A Tale for the Time Being (16 page)

Daisuke was still kneeling at my feet, head bowed, eyes closed. I grabbed a fistful of his hair and yanked his head up and shoved the paper in front of his nose.

“Does this make you happy?”

“N-no,” he stuttered.

“Usotsuke—!”
⁶⁸
I said, jerking on his hair. Of course the pathetic insect was lying. When you’re a nobody, you’re
always happy when somebody else is getting tortured instead of you, and I wanted to punish him for that. His hair felt disgusting in my fingers, too coarse for a young kid his age, like old
man’s hair on a young boy’s head, and it was greasy, too, like he’d used some of his mom’s boyfriend’s styling gel. It creeped me out. I tightened my grip and pulled
harder until I could feel the follicles popping from their pores. I took the knife and pressed the blade against his throat. The skin was pale and almost bluish, a girl’s throat. The tendons
were strung tight and trembling, and the veins throbbed against the thin metal serration. Time slowed down, and each moment unfolded into a future filled with infinite possibilities. It would be so
easy. Slice the artery and watch the red blood spurt and stain the ground, draining his stupid nothing life from his stupid nothing body. Or release him. Let the pathetic insect go. It didn’t
matter which. I pressed the blade a tiny bit harder. How much more pressure would it take? If you’ve ever examined skin cells under a microscope in biology class, you’ll understand how
the serrated teeth of the knife could tease the cells apart until the blood started to seep. I thought about my funeral tomorrow, and how this would be a fine way to put a stop to it. Give them a
real body. Not mine.

Daisuke moaned. His eyes were closed, but his mouth was slack and his face was strangely relaxed. A small drop of saliva dribbled from the corner of his chapped lips. He looked like he was
smiling.

My fist, gripping the knife, looked like it meant business, and my arm felt strong and powerful, too. I liked that. Standing there, we were frozen in time, me and Daisuke-kun, and the future was
mine. No matter what I chose to do, for this one moment I owned Daisuke and I owned his future. It was a strange feeling, creepy and a little too intimate, because if I killed him now we would be
joined for life, forever, and so I released him. He crumpled at my feet.

I looked at my hands like they belonged to someone else. Strands of his disgusting hair stuck to my fingers by the white blobs of their follicles. I rubbed them off against my skirt.

“Get out of here,” I said. “Go home.”

Daisuke slowly got to his feet and brushed off his knees. “You should have just done it,” he said.

His words surprised me. “Done what?” I asked, stupidly.

He squatted down on the pavement and slowly started putting his books back into his book bag. “Cut me,” he said, looking up at me and blinking. “Slit my throat. I want to
die.”

“You do?” I asked.

He nodded. “Of course,” he said, and then he went back to gathering up his papers.

I watched him for a while. I felt sorry for him, because I knew what he meant, and I even thought about offering to do it again, but the moment was gone. Oh well.

“Sorry,” I said.

He shook his head. “It’s okay,” he mumbled.

I watched him for a while longer as he crawled around on his knees, searching under the vending machine for his pencils. I almost wanted to help him, but instead I turned and walked away. I
didn’t look back. I wasn’t worried about him telling anyone. He knew better, like I did. I walked all the way to the station, where they have better vending machines, and I bought my
dad a pack of Short Hopes because that was the only brand I would buy for him on account of the name, and then at the drink machine I bought myself a can of Pulpy. It’s a kind of orange juice
with big bits of pulp in it that I like to pop between my teeth.

4.

My funeral was beautiful and very real. All the kids in my class were wearing black armbands, and they had set an altar on my desk with a candle and an incense burner and my
school photograph, enlarged and framed and decorated with black and white ribbons. One by one my enemies took turns going up to my desk and paying their respects to me, laying a white paper flower
in front of my picture, while the rest of the class stood at their desks with their hands clasped and their eyes fixed on the ground. Maybe they were trying not to laugh, but I don’t think
so. The atmosphere was very solemn and it felt like a proper funeral. Daisuke-kun was pale when his turn came to go up, but he did it, and he offered his flower and bowed deeply, and I almost felt
proud of him, which I know sounds kind of perverse but I think maybe you get a little fond of the people you’ve tortured and whose future you’ve owned.

