The Boy Who Glowed in the Dark (10 page)

“Why did you leave Tokyo?”

“Because I’m a working man,” Nakamura said. “The nuclear reactors in Fukushima prefecture are located in Okuma and Futaba. Okuma and Futaba are at the epicenter of the twenty-kilometer Zone of Exclusion. Radiation levels are severe. No humans are allowed in the Zone. They are ghost towns. Aizuwakamatsu contains the largest settlement of refugees from Okuma. That is why I will be there. And that is where Genesis II will be.”

CHAPTER 14

N
ADIA STARED OUT
the window of the Aizu loop bus. Water gathered steam down a river and plunged over rocks. It pooled in a basin and rolled slowly along flat terrain. Then it fell in shining twenty-foot-long sheets to another tier. The process repeated itself along four successive drops to the bottom of the waterfall. From there fury turned to foam that gradually merged into a gentle stream.

She’d left the hotel with Bobby and Johnny at 7:30 a.m. on Thursday morning. They’d taken a bullet train along the Tohoku-Shinkansen line from Tokyo to Koriyama Station and transferred to a regular one along the Banetsu-sai line. The trip to Aizuwakamatsu took a little more than three hours. The Aizu loop bus took an additional fifteen minutes. It dropped them off at Ryokan Higashino at 10:55 a.m.

An air of tranquility engulfed Nadia when she stepped off the bus. Nakamura was a genius. He’d chosen a perfect location for the meet. A hot springs resort. A place of reflection and contemplation that would defuse tension.

A
ryokan
was a traditional Japanese inn, Nadia learned. This one looked tired and run down. Some of the wood shingles needed repair. A woman in a blue kimono with a red sash across her midsection greeted the three of them in an entrance area. Johnny said a few words in Japanese that ended with “Nakamura-san.” The woman bowed and said something to Johnny, who returned the bow and smiled.

They took their shoes off and followed the woman down a maze of corridors to a steel door. The woman opened the door, bowed, and stepped aside. Nadia followed Johnny and Bobby into another corridor with rooms on each side and another door at the end. A second woman in a kimono placed three small canvas bags on the floor.

She slammed the door shut behind them. Darkness enveloped them.

Nadia rushed forward and tried to open it. The doorknob didn’t budge. She tried with both hands. Nothing.

“Locked,” she said.

Johnny tried to open it but couldn’t. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“Our shoes,” Bobby said. He pulled his hiking boots from one of the canvas bags. The other two bags contained Nadia’s and Johnny’s shoes.

An engine rumbled nearby. Tires rolled toward the door at the end of the corridor. Brakes screeched.

Metal slid against metal. It was the sound of a sliding door opening. Another metallic sound came from the door. A key slipping into a hole. A deadbolt snapped open. A second key slid into place.

The door swung open into the interior of a truck. It was hugging the back of the building.

A slender Japanese man stood inside the truck. Stacks of linen were piled high behind him. Three large gray rucksacks rested beside the linen. The interior smelled of fresh produce. Leaves spilled from the cracks of a crate.

“I am Nakamura,” he said, bowing in front of them.

Nadia recognized the name Nakamura, but the man looked far older than the one Johnny had described.

“Please get in truck,” he said. “We must go quickly.”

Johnny said, “Who are you exactly?”

“Nakamura Hiroshi.”

“You’re not the Hiroshi Nakamura I know,” Johnny said. “But you do look like him . . .”

“I am his father, the owner of this hotel, and we are late. To truck, please. My son is waiting for you. Every minute is most important.”

They climbed into the truck and sat down on a bench nailed to the floor along the driver’s side of the van’s interior. Nakamura climbed through the cabin into the driver’s seat and took off. He never opened the door. He never stepped outside.

He shifted into gear and drove onto an access road behind the inn.

“Where are we going?” Nadia said.

“To meet my son.”

“Why couldn’t he meet us himself?” Johnny said.

“It was not convenient.”

“Why not?” Nadia said.

