She stubbed her cigarette out in the ashtray, spilling stubs out onto the floor. Then she rubbed her eyes like you do when you have sand in them.
“They read her name out on TV. A list of the dead.”
Her eyes flickered open and shut. Open and shut.
“If you truly care about Emi-chan then take my car and that cowboy bastard with you. Show him my daughter’s body. Show him what his God has done.”
Then her head slumped on her chest. She was snoring.
Saturday, March 12th, 2011
5:03
I could smell the pancakes Mama was cooking downstairs, the butter that had just started to melt. Maple syrup was on the table. Mick Jagger was on the stereo. “Baby won’t you live with me?” Papa was going through a pile of papers on the kitchen table, tossing the sections on fashion, gardening, travel. He only scanned the news pages of a dozen papers until the books section of The New York Times and sports section of The Observer remained.
“Sleep well, Scoop?”
“No, Papa. Why did you do it? Why did you kill yourself? It doesn’t make sense.”
“You want a coffee? I gotta get coffee, I can barely keep my eyes open.”
“What?”
I was sweating but it was cold. It was the same old dream. I always woke up before I got any answers. I opened my eyes. I was sitting in the passenger seat of a tin car just like the one I’d seen get swallowed by the sea on TV. When was that? An hour ago, yesterday, a week ago? Had it been a dream too?
A man in a cowboy hat was sitting in the driving seat next to me. Mr. Blackmore. I hadn’t told him Emi was dead. I hadn’t told him this car wasn’t mine. But he had put his faith in me and was prepared to drive into the tsunami zone for his daughter. Her Mama wasn’t.
That had to mean something.
It was light out, but only just. Half-light in a grey car park.
“This isn’t Ishinomaki,” I said.
“It’s Yamoto highway rest area. We should be 10 km from downtown Ishinomaki. From here on in, who knows what we’ll find? But we are going to get that little girl of mine back.”
I looked away out of the window. There was no one around. Nothing to see.
“Right, that’s what we’re here for,” I said.
I couldn’t bear to tell him what I knew, but I couldn’t bear not to.
“Listen,” I said, “I want you to know that I’m grateful for you sticking with me after what I said in the text message. It means a lot to me you put your faith in me. I’m not used to people sticking with me, but there’s something you should know. It’s difficult, but… it’s Emi… I don’t know how to say this, but…
“…but you think she’s dead, right?”
“Yes. The TV said so.”
“She’s not dead. I have to believe that. God didn’t let us come all this way for that to be true. Text message? Haven’t gotten a signal since the big one. We don’t always know what is happening, we don’t have all the answers. There’s a greater power at work that we can’t see. All we see are the details, we’re not supposed to know how it fits together, we just do what we do. You don’t think we got this far just by chance do you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, don’t sweat the details. I need some coffee, then we find Emi.”
“Right.” I said.
We got out of the car and walked to two vending machines by a toilet block. The coffee was sickly sweet and made my stomach turn. I held the can in my hand to warm my fingers.
“I’ve seen the pictures on TV, Hana. There’s a lot of death and destruction. The country’s under attack, but you can’t believe everything you see on TV. The truth is, there is a girl in Ishinomaki that we have to find. She may not be there. She doesn’t belong here. And we will bring her back. There is no reason for her to be here.”
No reason for an earthquake. No reason why Papa would kill himself on a commuter line on the way to the biggest story of his life. No reason why I was in Ishinomaki and not serving ramen. No reason it was me on the case instead of someone who knew what she was doing.
“Is there a reason for any of this?” I said.
“There can be only one reason… it’s a test.”
“A test?”
He threw his empty can into a recycle bin.
“I don’t have all the answers, but I know this is a test. To find out if we are good people. I failed every test I ever did in school, and I failed in my marriage. But this is one I can’t fail. This is the big one. Please. She’s a 14-year-old girl. You said you know which school she went to, right?”
“Minato Junior High School.”
