“Did you know his first name is really ‘Wardell?’ My friend Salik here told me.” Maryam pointed at the skinniest boy with the wispiest beard who smiled then at the recognition.
“I’d call myself ‘Steph,” too,” she said. “Did you know on his sneakers, the Curry One, the lace loop at the bottom of the tongue has ‘4:13’ embossed on it? It’s his favorite Bible verse: Philippians chapter four, verse thirteen. Salik told me that as well. Providentially, it just so happens to be a verse my father made me memorize as a child.” She then recited it to the delight of the coders from Interactive Intelligence: “‘I can do all this through Him who gives me strength.’ Lovely, no?” said Maryam.
Know-it-all, Dan thought. Attention slut. Although he admired her accumulation of knowledge. She fed off facts the way he did. Intellectual detritivores, news-junkie arthropods, scandal-loving pill bugs, bottom-feeders, creepers, slugs. Her hunger, perhaps even larger than his. Her retaining capacity, clearly far superior.
After bidding the coders adieu, using the restroom, and joining the passenger queue, he and Maryam finally boarded their aircraft and took their seats. There, Maryam conversed with the Latino gay male flight attendant who home-based in San Carlos but loved this overseas junket, as he was both a self-proclaimed sushi and “kawaii” nut, which he explained to Maryam was a Japanese predilection for all things cute and beautiful. But she, of course, already knew. “I myself practice the art of amigurumi,” said Maryam, nodding vigorously in agreement, and like some ersatz Mary Poppins, she pulled from her carry-on a half-completed small stuffed animal, which the flight attendant instantly admired, and that she proceeded to knit into being throughout the flight.
Next Maryam introduced herself to the young white college girl across the aisle and discovered that she was taking her junior year abroad in Kyoto, to study Japanese porcelain and pottery. After that Maryam bypassed poor Dan—who was stuck in the center seat—leaning over his belly to introduce herself to the older Japanese-American woman sitting by the window and offering her a lemon drop. (Which she took gratefully.)
Maryam—gregarious, spirited, heedless imbiber-of-life Maryam—continued to conduct this three-pronged conversation in a circuitous order throughout the first leg of their nineteen-hour series of flights, around and around, a narrative swirl, across the aisle, up to the flight attendant (who seemed to relish standing by her armrest), and traversing Dan’s midsection to the impeccably dressed delicate gray-haired woman by the window. A Carvel cone of a story, Dan thought ridiculously, but that’s how her multiple dialogues presented themselves in his head, in an everlasting, voluptuous, aerated soft-serve. She spoke with the budding ceramics historian about their destination—a small town called Tomioka, less than six miles from the crippled remains of the Fukushima Daiichi plant—as the area had been known for Amakusa stone used in pottery since the Edo period.
To the flight attendant, Jaime—she read his name aloud from the label pinned onto his jacket—Maryam elaborated on the purpose of their visit, to report on Yoshi Hibayashi, a middle-aged, fifth-generation rice farmer who had the highest levels of radiation in his body of anyone in Japan.
And to the woman by the window seat, who, as luck would have it, was an editor of cookbooks, Maryam discussed what she was most looking forward to eating along the way: “Oh, man, the Nishin-No-Sansyo-Zuke!”
“I like it, too,” said the woman.
“What is it?” asked Dan.
“Dried herring pickled with sansho pepper leaves and soy sauce. Mama Mia,” said Maryam. “That and the Kozuyu! Do you know Kozuyu, Dan? No? Really? You really don’t?”
“No, I really fucking don’t, Mar,” Dan murmured.
“It’s a clear soup,” said the woman, gently butting in, as if to upend a potential marital squabble. “Filled with konnyaku jelly noodles.”
“They are like little glassine eels,” said Maryam.
“In Fukushima, they often eat soba with green onions as an implement instead of chopsticks,” said the woman. “These are all traditional dishes of the prefecture; you cannot procure them in the same manner anywhere else in the world.”
“I don’t get it,” Dan whispered in Maryam’s ear. “We’re eating the local produce?”
“We are. We are there for a short while.”
“Aren’t we worried about radiation?”
