A Tale for the Time Being

by Ruth Ozeki

  The primary source of oil in those days was blubber, and the only way to obtain it was to mine it from the bodies of living whales. When the technology for extracting kerosene and petroleum from the prehistoric dead was commercialized in the latter part of the century, the order Cetacea stood a fighting chance of survival. You could say that fossil fuels arrived just in time to save the whales, but not in time to save the whales of Whaletown. By June of 1870, a year after the station was established, the last whales in the area either had been slaughtered or had fled, and Dawson and Douglass closed up shop and moved on, too.

  Whales are time beings. In May 2007, a fifty-ton bowhead whale, killed by Eskimo whalers off the Alaskan coast, was found to have a three-and-a-half-inch arrow-shaped projectile from a bomb lance embedded in the blubber on its neck. By dating the fragment, researchers were able to estimate the whale’s age: between 115 and 130 years old. Creatures who survive and live that long presumably have long memories. The waters around Whaletown were once treacherous for whales, but the ones that managed to escape learned to stay away. You can imagine them chirping and cooing to each other in their beautiful subaquatic voices.

  Stay away! Stay away!

  Every now and then, there’s a whale sighting from the ferry that services the island. The captain cuts the engine and comes on the PA system to announce that a pod of orcas or a humpback has been spotted on the port side at two o’clock, and all the passengers flow to that side of the ship to scan the waves for a glimpse of a fin or a fluke or a sleek dark back, rising up from the water. The tourists raise their cameras and mobile phones, hoping to capture a breach or a spout, and even the locals get excited. But mostly the whales still stay away from Whaletown, leaving only their name behind.

  4.

  A name, Ruth thought, could be either a ghost or a portent depending upon which side of time you were standing. The name Whaletown had become a mere specter of the past, a crepuscular Pacific shimmer, but the name Desolation Sound still hovered in a liminal space and felt to her both oracular and haunted.

  Her own name, Ruth, had often functioned like an omen, casting a complex shadow forward across her life. The word ruth is derived from the Middle English rue, meaning remorse or regret. Ruth’s Japanese mother wasn’t thinking of the English etymology when she chose the name, nor did she intend to curse her daughter with it—Ruth was simply the name of an old family friend. But even so, Ruth often felt oppressed by the sense of her name, and not just in English. In Japanese, the name was equally problematic. Japanese people can’t pronounce “r” or “th.” In Japanese, Ruth is either pronounced rutsu, meaning “roots,” or rusu, meaning “not at home” or “absent.”

  The home they bought in Whaletown was built in a meadowlike clearing that had been hacked from the middle of the dense temperate rain forest. A smaller cottage stood at the foot of the drive where her mother would live. On all sides, massive Douglas firs, red cedars, and bigleaf maples surrounded them, dwarfing everything human. When Ruth first saw these giant trees, she wept. They rose up around her, ancient time beings, towering a hundred or two hundred feet overhead. At five feet, five inches, she had never felt so puny in all her life.

  “We’re nothing,” she said, wiping her eyes. “We’re barely here at all.”

  “Yes,” Oliver said. “Isn’t it great? And they can live to be a thousand years old.”

  She leaned against him, tilting her head all the way back so she could see the treetops, piercing the sky.

  “They’re impossibly tall,” she said.

  “Not impossibly,” Oliver said, holding her so she wouldn’t fall. “It’s just a matter of perspective. If you were that tree, I wouldn’t even reach the bottom of your anklebone.”

  Oliver was overjoyed. He was a tree guy and had no use for tidy vegetable gardens or shallow-rooted annuals, like lettuce. When they first moved in, he was still quite ill, prone to dizzy spells and easily tired, but he started a daily regimen of walking and soon he was running the trails, and it seemed to Ruth as if the forest were healing him, as if he were absorbing its inexorable life force. As he ran through the dense understory, he could read the signs of arboreal intrigue, the drama and power struggles as species vied for control over a patch of sunlight, or giant firs and fungal spores opted to work together for their mutual benefit. He could see time unfolding here, and history, embedded in the whorls and fractal forms of nature, and he would come home, sweating and breathless, and tell her what he’d seen.

