I heard them before I saw them, their mufflers zippering through the air like hornets, before they crested a rise in the highway and slid into view. Three choppers in total; a mess of curved pipes, elongated seats, telescopic forks and towered fairings. The bosozoku were weaving, slowing, bucking forward and then slowing again, blocking the cars behind them from passing. I was waiting for them on the rooftop. I’m seven feet tall, about as conspicuous as a redwood tree. Crouching behind the roof abutment of a three-story Japanese building was as effective as a giraffe crouching behind a log. As I pulled the Sonic Boom from my back pocket, I appealed to Heavenly Father to keep the bosozoku from looking up.

“Dode,” 3D said. “Are we dendoing or what?”
He’d just climbed over the railing looking for me.
“I told you,” I said. “Senkyoshigo is for knobs. Speak English.”

3D had his hands pushed into his yeasty armpits. Just the thought of tracting made him nervous.

“Elder Copenhaver,” he said. “Bud, I’m not a knob. If you don’t learn senkyoshigo, how will you fit in with, like, the rest of the elders?”

I raised a hand to silence him. The bosozoku were nearly under us, seven of them on five choppers, their hair punch-permed, their boilersuits the color of brown mushrooms, their headbands stamped with blood-colored suns. One of them dragged a Rawlings Big Stick along the road as he drove. 3D stepped closer.

“Bud? Why are you holding a rocket?”

I aimed the tube at a grease stain on the road in front of the lead chopper, snapped a thumb down on my Bic, and lit the wick.

“Umm, Dode? That’s like, waayyy against the rules.”

Do Not Handle Explosives. In the Mormon White Handbook, this rule follows Do Not Handle Firearms, just before Do Not Swim.

The Sonic Boom sparked and a fireball slid out the rainbow chute, boomeranging off a chopper tire and discharging under a vending machine selling plastic-wrapped neckties. A bosozoku and his partner flipped over the handlebars. Another chopper skid-sparked off the highway. Then the lot of them were up jamming their fingers into the sky in the wrong direction, hooting at the clouds as if a meteor had just nose-dived from out of the sky.

I pushed 3D back into the middle of the roof before they spotted us. His hand was over his black nametag, his eyes popping.

“Okay bud,” I said. “Let’s go dendoing. Heavenly Father’s waiting.”

Daniel Daniel Daniel, a Lebanese Canadian, was a green bean from Vancouver who’d arrived from the Missionary Training Center in Utah just three weeks earlier. He was sent to Hannan City after my previous companion, Elder Sheldon Barker (Sir Shelly Shit-For-Brains) got transferred. How many Lebanese Mormons are there? I suppose just as few as there are seven-foot Americans galumphing down the streets of Japan. The first two Daniels in his name were hand-me-downs from his father and his grandfather. The third was his family name.

“Go ahead and joke,” he’d said the first time I called him 3D. “Stretch.” He laughed at this. He thought he was being original. “How’s the weather up there?”

I spat on his shoe. “It’s raining,” I said.

He couldn’t make toast, and had to ask if you put the butter on before or after you toasted the bread. His MoonSaddle bike seat got inhaled into the jellowy vacuum of his size 44 slacks. He kept his shoes on in the apartment.

“You’re subverting the entire Japanese system of etiquette,” I told him.
“I feel naked without them,” he said.

If you didn’t speak senkyoshigo, the missionary invented lingo elders were supposed to use with each other in Japan, 3D felt you were a marked man for judgment day, that Jesus and Heavenly Father would ask you why you hadn’t made the effort in the spirit of companionship, and that you’d have no response to this except that you were lazy, insensitive, and wanpaku: disobedient.

“Proselytizing is selling,” I’d said his first day. “Japanese are polite, but a Japanese housewife will slam a door in your face as hard as anyone else.”
“What do they think of you?” he said.
“Who, Mormons?”
“No. You. To them you must be, like, a freak.”
“In Japan,” I said, “we’re all freaks.”

We stopped at a Lawson convenience store in our starched white shirts, name tags and dress pants. The clerks craned their necks up at me, their eyes swimming in their heads. We browsed the spines of teen magazines and committed to memory the names of the J-pop groups.

“Get in good with the kids,” I told 3D, “and you’re golden.”

3D flipped through a manga comic and ran a finger over a naked cartoon high school girl with nipples big as donuts.