“The human body is very resilient when it comes to radiation.” She was trying to reassure him. “We encounter background radiation all the time. There’s point one microsieverts in a banana. It’s the accumulation over time; it’s the amount of the exposure; it’s all the things no one yet knows that are so very worrisome. But would I insult my hosts by turning down their local bounty? The food they feed their children? The peaches? The Fukushima peaches?”
“Yes,” said the woman to Dan’s left, who clearly overheard them. “You’ve never tasted a true peach before you taste one of those. Although it is a little early in the season.” And then, as an afterthought, “I wouldn’t recommend the Fukushima beef. The cesium.”
Maryam didn’t sleep, she didn’t nap; as far as Dan could tell, she didn’t even rest her almond eyes. She was too excited!
Instead she engaged and she listened, on and on, through three airplane meals, the highlight being “Mos burgers,” which the eager flight attendant explained were “the greatest hamburgers in all of Japan,” but Dan thought they were blech, the spicy meat sauce on top of a pallid slice of airplane-cold tomato looking far too much like a skinned knee for his tastes.
While Maryam made friends, Dan searched for other forms of distraction. He’d forgotten to bring a book, and the movie choices—one of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchises, or some manga something—soon bored him. He turned to the stirring white noise of the airline’s classical music in-flight system to bring him calm and ease. Opera. Knowing almost nothing about the genre made it simple; it allowed him space not to agonize and stew. He didn’t have to care which recording of Mozart’s “Dans un Bois Solitaire” was being proffered, he could take it in without chewing, letting it just melt, the way you might eat an oyster.
That kind of easy listening was conducive to thinking. So, Dan thought hard. Suppose he had read the tea leaves correctly and gotten out of the newspaper business back when the getting was good? Who else might he have become: a documentary film producer? An environmental activist? The founder of an NGO?
What would he have accomplished in his nearly fifty years if, boots on the ground, instead of choosing the pink suburbia of Palo Alto, he’d gone to Africa, Haiti, Appalachia, built schools and hospitals, did some tangible good?
More! What if he hadn’t married, or had children? Would he be freer now to do the work that he was built for and so longed to perform? He had a friend from the Mercury. That guy never had a family and he went on his own to Iraq and then to Syria, without assignments, funneling back his stories after he’d first lived, then wrote them. He’d received grants, money from the Fund for Investigative Journalism, placed pieces in the Atlantic and the New York Times Magazine, and ended up with a nice fat book deal; Dan had tortured himself by watching the dude on the Today show. With no overhead, no responsibilities, maybe Dan could have been a lot like him.
He looked up. Maryam and Jaime were now engaged in a merry exchange of some hard-core stats and sabermetrics—Maryam was a newly converted Stanford fan, and the flight attendant had grown up in the East Bay; they were having at Cardinal football.
Jaime said: “I’ve never gotten over it. Never! Kid blew past Barry Sanders’s thirty-year-old record for all-purpose yards; how did Christian McCaffrey not win the Heisman?”
Maryam nodded vigorously in wide-eyed agreement, as if they hadn’t been sitting on this stupid plane for goddamn fucking ever, and she wasn’t going crazy like Dan was, but every interchange was fresh and new for her. It seemed her outlook didn’t dampen.
Dan, on the other hand, was fading fast. He wasn’t much of a sports guy and he was immun
e to fandom and by this time in their voyage he’d had the distinct sensation that his ears were bleeding, so much chatter coming from so many directions (is this how poor Theo felt in the lunchroom?)—they had just been served a juicy beef bowl, supplied in corporate collaboration with Yoshinoya, “Japan’s most illustrious beef bowl restaurant chain,” Maryam said. “Is that correct?” she asked the woman to Dan’s left. Her new-found friend nodded in agreement.
Maryam sounded as if she were a victim of the dictates of an ad campaign. In fact, she sounded an awful lot like his twins, who always broke into hip-hop song and dance, reenacting a local Mack Mack Taco Bell commercial—“For cheese in the shell, go to Taco Bell”—whenever they pulled into one of the parking lots to pee. The lunch, which Maryam received with a little seat-dance of excitement, Dan thought looked a lot like something Amy fed Squidward on his birthday (ground beef sautéed in Chef Boyardee tomato sauce; it’s what Lauren’s mother had fed their dogs on their birthdays), but Maryam and his seat companion clearly relished the dish.
