Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Touring
by Robert M. Schroeck
by Robert M. Schroeck
Chapter 1: Yesterday In Old Fall River
Motel 6 Fall River
459 Airport Road
Fall River, Massachusetts, USA
Saturday, September 17, 2016, 7:36 AM
"What are you doing drooling on me, Mophead?"
Half-asleep, Hane wrapped her pillow around her head in the hope that she could block out the sound of an outraged Rin, as muffled as it was, and return to blissful unconsciousness. She squeezed her eyes shut tighter than they already were, burrowed deeper into the covers and slid closer to the figure on the other side of the bed that radiated pleasant heat. "Mm, Yume, you're nice and warm," she murmured as she wrapped her arm around her sister, while still doing her best to ignore the sounds of the argument on the other side of the wall.
Then her eyes snapped open. Yume couldn't possibly be sharing her bed. The Club was on a road trip, and Yume wasn't a biker. And Hane had gone to sleep in the top bunk of a very narrow bunkbed in a youth hostel in Kyoto the night before. There should have been no room for someone to be in the bed with her -- but someone was, anyway. In front of her nose was hair the wrong shade of brown to be Yume. "Chisame?" Hane murmured in confusion.
She unwrapped her arm from around the other girl (who slept on, unaware) and carefully rolled over onto her back before sitting upright. (Definitely a larger bed than last night's bunk. And much closer to the ground.) The room that came into view was dimly lit by morning light leaking around curtains that covered a single large window to her left where the room she had gone to sleep in had had two regular casement windows to her right. There was a door next to the window that apparently led outside -- very different from the hallway door that had been past the end of the bunk by a couple meters. The faint light also revealed unfamiliar furnishings including a TV which hadn't been there the night before.
It was also lacking the other four members of the club and Mister Hayakawa, all of whom had been in the remaining bunks of their shared hostel room. Rin and Onsa's voices, somewhat muffled, were still audible through the wall behind her, so they at least weren't too far away. But they still weren't where they were supposed to be.
"Something weird is going on," Hane whispered to herself.
"Sempai?" a sleepy voice came from behind her. "What are you doing in my bunk?"
Ten minutes later, Hane and Chisame -- now hastily dressed -- burst out through the door to their room to find (as she'd feared) a sidewalk and not the hallway of a hostel. Almost absently Hane noticed it was cooler than it had been the previous day -- about twenty degrees, almost ten degrees cooler than the day before.[1] From the other side of the room next door seemingly occupied by Rin and Onsa came Hijiri, Lime and Hayakawa. Of the three, Hijiri was the most obviously distressed.
"Hane! Chisame!" she cried, agitation driving her voice almost up into a shriek. "What happened? Do you know where we are?"
Hane glanced around and shook her head. "I have no idea. It's not Kyoto, though." And it wasn't. The hostel where they'd gone to sleep had been a boxy, two-story structure of dark wood surrounded by densely packed city blocks, with nothing but sidewalk separating them from the narrow streets. But now... now they were standing along the front of a long, white one-story building in what looked almost like a rural area, with thick stands of trees and grassy lawns in every direction. At one end was something that looked like it might be a restaurant.
The only other structures for at least a hundred meters in any direction were three large buildings, one each to the left, right and across the broad highway that ran past the other side of that parking lot separated them from it; a sign where one could turn off the road into the parking lot declared they were at "Motel 6" and "Denny's"; something about the sign seemed odd to Hane but she couldn't put her finger on exactly what. The parking lot itself was filled with cars and...
"Our bikes!" Chisame cried. And there they were, neatly sharing a pair of parking spots right by the doors to their rooms.
Hane was the first to reach hers, and quickly ran her hands over it while checking the paint job. It was, she was glad to see, in perfect shape. In fact, she quickly realized, it was lacking the road dust that had accumulated on their drive to Kyoto. "Someone washed you?" she murmured. To either side of her, Chisame and Hijiri were saying similar things, and looking up, Hane saw that Lime seemed surprised and pleased at the state of her Kawasaki -- before she waved and pointed at the rear of the lime-green motorcycle.
