Over the Pacific yesterday Maryam had told some fellow passenger, maybe even him, that Tepco was building an ice wall of frozen dirt under the nuclear plant to prevent more groundwater leakage into the wounded reactors. When subsoil channels seeped into the plant they became highly radioactive. The idea was to prevent the now “hot” groundwater from flowing out into the Pacific. So far this phantasmagorical frosty plan was not exactly working for them. Every day radioactive water was still streaming into the sea.
A few more billion yen on that one. Like thirty-five. Which was—Dan did a quick calculus—over $300 million. This new cooling apparatus was also dependent on electricity, she’d said—electricity being the first thing to go during an earthquake, and of course, unusable during a tsunami. Dan shivered, remembering the temblors of the night before. Amy used to be a General Hospital fan. The freezing of Fukushima sounded like one of that soap opera’s crazier story lines.
Maryam made a right turn and continued following their irradiated topsoil truck right up to a Red Zone checkpoint. How much of that contaminated dust was blowing into the car’s vents right now? Two men in protective white suits wearing gas masks approached the car. Behind them was a blockade and some red Japanese writing. Maryam handed one guy the permit for entry.
“We should have suited up,” Dan said.
“We have a Geiger counter, we won’t stay that long,” said Maryam. “It’s no longer necessary for such a brief visit, I think. Besides, I’d feel awkward to be armed to the teeth while Yoshi greets us virtually naked on his beautiful farm. But there are gas masks in my satchel if you want one.”
“You make it sound like the Garden of Eden,” said Dan. “How about the Gates of Hell?”
“Believe me, this is no Eden,” said Maryam. “And not hell, exactly, more like Roman ruins.”
They were nodded along past the checkpoint by the first guy, while the second guy pressed some buttons and the barrier lifted to let them through. There were half a dozen cars in line behind them. But the barrier came back down as soon as they cleared its threshold, Dan could see it in his side mirror. Who were the officials protecting? He found the whole rigmarole patently ridiculous. They could have easily just navigated around the thing.
“A lot of people driving into town,” said Dan. “I didn’t expect that.”
“They are driving through,” said Maryam. “You’ll see; the town is dead empty. No one lives there but Yoshi, and he has long vacated his own home—he found it just too painful without his family, although he does go back from time to time to make repairs and tidy up, I don’t know who for.”
“I didn’t know he had a family,” said Dan.
“Yes, his mother now lives outside the exclusion zone with her sister, I forget where, and his grown children are in Tokyo; I fear they worry. He separated from his wife long ago when the kids were small. She remarried and was living in Osaka for years before the earthquake.”
Maryam slowed down to look at herself in the rearview mirror. She parted her lips and smiled. “Do I have lipstick on my teeth?” she asked. She turned to grin directly at Dan.
“All good,” said Dan. Her teeth were strong and white.
“A lot of these cars and trucks are carrying decontamination workers.” Maryam continued piloting down the city’s main artery. “Most are middle-aged men, many homeless, without education or ties, subsisting hand-to-mouth. The fringe element of society. Besides collecting topsoil, they wipe off roofs and other surfaces and basically live like your American migrant workers, in barracks, toiling for low wages with no benefits for months at a time until they are considered too contaminated to continue this kind of labor. They are at the bottom of the service class. And even though they are retired after some arbitrary number of weeks, they are unmonitored and untested and sent out to the winds to land who knows where. Some just re-up, finding new contract work with another shady company. Some, even while employed, still sleep on the streets. They throw their used gloves and trash in convenience store garbage cans, and nobody is monitoring that waste’s radioactivity either. The neighbors, however, are concerned about the dangerous nature of their rubbish, and I read on one of my blogs they have started a ‘manners’ campaign. Tomioka is no one’s destination.”
