“With care some of the animals recovered, and now they seem to be flourishing,” said Yoshi. “The cattle that had been abandoned in the pasture, I nursed back to health. Let’s go see them.”
They walked out of the barn and Dan looked out over the meadow. He estimated Yoshi had around fifty head.
“I milk them twice a day like I did before the earthquake. There are barn cats and kittens.” He pointed toward the chicken coop. “Chickens, so I have eggs. I have been here so long now, some of the chicks I’ve raised have lived a lifetime and died a natural death. There’s been a generation of rebirth. And there are more wild boar now than ever. With those, you have to be careful. They are prone to attack. I keep them away from the babies—calves, sheep, goats. The little ones I shelter inside the fences. The boar, they like them for lunch.” He laughed. “For some of the animals it’s a return to paradise. None are raised for slaughter. I take care of them and they love me. But then there are birds with cataracts in their eyes. There are tumors. Some of the cattle have these strange white spots . . .”
He continued pointing, but in another direction, toward the road that Maryam and Dan had come from. There was a tractor and a hay lift parked by the side of the road. Near the hay lift was a gray bunny.
“We had a rabbit born without ears. I took him into the house to live with me. He and the dog were like brothers; they’d sleep together in a bed I made of pillows and old sheets. Like a little nest.
“That bunny, he was also albino. He loved to sneak out, and one day I didn’t catch him. He was a fast runner. One of the boars did. He was so white, a perfect target. I went inside my neighbor’s house to borrow a gun, I was so mad, but then I thought, why? This is nature. There are other bunnies born to take his place. The boar was doing what God wanted him to do. To live his life.”
“What does God want you to do?” asked Dan.
“The same,” said Yoshi. “To live my life. That’s what God wants us all to do.”
He started walking toward the cattle. Dan and Maryam followed him.
“You said you went into your neighbor’s home? What’s it like here after so many years without your neighbors?” Dan asked.
“First I missed them, of course. The ones I liked, ha-ha. Now I’m used to it. Over time, everything has gotten easier. There’s a rhythm to my days. I’ll borrow, when I need it, some farm machinery, a tractor, from the farmers closest by. I take very good care of their things; I park them in their sheds and keep them well oiled. The guy next door, I take care of his animals. His fields. I plant and mow them. I grow food for the animals to eat.”
Dan asked, “Do you think your neighbor would mind if he knew?”
Yoshi shrugged. “He has never come back,” he said. “I don’t think he will. See that pig? That’s his. The ostriches are also his. If he wants them, he can take them.”
“He must have loved the ostriches,” said Dan. “They are so funny.”
Yoshi smiled. “I never had ostriches myself. Look at their bellies, those long thin necks. They have a peaceful life.”
“It’s Walden Pond,” Dan whispered to Maryam.
“Let’s go visit the cattle,” said Yoshi. He motioned for them to follow as he walked through the grazing field. “You can’t eat them. They are too contaminated. So they can live a long unfettered life.” A cow came up and nudged him gently with her muzzle. Yoshi petted it and it opened its mouth. He leaned over and inhaled deeply. “I love the smell of their breath. It’s fermented. Look at her eyes.”
“They are so beautiful,” said Maryam.
“Dark like yours,” said Yoshi. He leaned over and showed them the white spots on her flank. “See this? This is what I was talking about. There is another farmer who stayed nearby for a while; he was the first to see this in his livestock. He drove into the city with one of his cows to prove that radiation disease existed and was threatened with violence. A mob surrounded his truck. And not just the bureaucrats. Even the people wanted to run him out of town—they were afraid the sickness was catching. He ended up putting down all his animals. And then he moved away. I couldn’t do that. I think, what can I do but make her comfortable? I put salve on the spots and hope for the best.”
“This is a lot of work for one man,” said Dan.
“The animals, they are like my friends,” said Yoshi. “There is no loneliness worse than a loneliness being surrounded by other people.” He paused. “The whole time I was growing up we had butterflies in our fields. I used to catch them in a net. I’d bring them to my mother. She loved them, but she always set them free. Now there are so much fewer butterflies in Tomioka. And the wings, they can be so oddly small . . . That makes me sad.”
