The Sea Came in at Midnight (31 page)

If nothing else, she might at least wonder how it is she alone walks through Tokyo without a surgical mask, inhaling without consequence the time-contaminated air. As she walks through Ueno Park, she doesn’t see how the cherry blossoms shake loose from the trees in panic; as she rides the subways she doesn’t realize that it’s not typical for every subway train in Tokyo to break down all the time, that in fact in Tokyo the subway almost never breaks down, except when she’s on it. As she walks through the deranged electronic Vegas of Akihabara, with its hundreds of open electronics shops and stores and stalls of televisions and stereos and computers seeming to topple over one another, she takes no note of the televisions crazily changing channels, the stereos suddenly blasting songs no one has ever sung, let alone heard, the computers crashing in homage to her. She doesn’t even fully grasp the situation the night she rises wearily, nauseated, from her tatami mat to go downstairs and meet her best client. Straining to put on her blue dress, fastening the last button, she finally takes note of the
29.4.85
on her body and realizes with a start that today happens to be the twenty-ninth of April, the fifteenth anniversary of the fading date. She counts on her fingers the time difference and calculates that in L.A. at this very moment the twenty-ninth of April is just beginning to dawn, and then she goes downstairs to meet Doctor Kai, only to find him sitting in their booth, eyes peacefully closed, literally as still as death.

Doctor Kai had just gotten to a particularly important and difficult part of his memoirs. As it happened, the old man was actually from America, or at any rate had spent a great deal of his life there, which might have accounted for his special rapport with Kristin. By the time he returned to his Japanese homeland some ten years ago, after more than forty years of living in the States, his wife was dead, his disgraced and disowned daughter Saki had once again dropped from sight, and so all Doctor Kai had left was a memory so American in content and process, he explained to Kristin, that few Japanese girls understood.

Kristin understood. I can see the nuclear halo of Nagasaki across the bay—she recounted his words later in her journal—from my hometown of Kumamoto that August morning in 1945, around eleven o’clock, like the neon halo of Las Vegas: a great glowing star: I was twenty-six then. That was how Doctor Kai began. Over the next several weeks he returned every evening, distraught on the occasions Kristin wasn’t available, patiently waiting for his time with her on the occasions she was occupied with someone else; he had just gotten up to somewhere around 1988 or ’89, a particularly painful recollection of the last time he saw his daughter and exiled her from him forever with his silence, when Kristin said, We’ll finish tomorrow night—and reserved him a slot in her schedule.

Racked with nihilism, choking on his words, the old man had said to her, “We are living in an age of chaos.”

“Yes,” answered Kristin, “I’ve heard.”

Sitting beside the old dead doctor in the dark of their booth while waiting for someone to come for his body, having finished her story, Kristin notices something in the palm of his cupped hand, which rests on the seat at his side. Without taking it from his hand, she nonetheless cranes her neck around to try and make out what it is. She so convolutes her body in order to identify what the old doctor holds that she almost winds up sitting in his dead lap; that’s when she sees it’s a claim ticket, with a number. The next afternoon Mika presents Kristin with the ticket, explaining as best she can that it seems only fitting to all concerned—though Kristin has no idea who that might be—that the ticket should be bequeathed to her. Without Kristin’s knowing what it claims, nonetheless it is an odd and disappointing inheritance. Kristin can’t help wondering why it couldn’t have been ten or twenty million yen instead. But on her first day off from work, even as she wakes more nauseated than she’s yet been during her pregnancy, Kristin leaves the Hotel Ryu and takes the late-afternoon tram out across the bay to where Mika has told her she’ll find the address on the ticket. The white tram on its white track juts south out over the black water apparently toward nothing at all, or nothing that Kristin can see, until the tram turns east, in the direction of a small man-made finger of island curling into the bay from the city.

