In the film McNamara introduced his eleven rules of war. “In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil,” which sounded like something Google might say now, and “Belief and seeing are often wrong,” giving Dan the room to wonder which axiom was more valuable and which was more self-exculpatory.
Dan was probably ADD. That’s what Amy said. Belief and seeing are often wrong. How his mind jumped around! Theo most likely had inherited his neurology. Amy had blurted that out, too, more than once actually, when she was tired and frustrated—which was pretty much all the time these days—then walked it back, because as angry as they got sometimes (they were married) she never truly wanted to hurt him. He’d always felt safe in the arms of her love.
“Coney Island brain,” his mother had called it: whirring things, music, lights lighting up all over the place; it had been this way until he had found his life’s work, writing and reporting (and then on the weekends, when he was supposed to rest, the whole amusement park jazz in his head would rev up again, unless he did something totally immersive, like pogoing in a mosh pit, or getting so fucked up he could no longer feel his legs, which got kind of hard of course once they’d had kids).
Now there was no job-related discipline around to gird him, no deadlines to narrow and deepen his focus, no coworkers to both impress and egg him on. He was going crazy not working. He felt worthless and he was going crazy. Belief and seeing are often wrong! Good thing for the lovers of out of sight, out of mind that radiation is colorless, odorless, tasteless, making it so easy to deny. Mrs. Rini had taught him that, too, in science class (which came directly after cursive), and he’d never forgotten to be terrified of radioactivity’s invisibility, the inherent insidiousness, like an evil villain’s superpower.
Ever since 2011, when the earthquake and tsunami hit Japan and the nuclear reactors at the Daiichi power plant had first flooded, then exploded, and then actively melted down, hard news, actual data on the results of these catastrophes, had been difficult to nail. The privately owned Tokyo Electric Power Company, which oversaw the plants—an embattled and, Dan thought, clueless firm since day one—had been less than forthcoming with information. Time and time again the Japanese government had proven itself to be an inept communicator. The Japanese lived in an official state of disavowal. The country’s Government Secrets Act put reporters in danger of being jailed for revealing unsanctioned information. Dan was a freedom-of-the-press guy, Je Suis Charlie, a Twitter buddy of Glenn Greenwald’s. He saw the GSA as Japan’s Patriot Act. A dangerous, immoral abomination.
If he had a job, a real one, not, like the last two, in custom publishing—one, for God’s sake, geared to producing a lifestyle mag for the owners of a specific brand of luxury car—Dan would have jumped into action at this kind of official taunt. “The Government Secrets Act.” Fuck that.
Along with his fellow “people who tweet,” he had from time to time—between expressing abject disgust and love for the New York Giants, and curating a gallery of Donald Trump’s aerodynamics-defying hairstyles—bemoaned the lack of international coverage, which lulled the whole world into thinking things were actually under control over there. Or at least far away enough not to matter. He was busy worrying daily instead about, in no significantly apparent order: ISIS, Syria, the flood of refugees across Europe, Boko Haram, insane Republicans, income inequality, what to eat for dinner, the morality or potential deliciousness of foie gras and cinnamon French toast ice cream sandwiches, which Dan had just read about in an honest-to-goodness although lousy paper (the Chronicle, where Dan used to be employed) this very morning (and tweeted about it, good God, he was that desperate to connect).
Not working could flatten just about anyone’s life. A person’s dignity chewed up, extruded, and expulsed like a tasteless wad of gum, then poleaxed and crushed by throngs of inured stilettos, boots, and Crocs on a sidewalk in front of Neiman Marcus. Dan had joined the unemployed ranks of tennis moms, urban teens, ex–factory workers, midlevel managers, an army of newly minted PhDs, the undereducated, downsized, oversized, disabled, bored, and boneless nonworking Americans; he was now as ineffectual as the morbidly obese humans in that movie he’d tortured little boy Jack with, Wall-E. No wonder Dan, bitter and scared, clung to his iPhone the way “some cling to their religion and their guns.” It was like an oxygen tank for his breath-starved mind.