“You’ve been here five years,” said Dan. “What about your own health?”
Yoshi took out another cigarette and lit up. “The doctors don’t know what to do with me. I am so radioactive. There are some volunteers, old friends, a nephew. Every couple of weeks I meet them outside the zone and they bring me groceries that are uncontaminated. I do what I can. Plus, they buy me the shampoo I like.” He smiled. “They say I will eventually get cancer.” He shrugged. “I asked, ‘When?’ They say twenty to forty years.” He laughed. “I’m almost sixty now. I’ll be dead long before that.” He inhaled again, and looked at his cigarette. “I promised my daughter, this summer, I’m going to try and quit smoking,” said Yoshi.
“I love that plan,” said Maryam.
Dan was out of questions after that.
Later that evening, back in Fukushima City and thoroughly exhausted, Dan and Maryam ate dinner at a hole-in-the-wall sushi place behind a bamboo curtain in the shopping and dining mall under the bullet train tracks at Fukushima station.
“It’s not the world’s most inventive food,” said Maryam, when she suggested it. “But it’s across the street from the hotel and it’s fun. One of those conveyor belt sushi places like you see in Japantown up in the City.”
After the strain of the day, the constant effort to communicate, the long ride back, the speechless show-and-grab form of ordering sounded very appealing to Dan.
Fun. That sounded appealing, too.
They’d left Yoshi alone on a farm in a radioactive no-man’s zone to tend to his radioactive animals. It wasn’t part of Dan’s life plan to leave someone so vulnerable in such a hazardous spot, but number one, he was a journalist (you don’t intervene or change a story you are reporting, he’d learned that much back in high school) and, two, Japan, outside the zone, was seemingly too difficult for Yoshi to navigate. Perhaps people were also too difficult, too disappointing. Yoshi was opting out, but still working. He was, it seemed to Dan, happier to live away from a world that built nuclear power plants on fault lines, in tsunami zones, and had no real functioning procedures to safeguard its populations, or knew what to do when their own meager plans failed horribly.
Yoshi chose to stay. Still, it felt criminal to leave him there.
“I am a journalist. It is my job to report. It isn’t my job to try and save.”
Dan had repeated these three lines to himself during the drive home, like a mantra.
Seated at the sushi bar next to an elderly, argumentative couple, Dan felt thankful that he didn’t understand Japanese. He also figured he had received several decades of dental X-ray dosages of radiation already that day and one more in the form of eating sushi wasn’t going to add to the damage. If it was, he was too tired and overwhelmed to care. Instead, he swore that he would never let the dentist take pictures again; it was the most resolve he could dredge up. Invisible, odorless, tasteless.
“Oooh, mackerel, yellowtail, giant oyster!” exclaimed Maryam as the conveyor belt displayed its wares in front of them, the sushi chef behind it, stocking the assembly line with his dishes, grinning and bowing at her zeal.
“That’s the size of the tongue of my dress shoes,” said Dan when she plunked a giant oyster in front of him and then one in front of herself. “I don’t know if I can eat it.�
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“You can and you will,” said Maryam, slurping the meat down, taking several seconds to dissolve it in her mouth. She took a swig of beer. “Wow! That’s like eating the ocean.”
Only you want to eat the ocean, Dan thought.
“Uni,” she said, breathlessly. Four bright orange suns had been placed on the moving platform directly in front of them. Maryam had to dive a little to keep the plates from moving too swiftly away down the carousel. In an instant, she clattered a two-piece plate down on her small bamboo sushi tray and followed with another dish that she set down in front of Dan on his; the bright orange sea urchin embedded on sushi rice surrounded by warm seaweed paper knocking aside his as-yet-uneaten oyster.
“I wouldn’t dare fuck this up with soy,” said Maryam. “It is perfect as is. Try it, Dan. You’ll see God.”
Dan loved uni. It was one of his favorites. He picked the piece up with his hand, as all his compatriots at the sushi bar seemed to be doing, and bit in. Saline, sweet, creamy, a strong hint of umami. Indescribable deliciousness.
