This Is Only a Test

by B. J. Hollars

  Henry’s best behavior occurs in the place we need it least: at the bottom of Niagara Falls, where thousands of gallons of roaring water immediately lull him to sleep.

  After surviving all of this, we pull back into the driveway, where I promise myself to dedicate the rest of August to not going anywhere. Twenty-eight hundred miles have left us weathered, and though the minivan has performed admirably, we know it’s time to let that baby cool.

  From here on out we walk, I proclaim, and for most of that month we do.

  Thankfully, we live just a few houses down from a playground, which satisfies most of Henry’s hierarchy of needs. And what needs we can’t fulfill in the sand, or on the slide, or in the swoop of the swing, we find in the river instead. This, too, satisfies our walking requirement. We regularly march our swimsuited bodies down the hidden path toward the river’s inlet. It’s a freshwater paradise, a shaded glade once used to float timber into the river in the days when timber still ruled this town. Now, all that remains are the splintered pylons protruding like spikes from the sand, each of which Henry hugs while trying to keep from tumbling into the water.

  Amid all this summertime fun I forget about his fever, and when it returns in mid-August—lingering for well over a week—we just continue our afternoon swims as if nothing has changed.

  What this boy needs, I think, is cool waters.

  It is a theory I’d nearly put to the test during our burning night in the Poconos. There, in that strange place with the waterfall so near, it had seemed the only logical choice.

  And now, though we are closer to home, it still seems worth a try.

  After all, if this fever refuses to reveal its source, what choice do we have but to exorcise it by equally mysterious means?

  For weeks, I return Henry to the stream under the auspices of play.

  “Shall we play?” I ask as I tug his trunks over his thighs. “Let’s just go for a little play in the water.”

  “Wawa,” he says.

  “Water,” I correct.

  “Wawa,” he says again.

  99.5

  Despite the stream’s best efforts, we cannot break our boy’s fever. Cannot even lower it a tenth of a point. Though his temperature is hardly extreme, it is nonetheless troubling—proof of some cog out of alignment.

  I take to the phones, calling nurse after nurse like a seasoned telemarketer. I beg them for answers, and when none are given, I beg for a doctor instead.

  Fine, a nurse finally relents. We’ll set something up.

  Upon our arrival at pediatrics later that day, the nurse begins with Henry’s temperature. Henry’s eyes roll across his brow as she sweeps a path across his forehead.

  As the nurse peers down at the reading, I await confirmation that all my worry was reasonable, that I was right to advocate so fiercely on his behalf.

  “Ninety-eight-point-six,” she says, jotting the numbers down on her sheet. “Right this way for the doctor.”

  As a result of his perfect reading, the doctor has a hard time taking me seriously. He has seen parents like me before.

  “Viral,” he says. “It’s probably just viral, and it’ll pass.”

  I don’t believe him. Don’t believe the nurse, either.

  They’re in cahoots, I reason, part of some grand conspiracy to mislead parents into thinking their children healthy.

  Though we have at last obtained our 98.6, I refuse to be satisfied. Mainly, because I know it can’t be true. I convince myself that the fever has merely evolved, found a way to hold its hot breath until after the nurse’s thermometer passed by.

  You can trick them, I think as we pull into the Walgreens parking lot. But you can’t trick me.

  I return home with a new thermometer—top of the line—and insert it into my son.

  Together, we wait for its beep just like always, and when it does—when Henry mimics the sound with which he’s become so familiar—I glance the truth in the tiny screen.

  How can it be? I wonder. How is he already back to burning?

  89.1

  I have no choice but to protect my son the only way I know how—by rigging the thermometer readings. I stick the probe halfheartedly beneath his arm and wait for the result.

  “There. That’s better,” I smile as I read the screen. “A perfect 89.1.”

  All of this is lunacy, of course, but I am going mad. A part of me convinces the other part that there is logic in tricking the thermometer into giving me the reading I require. That same part of me dismisses my own powers of observation. It doesn’t matter that Henry’s acting the same and eating the same and playing the same—the thermometer counteracts everything I once knew to be true.

  Prior to Henry’s birth, a seasoned father warned me of the perils of fatherhood. He told me I would doubt myself and fail often, but that these transgressions were all par for the course. But then he offered a far more troubling thought: that although I would love every moment with my son, exhaustion would make certain that I hardly remembered any of it. At least not the first year, which he’d dubbed The Year of the Great Forgetting—a phrase I’m just beginning to understand.

  Yet even now, midway through Henry’s second year, my forgetfulness remains great. I can’t help but feel as if the fever senses my weakness, pegs me for an easy mark by the crow’s feet in the corners of my eyes.

  Let me just sneak in a quick catnap, I think as my eyes droop toward my boy, then I swear to God I’m coming for you.

  99.5, 99.5, 99.5, 99.5, 99.5

  On Henry’s 613th day of life we run the tests—all of them—anxious to learn the fever’s name. We can’t help but think that we know it, though we don’t want what we think to be true.

  On the doctor’s orders, I lay Henry flat on the table and cover his body with my own.

  “You’re going to be fine,” I say. “It’ll all be over soon.”

  The lie is so real I believe it.

