A Tale for the Time Being (29 page)

4.

The association between catfish and earthquakes has persisted into modern times. The Yure Kuru mobile phone app warns users of a coming earthquake, providing information about
the location of its epicenter, the arrival time, and the seismic intensity. Yure Kuru means “Shaking Coming,” and the app’s logo is a cartoon catfish with a goofy smile and two
lightning bolts coming out of his head.

“That’s cute,” Oliver said, reaching for his iPhone. “We should have that. We’re due for a big one here. I wonder if it’ll work in Whaletown.”

They were sitting in front of the fire in the living room after a dinner of clam-and-oyster chowder, fresh-baked rosemary bread, and a salad of tender young kale and spicy mustard greens from
the greenhouse. It was still only February, but Oliver was managing to keep them supplied with fresh greens even during the winter months.

“In Stuttgart, where my parents grew up, they had gigantic catfish that lived at the bottom of the river Neckar. Nobody ever saw them except right before an earthquake, when the catfish
would rise to the surface. Huge, whiskery things, weighing up to two hundred pounds.”

“Were they really that big?”

“That’s what my dad said, but they’re pretty much all fished out now. You don’t see catfish that big anymore, except in Chernobyl. There’s a bunch of them that live
in the channel that used to bring cooling water to the condensers in the reactor. They hang out under the railway bridge. Nobody fishes there anymore, so the catfish thrive. They’ve gotten
really enormous, some even twelve or thirteen feet long. They’re bottom-feeders, and apparently the mud still contains a lot of radioactive particles, but the catfish don’t seem to
mind.”

Ruth thought once again about the clams. She had been purging them on the porch for twenty-four hours to get them to expel the mud and sand. She had a technique, which entailed soaking them in
buckets of seawater, to which she’d add a handful of cornmeal and a rusty nail. She’d agitate the water several times a day, and change the water after twelve hours.

She’d read about this method in a novel, but she’d forgotten which one. She seemed to recall it was a story about a family with a summer house in Maine or Massachusetts or possibly
Rhode Island. An East Coast enclave of beautiful summer people, with lanky golden children and a comfortable lifestyle, and a mother who knew how to make bivalves spit. The clams that this
beautiful New England family ate would have no unpleasant grit to grind between their strong, white teeth. Maybe it was the Hamptons. Memory is a funny thing. The mother’s technique to
achieve this grit-free end had stayed with Ruth, even though she had forgotten the plot of the novel, or why the technique was effective.

When she had related this to Oliver, he supplied a theory. “I think two things are happening. The cornmeal is simply food, which the clams ingest and which cleanses the green stuff from
their digestive tracts and intestinal organs.”

Ruth had been dicing potatoes for the chowder at the time he was explaining this. As she wielded the knife and listened, she could clearly see the image of the mother in the novel. She was
wearing a long dress made of fine white linen. Her clams would not have green stuff in their intestines.

“That’s the first process,” Oliver was saying. “It’s biological. The second process is electrochemical. Saltwater is an ionic solution and functions as an
electrolyte. The rusty nail, which is made of iron, acts as a conductor, and I imagine the bodies of the clams do, too.”

Actually, it probably was the Hamptons, Ruth was thinking. There were sand dunes and Atlantic breezes, green-and-white-striped awnings and canvas-covered deck chairs. The mother wore a white
dress that billowed in the afternoon breeze, or perhaps she was in shorts, and the gauzy curtains in the tall open windows of the house were what billowed.

“When you introduce the nail into the saltwater,” Oliver said, “it generates a small electrical charge, which is just enough to irritate the clams and cause them to purge the
sand.”

But then again, maybe she’d conflated the scene from the novel with something else. Maybe the beautiful blond mother in the billowing white dress didn’t put the rusty nail in the
bucket with the clams. It didn’t sound like something she’d do. Maybe the nail in the bucket was a Japanese trick that Ruth had picked up from her own mother or from one of her Japanese
friends.

“So basically,” Oliver had concluded, “you’re simultaneously feeding them and electrocuting them to make them shit and spit.”

Ruth, who was by this time chopping onions, wiped the tears from her eyes with the back of her hand. “Actually,” she said, “the novel was more about the family—tall cool
drinks and tennis whites and human relationships, that sort of thing. It didn’t go into a lot of detail about the electrochemistry.”