“Are kids supposed to have access to this?” he said.

At our first house I taught him my trick with the Book of Mormon, leaning against the side of the doorframe and holding the book high above it, out of sight. A lady bouncing a baby answered and we introduced ourselves.

“Ehhh?” she said.

If you want to confuse a Japanese housewife, get a white seven-footer and a Lebanese kid to knock on her door and speak to her in her own language.

“We’re bringing you a message,” I said in Japanese, “about a book straight from heaven.”

I dropped the book into my waiting hand below. She jumped back.

“This book. Direct from heaven.”

The bosozoku never learned who’d attacked them. A few days after my rooftop assault, 3D and I shuttled past them on our bikes. It was the same group. They were roosting at a gas station smacking water bottles out of the air with the Rawlings Big Stick. A car rolled in and three attendants swarmed it, shouting and whirling squeegees over their heads. I waved to the bosozoku and coasted over to them. 3D stayed on the road, his face blanching white. I handed out mission fliers and they were polite, their heads nodding. “Tall,” one said in Japanese. Another said “Thank you” in broken English, and they laughed.

There was a talk on hope at the church by Mission President Pokorny. His hands opened and closed as he spoke, spreading hope over the congregation. He was the type of man to believe this hope really existed in his hands, like stardust, and he could sprinkle it over you. A Spanish lady spoke on wingless angles. Before reading scriptures Elder Worthlin told that Mormon light bulb joke:

“It takes five,” he said. “One to say an opening prayer, one to give a talk on changing light bulbs, one to change the light bulb, one to say a closing prayer, and one to bring the refreshments.”
3D laughed the hardest. He scribbled notes onto the backs of business cards he’d pulled from the banquet table. He packed in five mayonnaise and mackerel sandwiches, the bread so charged with preservatives that his finger impressions stayed punched into the surface like snow prints.
After the service on the train home he told me that his father taught economics in Vancouver and there were whispers among the students he’d been connected to Hezbollah.
“In Arabic, Hezbollah means ‘Party of God’. When we converted to the church my father joked we were swapping one party for the other, both with the same host.”

He talked about his girlfriend back home and said she’d promised to give him a blowjob when he returned.
“I don’t get it,” he said. “I always thought the guy gave the girl the blowjob.”
“What’s your definition of a blowjob?”
“You know,” he said. He opened his hands in front of his face, each hand the inner thigh of his girl’s legs. His lips pursed at the meridian of the hands, and he blew.

On a Saturday morning we took our bikes to Kainan city, skidding down side roads funked with open sewage. 3D wore a ventilated Giro helmet the color of scorched pennies. We were heading to meet Mrs. Yumeno, a soon-to-be convert, for our third lesson. When we arrived she fed us spaghetti with peas and chunks of ham.

“You must miss Western food,” she said. She spoke excellent English. Sometimes I wondered if she was only interested in us so she could practice. Chiho, her teenage daughter, also spoke English. After the lesson, Chiho plunged a finger into a jar of Dijon mustard and slapped it on her tongue.

“Tastes like wasabi,” she said. “You know?”
She was talking to 3D. She had on tight shorts and I caught him peeking at her thighs. He asked if she liked the boy band Arashi. He’d seen their picture on the cover of one of the teen magazines.
“Arashi’s a bunch of old men,” she said.
“Totally.”
“How about the band Hey! Say! JUMP?” She bobbed her head in a sharp nod. “I like them.”
3D jumped, and she laughed.

President Pokorny drove to le Belle Château Hannan in his Lexus.
“Elder Copenhaver,” Pokorny said. His hair looked perma-vacuumed into place. “We’re hearing good things about you. You’re a good model for the other missionaries.”

I knew what he was talking about. A month earlier a nineteen-year-old missionary in Kyoto had been caught with some high-school girl in his apartment. The area president had called his parents back in Chicago. “I’ve prayed for your son,” he told them. “He’ll not be completing his mission.”

Pokorny met with 3D, and I could hear them in his bedroom.
“I’ve been masturbating,” 3D said.
Pokorny said he was glad he’d told him this. He said to sing a hymn every time he felt the urge.
“And think of sushi. Raw fish will deter any base impulse.”

