A Tale for the Time Being (38 page)

And then a woman screamed, and then everybody screamed, and a man started crying out,
Oh my god! Oh my god!
over and over, as the first tower fell. It went straight down, disappearing
into itself, into a white cloud of smoke and dust that rose up and swallowed the world.

People were running down the street. They were hurt. They were trying to escape.
Oh my god! Oh my god!
Time passed, and then the second tower fell.

I held on to my dad’s arm. We sat there, side by side, and watched until dawn. One after the other, the towers fell. Over and over, we watched them. When I left for school, he was still
watching. When I came home, he was still watching.

4.

He became obsessed with the people who jumped. That first night we saw them, small dark human shapes, dropping down the sides of the buildings, and we kept expecting to see them
again on television or in the newspapers, but instead they disappeared. Did we just imagine them? Was it a dream?

For the next couple of weeks, he hunted for them on the Internet. He stopped walking. Late at night, I’d wake up and see him sitting at my desk in our bedroom, staring at the computer
screen, running searches. He said the government and the networks were censoring the images, but finally the picture of the Falling Man showed up. You’ve probably seen him. The photograph
shows a tiny man in a white shirt and dark pants, diving headfirst down the slick steel side of the building. Next to that gigantic building, he’s just a small, dark squiggle, and at first
you think he’s a piece of lint or dust on the camera lens that got onto the picture by mistake. It’s only when you look closely that you understand. The squiggle is human. A time being.
A life. His arms are next to his body, and his one knee is bent, like he’s doing an Irish jig, only upside down. It’s all wrong. He shouldn’t be dancing. He shouldn’t be
there at all.

From my futon on the floor, I watched my dad watching the photograph. He would sit with his nose inches from the screen, and it looked like he and the Falling Man were having a conversation,
like the man had stopped falling in midair for a moment to consider my dad’s questions.
What made you decide to do it? Was it the smoke or the heat? Did you have to decide or did your
body just know? Did you jump or dive or just step into the air? Did the air feel refreshing after the heat and smoke? How does it feel to be falling? Are you okay? What are you thinking? Do you
feel alive or dead? Do you feel free now?

I wonder if the Falling Man answered.

I know what me and Dad would have done if we’d been trapped inside those buildings. We wouldn’t have even needed to discuss it. We would have found our way to an open window. He
would have given me a quick hug and a kiss on the head before he held out his hand. We would have counted to three just like we used to do in Sunnyvale, standing on the edge of the swimming pool
when he was teaching me how to not be afraid of the deep water. One, two three, and then at exactly the same moment we would have jumped. He would have held on to my hand really tight as we fell,
for as long as he could, before letting go.

5.

What would you do?

Does falling scare you? I’ve never been afraid of heights. When I stand on the edge of a tall place I feel like I’m on the edge of time, peering into forever. The question
What
if . . . ?
rises up in my mind, and it’s exciting because I know that in the next instant, in less time than it takes to snap my fingers, I could fly into eternity.

Back when I was a little kid in Sunnyvale, I never thought about suicide, but when we moved to Tokyo and my dad fell down in front of the train, I started thinking about it a lot. It seemed to
make sense. If you’re just going to die anyway, why not just get it over with?

At first, it was all pretty much a mind game. How would I do it? Hmm. Let me think. I know kids who cut themselves, but razor blades are messy and bleeding takes too long. Trains are messy, too,
and some poor slob would have to clean up all the guts and stuff, not to mention there’s that fine that your family has to pay. It wouldn’t be fair to Mom, who works really hard to
support us.

Pills are hard to get and how would you know if you’d taken enough? The best would be to find a nice place outside in nature, maybe a steep cliff that goes straight down into a deep ravine
where nobody would find you, and your body could just decompose naturally or the crows could eat you. Or, better yet, a steep cliff into the sea. Yes, that’s a good one. Near to the little
beach where me and Jiko had our picnic. I could probably even see the small bench where we sat and ate our rice balls and chocolate together. From the top of that cliff, the beach would look as
small as a pocket. I would think fondly about Jiko and how she taught me the uselessness of fighting a wave, and that would be a nice last thought to have as I jumped off the edge of the world and
went flying toward the ocean. It’s the same big Pacific Ocean where Number One crashed his plane into the aircraft carrier. That’s nice. The jellyfish would eat my flesh, and my bones
would sink to the bottom, and I would be with Haruki forever. He’s so smart, we would have lots to talk about. Maybe he could even teach me French.

