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  To Erika, for the daily novel

  If something exists somewhere, it will exist everywhere.

  —CZESŁAW MIŁOSZ

  Love came … after the kill.

  —ANNE SEXTON

  I wonder if there is

  any operation

  that removes memories.

  —SHINOE SHŌDA

  … and if my body is still the soft part of the mountain

  I’ll know

  I am not yet the mountain.

  —JOSÉ WATANABE

  1

  MEMORY PLATES

  THE AFTERNOON APPEARS CALM, and yet time is waiting to pounce. Mr. Watanabe rummages in his pockets as though missing items might respond to insistence. Due to what is becoming a habitual carelessness, he has left his transit pass and glasses at home: he can clearly visualize them next to each other on the table, mocking him. He walks irritably toward the machines. While he is carrying out the transaction, he observes a group of young tourists reacting with bewilderment at the tangle of stations. They are making calculations. The numbers emerge from their mouths, rise, and disperse. Clearing his throat, he glances back at the screen. Vaguely hostile, the youngsters look at him. Mr. Watanabe listens to them deliberating in their own language, a melodic, emphatic one that he knows well. He considers the possibility of helping them, as he has so many visitors overwhelmed by the Tokyo subway. But it’s almost a quarter to three, he has a sore back and wants to go home. And, to be honest, he doesn’t sympathize with these young people. He wonders if he’s simply become unaccustomed to the shouting and the gesticulations he once found so liberating. Half listening to their foreign syntax, he pays for his ticket then walks away. He notices the Friday smell, a cocktail of weariness and anticipation. As the escalator descends, he contemplates those platforms that will gradually be filling up. He’s glad he didn’t take a taxi. At this time of day there is still room in the trains. He’s aware that soon the last passengers to arrive will be pushing against the backs of those who arrived ahead of them, and that the attentive subway officials will step forward to cram them in. Until the doors interrupt the flow, like someone clipping the sea. To push one another, Watanabe reflects, is an unusually sincere way of communicating. At that very instant, the escalator steps start to vibrate. The vibration intensifies to a tremor, and the tremor gives way to unmistakable juddering. Mr. Watanabe is engulfed by a feeling that none of what is going on is actually happening to him. His vision blurs. Then he feels the floor cease to be a floor.

  The young tourists study the subway map, its multicolored pipework. They are confused by the overlapping trains, the crossword of public and private lines. They try to calculate how many yen each of them will need. At the next machine, an old man clears his throat. The youngest boy among the tourists suggests that the old man could help them instead of staring so much at the girls. Another adds that if he goes on staring like that he could at least pay for their tickets. One of the girls retorts that this boy seems even dumber than usual today. Which, she points out, raising a finger, is saying something. The tourists insert a cascade of coins, while the old Japanese man disappears. Another girl reveals her preference for the coins with a hole in the middle. The youngest boy compares it to the piercing he himself carries on a certain part of his anatomy. Her friend’s hand slaps the back of his head: his hair becomes an asterisk. Their shouts and laughter startle people around them. The tourists become aware of a collective murmur, a strange precision prevailing among the crowd. They try, without much success, to control themselves as they run toward the escalators. They’re astonished that no one bumps into one another, at the way everybody respects the regulations. The more experienced of the group opines that in his country this could be achieved only by threats. What threatens the Japanese? When they feel the first vibrations, the youngsters blame the flexibility of the architecture. Not at all like the stations in their own country. The tremors grow more pronounced. With a mixture of panic and surprise, the tourists can’t decide whether the other passengers are silent because they’re so calm, or because they’re counting how long the tremors last. One of the young women remembers what happened a year ago in her own city, when she counted up to a hundred. And as she feels the ground shake, she begins to experience an increasing sense of déjà vu, as if each jolt were taking place a little deeper inside her head, infusing memories.

  Shoes alternate at different levels, improvising musical scores. Feet are Friday’s metronome. As the escalators transport them, the passengers contemplate the platforms that will soon be filling up. Some vaguely notice Mr. Watanabe. One of them studies his clothes, which seem bizarre or somehow out of place. The inertia of the descent takes over, the hum is a mantra. All of a sudden, the hum changes frequency. The looks pull away from their vanishing points. The escalators respond like leaden streamers. Farther below, the temporal dimension splits into two: the trains don’t move, and the passengers start to run. Even the staff appear anxious. They know that anything up to twenty seconds is a tremor, and more than twenty is something serious. Trying to calm himself, one of the guards calls for calm. A language teacher thinks she is witnessing a terrifying tautology: an earthquake is like a train passing close to your feet, yet her train had already arrived. Behind her, the same man who was struck by Watanabe’s clothes is overcome by a sense of incredulous fragility. There’s nothing to hold on to. He reneges on all his certainties. Directly above his head, on the other side of the vaulted roof, a young cyclist tilts over and falls to the asphalt, still pedaling.

