by Ruth Ozeki
Daisuke moaned. His eyes were closed, but his mouth was slack and his face was strangely relaxed. A small drop of saliva dribbled from the corner of his chapped lips. He looked like he was smiling.
My fist, gripping the knife, looked like it meant business, and my arm felt strong and powerful, too. I liked that. Standing there, we were frozen in time, me and Daisuke-kun, and the future was mine. No matter what I chose to do, for this one moment I owned Daisuke and I owned his future. It was a strange feeling, creepy and a little too intimate, because if I killed him now we would be joined for life, forever, and so I released him. He crumpled at my feet.
I looked at my hands like they belonged to someone else. Strands of his disgusting hair stuck to my fingers by the white blobs of their follicles. I rubbed them off against my skirt.
“Get out of here,” I said. “Go home.”
Daisuke slowly got to his feet and brushed off his knees. “You should have just done it,” he said.
His words surprised me. “Done what?” I asked, stupidly.
He squatted down on the pavement and slowly started putting his books back into his book bag. “Cut me,” he said, looking up at me and blinking. “Slit my throat. I want to die.”
“You do?” I asked.
He nodded. “Of course,” he said, and then he went back to gathering up his papers.
I watched him for a while. I felt sorry for him, because I knew what he meant, and I even thought about offering to do it again, but the moment was gone. Oh well.
“Sorry,” I said.
He shook his head. “It’s okay,” he mumbled.
I watched him for a while longer as he crawled around on his knees, searching under the vending machine for his pencils. I almost wanted to help him, but instead I turned and walked away. I didn’t look back. I wasn’t worried about him telling anyone. He knew better, like I did. I walked all the way to the station, where they have better vending machines, and I bought my dad a pack of Short Hopes because that was the only brand I would buy for him on account of the name, and then at the drink machine I bought myself a can of Pulpy. It’s a kind of orange juice with big bits of pulp in it that I like to pop between my teeth.
4.
My funeral was beautiful and very real. All the kids in my class were wearing black armbands, and they had set an altar on my desk with a candle and an incense burner and my school photograph, enlarged and framed and decorated with black and white ribbons. One by one my enemies took turns going up to my desk and paying their respects to me, laying a white paper flower in front of my picture, while the rest of the class stood at their desks with their hands clasped and their eyes fixed on the ground. Maybe they were trying not to laugh, but I don’t think so. The atmosphere was very solemn and it felt like a proper funeral. Daisuke-kun was pale when his turn came to go up, but he did it, and he offered his flower and bowed deeply, and I almost felt proud of him, which I know sounds kind of perverse but I think maybe you get a little fond of the people you’ve tortured and whose future you’ve owned.
The whole time they were doing this, Ugawa Sensei was chanting a Buddhist hymn. I didn’t recognize it at the time because I grew up in Sunnyvale and didn’t have much exposure yet to the Buddhist tradition, but later on, when I heard it again at my old Jiko’s temple, I asked her about it. She told me it’s called the Maka Hanya Haramita Shingyo,69 which means something like the Great Most Excellent Wisdom Heart Sutra. The only part I remember goes like this: Shiki fu i ku, ku fu i shiki.70
It’s pretty abstract. Old Jiko tried to explain it to me, and I don’t know if I understood it correctly or not, but I think it means that nothing in the world is solid or real, because nothing is permanent, and all things—including trees and animals and pebbles and mountains and rivers and even me and you—are just kind of flowing through for the time being. I think that’s true, and it’s very reassuring, and I just wish I’d understood that at my funeral when Ugawa Sensei was chanting because it would have been a great comfort to me, but of course I didn’t because these sutras are in an old-fashioned language that nobody understands anymore, unless you’re like Jiko and it’s your job. But actually it doesn’t really matter because even if you can’t exactly understand the words, you know they are beautiful and profound, and Ugawa Sensei’s voice, which was usually so mumbly and unpleasant, was suddenly soft and sad and gentle, and he was chanting with feeling, like he really meant it. When he walked up to my desk to offer me a flower, the look on his face made me want to cry because it was so twisted up and full of his own particular sorrow. A couple of times I actually did cry—like when I saw my portrait hung with the black and white funeral ribbons, and when I saw how respectful my classmates were being to me, with their bowed heads and their paper flowers. They must have all gotten together in clubs after school to make those flowers and decorate my picture. They were so serious and dignified. I almost loved them.
5.
I didn’t go to school that day, so I wasn’t actually there at my funeral. I saw it later on. After my encounter with Daisuke, I went home and gave Dad his cigarettes and went to bed. When my mom got home that evening, I made myself throw up on the bathroom floor and told her I was sick, and the next morning I threw up again for good measure, and since it was the last day of school before the summer holidays, she let me stay home. I was really happy, figuring I’d escaped the whole thing, but that evening I got an anonymous email with a subject line that said, “The Tragic and Untimely Death of Transfer Student Nao Yasutani.” The email was a link to a video-sharing website. Someone had made a video of my funeral with their keitai phone and posted it on the Internet, and over the next couple of hours, I watched the hit counter rise. I don’t know who was viewing it, but the video was getting hundreds and then thousands of hits, like it was going viral. Weird, but I was almost proud. It felt kind of good to be popular.
