Love and Other Ways of Dying (49 page)

At first you listen for the whirring sound of helicopter rotors or the gurgle of a boat engine. Even the faintest murmur sparks an attempt to rise, shout, wave. But as the hours pass, you descend into yourself, shutting the cupboards one by one. The rice, the pigeons, the lumberyard, Yuko, your parents, your daughter: It wasn’t such a bad life, but for the ending. The debris field has become so thick it looks like land, and the oil keeps spreading. You’re too tired to think or care. Head bowed, you focus only on what’s right before you, the fringe where the rotted roof is being licked by salt water. Soon, you know, the dark flank of sea will transform into rolling hills of water, and another wave will come for you. Now black water bubbles up through the planks and scraps of corrugated tin. A last note to your parents:
I’m in a lot of trouble. Sorry for dying before you. Please forgive me.

Just before you lie down on the futon and wait for death,
there comes a disturbance on the horizon again, the faraway shape of a boat, the whir of a propeller at the edge of your mind. The sound brings you shakily to your feet, where you shout and wave … until you watch the boat turn away, diminishing on the horizon.

A terrible lonesomeness fills this void now. It would be good to sleep, though that surely spells the end. But it’s over now. In your beleaguered twilight, you either see or dream that the receding boat has changed course and is circling back. But who can trust these visions anymore? Before your eyes, it seems to grow into a gray lifeboat with one, two, three … 
three times that
, nine rescue workers in green bodysuits and gray life vests. When the boat doesn’t turn away, when you can feel a searchlight on your skin, you let loose your last primal yawp, “Help me!”

Out of the oblivion, a clear voice responds, “We’re here,” and the boat drifts alongside your roof-home, and the voice asks, “Which side is safest?” And you say, “The side toward land, please,” as you strip the plastic container full of notes from your body and place it on the altar of your futon. Then one of the bundled figures steps out of the lifeboat onto the tippy roof and comes toward you with arms outstretched. The figure leads you across, five paces, and only when you lean forward into their boat and splay your body over its hard gunwale, like a glorious falling tree, do you know it’s real. Immediately you’re wrapped in blankets by the incredulous men. They want to know who you are, hand you yet another can of energy drink. Speechless, you take a long slurp, then burst into uncontrollable tears.
Who are you?
Your memory opens suddenly to a fire truck on the road before your house just before the wave, the loudspeaker announcement over and over again, “Please evacuate.” And you remember directing your wife to move the rice seed into the barn while you went up to the terrace to stand lookout. Even a quarter mile to higher ground and she would otherwise be safe.

You’re tested for radiation, transferred to a naval destroyer, and given porridge and
umeboshi
, pickled plum. You’re placed in a hot bath, and the crew members are shocked by the amount of mud that comes off your body, even as you continue to shiver with such violence that they must remove your body from the warm water. Then you’re on a helicopter, airlifted over the ravaged coastline—the ground below silt-blackened as if burned, the pornographic wreckage of houses and buildings, colorful entrails of bedsheets and curtains, people below digging with their bare hands for children, parents, spouses, mothers washing dead babies with spit—to a hospital outside the radiation zone. Meanwhile, the images of your rescue have been televised across the world, the man on his roof, dragged nine miles out to sea, found on the third day, a day almost devoid of survivors but you.

If you had supernatural powers, Hiromitsu, or thought yourself prophetic, now would be the moment to deliver your message to the world. Now would be your moment to make an example or speak uplifting words. To transubstantiate into a symbol. Of hope. Perseverance. Strength. For the news reports call you a miracle.

But you’re more humble than that—and broken—fearful as well, for now you must tell your parents, your daughter, everyone, exactly what happened. You would rather make yourself invisible—almost rather have drowned—than reveal your disobedience, your stubborn selfishness, for that’s what you think of it as: the sins of a child. You lie in your hospital bed with IVs, doctors who come and go. You’re dehydrated and whittled down, face unrecognizable at first, bruised and cut but nonetheless in good recovery. You’re out of the hospital that evening, and when you first see your father at your uncle’s house, you’re surprised by how spry he seems. In the days before the tsunami, he’d been struggling with his health, and slid downhill when you went missing,
unable to sleep or eat. He wouldn’t listen to the radio or watch the news. But your mother says that when friends arrived to say that you had floated onto the television screen that third day, he seemed to regenerate. In what is for him a great show of emotion, he says, “I’m glad you’re alive. Many people made mistakes. You need to keep living.” That’s it—no encouragement or criticism, no questions, as if he doesn’t want to know.