  The nerves of the pipes run along the roof. The leaks rehearse their future appearance, form layers of time on the architecture. Weight is distributed evenly on the escalator: some passengers go up, others come down. The forces are aligned. Energies cooperate. When the escalator starts to vibrate, and the vibration intensifies to a tremor, and the tremor gives way to unmistakable juddering, each shape fragments into a jumble of lines. Every object is in hiatus. Doubt prowls the platforms. The underground expresses itself in the underground. Like dice changing their numbers, the walls calculate the throw. A black spot amid innumerable spots, Mr. Watanabe raises one of his shoes.

  The objects on the ground play their own game. They move one square and wait their turn. The air currents create eddies, microscopic disturbances. A scrap of paper, an unsuccessful origami, is dragged along. That ice cream melting on the platform used to be round. A lighter offers itself to passing bits of fluff. Next to the machines, two earbuds hanker after their ears. They fell out of Mr. Watanabe’s pockets as he went over irritably to purchase his ticket. When the floor ceases to be a floor, the earbuds snake among the footsteps: a stampede in stereo. The lighter bounces, summons its flame. The blob of ice cream lengthens its trail. The scrap of paper relaxes, unfurling a text that no one reads.

  The subway’s even light pours over things. Each neon bulb emits its dose of anesthesia. The entire space floats in an electric liquid. Shadows drift amid whistles that guide them like buoys. All at once, Watanabe’s vision blurs. Reality becomes an intermittence, the vibrating blink of an eye splintered into myriad eyes. Then the noise remains. Only the noise. A broken music, captured possibly by the earbuds. Every spoon tapping in unison against its cup. A nutcracker the size of the country. The subterranean protest. And, in the background,
the ancestral sound of strings twanging, like a boat caught in a storm.

  An earthquake fractures the present, shatters perspective, shifts memory plates.

  AS SOON AS WATANABE STICKS HIS HEAD OUT, a torrent of feet engulfs him. He takes a deep breath before emerging. He still has the feeling that the world is swaying slightly, that every object emits the memory of its instability.

  Fortunately, everything outside appears more or less in its place. He hadn’t been at all sure of this. The force of the jolts made him fear the worst.

  It’s cold for March: the hunched shoulders act as a thermometer. On some corners the traffic is at a standstill; at others it is overflowing. Sirens wail in all directions. Lines are snaking around the few vehicles still running. Anyone would think that, in a matter of minutes, the population had multiplied.

  The entire city has reverted to an earlier state, before the new road system existed. Its arteries are narrowing. Its circulation has collapsed. After many years—more than he dare count—Mr. Watanabe feels once more that, rather than protecting him, the crowd is crushing him.

  He tries to calm down and assess the situation. Despite his fatigue, he decides to make his own way home. His neighborhood isn’t all that far away. If he keeps up a brisk pace, he should reach Shinjuku before sunset.

  People are occupying the space in a new, or rather a very old, way: with the visceral sense of those who can rely only on their bodies. Pedestrians walk down the middle of the avenues, a tiny displacement that to Watanabe seems radical.

  These encounters and passing collaborations have an air of shipwreck and rescue. A sudden solidarity disputes distances.

  Under normal circumstances, he reflects, isolation offsets overpopulation. And yet that afternoon, several strangers ask how he is, he asks others, and they in turn ask others. Fear is a twisted form of love.

  There is still no phone coverage, or at least he can’t make any calls on his device. The emergency has prompted Wi-Fi providers to clear their networks. He sees many people walking and checking their phones: he can read the news on their faces. Envious of their ability to navigate the virtual world at the same time as the public thoroughfares, Mr. Watanabe tries instead to listen to the radio. He pats his pockets. And discovers he has lost his earbuds.

  * * *

  As if the movement of the earth’s plates had disrupted the clocks, the lights in Tokyo are dimming early. The contrast is so startling, he thinks, that each place ought to have one name in daylight and another in darkness. Many stores have closed. People are stocking up on food and batteries. The bigger the city, the greater its dread of the dark.

  Mr. Watanabe remembers when, in his youth, they abolished height restrictions on buildings. To own the air became more important than to own the ground. People protested, demanding their right to the sun. And so the Sunlight Act was passed, thanks to which buildings started to be erected at an angle.

  The city’s obsession, its nervous system, is prevention. Containment. Isolation. Ditches. Firebreaks. Anti-seismic constructions. An entire urban plan based on future disasters. The result is a dense weight of trust on a surface of fear. With this in mind, Watanabe stops off at a supermarket. He enters with a very specific objective.

  When he locates the toilet paper shelf, he discovers there isn’t any. He notices that the people gathering the last rolls are more or less his age. On his way out, he sees that stocks of a second product have been exhausted. Diapers. Senescence and infancy are united by the bathroom.

  The advertisements on the facades of buildings have vanished. Today, for the first time since his return, the streets are naked.

  It no longer resembles Tokyo. As he raises his eyes, only the sky is shining.

  Observing people’s necks craned in surprise, Mr. Watanabe realizes how seldom he looks upward. The city center, he reasons, is designed to protect us from the heavens. And yet, the instinct to orient oneself by means of them has resurfaced: a hole has appeared through which they can be seen. The glow diminishes drop by drop, an ocean seeping out through a grating.