“Then let’s go there now. And time to waste is a luxury none of us has.”
He turned from me and studied a tourist information map on the wall of the toilet block. There were cartoon children on it, jumping with smiling whales splashing in the sea.
“Route 240 goes by the coast. It’s probably been destroyed. Route 6 is the only other way in, but there is a bridge over the estuary. The school is near by. We’ll go as far as we can. Let’s find her.”
I believed we would. We got back in the car and followed the signs for Route 6.
“What’s that smell?” Mr. Blackmore said.
“Sorry, I brought some natto rice balls for the trip. They’re good for you…”
“No, it’s not that. It’s something worse. Something outside.”
It got worse as we drove on.
6:02
Nothing. No one was around. No one was walking by the road. No traffic coming or going. No signs of life. Nothing green. Only greys and browns. Pipes, gas tanks and metal jetting out of a building as big as a Tokyo city block. A grounded oil rig? A factory. But all the walls on the ground floor had been ripped off. All that were left were its steel legs. Stripped to the bone. Standing in swampland.
Another factory, but no walls. An iron and steel skeleton. A fork lift motionless in the middle of the car park. Everything left as it would have been when the tsunami had hit. Frozen. Where is the forklift driver? Twisted metal by the road side. No place for a missing girl.
I was not in Ishinomaki in 2011. I was in Hiroshima in 1945. Debris and the road grid. This is what was left. A sign for Japan Paper. A massive factory floor, gutted. Giant rolls of newsprint stacked three high. Toilet paper for the gods. The metal factory walls had been yanked off and thrown, who knows where? Abandoned. Twisted metal. An aircraft hangar? The bare bones of a concentration camp victim. What was inside was outside. What was out was in.
Nothing left.
Where were the people? If they were still alive, they must be in hiding. How will they eat? How could anyone think of eating here? It would be like eating in the same room as a corpse.
Here lies my Mama. She has breathed her last. Anyone care for a sandwich? Smoked ham? Perhaps a rice ball with salmon roe? Pickled radish? Natto? Every building a skeleton. The cancer was malignant. It had eaten all the flesh before the patient could be saved. All is now devastated, like a strong, proud woman living between doses of poison. It’s for the best. The doctors said so. Only the chemo tube had to stay attached. The doctors said it would keep her alive. The experts said so. They knew. Half alive, half true. If she knew the whole truth, she never let on. Papa knew it though. It would have been kinder to end her suffering.
A super-centre car park. Only every car was twisted metal. Debris from the war. Flat. Grey. Pipes. Trees with no greenery. No food, but piles of rubbish. I couldn’t tell what it was. Twisted wood and metal two floors high. Like the mass graves of Leningrad in the history books. A starved city, a million bodies buried without a single name. But I couldn’t see any bodies here. Then I could see two wheels in the debris.
They were cars. And more cars, pushed to the side of the road by an angry god. Fields of lifeless metal. A bent tree leaning away from the line of attack. Away from the sea, falling over itself to get further inland. A single seagull tried to keep up with our car, perhaps happy fo
r the company.
There was nothing else living as far as I could see.
The road was rising. We were climbing high above the ground.
Then we were crossing water, the estuary. Nothing but grey water. Neither angry nor black.
We drove on. Now we were descending, then touching down on the other side. Solid ground? Everywhere was mud and water.
We slowed to a crawl, unsure how deep the puddles were. In front of us a giant rusted water tower lay on its side. I put my cheek on my knee to read the message painted in 10-meter-long characters passing our window:
W
H
A
L
E
I
N
A
C
A
N
Now we were slowing. Pools of black water. Rubbish and cars strewn around. No order. No reason. Some cars of this world, others twisted metal zombies. Mud. I couldn’t tell what I was looking at any more. Houses on their sides, children’s toys in the streets, mud and still more mud. But no people. It was not Japan. It was the end of the road.
And the stench.
