Fracture

by Andres Neuman

  Ai comes running back to her grandfather’s side. Laboriously, he picks her up in his arms. He releases his grip as soon as her little shoes touch the ground. Rubbing his back, he looks at Watanabe with an amused wince.

  Listen, he says. I have neighbors older than me, who have agreed to live in dreadful conditions simply to be slightly beyond the thirty-kilometer radius. As if radioactivity can be neatly divided into districts! Don’t tell me that isn’t crazy. When I think about them it makes me want to cry. At our age, death isn’t so scary. What’s scary is suffering. Some of them have died in offices. Gyms. Libraries. Well, that last one wouldn’t be so bad. I’ll tell you something. Even if they had died here due to lack of medical attention, at least they would have had an honorable death. In their own home. With their loved ones. What more can you ask?

  Mr. Watanabe tries to swallow. His throat resists. He moves his hand toward Ai’s little head, lets it hover above her. It’s your new hat, he says. The little girl remains stock-still, awaiting contact. Like an elevator that resumes working, his throat gives.

  The teacher asks about the hospitals in Sōma. How well equipped they are. Watanabe extemporizes as best he can until the other man starts speaking again.

  Until recently, says Sasaki, delivery vehicles refused to come here. We received no mail either. There were shortages of essential items, like in the old days. While only a short distance away, people wanted almost for nothing. They thought that a stupid invisible circle would really protect them. Such was the confusion that even rice packed prior to the accident was being rejected by supermarkets that were still up and running. Until a truck came from I don’t know where, deposited a load of vegetables here, and then sped away. Like a robbery in reverse, my friend! Luckily some stores are starting to open their doors again. The other day, I was overjoyed to see the Café Eisendō open. My granddaughter loves their cakes. And Yamada’s fishmonger, where I buy fish for my wife.

  Cakes! shouts Ai, who had appeared to be absorbed in her game.

  Tomorrow, sweetie, tomorrow, replies her grandfather.

  The little girl protests. He gives her a stern look and she calms down again. Then for the first time, they fall silent.

  You know what infuriates me the most, the teacher says finally, looking up. What the hell is the use of decentralizing political power if we continue to delegate our most basic responsibilities as citizens?

  We’ve always trusted the inside enemies more than the outside friends, says Watanabe, unsure how to respond.

  In order to prevent the collapse of farming industries in the region, Sasaki explains, the authorities have raised the exposure levels approved for human consumption. As no one wanted these products, the government acquired the surplus of locally produced rice and vegetables and dispensed them to schools. This apparently legal measure at last mobilized families to do something about it, and now all food destined for consumption by schoolchildren is tested for radiation.

  Watanabe, who has come to recognize when Mr. Sasaki requires prompting, asks him about the results of those tests.

  With an almost mocking laugh, the teacher declares that this is where the problem lies. These test results usually indicate that the food is safe. Yet many of the tests are incomplete, because the proper instruments aren’t available.

  What we call safety, he says, is little more than a series of rules designed so that violations go undetected.

  Checking the time on his phone, Mr. Watanabe thinks that he should get back to his car before it gets too late.

  To top it all off, says Sasaki, growing increasingly indignant, some children who refuse to drink school milk are being labeled traitors. Remember the war, my friend?

  Mr. Watanabe sighs in agreement.

  The truth is I don’t remember it at all, the teacher adds. I hadn’t even started school. How old are you?

  A little older than you, I fear, replies Watanabe.

  You don’t look it.

  Tell that to my back.

  And you’re still working!

  Only occasionally. Some things you never retire from.

  That’s true. I teach my grandchildren, and I learn more from them than they do from me.

  They stand up. Sasaki takes his granddaughter by the hand. They walk slowly toward the exit, at Ai’s pace.

  As they cross the park, they discuss the latest about the power plant. In spite of everything, the teacher isn’t opposed to atomic experiments. Nuclear fusion is a scientific development, he argues. The power plants are an economic decision. And nuclear weapons, a military misuse. There has to be some distinction.

  Think of this, Sasaki says. If the first ever use of gasoline had been napalm, you wouldn’t want to touch that car today.

  They come to a halt beside the Verso. The yakitori vendor has vanished. Sasaki asks about his plans. When he mentions his intention to drive south, the teacher advises him not to cross the Odaka district, which is right in the middle of the exclusion zone. Waving in various directions with his free hand, he suggests making a detour on the 399, or possibly the 349, which is farther away and therefore safer.

  As they say goodbye, Ai leans in to look at the inside of the car. Her grandfather scolds her, apologizes, and adds with a smile that curiosity runs in the family. He wishes Watanabe the best of luck with his research. He remarks that today the air quality is perfect, lifting his finger above his head, like a bony arrow pointing at the clouds.

  I confess I’m a little worried about leaving you here, says Mr. Watanabe.

  You’re very kind, Mr. Sasaki replies, but don’t worry. Be a pessimist, like me, and you’ll see what a relief it is.

  As Watanabe drives off, the teacher and his granddaughter dwindle in his rearview mirror until they become one radiant dot.

