Tremors
Columbus, Ohio
I remember when the quake struck, or rather, the moment after, when the woman I was in love with called. It was Friday morning, just before 1:00 a.m., and I was in my cramped apartment at my desk, which was lit by the pale-blue glow of my laptop and covered in stacks of my students essays. The college writing class Id been teaching during the winter term was over, and the only thing between me and spring break was nineteen final papers. In Japan, it would be past noon, and Junko would be working at International Travel, an agency owned by her aunt in Mutsu, a small city in Aomori Prefecture. Every day, we talked during her lunch break, but her call was two hours late.
Hey, I said, picking up my cell phone. She usually called on Skype, so I asked, You want me to login? I can turn on my video.
There was an earthquake. A big one, she said. It mustve shook for two minutes.
Are you okay?
Theres no damage. For a second I thought the ceiling was going to cave in.
This didnt seem unusual; actually, in a way, I was jealous. Id been an English teacher in her hometown for two years, and one day while at work at Odaira Middle School a rumbling had risen from the ground, and the walls of the teachers office began to tremble as the whine of tsunami sirens echoed out of the port. I sat frozen at my desk, waiting for the order to evacuate, though the Japanese teachers turned back to their computers the moment the shaking stopped. It had been a small quake, and the school soon resumed its regular rhythm. By the time I left Japan, Id begun to enjoy these tremors, especially when they came at night: the sense of my consciousness floating up through the murky waters of sleep, breaching the surface of the black ocean for an instant, and then, after glimpsing the shadows on the ceiling, sinking back down to the depths where my dreams were waiting. After I moved back to the States for graduate school, earthquakes were just part of what I missed about Mutsu.
Mom called and said the tsunami sirens are sounding, Junkos voice was dull with shock, but she didnt seem afraid. Shes going to the elementary school with Dad, just to be safe.
Im sure itll be fine, I said.
Yeah, right. She exhaled. I pictured her in a wheeled office chair, her cell phone pressed to her ear.
What are you going to do with the power out?
Maybe Ill get lucky and well close early.
I laughed and, to help her forget about the quake, started to complain about my grading: how many of my kids had fallen back on the writing habits theyd entered my class with, how so few of them had taken to heart my advice that the English language is not a blunt instrument.
I knew Junko was worried about her father getting to the evacuation area. Half a year earlier theyd learned he had cancer, but by the time the doctors discovered the malignant cells, those cells had already spread from his lungs to his bones. He was stage four, on chemo, and doing his best to fight it. A few days before, shed told me he was having trouble eating and had lost a lot of strength.
Junko had learned of her dads condition after Id left, at a time when, with the Pacific Ocean between us, our relationship was unsteady.
Wed first met at a wine-tasting event, and I was immediately taken by her smile and cynical sense of humor. Id come to Mutsu after finishing college, my head full of memories of my former homestay familys warmth and images of the city on the outskirts of Tokyo where Id studied abroad. Id figured I could teach for a year and plan my next step in life. But instead of one of the countrys metropolises, I was assigned to a small city on the northern tip of the main island. I spent most of my first year adapting to the cold and sense of isolation. By my second year, Id begun to feel at home in the city. When Junko told me she worked for a travel agency, I recognized the company.
A few days after the wine tasting, I went to International Travel to book a Shinkansen ticket to Tokyo; I couldve made the bullet train reservation online, but I was curious about her. After shed typed the details of my trip into her computer and printed out my tickets, I leaned across the counter and, under my breath, asked if shed be free for dinner someday. On our first date, we went to the citys only French restaurant and then to a bar, where we drank until we felt brave enough to kiss.
Over the course of more evenings spent in more bars and restaurants, we stumbled into a relationship. Things between us felt right and soon it was natural for her to drop by my apartment on the weekends or invite me to grab a drink with her work friends. The only hitch was that Id enrolled in a graduate writing program back in the States. I planned to keep teaching in Mutsu until the spring, fly back to the US over the summer, and then find an apartment in central Ohio before courses started in the fall. Id told Junko I was planning on going back when we met, but, back then, this fact had been but a distant cloud on the horizon. By the time I was boarding the train to the airport, the skies had darkened, and fate was about to start pouring down on us.
Id failed at long-distance dating enough times to know better than to try again, so we kept things ambiguous: no promises as to what would happen once we were on different continents. But we stayed in touch, and, late that fallnot long after her family got the results of her dads CT scanshe came to Columbus and confided that her father was in a bad way. What I felt for her wasnt pity, but respect for the honesty with which she faced the situation. In spite of everything, we were still together and had been making things work for nine months on March 11, 2011.
We only stayed on the phone for a few minutes after the earthquake. With the power out, Junko couldnt charge her cell phone, and she needed to save her battery for an emergency, so we said goodbye. I didnt know it then, but it would be the last Id hear from her for a long time.