They ate in the living room in front of the fire and listened to the wind howl. It was too cold to wear billowing white dresses here, and besides, people in the Pacific Northwest wore practical
clothes, polypropylene and synthetic fleece, but Ruth couldn’t complain. The fire was nice and the chowder was delicious, rich and creamy. Whatever its origin or explanation, the technique
for purging the bivalves worked, and the clams were both plump and free of grit and sand. The cat liked the chowder, too. He’d been circling around all during their meal, trying to lick their
soup bowls. When Oliver shooed him away, the cat took a swipe at his hand, so Oliver grabbed him and pinned his head to the ground. Subdued but offended, Pesto had turned his back to them, shunning
them, and now he stared moodily into the fire.

“This sucks,” Oliver said. “I can download Yure Kuru, but it only works off data from the Japan Meteorological Agency. It won’t tell us anything about earthquakes in
Canada.”

Ruth stared into the flames. “I thought Canada was safe.”

“No place is safe,” Oliver said. “Okay, I’ve got it. Now we’ll know all about seismic activity in Japan.”

“Maybe we should go to Japan so you can use the app.”

“Maybe we don’t have to, since Japan is coming here.”

5.

“What?”

“Japan is coming here.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The earthquake,” Oliver said. “It moved the coast of Japan closer to us.”

“Really?”

Oliver looked puzzled. “Don’t you remember? The release of subduction caused the landmass near the epicenter to jump about thirteen feet in our direction.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Yes, you did. We talked about it. It also caused the planet’s mass to shift closer to the core, which made the earth spin faster. The increase in the speed of rotation shortened the
length of the day. Our days are shorter now.”

“They are? That’s terrible!”

He smiled. “You sound just like your mother . . .”

She ignored his comment. “How much time did we lose?”

“Not much. One point eight millionth of a second a day, I think it was. Do you want me to look it up?”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“I’m sure we talked about this,” Oliver said. “It was all over the Internet. Don’t you remember?”

“Of course I remember,” she lied. “I thought the days seemed awfully short. I figured it was my imagination.”

1.

By the end of the summer, with Jiko’s help, I was getting stronger. Not just strong in my body, but strong in my mind. In my mind, I was becoming a superhero, like
Jubei-chan, the Samurai Girl, only I was Nattchan, the Super Nun, with abilities bestowed upon me by Lord Buddha that included battling the waves, even if I always lost, and being able to withstand
astonishing amounts of pain and hardship. Jiko was helping me cultivate my
supapawa!
by encouraging me to sit zazen for many hours without moving, and showing me how not to kill anything,
not even the mosquitoes that buzzed around my face when I was sitting in the hondo at dusk or lying in bed at night. I learned not to swat them even when they bit me and also not to scratch the
itch that followed. At first, when I woke up, my face and arms were swollen from the bites, but little by little, my blood and skin grew tough and immune to their poison and I didn’t break
out in bumps no matter how much I’d been bitten. And soon there was no difference between me and the mosquitoes. My skin was no longer a wall that separated us, and my blood was their blood.
I was pretty proud of myself, so I went and found Jiko and I told her. She smiled.

“Yes,” she said, patting me on the arm. “Plenty of good food for mosquitoes.”

She explained to me that young people need lots of exercise and that we should exhaust ourselves on a daily basis or else we would have troublesome thoughts and dreams, which would result in
troublesome actions. I knew enough about young people’s troublesome actions to agree with her, so I didn’t mind that every day she made me work in the kitchen with Muji. I know Muji was
happy to have me there, because she told me so. Before I came, there was too much work for a single nun to do. I’ve probably said this before, but the thing you have to realize about temple
life is that it’s like living in a whole different era, and everything takes about a hundred times longer than it does in the twenty-first century. Muji and Jiko never waste anything. Every
rubber band or twist-tie, every piece of string or paper or scrap of fabric, they carefully collect and reuse. Muji has a thing for plastic bags and she would make me wash them carefully with soap
and water and hang them outside, where they would catch the sunlight and spin in the wind like jellyfish balloons as they dried. I didn’t mind, because I didn’t have much else to do,
but in my opinion, it took way too long. I tried to explain that it would be quicker and easier just to throw the old bags away and buy new ones, and then they would have more time for zazen, but
Jiko disagreed. Sitting zazen, washing freezer bags, same thing, she said.