  LEAVING MINAMISŌMA, he stops off to buy water and to snack on some cookies. He checks his dosimeter again. He has just read some information about the threshold of microsieverts at which there is no immediate health risk. Mr. Watanabe considers that subtle, insidious adjective qualifying the risk, and everything it says by omission.

  He evaluates the numbers on the screen of the dosimeter. It seems to him that his entire life has been spent calculating fears and calibrating warnings. Leukocytes in the blood. Financial risks. Hematocrit levels. Balance sheets. Seismic magnitudes. Radiation levels.

  Watanabe wonders how much of statistics is intimidation, and how to weigh that factor in what is being measured.

  Everyone now consults these dosimeters obsessively, like a tribe seeking its atomic oracle; as well as the wind direction, which now brings nightmares. The enigma is in the air, it is the air.

  * * *

  To avoid the prohibited area and the inaccessible roads, Watanabe follows Mr. Sasaki’s advice. He makes a detour west and takes the 399. By midday, he reaches the Katsurao checkpoint.

  As he is slowing down, he sees a police van drive off. It is full of officers clad from head to foot in white overalls. One of them stares at him through the window, until the van moves away.

  The officer on duty asks him the routine questions, plus a couple that are new to him. Mr. Watanabe tells him that some of his relatives live a bit farther south, and that he has come to help them clear out their houses. He mentions his brother who is a Spanish teacher and has just retired. And his granddaughter, Ai, who is all grown up and about to start university. She wants to study French, he explains, although he would prefer if she studied economics. First and foremost, young women today need to be practical.

  The officer interrupts Watanabe’s story with his gloved hand. He repeats some safety warnings, wishes him luck on his mission, and waves him through.

  A quarter of an hour later, he glances at the GPS and sees that he is parallel to the nuclear power plant. Fukushima Daiichi and his car, separated only by the last circle. He rolls up the windows, cuts the air circulation, clenches his stomach.

  Driving along the empty road, Watanabe notices once again, or he thinks
he does, a difficulty when breathing, as if the oxygen were filled with tiny needles.

  He accelerates. He comes across side roads blocked off by barriers bearing DANGER signs, bindweed spreading indifferently beneath them.

  A few kilometers later, he comes to the Kawauchi checkpoint. The easternmost tip of the town is closest to the power plant and part of the exclusion zone. Here in the west, a handful of residents are holding out, together with a few police officers. The police, one resident explains, had no choice but to move their checkpoint to this side of town, so as not to break the restrictions they are meant to uphold. The latest rumor is that any minute now, the government will order a complete evacuation. In any case, adds the resident, stepping away from Watanabe’s car window, our harvest has already been lost.

  Leaning back in their folding chairs next to their patrol cars, noses and mouths covered, the officers look at him as if he were an alien. He, on the other hand, has never felt so close to his native land. Each time, he has more difficulty persuading them to let him pass, so he invents increasingly dramatic reasons: elderly folk who can’t walk, grave illnesses, imminent funerals. He is aware that, only a few weeks ago, the state announced it was implementing the Emergencies Act, giving the police the right to arrest and fine anyone illegally crossing the barriers into evacuated zones.

  As he wrangles with an officer reluctant to let him through, Watanabe, perhaps inspired by his time in Argentina, weighs the possibility of bribing him. He lets slip an ambiguous comment about the flexibility of fines. The officer’s expression hardens. His body is set for a reprisal. Watanabe realizes that, accustomed to driving on Hispanic roads, he has just committed a serious cultural blunder.

  He masks his anxiety. Smiles innocently. Gazes at the officer with evident admiration, and he repeats his last sentence, with a slight variation that removes all doubt and restores honor. Once more, he invokes his sister: alone, ill, incurably so, waiting for him to help her evacuate.

  * * *

  He divides his attention among the damaged asphalt, the map on the GPS, and the see-through roof. He makes up for the loneliness of his journey by imagining, as he did when he was a child, that he’s competing with the clouds. He still isn’t sure who is chasing whom.

  For an instant, he has the impression that a piece of cloud is falling onto the road.

  There are an increasing number of potholes, cracks, abandoned objects. After driving for so many hours, he is no longer alarmed by the jolts to the wheel, the steering going off course, or the unforeseen obstacles.

  But whatever has just struck the front of the vehicle doesn’t resemble any of that. The force of it was something else. The sound different.

  Watanabe grinds to a halt, climbs out of the Verso, walks back.

  And he sees a dog writhing.

  The first thing he does, in vain, is to look all around in search of some kind of help, which he knows won’t be forthcoming. He is unable to muster another reaction. All he can do is spin in circles. The landscape, the light, the objects, everything shrinks before his eyes.

  He sees only his most recent gestures, the last few seconds, as if he were still in the act of slamming on the brakes.

  He was distracted, and he didn’t see it. He didn’t see it, and it was there.

  In this area, he surmises, there must be legions of pets roaming the countryside, abandoned by owners who’d left their homes, believing they would be returning shortly.

