How High We Go in the Dark(45)
“I thought we were going to buy flowers or something,” Aki says without turning. We’re at the three-story torii gate, signaling that we’re close. Beyond the gate, a rainbow-colored holographic Buddha the size of a bus floats in the middle of a koi pond.
“There’s always a markup at those Yamamoto shops,” I explain. “We’ll get something from one of the private vendors on the street. Much cheaper.”
Aki nods and heads for the doorway, already crowded with people, as the train slows to a stop. Welcome to the Japan Post Ltd. Funerary Remembrance Complex. This is the last stop. Please take all of your belongings.
Outside, orderly lines wrap around the towers like slow-moving eels as people are checked in at the hospitality desks and given a ticket to enter the mortuary suite at their allotted time. Aki and Hollywood hold our place in line while I buy flowers and incense from a janitor selling wares from his cleaning cart. After more than an hour of waiting, we pay our two thousand yen for an hour of suite time and enter our code for the thirty-seventh floor. At first, the room is completely white. Soon, images of the temples outside are projected onto the walls, punctuated occasionally by banner ads offering us an upgrade in services. Aki and I wait on a wooden bench, the only piece of furniture in the room apart from the altar. A robotic arm retrieves Ayano, delivers her to the altar through a tiny elevator. The niche is a simple model—a rosewood box with cherry blossoms carved into it, two clay vases for flowers, a large photo of Ayano above the urn, an incense bowl Aki made in grade school. We change out the flowers and take turns telling her about our lives: school, the likely end of my repair business, the job applications I’m planning to send out. “I wish you were here,” I say. “But we’re doing our best. I’ll keep Aki safe. We’ll make you proud.” Aki has brought the shamisen and begins to play as Hollywood shuffles on the grass—“Rainy Days and Mondays” by the Carpenters. I’m gazing at the photo of Ayano (taken during our honeymoon), listening to her sing. And then a few seconds of static, the male British voice saying good morning, followed by a techno club beat. Hollywood stumbles in circles. A banner ad on the wall tells us to cherish Ayano’s memory by enjoying life via a buffet at the food court in tower 2.
“Keep playing,” I tell Aki. I light a stick of incense. I squeeze his shoulders and wipe a tear from his cheek. I pick Hollywood up off the floor and his legs tread the air. Hollywood tells us it’ll be cloudy with a chance of rain. He tells us that plague deaths are at an all-time low. I imagine part of my wife’s spirit floating inside this tiny plastic body, wanting to connect us, waiting patiently for its turn.
Songs of Your Decay
Most medical doctors in the plague wards are working toward the goal of keeping their patients alive, intact. It’s my job to study how we fall apart. At the forensic body farm where I work, I’m researching the multitude of ways the Arctic plague transforms the human body, planting liver tissue in brains, heart tissue in intestines. I compare the Siberian strain to the Kindergarten strain to the latest mutations that have pulled the stricken into comas, made their skin glow with stars. Most of my cadavers come to us nameless, donated for research by their families staying at elegy hotels. Laird is a special case, though. He volunteered on his own and he’s still alive. I compare the virus in his cells from before and after the most recent drug trial. The part of me that’s spent hours listening to music with him late into the night wants the drugs to work, but my scientist heart knows studying the contagion both in life and during decomposition will help us gain a better understanding of how the virus functions in the body’s ecosystem (and how it managed to survive in a Siberian cave for thousands of years). Beneath my microscope, I see Laird is losing, cell by cell.
My phone vibrates in the metal tray next to me, lying there alongside the many vials of skin and human hair.
How about pizza for dinner? A text from my husband.
Didn’t we just eat pizza the other night? I respond after removing my gloves and sanitizing my hands.
We can order something else.
I imagine Tatsu searching through local delivery options that aren’t Chinese or pizza. Don’t bother, I message. I’ll be late.
This probably isn’t a surprise to him. I’ve been late every night this week. Sure, there’s my workload—the pressure from the state and feds to find answers, anything that can help the infected—but I’ve also been revisiting my old self, the punk rocker who thought she could save the world with music and a microscope. Tatsu and I have been married for seven years now. But only our first was pandemic free. I can barely remember those early days, how he once bought us tickets for a punk festival even though I only ever heard him listening to Mariah Carey as he studied for his EMT exams. All my friends thought he was a complete square. I told them that’s what I loved about him. He wasn’t like my other boyfriends, those assholes with their leather jackets and their rock star dreams who ghosted you in their quest to be an artist. But when the plague hit American shores in 2031, something slowly changed between us as the virus evolved—maybe it was the lack of space, being trapped together like that all the time, apart from the hours we spent at work, everyone afraid, with no place to go.
“Are you gonna sit around and feel sorry for yourself all day?” I recall saying to him, about a year after the first wave. Tatsu was in his recliner, still in his uniform, a stethoscope dangling around his neck. A two-way radio sat beside him next to a glass of whiskey. “Do you know how many bodies I examined today?”