When the twins were born, Dan remembered, even after they had battened down the hatches with all their preparations, Amy had said that bringing them home from the hospital felt like the difference between knowing you are going to go fight in battle, and being in a battle and having people shoot at you. Everyone had told her she’d be tired; she’d had a baby before; she knew from tired, but twins were unfathomably hard. They were ridiculous. Tomioka was ridiculous. A ghost town. Stopped by a remote control pressed on pause. The town looked vaguely intact, a little jiggled, stirred up, Dan thought, but like a semifunctioning entity, although there was not a single living soul around. Neutron-bomby. The streets were completely deserted. Two cars flipped over by the earthquake met in a bumper-to-bumper kiss in the middle of the road, and Maryam had to navigate up on the sidewalk to avoid them. Tall brush was growing out of the cracks in the cement. Many of the storefronts and apartments were trashed. Some buildings had lost a front facing or side wall and you could see inside like a diorama: a table still set for dinner, while the room next door was flooded with rubble. In front of an apartment house a dollhouse lay smashed in the yard, as if it had been jealously heaved out a window by a demonic sibling.
Maryam stopped at a red light. A spotted dog meandered about the crosswalk. Since there were no competing sounds, Dan could hear it snuffling through the glass. Some bicycles lay on their sides, crowding the sidewalk. A house slumped into the street. Another stood tall. The light switched to green. Maryam drove onward.
“Why did you stop?” Dan asked, belatedly. That nonsensical bit of decorum just occurred to him. “I remember you did it also in your film.”
“Did I? Habit?” she said. “Protocol? See that video store?”
She slowed down, Dan gazed out the window. Through the storefront’s pane of glass, it looked like most of the stock had fallen from the shelves and lay untouched on the floor.
“You can take whatever you want, Dan. It’s all still there. Any Japanese movies you missed in 2011? That is if you don’t now just stream. There has been no passage of time here.”
Next to the building there was a metal structure that looked like a robot, child-size, with what appeared to be solar panels on its square head and digitized numbers on its rectangular body. This one’s torso read 2.07 in a vertical line. Then it read 2.08.
“What’s that?” said Dan.
“It’s a radiation sensor,” said Maryam. “They’re all over. They indicate the accumulated background radiation by millisievert. Perfect for one of your ‘late night’ talk show hosts.”
“Why?” said Dan, feeling thick, but curious.
Maryam turned from the wheel to stare at him. “Because there is no one around to read the thing, silly,” said Maryam.
She took a left. “I want to show you what life looks like stopped midsentence.”
She drove toward a minimall. There were cherry blossoms lining the empty streets, breathtaking in their fulsome thick beauty. They wept pink snow.
“Do cherry blossoms smell?” Dan asked.
“If you bury your nose in them, yes, there is a faint scent of cherry,” Maryam said. “It’s plum blossoms that really have a strong perfume. ‘Scent of plum blossoms,’” she recited, “‘on the misty mountain path / a big rising sun.’ That’s Bashō, if you don’t know.”
She pulled into a parking lot in front of a grocery store. “Come on,” she said. She got out.
Dan hesitated.
“Come on, Danny,” said Maryam. “Don’t be scared.”
He got out of the car. It was a lovely spring day—one of the loveliest. The air felt good. Clean. He took a deep breath in through his nose. He thought he could detect the lightest scent of cherries. Maryam, ahead, she was always
ahead of him, held open the market’s glass door. They walked inside. There was packaged food all over the floor. The aisles were knee-deep. But the shelves were also stocked—chips in canisters, canned goods, Japanese crackers and cereals with bright funny cartoonish illustrations on them. “Are you hungry?” asked Maryam. “I bet some of this stuff is still good.”
She turned down an aisle, and he followed her. The periodicals section held magazines and newspapers in the racks although the floor was slippery with glossies.
“No one’s cleaned up,” said Dan.
“No one’s been back,” said Maryam. “Let’s check out the Laundromat next door.”
They picked their way through the debris and once again went outside. The sky was blue. You could hear birds. Birds still live here, Dan thought. Maybe life was easier for the birds here without the people to bother them. Wildlife flourished in Chernobyl after the citizens had left.