I should just do it, Dan thought. Just go. Find and write my own stories. See what shit sticks. I’d only be making more money; I’m not making any now. Maybe my family would be better off without me. I’m a burden, anyway. I know I am.
“Dan,” said Maryam. “Try this, freeze-dried natto! Fermented soybeans. Highly nutritious,” she added.
She lifted her palm and Dan sniffed the greenish-gray pebbly snack that Jaime had just poured into her hand. It smelled like bad beer.
They both grinned down at him.
Dan stretched his lips in an effort to grin back. Then, using his thumb and forefinger as pincers, he tasted it.
It wasn’t half-bad.
After they landed at Kansai International in Osaka Bay, and exchanged email addresses with all their new pals—Maryam first making sure that Dan’s neighbor was properly escorted to her waiting wheelchair—Dan hissed at her in emulous awe as they exited the jet bridge: “You’re way too nice to people.”
Maryam stopped in her tracks and batted her long, long lashes. “Why, thank you. And I was afraid after the flight you were going to get cranky.”
“I didn’t mean it as a compliment,” Dan said.
“Perhaps you only want me to be ‘too nice’ to you,” she said.
Well, that was true. And rather embarrassing. So, Dan looked around the airport in an effort to get away from truth. He’d read about this place. Now he had a chance to show off some of his own arcane and useless knowledge.
“This airport is built on a man-made island,” said Dan. “A bunch of mountains were excavated and plunked into the sea.”
Maryam lit up. “You’ve done your homework. Good boy. Now, do you know how old it is?”
He desperately searched his memory; he wanted badly to impress her. “’87? ’88? Someone, I forget who, twisted Renzo Piano’s arm to design the aerodrome.”
“I am a huge Piano fan,” said Maryam as they began to walk. “‘The serenity of his best buildings can almost make you believe we live in a civilized world.’ Nicolai Ouroussoff—the former Times critic. He’s married to that lovely painter Cecily Brown—her work is so excessive. I adore it. Her paintings possess a specific clotted beauty. It was initially considered a financial disaster—”
“Cecily Brown’s work? Her paintings are worth millions.”
Finally, Dan thought, he had her.
“No, not the paintings, dummy, the airport! But eventually it was pronounced the Civil Engineering Monument of the Millennium or some such rot, because it survived the Kobe earthquake. That was in ’95. Just goes to show you how the fashions of the times do change. Now let’s take the Wing Shuttle. I love the Wing Shuttle.”
The Wing Shuttle turned out to be a sleek little train that took them across the terminal to the gate of their connecting flight in record time. Although, in retrospect, Maryam might have preferred the walk. “It would have equaled around two thousand strides,” she said, and she was determined to make her daily quota of ten thousand on their journey.
She pouted fleetingly, and for a flash Dan saw the sad, vulnerable little boy buried somewhere in her skeleton.
That moment passed. He offered to take her camera bag off her shoulder, it looked so heavy. But she waved him aside. Grown-up Maryam was unbeatable and unstoppable, at least in any battle of verbiage; he couldn’t imagine a more dominant force. She continued praising the airport’s practicalities even after takeoff on the one-hour flight to Fukushima—how he longed for the SuperShuttle van now and its row of single seats—and then as they waited for both her bags to spin by at baggage claim.
“You pack like a girl,” said Dan, who just had a carry-on.
“It was one of the first signs,” said Maryam, laughter pealing. “That and I refused to stand up to wee.”
From Fukushima Airport, it was a forty-minute bus ride (¥800) to Koriyama station, during which she continued to chat impressively, more about her life, did she have to be so goddamn fascinating?—Dan felt more useless and boring than ever, what could she ever see in him? But there was no time to ask this question, to grovel for her attention, Maryam on some manic traveler’s high persisted, yip-yap-yapping, about her first lover as a woman and her final lover as a man (both the same guy, some South American professor/revolutionary/poet, a super hottie, a sexual adventurer, who had also been in the Olympics, Dan wasn’t sure if he’d hallucinated the high jump or not), and upon arrival they’d had one very clear choice to make: take the high-speed Shinkansen train (¥2,920, fifteen minutes) or a forty-five-minute local train (¥820) to Fukushima station.
