It was a part of the Earth he had never dreamed he would see in person or even would ever want to. But the sign said it all. He was here, he did not have to take a selfie to prove it.
As they rolled in next to the platform, the train and station’s lights illuminating ahead just a few short feet of Dan’s future, the surrounding landscape looked similar to much of the Japan he’d already traversed, and was surprisingly and boringly intact. A graceful green mountain stood waiting ahead. Ungroomed brush sprouted alongside the tracks. Low-slung office buildings peeked out over the glass-and-metal station, cookie-cutter shapes, painted white, gray, and brown, an architecture that read as purposefully undistinguished as possible, like this was the outskirts of Scranton or part of those low monotonous stretches that extended from LAX, save an occasional splash of red. In juxtaposition, the sign itself, FUKUSHIMA STATION, he now noticed, was not exactly red, but a defiant blood orange. Poppy. He remembered a story he’d done in Afghanistan, long before Afghanistan was Afghanistan. The fields of opium red poppies. Like out of The Wizard of Oz. Once he had thought they were the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. They were way darker than California poppies. Those were a sort of golden orange, Dan thought. Amy’s favorite.
After they disembarked from the train, Maryam walked slightly ahead of Dan, dragging her two roller bags and adjusting her camera bag as she went. At one point, she stopped and politely let the other disembarking passengers pass them, and he waited, several steps behind her. Then they crossed over one of the elevated enclosed pedestrian walkways that got them to the other side of the tracks. They took the west exit out.
“I don’t get it,” said Dan. “The city looks intact.”
“Fukushima City was never evacuated,” said Maryam. “It’s the capital of the prefecture. Evacuation orders started small in an expanding radius surrounding the nuclear power station. Some residents of this city didn’t even know about the nuclear accident until ten or eleven days later. The authorities insisted it was safe, but they are still in the process of decontamination even as we speak. There are storage sites for the contaminated topsoil all over the city. I’ll show you tomorrow.”
“My God,” said Dan. “All over the city?”
“You’ve seen my photos. They store them in schoolyards and in lots behind people’s houses under blue plastic sheets.”
“Let’s just go home,” said Dan, standing on the sidewalk. He was dead on his feet.
“Home?” said Maryam.
“You know what I mean. A hotel. Is there a taxi stand around here? Or do we take another goddamn bus? Or do we just pitch a tent in the contaminated topsoil in the center of the unevacuated city?”
“Unevacuated? That’s not even a word, Dan. An unevacuated city is just a city, or perhaps a city in peril, or maybe even a city at ease . . .”
“Shut up,” said Dan. “I hate it here. I want to go home. I’m not having any fun. You’re not paying any attention to me!” He was aware that he sounded like a baby and for a moment hid his face in his hands. He rubbed his eyes; he was that tired.
“I will be with you,” Maryam said. “You don’t have to snivel.” She pointed down the street. The Richmond Hotel. A tall white unremarkable building one could find anywhere on the planet. “A bargain. Sixty-nine American dollars a night. They have this marvelous breakfast buffet. You will love it. I picked it for your enjoyment. I pay attention to you. I know what you need. I just also happen to be alive.”
“You spoiled, deprived child.”
She took a deep breath, gathering back her patience.
“I’m sorry, Mar,” said Dan. “I’m just, I don’t know what, I’m spent, I guess.”
She nodded. She’d accept his apology. She accepted him.
“It’s where I stayed last time. They will remember.”
Of course, they would remember. Who could possibly forget?
Dan followed her blindly across the street. He was so beat he could not believe his legs moved, but they did, seemingly of their own volition, they felt unattached to his body, which felt totally disassociated from his mind.
Maryam entered the hotel first, and again Dan toddled after her as she walked up to the front desk. A young woman in a black suit with a blue-and-white silk scarf poking out of the breast pocket was leaning over an open drawer. Her hair was in a sleek, slicked-back black knot at the base of her collar.
“Kombawa,” she said, without looking up. “Welcome to the Richmond Hotel, how may I help you?” She stood up straight and faced them; then she took a breath. She burst out laughing and bowed excitedly. “Maryam, kiuaku-san! Hisashiburi. I saw your reservation and was hoping you would arrive when I was on duty!”
