A Tale for the Time Being (21 page)

“But . . . ,” I said, trying to find my voice. Of course I didn’t believe him, but what could I say? So I just nodded, and that was that.

1.

Miyagi prefecture is located in the Tohoku region, in the northeastern part of Japan. This area was one of the last pieces of tribal land to be taken from the indigenous
Emishi, descendants of the J
ō
mon people, who had lived there from prehistoric times until they were defeated by the Japanese Imperial Army in the eighth century. The Miyagi coastline was also
one of the areas hardest hit by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. Old Jiko’s temple was located somewhere along this stretch of coastline.

Fukushima prefecture, located just south of Miyagi, was also part of the ancestral lands of the Emishi. Now Fukushima is the prefectural home to the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station. The
name Fukushima means “Happy Island.” Before the tsunami caused the catastrophic meltdown of the nuclear power station, people believed Fukushima to be a happy place, and the banners
stretched across the main streets of the nearby towns reflected this sense of optimism.

Nuclear power is energy for a brighter future!

The correct understanding of nuclear power leads to a better life!

2.

The island where Ruth and Oliver lived was named for a famous Spanish conquistador, who overthrew the Aztec empire. Although he never made it up as far north as his eponymous
isle, his men did, which is why the inlets and sounds of coastal British Columbia are scattered with the names of famous Spanish mass murderers. But in spite of its sanguinary name, theirs was a
relatively benign and happy little isle. For two months out of the year, it was a gemlike paradise, overflowing with carefree summer people with yachts and vacation homes, and happy hippie farmers
raising organic veggies and bare-bottomed babies. There were yoga teachers, body workers, and healers in every modality, drummers and shamans and gurus galore. For two months out of the year, the
sun shone.

But when the tourists and the summer people left, the blue skies clouded over and the island bared its teeth, revealing its churlish side. The days grew short and the nights grew long, and for
the next ten months, it rained. The locals who lived there year-round liked it this way.

Their island had a nickname, too, a shadow name that was rarely spoken: the Island of the Dead. Some said the name referred to the bloody intertribal wars, or the smallpox epidemic of 1862 that
killed off most of the indigenous Coast Salish population. Other people said no, that the island had always been a tribal burial ground, laced with hidden caves known only to the elders, where they
entombed their dead. Still others insisted that the nickname had nothing to do with native lore at all, pointing instead to the aging population of retired white people, who’d come to spend
their twilight years on the island, turning it into a kind of gated community, like Boca Raton only with lousy weather and no amenities.

Ruth liked the nickname. It had a certain gravitas, and she’d brought her own mother here to die, after all. Her father’s ashes, too, she’d brought with her in a box, and after
her mother’s cremation, she had interred both parents’ remains in the tiny Whaletown Cemetery, in a plot with ample room for her and Oliver, too. When she mentioned this to her New York
friends, they told her that rural island living was making her tedious and morbid, but she disagreed. It was true that compared with Manhattan, there wasn’t a lot of excitement on their
island, but how much excitement did you need if you were dead?

3.

The Whaletown Post Office was a tiny wooden shack, clinging to a rocky outcrop on the edge of Whaletown Bay. The mail came over by ferry three times a week, and so three times a
week, a representative from each of the households in Whaletown got into a car or a truck or an SUV and drove to the post office to pick up the mail. This reckless squandering of fossil fuel drove
Oliver crazy.

“Why can’t we have a mailperson?” he would rant. “One person, one vehicle, cuts carbon, delivers all the mail. How hard is that?”

He refused to drive and always rode his bicycle, and when it was Ruth’s turn to go, he insisted that she walk, even in the rain. Even when a storm was brewing. It was three miles.

“You need the exercise,” he told her.

The wind was beginning to pick up and the rain was coming down hard. Ruth was soaked when she got to the post office. She fished her soggy outgoing letters from her pocket and
asked for stamps.

“Sou’easter,” Dora said, from behind her wicket. “Wind’s picking up. Hydro’ll be out by dinner. Good night for writing, eh?”

