Love and Other Ways of Dying

by Michael Paterniti

  Yesterday seems long ago, and today, you tell yourself, must be the day of your rescue—you’re willing it so. The helicopters come close, circling for survivors, and the dozen times you hear one, you climb to your feet, scream, and wave. There are boats in the distance, cutters and smaller lifeboats trolling, and for those, you holler even louder, though time after time they turn back before reaching your debris field, your minuscule ring of ocean. Is it that they don’t believe anyone could be this far out?

  In between, you fish more objects, including a futon and blankets, which you lay out in the sun to dry. You write in the margin of the comic book. I just want to report that I am still alive on the twelfth and was with my wife, Yuko, yesterday. She was born January 12 of Showa 26. You fold the page, place it in your empty can, and, ripping more string from the mat, tighten it across your chest, adding one more testimonial to your body.

  So the hours linger, the sun beats, rust-colored smoke rises, and now you can feel your thirst clawing. Drink the second energy drink in slow, intermittent sips. When it’s gone, you’re gripped by an animal urge that nearly upends the disciplined regimen you’ve set for yourself. You fight the need to drink that third energy drink, hand fluttering for the holster—no, save it for tomorrow, if luck brings you that far. This is when you think to drink your pee. You collect it in your hands three times and drink—warm but not terrible.

  There’s another problem, too: The wood of the roof has become waterlogged, weak and rotten. And from time to time a low rumble comes up from the deep, aftershocks. At first the sound is startling but then you only worry about the waves. Has a swell begun to rise? What approaches from the east? You now have waking dreams, hallucinations: You’re convinced you see a body coming near, and start screaming—Help me! But then it’s a tree trunk. In another you see a huge wave hurtling toward the roof and imagine turning into a tree to save yourself. But just as you think to stand and hang your arms like branches, you stop yourself for fear the roof will tip.

  One other thing: You’re not uninjured after all. A nerve at the top of your palm has been cut—how you’re not sure—but it radiates sharp pain. And your eyes have begun to swell shut. You opened them underwater, now some infection blurs your sight. Still you sit, knees drawn up, white hard hat in place for safety. Safety is important, you know that. You work in a lumberyard. You live in a village by the sea with your parents and wife, Yuko. You will be rescued soon, by concentrating on the sounds, engines and rotors and waves. On a scrap of wood, you write with the red marker—SOS—and if any machine approaches, even remotely, you stand and yell and wave at it. Please.

  You muster the energy to sing again, same school song, second verse in your now hoarse tenor (Help me!):

  We had a day in tears.

  We had a day in jealousy.

  We will fondly remember those days.

  Ah, we are third-year high school students.

  Once you take her hand at folk dancing,

  Her black hair smells sweet.

  A fat statuette of Daikoku, a god of fortune, bobs by, the round belly and happy demeanor, the rice barrels at his feet that signify plenty, plucked from someone’s home and delivered here to you, a very good omen. His name translates as “the god of great darkness,” and yet, as he wields a mallet, his broad smile conveys contentment. You think to bring him aboard, but you no longer trust the roof, nor your ability to balance on it. So you allow a small acknowledgment of the moment: one more laugh in diminishing light, the last of your good cheer.

  Exhaustion, in its full flower, strikes on the second night as the ocean air drops to freezing. You can’t keep from shaking, even wrapped in blankets. You crave sleep, a desire to be curled in bed. And in your mind, remembering stories from youth, you imagine yourself as the hero who survives the great calamity only to face, in a moment of cosmic irony, a different death. Dehydration, hypothermia, bodily dysfunction.

  The second night is interminable. The stench of oil thickens as you shrivel. The water seems to rise. The grinding reverberates from the center of the earth. The roof is disintegrating beneath your feet. If there’s a force trying to crush you, you realize now that it’s neglect. Where nature brought the full bore of her attention on you, cleaving you from all that was precious, it has abandoned you here, in these black, oily fields. No singing now. At some point, the blue light returns—billowing pods, otherworldly ocean mushrooms, phosphorescent jellyfish, it turns out—but if someone could see you in that supernatural glow, they’d see a thin, hunched man, mouth in that grim line of your father’s. You’re too tired to be amused or feel optimism. The light can’t feed or save you. Maybe it’s not a sign after all. The tunnel narrows. You write another note, to your parents this time. I am sorry for being unfilial, it says.

