Background Radiation

With her mask down, she smells the vanilla before she sees the tree. It looks fake, like one of those plastic things you see in a Japanese restaurant imitating nature, all twisting branch and purple flower. There are no leaves on the Kiri, its papery clusters of trumpet flowers look like they are bursting from a dead thing. It is the tree that shoots up first on abandoned land. She checks the dosimeter around her neck. She should leave soon. At her feet are shoots of dokudami, the poison-blocker, coming up like spades on a playing card. Tight fern spirals are just emerging from the earth. She kneels before them.

She photographs the plants, tying a pink ribbon to the trees, piercing the earth with a thin metal rod tipped by a pink flag, then cuts some samples with the field scissors. The fresh dokudami has a fishy, medicinal smell, reminding her of the warm yellow tea her mother made her drink as a child, to detox and purify. She circles the Kiri and goes further into the forest. The dosimeter beeps, another uptick in radiation. She can accumulate 20,000 micro sieverts in a year and she’s already pushing the limit. She almost wasn’t accepted to this project after her years in the field. What your body accumulates lives inside of you forever.

The average chest x-ray is 100 µSv. A transatlantic flight 50 µSv. Even sleeping next to another person exposes you to the radiation emanating from them, from the 4,000 radioactive decays a second happening in every human body. She thinks of her mother, telling her not to stand in front of the microwave at womb-height. She’d told her that was a superstition. So were the herbs that got you pregnant, said her mother. The doctors had said it was a miracle, one that couldn’t happen again. They were right about that.

Through the trees she sees the blind windows of a building, glass glinting in only one square. She snaps off her gloves, deposits them in a waste bag and puts on her outer gloves. She turns back. The others will be up by now.
*

Her boss speaks Japanese to her on the first day, surprised when she responds with the syntax of a child. I’m sorry, your file says you were born not far from here, she says. I assumed. She explains that she grew up here but moved to the states when she was very young, when her parents split up. She made a life in San Francisco. Got married. Got divorced. She doesn’t say this last part out loud.
She’s there to study the plants and the trees. There are three others. The boss, a government scientist and radiation biologist, and two American men who set up traps for the animals to take samples. They had both spent an afternoon whisper shouting in the lab about mutated cells. The animals looked the same – monkeys, birds, wild boar. But inside they were changing.
The lab is a repurposed community center in an abandoned town on the edge of the forest. It’s been turned into a research space, cot beds set up in the offices, a shared kitchen. The walls are thin, you can hear everyone’s business. The lab space is in what would have been a meeting room. After morning field work, this is where they spend their afternoons, waiting until it’s a reasonable enough time to start drinking.

They explore the perimeter for days before preparing to enter the exclusion zone, the four of them climbing into a jeep.

The boss is at the wheel and on the way into the mountain, she has to hit the brakes for gangs of monkeys meandering over the asphalt, unconcerned by an approaching silver beast on four wheels. Wild boar gambol in the fields near them.

Just look at that, says Jay. Wildlife flourishes without mankind.

Jay sits in the back with her. He has that puppy-dog, just love me baby energy that used to draw her like sardines draw the neighborhood strays. Jay talks a lot. She knows more about him after a few weeks than some plant species and not because she’s asked a single question. He’s a New Orleans boy who loves coffee with chicory and he’s proud of his trail mix with peanuts, coconut and M&Ms and his special ingredients: salt and cinnamon. He worships the Saints, has their gold and black logo on his water bottle. He’s maybe ten years younger than her. He and his colleague, an older man from Boston, share jokes she finds insufferable. They grill meat in the little kitchen that makes her gag.

Saved you some, he says, offering a bag of trail mix.

I don’t like coconut, thanks, she says.

I remembered. I didn’t add any this time.

She notices the boss looking at her in the rearview mirror, eyes flicking back to the road. The salt squeaks in her teeth, crunch of peanut and the sweetness that passes for chocolate in an M&M.
They park and suit up outside the car.