After he left we rode the train to Wakayama JR station and distributed free English-lesson fliers to high school kids.
“You know,” I said to 3D. “You don’t have to admit anything to Pokorny.”
3D had rolled some fliers into a tube. He held it to his eye, and the eye floated disembodied within the tunnel of the tube.
“I know,” he said, and then he said something about Heavenly Father. Something like: “He’s watching.”

My next encounter with the bosozoku went as follows: I ground my head into my pillow. Outside, a chainsaw was whipping itself into a froth, sputtering and howling, on and on. The racket bounced down the highway and disappeared. I dreamed of my body jigsawed apart into terrible fleshy lumps, and then the chainsaw again, cleaving the darkness wide open, spraying sleep out from under its teeth like so much sawdust.

They came back forty minutes later for a third pass. I was waiting for them on the roof. I was out of Sonic Booms, so I’d grabbed a can of smoked fish from the cupboard before climbing up. After they passed I side-armed the can of fish at them like I was skipping a rock and then ducked behind the roof abutment. Ping! The choppers didn’t stop.

Later, back under my blankets, I still couldn’t sleep. I could hear 3D in his room, snoring a rich, meaty snore. One of the snores said:
“Copenhaver, don’t be so sensitive, noise is noise. Copenhaver, get over it.”

Sister Nanami swished a salad of soba noodles, cabbage, and beef in a fry pan with her tongs. 3D’s shirt collar had already mopped up half a plateful of brown soba sauce. Over on the sand, a little girl cracked a water balloon over her brother’s head and he cried.
“The kids are wanpaku,” 3D said. “They’re not playing the game right.”

Kataonami beach. This was a ward party. Most of the church members were here along with President Pokorny and his wife, the area missionaries, and the potential converts and their families. We’d set up a volleyball net on the beach. Elder Talbot had suggested using water balloons for balls but nobody was really sure how it would work, so the kids just started throwing them at each other.

Mrs. Yumeno and Chiho were there. 3D stood near the barbecue shoveling in his third plateful of yaki soba, his eyes locked onto the six inches of Chiho’s bare thigh spanning the hem of her skirt and the tops of her knee socks. In another week she and Mrs. Yumeno would be baptized. Mrs. Yumeno’s husband lived and worked in another prefecture. “He is disinterested,” is all she’d said when we’d asked if he was ready to join the church.

We sang hymns. The kids stroked the blond hair on my arms and ran back and forth between my legs. Most could do it without ducking. There was a basketball court near the parking lot. Elder Toomey asked me to dunk a water balloon, but I lied and told him I had a bad knee. The year before at Brigham Young I’d been recruited as a project. In my first game, I accidentally tipped the ball into our opponent’s basket. That was the only two points I scored all year. I had no plans to return to varsity after my mission.

Later, I spotted 3D by one of the picnic tables, soaking wet, holding a broken balloon in his hand. He’d been juggling water balloons for Chiho. She was laughing, and touched his chest.
“So wet,” she said. “Like a dolphin.”

He started disappearing in the middle of the night and returning just before sunup. He thought I didn’t know, but 3D was clumsy. He had a way of announcing his presence in spite of himself.

In his room, I uprooted contraband. A J-porn mag curled inside a roll of paper towel. A losing Dragonball scratch-and-win ticket stuffed into a gym sneaker. He’d stopped speaking senkyoshigo to me. I asked him why. He was in the bathroom snipping nose hair with tiny scissors. “It’s for knobs,” he said.

We went tracting through Hannan city and stopped in to see Mr. Oshiro, a recent convert. His apartment was littered with the dismembered dolls parts he sold over the internet. He’d been a Christian for three years, and before that a Buddhist. We prayed with him, kneeling under a tray of pink grasping doll hands. Mr. Oshiro’s face looked pushed in. Praying can sometimes be a painful process.

Afterwards on the street a Japanese woman approached us, shaking a whack of pamphlets at us, scolding us.
“You’re too bad,” she said in English. “You never come to see me!”

She was a Jehovah’s Witness. We’d run into her before and she’d asked us to come to her house to teach her English. We’d invited her to our weekly group lessons at the church but she’d declined.

“Is it true,” I said, “that Jehovah’s Witnesses believe there’s only a small number of people who will get into Heaven?”
She nodded sharply. “One hundred forty-four thousand.”
“Then why look for new members? Doesn’t that lessen your chances?”