  Let it go, Hiromitsu, man of men. You had your reasons for staying—and you stayed. Two days before, there’d been another tsunami warning that came to naught. Some had rushed to high ground, and then … nothing. In a land of tremors and quakes, of errant waves and a history of coastal destruction, the people had grumbled a little. Too many false warnings—and with so much to get done. And when you came home and found the contents of your life strewn on the floor, willy-nilly, all the desire to flee left you. You decided to abdicate to nature—or stand up to it—because somewhere inside, you had a flash of invincibility; that is, you thought, If my life is worthy and my house is well made, it will be strong enough to stand up to the wave—and the moon and stars (none of which care for you, Hiromitsu, nor soothe nor feed nor augur). You realize now that once you arrived home, once shown the precious thing about to be taken away forever, once you saw the garden and barn, the koi pond and the pigeons, and Yuko arrived with the rice seed, you knew you wouldn’t be able to leave—that you would be doomed by obligation and memory and sentimental attachment—which is how you’ve ended up here now, on the roof of your house, nine miles out to sea.

  Let morning come. Let it come and with it all the helicopters and boats gathered around in some holy convocation, to rescue you from the rising sea and the goblin sharks, for you are pure, Hiromitsu. Or let morning come and suck you down in the last black hole, for you are not. After focusing so intently on survival, it almost doesn’t matter now. You can’t keep from shaking in the cold, and there may be advantages to slipping quietly under the cover of ocean (for one, to join your wife, whom you know to be both alive and dead, a mermaid and a body tumbling). But then you’re imagining your parents again, both sitting around a low table, wordless, tea untouched. How could you ever explain to them that, after failing to heed the tsunami warning, after standing up to the wave in your concrete house and being smashed by your hubris in the form of tons of rushing water, after somersaulting and surfacing and clambering to safety, after being dragged out to sea and neglected there as you can see in the far distance your ruined country in little fires on the coast, after mustering your optimism and hope and fighting so hard to live (three times you collected and drank your own pee), you came to the third day and swaddled in last testaments roped to your body, with visions of those who bore you in mind, how could you explain to them—your mother and, most especially, your father—that you finally just gave up?

  On that last morning, when the light leaks up from the water and bleaches the sky, you fumble for the third energy drink, tip it to cracked lips, and slurp greedily. You’re too weak to stand now, body swollen, hands frozen, your voice hoarse from yelling. You sit on your roof, on the futon, cross-legged, unmoving like a statue, wearing a white hard hat. You hold up your scrawled message, too—SOS!—so blurred by the water you can’t even read it, but still, you’re not of logical mind. Perhaps someone else can.

  At first you listen for the whirring sound of helicopter rotors or the gurgle of a boat engine. Even the faintest murmur sparks an attempt to rise, shout, wave. But as the hours pass, you descend into yourself, shutting the cupboards one by one. The rice, the pigeons, the lumberyard, Yuko, your parents, your daughter: It w
asn’t such a bad life, but for the ending. The debris field has become so thick it looks like land, and the oil keeps spreading. You’re too tired to think or care. Head bowed, you focus only on what’s right before you, the fringe where the rotted roof is being licked by salt water. Soon, you know, the dark flank of sea will transform into rolling hills of water, and another wave will come for you. Now black water bubbles up through the planks and scraps of corrugated tin. A last note to your parents: I’m in a lot of trouble. Sorry for dying before you. Please forgive me.

  Just before you lie down on the futon and wait for death, there comes a disturbance on the horizon again, the faraway shape of a boat, the whir of a propeller at the edge of your mind. The sound brings you shakily to your feet, where you shout and wave … until you watch the boat turn away, diminishing on the horizon.

  A terrible lonesomeness fills this void now. It would be good to sleep, though that surely spells the end. But it’s over now. In your beleaguered twilight, you either see or dream that the receding boat has changed course and is circling back. But who can trust these visions anymore? Before your eyes, it seems to grow into a gray lifeboat with one, two, three … three times that, nine rescue workers in green bodysuits and gray life vests. When the boat doesn’t turn away, when you can feel a searchlight on your skin, you let loose your last primal yawp, “Help me!”