Nakamura thought about this for a moment. “You will understand when you see him.”

He followed the same path the bus had taken in reverse, and then merged onto a thoroughfare headed east.

“How long have you owned the inn?” Nadia said.

“I bought the inn and moved to Higashiyama Onsen last year. Before that I lived with my wife in Minamisoma. You know Minamisoma?”

“No,” Johnny said. “What prefecture?”

“Fukushima prefecture. You remember the three-eleven earthquake and tsunami?”

“Three-eleven?” Nadia said.

“The Great East Japan Earthquake,” Nakamura said. “We call it the three-eleven earthquake. It happened on three—eleven—eleven. March 11, 2011.”

“We remember,” Johnny said.

“Who can forget the pictures,” Nadia said.

“Those pictures do not tell the entire story. To understand the three-eleven earthquake, you must first understand the Ring of Fire.”

“Ring of Fire?” Nadia said.

“Yes. Japan has been the battlefield for a world war for centuries and it has been slowly losing the battle. The three-eleven earthquake. It was inevitable.”

“What world war?” Johnny said.

“The one being fought beneath the sea.”

Johnny and Nadia exchanged concerned glances. Perhaps the elder Nakamura was not entirely in control of his mental faculties.

“What war beneath the sea?” Nadia said.

“The war between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. The surface of Earth is made of crust. The crust is made of plates. They are constantly destroyed and created by underwater volcanoes caused by heat from radioactive decay of Earth. The underwater volcanoes around the Atlantic Ocean do battle with the Pacific Ocean. One ocean get larger, other ocean get smaller. The Atlantic Ocean is making plates of crust faster than Pacific Ocean. Atlantic Ocean is winning. Pacific Ocean is gradually shrinking. In three hundred million years, there will be no more Pacific Ocean. It will be a mountain.

“Worst of volcanoes run down the center of Japan—like a human being’s spine, yes? It cause earthquakes and tsunamis more and more dangerous over time. That is why geologists call Japan the Ring of Fire. The three-eleven earthquake. It was inevitable. Because of the Ring of Fire.”

Johnny said, “What did you do for a living before you bought the inn, Nakamura-san?”

“I was a physics professor,” he said. “But geology. It makes me very fascinated. On the day of the great earthquake, one of the plates under Japan snapped upward. It caused the Japanese island of Honshu to move eight feet closer to America, and four hundred kilometers of the coastline of Japan to drop two feet. This caused a magnitude nine earthquake. It lasted for six minutes and released six hundred million times more energy than the bomb that fell on Hiroshima. Two days later volcanoes exploded on Japanese island of Kyushu and in Antarctica. And planet Earth started rotating almost one second faster.”

“Where were you when the earthquake hit?” Johnny said.

“I was in Tokyo lecturing at a university. Japan has an advanced warning system for earthquake. That system gave us one minute warning. At first everyone thought it was just another earthquake. The students carry cell phones. They were communicating with each other on the social media. On Twitter. Before the earthquake, I did not know what Twitter was. Now everyone in Japan knows Twitter. The twitters started getting more frantic. A student shared a picture of his parents’ house collapsing. Another showed a woman hugging the ground for support. Then it hit us. Computers started to slide off desks. Skyscrapers started swaying like rocking chairs. The next six minutes felt like six hours. The only way we could tell when the earthquake stopped was when the ceiling fan stopped swaying.”

“How did everyone get home?” Bobby said.

“People walked. Elevators, trains, buses, and cars. They all stopped. Tens of thousands of people walked home. There was no traffic. They walked in streets. They walked calmly. There was no running. There was no panic. From the first moment there was Japanese solidarity. An unspoken understanding that we would get through this together. Only when we got home did we realize exactly what was happening to our country. Roads cracked and disappeared under the Earth. Cars and houses were thrown like toys.”

“How long until the tsunami started?” Johnny said.

