Love and Other Ways of Dying (48 page)

So it is that you slide out into this nothingness. Tendrils of smoke rise from the country at your back; fires dot the coast. The slim chances of survival and the utter, certain loss of everything you call home makes you delirious, almost slaphappy. Hard to imagine that at 2:46
P
.
M
. you were at the lumberyard, cutting boards, looking forward to your midafternoon break, and now at the
hour when you’d normally be flying your pigeons, you’re instead being pulled out into some watery oblivion under a low ceiling of gray cloud, a disconcerting smell of diesel on the air. Your body thrums with such adrenaline you feel nothing now. No thirst or pain, no fatigue or cold, though you’ve just been thrown into the ocean in March and are now exposed to near zero temperatures.

Your first thoughts turn to Yuko, how you’re certain she’s alive and certain she’s dead, too, how your mind continues to hold these opposing ideas with the same fervor. On the one hand, in some myth, you’d like to believe she’s become a mermaid. Or she was gently lifted and placed onshore, where she awaits your return like a seafarer’s wife. On the other, doomed from the start, she was struck by a concrete pillar and went tumbling with the others. Or the watery hand held her down until she was motionless. And even as you play these scenarios, you’re also imagining your parents, and how you’re going to explain this to them, explain how, in the end, you happened to live while she disappeared, all because you didn’t heed the tsunami warning—and their warning, too!

This line of thinking may kill you. It’s vital to empty your mind of memory and remorse—the birds, the house, her—the might-have-beens (… 
fingers loosening, then raking your body as she was swept away
), because you’re an amnesiac speck who survives by the grace of some force you suspect may be circling to crush you. Be ready.

All your clothes—the two pairs of pants, the shirt and purple top, the green down jacket, even the watch on your wrist—all of it is intact, on your body, if drenched. The tsunami has taken more than twenty thousand lives, but from you, only your left shoe. And those caramels you stuffed in your pocket. The three cans of energy drink, mercifully, are still there.

At sunset, sky in scratches of purple light, a gnawing in your
gut tells you it’s dinner, so you crack open the first can, drink, then, head tilted back, try to lick out the last drop. The roof is perhaps twelve feet by six, of corrugated metal nailed to wooden beams, your raft at sea. Last night, you and Yuko slept beneath it, and now you perch atop it on the sea, above the goblin sharks and bodies and whatever else lurks below. Salt water laps up the sides, and any sudden movement immediately sets it seesawing. Sit still, in the middle—and as time passes, let the contrite sea bring gifts from the dead. This makes you giddy, too, the gifts. First it brings a red marker. Then the torn pages of a comic book, a manga, its hero, Captain Tsubasa, kicking a soccer ball with superhuman force. It brings some sort of red container that used to hold paint. It brings a tatami mat woven together with string, a broken radio, and a white hard hat. All of which you fish out of the murk. The hat (
To whom did it belong?
) immediately goes on your head, the marker in your hand. You imagine the dead offering you these things from underneath the sea. Hunched over the ripped comic, you test the marker on the damp page and write the following words in the margin:
On March 11, I was with my wife, Yuko. My name is Hiromitsu.
Then you tear the paper, fold it, place it in the red canister, seal it, and with the string from the mat, bandolier it to your body. Resume your pose.

Nighttime is a dark tunnel, starless and strange, the sound of water nibbling at the edges and in the distance the beating rotor blades of helicopters. You’re being dragged, deeper to nowhere. You try your voice, just to keep yourself company. You sing to forget, pass time, stanch the fear. You sing to remind yourself that this is indeed you, in the wreckage of a debris field. It’s an old song, your voice an imperfect husky tenor. On a raft drifting farther out to sea, you sing about high school.

Now the temperature drops—and as it does, your senses return. You sit, holding yourself in a tight ball, hands pulling knees to chest. The key is not to sleep. You remember this from a famous Japanese adventurer you once saw on television.
Do not sleep. Also: Do not think of Yuko tumbling beneath. Do not think of pigeons.
What’s surprising is how strong your mind is, how well you forget, how childlike your wonder remains. You’ve maintained your optimism—an odd word given what’s befallen you, but that’s what it is, an openness to being bemused or astonished. You’ve tapped into some hidden spring of endurance. You’re open to little miracles now, so let one come.

The blue light appears from the depths, shining up through the inky water. In your ball on the roof, you find yourself surrounded, inexplicably bathed by luminescence. You squint but can’t identify the source. Might these be the spirits of the dead, meant to convey a message of hope or allegiance rather than surrender? That’s how you take it, at least. And if a picture could be made of this moment, then the world would see you—the man named Hiromitsu—seated in serene meditation, staring in awe at the blue light that comes from the abyss, then laughing out loud.

At sunrise, the scene resolves itself: the black water, the blue sky, a thin band of land on the far horizon. Soon you will see an explosion, in the vicinity of the nuclear power plant, a loud blast and then a rust-colored cloud rising ominously, in atomic layers.
Do not look back.
You notice a fishing rod floating alongside you, one you glimpsed the night before, and realize that you’re
traveling in a slow-moving whirlpool of sorts, the same relics recurring, new ones entering the gyre and orbiting the roof as it gets sucked out farther and farther.

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!
):

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.