Maryam bowed back, grinning, and said something in Japanese. “Dan,” said Maryam, “please meet my young friend Aiko Ikehara-sama.” The receptionist bowed back, and now she laughed at Dan. Why was she laughing at him?
He bowed awkwardly in response, but he’d waited too long, as she had already turned her focus to her computer. Bowing, he thought, was a lot like the tip jar. All in the timing.
The lobby was white; the desk was dark wood. There were a few low-slung modular black leather sofas lining the perimeter of the reception area and surrounding an extremely large white rectangular, plastic coffee table. In the corner of the room there was a matching dark wood desk with three computer monitors on it. No paintings, plants, or wall art. Simple, Dan thought, and spare. Maryam’s friend was the only sign of life, her scarf the only bit of color.
“What did you say to her?” asked Dan.
“That I’ve missed her and that we need two rooms.”
“Two rooms,” Dan repeated dazedly.
“I’m not going to fuck you, Dan,” said Maryam. “I’m too knackered.”
She knocked the air right out of him. But before he could even respond, the young woman presented them each with a key card. Maryam said something else in Japanese. Then she winked, and the two women laughed.
“What’s so funny?” Dan said.
“I told her the bill is on you,” said Maryam.
Finally, alone in his hotel room—the size of a walk-in closet in California—Dan sat down on the neatly made-up white double, gazed down at the dark brown carpet, took off his sneakers, and peeled off his socks. The skin on his feet was as wrinkled and damp as if he’d just come out of an extended warm bath. Ultrapale and pruney. His feet looked like they belonged to a dead person. He tried to wiggle his toes, but for one hot second, he forgot how. He forgot how to move his own extremities. Suddenly, the building shook. The shaking frightened him. An earthquake. Maryam had warned him, they come and go here all the time, she’d said. Still the minor tremor terrified him. Like an empty vessel, he filled with existential dread. It seemed to take liquid form and suctioned up through his toes and to the top of his throat, where it sloshed around noxiously, threatening to spill over and out of his mouth in pure, terrified vomit. You could die right now, Dan thought. How much beauty have you squandered?
Dan couldn’t breathe then. He was drowning in the stuff of regret and stupidity and waste. A toxic stew. For a moment, he thought he might even collapse.
“Maryam,” he eked out. “Maryam, please come back.”
He looked around the empty room.
A long white desk was fitted against the floor-to-ceiling window. There was a lamp and a phone on either end. A brown leather rolling office chair was tucked in underneath it. The curtains that kept the night out, like everything else in the room, were brown and white. The white inner skirt was chiffon. Through it, he could see light bleed in from the street.
He was still on Earth. There was furniture. All the way here in Japan, there was electricity, things he knew.
“Maryam,” he said, aloud again. “Please. I want you. I want me. I miss myself when you’re not here.”
She was his kindred spirit. He was simply lost without her. He couldn’t stand her. He couldn’t bear their separation. He felt like a teenager. Cr
azed and crazy. He did not know what to do with this kind of love. Dan folded himself over his knees and began to sob.
Later, Dan found himself snoozing on top of the bedding in the fetal position, still wearing his travel clothes, that same stupid green fleece. He’d cried himself to sleep the night before. Now, at last, there was the relief of daylight. It shone through the gauzy curtains like fairy dust. He looked at his watch. What he read there was latitude. He was seventeen hours ahead of his family. Those hours had revolutionized who he was, but they did not yet exist for them. There was still room to change his life.
* * *
It was 3:30 a.m. Kevin knew this because he was up and when he was up, which was always, he periodically checked his phone. Kevin couldn’t sleep, he didn’t like to sleep, he didn’t like to dream, it wasn’t worth it, his dreams were always bad. In them, sometimes he kept getting old real fast, like he had that bizarre aging disease, the kind he and the guys read about in tabloid magazines while killing time at the CVS across from Paly, in the Town & Country shopping mall during lunch period. Every so often there was some little kid who turned into an old man like overnight, and that’s what Kevin dreamed happened to him. He dreamed he literally watched himself shrivel, and his teeth rotted in his mouth and crumbled into wet, gravelly shells that he had to scoop out with his fingers so he wouldn’t choke, and then all his hair went white and it fell out and he looked like a cancer patient, like that poor freshman kid last year at school.