  This dog, for instance, what’s left of its breathing presence, is wearing some sort of collar.

  There must also be a fair number of cattle wandering aimlessly, hoping for an unlikely survival. He remembers reading, back when the subject scarcely mattered to him, something about these animals being slaughtered, and compensation being paid to their owners.

  Health, money, slaughter.

  Watanabe realizes he has killed, is about to kill for the first time in his life. Something is instantly activated in his body, something that originates deep in his gut.

  There’s no other way out for this mound of blood, fur, and helplessness, which he is incapable of looking in the eye.

  Yet, at the very least, he owes it that: a look. To take in its existence. To acknowledge what he is killing.

  He stares fixedly into the animal’s eyes. Then he gets into the car, shifts into reverse, and rolls over it again.

  * * *

  The GPS spews out places, roads, distances. He drives on and on toward the south. The forbidden east seems so close on the map, so far beyond his capabilities. Watanabe again feels an intermittent tightness in his chest. Why does this sensation come and go?

  What’s choking me, he thinks, is this detour.

  He takes a deep breath. He looks at the wheel purring in his hands. And, at the first opportunity, turns abruptly to the left.

  Leaving the main road behind, he slows down as he enters a bumpy back path that no one has bothered to guard or block off. It’s a steep, winding track, surrounded by mountains filled with moist green, patches of shadow, and fragments of sunlight. His breathing deepens. His body softens.

  Mr. Watanabe proceeds slowly east toward the coast he was avoiding and desires. Gradually he is penetrating the periphery of the prohibited zone, the realm of the last circle.

  Halfway along the path, he makes out the columns of a Shinto shrine. He doesn’t stop.

  * * *

  Once he has climbed the mountain, he exits onto a wide highway. Having all that space to himself once more seems daunting; in a sense, he thinks, the narrowness of the dirt track protected him. The glare forces him to change into his sunglasses again.

  He picks up his speed and his journey south. He sees fields left fallow. He drives past a sewage treatment plant. He wonders if it is still working, what effluents it is extracting.

  For a few minutes, he follows Route 35. He drives through the first set of traffic lights he has come across in a long time. Squinting, he thinks he sees the moving blur of another car.

  His plan is to turn left at some point, to get as close as he can to the coastal towns. But where?

  He keeps going. As is his custom when in doubt, he allows himself to be carried by his own momentum, waiting for some kind of trigger; he lets the random signs decide for him.

  Before long, he sees a particularly sharp bend. Very much like a turning point, he thinks. He takes a left at last onto Route 246 and heads straight for the coast.

  Soon afterward, amid the cracks in the asphalt, he comes to a fork in the road. Its choices diverge like a pair of trousers about to tear. He slams on the brakes.

  Ovine clouds drift over the sunroof.

  As he contemplates the fork in the road, the engine running, he recalls the verse by Gesshū Sōko that he used to recite as a youth:

  The launched arrows

  against each other

  meet and divide

  the air in flight.

  Thus I return to the source.

  Mr. Watanabe consults the screen. The profusion of data doesn’t help him decide, so he unfolds his old printed map. There he sees that one of the branches leads to the tiny village of Hirodai.

  He tries to search on his phone. The signal is very weak and the page takes too long to load. In fact, he doesn’t really need any additional information: he feels the urge to go to Hirodai. He intuits that he should acquaint himself with it; that, in some sense, he is choosing between two directions in his memory.

  He remembers that platform in Madrid, at Atocha Station, seven years earlier. He had just left Carmen’s house. She had told him that she definitely wouldn’t be going to Tokyo. They were fine as they were and there was no need to go such a long way away.

  He had just stepped off the train. He was standing, motionless, between platforms one and two. He focused on that detail because it seemed to present the starkest choice. On one track the trains arrived at the station. On the other they departed.

  Watanabe is well aware that, in that moment, he’d had t
he impulse to go back. The adjacent track was waiting for him. There was still time to get on a train and return to the point of departure. He’d looked at his phone, squeezed it hard, and was about to call her. Then he put it away again and left the platform, walking slowly through the station where, since March 11, everything was only semi-operational. Toward the fractured city, which didn’t know what to do with its fragments.

  It had been a covert process for him, like digging a tunnel. The bombs in Madrid that year had brought him to the end. Since horror seemed to be pursuing him, perhaps it was best to go in search of his own.

  Mr. Watanabe drives on, steering between the cracks.

  8

  CARMEN AND THE LESIONS

  I KNOW MYSELF. WHEN MY FINGERS ACHE, it’s because I’m on edge, and I’ve clenched my fists in my sleep. When my knees crack, it means the weather’s going to change. When my children argue about politics, I get a stiff neck. I know these bones. Now my fingers have seized up. This means I’ve been thinking too much about him.

  All week that Argentinian guy has been writing to me. He refused to take no for an answer, so I had to tell him something. He kept plying me with questions. He even wanted to know about my relatives across the pond. Look, I said in the end, if you’re so interested, come to Madrid and we’ll talk. He said he found me through that Mariola woman.