The plastic won’t keep out the radiation, but she zips the suit up to her chin, pulls the toggles at the wrists and ankles, positions the mask. It will prevent the dust from settling into their clothes as they search any debris. Any radiation in the air will pass straight through plastic, through clothing, through skin. She puts the dosimeter around her neck.

Don’t forget this, says Jay, handing her a whistle.

They walk down the road, relatively free of radiation, before turning into the woods which are saturated in it. The trees stay still but the radiation moves through them for years. It rains down from the sky, is drunk up in the roots along with the potassium necessary for growth. It runs through their veins in lymph and resin. If a branch becomes infected, it’s dropped. If a cell mutates too much, it’s isolated. Trees are so much more stable than animals.

They stop for the men to check some tubes in the ground. Two have moles in them, their tiny soft bodies unmoving in the men’s hands. Jay brushes the dirt from one’s silver-gray fur while he takes a sample. The Bostonian is more brusque she notices, not rough but clinical, dropping it back to the mouth of its earthen home. Jay slides it off the tips of his gloved hands as if he doesn’t want to let it go.

They have been walking for a few minutes when the boss stops and holds up her arm. They silence abruptly, listening to the rustle in the leaves to their left. In the underbrush, a snout emerges, a chocolate and cream streaked head, tusks, barely visible but blunt and strong enough to gore a man. This one has the double tusks the Bostonian was talking about sprouting from the same root, a mutation not seen in other species in the area. They wait for the pack to emerge. No young. Boss blows two short whistles and they disappear into the forest. She signals at them to keep walking. Today they will lay more traps for the macaques and the racoon dogs that her father called shape-shifters.
*

When she couldn’t sleep, she used to call her father and he’d tell her stories. As a child she was anxious to be the only person awake while everyone else slept. She’d think of her father, awake in Fukushima, and feel less alone. In one of his stories, he had told her about a version of the world before this one. A world populated by ghosts. The animals were all mixed up: donkeys had human legs; elk walked upright; birds swam in the sea and fish had fur. The creator of this crazy world loved the creations. But all of these animals lived only one lifetime and they could not have children. They died one by one and then there was a great and terrible silence. The earth was populated only by plants for a long time before the creator was ready to try again. What did it make this time? she had asked.

The creator made us. It made you. We are new things here and the plants and the trees, they are ancient and they have an ancient wisdom.

She had never asked why he called it a world of ghosts but now she thought she knew. They were animals with no past and no future passing through a world of silent, watching green, reaching down into the earth, up to the sky. Perhaps they hadn’t even noticed the animals, they were gone so soon. Or perhaps they had loved them like the creator had. Perhaps they missed them and that’s when the bush clover grew all over the mountains, the plant of melancholy and impermanence.
*

They hear the macaques before they reach the cages. The troop is howling and whistling on the edge of the clearing. In one cage is an adult and in the other, a youngster. Jay and the Bostonian dart forward, she feels their excitement. They tranquilize the monkeys with a pole syringe and collect their samples. The rest of the troop is making such a racket they can barely talk. They keep their distance, shouting what she imagines are insults while others munch on leaves.
While they wait for the sedated macaques to wake up, she takes samples of what the macaques eat. The young sticky leaves of the mizunara oak. Sasa bamboo shoots, the Zenmai fiddleheads, some tree bark. She gathers soil samples, takes pictures, labels with pink flags.
You’re lucky, shouts Jay over the din. Your targets don’t move.

She packs up her last baggy and turns to him. They are moving, actually, she says. The perimeter… it’s changing. These plants are different and whatever’s in them, it seems to be spreading.
She watches a macaque snap off a fern fiddlehead and munch on it. The ferns are some of the highest accumulators of radiation and heavy metals. What the plants pull up from the earth the monkeys ingest into their system, irrevocably changing them. She thinks about how they have no choice, it’s eat or die. And what they eat might kill them. A sensation of excitement grips her, followed immediately by terror.

Something in me always wants to rip it out of their hands, he says. Save them.
The meat eater wants to save the animals?