When she pointed at the back ends of the other bikes, Hane stood and stepped behind her Su-Four. It took her a moment to figure out what Lime had spotted.
The license plate was not the one she was familiar with. Gone were the familiar kanji, hiragana and number in green on white. The plate that was now affixed to her bike had red romaji and numerals on it...
"What's 'Florida'?" Chisame demanded.
"It's one of the United States," Hijiri said absently. "How odd. Your bikes have red lettering. Our Ducati's license has green. And why do yours say 'Under 21' below the number?"
"Because we're all under 21 except for Mister Hayakawa," Hane offered. "Speaking of Mister Hayakawa, where is..."
"Right here," the butler said from behind her. She spun, surprised, to see him standing there in a fresh uniform, with a newspaper under his arm. "Good morning, young ladies," he continued, withdrawing the paper and unfolding it. He held it up so they could see the masthead, which read "The Boston Globe" in English. Under it were headlines, also in English, that Hane realized she was reading so easily that she hadn't noticed she'd been reading English. She turned abruptly to look at the sign that had seemed odd and it, too, was in English. That was what had been odd about it.
"We appear to be in Massachusetts in the United States," Hayakawa continued calmly. "And if this newspaper is correct -- and I believe it is, as I have just retrieved it from a stack of identical copies from a vending box a few meters away -- it is September 17, 2016."
"What?" someone shrieked. Hane wasn't sure who said it; all she could think of was how when they'd gone to bed in Kyoto the night before it had been July twenty-third, just a couple days after the start of the summer holiday.
In 2012.
The door closest to them was flung open; Onsa and Rin, still buttoning and zipping up their clothes, charged out onto the sidewalk. "What about September 2016?" Rin demanded. Huh. Hane realized she hadn't heard them arguing for a while now.
Onsa dragged her sleeve across her mouth, glanced around, then added, "And where are we? This isn't Kyoto."
It took only a minute to share what little they knew, and most of that was spent convincing Rin that whatever it was, a mistake wan't among the possibilities. Hayakawa's newspaper went a long way to proving that something weird was going on, much as Rin didn't want to believe it.
"What do we do now?" Chisame asked
"I think," Hayakawa said slowly, "that before we do anything else, it would behoove us to have breakfast." He gestured toward the end of the building, toward what she had thought was a restaurant. "I am reliably informed that Denny's serves a more than acceptable American-style meal."
"Of course it would, we're in America," Onsa muttered.
"How are we going to pay for breakfast if we're in America?" Rin demanded.
Hayakawa held up a wad of unfamiliar-looking money. "What or whoever is responsible for depositing us here has not left us without resources."
If being able to read the newspaper hadn't been enough, reading the menus at the Denny's certainly hammered home that everyone could now read English perfectly -- even Onsa, whom Hane knew hadn't been the best in class. Knowing that, she wasn't sure why she'd been surprised when she realized that they all now spoke English as well, and had been since waking, and hadn't realized it until the hostess had greeted them and guided them to a large corner booth.
Most of the breakfasts in the menu were huge, but that was okay -- Hane was starving, and judging by everyone else's orders, they were, too. Hayakawa was the exception, ordering just a bowl of fruit, which he consumed quickly but elegantly before excusing himself. "I believe I shall take a short walk to learn more about where we are," he said as he handed off the money to Lime. Then he gave the table a quick bow before exiting the restaurant.
"You can tell he was in the army during the Pacific War," Onsa said between bites of sausage. Hane had a couple links of it on her plate, and she thought it was oddly seasoned but still tasty.
"What do you mean?" Chisame asked, a forkful of scrambled eggs halfway to her mouth. Next to her, Hijiri nodded sagely but said nothing.
Onsa gestured vaguely. "Every once in a while he gets all military-like. Like just then," she said. "He's scouting the area like we're in enemy territory."
"Aren't we, though?" Rin asked. "We're in another country, probably illegally for all we know, in the freakin' future, and we have no idea how or why. Someone left us money for breakfast, but we don't know who."
