This Is Only a Test (15 page)

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?

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 hand 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.”

I press my hand to the belly and close my eyes.

Good one, sweetheart
, I think.

April 2014

Dear Daughter,

Once upon a time many years back, the citizens of Eau Claire, Wisconsin—your future home—tilted their heads skyward and observed what they couldn't explain. This was in 1870, back when lumberjacks still ruled the land and lived among the trees.

But on this particular night all their axe blades stopped swinging long enough to take in the unusual sight: a light that resembled the northern lights but was no northern light. Not only did it inhabit the wrong section of sky, but its movements were unlike anything the region had seen. It was a core of light expanding like a halo, soon joined by a second halo, both of which merged to form a pair of magician's rings in the sky.

I suppose the details don't much matter, dear. What matters is that the event was so mysterious that even the most grizzled lumberjacks were roused from their bunkhouses, forced to admit that even they—who'd seen it all—had never seen anything like that.

As the sawdust began settling like snow, those lumberjacks crossed their arms, fidgeted, and ran blistered fingers through bushy beards to try to make sense of the message being sent.

But what is the message?
they wondered.
And who is sending it?

I've asked similar questions of you, dear, trying hard to decipher your message through the static of the ultrasound. But the signal always drops—your image never budges—and some part of you continually remains unknown.

And what are we to make of that strange light in the sky? Well, it was different things to different people—a miracle, a mystery, a meteorological phenomenon. But it was the latter-most phrase that made it into the headline, a scientific catchall for the mostly indescribable event.