He pulled into the parking lot next to the restaurant, sliding the old Volvo into one of ten empty spots. He put the transmission in park and then pulled his keys out of the ignition. It took him a moment to get out of the car. But he did. He unhooked his seat belt and stepped out into the evening. The air was so cool and glassy, the darkening sky so shiny and bright. Coming from the East, Dan never totally got over this nightly sensation of envelopment. He supposed it was akin to sliding a smooth leg into a classic silk stocking. Amy wore panty hose when she had to or simply went bare-legged. Maybe tonight he would ask Maryam what the real deal in fine hosiery actually felt like.
Dan walked down California Avenue. He walked past Avalon Yoga. Amy had made him take a sitting meditation class there a couple weeks ago to either rev him up or calm him down—it was hard to know what she was aiming for that day. If she wasn’t ostentatiously holding her tongue, she was either complaining gently about his “lack of agency” or worrying aloud about his “anxiety and distraction.” Whichever it was, her best friend, Lauren, had hit upon yoga and meditation as possible answers for him—a real original thinker, that Lauren. (“I need a job,” Dan said in frustration when Amy wouldn’t let up. “I know,” Amy said. “But maybe this kind of mindfulness will help you approach the search from a fresh angle . . .” Which meant what, exactly? Teaching journalism at Jack’s school? How much lower could he fall? Dan thought. Stock boy at Trader Joe’s? And it infuriated him the way she let her sentences trail off in the manner of someone trying to be a good wife but sick and tired of carrying the bulk of the burden herself. Even her well-worn patience and innate kindness were an affront to him.)
At Avalon, he’d found middle-aged women with middle-aged haircuts, bowl-shaped and hitting them squarely at the chin, perversely highlighting that little hammock of skin below the jaw that started to appear around age forty. There was an ancient Japanese man and his handsome gray-haired son, both so lean and strong, the sinews on their calves were as impressively stringy as they were scary. Stanford girls with their sweatshirts and shorts and hairless legs, friendship bracelets tied around their ankles, ubiquitous ponytails. Dan was alone with his overheated gray matter, a dusky bubbling neural porridge. No Internet, no books, magazines, hell, no podcasts or Netflix, no streaming to help him cool off.
Apparently, that’s what his own breath was for, or so sayethed the beautiful ageless dark-skinned female instructor in tunic and tights, with a long metallic-y braid snaking like liquid silver around her shoulder. “Take deep cleansing breaths,” she’d said, or was it the idiot principal of Theo’s school who had said this? Was he conflating again? Zhang. Dan had half expected her to walk into Mindful Meditation in a tight fleece pantsuit. The longer he sat, the more rabid his thinking felt. What could he say? Meditation didn’t work for him. He survived on heedless cerebral infusions. In the yoga studio, he’d almost gone postal.
Dan left the circle before the hour was over. When he got back into his car, he simply shut all the windows and screamed. Then he drove to the gym and lifted weights for a while; at least the music kept him focused—Eminem, Macklemore, Kanye, a CrossFit playlist he’d downloaded while researching and then eschewing the discipline out of a wimpy brand of fear (he hated burpees). Now he looked in Avalon’s window. He could see people in the back studio standing on their heads. Maybe he should try that instead. Flattening his thoughts, thinking horizontally.
Fukushima was the kind of fucked-up crap that once got Dan out of bed in the morning, so now that he was living in bed, it would have been natural for him to post his own responses to Maryam’s call for citizen scientists and citi
zen journalists at noon or at three in the morning, post or ante meridian, it sort of didn’t matter anymore, but he hadn’t bothered. Not until he met her. Once he met her, the story caught on fire. The obliterating wreckage from the one-two punch of the earthquake and the tsunami, the flooding that had shut down the electrical cooling systems, which were there to keep the radioactive spent rods from overheating in the six reactors, three of which melted down, the chaos of the forced evacuations—how about the scores who perished in the mass migrations, many of them elderly and infirm? How about the single patient left without food or care to die alone, abandoned in his hospital bed by the freaked-out medical staff? None of this even had anything to do with radiation poisoning. Panic and poor planning, more like it. And now the ghost towns still forbidden, all those displaced citizens, over 100,000, their anguish and desolation.