6.
I just remembered the last lines of the Heart Sutra, which go like this:
gaté gaté, para gaté,
parasam gaté, boji sowa ka . . .
These words are actually in some ancient Indian language71 and not even Japanese, but Jiko told me they means something like this:
gone gone, gone beyond,
gone completely beyond, awakened, hurray . . .
I keep thinking of Jiko, and how relieved she’ll be when all sentient beings, even my stupid horrible classmates, wake up and get enlightened and go away, so she can finally rest. She must be so exhausted.
Part II
In reality, every reader, while he is reading, is the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument, which he offers to the reader to permit him to discern what, without the book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself. The reader’s recognition in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its truth.
—Marcel Proust, Le temps retrouvé
Ruth
1.
The image on the screen shows a man in his late thirties or early forties, standing before a vast field of tsunami debris that stretches into the distance, as far as the eye of the camera can see. The man is wearing a white paper face mask, but he has tugged it down to his chin in order to speak to the reporter. He is wearing tired sweatpants, work gloves, a zippered jacket, boots. He raises his arm to gesture toward the wreckage behind him.
“It’s like a dream,” he says. “A horrible dream. I keep trying to wake up. I think when I wake up, my daughter will be back.”
His voice is flat, his utterances short. “I have lost everything. My daughter, my son, my wife, my mother. Our house, neighbors. Our whole town.”
The caption at the bottom of the screen gives the man’s name: T. Nojima, Sanitation Worker, O— Township, Miyagi Prefecture.
The newscaster, his voice muffled by a face mask, speaks to the camera. He explains that they are standing on the site where Mr. Nojima’s house used to be. The scene is one of total devastation, but what the camera cannot pick up is th
e stench. He pulls the face mask down. The smell, he explains, is unbearable, a choking odor of rotting fish and flesh, buried in the wreckage. Mr. Nojima is searching for his six-year-old daughter. He has little hope of finding her alive. He is looking for the backpack she was wearing on the morning of March 11 when the tsunami hit.
“It’s red,” Nojima says. “With a picture of Hello Kitty on it. I’d just bought it for her. The school year was starting and she was so proud of it. She wore it in the house. She was going to be entering the first grade.”
Nojima and his daughter were at home in the kitchen when the wall of black water and debris smashed through their house. Within seconds, Nojima was crushed up against the ceiling and his daughter was gone. He thought he would drown there, but miraculously the house was ripped from its foundation just as the ceiling gave way, and he was pushed through onto the second floor and into the bedroom, where his wife was crouched in a corner, holding their infant son.
“I tried to catch her hand,” he says. “I almost had her, but then the house tipped and split in half.”
His wife and son were dragged away. He thought he could still reach them. He managed to scramble onto the roof of a passing concrete building. He could see his wife in the corner of their floating bedroom, holding the baby, but she was being pulled farther and farther away. He called to her. The roar of the water and the crashing debris was deafening.
“It was so loud, but I think she heard me. She looked at me. Her eyes were wide, but she never once screamed. She didn’t want to scare the baby. She just kept watching me until the end.”
He shakes his head as though to clear further recollection from it. He stares out over the debris field—splintered houses and crumpled cars, cinder block and tangled rebar, boats, furniture parts, smashed appliances, roof tiles, clothing, stuff—a ghastly midden piled several meters deep. He looks down at his feet, poking at a muddy tangle of fabric with the toe of his shoe.
“I will probably never find my family,” he says. “I’ve lost my hope of giving them a proper funeral. But if I can just find something, just one thing that belonged to my daughter, I’ll be able to rest my mind and leave this place.” He swallows hard and then takes a deep breath.
“That life with my family is the dream,” he says. He gestures toward the ruined landscape. “This is the reality. Everything is gone. We need to wake up and understand that.”
2.
In the days following the earthquake and tsunami, Ruth sat in front of her computer screen, trawling the Internet for news of friends and family. Within days, she received confirmation that the people she knew were safe, but she couldn’t stop watching. The images pouring in from Japan mesmerized her. Every few hours, another horrifying piece of footage would break, and she would play it over and over, studying the wave as it surged over the tops of the seawalls, carrying ships down city streets, picking up cars and trucks and depositing them on the roofs of buildings. She watched whole towns get crushed and swept away in a matter of moments, and she was aware that while these moments were captured online, so many other moments simply vanished.