Then there’s no missing it. Even from out over the water several kilometers away Kristin can suddenly see the monumental aquariumlike structure that sits on the island, its previous invisibility a trick of the Tokyo light, where the gray of the bay and the gray of the sky and the gray of the wide-open brick plaza on which the building sits all run into each other. With the turn of the tram and the shift of the hazy light, the tremendous aquarium suddenly reveals itself as an interlocking piece of sea and sky in a completely elemental universe of water and air and stone, a huge patch of sky swimming before her in crystal-blue blocks of glass, covering the equivalent of several square city blocks and stacked some thirty stories into the air like massive cubes of ice frozen together, filling the horizon. Even from several kilometers away, before the tram pulls into the station, Kristin can make out the thousands of silver time-capsules floating throughout the building in a lattice of intersecting interior canals. Dwarfed by the building, the tiny figures of hundreds of people can be seen standing around the perimeter looking in. When the blinding glint of the sun off the peak of the aquarium reflects into her eyes, Kristin suddenly realizes that the light she used to see from her window when she lived at the ryokan was the moon off the top of this glass building that is otherwise rendered transparent by both night and day. A Fuji mist surrounds the aquarium’s highest spires.

Of course, Kristin thinks nothing of it when, just as the tram pulls into the station, it lurches and, for the first time ever, in an audible gasp of confused machinery and technology, breaks down. Baffled attendants and security guards help the passengers off the cars onto the platform. Kristin and the other passengers descend the steps from the open station and make their way across the gray brick plaza toward the time-capsule aquarium; in the open empty expanse between, nothing else can malfunction as Kristin passes. Near the building, signs presumably direct Kristin, but they’re in Japanese. Several pedestrian corridors run beneath the aquarium from one side to the other, through which people stroll looking up at a distant and obscured sky beyond the water and glass. On the outer glass walls, condensation forms from the frigid temperature inside, and little kids run their fingers through the moisture.

Inside the front entrance and at the far corner of a huge interior lobby, with the last of the twenty-ninth of April 1985 faintly receding into her flesh, Kristin shows her ticket to a man behind a booth and he points her to the other end of the lobby down a glass hallway. The ceiling of the inner lobby rises hundreds of meters above her, its glass balconies full of people circling the edge; and all around her, as though floating in the sky, countless capsules gleam in the sun, shining through the glass like metal stars. From one of the structure’s upper suspended ramparts, a little girl being pulled along by her impatient mother releases a red balloon that Kristin watches float higher and higher up into the glassy trellis overhead, a drop of blood disappearing down the drain of the sky. As she makes her way to the claims department, she notices what appears to be a number of security people running excitedly in the other direction, and far off she can hear something like an alarm, harsh and bleating, less a bell than a buzz saw. A few other people in the building look around at the sound. But no one seems especially concerned.

At the claims department Kristin finds she has to wait her turn with a crowd of other claimants. The rather unsettling blast of the distant alarm continues. After ten minutes, when Kristin gets to the window and presents her ticket, there’s another flurry of men in uniform rushing through the hall, and finally people seem to be wondering what’s going on. Three minutes later, the woman behind the window counter presents Kristin with the capsule.

It’s still wet and cold, just fished out of its glacial coffin somewhere in the upper glassy catacomb. It’s round and very shiny as though it’s been polished, perfectly unmarred except for the small number etched in the rim that matches the number that was on the claim ticket. Kristin is studying the capsule when several policemen come in and start saying something very emphatically, and an announcement blasts out from an overhead speaker at a frightening volume. Kristin has no idea what’s being said, of course, which seems inconvenient, since everyone around her, from the waiting claimants to the woman behind the counter to the policemen themselves, responds with nothing less than sheer panic.

From all corners of the lobby, across the glass ramparts above her, there’s a terrified stampede for the main door.