  Their house was made of cedar from the forest. It was a whimsical two-story structure built by hippies in the 1970s, with a shake roof, deep eaves, and a sprawling front porch overlooking the small meadow and encircled by the tall trees. The real estate agent had listed the house as having an ocean view, but the only glimpse of water it afforded was from a single window in Ruth’s office, where she could see a tiny patch of sea and sky though a U-shaped notch in the treetops, which looked like an inverted tunnel. The real estate agent pointed out that they could cut down the trees that were blocking their view, but they never did. Instead, they planted more.

  In a futile attempt to domesticate the landscape, Ruth planted European climbing roses around the house. Oliver planted bamboo. The two species quickly grew up into a densely tangled thicket, so that soon it was almost impossible to find the entrance to the house if you didn’t already know where it was. The house seemed in danger of disappearing, and by then, the meadow was beginning to shrink, too, as the forest encroached like a slow-moving coniferous wave, threatening to swallow them completely.

  Oliver wasn’t worried. He took the long view. Anticipating the effects of global warming on the native trees, he was working to create a climate-change forest on a hundred acres of clear-cut, owned by a botanist friend. He planted groves of ancient natives—metasequoia, giant sequoia, coast redwoods, Juglans, Ulmus, and ginkgo—species that had been indigenous to the area during the Eocene Thermal Maximum, some 55 million years ago.

  “Imagine,” he said. “Palms and alligators flourishing once again as far north as Alaska!”

  This was his latest artwork, a botanical intervention he called the Neo-Eocene. He described it as a collaboration with time and place, whose outcome neither he nor any of his contemporaries would ever live to witness, but he was okay with not knowing. Patience was part of his nature, and he accepted his lot as a short-lived mammal, scurrying in and out amid the roots of the giants.

  But Ruth was neither patient nor accepting, and she really liked to know. After a few short years (fifteen, to be exact—brief by his count, interminable by hers), surrounded by all this vegetative rampancy, she was feeling increasingly unsure of herself. She missed the built environment of New York City. It was only in an urban landscape, amid straight lines and architecture, that she could situate herself in human time and history. As a novelist she needed this. She missed people. She missed human intrigue, drama and power struggles. She needed her own species, not to talk to, necessarily, but just to be among, as a bystander in a crowd or an anonymous witness.

  But here, on the sparsely populated island, human culture barely existed and then only as the thinnest veneer. Engulfed by the thorny roses and massing bamboo, she stared out the window and felt like she’d stepped into a malevolent fairy tale. She’d been bewitched. She’d pricked her finger and had fallen into a deep, comalike sleep. The years had passed, and she was not getting any younger. She had fulfilled her promise to her father, and cared for her mother. Now that her mother was dead, Ruth felt that her own life was passing her by. Maybe it was time to leave this place she’d hoped would be home forever. Maybe it was time to break the spell.

  5.

  Home-leaving is a Buddhist euphemism for leaving the secular world and entering the monastic path, which was pretty much the opposite of what Ruth was contemplating when she pondered her return to the city. Zen Master Dōgen uses the phrase in “The Merits of Home-Leaving,” which is the title of Chapter 86 of his Shōbōgenzō. This is the
chapter in which he praises his young monks for their commitment to a path of awakening and explicates the granular nature of time: the 6,400,099,980 moments40 that constitute a single day. His point is that every single one of those moments provides an opportunity to reestablish our will. Even the snap of a finger, he says, provides us with sixty-five opportunities to wake up and to choose actions that will produce beneficial karma and turn our lives around.

  “The Merits of Home-Leaving” was originally delivered as a lecture to the monks at Eiheiji, the monastery that Dōgen founded, deep in the mountains of Fukui prefecture, far away from the decadence and corruption of the city. In the Shōbōgenzō, the text of the lecture is followed by the date of its delivery: A day of the summer retreat in the seventh year of Kenchō.