  Out of the oblivion, a clear voice responds, “We’re here,” and the boat drifts alongside your roof-home, and the voice asks, “Which side is safest?” And you say, “The side toward land, please,” as you strip the plastic container full of notes from your body and place it on the altar of your futon. Then one of the bundled figures steps out of the lifeboat onto the tippy roof and comes toward you with arms outstretched. The figure leads you across, five paces, and only when you lean forward into their boat and splay your body over its hard gunwale, like a glorious falling tree, do you know it’s real. Immediately you’re wrapped in blankets by the incredulous men. They want to know who you are, hand you yet another can of energy drink. Speechless, you take a long slurp, then burst into uncontrollable tears. Who are you? Your memory opens suddenly to a fire truck on the road before your house just before the wave, the loudspeaker announcement over and over again, “Please evacuate.” And you remember directing your wife to move the rice seed into the barn while you went up to the terrace to stand lookout. Even a quarter mile to higher ground and she would otherwise be safe.

  You’re tested for radiation, transferred to a naval destroyer, and given porridge and umeboshi, pickled plum. You’re placed in a hot bath, and the crew members are shocked by the amount of mud that comes off your body, even as you continue to shiver with such violence that they must remove your body from the warm water. Then you’re on a helicopter, airlifted over the ravaged coastline—the ground below silt-blackened as if burned, the pornographic wreckage of houses and buildings, colorful entrails of bedsheets and curtains, people below digging with their bare hands for children, parents, spouses, mothers washing dead babies with spit—to a hospital outside the radiation zone. Meanwhile, the images of your rescue have been televised across the world, the man on his roof, dragged nine miles out to sea, found on the third day, a day almost devoid of survivors but you.

  If you had supernatural powers, Hiromitsu, or thought yourself prophetic, now would be the moment to deliver your message to the world. Now would be your moment to make an example or speak uplifting words. To transubstantiate into a symbol. Of hope. Perseverance. Strength. For the news reports call you a miracle.

  But you’re more humble than that—and broken—fearful as well, for now you must tell your parents, your daughter, everyone, exactly what happened. You would rather make yourself invisible—almost rather have drowned—than reveal your disobedience, your stubborn selfishness, for that’s what you think of it as: the sins of a child. You lie in your hospital bed with IVs, doctors who come and go. You’re dehydrated and whittled down, face unrecognizable at first, bruised and cut but nonetheless in good recovery. You’re out of the hospital that evening, and when you first see your father at your uncle’s house, you’re surprised by how spry he seems. In the days before the tsunami, he’d been struggling with his health, and slid downhill when you went missing, unable to sleep or eat. He wouldn’t listen to the radio or watch the news. But your mother says that when friends arrived to say that you had floated onto the television screen that third day, he seemed to regenerate. In what is for him a great show of emotion, he says, “I’m glad you’re alive. Many people made mistakes. You need to keep living.” That’s it—no encouragement or criticism, no questions, as if he doesn’t want to know.

  Of course, you tell your mother everything, because underneath, she’s stronger than he—and then, shortly after, you go to Tokyo and you meet your daughter at the Kawasaki train station, standing anonymously among the hordes. You haven’t seen your daughter cry since she was a teenager. And after a quick hug, describing how it was you who suggested that Yuko carry the rice seed to the barn while you went and stood on the terrace staring at the mountain, as your daughter reads between the lines (You could have saved yourselves), her expression even now is unchanging. She tells you she’s glad that you’re alive, and you believe her. When you’ve finished, she seems to absorb the truth—that her mother is gone, but that you’ve returned—and says, “Well, then, you must feel better, for you’re talking a lot.” Whatever else she thinks she holds inside and turns to go home, swallowed by the crowd. And you—you can’t return to your razed house, to your neighborhood between the sea and the mountain, but relocate to a suburb of Tokyo, to a subsidized apartment big enough for you and your parents, in which you dream of the place you just left.