The Russians had eventually surrounded their own personal nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in a tomb of cement. In contrast, the Daiichi spent rods, still leaking radiation, were in the long process of being moved individually to cooling ponds. It had taken over a year to remove four hundred tons of consumed fuel from the upper levels of Reactor 4. There were now three more reactors to go. The more difficult task of removing the actual cores was scheduled to commence in 2025. Dan could be a grandfather or dead in the ground by then. Japan had such a high level of seismicity, over 1,500 earthquakes estimated per year, he had to wonder: What if there was another accident or earthquake? Another tsunami with the reactors now stored at ground level?
Initially, Dan was more concerned with following the “official” spiel, the pure paucity of it, more interested in the theater, the Kabuki, Tepco’s stance, posturing and withholding and their out-and-out lies. It took them two months to admit that the plant was in meltdown! Even now, years post facto, radiation continued to leak into the sea. Daily, three hundred tons of contaminated water poured into the Pacific, polluting Japan, entering the aquifer, poisoning the food chain, crossing the ocean, soon to be in his kids’ milk, he was sure of it—the expensive local organic stuff that Amy insisted they drink, from Straus creamery, those beautiful fat cows up in Marin chewing on grass soaked with sea spray, sea spray with trace elements of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, dispersed across the Pacific now, leaching their way into his children’s bones.
Even if some scientists pooh-poohed its dangers, Dan was concerned. “We live in a radioactive state,” Dr. Angela Mayhews from the University of Texas–Houston pontificated in a podcast he’d downloaded from her website. “Our bodies learn to adjust to background radiation.” Not that much radiation, Dan thought. After the attacks on the World Trade Center, the federal government, the EPA, Christie Todd Whitman, Rudy Giuliani all insisted the air was safe to breathe. Tell that to James Zadroga, if you possess a phone that reaches the dead, Dan railed internally, and to the thousands killed and still suffering from 9/11 disease.
Maryam wasn’t the first person in cyberspace blogging and reporting on the nuclear disaster that Dan had followed, although she was one of the most interesting. But he hadn’t reached out to any of them. Call him cyber-lazy; he’d met Maryam the old-fashioned way. At a bar.
Now he walked into Palo Alto Sol, ostensibly to pick up dinner. It was a Mexican family place right next door to Avalon Yoga—best green sauce north of the border. The doors were always open, as they offered simple wooden tables both inside and outside, the outside sometimes warmed by overhead heat lamps. Tonight was too balmy and soft for that. Donny, their foster child and Dan’s wife’s boss, had seen Zuckerberg at the restaurant several times. But Dan had seen only Zuck’s wife, out with a gaggle of girlfriends, as he’d waited at the restaurant’s bar to pick up dinner, and once alone with her baby in a Snugli—in New York she’d have required a bodyguard. Amy read somewhere that the Zuckerbergs had Palo Alto Sol cater their wedding dinner and that they’d opened an outpost at the Facebook campus. Those facts made both Amy and Dan feel okay, somehow, about feeding their children the same high-cholesterol grub as Valley gods and goddesses, often up to three times a week.
This was also the bar where Dan met Maryam a few months back, when he’d purposefully arrived early one night so that he had time for a margarita, up, with salt, and to dive into a bowl of chips, three salsas, while the cooks prepared his order. Jack, that human vacuum cleaner, always had the same thing, nachos, plus three enchiladas suizas, two chicken, one cheese. Thing One and Thing Two were taco al carbon fanatics, and Miles loved guacamole. Amy was the wild card—tortilla soup and salad if she was watching her weight, or cheese enchiladas with mole, if she was having an “I don’t fucking care day,” which bizarrely seemed to occur when she was most relaxed. Before a long run, she’d carbo-load.
When it was Dan’s turn to pick up dinner, and it was his turn a lot these days, picking up dinner was a reason to venture out of the house. He’d make sure to arrive early so he could fill up on chips, sometimes a taco or two at the bar, and go home with his own salad, pretending to be good.
The night he met Maryam she had been sitting at the bar as well, surrounded by other Knight Fellows, fully holding court. Shmancy journalism scholars, all of them. International. Somewhere in the beginning middle of their careers—the sweet spot. Launched, surrounded by choice, nothing over and done yet. No custom publishing for that lot.