Dora was the postmistress, a small and deceptively mild-looking woman with a sharp tongue and a reputation for reducing her neighbors to tears for failing to pick up their mail in a timely
fashion, or arriving too early before she’d finished the sorting, or simply addressing their envelopes in an illegible hand. She was a retired nurse and she wrote poetry, which she submitted
in an orderly rotation to journals and literary magazines. She claimed not to like many people, especially newcomers, but she took an immediate shine to Ruth, and this was only in part due to
Ruth’s subscription to
The New Yorker
, which, as Muriel had informed her one day when she was complaining about the magazine’s slow arrival, Dora was in the habit of siphoning
off and taking home to read before delivering, belatedly, into Ruth’s mailbox. No, the real reason Dora liked Ruth was because Ruth was a fellow writer, a colleague, and whenever she came to
the post office, Dora would give her an update on the status of her poetic submissions. Over the years Ruth had known her, Dora had had several poems accepted for publication in small magazines,
but
The New Yorker
remained her holy grail, and she was steadfastly refusing to buy a subscription until they published one of her poems. This arrangement worked as long as Ruth kept her
subscription current, and Dora didn’t seem to mind. She maintained that collecting rejection slips was a noble and necessary part of a poet’s practice, and she was proud of her
collection. She was papering her outhouse with them, as she’d heard Charles Bukowski had done with his. Ruth admired her for admiring Bukowski.

Dora knew everything about everyone, and not only because she read people’s mail. She had an abiding and unapologetic interest in the business of others, and she was kind, too, in spite of
her curmudgeonly affect. She used to dote on Ruth’s mother and brought her garish bouquets of variegated roses from her garden. She always asked after her neighbors’ health and had a
stock of morphine left over from her nursing days which she would dispense when needed, when someone was injured, or dying, or needed to put down a favorite pet. She knitted layettes for the
pregnant single moms on the island, and on Halloween she made cookies that looked like severed fingers for the children, with almonds for the fingernails and red icing for blood. The post office
was like the village well. People lingered there, and it was where you went if you needed information.

Ruth had overcome her aversion to telephones twice that week, the first time to call Callie, and the second time to call Benoit LeBec. She had left a message, but when he didn’t call back,
she figured Dora would know why.

“Oh, they’ve been away,” Dora said, hammering the stamps onto Ruth’s damp letters with the Whaletown postage canceler. She was very proud of this canceler. It was the
oldest continuously used canceler in Canada, dating back to 1892, when Whaletown got its first post office.

“They’ve gone to Montreal for the niece’s wedding. They’ll be back tomorrow in time for the A meeting. What do you want with Benoit?”

Ruth took a step back from the wicket and pretended to fumble for change. She felt sure there were clues in the mysterious French composition book that would help her track down the Yasutanis,
and she wanted to get it translated as soon as she could, but she wasn’t about to tell Dora this. If Muriel was bad about spreading gossip, Dora was worse. As the postmistress, she saw it as
part of her job description, and Ruth was feeling oddly protective of Nao and her diary and didn’t want everyone to know. There were other people in the small mailroom, too, lingering in
front of their postal boxes, pretending to read their mail—an oyster farmer named Blake, a retired schoolteacher from Moose Jaw named Chandini, a young hippie chick who used to be called
Karen until she changed her name to Purity. No one was talking and everyone seemed to be waiting for her to answer.

“Oh,” Ruth said, handing Dora the money for the stamps. “Nothing, really. Just needed some help with a translation.”

“You mean that French notebook you found on the beach?” Dora asked.

Damn, Ruth thought. Muriel. There were no secrets on this goddamn island.

“A diary, too, eh?” Dora asked. “And some letters?”

There was no point in denying it. The others in the mailroom had moved closer to the wicket.

“Did it really drift over from Japan?” Blake, the oyster farmer, asked.

“Possibly,” Ruth said. “It’s hard to tell.”

“Don’t you think you should turn it in?” Chandini asked. She was a thin, nervous woman with stringy blond hair, who used to teach math.

“Why?” Ruth asked, squeezing past her and opening her postal box. “Turn it in to whom?”