  Henry has no reason to doubt me, so he grins, then begins babbling in a language I’ll never know.

  I steady him as the nurse readies the needle, then inserts it into his arm. The flesh of my flesh is broken, and for a moment, the babbling stops. Henry’s body buckles, turns rigid, and then he lets loose, wailing as if trapped in the Mark Twain house or aboard a ship in Salem harbor.

  The only word he knows to be of any use to him is no: “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.”

  “It’s going to be fine, boy . . .”

  “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.”

  I press down hard upon his body as the vials fill with blood.

  With each rise in pitch, my body trembles.

  I think: Give me the ram, the altar, the sharpened knife. I am ready to make good on my promise.

  TEMPERATURE UNKNOWN

  The tests come back, and since the doctors still don’t know what it is, we settle for what it’s not. It is not cancer, it is not Lyme disease, it is not anything we have a name for. Our pediatrician is pleased to inform us that the blood culture is negative for bacteria, that the white blood cell count looks good.

  “So what is it?” I ask.

  He says that’s a little less clear.

  When I ask what to make of the continual low-grade fever, he reminds me that temperatures fluctuate, that some children just run warm.

  The easiest fix, we’re told, is simply to lay off the thermometer for a while.

  My jaw drops, though I soon admit this seems like sound advice.

  Two months later, our boy is back to being a boy. Just some kid who will quickly forget what we will always remember.

  Of all my parental trespasses, the one I’ll never forget is how I placed my faith in numbers and not our son. How many afternoons had he hugged pylons in the stream to assure me he was fine? And how many times had I ignored him? Why was it easier for me to trust a beep and a screen than the person I loved most?

  Some days I want to wear a button that reads IT’S MY FIRST DAY ON THE JOB. But I want to wear it always,
because every day feels like the first day, and every lapse in judgment feels wholly my own.

  Today is my 670th day on the job, though I am no better at it than I was yesterday. As proof, you need look no further than my forgetting to zip Henry’s coat as we sit on the deck and watch the leaves fall alongside the outdoor thermometers. We grip the porch railing and peer into our backyard wilderness.

  “Hey, boy,” I say as we shiver, “how about you and I look for some deer?”

  “Deya,” he says.

  “Deer,” I correct.

  “Deya,” he says again.

  I smile, pull him close, and save every last breath I’ve got for a moment he might remember.

  Hirofukushima

  Before there was nothing, there was everything: a flash like magnesium, followed by the darkness. By 1945, the people of Hiroshima had grown accustomed to the flashbulbs that preserved them in photographs, though they remained unfamiliar with the curious light they glimpsed in the sky one early August morning.

  What, they wondered, could possibly cause such a—

  Across the ocean, there were men who could measure destruction to the kiloton, men who had done it just three weeks prior, while hidden behind dark glasses. In the hours leading up to the test, scientists and soldiers gathered in New Mexico’s desert and placed bets on their creation’s destruction.

  Will we incinerate the entire planet, they wondered, or simply some small part of it?

  Sixty-six years later and seven hundred miles from Hiroshima, a high school buddy of mine—let’s call him John—glances up at a squawking speaker in his classroom in Sendai.

  The voice on the speaker tries to warn him of what’s soon to come, but the warning comes too late.

  Please prepare yourself for—

  It is Friday, March 11, 2011. John doesn’t yet know it, but Japan’s most powerful earthquake in modern history has just struck the east side of the island, triggering a tsunami that is soon to swell the city’s shoreline.

  This is not John’s first earthquake, but it’s his first earthquake like this—a world-churning undulation that grinds his teeth to dust. The event itself is indescribable, even for John, who for years will struggle to find a language to match its power. All he will say is that the quake broke his frame of reference, forced him to rethink all he knew of rock and water.

  Growing up in Indiana, John and I had never known disaster. Sure, we’d huddled alongside one another in our school’s hallways in the midst of tornado drills, but they were always just that—drills—and thus the fear we felt was fake.

  The real disaster came for him years later, in the form of an earthquake, a tsunami, and multiple partial nuclear meltdowns in the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant just fifty miles away.

  This was no drill. The fear was not fake.

  Let it end, John prays while clinging to the carpet, please God, let it end.

  Fifteen-year-old Taeko Teramae glanced up from her place in the telephone office to spot a strange shape in the sky. She leaned toward a friend, but before she could speak the building crumpled around her—not an earthquake, but an eruption of another sort.

  The kind that brought silence, followed by a dozen cries of Mother!

  The school-age girls’ accumulated voices rose up through the dust.

  Mother! Mother!

  A deafening roar followed by a deafening wail until their teacher, Mr. Wakita, told them to behave.

  Taeko behaved, staying mostly mum as she freed herself from the rubble. She breathed, only to find that the world now smelled like the ash from Mount Aso.

  Come, Mr. Wakita called to her, can you swim across the river?

  She could so she did, following her teacher to the river, then into it, then to the safety on the other side.

  She was reunited with her parents—Mother! Father!—both of whom lied to their daughter’s broken face.

  Your wounds are not serious, they assured her.

  They knew nothing of radiation back then.