“Within an hour, a tsunami washed away Sendai Airport along the eastern coastline. Cars and planes were swept away. A camera from a helicopter caught a picture of a driver trying to steer his vehicle away from the wave. He was swallowed whole. The waves were black. Black like night. Entire towns were washed away. I was in my hotel room in Tokyo, just sitting and trembling. Finally I got the message from wife that she had arrived at her cousin’s house in the mountains.”

“Ah,” Nadia said. “Your wife wasn’t travelling with you.”

Nakamura appeared pensive in the rearview mirror. “‘I am safe,’ she said. ‘I have made it to higher ground.’ I can remember the relief. I can remember sending my son a note that his mother was safe.”

Nadia was about to say thank goodness, but stopped herself. Nakamura’s words spoke of a happy ending, but there his tone was too somber.

“It turned out I spoke too quickly,” Nakamura said. “High ground was not high enough. No one had ever imagined a tsunami of this force. No one ever imagined waves thirty-nine meters high.”

Nadia had used the metric system so much during her two trips to Eastern Europe she could do the numbers in her head. “A hundred thirty feet,” she said.

“And so the
salary men
in Tokyo who thought their wives would be safe in the mountains discovered that they were the safer ones,” Nakamura said. “The skyscrapers were built to survive an earthquake, but the mountain was not tall enough to withstand the tsunami.”

“We’re very sorry for your loss,” Nadia said.

Nakamura merged into the right lane to exit.

“Life is suffering,” he said.

“
Ganbaro
, Nakamura-san,” Johnny said, “
So desne
?”

Nakamura’s eyes lit up with appreciation. “Yes,” he said, with a quick bow to the rearview mirror. “
Ganbarimashou
.”

Johnny glanced alternately at Nadia and Bobby. “It’s a special phrase in the Japanese language,” he said. “It means stay strong, stand tall. Keep fighting.”

“Kyoto operates on a different electric grid than Tokyo,” Nakamura said. “The people in Kyoto were much less affected than in other parts of Japan. Still, they conserved electricity to donate to relief efforts. There was wind, snow, and rain in Kyoto after the earthquake, but there were no cherry blossoms that year. People smiled less. But they woke up from complacency. Adversity reminded us how to be strong as a nation. The aftershocks only strengthened our resolve.”

“Aftershocks?” Bobby said.

“More earthquakes,” Nakamura said. “Two measuring 7.7 and 7.9 within a month. Eighteen hundred more measuring 4.0 or higher within a year.”

“Almost two thousand earthquakes?” Bobby said.

“Yes,” Nakamura said. They drove quietly for half an hour until Nakamura spoke again.

“There are three gray satchels beside linen,” he said. “You will find personal protective equipment inside. Please put them on.”

They opened the bags. Each one contained white overalls, shoes, rubber gloves, plastic goggles, and a respirator.

A bolt of anxiety wracked Nadia. “Hazmat suits?”

“Yes. Radiation suits.”

“Why do we need radiation suits?” Johnny said.

“My son can explain. We will be meeting him soon. Please to prepare. You do not need to put breathing equipment on yet. My son will show you how.”

They put their suits on.

Ten minutes later Nakamura turned into an empty gas stand, drove past the pumps, and accelerated around to the back. A small parking lot backed up to a wooded lot. Two jalopies sat rusting in the lot beside a garbage Dumpster. A crisp white van sat idling beside the old cars. Japanese lettering covered the side of the van. Beneath it was the English translation. Global Medical Corps.

A younger man resembling Nakamura sat behind the driver’s seat.

“That’s him,” Johnny said.

The younger Nakamura opened the door and emerged before his father could back into the space beside his van. The elder Nakamura directed them toward the rear door, which would keep them hidden from the front of the gas stand. The younger Nakamura opened the rear door and introduced himself to Nadia and Bobby.

“Into the back of my van,” he said. “Quickly, please.”

“Where are you taking us?” Nadia said. She held her purse in one hand, a respirator in the other. She knew the answer to the question. Given the equipment they’d been asked to wear, there was little doubt about where they were going. Still, the question had to be asked.

“To meet with Genesis II,” Nakamura said.