This Is Only a Test

by B. J. Hollars

  Sweetheart, perhaps he said, be careful not to spill the—

  The clink of a teacup, followed by a fireball.

  Sweetheart!

  That afternoon, when the mayor could not be reached, the city treasurer sifted through the wreckage of the mayoral residence and found Senkichi’s scorched skeleton inside.

  His reign was over. The radiation was not.

  On Saturday morning John and Hanako wake to find their world has not yet changed.

  Yes, they are still without power, but otherwise, it is a normal Saturday morning following an earthquake.

  They leave their apartment and search the row of nearby shops for an outlet to charge a phone. What they find instead are swarms of people with similar plans, gripping their phones and waiting for the outlets.

  Guess we’re out of luck, John thinks, though as they return to their apartment, Hanako spots a beacon—a glowing traffic light—just beyond their home.

  Could it be? they wonder. Is it back?

  They bustle up the stairs, swing wide the door, and find their luck has changed.

  The power is back, which means their lives are back as well. They have running water, internet, and more food than they can eat.

  Their good fortune is enough to keep them in Sendai while others flee.

  We are safe here, they think, while fifty miles away the core of a reactor melts.

  Ten days after the blast that killed her father, brother, and child, Motoko Sakama—the mayor’s daughter—boarded a train to see what remained of her father’s city. When she stepped from the train, she found that what little remained was all but unrecognizable.

  Motoko walked for miles, until at last reaching the home where her injured mother lay.

  I am so sorry, her mother said, for the death of Ayako.

  Motoko’s mother explained how Senkichi, Shinobu, and Ayako had just finished breakfast as the air-raid warning lifted.

  How, for a moment, everyone felt fine.

  Initially, when Motoko’s father’s and brother’s skeletons were recovered, her young daughter was nowhere to be found. But upon closer inspection, once the ash was swept clean, the two-year-old’s skeleton was unearthed alongside Senkichi’s.

  The grieving Motoko was left to draw but a single conclusion:

  My father held my daughter as their bodies burned away.

  For a moment, everyone felt—

  By Sunday evening their world has begun to change. John and Hanako have heard rumors of problems at the Fukushima plant, and though they are just rumors, they are enough to give John pause.

  In a search bar, he types: HOW TO SURVIVE FALLOUT.

  John’s internet search yields more than he ever wanted to know. Suddenly he knows its language: radiation, contamination, alpha, gamma, beta.

  John and Hanako discuss the possibility of leaving. Of flagging a taxi, or renting a car, or purchasing plane tickets. The problem, though, is that the taxis are low on gas, the rental cars rented, and thus, even with plane tickets in hand, there is no way to reach the airport.

  Add to this the unspeakable problem of radiation: the knowledge that every time you open a door there’s no telling what might slip inside.

  John stares at the vents, the windows, the doorway, and thinks: Every crack is a killer.

  He wants to tape the cracks shut, as one website suggested, and though he has no tape, he knows where he can find some.

  He pulls on a sweatshirt, a surgical mask, waves goodbye, and walks out the door.

  Then, he steps back into his city (which is dead), and the streets (which are empty), and tries to reorient himself in a place that once felt like home.

  But his home is now populated with ghosts, the buildings are ghosts, and each window in each building is just another entry point for the radiation to make more ghosts.

  John turns a circle, thinks of the bustle of the people on that street the week before. Thinks how before it took to trembling, the world was something else—something it would never be again.

  Still, some parts remain unchanged. Like the office building just a few blocks away, which he enters, heading toward a supply closet he’d noticed in passing months prior.

  There is no one anywhere, so he helps himself to the tape.

  He helps himself by helping himself to the tape.

  Weeks before the blast, a young student left Hiroshima to enjoy his summer break among family. He was the sumo wrestling champion of his small town, and he enjoyed his hero’s welcome.

  As the break came to its end, the young man’s friends took the train back to school, though the young man decided to stay home for one day more.

  A bomb dropped in the time between, and the young man became one of the few young men of his class to survive.

  Like Motoko, he, too, got off the train to find a landscape mostly stripped of landmarks.

  And he, too, walked the crumbled streets trying to remember what was once where.

  He walked until he discovered a metallic taste in his mouth.

  Odd, he thought, and in an attempt to purge himself of the taste he took a drink of water. (He knew nothing of radiation back then.)

  The young man grew sick, and soon his sumo wrestling days were over.

  He could not fight two things at once.

  The young man grew up, grew older, and though he and his wife were desperate for a child, after years with no luck they began to wonder if his exposure had made it impossible for them to conceive.

  It had not.

  In fact, one day many years later, even the young man’s daughter would have a daughter—who we call Hanako—and sixty-six years later, she and John will sit in their apartment and know his fear firsthand.

  It is not metal they taste that night, but blueberries and cream.

  It is not the family’s first nuclear incident, but their second.

  Two and a half years after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, John and I meet up for a beer.

  Sitting cross-legged on my parents’ couch, he tells me about the earthquake, the aftermath, and his decision to open the apartment door in an effort to retrieve the tape.

  Was it worth it? I ask. Did you do the right thing when you opened the door?

  John pauses, picks at the beer label.