Lime waved for their attention and held up her pad:
"There's enough here for lunch, too!"
Rin rolled her eyes. "Okay, so we won't starve until after it gets dark. Big deal. The point is, we've got nothing but our bikes, the clothes on our backs, and our travel gear. We may have our licenses and all, but they're all in Japanese, and we don't have passports. What happens the first time a cop pulls us over?" She spread her hands with a self-satisfied look on her face. "Enemy territory."
Across the table, Hijiri suddenly got that delighted look she always got whenever she thought she was doing something naughty or "delinquent".
Hane bit her lip as a thought struck her. "We're four years in the future... and we're not any older, any of us." She looked up at the rest of the table. "We've all been missing for four years! Our families must be frantic."
"Or they've given us up for dead," Chisame said glumly, staring into her orange juice.
"That's easily fixed," Onsa declared confidently. "When we're done here, we go back to our rooms, and we call our families."
"And tell them what, Mophead?" Rin snorted derisively. "'Hi, we went to sleep in Kyoto in 2012 and woke up in the United States in 2016? Can you come get us?'"
Onsa scowled at her. "We can at least let them know we're alive."
Rin's expression softened. "Yeah," she admitted after a moment. "You're right."
"I have to admit, I'm curious who is behind this," Hijiri said, then nibbled on a strip of oddly crispy bacon. "As Rin said, the money proves there is a someone. But what can possibly be the motive for transporting us halfway around the world and four years into the future?"
The debate on that topic which ensued lasted longer than their remaining breakfasts, and continued as they left the Denny's and returned to their rooms.
Hane bit her lip as she closed her phone. She tried not to worry what it might mean that both her home number and her parents' number here in the United States had netted her "no such number in service" recordings. "Chisame?" she said without looking up from the phone cupped in her hands. "I heard you talking. Did you reach your parents?"
"There's something really wrong here, sempai," Chisame said from the other side of the bed. "Someone answered, but I didn't recognize them. they'd never heard of my parents, and they said they'd had the number longer than I've been alive. When I told them my dad's name, they asked if I mean Nakano Shinya instead of Nakano Kinya.[2] " Hane looked up in time to see Chisame shake her head. The younger girl normally showed little in the way of emotion, but Hane thought she looked like she was about to burst into tears. Not that Hane didn't feel much the same.
Yume... where are you?
There was a knock at the door, and after a glance at Chisame, Hane hopped off the bed. It was, as she expected, the other girls.
None of them looked happy. In Lime's case, her entire bearing seemed to droop. Hane looked from face to face, and said, "I'm guessing you didn't have any more luck than we did."
"If that means you didn't reach anyone," Onsa said with a grimace, "Then yeah, no luck."
Hane stepped back and opened the door wide. "Come on in."
A minute later the entire club was in a rough circle, some perched on the bed, others sitting in a pair of chairs that flanked a small table in front of the room's picture window. "So now what?" Rin asked, in a tone considerably more subdued than her usual.
"I don't know," Hane admitted, shaking her head.
"Where are we going to go?" Hijiri asked. "We don't have enough money for another night in this establishment." Her eyes widened. "We have no money." She looked like she was about to start hyperventilating.
Chisame rolled her eyes. "Relax, Hijiri. Worse comes to worse, we should still have our tents -- we can always camp overnight."
"Besides, someone left us money for breakfast," Onsa pointed out. "Somebody is looking out for us."
"Well, whoever they are, they could be doing a better job of it," Rin snapped.
There was another knock and the door, and once again Hane got up from where she was sitting on the end of the bed to open it, to reveal Mister Hayakawa.
"Hayakawa!" Hijiri declared as if the simple presence of the butler was a lifeline. "Please tell us you have good news."
As Hane closed the door behind him, Mister Hayakawa calmly replied, "Yes... and no."
"No?" Chisame asked, an eyebrow raised.
He nodded, glancing around the room at them. "I have made several phone calls and learned a few things. For one, the Minowa conglomerate does not exist and never has."
Hijiri shot to her feet. "What?"