Or, he’d forgotten to take chemistry, the entire course, not only a semester but the whole year, but there he was at the final exam anyway and Kevin didn’t understand one single solitary thing that was asked of him (even though in real life he’d aced AP chem). In fact, the letters on the exam paper weren’t letters, at least letters whose shapes he recognized, and the numbers weren’t numbers, but moved around like tiny insects, and if he failed his exam, a final, he wouldn’t graduate. In this dream, if Kevin didn’t graduate they would take away his scholarship to Stanford (the scholarship he didn’t have yet, which made him feel even sicker when he woke up, sweaty with sheets twisted around his legs, because Kevin wanted that scholarship so bad).
There were more nightmares in his catalog, the one he hated the most was that he was a grown-up but he was still living with his parents, sometimes in his room, sometimes on the living room couch, sometimes in the garage, sometimes in the basement, and this part was really screwed up, it was so specific it made the dream feel really real; in this horrible dream he could hear his mom with her high heels walking across the hardwood floor above his head, doing stuff, rushing to get out, to start her long full important day, saving people’s lives, clicking, clicking, clicking, while all he could do was just sit on his bed.
Also, in his dreams there was fucked-up sex stuff, stuff he didn’t want to think about. Boys, girls. Boys and girls he knew. Boys and girls he loved, who didn’t love him back. Boys and girls who actually had sex with each other but never with him. Jack said his mom said that in terms of sex everything was all right if it was consensual and you didn’t hurt yourself or anyone else, but Kevin wasn’t sure, and anyway Jack’s mom wasn’t his mom, and he wasn’t sure he agreed with her even if the two moms were like besties. Both had older boys, and much younger twins. They had so much in common! they said, and they liked calling themselves Jack’s and his second-mothers. Not-thinking about the sex stuff after one of his dreams was hard and he had to drive his fists into the top of his thighs to get the active not-thinking to kick in. But it was a great discipline. It helped him with the other not-thinking he had to do, just to get by. When he was conscious he still thought about sex, but he beat off to regular porn like normal people.
So, he chose to stay awake. Kevin didn’t need sleep. He needed food, but not sleep. He was an athlete, so he needed to eat right. He was trying harder; he was trying not to be such a goofball; he was trying not to be a clown. For some reason, he always messed around with food, which made people laugh. Like his sisters, Josie and Suz, six-year-old twins—his parents waited for his mom to finish her training for that “second child” and, boy, did her training take a long time, four years of med school and seven years of neurosurgery. The twins were super-alike, they liked unicorns, they were summer ballerinas and winter figure skaters; they did everything together, and everything he did made them giggle. Probably in the world, they were the ones who liked him most.
He also made Lily laugh, Jack’s girlfriend, which in the moments when he was trying hardest was all he wanted, her to look at him, not Jack, her laughter and her girlfriends’, too. He made the girls laugh all the way from Texas the last time he and Jack split a burrito by shoving the whole thing into his mouth as Jack Instagrammed it. Kevin didn’t want to do that anymore.
“Kevin, sweetie, don’t keep doing this to yourself,” Lily had said, he could see her beautiful face on Jack’s phone, all scrunched up and, because she couldn’t stop giggling, red from lack of air. “You can take little bites. We don’t have to laugh. I’ll still love you.”
As if, he thought. Tell him.
And then, Bitch.
And then he took that evil thought right back.
Since then, he tried to eat açai bowls and rice bowls and dragon bowls—“Bowl Boy,” Jack called him—but Jack was supportive and ate bowls, too, whenever they were together, which was all the time, except when Jack was with Lily, which was all the time, too, even when Jack slept. Jack slept, but not Kevin. No sleep for Kevin. He functioned fine with less than none. He had work to do, he always had work to do, he didn’t mind doing work, he was good at it, his grades were awesome, he liked that. He opened his AP physics textbook. His phone pinged. It was Jack. Saved by the bell.