Her head twitched. You could tell her mind was working its way over the words. Then she slapped her pamphlets across my arm.
“Naaa! You are joke.”
On our way back to the apartment, 3D asked if I thought the Jehovah’s were crazy.
“Nuts,” I said.
“What about us? I mean, do you like, believe in everything the Church teaches us? You know. Do you think this is real?”
“There are worse things to believe.”
“Like what?”
Something had been bothering me. I needed to say it.
“Chiho’s a problem,” I said. “You’re risking everything.”
3D blushed. “She’s the only thing that makes sense to me right now.”
“None of this is supposed to make sense,” I said. “That’s what faith is. You buy in, whether you believe it or not.”

On a Friday night we bumped into two English teachers on the street, Tony and Gindy, and they invited us to join them for drinks.

“I know a Mormon who drinks like a fish,” Gindy said as we walked to the izakaya. She claimed she was from Scotland, but I couldn’t detect any accent.

The ceiling at the izakaya was so low I had to walk with my chin to my chest. The whole place was outfitted in glossy wood. We sat on slippery pine benches and Tony, an Australian whose Windsor knot looked ready to pop off his neck, ordered us beer. I’d drank in high school and at BYU, but this was 3D’s first time. His face looked wind blown after the first sip: “This is beer?”

“Why can’t Mormons drink coffee,” Tony asked 3D.
“I don’t know,” he said, “but it’s not because of the caffeine. Everyone thinks it’s because of the caffeine but it’s not.”

We stayed for three hours. Tony ordered beer every thirty minutes. Each time, 3D finished his faster than everyone else. Gindy bought fugu sashi, a translucent gummy meat that tastes like edible barbed wire, and 3D polished off half the plate. At one point he disappeared and then returned reeking of puke, his black nametag upside down. Those nametags are attached with a long flat pin. He must have intentionally turned it.

We ended up at karaoke in a private padded room. 3D sang Foo Fighters a little too seriously, and then tripped over the mic cord. Gindy and I shouted an Elvis Costello song. Tony started sucking beer from a plunger he’d stolen from the washroom. His tie now dangled off his neck like a loose scarf. At one point Gindy was on my lap, my hand under her skirt. She patted my arm: “I’m wearing Mormon panties.”

On my way to the bathroom I stumbled over 3D lying in the hallway, half-passed out with Gindy’s cell phone to his ear. He must have borrowed it from her. A girl’s voice warbled through the line. Chiho. I hauled him up by his wrists.
“I want to give her a blowjob,” he said.

We missed the last train and so walked the teachers to their apartment. On the way at an Asahi vending machine, Tony crammed the end of the plunger up the dispenser, fishing for free beer. I backed up twenty paces, yodeled, and charged it. Drop kick. Tony dove away. He actually did a stunt roll, head over shoulders. The vending machine made a crunching sound as my foot made contact—hard plastic tubes and glass. It splashed on its side and 3D scrambled on top and started stomping on it. Tony joined in, then Gindy. I swung a foot into the soft glass front. You’d never believe something so absurd could be so vindicating. Exactly who or what we were vindicating, I don’t know.
During the cab ride home, 3D squeezed both of my shoulders.
“That,” he said, “was the best night of my life.”

Near Burakuricho in Wakayama we knocked on doors. I was still hung-over from the night before, and accidentally smacked my head on somebody’s porch gable. Everything was an inch too low, an inch too narrow. 3D’d had a hand on his gut all day. You could’ve mopped the remorse off his face with a sponge.
“We’re goners,” he kept saying.
“Gone where?”

“Pokorny knows what we did. He told me in a dream last night.”
“Toast,” I said. Something had just occurred to me. “I bet you could butter it before toasting. The butter melts into the bread. It’d probably taste pretty good.”

At one disinterested house the resident’s son, a teenager, ran after us with two bags of Colombian coffee beans as a gift and 3D gave him five pieces of gum, the only thing he had in his pockets. Near an intersection, a man dressed in a yellow and black fur coat and matching hat held the fliers we gave him up to the sunlight, squinting. We caught a bus back to JR station. There were red curtains on the windows and a vent blew conditioned air over our heads. My dinged forehead was trying to squeeze out its own appendage.
“Can you see the bump,” I said.
“Your forehead looks eight months pregnant.”