“I’m seeing him, I’m seeing him,” Dan said.
It was as if he had been starving and hadn’t known it.
He looked at her. “I’m seeing you,” Dan said.
For a moment, she seemed to blush.
“Good, hunh?” Maryam said. “Delectable. There is nothing like sushi in Japan.”
She recovered, but she kept her eyes downcast.
“No, yes. I mean, yes, this is delicious. But the whole day, Mar. That man. Those animals.”
“I love Yoshi,” said Maryam. She snagged a plate of octopus sashimi sailing by her.
“Why? Why do you love him so much?”
“For the same reasons you love me, Dan,” she said. “He sees the unnoticed and concealed. What others want obliterated.”
Dan thought for a moment. Was that why he loved her? It certainly was part of it. Her activism. But also, he had never met anyone else remotely like her. Mysterious and straight up. She made him do and say things he never thought possible. She was compassionate and full of empathy. She cared, she cared radically about the whole fucked-up crazy planet. The animals broke Yoshi’s heart. The laundry broke her heart. Her broken heart restored Dan’s heart. She’d put a heart back in his chest. There, it beat wildly.
“I do love you, Maryam,” said Dan.
“I know,” she said.
“And,” he said.
“And,” she said.
“Mar,” he said.
“I love you, too,” said Maryam.
As soon as Dan entered Maryam’s room, he realized that it was twice as big as his was. He had a standard single and Maryam had a Hollywood twin—which was Japanese-train-station-hotelese for a suite. There was one queen-size bed and a sleeping sofa by the window. Probably for a small child, but Dan thought it just right for Maryam—a fainting couch for her to swoon on.
“Did your friend upgrade you?” Dan asked.
“I upgraded me,” said Maryam, with a crafty smile. “It’s all on your credit card.”
Dan shook his head. Then he moved in closer, putting one arm around her waist and drawing her in near to him.
They were pretty much eye to eye, as her head was bent, and she seemed suddenly to be bashful or even a little bit frightened.
“Sweetheart, are you scared?” said Dan.
“A bit,” said Maryam.
He softened his knees enough so that he could lean back and up under her bowed face to kiss her. Each eyelid, each cheek, the tip of her nose, and then her lips. Top, bottom. Both.
Soon she was kissing him back. Then they were on the bed. They rolled around for a while, getting used to each other.
Maryam tugged at Dan’s polo shirt, and he pulled it off from behind his neck. He stroked the front of her pink cashmere sweater, across and between her breasts.
“So soft,” said Dan. “Let me feel it against my chest.” She moved in closer to him and snuggled.
“Can I take it off?” asked Dan, and she nodded, wordless, Maryam was wordless, and so Dan took off the pretty pink sweater and folded it carefully and laid it beside her on the other side of the bed. She sat up and he pulled off her white T-shirt. She was wearing a lacy white bra and he kissed her lips and reached with one hand behind her back, first to bring her in closer to him and then to unclasp it. (He’d perfected this move in high school, although it had been years since he’d trotted it out.)
“Is this okay?” Dan asked.
Maryam nodded her head yes. He slipped the bra off both of her arms, one at a time. He gently cupped her left breast. It was a beautiful breast. It felt real. He leaned down and kissed her nipple. It got hard. He’d wondered. Now he thought, what does this mean about me, that this all feels so natural and right? He’d never been with a man. He’d thought about it. He’d thought about almost everything. There was almost nothing he hadn’t thought about. He’d never been with a man, but Maryam was a woman.
It was so sexy.
“Are my hands too cold?” Dan asked.
Maryam shook her head no. Slowly, one hand cradling her head, one hand behind her waist, he laid her back down on the bed and kissed both breasts. Then he moved down toward her tummy and kissed around her belly button. Then he unbuttoned her jeans, and unzipped them. He hesitated for a moment. He wasn’t exactly sure what to expect.
As if she read his mind, she said, “My transformation is complete, Dan, if that is what you’re worried about. We can do what we want, we’re just going to have to use lube.”