In the Laundromat, clean laundry spilled out of some of the open dryers. Formerly wet laundry moldered behind the glass in the washing machines. There was a stray shoe on the floor. They sure left in a hurry, Dan thought. It was a little like Pompeii. A little like Vesuvius. Except none of this had been preserved in lava. How long, if ever, would it take to decompose? The bras and underwear on the linoleum floor, the children’s socks, almost comical.
“I don’t know why, but it’s the laundry that gets me,” said Maryam. “I hate laundry so much, you’re never done, you always have more to do. Sometimes I strip naked just to have it all done at once. But here that eternal cycle is broken. It’s so bloody intimate.” There were tears in her eyes. The first time Dan had witnessed them. He reached out his hand and cupped her cheek and some spilled down through her black lashes as she closed her lids. When she opened them, their eyes caught. They had a moment, Dan was sure of it. She was speechless and so was he. Then . . .
“You are so smart and so nice,” Maryam said. “Would that all people were just like you.”
Dan experienced a wave of emotion. He had not known she felt that way.
Without thinking he took her hand and they walked out of the Laundromat and back to the car. He escorted her to the driver’s side and opened the door for her. Then he walked around to the passenger’s side and slid in. As he was buckling his seat belt, Maryam turned to him. They kissed. Softly, light, dryly. The kiss of two people who were vowing to be careful with one another.
Maryam started up the car and they drove off.
When they arrived at Yoshi’s farm, he was feeding the ostriches. Maryam tooted the car horn as they approached so that they wouldn’t frighten him or the animals. “I think it would be the quiet that would most get to me,” she said. “But Yoshi seems to have gotten used to it.”
“Does he know we’re coming?” Dan asked.
“We emailed a bit, he and I, and a few of the friends he still keeps in touch with, but no Wi-Fi here. It was spotty, even before the earthquake. Once in a while, he’ll drive to get Internet service. I hope he received my last few messages. He is not the world’s best correspondent.”
“He emails?” Dan said. “Does he Facebook?”
“His supporters set up a page for him, but it is full of a lot of rot and well-meaning twaddle, and also hot air. Fund-raising, most of it. For other causes! I have no idea if he even knows.”
She pulled up next to the pen. Just some wire fencing and dirt and four or five giant birds next to an open shed. Dan had seen ostriches before—rich hippies he knew up in Marin kept them as pets, and local farmers sold their giant eggs at the Sunday farmers’ market on California Avenue back in Palo Alto, but he’d never been tempted to buy one. There was something obscene about the egg’s large shape, as if a baby could be cradled inside, which of course was how baby ostriches were born, but still. These birds were tall, taller than he was or Maryam for that matter. She was already out of the car.
“Yoshi,” she called. A handsome middle-aged man came out of the shed, where he had been spreading what looked like grass. He had dark hair with graying temples and was wearing a white T-shirt and a charcoal gray pullover and a big smile. Well dressed for someone living all alone and farming, Dan thought.
“Maryam-sama,” Yoshi said.
She said something in Japanese and he replied and burst out laughing.
“Well, I don’t know whether to be flattered or insulted,” said Maryam, Dan guessed to both of them, or maybe just to herself? She walked over to the fence and gave Yoshi a little bow and spoke with what Dan assumed to be a touch of sass. Then she pointed to Dan and waved him over.
“Dan,” she said. “Watashi no ashisutanto.”
Dan came over, and each man bowed. Dan turned to Maryam. “Did you just call me your assistant?”
“Don’t sweat the small stuff,” said Maryam, laughing, and looking suddenly rosy. “He said I was prettier than he thought. He’s only seen me in protective gear till now.”
She is incorrigible, thought Dan. She can’t help flirting. As if to prove his point, Maryam held her hand out across the fence to one of the ostriches. She let him sniff it or poke it or whatever a beaked bird does to get comfortable with a human being. The ostrich, with its fuzzy, buzzed, chemo head, nuzzled at her hand and then backed off. “It’s okay, baby, we have all night,” cooed Maryam.