Dan was eager to eavesdrop. He was predisposed to the topic, and Maryam revealed herself to be a natural interlocutor, spouting not only facts but also big on narrative. “In a gentle way, you can shake the world,” Maryam quoted Gandhi to her fellow fellows, about her monthlong photographic and video tour of the “exclusion zone,” while Dan hovered nearby on his tall barstool.
She’d visited Japan in 2014; the country simply called to her. Alone, she’d walked the ghost towns and abandoned intersections in the Fukushima prefecture, still empty several years post-evacuation, without official recognition or even permission, in a sixty-pound radiation-proof suit and boots, accompanied only by her cameras and a Geiger counter.
“The beeping,” she said, shaking her head so that her earrings chimed. “At first I thought I’d go mad. It was as if you could hear yourself cook,” she said. “But it became a companion and a savior, reminding me of the dangers of where I was, so I didn’t fall away into a dream. Which is easy when one is alone like that. The traffic signals, for instance, they still worked. I’d find myself waiting for the light to turn green, when of course there were no cars, no pedestrians, only once a tiny kitten crossing my path. I captured her on film. That sweet mewling thing.”
“This is a crass question, I guess,” said a skinny Indian guy, in a Facebook sweatshirt and cargo shorts, with black hair and what must have been prematuring silver temples because his forehead was still so ridiculously smooth, Dan thought. “But how do you go to the bathroom in one of those things? Is it kind of like astronauts?”
A couple of his fellow fellows laughed.
“Not that I know what astronauts do exactly,” he added, and they laughed some more, especially the women, making him grin and blush. Exponentially increasing his geeky good looks.
“Don’t laugh at poor Arvind,” soothed Maryam. “It is a serious question. There were all these untrained workers at a cemetery that I was shooting. They were there ostensibly to decontaminate the area—which literally meant scraping the topsoil and gravestones and putting the outer layer of dirt and foliage into plastic garbage bags . . .”
“You’re kidding me,” said Arvind. “You mean like Glad bags?”
“You? Never, Arvind. No kidding,” said Maryam, smiling at him. Clearly she liked Arvind, and/or she liked teasing him. Her tone made Dan feel unaccountably covetous; he wanted her to talk to him this way. “Yes, like Glad bags. I know, it is shocking. It is a shockingly lame response to a nuclear crisis. If that’s what you’re thinking, I agree with you! And then they just stacked all those garbage bags up on the side of the road and left them there . . . Full of highly radioactive material. Some of th
em wore hazmats, some had paper face masks and were not even wearing gloves. I believe they used Porta Potties.
“I wore adult diapers inside my suit,” said Maryam. “Frankly, there were times I just peed down my leg.”
Her audacity and frankness made Dan stand up. What should have felt off-putting was both beguiling in its honesty and all too real. As she spoke, he had entered the world of her story and gotten lost in it. So sensitive, his mother had always said. It was almost as if he could feel that steaming hot piss himself.
Maryam noticed him then; at least that’s when she’d allowed him to realize that she was aware that he was listening. She gave him a quizzical stare. Ally or voyeur?
She leaned over the bar, asking Hector, the bartender, to please bring her another Modelo; and folded somewhat at the waist that way, her breasts pooling on the tiled surface; she was tall, Dan could see, perhaps taller than he was, and lithe, with amber glowing skin and dark luminous flowing hair. He’d always had a thing for Arab women. Maryam’s fingers were long, and though she was fine-boned, her shoulders were broad. She wore gold dangling earrings that flirted with the bright lights of the liquor bottles—there were tiny bells on them, no wonder they’d chimed. She had a great ass. Was he objectifying? Sure. Why not? There was still privacy in his own mind, right? Pretty much anything he could come up with was sanctioned in there.
Beer in hand, she’d flipped around and sat back on her seat, finally, to take a sip, and when she did, Dan had said: “You’re Maryam Ainsworth, aren’t you?” She’d looked at him coolly then, iris and pupil the same enchanting velvety black, like who wants to know? But that changed, when he properly introduced himself and they started to talk. The group, which had protectively encircled her, allowed him entry then to, ahem, lean in.
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