might be taken, those who think it’s fine for me/anyone to die, ✓. But if it were their own bodies, ✗. Death is selfish and unforgiving, the shot has been fired, the bread crushed, it is Ezekiel 4:9, sprouted whole grain. I don’t toast it, eat it the way it is, with butter. There’s no point buying the biscuits, I wouldn’t be eating them. Not Dana too. She wouldn’t be celebrating, removing the silver foil and be surprised, oh, ginger snaps. Poor daughter. All the stigma she’ll face. Our privacies gone, the questions she’ll have to answer. 

About our births, lives, immigration statuses; year of arrival in the United States, why did we come to this country, how long have we been here, why; how many travels per year do we take back to Japan, show me your documents, id, passports; where do we live in Tokyo, who is Michiko Arata, Hideki Arata, Setsuko Miyamoto, Toshiki Miyamoto, Shigefumi Akiyama, and your father’s name is? Sorry, a confusion of names. Dana would have to repeat: Shigefumi, Shigefumi. Whom I’ll join, finally, in peace in our family grave in Anritsuji Temple, Tokyo. Good thing I’ve instructed her about my burial. 

I looked at the pushcart. Earlier I was in the fruit and vegetable section, the oranges were already in there. Four of them, round like tennis balls. There was a bunch of cauliflower, I thought to boil them and eat with some salt and mayonnaise for dinner tonight. It felt good to walk away from the display. It was becoming a glittery prison. Maybe things that sparkled were so. My feet felt glued to the same spot they’d almost turned lead. I’d admit I was slow. Not sharp as I once was, dropped things often, scrambled my tongue and misplaced my spectacles. Someone else would have grabbed a package, passed by without noticing, or call the police and be believed. Things invisible to the eye did not exist, or they might stare at something else: Coffee, eggs, poultry. When seasons changed and winter gave way, to fresh spring then summer, the shooji doors of the house of kawara tiles opened. Shimmering morning gold filled the six mat tatami room. In a pair of tabi socks my mother, Setsuko, would practice Noh plays on the wooden walkway that bordered the back of the house, where the garden of inumaki grew. “Follow me,” she said. It was slow, so slow. The house seemed huge, the walkway never-ending. I was slow since nine, with time to spare, a future I had not known then would be in America, where I learned to hurry. I pushed the cart to the next aisle. It was for beverages. Passed the coffees the teas packages sat in many flavors, for the fat, ill, anxious, impure, connoisseurs. Without thought I took a box of English Breakfast. At the dairy section, Brown was still there. 

I said, “How are you?” 

He said, “Addie, good to see you.” 

He smiled peacefully and went on arranging the milk cartons in the fridge display. His body bent, a stack of boxes beside him. When he stood, he rose to seven feet, and would have passed the criteria for the national basketball team. Once he said he’d played the game like a pro since young, but had loved his brothers and sisters more, earned for them. Now his wife and child, and the German Shepherd he had special affection for. I took a box of butter. On it was a picture of a woman kneeling in seiza style, on her knees, offering with two hands the same box of butter with her smaller self in it. Behind her, a lake flanked by pine trees. She was a native person of America, but I understood her through Japanese eyes. I turned around, said to Brown,

“Goodbye.” 

“See you next time,” he said.

At the register, I paid for my purchases. The cashier was weary. She beeped the items, punched in the numbers, the story of Dalmatians black and white on her fingers. I swiped my credit card. This would be my final purchase. Then, I exited the Engles’.

Genre: 
Author Bio: 

Meiko Ko’s fiction have been published in the The Literary Review, Columbia Journal, Epiphany, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Litro Magazine, Heavy Feather Review (Best of the Net 2019 nomination), Five:2:One Magazine, Breadcrumbs Magazine, Crab Orchard Review, Scoundrel Time (Pushcart Prize nomination) and elsewhere. She was long listed for the Home is Elsewhere Anthology 2017 Berlin Writing Prize and is currently at Bennington College for her MFA.

Issue: 
62