The whole time they were doing this, Ugawa Sensei was chanting a Buddhist hymn. I didn’t recognize it at the time because I grew up in Sunnyvale and didn’t have much exposure yet to
the Buddhist tradition, but later on, when I heard it again at my old Jiko’s temple, I asked her about it. She told me it’s called the Maka Hanya Haramita Shingyo,
⁶⁹
which means something like the Great Most Excellent Wisdom Heart Sutra. The only part I remember goes like this: Shiki fu i ku, ku fu i shiki.
⁷⁰

It’s pretty abstract. Old Jiko tried to explain it to me, and I don’t know if I understood it correctly or not, but I think it means that nothing in the world is solid or real,
because nothing is permanent, and all things—including trees and animals and pebbles and mountains and rivers and even me and you—are just kind of flowing through for the time being. I
think that’s true, and it’s very reassuring, and I just wish I’d understood that at my funeral when Ugawa Sensei was chanting because it would have been a great comfort to me, but
of course I didn’t because these sutras are in an old-fashioned language that nobody understands anymore, unless you’re like Jiko and it’s your job. But actually it doesn’t
really matter because even if you can’t exactly understand the words, you know they are beautiful and profound, and Ugawa Sensei’s voice, which was usually so mumbly and unpleasant, was
suddenly soft and sad and gentle, and he was chanting with feeling, like he really meant it. When he walked up to my desk to offer me a flower, the look on his face made me want to cry because it
was so twisted up and full of his own particular sorrow. A couple of times I actually did cry—like when I saw my portrait hung with the black and white funeral ribbons, and when I saw how
respectful my classmates were being to me, with their bowed heads and their paper flowers. They must have all gotten together in clubs after school to make those flowers and decorate my picture.
They were so serious and dignified. I almost loved them.

5.

I didn’t go to school that day, so I wasn’t actually there at my funeral. I saw it later on. After my encounter with Daisuke, I went home and gave Dad his cigarettes
and went to bed. When my mom got home that evening, I made myself throw up on the bathroom floor and told her I was sick, and the next morning I threw up again for good measure, and since it was
the last day of school before the summer holidays, she let me stay home. I was really happy, figuring I’d escaped the whole thing, but that evening I got an anonymous email with a subject
line that said, “The Tragic and Untimely Death of Transfer Student Nao Yasutani.” The email was a link to a video-sharing website. Someone had made a video of my funeral with their
keitai phone and posted it on the Internet, and over the next couple of hours, I watched the hit counter rise. I don’t know who was viewing it, but the video was getting hundreds and then
thousands of hits, like it was going viral. Weird, but I was almost proud. It felt kind of good to be popular.

6.

I just remembered the last lines of the Heart Sutra, which go like this:

These words are actually in some ancient Indian language
⁷¹
and not even Japanese, but Jiko told me they means something like this:

I keep thinking of Jiko, and how relieved she’ll be when all sentient beings, even my stupid horrible classmates, wake up and get enlightened and go away, so she can finally rest. She must
be so exhausted.

1.

The image on the screen shows a man in his late thirties or early forties, standing before a vast field of tsunami debris that stretches into the distance, as far as the eye of
the camera can see. The man is wearing a white paper face mask, but he has tugged it down to his chin in order to speak to the reporter. He is wearing tired sweatpants, work gloves, a zippered
jacket, boots. He raises his arm to gesture toward the wreckage behind him.

“It’s like a dream,” he says. “A horrible dream. I keep trying to wake up. I think when I wake up, my daughter will be back.”

His voice is flat, his utterances short. “I have lost everything. My daughter, my son, my wife, my mother. Our house, neighbors. Our whole town.”