Dude, u up?
Hye ya, Kevin texted him back. Hye ya meant yes in Cantonese.
Happy Donuts? Jack wrote. I’m feeling an apple fritter I’ll pick u up
?, Kevin wrote.
Dad’s away got his keys Mom killed a whole bottle of wine at dinner LOL she’s passed out C U in a few
Kevin rolled out of bed. He was already dressed. He did that to save time. He dressed after his shower before he went to bed at night. He had his Speedo on underneath his board shorts. They had water polo practice at 10:00 a.m., he and Jack. School started at 8:10, but Kevin hated changing and changing back in the locker room. He didn’t like people seeing him naked. He had a six-pack and good shoulders from working out so much, but his dick was long and thin and it looked like there was something wrong with it to him, it kind of curved to the side like a banana when it got hard. And it got hard a lot. For no reason. Sometimes it even got hard when he looked at Jack. He couldn’t risk it getting hard in the locker room. It wasn’t big and full like the guys online.
He and Jack always played sports together. When they were little they played soccer, and biked and skateboarded around the Stanford campus. Swimming was their hands-down favorite; they both had their eye on water polo from the start. They used to go watch Stanford meets at the Avery Aquatic Center, right near the football stadium and the Sunken Diamond baseball field. Jack had a great eggbeater and long arms. When they were in middle school Jack used to practice sitting in a chair at lunch, in the cafeteria, he didn’t give a shit, the right leg moving out in a circle as the left leg came in in a circle from the other direction. He looked like a retard, but the retarded moves paid off. He was a natural goalkeeper, born with his shoulders out of the water. But Kevin was fast, faster than anyone else at Paly. He did swim team in the spring and water polo in the fall, but water polo was his first love. He was a driver of the first order. No doubt, he could play in college. Even though it was only junior year, recruitment had already begun.
Kevin had collected his grades, stats, and videos and sent them with his résumé to coaches on both coasts. You had to be proactive in water polo because it wasn’t a well-funded sport and it was supercompetitive with only a few scholarships per year for boys; girls had it easier. Also, you had to com
pete against international students, too. Some of them came from countries that actually valued water polo. Like Hungary, Croatia, Montenegro. Kevin wasn’t exactly sure where Montenegro was, but he viewed it as a threat. There had been kids from Montenegro at his water polo camp last summer, but he’d been embarrassed to ask them. They kicked ass, those Montenegro kids. Kevin really wanted a scholarship. His parents could afford college for him and his two sisters, but he loved the thought of getting that scholarship anyway. He’d never gotten high, but the feeling he felt when he daydreamed about getting an email from Stanford that said welcome entering class of 2021 you have just received a water polo scholarship and walking his laptop over to his parents while they were sitting in the living room going over the bills or watching Orange Is the New Black and showing them the email, well he bet getting high felt exactly like that.
Kevin didn’t get high because he was an athlete, and an athlete had to protect his lungs and his reflexes. All their coaches said that, and it was true. He got drunk a lot, but who didn’t? USC was a five-peat champion and UC San Diego didn’t suck, but it was D2. His folks wanted him to go to Stanford. His father had gone to the B-school, his father’s parents had sent him all the way from Hong Kong to the States for college at MIT where he’d majored in math and he’d never looked back, and his mom was local, she grew up in Cupertino; she went to Stanford as an undergrad and graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa and got her medical training at Stanford Hospital. She spent her days sawing open other people’s skulls. They’d met at a singles blood drive at the Stanford Blood Center. How corny could you get? Buck/Cardinal was the best option, sure. But USC would be chill, the girls were cuter, and he’d be closer to the beach. He was more competitive than Jack for Stanford, because his grades were better and he was double-legacy; also, his parents were donors. Jack was a natural athlete, but in some ways Jack didn’t care. That was what was so great about Jack and made him Kevin’s best friend. Kevin cared about every detail of his life.
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