The stink of the sea. Rotten fish. Mud. Dirty water. Everything mixed up, nothing pure. And something else. Something I was smelling for the first time.
The smell of death.
06:45
The car shook from a sudden blast of wind. Only it wasn’t windy. We rocked from side to side for half a minute. Maybe more. Then it ended.
I looked out the car windows, trying to make sense of what was out there. The only building standing was a four-story concrete box of a school. Only the top two floors were clean of mud. There was muddy water covering everything, so that you couldn’t be sure where the road was supposed to be, or where the land ended and the sea began.
“This is as far as we can go,” Mr. Blackmore said.
I felt small, powerless, and something else I couldn’t put a name to.
“Emi’s not here,” I said, “let’s get out of here. Nothing for us here. Emi can’t be here.”
Mr. Blackmore reached past me and took his hat from the back-seat and put it on his head. “This is the only building still standing, so I’ll start here. Wait here in the car. And it may be best if you locked the doors.”
“Wait,” I said. I rummaged through the glove box and handed Blackmore a white paper mask.
“I’m not planning to operate,” he said.
“It’s for the stink.”
He opened his mouth, but said nothing, just bowed his head a little and took the mask.
“You’re catching on,” I said.
He smiled an unhappy smile. He strode away making waves behind his footsteps. He disappeared into the building. I locked the door. There were no sounds, except the squawks of a seagull.
I sat alone, for I don’t know how long. A clock on the side of the building looked down on me. It had stopped at 2:46. I was alive when everything around me was dead. What right did I have to be here?
None.
But that wasn’t even what was really bothering me. I was alive and doing what? Waiting in a car for Mr. Blackmore to be devastated. Waiting for the dead to come back to life.
Waiting.
There were clothes hanging from the second floor. Mud was splashed against the pretty salmon-pink and sandstone yellow walls. And there was a scum ring around the building. Like a ring around the bath. Only this one was two meters above the ground.
A sign said Minato Junior High School. So this was where Emi went to school. Why was there a school in the middle of a wasteland?
Waiting is for the dead. I couldn’t wait any longer.
I unlocked my door and put one foot onto the ground and put some weight onto it. My geta sandals sank into the gunk. But there was nothing I could do about it. I slogged through, pulling my feet free with every step to the school building where Mr. Blackmore had disappeared.
The mud was cold and water lapped against my ankles. In the 10 meters it took to get to the entrance of the school, my legs were covered in mud and my toes were aching from the cold.
There was another clock in the courtyard, where the children would meet for after-school clubs. It was stopped at 3:54.
I waded through the puddles that were like a pond now to the school entrance hall. Shoe cubbyholes had fallen from the walls and were floating on the water. I stepped into the corridor and sloshed through the ground floor classrooms. No glass in the windows. Holes in the ceiling. No feeling in my toes.
I saw a freezing staircase in a gutted, stinking shell of the junior high school. A handful of mismatched towels covered the width of the first two steps, and two dozen pairs of mud-splattered boots were stacked along the edges.
I tried to kick my mud-smeared sandals off but had to pry them off with my hands. I dry heaved. The stink from the gunk was now on my hands and mixed with the air. I reached for the window to clear my lungs with fresh air, but it was more of the same stench.
I walked barefoot up the stairs, the damp and cold of the concrete floors seeped through to my bones with every step. No lights, no heat, no defence, no life.
Wait.
Sounded like men’s voices, talking, grunting from far above. I dashed up the steps to tell them: “I’m here! I’m alive!” But I stopped. Men? Talking? Laughing? Focus, Hana, focus.
I held my breath and listened as my eyes ran wild around the room. Two men. Two floors above. Laughing? Crying? Drunk?
“… any girls here?”
Ono’s voice. How could that be? It couldn’t be him. Maybe I was confused. I scanned the room.
A notice board in the corridor was covered with two posters hung the wrong way round, with the pictures facing the wall, the blank backs facing out.