I noticed you’re a vegetarian, he says, like he’ll forgive her for it. So, you eat your subjects too.
When the monkeys wake up, they open the cages and the adult and youngster run back to the troop. Their cries change and they amble into the forest.
*

Another afternoon she watches Jay giving a talk to students, a chicken wrap in one hand, the phone in another. He points out vials and stacks of paper. Jay who is always eating. Peanut butter out of the jar, beef jerky out of crackling bags, teriyaki flavor. Hot sauce he has brought with him to add one drop at a time, like manna from heaven, to pieces of chicken, to sandwiches, to eggs. He turns the camera on her. And here’s our very own plant specialist!

I’m busy, she snaps and he turns away, mouthing sorry. She stares at her screen but listens to what he tells them.

In this area the monkeys usually show signs of anemia, of smaller brains and reduced cranial size. Some have albinism. Some birds, white spots and deformed beaks. Here on Bush Clover Mountain we are investigating some anomalies. Boars with extra tusks, monkeys that are 20% larger. It doesn’t make sense.

When he hangs up the call, he turns to his computer with a loud sigh.

It’s what they’re eating, she says.

Pardon?

What they’re eating is what’s changing them.

But what they’re eating is poison.

There’s something else going on here. Something else on this mountain other than the radiation, that’s going into the plants and changing them.

So, what you’re saying is, your work is more important than mine?

She glances at him and sees he’s smiling. She shrugs.

Definitely more important.
*

Walking through the empty town at dusk, she dials her ex-husband’s number. It’s late where he is, she doesn’t expect him to pick up.

Hey! he says after the first ring. You actually called back.

I’ve been busy.

Must have tried you about ten times.

What’s up?

Look, I’m worried about you out there. I know we haven’t talked much, but, I worry.

I’m fine.

I just don’t know why you’ve isolated yourself out there in Japan.

It’s my work.

Do you expect to find something there of hers?

No, I just-

Some memento?

A memento? Our daughter wasn’t a tourist attraction I want to remember.

I can’t see her face sometimes. It feels like it was a dream I had. You, me, Kiko.

To me, it feels like the only thing that was real.

For a moment there is silence. She can’t hear him breathing. To her left is a shuttered supermarket
To her right a pharmacy, faded signs of smiling women holding bottles of some beauty cream.

I read an article, she says, about someone finding the jawbone of their child, wrapped in the scarf she was wearing.

That’s horrible.

I thought it would be a relief. To have that closure.

You need to move on.

What are you now, a life coach? Look, I have to go.

I just want to tell you that Susan and I, we’re getting married.

That’s wonderful.

I just wanted to tell you personally.

That’s great.

Are you ok?

I’m ok.
*

The backpacks, banana yellow, bubblegum pink, icy Elsa blue, panda black, are scattered on the ground next to the cubbies. Papers speckled with dust and pebbles, clipboards. On every desk sits a book. Drawings on the walls. On the way in, they passed a metal slide deep in a wall of swaying Pampas grass. A tree that once shaded a swing- set now bows down its arms to envelop it with drooping boughs, and the grass reaches up, a coordinated, slowly closing jaw of green. The building she’d seen through the trees turns out to be a school, windows broken on one side, intact on the other, great sheets of glass. She wants to climb through the empty eyes and smash the glass. She could use a chair.

You alright? Jay asks.

Sure, she says, walking on.

The night before he had told some garbled drunken story about canoeing through his neighbourhood after a hurricane and the animals he’d seen on the roofs of houses. When he’d laughed he’d put his hand on her leg, but only for a moment, in a way that was nonchalant enough for her to ignore it if she wanted to.

A stone sign broken in two pieces across the path. This is what did the damage. The earth heaving up, then washing itself clean. Nobody was killed in the nuclear reactor explosion, not directly. It was the tsunami that took people away.