Dan knew what he wanted. The local, because every train car in Japan is a quiet car. He could not stand to be dazzled a second longer. Maryam had told him as much back at Palo Alto Sol when she’d first wheedled him into this misadventure; he’d wanted the local because she would then have to be silent for an extra half an hour. Since she was cheap, she’d agreed. Dan had never realized how cheap she was before—Yay! One mundane strike against her!—but maybe that’s because they’d all, her friends, himself included, always lined up to buy her beers and dinners—so they took the less-expensive train. In Japan, every car is a quiet car, she’d been right about that, but she’d neglected to tell him they were also allowed to eat, albeit quietly, and eat she did, kine ahora (“don’t tempt the devil,” as his Yiddish-speaking grandma always said, spitting three times over her left shoulder). He’d look up at her dazedly every ten minutes or so: chips, chocolates, crackers, beef jerky, an eel-flavored dried-fish snack called “Me So Hungry,” which Dan wouldn’t touch for love or money, and ice cream, but who cared? As far as Dan was concerned, she could eat whatever she wanted, as long as she wasn’t allowed to utter a single exuberant sound. As long as simply everything and anything didn’t make her ridiculously happy. He wished the train would stall on the tracks for hours and the silence could last and last.
Intimacy breeds contempt, who said that? Aesop, as in fables, or Mark Twain? Or had it been his own weary-to-the-bone wife, Amy? Was the phrase really familiarity breeds contempt and Amy had augmented it to serve her own marital purposes when commenting on his morning fart, or on the way he smacked his lips when he ate cereal, or on the fact that he seemed incapable of (a) paying a bill on time, (b) putting his socks into the hamper, (c) making a noncorny joke, or (d) all of the above? Amy was now back in Palo Alto, ignorant of her own abandonment, left at home alone with three children and a job, three boys, thinking her husband had flown to Boston of all places, for an interview at the Globe, a paper that had offered buyouts and then layoffs three years running. Don’t you ever google, Amy? Why did she simply trust him?
Dan had never done a thing like this before. He’d never run off to another country with another woman spending money they did not have for a story of dubious merit just because he was still alive and really wanted to. Perhaps he’d never really wanted to before. Who knew? Not Dan, who didn’t recognize the palms of his own hands when he blea
rily stared at them during the train ride. Why was the lifeline on the left so strangely short? The one on the right was so ragged and so lengthy, it looked like an ultralong protracted painful fadeout tragically awaited him. At the time of his death, Dan’s father was 98 percent demented, in a diaper, confined to a wheelchair, paralyzed by what his army of doctors thought was Parkinson’s, but following his autopsy turned out to be plain old-fashioned arteriosclerosis. All that pastrami! The Parkinson’s medication he did not need had made Dad hallucinate he was being eaten by bears. The value of his remaining 2 percent of cognition had made Dad agonizingly aware of the 98 percent of the intelligence that had forsaken him. Maybe for Dan a similar journey had already kicked off.
Who could blame him for wanting an adventure? His time on earth was rapidly diminishing. Even if said adventure cost him a fortune. Despite Maryam’s schemes and abundant frequent-flier miles, Dan shuddered to think about what he’d just put on his credit card. It was an old corporate Amex, the bills went directly to him now, he could bankrupt himself and Amy both, without her knowledge until it was too late. How would he ever explain this to her? Maryam was wily. She knew how to skirt the Japanese bureaucracy, getting them both official orders in record time, a separate permit required for each town within the No-go Zone; they all were still heavily guarded, she’d said, but she could get them in. She made things happen. But in their weeks of planning, she’d never mentioned Amy, and he hadn’t either. It was as if they were both pretending his wife, and kids for that matter, simply didn’t exist.
It was night by the time they reached Fukushima Station. Dan knew where he was because it said FUKUSHIMA STATION in bright red neon English letters next to three big bright red Japanese characters slapped across the glassy modern and chrome building beside the tracks. Some of the other signs hanging on the terminal were also in English, which helped ground Dan; he was actually here! He couldn’t believe it! Even after the long expedition that had started now over a day and a half ago and felt like a veritable lifetime, he was in fact at the gateway to a place that he had read about and pondered, worried for and twittered about, a cursed land.
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