  Were you in Mr. Kuelling’s senior seminar class? he asks.

  I shake my head no.

  John describes how the teacher assigned them to read Don DeLillo’s White Noise, and how even as a high schooler, John had been troubled by a particular scene in the book; one in which a toxic chemical cloud drifts toward the main character and his family as the character stops to fill up for gas.

  When I first read that book, I remember thinking, “Why doesn’t he get back in his car while the gas pumps?” John says. “Why does he just stand out there breathing in the toxins?” But then, after the radiation started spreading throughout Sendai, suddenly I got it. I understood why the guy doesn’t get back in the car.

  Why? I ask. Why does a guy stay outside in a chemical cloud?

  Because, John says, when you love your family, you don’t open the door—you never open the door—unless you’re going to get some tape.

  On that August morning, thirty-three-year-old Isao Kita kept his eyes fixed on the sky. As the chief weatherman in the Hiroshima District, it was his job to do so. Isao cocked his head at a sound, then watched as a blinding flash far brighter than the sun erupted directly before him.

  Glass broke, heat entered, and Isao winced as the smoke cut his city in half.

  Though it was his job to understand the weather, he didn’t know what to make of the strange black rain that followed.

  He could hardly believe the way that rain stuck to every limb and every leaf it touched. Stuck to every body—every hand and foot and face left unprotected.

  The rain marked the people and the place, and Isao, the chief weatherman of Hiroshima that morning, took note.

  It couldn’t be washed off, he later remarked. I co
uldn’t be washed off.

  On the Wednesday following the earthquake, John finds an unread message in his inbox.

  According to a friend, beginning at dawn, one bus every hour is rumored to arrive from Yamagata.

  Perhaps this might be your way out? the friend suggests.

  That night, John and Hanako don’t sleep. Instead, they decide how best to fit their lives into a suitcase. There is no room for sentimentality; all they take is a hard drive and dried fruit.

  They zip their suitcase, lock their door, then start off toward the station.

  It is 3:00 AM and raining, and though the rain is not black, John wonders: What exactly is acid rain?

  They huddle beneath the bus station awning for hours, though even there they can’t dodge the droplets that splatter sideways against their skin. Their breaths are shallow beneath their surgical masks, which make them feel safe.

  Less is more, John thinks as he breathes. Less is more.

  They distract themselves by watching the line grow behind them, and then—far more troubling—grow ahead of them as well.

  People are cutting, John realizes. They’re stealing our seats and our lives.

  He considers confronting them but doesn’t.

  No one confronts anyone.

  Although the lines are long and the buses are few, nobody says a thing.

  They simply clutch their umbrellas and wait for the line to move forward.

  When the first bus arrives at 6:00 AM, John and Hanako fill the last two seats.

  Dr. Kaoru Shima—the proprietor of Shima Hospital—was assisting a colleague in nearby Mikawa when he learned of his city’s destruction.

  He was spared, though his hospital wasn’t.

  In fact, Shima Hospital was ground zero; the bomb had transformed the two-story structure to ruins, turned the bones of his patients to dust.

  On the evening of August 6, Dr. Shima returned to Hiroshima, stood alongside the busted Chamber of Commerce building, and shouted to the survivors.

  The director of Shima Hospital is here! he cried triumphantly. Take courage!

  He knew nothing of anything then.

  By day’s end, John and Hanako step off a train platform in Akita, a city 150 miles northwest of Sendai.

  Their flight to Tokyo isn’t scheduled until the following day, so they wander the city, staring at a world seemingly unchanged. Everywhere, people are shopping, clutching their bags with one hand while holding their phones with the other.

  People smile, people laugh, people snap selfies on the street. None of their cameras are out of batteries.

  Have you not heard of Fukushima? John wants to scream at every passerby. Or a city called Sendai?

  Dumbfounded, John and Hanako slide into a booth at a family restaurant and pretend they are a part of this unchanged world. They mull over the menu, studying their many options.

  Within minutes, the waiter arrives to take their order.

  They are famished and they are alive so they want everything.

  Pizza, pasta, chocolate cake.

  Make that two slices of cake, John says.

  When the pizza arrives, John notices distress on the waiter’s face.

  I’m so sorry, the waiter says, but the kitchen informs me that we have run out of fresh basil. There was an earthquake—perhaps you have heard?—and the trucks were unable to make the trip.

  John stares down at his feast while the poor man says, Please, sir, will you accept my apologies?

  Dr. Shima set up his makeshift hospital at the primary school near the center of town. There, he did what he could, but as the bodies piled high, Dr. Shima realized he needed a way to dispose of the dead in order to make way for the living.

  He ordered that a crematorium be built on the school’s playground, and there for days the bodies of his townspeople burned.

  Day and night one could smell the odor of burning flesh and watch the flickering fire of the funeral pyre, the doctor later recalled.

  This time, fire was the cure, and though Dr. Shima treated the cuts and broken bones, he knew nothing of the purple spots that began dappling people’s skin.

  Radiation, he’d later learn. The word is radiation.

  Upon deplaning in Seattle the following day, John finds that still the world has not changed.