Most of the footage was shot by panicked people on their mobile phones from hillsides or the roofs of tall buildings, so there was a haphazard quality to the images, as if the photographers didn’t quite realize what they were filming, but they knew it was critical, and so they turned on their phones and held them up to the oncoming wave. Sometimes an image would suddenly blur and distort as the photographer fled to higher ground. Sometimes, in the corners and the edges of the frame, tiny cars and people were caught fleeing from the oncoming wall of black water. Sometimes the people looked confused. Sometimes they looked like they were taking their time and even turning back to watch, not understanding the danger they were in. But always, from the vantage point of the camera, you could see how fast the wave was traveling and how immense it was. Those tiny people didn’t stand a chance, and the people standing off-screen knew it. Hurry! Hurry! their disembodied voices cried, from behind the camera. Don’t stop! Run! Oh, no! Where’s Grandma? Oh, no! Look! There! Oh, this is horrible! Hurry! Run! Run!
3.
In the two weeks following the earthquake, tsunami, and meltdown of the Fukushima nuclear reactors, the global bandwidth was flooded with images and reports from Japan, and for that brief period of time, we were all experts on radiation exposure and microsieverts and plate tectonics and subduction. But then the uprising in Libya and the tornado in Joplin superseded the quake, and the keyword cloud shifted to revolution and drought and unstable air masses as the tide of information from Japan receded. Occasionally an article would appear in The New York Times about Tepco’s mismanagement of the meltdown, or the government’s failure to respond and protect its citizens, but this news rarely made the front page anymore. The Business section carried gloomy reports about the cost of Japan’s cascading disasters, deemed to be the most expensive in history, and dire projections for the future of the country’s economy.
What is the half-life of information? Does its rate of decay correlate with the medium that conveys it? Pixels need power. Paper is unstable in fire and flood. Letters carved in stone are more durable, although not so easily distributed, but inertia can be a good thing. In towns up and down the coast of Japan, stone markers were found on hillsides, engraved with ancient warnings:
Do not build your homes below this point!
Some of the warning stones were more than six centuries old. A few had been shifted by the tsunami, but most had remained safely out of its reach.
“They’re the voices of our ancestors,” said the mayor of a town, destroyed by the wave. “They were speaking to us across time, but we didn’t listen.”
Does the half-life of information correlate with the decay of our attention? Is the Internet a kind of temporal gyre, sucking up stories, like geodrift, into its orbit? What is its gyre memory? How do we measure the half-life of its drift?
The tidal wave, observed, collapses into tiny particles, each one containing a story:
• a mobile phone, ringing deep inside a mountain of sludge and debris;
• a ring of soldiers, bowing to a body they’ve flagged;
• a medical worker clad in full radiation hazmat, wanding a barefaced baby who is squirming in his mother’s arms;
• a line of toddlers, waiting quietly for their turn to be tested.
These images, a minuscule few representing the inconceivable many, eddy and grow old, degrading with each orbit around the gyre, slowly breaking down into razor-sharp fragments and brightly colored shards. Like plastic confetti, they’re drawn into the gyre’s becalmed center, the garbage patch of history and time. The gyre’s memory is all the stuff that we’ve forgotten.
4.
Ruth’s mind felt like a garbage patch, an undifferentiated mat of becalmed and fractured pixels. She sat back in her chair, away from the glowing screen, and closed her eyes. The pixels lingered, dancing behind her eyelids in the darkness. She’d spent the afternoon watching clips of bullying and harassment on YouTube and other video-sharing sites in both the United States and Japan, but the clip she was looking for, “The Tragic and Untimely Death of Transfer Student Nao Yasutani,” which according to Nao had once gone viral, was nowhere to be found.
She rubbed her hands up and down across her face, kneading her temples and pressing her fingers into her eye sockets. She felt like she’d been trying to suck the girl out of the glowing screen with the sheer force of her will and the fixity of her eyeballs. Why did it matter so much? But it did. She needed to know if Nao was dead or alive. She was searching for a body.
She stood and stretched, and then wandered downstairs. The house was empty. Oliver had received a large shipment of dawn redwood seedlings, which he was planting over at the NeoEocene clear-cut. He’d left early that morning, whistling the dwarves’ tune from Snow White. Hi ho, Hi ho. Nothing made him happier than planting baby trees. The cat was outside on the porch, waiting for him to come home.
5.
“They’re goosenecks,” Callie said, examining the barnacles on the freezer bag. “Pollicipes polymerus. Order Pedunculata. A gregarious pelagic species, not really native, but it’s not uncommon to find them on tidewrack that’s drifted in from farther out at sea.”
She glanced across the kitchen at Ruth, who was heating water for tea. “Is this the bag you found below Gudrun and Horst’s place?”
When she spoke with Callie on the phone, Ruth hadn’t mentioned where she’d found the bag, but Callie hadn’t sounded at all surprised to hear from her and had offered to come right over. It was almost as if she had been expecting the call, but of course Callie was helpful that way. She was a marine biologist and environmental activist who ran the foreshore monitoring program on the island and did volunteer work for a marine mammal protection agency. She made her living as a naturalist on the massive cruise liners that plied the sheltered waters of the Inland Passage on their way to and from Alaska.