Literature Club was meeting at 2:30 this afternoon for its last session of the school year. Shuya was going to propose that they all try their hand at writing cell phone novelettes over spring break, and then upload them as authored by the club at the beginning of next term. He mentioned the idea to Ryu.
“So we’d all be anonymous, right? Wouldn’t show who wrote what?”
“Right.”
“What are you going to write?”
“Don’t know yet,” said Shuya. “I just came up with this idea.”
Ryu was doubtful. “My life is too boring. I don’t have anything to write about.”
“Use your imagination. You don’t have to write about yourself, you know.”
Classes ended and everyone who was in a club headed for their meeting place. People brought juice and snacks to celebrate. As Shuya stood up to announce his suggestion for spring break, the room suddenly began to sway. Cups were dashed to the floor even as people grabbed onto the edges of the table. Lights flickered and books tumbled out of shelves.
“Earthquake!” students were shrieking.
“Under the tables!” someone shouted.
They had done this drill numerous times. Automatically, students moved away from the windows, crouching under the tables. Every five minutes or so another tremor caused buildings to rumble. Several students pulled out their cell phones to call home, but the system was down.
After the swaying stopped, a few walked to the train station in Niiza, but the trains weren’t running, either. They came back to campus. Most students, especially the commuters, decided to stay at school. The principal walked around with a bullhorn, reminding people to stay with their classmates and not go back in the buildings. Food would be distributed, as would blankets from the school’s emergency supplies. The quake had been centered north of here, off Tohoku, and there had also been a huge tsunami. . . . This was all he knew at present.
It was getting chilly. Shuya again wished he had his jacket. He sat with his back propped against Ryu, who was sniffling quietly.
Shuya pulled a notebook out of his backpack. The science teacher had been talking about earthquakes and catfish last week. He mentioned the myth of the monster catfish—people used to believe that there was a giant catfish who lived underground, and when it thrashed, this caused the earth to shake. Recently, scientists had noticed that catfish are particularly sensitive to changes in the electrical field of the atmosphere. And along with this, in fact, just before an earthquake occurs, they get agitated.
This seemed like a good seed for a science fiction story, thought Shuya. But why stick to catfish? A monster living underground, quietly sleeping until something provokes it. . . .
Just then an aftershock rippled through the school grounds. Ryu began to whimper, so Shuya punched him lightly on the shoulder.
“Remember the catfish story?” He asked. “Underground?”
Ryu nodded.
“Well, maybe it’s not a catfish at all. Maybe it’s a dinosaur, or . . . you know, like Godzilla or something. . . .”
Ryu stopped sniffling.
“And maybe there’s a special stone that has to be positioned just right to make it quiet again. . . .”
Ryu was listening. Shuya saw the stone in his mind’s eye. It was dark gray and smooth, just like an ordinary rock. “You have to have superior abilities to sense its power,” he told Ryu.
“What kind of abilities?” Ryu wanted to know.
“Power of observation,” declared Shuya. “To see things ordinary people don’t notice.”
He decided the rock would be mostly buried in the earth, so that what looked like a simple stone sitting on the ground would be the iceberg-like tip of a massive boulder. Immediately, that suggested the twist of how the story would end.
Inspired, Shuya opened his notebook and began furiously to write.
Half Life
by Deni Y. Béchard
The alarm wakes me at 3:00 a.m. The window to our garden is black, the streetlights extinguished. Since the disaster, Tokyo has been getting darker and darker.
I slip out of bed and follow the instructions I read online. I googled “how to walk quietly.” Dad taught me to use the Internet for research, but he didn’t expect me to learn these techniques: how to move my foot in a circular motion out and forward, then slightly across, to keep my pant legs from rubbing; how to shift my weight onto the ball of my foot in increments; how to walk on the side of a step to keep it from creaking.
The stairs end in a rectangle of space with three doors: my parents’ bedroom, their bathroom, and his study, where, every night for the last week, he’s been shut up, the house so dark that the light beneath the door blazes. The one time I knocked, pretending I needed help with homework, he was sitting there, a single lamp burning down on a stack of yellowed papers. He told me he was working, but I recognized the papers. They were Grandpa’s, from when he passed away a year ago. I’m certain they will help me understand the mystery of my parents’ distance, the silence that has taken over our house.
I listen. The band of light no longer shines beneath his door. He must have finally gone to bed, but he isn’t even snoring.
This is the hard part. Normally, his study hinges screech like something from a horror film. When I googled “how to open a squeaky door silently,” I doubted that I’d find anything useful, but websites explained every technique.
I put the end of a large screwdriver just beneath, on the side with the hinges, then, holding my breath, lift slowly. After a moment, I feel the door shift upward, and I take the knob with my free hand, wrapping my fingers around it as if touching a skittish cat. I turn it as gradually as possible, and ease it back. With the weight off the hinges, there’s not a sound. I gently return the handle to its resting position so that it won’t snap back. I repeat the procedure from the other side, drawing the door shut, all in perfect silence. I’ve brought a folded towel, draped across my shoulder, and I lay it along the base of the door, then switch on the lights.