1.

On September 11, they were in the Driftless. A few days earlier, Ruth had given the keynote address for a conference on food politics at the University of Wisconsin in Madison,
after which she and Oliver had gone to visit their friends John and Laura, who had a house in the country. The Driftless is a rural area in southwestern Wisconsin, one that Oliver had long wanted
to see on account of the unique geology of the Paleozoic Plateau, which had somehow escaped glaciation and was named for the absence of drift: the silt, sand, clay, gravel, and boulders usually
left behind by the retreating sheets of ice. He was particularly interested in the cave systems, the disappearing streams, blind valleys, and sinkholes that characterized the topography, but Ruth
was feeling anxious. Her mother was still alive then and living with them on the island, and although Ruth had arranged for a neighbor to drop in and bring food and check up on her, she
didn’t like leaving her alone for so long. But the fall weather in Wisconsin was beautiful, and it felt good to be with their friends. They spent a long, lazy afternoon in canoes on the
Mississippi, watching turtles basking on logs in the golden sunlight.

The next morning the four of them were sitting around the kitchen table after a leisurely breakfast, enjoying a second cup of coffee, when they heard the neighbor’s pickup truck
approaching. John went out to see what he wanted. He came back a few minutes later looking serious.

“Something’s happened in New York,” he said. The farmhouse had no television. He turned on the radio to NPR just as the second plane hit the North Tower.

Ruth spent the next hour standing on a picnic table at the top of a small rise on the property, trying to get a mobile phone signal so she could call her friends in New York. Finally she managed
to get through to her editor, who was watching the disaster unfold from her kitchen window in Brooklyn.

Her editor’s voice cut through the static. “It’s falling!” she cried. “Oh my god, the tower’s falling down!” And then the connection went dead.

They drove back to Madison, turned on the television, and spent the rest of the afternoon watching the planes slice into the towers and the towers collapse. She thought about her mom, all alone
in the little house in Canada. Her mom always watched the news, even if she couldn’t remember what was going on from day to day. Ruth tried calling, but nobody picked up. Her mom was almost
deaf and couldn’t hear the phone ringing.

“Mom’s watching this on TV,” she told Oliver. “She’ll think we’re in New York. She’ll be crazy with worry.”

“Call the neighbors,” he said. “Tell them to unplug the set.”

By the time she got through to anyone, it was already the next morning. “I need you to go to Mom’s house and find out if she’s seen anything,” she said. “If she
has, just reassure her. Tell her we’re okay and that we’re nowhere near New York. Then unplug the television and tell her it’s broken.”

There was a long silence on the end of the line. “Sure thing,” the woman said. “Is there a problem?”

“I’m afraid she’s going to see the news and panic.”

Again, a long silence. “What news . . . ?”

Ruth explained briefly and then hung up the phone. “We have to get back,” she told Oliver.

2.

The airports were closed, so they rented a car, a white Ford Taurus, and drove west, skirting the Canadian border. Their plan was to drop the Taurus off in Seattle and take the
hydrofoil back to Canada. Canada was safe.

As they made their way across the country, American flags began popping up like flowers after a rain, fluttering from poles and car antennae, and taped to the windows of stores and homes. The
country was awash in red, white, and blue. At night, in Super 8s and Motel 6s, they watched the president vow to hunt down the terrorists. “Dead or alive,” he promised. “Smoke
’em out of their caves. Git ’em running so we can git ’em.”

One evening they stopped for dinner at the Great Wall of China restaurant in Harlem, Montana. The restaurant was empty and closing early. It was an extra security precaution, their waitress
explained, when she brought their bill.

“You never know who they’re gonna target next,” she said.