“Fish and Wildlife?” Chandini said. “The RCMP? I don’t know about you, but if stuff’s washing up from Japan, I’m worrying about radiation.”

Purity’s eyes grew wide. “Oh wow,” she said. “Nuclear fallout. That would totally suck . . .”

“It’ll be a problem for the oysters,” Blake said.

“Salmon, too,” Chandini said. “All our food.”

“Totally,” Purity said, exhaling and drawing the word out long. “’Cause it’s in the air, too, and then it rains down and gets into the aquifer and like the whole,
entire food chain, and then into our bodies and stuff.”

Dora gave her a look.

“What?” the girl said. “I don’t want to get cancer and have deformed babies . . .”

Blake stroked his beard and then shoved his hands into his front pockets. His eyes were bright. “Heard there was a watch, too,” he said. “A real kamikaze watch.”

Ruth flipped through her mail and tried to ignore him.

“I’m interested in that historical stuff,” he said. “You think I could see it sometime?”

It was hopeless. Ruth held out her arm, and Blake and Chandini crowded in to see, but Purity backed away.

“That could be contaminated, too, right?” she said.

“Probably,” Ruth said. “Now that you mention it, I’m sure it is.”

Dora leaned out through the wicket. “Let me see.”

Ruth unbuckled the sky soldier watch and handed it to her, dangling it by the strap. Outside, the wind was starting to howl. Dora took the watch and whistled.

“Neat,” she said, strapping it to her wrist.

“Aren’t you scared of getting poisoned?” the girl asked.

“Honey,” Dora said. “I survived breast cancer. A little more radiation isn’t going to hurt.” She admired the watch, then unbuckled it and handed it back to Ruth.
“Here you go,” she said, and then she winked. “Good material, eh? How’s the new book coming?”

4.

Ruth got a lift back home with Blake in his truck, which smelled of oysters and the sea. He let her off at the foot of her road, and she ran up the long driveway to the house
through the pounding rain. Gusts of wind lashed the tall firs, and the boughs of the maple trees groaned. Maple was a brittle wood. A few years back, another neighbor died when a large branch fell
on his head in a storm. Widow-makers, they called them. She kept an eye out overhead as she ran. Where was the crow, she wondered.

The power had already flickered on and off, Oliver told her, so she ran upstairs to check her email. She was trying to be less ob-com about email, but more than forty-eight hours had passed
since she’d written to Professor Leistiko and she was impatient for a reply. She quickly scanned her inbox. No word from the professor. What now?

She could hear Oliver in the basement, fiddling with the old gas generator, trying to fire it up. They had a system for outages, which relied on a working generator to power several hundred
meters of tangled extension cord that snaked up from the basement, delivering electricity to the freezer and refrigerator before coiling through the kitchen and up the stairs to their offices. The
cords were hazardous. You could easily trip on a loop and fall down the stairs. If the generator didn’t work, they resorted to candles and flashlights and oil lamps. The generator was noisy.
Without it, and without the ambient presence of appliances—the hum and whir of fans and pumps and transformers—the silence in the house was profound. Ruth liked the silence. The problem
was you couldn’t power a computer or surf the Web with lamp oil.

The Internet was their primary portal onto the world, and a portal that was always slamming shut. Their access was supplied through a 3G cellular network, but the large telecommunications
corporation that provided their so-called service was notorious for selling more bandwidth than it could provide. The closest tower was on the next island over, and their connection was achingly
slow. In the summer, the problem was compounded by oversubscription and traffic. In the winter, it was the storms. The signal had to travel across miles of churning oceans, through densely
saturated air, and then, once it reached their shores, thread its way through the tall, wind-lashed treetops.

But at least for now the Internet was working and she wanted to take advantage of it before the power went out. She consulted her growing list of keywords and clues. She typed in
The Future
Is Nao!
The search engine returned a few unhelpful hits: some videos of an autonomous programmable humanoid French robot named NAO; a report by the National Audit Office about the importance
of safeguarding the future health of the honeybee.

“Did you mean to search for: The Future Is
Now
?” the engine asked her, helpfully.