This Is Only a Test (14 page)

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 couldn'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.