Of course, you tell your mother everything, because underneath, she’s stronger than he—and then, shortly after, you go to Tokyo and you meet your daughter at the Kawasaki train station, standing anonymously among the hordes. You haven’t seen your daughter cry since she was a teenager. And after a quick hug, describing how it was you who suggested that Yuko carry the rice seed to the barn while you went and stood on the terrace staring at the mountain, as your daughter reads between the lines (
You could have saved yourselves
), her expression even now is unchanging. She tells you she’s glad that you’re alive, and you believe her. When you’ve finished, she seems to absorb the truth—that her mother is gone, but that you’ve returned—and says, “Well, then, you must feel better, for you’re talking a lot.” Whatever else she thinks she holds inside and turns to go home, swallowed by the crowd. And you—you can’t return to your razed house, to your neighborhood between the sea and the mountain, but relocate to a suburb of Tokyo, to a subsidized apartment big enough for you and your parents, in which you dream of the place you just left.

These are strange days, in this anonymous eight-story beige structure where, at first, you know nobody—and where the world carries on without reflection, the bustle of salarymen in the stations and streets, traffic rushing somewhere. You say nothing about who you are to the neighbors but spend your time trying to keep busy, all in order to forget, too. Unbidden, you begin a daily sweeping of the walkways at the complex. You and your
broom, hoping to make yourselves useful. You also try to spend time with your grandson, who is now a short commute away, but of course mothering doesn’t come as naturally to you as it did to Yuko. And so between your parents, who sit all day watching television in sad nostalgia for everything lost, and your daughter, whose life is busy and now motherless, your displacement is complete.

You’re not a poet, in fact you’ve never read, let alone written, much of anything in your life—Yuko read feverishly, as if she were running out of time—and yet ever since you scribbled that first note on the roof at sea, words have become a conduit. They make the pain smaller, you say. Now you write poems and short fables, reflections and admonitions. All the scraps go in a black bag belted to your waist, the vault of your collected emotions and memories. You write one poem, “A Song of Five Lines,” that goes as follows:

This is how you speak to her, through the scraps in the bag, but also aloud sometimes. Before eating, you might murmur, “Thank you,” as if she’s prepared the food on your plate. You might do the same on a beautiful day, as if she’s created it. And before bed each night, you tell her you love her. You say this to her presence or spirit, but you forgo mementos, little altars, or pictures on the wall. You can’t bear the idea of seeing her again, as you knew her in all those endless days before the wave.

Here’s how you think about it: Together you constructed
many things throughout your life. Then her body disappeared, but the constructions still remain. Human beings die: That’s natural. But to accept her death is to lose all hope. And yet you know now in retrospect that there were so many small goodbyes, foretellings, and encouragements. There was a dream you had in the months before the tsunami: You were alone and couldn’t find your wife—everywhere you looked, she wasn’t there—and you woke up instantly, thinking,
I need to find an accountant
, because she did all the accounting. There was a trip Yuko made to see your grandson, one that lasted more than a week. She returned home and told you that since you’d survived ten days without her, cooking and cleaning, you were now ready for anything. And then, of course, she habitually ribbed you. If it came down to it, she’d ask, if the world came to an end and you could take only one thing with you, would it be the pigeons or me?

“The pigeons,” you would say, just to see that look on her face, that instant of mock anger, admiration, and uncertainty.

Three months later, in June, you go back, traveling on the bullet train two hours north under hazy sun to the city of Fukushima, continuing to the coast by car. Unable to stay away, your parents have recently returned to the village, moved into temporary housing there, one-room modules in clusters off a main road, each with a television, a refrigerator, some rudimentary furniture, a latrine. The clothes are hung on hangers off nails in the wall. After driving through the mountains, through fluctuating radiation levels, a landscape steeped in cesium that will persist for decades, your first stop is the lumberyard where Mr. Mori, the boss, removes his white hard hat and greets you with bows that you return in double. “How is everything?” he asks after the formalities, placing a hand at the center of your back as he leads
you out into the yard, and you respond by saying, “She’s still missing,” and he shakes his head
what a shame.