She watches a macaque, its red face, its velvet fur, golden in the sun motes. It stares at her and she finds she is turning to it like a leaf turns to the sun. It begins to walk through the school and swivels its head to look at her like, you coming? She follows it. It takes her past the cubbies, each with a recorder in it. Past fallen colored paper stars on the ground, their ribbons that held them to the wall stiff with dust. They pass room after room. Finally, it stops at a broken window where a dokudami tendril reaches in. The macaque holds the stem to its mouth and pulls it through, removing the tufts at the end, munching and crunching. She watches it eat and it looks back at her now like, Why you following me crazy lady?
*

Why are the racoon dogs called shape shifters? She had asked her father.

Ah the tanuki, he said. They are mischievous beings with big appetites. They are chaotic masters of illusion. They can transform into other beings.

How? Well, they put a leaf on their head. That’s the first thing. And then they can appear to be people, objects, other animals, even landscapes. The secret of the tanuki is that they don’t change. But people looking at them see different things.

She thinks they might have come from the other time, the time before. Perhaps they disguised themselves as trees, she said.

She heard her father’s voice laughing on the phone. Maybe, he said. Maybe they didn’t die, they just changed their shape.

Maybe there are tanuki all around us! She said. Maybe you are a tanuki!
She lay there more awake than ever, wondering if she herself was a tanuki and didn’t know it.
*

When she opens the door to Jay’s room, he’s lying on the bed, a bulky green sweater on. He must wear contacts because now he has glasses and he’s reading a book. When he sees her in the doorway, he sets the book down and sits up. She doesn’t say anything, just closes the door. He watches her. She goes to him and kneels before him so that his legs are either side of her rib cage and their faces are close together. She rests her elbows on his knees and removes his glasses. He waits. She touches his face and feels him touch her shoulders, the back of her neck.

Like this? He asks, though he’s not doing anything yet.

Yes, she says.
*

He had images from the forest cams up on the screen. A frozen, blurred shot of a tanuki. She knows their stare though it is impossible to see in the photo. Unfocussed, like they are looking into another world.

I brought you something to taste, she says. Onigiri with umeboshi, rice balls with pickled plum.
Is this your favorite food?

A few days before he’d asked her what her favorite food was. Why? She asked. So I can make it for you, he said. Why do you want to make my favorite food? Food is the way to a woman’s heart, he said.

She’d told him about pancakes with red bean paste, ochazuke, white rice with green tea poured over it and pickled toppings. Things her mother made. But then she found herself telling him about things she’d come to love from growing up in San Francisco. Nachos with melting cheese, kimchee from the Korean place down the road. Bowls of clam chowder, extra crackers crumbled on top. She couldn’t stop telling him all the things she loved to eat and while she talked, he watched and watched and watched her.
*

All day Jay and the Bostonian have been on calls with their colleagues in the states. The data is in. Some of the young are born like you’d expect, weaker, deformed. Others show significant anomalies. They are stronger, more powerful. Jay looks at her for approval, like he was the one that made it happen.

She and the boss stand beside them, arms crossed, listening to them talk about mutated cells. Whatever is happening in this soil is changing the plants and changing the animals in ways we’ve never seen before, says the Bostonian. The young are so different, it could be a new species.

And the fertility of the mothers? Asks the boss.

The fertility of some is significantly weakened, like you’d expect, says Jay. But for others, it’s through the roof.

The boss says she’s going to make some calls and leaves the room. There’s a silence.
What do you think that’s about?

Our boss is government, she says. I’ve been wondering why they sent her. The plants on this mountain are doing something we don’t understand yet. Something beyond the radiation.
Perhaps they did chemical tests here that they’re not telling us about, Jay says.

Maybe. Or it’s the earth, adapting.
*

The Kiri tree’s vanilla scent still lingers in the air but it’s not as potent as it was before. The spring is changing. The fern fiddleheads are unfurling. She strips off her gloves slowly, touches the ferns with an ungloved hand and feels the firm and fibrous coil against her skin for the first time. The sap is sticky on her fingers when she plucks it. It’s firm and squeaky between her teeth. The taste is mineral and grassy, vegetal, earthy. She looks up at the branches of the Kiri tree, its flowers dying, replaced by green leaves. She swallows.

> RESPOND

EXIT <

WE DIDN’T START THE FIRE