  Once the shaking stops, John runs to his girlfriend—let’s call her Hanako—and together, the pair retreats to their apartment. Hanako is native to Japan, an expert in earthquakes, and she, too, knows this one was different; that this was the kind that shakes snow from the sky as if shaking the leaves from the trees.

  Suddenly, that snow is everywhere—a thick-flaked confetti drifting across John and Hanako’s faces. For half an hour they huddle at their bus stop, but when the bus does not come they continue on foot.

  The streets are cracked but quiet, nothing but the ceaseless sound of idling cars going nowhere. The sidewalks are mostly the same, and though small clusters of people pass one another, no one speaks to anyone.

  This silence isn’t out of the ordinary, nor is the sound of the idling cars. In fact, aside from the cracked window and crumbled walls, for the moment their world remains almost unchanged. The only indication that something is awry is the long line of people outside the convenience store, all of whom are anxious to buy their bento box of food.

  John and Hanako don’t need food; a six-month supply awaits them in their apartment. As they bypass the line, John is grateful for his foresight, glad to have thought of everything in advance.

  It isn’t until they enter their apartment to see the toppled water cooler flooding the floor that he learns a valuable lesson.

  Only in retrospect, John thinks, can you ever think of everything in advance.

  Look, a boy said, pointing out his classroom window, a B-29.

  Thirteen-year-old Yoshitaka Kawamoto looked. Or attempted to look as he rose from his chair and headed toward the window.

  Then, the blast, followed by the same wails Taeko heard in the telephone office:

  Mother! Mother!

  Yoshitaka woke to find himself trapped beneath debris.

  Woke to the sound of familiar voices belting out the school song.

  They sang to attract a rescue team, though eventually their dust-caked voices gave out. Yoshitaka’s voice was the last to quit, though by the time it did, he’d freed himself from the rubble.

  He became the rescue team, searching his shattered school for someone in need of saving.

  Eventually he unearthed a classmate with a broken skull and a single eye but with breath still in his body.

  Yoshitaka tried to save him but could not—the boy’s lower half was buried deep.

  The boy reached for a notebook in his chest pocket, cried Mother! Mother! as Yoshitaka retrieved it for him.

  You want me to take this along to hand it over to your mother? Yoshitaka asked.

  Mother! Mother! the boy replied.

  Yoshitaka nodded, then burst through the smoke toward the playground, kicking at the hands that reached for his ankles.

  What he needed was water—something to clear his throat—so he ran toward the Miyuki Bridge over the Kyobashi River. But when he arrived at its bank, he learned that the river was clotted with dead people.

  Still, he drank deeply as a mushroom cloud blossomed overhead.

  He knew nothing of radiation back then.

  John and Hanako marvel at the wreckage inside their apartment, amazed at how everything has found its wrong place.

  Here are the books and here is the water, they think, but why are they together?

  Tiptoeing over the soggy pages, they make their way to the fridge. The earthquake has rendered them powerless, and though they risk spoiling the food, they open the fridge door all the same.

  Inside, they find an inordinate supply of milk, cream, and blueberries, and since they cannot yet wrap their heads around what has occurred—or what is occurring inside reactor 1 at the Fukushima plant—they whip the cream and dip the berries and feast amid destruction.

  It is not a last meal. Why would it be?

  They knew nothing of radiation back—

  Eiko Taoka and her one-year-old son rode the streetcar in search of a wagon. Their apartment building was soon to be evacuated, and a wagon was need
ed to assist in their move.

  As the streetcar neared the station, Eiko’s arms began to grow weak. She’d been holding her son for quite some time, and as she adjusted him in her arms, she caught the attention of the woman seated directly in front of her.

  I will be getting off here, the woman said. Please take this seat.

  Eiko thanked the woman, but as she and her son prepared to sit she noticed a strange smell, a strange sound, and then darkness.

  Eiko’s one-year-old son was staring out the window when the glass blasted from the streetcar. His face shattered, but even then he turned to his mother and smiled.

  In the three weeks he had left to live, Eiko gave her son what comfort she could, offering him her breast and allowing him to suckle everything she had inside her.

  The radiation, too.

  John and Hanako try to sleep, but eventually they just stop trying. They have lost their faith in the earth. The aftershocks continue throughout the first night, though what scares them most isn’t the possibility of another major quake, but what even a tremor might do to the already compromised structure of their apartment.

  Their hearts flutter with every shift of the bedsheets.

  I should have seen it coming, John thinks as he lies in bed. There were just so many signs.

  He means literal signs. Signs on buses and streets and the sides of buildings—all of them warning of the long-overdue earthquake soon to strike Sendai. Over time, these signs had become so ubiquitous that even John of Indiana knew better than to believe them.

  A few nights before The Earthquake struck, another earthquake struck. It didn’t cause John to grind his teeth to dust, but it did stir him awake.

  He sat up, turned to Hanako, whispered, What if this is the foreshock?

  Senkichi Awaya, mayor of Hiroshima, sat down to his morning breakfast. His thirteen-year-old son, as well as his two-year-old granddaughter, joined him.

  Perhaps he quartered an orange for young Ayako, poured Shinobu a cup of tea.