“I’m not worried,” said Dan. “I’m curious. And I’m just sort of amazed at how I feel and how much I don’t care. I don’t care. In fact, I find it hot. It’s you I want.”
Then carefully, one leg and then the other, he tugged her jeans off her long brown legs.
“Would you look at that,” said Maryam.
He looked where she was looking and saw his dick pressing hard against his jeans.
“No Viagra for you,” she said.
“Hey, I’m not that old,” said Dan.
“Take them off, Dan,” Maryam said, in a husky whisper.
He obeyed her. Dan stood up, his feet on the carpet, and slipped his jeans down to his ankles. He stepped out of them and then he let his boxers fall to his knees and he stepped out of those, too.
“Wow,” said Maryam.
“Wow what?” said Dan, smiling.
“You’re my first circumcised penis,” said Maryam.
A second, and they both burst out laughing.
Dan dived down on top of her. “Your first and your last,” he said.
“From your mouth to the Gates of Heaven,” she said.
He pulled back. “From your mouth to God’s ears,” he said. “My grandma always said that.”
Maryam sat up on her elbows. “Well, my mother said it my way to me, and I’ve scoured the Internet on its origins. Somewhere someone wrote that the saying, which is Arabic in origin, mind you, probably entered the Jewish vernacular in southern Spain, Andalusia, and then it must have just been a verbal hop, skip, and jump to Yiddish. It seems to me it can be used to indicate our deepest wishes, as in ‘yours will be my first and last circumcised penis for—we both hope—our love will be everlasting,’ or it can be used lightly, with bite, as in ‘if only,’ or ‘Insha’Allah’—”
Dan kissed her. Midsentence. Now he knew the secret to shut her up. He kissed her again and again, and again and again Maryam kissed him back.
* * *
Honey, we need to talk.
Her phone pinged, but it was a headache that woke her up. Amy felt as if her skull had been cleaved in two and was now being held together only by the skin of her face and scalp. She’d drunk far too much wine the night before. A whole bottle by herself at dinner with the boys, and then another glass or two when the kids went off to bed and she slunk alone upstairs to her bedroom. She remembered thinking: I need to pour myself some water and take a couple of Advil, but she had been too hammered
to get up. This is what husbands are for, she remembered thinking. If Dan were here, he would have brought the rescue remedies to her. Instead, Amy had just lain on her bed, incapable of organized movement, watching the world spin. First, she had set her phone alarm on vibrate for an early-morning run, although apparently this headache beat that buzz to the punch—that or at some time in the night she’d had the sense to change the setting to an hour later. But she had not reckoned on that piercing ping. Her phone said 5:59 as she reached over to shut it off before the onset of dreaded vibrations.
The effort of grabbing the phone was too much and she had to roll onto her back. There were only a few times in her life when she’d awakened this poisoned, but she knew what was next in store for her: finding a way to slide off the bed and crawl to the bathroom, where she’d have to sit on the tub’s lip and drink out of the faucet on the sink before finding the strength to stand. Once up, she’d need to take that Advil now and then crawl back across the floor, hoist herself again onto the bed, if that was in the realm of possibility, and lie still, paralyzed, until the ibuprofen and hydration began to do their magic. When that happened, she knew she could make her way downstairs and start the coffee.
All this measured activity would take courage. Flung on her back on her bed, Amy realized she still had her phone in her hand. She could open her eyes. Maybe the news would scare her into action.
Amy opened her eyes and stared at her phone. She’d forgotten to charge it the night before and it was on low power, what remained of the gray-white bar on the right had turned to danger-danger warning red. Still there was enough juice for it to continue to torture her—the source of that horrendous ping, a text from Dan, who had been missing in action.
Honey, it read, we need to talk.
There was also an older text from Donny. From three in the morning. Thank God she’d slept through that one.
i.e. 8:30 sharp
Sharp? She’d like to stick something sharp up his anus.
Roger that, Amy typed with her thumbs. He was the last person in the world she wanted to see. She still hadn’t gotten over how cruel he’d been to her with his stupid algorithms. Every time she looked at him at work she felt like she was going to puke.
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