  All well and good. You can imagine the pure summer heat enfolding the mountain, and the cicadas’ shrill cry piercing the torpid air; the monks sitting in zazen for hour upon hour, immobile on their damp cushions, while mosquitoes circle their shiny bald heads and rivulets of sweat run like tears down their young faces. Time must have seemed interminable to them.

  All well and good, except that the seventh year of Kenchō corresponds with 1255 in the Gregorian calendar, and during the summer retreat that year, Zen Master Dōgen, who was purportedly delivering his lecture on the merits of home-leaving, was dead. He had died in 1253, two years and many moments earlier.

  There are several explanations for this discrepancy. The most probable is that Dōgen wrote a draft of the talk several years prior to his death and, intending to revise it, had left notes and commentary to that effect, and these were later incorporated into a final version and delivered to the monks by his dharma heir, Master Koun Ejō.

  There’s another possibility, however, which is that on that day in the summer of the seventh year of Kenchō, Zen Master Dōgen wasn’t entirely dead. Of course, he wouldn’t have been entirely alive, either. Like Schrödinger’s cat, in the quantum thought experiment, he would have been both alive and dead.41

  The great matter of life and death is the real subject of “The Merits of Home-Leaving.” When Dōgen exhorts his young forest monks to continue, moment by moment, to summon their resolve and stay true to their commitment to enlightenment, what he means is simply this: Life is fleeting! Don’t waste a single moment of your precious life!

  Wake up now!

  And now!

  And now!

  6.

  Ruth dozed in her chair in her second-floor office. The bristling tower of pages that represented the last ten years of her life sat squarely on the desk in front of her. Letter by letter, page by page, she had built this edifice, but now every time she contemplated the memoir, her mind contracted and she felt inexplicably sleepy. It had been months, possibly even a year, since she’d added anything to it. New words just refused to come, and she could barely remember the old ones she’d written. And she was afraid to look. She knew she needed to read through the draft again, to consolidate the structure, and then to start editing and filling in the gaps, but it was too much for her foggy brain to process. The world inside the pages was as dim as a dream.

  Outside, Oliver was chopping firewood and she could hear the rhythmic thunk of the ax splitting wood. The exercise was good for him. He had been out there for hours.

  She summoned her resolve and sat up resolutely in her chair. The stout red diary lay on top of the memoir, and she picked it up to move it aside. The book felt like a box in her hands. She turned it over. When she was little, she was always surprised to pick up a book in the morning, and open it, and find the letters aligned neatly in their places. Somehow she expected them to be all jumbled up, having fallen to the bottom when the covers were shut. Nao had described something similar, seeing the blank pages of Proust and wondering if the letters had fallen off like dead ants. When Ruth had read this, she’d felt a jolt of recognition.

  She placed the diary on the far edge of the desk, out of the way, and then glowered at the manuscript. Perhaps the same sort of thing had happened to her pages. Perhaps she would start reading only to find her words had vanished. Perhaps this would be a good thing. Perhaps it would be a relief. The battered memoir stared balefully back at her. While her mother was still alive, the project had seemed like a good idea. During the long period of decline, Ruth had recorded the gradual erosion of her mother’s mind, and she had observed herself, too, making copious notes of her own feelings and reactions. The result was this ungainly heap on the desk in front of her. She scanned the first page and immediately pushed it away. The tone of the writing bugged her—cloying, elegiac. It made her cringe. She was a novelist. She was interested in the lives of others. What had gotten into her, to think she could write a memoir?