“You think Arab terrorists will attack us here in Harlem, Montana?” Oliver asked. Harlem, Montana, had a population of just under 850. It was two thousand miles from New York City,
and surrounded by desert.

The waitress, who looked like she might be Mexican, shook her head. “We’re not taking any chances,” she said.

Later, at the Super 8 motel, they watched a news report about the spate of hate crimes against Muslim Americans being committed across the country.

“You know, I think I was wrong,” Oliver said.

“About what?”

“Our waitress. I don’t think it was Arab terrorists she was afraid of.”

3.

They made it across the border, and Canada had never felt safer. Back on the island, their neighbors expressed concern for their well-being, but news of the world had little
relevance to their daily lives, and they were only vaguely aware of what was going on down south, which didn’t keep them from having opinions.

“I’m pretty sure it’s all a hoax,” one neighbor said, when he dropped in to deliver Masako’s Alzheimer’s medication, which he’d picked up for her at the
clinic.

“A hoax?” Ruth repeated. “You mean, you don’t think it happened?”

“Oh, no,” he said. “It happened all right. It’s just not what they’re saying it is.” He looked around and then took a step closer, standing so that his face
was inches from hers. “If you ask me, it’s a government conspiracy.”

He was American, a Vietnam vet. He had been awarded a Purple Heart, which he handed back to the U.S. immigration authority at the border when he crossed into Canada. His spinal injuries had
never healed and he required a steady dose of morphine in order to control the pain. Ruth didn’t have the energy to argue. She offered tea and then sat with him, listening to his theories and
thinking about the box in the basement. How nice it would be to crawl inside and fall asleep.

From their fog-enshrouded outpost on the mossy margin of the world, she watched the United States invade Afghanistan and then turn its sights on Iraq. While troops were quietly being deployed to
the Middle East, she sat on the couch with her mother, in the little house in the middle of the dark and dripping rain forest, staring at the small, glowing television screen.

“What program is this?” her mother asked.

“It’s the news, Mom,” she answered.

“I don’t understand,” her mother said. “It looks like a war. Are we at war?”

“Yes, Mom,” she said. “We’re at war.”

“Oh, that’s terrible!” her mother exclaimed. “Who are we at war with?”

“Afghanistan, Mom.”

They watched together in silence, until the commercial break. Her mother got up and shuffled to the bathroom. When she came back, she stopped and looked at the screen. “What program is
this?”

“It’s the news, Mom.”

“It looks like a war. Are we at war?”

“Yes, Mom. We’re at war.”

“Oh, that’s terrible! Who are we at war with?”

“Iraq, Mom.”

“Really? But I thought that war was over.”

“No, Mom. It’s never over. America has always been at war with Iraq.”

“Oh, that’s terrible!” Her mom leaned forward and peered at the screen.

Days pass, and weeks. Months pass, and then years.

“Now, who did you say we are at war with?”

1.

After 9/11 we thought the world was going to end more or less immediately, but it didn’t. School just kept plodding along. My classmates were nice to me for a while
because of my connection to America. We folded a thousand origami paper cranes to send to Ground Zero for the twenty-four Japanese victims and all the other people who had died in the towers. But
by the end of September, everybody was tired of feeling kind and compassionate, and there was a noticeable increase in hostilities. It wasn’t organized like before, at least not at first,
just minor random sniper attacks coming out of nowhere when someone felt impatient or restless. A shove in the hallway, a punch in the breast. War and treachery were in the air. The whole world was
waiting for America to attack Afghanistan, but nothing was happening, which seemed to cause a lot of tension, even in our classroom. We took our preliminary exams, which weren’t the real ones
but still made it clear who was going to get into a good high school and have a fabulous life, and who was a loser. Me. I should have been prepared, but I wasn’t. Still, what’s the
point in beating yourself up when other people will do it for you?

Finally, on October 7, the United States started bombing Afghanistan, and I got my period again, and in a way both of these felt like a huge relief.

I know a lot of people think it’s gross to talk about this kind of thing, so I hope you don’t mind. I’m not the kind of girl who gets an erotic kick out of telling everyone
about her menstrual cycles, and I wouldn’t even bring it up if it wasn’t important to what happened next.