Mr. Komuro, Mr. Tomita, and all the other workers: They’re astounded and pleased to see you, so pleased that they keep asking, “When are you coming back?” You smile, for this is something you want more than anything
—to come back
—but have no answer. Or do, but don’t say:
I’m trying to fill the space left behind by my wife.
They intuit some part of this anyway. Two here have lost their homes; a colleague at a nearby yard died; Mr. Hamauchi, in the office, has lost his father, his body identified by DNA. Most all of the men operated the heavy machinery—the backhoes and forklifts—used to try to dig out the tar-filled bodies buried by the sea. Yours isn’t the only survivor story they tell in the yard. They tell of people swept off in cars who lived, of families carried inland who clung to trees, and when the wave sucked back out to sea, it cleaved the wife, the husband, the child. “We had a regular life until we felt how great the power of nature could be,” says Mr. Mori. “I went to the hills and watched the waves coming. I could see people running, like it was a movie.”

“I was too scared to look at the ocean,” you say in return. “I looked at the mountain.”

And then you head toward the sea, to where the house once stood. The landscape appears bulldozed, miles of decimation, houses lopped from the earth as if they were rice stalks, chunks of concrete set at unsettling angles. Your neighbors have lost six of seven in their family; another family of four has disappeared. Babies and grandparents alike, gone. Three hundred yards from the ancient wood shrine is your driveway. Now down you go, past the imaginary garden of corn and onion, potato, garlic, and taro. The imaginary peonies are in full bloom, the invisible apricot tree bears small fruit, the imaginary koi pond teems. Here was the greenhouse where the rice seeds were planted; the warehouse
that kept the machines, the combine, tractor, and rice-drying apparatus; the barn that kept your thirty pigeons. Perhaps, in the end, you did love them best, for they seemed unlovable to everyone else.

Your folly, the concrete house, is a pile of rubble.
(Here is the kitchen and here is the bathtub; here is the bedroom with the roof above.)
The foundation remains, a last footprint, but there’s nothing else: no garden or outbuildings. Not even her ghost lingers. By the ruined koi pond, in a desolation of cinder block and metal rod, is a note intended for Yuko, left by one of her best friends, set beneath a rock near a guttering candle.

“I’ve come here for you,” it reads. “How long are you going to play hide-and-seek? That’s enough. Come out!… Yuko, can you hear me?”

Before the trip back to Tokyo, you visit your uncle, who has kept something for you. He reaches into the closet, wrestles with a heavy bag, and there on the floor at your feet are the clothes they found you in, nine miles out to sea.

Here is the flannel shirt and here are the pants. Here’s the purple fleece—and the green down jacket. Here’s the comic-book page scribbled with your note (
I’m in a lot of trouble …
) and the container in which you placed that note. And so you take them with you, the magical clothes that you wore on the last day of your former life.

You sleep that night in the makeshift home of your parents, on the floor beside them, listening to them breathe. You rise early so your father can cut your hair, the cold silver blade against your head while you sit under his hand, wordless, with gratitude. You ride the bullet train south, disembark at Kawasaki station to walk to your new home, the empty apartment, where you will sweep
the sidewalks. You are here now, alive, adrift. The crowd—the salarymen and the schoolkids, everyone on their busy way—swells. It rises around you and bears you aloft and out into the light, where birds, too lovely and painful to gaze upon, swarm the sky.

I
GIVE YOU
T
HURMAN
M
UNSON IN
the eighth inning of a meaningless baseball game, in a half-empty stadium in a bad Yankee year during a fourteen-season Yankee drought, and Thurman Munson is running, arms pumping, busting his way from second to third like he’s taking Omaha Beach, sliding down in a cloud of luminous, Saharan dust, then up on two feet, clapping his hands, turtling his head once around, spitting diamonds of saliva: safe.