I almost shout with fear and have to grit my teeth not to.
Dad sprawls in his desk chair, mouth open, face paper-pale, red hair standing straight up, glasses lopsided on his nose, as if he’s been punched. His small green eyes open. He smacks his lips and groans and rubs his face, then pushes his glasses into place.
“Yes, Kenji,” he says, “what is it?”
By then I’ve grabbed up the towel and I hold it to my cheek.
“I had a nightmare,” I tell him. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t sleep.”
When I was little, I used to think my parents were the most beautiful people on earth. They laughed and danced in the kitchen. He was huge, and she was tiny. He’d pick me up, then take her under his arm and press us all together, so I could smell her perfume and his aftershave, feel the beating of their hearts and mine, inside my breathless ribs.
But a few years ago, one night I stayed with Obaachan when my aunt Michiko was over. They thought I was sleeping. I was twelve then, and I liked to listen to other people’s conversations, often surprised at how different they spoke when they weren’t speaking to me.
“It’s amazing,” my aunt said in a low voice, “how two people like them can make a boy like him.”
“I always worried,” Obaachan admitted, “that Yumiko would never find a husband. When your father was alive, we discussed some older men we knew who might be willing to marry her. But then she brought Ed home. If you had, I would have been angry, but to see her with someone—with anyone—was such a relief.”
Aunt Michiko laughed quietly. “I’ve heard people say that mixed children take the best from both parents, so we should be happy.”
“I just think that foreign men can’t always tell which Japanese women are beautiful. Maybe Ed thinks he’s lucky. Maybe for an American, Yumiko is pretty.”
After hearing that conversation, I started to see things differently. Each passing day deteriorated the world I’d known. My parents began to look ridic
ulous. He towered over her, his white face splotched red from the heat. He panted and sweated when he walked. In the subway, his head brushed hanging advertisements for makeup and coffee, and everyone pulled back while they looked from him to me. Mom barely came up to his chest, with large breasts for a Japanese woman, a round butt, and very short legs, and she had crooked teeth until he paid for her to get braces.
After the earthquake came and the tsunami crashed down on Tohoku, we watched the TV reports. He held her in one arm, me in the other, though I didn’t like this anymore and sensed that he was comforting himself, not me. Then, with the disaster at the nuclear reactor, the news of meltdowns and radioactive particles in the air and water, they changed. He spent his nights in his study, reading Grandpa’s old papers. He and Mom avoided each other. I heard them arguing once, in the bedroom, but they told me nothing. They simply stopped speaking.
Miho sits next to me, head lowered as she checks the answers to her exam with the same focus that she gives me when we talk. Afterward, during recess, we play each other our favorite songs from our iPods while the boys in my class watch jealously. A few times, because I’m half, they’ve asked where I learned Japanese, but I’m one of the best soccer players, so they don’t get mean the way they can with other half kids. I’ve also done my research. Dad used to spend hours on the computer, learning everything about whatever his new passion was, usually something to do with outer space: black holes or quasars or nebulae. He’d call me into his study and explain that light from the creation of solar systems was reaching us billions of years after the systems had been made, and that we could look at that light and see how things had been when the universe was born, just after the big bang.
Though I liked these ideas, I saw that google could help me with more important things, like “how to be popular,” “how to be good at soccer,” and “how to practice so you improve quickly.” The information was endless, and the answers worked. I had good grades and got into a competitive soccer club, and at school, I chose my words carefully. Being liked wasn’t always easy with MacDonald for a last name and a polar bear-size father, his hair so red I feared the other kids would ask if we were descended from Ronald McDonald. Though sometimes I worried about being a fake, I had no choice. Besides, what was wrong with learning the best ways to be liked? Everyone wants to be popular. Miho talks to me every day. She didn’t used to. I’ve read wikihow and ehow articles on ways to make girls like you. Maybe I am an otaku—a nerd, no different from Dad, but if the other kids don’t know, and she likes me, what difference does it make?
After school, when I say good-bye to Miho on the sidewalk, Dad pulls up. Since he teaches at the university nearby, he likes to stop on his way home and drive me to soccer club across the city.
“Is that your girlfriend?” he asks, motioning his head toward Miho.
“No. She’s just a friend.”
He laughs and says, “Ah, first love.”
“Stop it, Dad,” I tell him. I hate how he always makes everything sound dramatic.
“I’ve seen you talking to her before,” he says. “She’s beautiful.”
I’ve worried that he’d notice. Aside from being obsessed with outer space, he writes embarrassing poetry. When he used to read it to Mom, I pretended not to hear. I do the same now.
“Enjoy the way it feels,” he tells me. “When love’s new, it’s amazing. It’s all so fresh. Then everything changes, though you have a ways to go before that happens.” He tries to muss my hair as he accelerates, and I yank my head to the side, dodging his hand, which he drops back to the wheel, not seeming to have noticed.
“Listen,” he says, and immediately, from his tone, I know that he’s going to discuss something important. He does this when he drives, maybe because if he’s busy with the traffic, our conversations seem less personal.