Maryam rattled around her camera bag and took out both a video camera and a Sony α7RII. “Okay, Yoshi?”
He nodded. Yoshi unhooked the pen’s fence, stepped out, and rehooked it again. He took out his lighter and lit up a cigarette. There was something dapper about him, Dan thought. Like a gangster in a movie.
“How are we going to do this?” Dan asked suddenly. “I don’t speak Japanese, and he doesn’t seem to speak English.” Why hadn’t he thought about any of this before?
Yoshi took a deep inhale on his cigarette. Politely waiting.
“We’re telling the story in images, Dan,” said Maryam. “You need enough only for an accompanying text. And I can translate.” She laughed again. “Sort of.”
“Okay, then,” said Dan, skeptically, but also juicing up. He looked at the well-dressed farmer. Curiosity, as ever, taking hold. “What made you return to Tomioka, Yoshi?”
Maryam repeated this in Japanese.
“I had nowhere to go really,” Yoshi said, and Maryam translated. “I mean, my daughter offered for me to live with her family, but I didn’t want that. And I hated temporary housing. I felt like a prisoner. So, I decided to come back and check on the livestock. We had a dairy farm, and some cats and dogs. I missed my animals.” He whistled between his teeth and a handsome black mutt came running. Then he bent down to scratch the dog’s back. He stayed in a crouch, petting the dog as the animal licked his face, Maryam shooting away. “The other two dogs died, but this guy, he was still living.”
“He’s like Dr. Doolittle,” Dan whispered.
“Don’t act jealous,” said Maryam.
“Isamu,” said Yoshi.
“That’s the dog’s name,” said Maryam.
“I mean, he was almost dead,” said Yoshi, Maryam translating. “He was starving. We still had plenty of pet food in the cabinets, but of course he could not reach. So, I fed him. The whole neighborhood was this way, the dogs, the cats, the cattle. The house animals were locked up in the houses, the livestock in their pens, they could do nothing to fend for themselves. Some were roaming free, toppling garbage cans, breaking into things. I went from house to house, sometimes I forced in the front door, sometimes I crawled in through a window. If I had to, I smashed the glass. Many of the animals were already dead. I buried those. The others I fed. I gave them water. So many were famished, but they were also eager for affection, to be touched—especially the ones who’d lived their whole lives as pets. Only a few were crazed enough with hunger that they bared their teeth to attack. With those, I pushed food into the house and backed away, but I sang little songs as I went, the way you might with a small child, to show your best intentions. Let me take yo
u to the barn.”
As Maryam shot and translated, Dan took notes. He’d brought a pad and pencil; he also tape-recorded. He could get the tapes transcribed when he got back to Palo Alto. He’d hire a grad student at the university to check on Maryam’s Japanese.
The barn was several yards away on the property. It was cool when they entered and smelled of hay, manure, and livestock. Flies buzzed overhead as Yoshi pointed first to the horse stalls. Several still housed skeletal carcasses and rotted hide.
“I tried to save the ones that were still alive by feeding them through baby bottles, but by that time anything locked in the pens had no chance.”
He walked them over to gaze more closely at the skeletons. Dan saw both hide and bones half buried in the dirt, hooves, which seemed perhaps even slower to decompose. “We’d always kept a few horses for the kids to ride.”
Dan asked why he had not removed the remains five years in; after all, he had buried the neighbors’ animals; and Yoshi replied something in Japanese while flicking a piece of tobacco off a front tooth. “They were pets. Pets are like children. With these guys, the farm animals, he says they are evidence,” said Maryam.
“If a tree falls in the forest,” said Dan.
“What do you mean?” she said.
“There’s no one else here,” said Dan. “To see it.”
“We’re here and we see it,” said Maryam. “We are bearing witness. We will make sure the rest of the world doesn’t forget. Isn’t that the heart of why we came? I mean, professionally?”
Come With Me Page 14