  Suddenly, the murmurs change in tone. The rumor spreads through the crowd like a current along a cable. Watanabe tries to speed up. Bad news is something he prefers to assimilate on his own.

  Behind him, growing ever louder, ever closer, he hears the word tsunami.

  BEFORE FIVE IN THE AFTERNOON, Watanabe arrives at the entrance to a skyscraper in Shinjuku. On the day of its inauguration, it was vaunted as the tallest in Tokyo. From a distance, it looked like a pencil standing out among a bunch of erasers. Another one soon superseded it. We’re addicted to records, he thinks. Or we’re simply addicts.

  As he enters the building, his sense of relief evaporates. What if, due to some electrical fault, he is forced to take the stairs? Would his lungs and knees withstand it? What would it be like to sleep in the foyer, to camp out beneath his own home?

  Once he sees that the elevators are working, Mr. Watanabe allows himself a lengthy sigh. But, before he presses the button, fresh doubts assail him. What if there’s a power outage while he’s going up? On days such as this, is anyone from the emergency services available? How does the alarm work? Why has he never bothered to learn about these things?

  The elevator deposits him peacefully on the twenty-eighth floor. He jumps out. The carpeted corridor is redolent of a muted garden.

  Watanabe inserts the key, opens the door to the apartment, walks through the tiny hallway, inserts the key, opens the door, and enters his apartment. This isn’t a repetition. Or rather it is, of the apartment itself: when he bought it, among the other alterations, he had a thick additional wall built. Now he lives in a house within a house. He is bunkered within himself. If something terrible happened, part of the skyscraper could get damaged, or the twenty-eighth floor, even the outer wall. But perhaps not the inner dwelling. His home. The survivor’s.

  Clashing with the rest of the decor, an old black-and-white-striped rug covers the floor like a pedestrian crossing. To compensate for his reclusiveness, Mr. Watanabe likes to imagine he is crossing the street when he enters his abode.

  He takes off his shoes before going into the living room, quite spacious by Tokyo standards. Although at this point in his life he can afford it, he hasn’t forgotten that when he lived with his aunt and uncle, he couldn’t cross his bedroom with his backpack on. Narrow spaces have never bothered him. His claustrophobia is vertical. That’s why what he most appreciates is the ceiling, approximately three and a half meters high, one surpassing the norm. Watanabe feels that this meter hovering above his head is the space where his ideas and memories float.

  From the very moment he steps into the living room, he senses that something isn’t right. As an obsessive, he knows that each space possesses a secret equilibrium, which any imbalance can disturb. Some of the furniture has moved slightly, a confirmation that this earthquake was more powerful than usual. Watanabe advances like a detective investigating the crime committed in his own room.

  He instantly notices the disarray among his collection of banjos. Some have slipped off their stands and are lying on the floor. A few strings have come away from their bridges. The necks are pointing every which way, hinting at multiple culprits. The sound boxes sing infinitesimally of their fall.

  Mr. Watanabe contemplates this catalog of toppled instruments. He stoops to examine them, then puts them back in place. None appears to have suffered irreparable damage. But then, he corrects himself, to what extent is damage reparable? Wouldn’t it be worth doing something different? Why hide the imperfections in his banjos, why not incorporate them into their restoration? All broken objects, he reflects, have something in common. A crack joins them to their past.

  One by one, he caresses the instruments that have survived the toppling. He is convinced that things which have been on the verge of breaking for whatever reason—slipping, falling, smashing, colliding with one another—enter a second life. An amphibious state that makes them meaningful, impossible to t
ouch in the same way as before.

  This explains perhaps his growing admiration for the ancient art of kintsugi. When a piece of pottery breaks, the kintsugi craftspeople place powdered gold into each crack to emphasize the spot where the break occurred. Exposed rather than concealed, these fractures and their repair occupy a central place in the history of the object. By accentuating this memory, it is ennobled. Something that has survived damage can be considered more valuable, more beautiful.

  Inspecting his library, Watanabe discovers that a few volumes on the uppermost shelves have been dislodged. Is there a pattern to these literary movements? Might they make up a kind of seismic anthology? Might certain authors be more predisposed to being displaced? He pauses to cross-check whether these books correspond in some way to his preferences. The result surprises him.

  At the far end of the room, a small detail causes him to shudder. He sees that the doors of the butsudan are ajar. And a couple of objects that evoke his parents and sisters have toppled over on the tiny shrine. He dares not stand them upright immediately, as if to do so would be to contradict their will.

  Mr. Watanabe heads for the kitchen. He pours out a glass of wine to calm himself, or at least enrich his lack of calm. When he opens the cupboard, he sees that the cleaning products and cans of food have rolled over and are intermingled. He suspects there’s a hidden meaning to this disarray but can’t think what it is.

  He returns to the living room, the glass reddening his hand. He drains it quickly and slumps onto the sofa. He rubs his ankles with difficulty. Then he switches on the television and goes online to immerse himself in the news.

  Just at that moment, on the table, he spots his transit pass, intact, hateful: the glimmer of an earlier city where nothing had happened. His missing glasses have slid to the edge. The sun has started to do likewise.