"There is not, and never has been, a Japanese zaibatsu by that name, and by extension there is no Minowa family. At least one of great wealth," he replied blandly.
"My family's gone?" Hijiri whispered.
"Well, that's just freaking great," Onsa growled. "Compared to that, what's the good news?"
Mister Hayakawa favored her with a faint smile. "When I returned to my room after my... investigations, I found this." He reached into his pocket and withdrew...
"That's my teacup!" Rin declared. And it was -- Hane recognized the Suzuki cup she'd given to Rin after receiving it from that biker with the robes and the halo that she'd helped on the road to Aomori that one time.
"Indeed it is," Hayakawa said, handing it over to her. "It was in my room, next to another stack of money, on top of this." He held up a sheet of what looked like parchment. "It is, as far as I can tell, an itinerary, sending us to a number of stops along a route that terminates in the state of Florida a week from now."
"Florida again!" Hijiri cried.
"Oh yeah," Onsa chuckled. "Somebody's got a plan for us."
"Someone who keeps breaking into Mister Hayakawa's room," Rin growled.
"While two of the stops are at motels where, it notes, reservations have been made for us," Mister Hayakawa continued, "the rest are at locations with quite odd names like 'The Steeple' and 'Gulfside Rest'. And the first stop, which we are apparently expected to reach by tonight, is 'Douglass Gardens Apartments' -- where, according to a note next to its name and those of its managers, 'All will be explained'."
Onsa laughed out loud. "Like I said, a plan!"
"So that's it?" Chisame asked. "We're just going to bike over to wherever this Douglass Gardens Apartments is?"
"New Jersey," Mister Hayakawa noted, "about five hours away to the south."
"Do you have anything better to do?" Onsa demanded of Chisame, who scowled at her.
"Do you know anything about driving in the United States?" she asked.
Onsa dug into her pocket and pulled out a little leather case, which she flung at Chisame. "I have a Japanese motorcycle license! I can go anywhere in the world."
"I don't think it works like that," Hane pointed out.
Meanwhile, Chisame was frowning at the contents of the case, which had landed open in her lap. "No, you don't, Onsa."
"What?" Onsa gave her a puzzled look. "Of course I do."
Chisame shook her head. "No, you have a Florida license." She held it up. "Driver License Class E, Motorcycle Only." She turned it around and peered at the front. "And according to this, you live at 809 SE 8th Ave, Okeechobee. Wherever that is."
Mister Hayakawa chuckled. "What a coincidence. That is the address of our ultimate destination."
"Gimme that." Onsa lunged across the bed and yanked the case out of Chisame's hands. "Damn," she said disconsolately. "The same lousy picture of me."
A quick check revealed that they all now had Florida licenses. Lime and Mister Hayakawa had full Florida driver licenses with motorcycle endorsements, meaning (Mister Hayakawa explained) that they were both permitted to drive cars as well as motorcycles. To her chagrin, Chisame had a motorcycle learner's license. (But according to her paperwork, Chisame had completed all the required courses and passed all the tests to convert her learner's license into a full license on or after her 17th birthday. So she was somewhat mollified, even if she had to wait nine months.) As for the rest of the club, like Onsa, they had full Florida "Motorcycle Only" licenses.
And all the paperwork had "809 SE 8th Ave, Okeechobee, FL" on it for their home addresses.
"Could they be forgeries?" Hijiri asked with that barely-restrained delight with which she approached anything that seemed the least bit "delinquent".
"I bet you'd be so disappointed if they weren't," Chisame muttered, and Hane giggled.
In the end, they ran out of reasons to delay. There was no point in staying here -- even with the money Mister Hayakawa had found, they didn't have enough for another night. They didn't have anywhere else to be, either, and they'd been promised an explanation by their mysterious benefactor at their first stop. Rin had suggested ignoring the itinerary and striking out at random, but only half-heartedly, and no one else thought that contrariness was a good enough reason to ignore the only lifeline they had in this weird, crazy situation.