  There was no denying that Nao’s diary was a distraction, and even though she was determined to pace herself, she had still managed to spend the better part of the day online, looking through lists of names of the victims of the earthquake and tsunami. She’d located a People Finder site and run a search for Yasutani. There were several, but no Jikos or Naokos. She didn’t know the names of the parents, so she browsed through the files that people had posted of the missing, looking for likely matches. The information was sparse: basic facts about age and sex and residence, where the victims worked, where they’d last been seen, and what they’d been wearing. Often there were pictures, taken in happier times. A grinning boy in his school cap. A young woman, waving at the camera in front of a shrine. A father at an amusement park, holding his child. Below this spare layer of data lay the fullness of the tragedy. All these lives, but none were the lives she was looking for. Finally, she gave up. She needed more information about her Yasutanis, and the only way to find it was to read further in the diary.

  Ruth closed her eyes. In her mind, she could picture Nao, sitting by herself in the darkened kitchen, waiting for her mother to bring her father home from the police station. What had those long moments felt like to her? It was hard to get a sense from the diary of the texture of time passing. No writer, even the most proficient, could re-enact in words the flow of a life lived, and Nao was hardly that skillful. The dingy kitchen was dim and still. The bar hostesses moaned and beat against the flimsy wall. The metallic clank of the key in the lock must have startled her, but she stayed where she was. Feet scuffled in the foyer. Did her parents speak? Probably not. She listened to the sound of running water as her mother filled the tub in the bathroom, and her father undressed in the bedroom. She didn’t move. Didn’t look up. Kept her eyes fixed on her fingers, which lay in her lap like dead things. She listened to her father bathe, and then, as her mother grimly looked on, she listened to him stumble through his confession. Did she sneak a glance at his pink cheeks and see it as shame or just the heat of the bath? Did she notice the sweat on his forehead? How many moments passed from the time he started talking until her mother stood and left the room? Did the hum of the fluorescent light sound particularly loud in the silence?

  And afterward, in the bedroom she shared with her parents, did she pull the covers over her head, or turn on the light and read a book, or cram for a test that she was sure to fail the next day? Perhaps she went online and googled suicide, men, while her parents slept, or pretended to sleep, back-to-back, on their separate futons on the floor behind her. If she did, she would have learned, as Ruth had, that suicide surpassed cancer as the leading cause of death for middle-aged men in Japan, so her father was right on target. Was that a consolation? Dressed in her pajamas, she sat in front of the glowing screen in the dark, dimly aware of the sounds of breathing in and out of sync, her father’s breath the louder, steady, despite his professed desire for its cessation, her mother’s softer, but punctuated from time to time by a sharp panicky nasal intake or an apneic stopping.

  What did she feel at that moment?

  Ruth opened her eyes. Something was different. She listened. She could hear birds outside, a flock of scoters coming off the water, the tapping of a pileated woodpecker, the liqu
id plonk and caw of the ravens, but what had caught her attention just now was not a sound, but rather its absence: the rhythmic thunk of Oliver’s ax was missing. She felt a quickening of fear. When had it stopped? She stood and walked to the window that overlooked the woodpile. Had he hurt himself? Gotten dizzy and cut off his leg? Rural life was perilous. Every year, someone on the island died or drowned or was seriously injured. Their neighbor died picking apples. He’d fallen off his ladder onto his head, and his wife found his body under the tree, surrounded by spilled fruit. Dangers were rife: ladders, fruit trees, slick moss-covered roofs, rain gutters, axes, splitting mauls, chainsaws, shotguns, skinning knives, wolves, cougars, high winds, falling tree limbs, rogue waves, faulty wiring, drug dealers, drunk drivers, elderly drivers, suicide, and even murder.

  She peered out the window. Down below in the driveway, she could see her husband. He looked all right. He was standing on both legs next to the woodpile, with one hand in his pocket and the other on the handle of the ax, staring up into a tree and listening to the ravens.

  7.

  “That Jungle Crow is back again,” he said in the bath that night. “It’s driving the ravens crazy.”

  Ruth grunted. She was brushing her teeth with the electric toothbrush and her mouth was full of toothpaste. Oliver was stretched out in the bath-tub, flipping through the latest issue of New Science magazine, while Pesto perched on the rim of the tub, next to his head.