The caption at the bottom of the screen gives the man’s name:
T. Nojima, Sanitation Worker, O— Township, Miyagi Prefecture
.

The newscaster, his voice muffled by a face mask, speaks to the camera. He explains that they are standing on the site where Mr. Nojima’s house used to be. The scene is one of total
devastation, but what the camera cannot pick up is the stench. He pulls the face mask down. The smell, he explains, is unbearable, a choking odor of rotting fish and flesh, buried in the wreckage.
Mr. Nojima is searching for his six-year-old daughter. He has little hope of finding her alive. He is looking for the backpack she was wearing on the morning of March 11 when the tsunami hit.

“It’s red,” Nojima says. “With a picture of Hello Kitty on it. I’d just bought it for her. The school year was starting and she was so proud of it. She wore it in
the house. She was going to be entering the first grade.”

Nojima and his daughter were at home in the kitchen when the wall of black water and debris smashed through their house. Within seconds, Nojima was crushed up against the ceiling and his
daughter was gone. He thought he would drown there, but miraculously the house was ripped from its foundation just as the ceiling gave way, and he was pushed through onto the second floor and into
the bedroom, where his wife was crouched in a corner, holding their infant son.

“I tried to catch her hand,” he says. “I almost had her, but then the house tipped and split in half.”

His wife and son were dragged away. He thought he could still reach them. He managed to scramble onto the roof of a passing concrete building. He could see his wife in the corner of their
floating bedroom, holding the baby, but she was being pulled farther and farther away. He called to her. The roar of the water and the crashing debris was deafening.

“It was so loud, but I think she heard me. She looked at me. Her eyes were wide, but she never once screamed. She didn’t want to scare the baby. She just kept watching me until the
end.”

He shakes his head as though to clear further recollection from it. He stares out over the debris field—splintered houses and crumpled cars, cinder block and tangled rebar, boats,
furniture parts, smashed appliances, roof tiles, clothing, stuff—a ghastly midden piled several meters deep. He looks down at his feet, poking at a muddy tangle of fabric with the toe of his
shoe.

“I will probably never find my family,” he says. “I’ve lost my hope of giving them a proper funeral. But if I can just find something, just one thing that belonged to my
daughter, I’ll be able to rest my mind and leave this place.” He swallows hard and then takes a deep breath.

“That life with my family is the dream,” he says. He gestures toward the ruined landscape. “This is the reality. Everything is gone. We need to wake up and understand
that.”

2.

In the days following the earthquake and tsunami, Ruth sat in front of her computer screen, trawling the Internet for news of friends and family. Within days, she received
confirmation that the people she knew were safe, but she couldn’t stop watching. The images pouring in from Japan mesmerized her. Every few hours, another horrifying piece of footage would
break, and she would play it over and over, studying the wave as it surged over the tops of the seawalls, carrying ships down city streets, picking up cars and trucks and depositing them on the
roofs of buildings. She watched whole towns get crushed and swept away in a matter of moments, and she was aware that while these moments were captured online, so many other moments simply
vanished.

Most of the footage was shot by panicked people on their mobile phones from hillsides or the roofs of tall buildings, so there was a haphazard quality to the images, as if the photographers
didn’t quite realize what they were filming, but they knew it was critical, and so they turned on their phones and held them up to the oncoming wave. Sometimes an image would suddenly blur
and distort as the photographer fled to higher ground. Sometimes, in the corners and the edges of the frame, tiny cars and people were caught fleeing from the oncoming wall of black water.
Sometimes the people looked confused. Sometimes they looked like they were taking their time and even turning back to watch, not understanding the danger they were in. But always, from the vantage
point of the camera, you could see how fast the wave was traveling and how immense it was. Those tiny people didn’t stand a chance, and the people standing off-screen knew it.
Hurry!
Hurry!
their disembodied voices cried, from behind the camera.
Don’t stop! Run! Oh, no! Where’s Grandma? Oh, no! Look! There! Oh, this is horrible! Hurry! Run! Run!