They'd packed up, checked out of the motel, and mounted up. A few minutes later they were heading south along the Western Fall River Expressway, which was also Massachusetts State Route 79, enjoying the weather, the ride, and the view of the river to their right, chatting over the radio link along the way.
"All I'm saying is that whatever's waiting for us in Florida, it had better be worth the drive," Rin grumbled.
Hane laughed.
809 SE 8th Avenue
Okeechobee, Florida, USA
Saturday, September 17, 2016, 9:45 AM
There was, Molly decided, something distinctly odd about the guy who'd hired her father to do a little fix-up on the house around the corner, and then be something like a landlord for the people who were going to be moving in. There wasn't any one thing that she could put her finger on, but a whole lot of little things that just didn't add up.
She stretched out her legs in front of her as she sat on the hearth of the fireplace that took up nearly a third of the longest wall in the great room, pulled a scrunchy out of her pocket, and gathered her mane of red hair together into a long, thick ponytail with it. Then she leaned back against the cool stone and watched as the guy led her dad around the house, pointing out a host of little things that needed attention. He had a really deep voice, she noticed, that seemed out of place on a guy of decidedly medium height and (fit) build -- a build that was revealed nicely, in Molly's opinion, by the white leather motorcycle suit he wore.
And that was one of the odd things -- she'd never seen a pure-white head-to-toe full-body biking suit with matching boots before. (She was sure they must exist, but she'd never seen one in a catalog or a shop.) It looked absolutely brand new, without a speck of road dust or wear on it, either, even though she'd seen him drive up to their house on a simply massive black Suzuki Intruder. His beanie-style helmet was also pure white, with a green "crown of thorns" design on it that Molly was pretty sure Pastor Williams would call "sacrilegious".
As her dad and his new boss returned from the far end of the house Molly squinted and tried again to get a good look at the empty air above his head. She could almost but not quite see something floating there, and it was driving her nuts. It almost looked like a... a halo, of all things. But that was crazy. She sighed. Just one more oddity about this guy. "We're expecting the furniture to show up on the twenty-third," he was saying, showing her dad something on the tablet he was carrying. "Do you think you can get all that done by then?"
Her father thought for a moment, then nodded. "Yes, that's doable. Fortunately there's nothing really bad that needs attention, just little things. I'll assemble a small crew and we can get it all done, if not before Friday, then on Friday." He grinned at the other man. "We'll just work where the delivery guys aren't if it takes that long."
"Fair enough," he said with a chuckle. "Then I think we have a deal, Mister Ritter."
"Tom, please. And excellent," her dad said, smiling, as they shook hands. "Let's head back to my place and we can take care of the paperwork."
"Paperwork." The other man shook his head with a rueful smile, sending his shoulder-length hair swinging. "The bane of mortal man since at least the Romans."
Her father shrugged. "What can you do?" he asked, then looked over at her. "Well, sweetheart, we're done here."
Molly smiled, and climbed to her feet. "'Kay, Dad."
"I'm sorry I interfered with your plans for the morning," his boss said. "But I'm afraid it couldn't wait. Maybe it'd help if I mentioned there'll be five girls your age moving in next Saturday? I'm sure you'll become the best of friends."
"I don't know," Molly replied doubtfully. "What if we don't have any interests in common?"
"Oh, I don't think that will be a problem," he said. "They're all bikers like you and your dad."
Molly blinked. "In that case, you might be right."
- RMS: That's in Celsius, of course -- in Fahrenheit it would be low 70s vs low 80s, which were the actual temperatures for the locations and dates concerned.
- RMS: Chisame's father, Kinya Nakano, is a thinly-disguised version of retired Grand Prix motorcycle road racer Shinya Nakano.
-- Bob
I have been Roland, Beowulf, Achilles, Gilgamesh, Clark Kent, Mary Sue, DJ Croft, Skysaber. I have been
called a hundred names and will be called a thousand more before the sun grows dim and cold....
I have been Roland, Beowulf, Achilles, Gilgamesh, Clark Kent, Mary Sue, DJ Croft, Skysaber. I have been
called a hundred names and will be called a thousand more before the sun grows dim and cold....