Clutching her time-capsule, Kristin runs with everyone else. There’s a crush in the doorway, among people almost too civilized for sheer survival; it puts Kristin at an advantage. Bigger than many of those around her, including the men, she bulls her way through. Outside, hundreds of people are now fleeing from the colossal aquarium across the open gray plaza, couples divided and frantically looking for each other, women scooping up children, younger people moving older people as fast as they can. At the tram station in the far distance, passengers who have finally gotten off the broken-down train and are just starting to make their way across the plaza stop in their tracks, wondering what’s happening. Sirens wail in the distance and flashing police cars appear on the horizon, speeding along the thread of land that connects the city to the small island, along with a stream of screaming fire engines and ambulances, while security guards from the aquarium are blowing whistles and desperately motioning everyone away from the building. Kristin keeps looking back over her shoulder, irritated that she’s apparently the only one in these circumstances who doesn’t speak the stupid language. But none of the others around her seem any more certain of what’s happening than she is, and when she finally stops at the edge of the gray plaza to turn and look back at the aquarium, as though waiting for the entire situation to explain itself, with a cop yelling at her and gesturing for her to move on, the situation explains itself.

There’s a crack, like lightning but not lightning, and an explosion from a corner of the building, and a wall of water is launched at Kristin in a flame of glass.

Things never happen in slow motion like people say. Things always happen much faster than people can know or comprehend: what happens in slow motion is the memory of the thing later; it’s surprisingly vivid, rendered in more detail than seemed possible to register at the time. Later Kristin will remember the event with more precision, the swirl of the new river roaring across the plaza as millions of liters of water burst from the building, carrying thousands of time-capsules like bullets. The power of the onslaught has only begun to wane when it reaches Kristin, hitting her so hard it instantly springs loose from her arms the capsule she’s been holding as she goes under. To those around her who see her, in her light blue dress not entirely dissimilar to the color of the water, it looks as though only Kristin’s face is left—a blond head bobbing among the waves. Under the water, perhaps from the sun above her, perhaps from some detonation in her mind, there’s a white flash before her like a Moment, a submerged imploding star of faith and memory, and going through it, she’s surprised to find herself back above the water’s surface, gasping and flailing for the capsule she had held, grabbing it back into her possession as a torrent of other capsules surf past her and into her. One swipes a gash across her face. The water furiously sweeps her farther from the aquarium, its rapids unsure where to carry her, until she’s finally deposited in a wave near the top of the tram-station steps.

S
HE CAN’T BE UNCONSCIOUS
of long. She wakes to what she first believes is an astounding sun in her eyes.

But it isn’t the sun itself, it’s the sun’s reflected blaze off the water and glass that fill the plaza in a lake of light. Kristin rolls out of the sun into the shade of the overhang of the tram station; cut everywhere, bleeding, she assumes the pain in her side is from several cracked ribs. She dozes a little more until—after what’s been a remarkably silent and stupefied catastrophe—she wakes to the air finally filling with cries. Raising herself, she expects to see a holocaust in front of her, and in fact water and glass are everywhere, and across the plaza people lie hurt and, for all she knows, dead. She expects to see people crying over relatives and friends, she expects to see people crying at carnage, but that isn’t what people are crying about; they aren’t crying about the ruptured building or the dashed bodies. They’re crying because in the fall of twilight the flooded landscape is covered with thousands of beached and gutted time-capsules, their contents strewn from the shores of the aquarium out to the bay of the city. First in tens, then in hundreds, people wade through the water from one capsule to the next, many ripping from their faces the surgical masks that then float out into Tokyo Bay like dead white cherry blossoms.

In the light of the moon over Tokyo, this goes on through the night. Finally one of the nurses making the rounds of the disaster reaches Kristin; in broken English she confirms that Kristin has probably cracked two or three ribs, and explains there isn’t much to be done about it except give her some pills for inflammation. Kristin’s bleeding has stopped. Slowly and painfully she gathers up her capsule and waits another hour for a repaired tram to take her home. At the Hotel Ryu she doesn’t see anyone, none of the memory girls or their clients, as though the Tokyo night has been wiped clean of memory, and she goes straight to her room up on the third floor where, for a while, she sleeps. She has a great deal of pain in her side from her ribs, and later in the night, when she wakes, it’s with a start so violent she suspects she’s fractured her rib cage more by turning in her sleep; but then the pain, no longer just in her ribs, is irresistible, and she stumbles in terror through the dark hotel to the toilet down the hall. She makes it to the toilet just in time to see the glistening white rain of Kierkegaard Blumenthal run from her body.