“Your mother and I, we’ve come to a difficult point. We really love each other, but before we married, she told me that she didn’t want to leave Japan. Her English isn’t very good. I was the one who’d made the choice to move here and study Japanese, and we met here. Except now things have changed.”
He sighs and rubs his face, massaging his jaw and cheeks, his glasses knocked at an angle. I say nothing, afraid that if I ask questions he might stop speaking. He’s always talked about problems when I least expect it, his words seeming incidental.
“You’re young,” he says, “and there’s a lot of radiation coming down to Tokyo from the north. People are acting as if it’s not a big deal, but this stuff is going to be in the food and water in some places for a long time. For your mother and me, it’s not as serious as it is for you. You’re growing. The half life of some of these particles is thirty years, and if your body absorbs them, it can’t get rid of all of them. They could really affect your health.”
“How?” I ask. He’s begun to sweat, his face flushed, as if he is suddenly afraid.
“Well, you could get cancer down the road. Leukemia is a real threat. The particles emit waves that damage your DNA, and the effects take time to show up.”
I just nod. The disaster has been on the TV often, the three meltdowns, but nothing has really changed. Until now I thought it was a danger only farther north.
“Anyway,” he says, “your mother doesn’t want to go, but I think that staying is a real mistake. Our old agreement didn’t take this into account. The government is finally telling the truth—or some of it—and it seems there’s been more radiation in Tokyo than they’ve admitted. I’m pretty angry about it, but we can’t agree. So we’ve come to a decision. It’s your choice. You’re old enough that your opinion matters. If you want to go, we’ll go. We’ll move to the US. If you want to stay, we’ll stay.”
Cars rush past in the opposite lane, sunlight slanting from the clouds, flashing against their windshields. No one has ever asked me to make a choice like this. The blue, cloudless sky outlines the tops of buildings with gold. Nothing looks dangerous.
When Dad glances at me, he doesn’t seem angry but afraid.
“What do you think?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” I say, but before I can tell him that I don’t understand radiation enough to decide, he keeps talking.
“It’s a shame what’s happening in this country. The nuclear plant has those workers out there under awful conditions, in all that radiation. Those men are giving up their lives. But not everyone has to. I want you to think about what’s best for you. This is serious. It’s okay to be selfish.”
No words come to me, other than a question that I can’t bring myself to ask: how can he expect me to make this decision when he doesn’t trust me with everything he knows? He reads his papers every night, and I’m certain they must have something to do with the meltdowns and radiation. He showed no interest in them before.
The sun has fallen lower, shining between buildings and over rooftops, and I consider all that I don’t understand—how this light was created, what it carries, and that everything, the air, the sky, holds tiny particles that are determining my life. But if we leave Tokyo, who will we be, and will we even stay together? I miss how he was when I used to think my parents were beautiful. Together, they seemed perfect, and remembering that, I am so sad I can think of nothing else, of no decisions. I stare into the sunlight, wishing I could see into it, into the past, to before these problems began.
That night, Dad sleeps in the bedroom with Mom, as though talking to me resolved a question for him, or maybe because he believes I will choose to leave and he wants to be close to her, to reassure her, so that she will go with us.
I am already at the top of the stairs. He snores loudly, as if things are back to normal. I slip the screwdriver under the door and lift, then palm the handle and turn. Once inside, with the door closed, I lay the towel on the floor and turn on the light.
The papers are in the bottom desk drawer, and I take them and begin to read.
My Dearest Ellen,
This isn’t easy to tell you. It is shame
ful. I don’t know what has happened to me. I am not the man you saw six months ago. My hair has fallen out. I have lost two teeth. I thought they would all fall out, but they’ve firmed up again. My hair is gone, though, and I don’t think it will grow back. . . .
I can’t make sense of this. Is it Grandpa’s writing? I met him only a few times, a man bigger even than Dad, but stern. Dad once told me, offhandedly as usual, that they never got along. His father was of another generation, “like your mother’s father,” he said. “They were like samurai, not afraid of anything. They’d gone to war and done what they had to. They didn’t complain. Men like that couldn’t understand change. I was the youngest in the family. We weren’t the same generation, and your grandpa wanted me to join the military, but I didn’t have the stomach for it. When he refused to pay for me to study literature, we agreed on physics, so I went to college for that, then moved to Japan. I didn’t marry until late because my memories of family weren’t very good.”
Though Dad told me all this, I never considered it too seriously. He’d also put the idea of not being fake in my head, saying that if he’d lived the life his father had wanted for him, he’d just have been faking; he’d have hated himself.
I turn the pages, first letters to Grandma from when Grandpa was stationed in New Mexico, then government documents about radiation at a place called Los Alamos. Most involve a court case. In a testimony, he explains how he and other Navy men, all in the desert to run trials on ballistics, worked while the atomic bomb was tested. Hot wind gusted over them, dust everywhere, and then, within a few days, they began to sweat horribly. They took their helmets off, their hair plastered inside. Their teeth became loose. Overnight, he looked decades older. Later, when he’d started to recover, he was transferred to a ship in the Pacific, off the coast of Japan.
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