  It is the same America he always knew—complete with seven-dollar bagels and five-dollar coffees and a surplus of television screens.

  From a TV in the terminal, he watches as Charlie Sheen speaks of tiger blood.

  Have you not heard of Fukushima? John wonders as he stares at the screen. Or a city called Sendai?

  Hanako pulls him to the baggage claim, where they soon hear a swarm of well-wishers cheer the safe arrival of a mother and father and their teenage son. The trio grins at their compatriots, making a grand display of pumping fists and flexing muscles while pointing to their matching T-shirts.

  John glances their T-shirts and is surprised to see an outline of Japan and a red dot near his city.

  The T-shirts read: I SURVIVED EARTHQUAKE 9.0!

  More hooting, more hollering, more high fives than John can handle.

  A TV bleats: Actor Charlie Sheen claims that he has tiger blood . . .

  Come on, John says. We need to get out of here.

  One summer evening many years back, a friend and I obliterated every last ant on the planet. At least it felt that way. We were seven, and on that moon-drenched night, we found a field behind our houses and turned its anthills to dust. Soon, that field would be a neighborhood anyway, but before the steamrollers rolled in we flattened the land by hand, told ourselves we were sparing them a worse fate.

  As John and I sit in my parents’ living room drinking our beers, we refrain from speaking of those men in the New Mexico desert. We don’t talk about ants either, or whisper the names of the people who perished so long ago. In fact, we don’t talk about the old disaster at all, just the one that is still ongoing.

  People won’t really know how bad it is for years, John says. Not until the uptick in cancer, and the birth defects, and the shrinking attention spans. We won’t know just like we didn’t know with Chernobyl.

  What about your health? I ask. Yours and Hanako’s?

  We won’t know either, he says.

  In that moment on the couch, I might’ve said any number of things, but I don’t say any of them.

  Instead, I watch as John’s eyes glaze over as he studies his beer bottle.

  After a moment, he returns to me, clear-eyed, and tries to give me the old smile.

  But enough about me, he says, delivering his line. Tell me, what’s new with you?

  Punch Line

  One night when my wife is pregnant with our second child, she asks me for a glass of water. It’s late, and though it is a minor request, I still grumble as I sleepwalk to the kitchen. Who can say what time it is? Even the clocks are asleep. But the water is there, and the glasses are there, and so I fill a glass to the brim. This is no hyperbole; I literally fill a glass to the brim, measure each droplet until the water forms a perfect plane. This is my idea of a joke.

  My wife and I are exhausted—mostly the result of Henry’s sleeping proclivities (i.e., not sleeping)—and so, we work in laughter wherever we can.

  “Here,” I say, straight-faced. “I’ve come bearing water.”

  “Why do you insist on doing this?” she asks, eyeing the brim.

  (The last time she asked for a glass of water, I brought her a pitcher instead.)

  “You’re welcome,” I say as she lifts herself up and chugs. “The pleasure’s mine.”

  And then I feel another joke brewing—this one even better than the first.

  I open my mouth but choke on my own laughter.

  “What?” she asks, placing the glass alongside the fetal Doppler on the bedside table. “What’s so funny?”

  I shake my head; hold up a finger.

  “What?”

  I restart; compose myself by sliding a han
d down my face.

  “Now that . . .” I snort, “that there’s . . .”

  “That there’s what? Seriously, why are you laughing?”

  “Now that there’s some good . . .”—I pause for the punch line—“. . . water.”

  Maybe you have to be there to get it. Maybe you have to be us.

  And maybe you have to know that the part that isn’t funny (assuming there’s a part here that is) is that I can count on one hand the number of times she’s asked anything of me.

  My slaphappy spreads, and soon she, too, is laughing.

  “Quiet,” she hisses, nodding toward our finally sleeping boy one room over. “You’ll wake him.”

  “But that there water . . .” I say, wiping tears, “. . . that there was some good water, huh?”

  “That’s not funny,” she says, but by then we’re laughing so hard she’s beginning to wonder if maybe it is.

  Maybe this is funny, and maybe Henry’s low-grade fever is funny, too. Maybe exhaustion is funny, and hiding heartbeats are funny, and every fear we’ll ever face is just some form of funny.

  “Oh, the lunacy of water, am I right?”

  “Stop talking!” she repeats. “You’re seriously going to wake him.”

  “Or her,” I laugh, pointing to my wife’s belly. “Maybe I’ll wake her, too!”

  The joke stops because my loose lips have made her real, turned our prophecy into a promise. We’d found her heartbeat just an hour before, and I’d grown bold, said a thing when I shouldn’t have said a thing—made a her out of an almost her.

  “Come on,” my wife says. “Just shut up and come to bed.”

  I do both of these things.

  But within a few hours I wake to the pitter-patter of my wife’s feet en route to the bathroom.

  I shoot up, anxious for some assurance that we are all still okay. That no signal has been dropped, no wires crossed, no message miscommunicated.

  Then: the rumble of a toilet paper roll, a flush, and the return of the pitter-patter.

  “Drink too much water?” I ask.

  “She just loves punching me in the bladder,” my wife groans, collapsing onto the bed. “It’s like her favorite thing in the world.”