The only time they ever throw anything away is when it’s really and truly broken, and then they make a big deal about it. They save up all their bent pins and broken sewing needles and
once a year they do a whole memorial service for them, chanting and then sticking them into a block of tofu so they will have a nice soft place to rest. Jiko says that everything has a spirit, even
if it is old and useless, and we must console and honor the things that have served us well.

So you can see how, with all this extra work, having an extra young person around really helps, and we were able to pickle more plums and cabbages, and dry more gourds and daikons, and take
better care of the temple garden. We were able to visit many parishioners who were old or sick, and sometimes when we visited them, I weeded their gardens, too.

I started getting up at five in the morning to sit zazen with them, and after the offerings and service and soji,
¹²¹
while Muji was cooking
breakfast, Jiko would make me run all the way down the mountain to the road and then all the way up to the temple again. She would be there to meet me as I came panting up the last few steps, my
legs like noodles. She’d be standing there with Chibi, the little black-and-white temple cat, and she would hand me a towel and a big jar full of cold water, and she’d watch me as I
drank it down.

“You have good straight legs,” she said once. “Nice and long. Strong.”

I was pleased and would have blushed if my face wasn’t already red from running.

“They are your father’s legs,” she continued. “He was a strong runner, too. Just a little faster than you.”

“You made him run up and down, too?”

“Of course. He was a young boy with many troublesome thoughts. He needed lots of exercise.”

I poured the remaining water from the jar over my head and then shook it. Water drops flew from the tips of my hair, showering Chibi, who jumped and moved away.

“I’m sorry, Chibi!” I cried, but of course he ignored me. He sat at a distance with his back turned and started licking himself. He seemed really offended, but he’s a cat
so I didn’t take it personally.

“Dad still has troublesome thoughts,” I said, watching the cat ignore me. “Maybe he should come back and live here with us. Maybe you could train him and teach him to be strong
again. He could run up and down, and do zazen, and work in the garden . . .”

The more I thought about it, the better my idea seemed, and before I knew it, the words were just falling out of my mouth. Please, Granny! I said. I’m serious. He needs help! And then I
told her all about the night he fell in front of the train, and how he and Mom were pretending it was an accident but it wasn’t, and about how he never left the apartment during the day, but
went out late at night and stayed out for hours and hours, and I knew because I stayed up and listened for him because I was afraid he wouldn’t come back. And how one night, when I
couldn’t stand it anymore, I snuck out after him, because I needed to know if he was stalking someone or going to meet a lover, which would kind of suck for Mom, but at least would give him a
raison d’être, and I followed him through the streets, staying in the shadows and keeping close to the walls. The route he walked made no sense, but he didn’t care, like he was a
robot and his feet had been programmed to execute the kind of random algorithm we learned about in computing class, but his mind had been turned off so he didn’t notice where he was going.
Maybe he was sleepwalking. Sometimes he entered different neighborhoods, and sometimes the streets got so old and narrow and twisting I was sure we were lost. He never stopped or spoke to anyone or
bought anything, not even cigarettes or beer from a vending machine, and now that I think of it, we never passed anyone on the streets either, so maybe he had an avoidance algorithm built into his
program, the way some robots do so they don’t bump into things.

We walked for hours. I was scared because I knew I’d never find my way back home alone, and I didn’t want him to know I’d been following, but I was too tired to keep up. And
just then he made one last turn, and we came out into the same small park on the bank of the Sumida River that I’d seen in my bed in my metal-bound dream. It was exactly like I pictured it.
Off to one side, next to the riverbank, there was a playground area with a swing set and a slide and a teeter totter, and I knew that’s where he was headed. And sure enough, he walked
straight over to the swing set and sat down. He had his back to me, so I went around and hid behind a cement panda where I could see his face. He lit a Short Hope and began to swing. He was facing
the water, and he started pumping his legs and swinging higher and higher, with his cigarette clenched between his teeth, grinning like he really meant business. It looked like he was trying to get
that swing going as high as he could so that when it reached the top of its arc and he let go, the momentum of his swinging would send him sailing over the low safety wall and into the Sumida
River, where he would drown and his body would sink to the bottom and get eaten by a kappa or a giant river catfish. I swear, I could see it, the moment when his hands slipped from the chain and
his body shot out of the seat, flying forward, his arms and legs spread wide to hug the oncoming air and the dark, deep water.
No . . . no . . . no!
I heard myself whispering, and my
heart was beating in time to the swinging.
Now . . . now . . . now!