On them were two lists of names. Two whiteboard marker pens hung from pieces of string nailed to the notice-board. On the left, 40 names under the word: “Resident.” On the right, “Searching for” with messages scribbled in red. The poster was bleeding red.
“…nobody’s here, we are the law. We made it, so we can do what we want here, who’s to know?”
I’m looking for my son, Taisuke Sakuta, Grade 3. Contact Yuri… Please, does anyone know of the Ito family?… Yui Kinoshita if you see this, we have left for Aunt Sugiyama’s in Ibaraki… Mio, we are waiting for you, don’t worry about us…
I retched.
“…did you hear someone downstairs?”
I started to read the list of residents, angry at myself I hadn’t done that first. Footsteps, shuffling, tripping. I scanned for any names in katakana, the writing used for foreign words. The footsteps were one floor above. In a moment Ono would come around the corner and be face-to-face with me.
“…couldn’t be. Nobody’s down here…”
I found it. Emi Blackmore with a line through her name. An address scribbled by hand: Ishinomaki 14-124.
“…earthquake!”
I shook. I pressed myself flat against the corridor wall, then hit the floor, face-down to the ground. Plaster fell from the ceiling. I held my breath and closed my eyes. I could hear the men on the stairwell. Ono and his friend were running now, but straight down the stairs.
They were putting on their boots. The building stopped shaking. I breathed. But I couldn’t stay here. Maybe I could beg Ono for help? The only other way out was to climb the stairs, away from him.
Easy choice.
I went up. Two more flights. Past the No Admittance to Students sign. A metal door to the outside. I pushed the door open, which put me on the flat roof. No one there. I forced my numb body over to the edge of the roof and looked out over the concrete lip. The school swimming pool was below, filled with water so black I couldn’t see the bottom. But it wasn’t empty. There was a body in the centre of it, floating face down with outstretched arms.
A girl in school uniform.
I rolled back from the edge.
I took a moment to stare up at the sky, then down at the concrete r
oof under my feet. There in crayon, in kanji characters for the oldest Japanese words:
Water
Food
And in English…
SOS
The children’s handwriting was far too small for a helicopter to notice. Twenty little chairs were arranged in a circle at the far end of the roof. An open-air lesson? There was a door beyond the chairs. A way down? I stumbled to it, not caring about the grazes to my bare feet. I couldn’t feel them anyway. I grabbed the door handle with both hands and pushed. It rattled, but the frame was warped. I pushed harder. Voices again, men’s voices coming from behind me. From the stairwell I had taken up to this roof. Ono.
I put my shoulder to the door. Nothing budged. I looked behind me. The stairwell door was swinging open, outwards. Outwards. Of course. I stopped pushing and pulled instead. My door swung open and I threw myself down the stairs. I tripped and skidded down, the only thing that mattered was to put as much distance between me and Ono. On the ground floor were more muddy boots and shoes. I stuck my feet in the first pair of boots I could reach and I was out the school without looking back.
I splashed through yellow water on the road, and strode away into a side street without looking back. I wasn’t walking through a neighbourhood. I was walking through a rubbish dump.
A house painted in pastels, leaning at an impossible angle with a car upside down in the yard. Minnows swimming over a zebra crossing. On another house all the doors were missing. I could see into its kitchen, every pot and pan was on the floor. The front garden was a wreckers’ yard. I saw a bath and a cement-mixing truck in the yard of another house. The truck’s wheels were bent inwards. Disabled. Insect screens hung loose from patio doors like the last tooth in Aunt Tanaka’s mouth. The street I walked was dense with rubbish and stagnant water. I saw another car. It was filled with mud instead of seats. I looked down into brown waters and saw the reflections of fallen telephone poles. There was the body of an electric guitar, face down in the rubble, its neck under piles of wood and cloth in the reeking mud.
Half Life: A Hana Walker Mystery (The Hana Walker Mysteries Book 1) Page 8