A group of bosozoku cruised by on their choppers. One of them slapped the side of the bus as they passed.
“Why do you hate them so much,” 3D said.

I stabbed the window with my finger as they rode off ahead.
“Nobody here cares. I ask people about them and they say, yes, yes, very noisy. Terrible. But you can tell it doesn’t bother them. They just accept it. I don’t hate the bosozoku. I hate the country for not hating the bosozoku.”

The next day we took our bikes on the train and went tracting in a newer area of Kishiwada. A man shouted at us from a ground-floor bathroom window as we passed.
“Are you them,” he said in Japanese.
“Yes,” 3D said, taking a stab in the dark. “May we come in?”

We sat at his kitchen table. He said he’d been expecting someone, but hadn’t known who. We watched him run his hands over the Book of Mormon and I noticed one finger was gone at the knuckle.
“I used to be yakuza,” he said, holding the finger up. “A gangster. This was my punishment for leaving. I want to turn my life around.”

3D stared out the window on the train ride home.
“I’m backwards,” he said. “This guy started out bad and changed to good. Me, I started out good and am changing to bad.”

I placed a hand on the back of my neck. Something felt gone from me, different, like when you realize that for all your worth you’re really nothing special and those illusions you had as a youth, of being meant for some higher purpose, were nothing but the trifling daydreams of a child.
“At least your path is clear,” I said. “I still don’t know whether I’m bad or good. What’s worse, I don’t think I really care.”

The door to our apartment at le Belle Château Hannan was ajar when we got back. President Pokorny was standing in the kitchen by the mini fridge. Sitting in the two kitchen chairs in front of him were Mrs. Yamada and Chiho.

3D’s whole body blushed, right down to his knuckles.
I retreated to the roof while they talked, watching the cars pass below. 3D called up to me after they left and I took him for ice cream across the street at Lawson.
“Do you think this is Heavenly Father’s plan,” he said. His eyes were watery. “Like, maybe I’m supposed to fail at this?”

He stood in front of the counter and licked his ice cream. Japanese ice cream is creamier than American ice cream; something about less preservatives in the milk.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “They pump chemicals into the bread but leave the dairy all natural. Talk about a contradiction in philosophies.”

We were in the parking lot waiting to cross the busy highway back to our apartment, an apartment 3D would be vacating in twelve hours, back to Vancouver.
“Gaijin.”

We looked back. It was a bosozoku, the one who’d scraped the Rawlings Big Stick across the road the day I’d attacked them with the Sonic Boom. Two of his buddies stood behind him. He was holding an unopened plastic water bottle, a big two-liter one. He gripped the neck with two hands and swung. 3D never saw it coming. The bottle didn’t break until the third or fourth hit. Water exploded over the back of his head, soaking him, and then he was on the ground.
“Jesus,” I said. Was that blood? Can a plastic water bottle draw blood?

I knelt beside 3D and pressed his free hand into mine, a child’s hand in the pocket of a baseball glove. The bosozoku chucked the empty bottle and pointed at me, speaking incomprehensible Japanese, the curse words we were never taught at MTC. Even kneeling, I was still an inch taller than him. He knew he couldn’t do anything to me. I would have tossed him and his friends like sacks of rice.

“I deserve this,” 3D said. We were back at the apartment and I was holding a bag of frozen edamame on the top of his head where he’d been hit. 3D’s sock feet were on the kitchen table, a stumpy toe poking through one of them. His shoes were off. His whole time in Hannan City he’d kept them on in the apartment except this one time, his final night.
“It’s my fault,” I said. “I was the one who deserved it.”

That night while we were sleeping, the choppers passed. Four, maybe five of them, engines blistering. I looked at them through the window and watched the glow of the tail lights slide down the highway, out of sight. Maybe 3D had been right. This was Heavenly Father’s plan. Or maybe there was no plan. No plan at all, not for anyone.

I stayed by the window, but this time I wasn’t waiting for the choppers to return. I don’t know what I was waiting for. A dog barked down the highway. It started howling at something—a cat, a field mouse. But I knew there was more to this howl than just a reaction to something it sniffed or saw. This was the dog’s excuse to release something more of itself than it understood, something bigger, to howl at the world and purge itself of this place. To purge itself of Heavenly Father and to chase it all back to where the whole god-awful mess began.