  These are strange days, in this anonymous eight-story beige structure where, at first, you know nobody—and where the world carries on without reflection, the bustle of salarymen in the stations and streets, traffic rushing somewhere. You say nothing about who you are to the neighbors but spend your time trying to keep busy, all in order to forget, too. Unbidden, you begin a daily sweeping of the walkways at the complex. You and your broom, hoping to make yourselves useful. You also try to spend time with your grandson, who is now a short commute away, but of course mothering doesn’t come as naturally to you as it did to Yuko. And so between your parents, who sit all day watching television in sad nostalgia for everything lost, and your daughter, whose life is busy and now motherless, your displacement is complete.

  You’re not a poet, in fact you’ve never read, let alone written, much of anything in your life—Yuko read feverishly, as if she were running out of time—and yet ever since you scribbled that first note on the roof at sea, words have become a conduit. They make the pain smaller, you say. Now you write poems and short fables, reflections and admonitions. All the scraps go in a black bag belted to your waist, the vault of your collected emotions and memories. You write one poem, “A Song of Five Lines,” that goes as follows:

  Missing:

  How many days later

  Will you appear in my dream

  My beloved

  Wife?

  This is how you speak to her, through the scraps in the bag, but also aloud sometimes. Before eating, you might murmur, “Thank you,” as if she’s prepared the food on your plate. You might do the same on a beautiful day, as if she’s created it. And before bed each night, you tell her you love her. You say this to her presence or spirit, but you forgo mementos, little altars, or pictures on the wall. You can’t bear the idea of seeing her again, as you knew her in all those endless days before the wave.

  Here’s how you think about it: Together you constructed many things throughout your life. Then her body disappeared, but the constructions still remain. Human beings die: That’s natural. But to accept her death is to lose all hope. And yet you know now in retrospect that there were so many small goodbyes, foretellings, and encouragements. There was a dream you had in the months before the tsunami: You were alone and couldn’t find
your wife—everywhere you looked, she wasn’t there—and you woke up instantly, thinking, I need to find an accountant, because she did all the accounting. There was a trip Yuko made to see your grandson, one that lasted more than a week. She returned home and told you that since you’d survived ten days without her, cooking and cleaning, you were now ready for anything. And then, of course, she habitually ribbed you. If it came down to it, she’d ask, if the world came to an end and you could take only one thing with you, would it be the pigeons or me?

  “The pigeons,” you would say, just to see that look on her face, that instant of mock anger, admiration, and uncertainty.

  Three months later, in June, you go back, traveling on the bullet train two hours north under hazy sun to the city of Fukushima, continuing to the coast by car. Unable to stay away, your parents have recently returned to the village, moved into temporary housing there, one-room modules in clusters off a main road, each with a television, a refrigerator, some rudimentary furniture, a latrine. The clothes are hung on hangers off nails in the wall. After driving through the mountains, through fluctuating radiation levels, a landscape steeped in cesium that will persist for decades, your first stop is the lumberyard where Mr. Mori, the boss, removes his white hard hat and greets you with bows that you return in double. “How is everything?” he asks after the formalities, placing a hand at the center of your back as he leads you out into the yard, and you respond by saying, “She’s still missing,” and he shakes his head what a shame.

  Mr. Komuro, Mr. Tomita, and all the other workers: They’re astounded and pleased to see you, so pleased that they keep asking, “When are you coming back?” You smile, for this is something you want more than anything—to come back—but have no answer. Or do, but don’t say: I’m trying to fill the space left behind by my wife. They intuit some part of this anyway. Two here have lost their homes; a colleague at a nearby yard died; Mr. Hamauchi, in the office, has lost his father, his body identified by DNA. Most all of the men operated the heavy machinery—the backhoes and forklifts—used to try to dig out the tar-filled bodies buried by the sea. Yours isn’t the only survivor story they tell in the yard. They tell of people swept off in cars who lived, of families carried inland who clung to trees, and when the wave sucked back out to sea, it cleaved the wife, the husband, the child. “We had a regular life until we felt how great the power of nature could be,” says Mr. Mori. “I went to the hills and watched the waves coming. I could see people running, like it was a movie.”