God Does Not Play Dice

At what point is the inability to write not a block or lack of practice but a bonafide malignancy? I’d get a brain scan if I hadn't already had two, the second of which diagnosed me with vertigo, inconclusively, never concluded because the Japanese doctor in the only neurology department at the only hospital in town phoned me afterwards to ask where I live, streets and landmarks, and I opted to skip our follow-up appointment where I might have gotten confirmation that the memai I had was indeed “vertigo” and not “giddiness,” “bedazzlement,” or even your run-of-the-mill “dizziness,” all of which show up under the dictionary definition of memai. Before and around the issue of my living situation he also, on this phone call, dropped in details of his wife, notes of her general appearance and demeanor barren of any personal opinion, non-sequitur-like, in the way bad guys talk in riddles only they can trace the line of, and I wondered if anything, anything in the world, would ever be truly conclusive.

It was before and around that time that the ground shook for several minutes as I watched a tiny bicyclist pedal on tv at such a speed it rendered the bicycle he was on so small, clown-show small, asburdly, pitifully, hopelessly small against the average-sized municipal buildings he hurried by in the tiny town he was in. Setting the scene: me in my chair, inhabiting my full skin, overly caffeined and sitting ten feet away from a microwave-sized box tv in the mid afternoon, wall of beige- and black-clad lanyard-jingling relative strangers tunneling my peripheries, our city a small one but if you looked beyond and around the tv through the window behind, the earth dropped off and expanded into a bowl of humble homes and warm restaurants, planned and executed near-grids of streets, a gas station, giving the appearance of a highly functional wholeness, us on the overlook feeling untouchable, more likely puppeteer than puppet. On tv, the little bike and its marionette disappeared in the shadow of a wave so tall it didn’t fit in the tiny frame, which, for its tininess, we somehow don’t forget holds the totality of the world worth looking at.

My brain pulled up clips of big wave surfers, men swallowed who escape, conceiving of a reality in which the wave, which hadn’t broken yet, opened for him, as water does, yielding to, accommodating foreign objects without choice. The little bicyclist would soon come pedaling out of the wall just the same, unfazed, if the camera would just stay on him long enough—just high tide, not a tsunami.

It cut to a group of office workers on a rooftop, clumped, static, until one of them would step forward and to the side as if moved, and then another to the side and back, like they were in a life-sized icebreaker chess game, a rigid tangle of beige- and black-clad relative strangers not like us at all. They were cold and unheld and we knew exactly where to put our attention; they were at the sunken base of out-breath and we were at the crest increasing our capacity for what would naturally come, naturally—how waves move is inherent to our intelligence.

After that there was a nuclear meltdown, and our food, the very ground we walked, the air, the water, was irradiated—or it wasn’t, depending on whom you asked. The government said no, it’s fine, but if you asked another, say, on another island with different values working from different strategy books with less to lose, they’d say it was, dangerously so.

On a small plot of land in a small town a mere 75 miles south of where I was stationed, my dad, as a child, was sent out by his parents to kill stray cats after the war. They were a family of six and still, to this day, meager eaters (all of them but my father who moved to America and developed a more American appetite), but there was no food then, or not enough food, so the cats and the Akahas were in competition for what there was. I thought often of this after making my decision to stay, a decision only because my parents put it to me to leave, worried about aftershocks, toxicity, the stress. I watched droves of people like me defect and I could have found permission in that but I chose to sink in, avow loyalty to my neighbors, to my aunts and compatriots who couldn’t leave, believing my suffering might compensate for my American privilege and liberal education, for my come-from-away accent and somewhere, subterraneously, for the gulf between me and my dad, even though he was saying come home, even though I’d not half a year earlier already renounced my Japanese citizenship.

I’ve never understood why, on my father’s side, in the country with the highest life expectancy, there is so much cancer. How tumorous masses can feel like gas, how treatment itself can become incurable.

It took the Japanese government two months to use the term “meltdown” and by then, I had my self-diagnosed brain tumor. It could have been the stress, the surge of tension in this singular body, that liquefied the landscape for me—aftershocks triggered by my own brain, a thought I thought as often as “or it’s a brain tumor,” and doesn't stress cause cancer? Or perhaps the act of suddenly looking up for the first time in a long while was it. I was an extraneous employee straining for connection with similarly displaced Americans across the prefecture on GChat between furiously translating one of the most infuriating essays about ophidio (snake) phobia, filling a notebook with antiquated Chinese characters my desk neighbor, a Japanese Japanese language teacher to Japanese students, did not know, for a contest that, if I won, I could only hope would impress my dad, slipping into sleep under my kotatsu by 8pm with a half-drunk Cutty Sark sweating radially across the table waiting for my fantasy boyfriend to wake up in his San Francisco afternoon, hungover, hanging on, absolutely marooned.

After the earthquake I would wake with a start several times throughout the night, if I slept at all, just to touch the wall and stare into the dark trying to root out the trembling, topping off my bathtub with in-case-of-emergency water each time stupidly relieved to find the tap still flowing.

When I was a kid I told a doctor I’d found a growth in my abdomen, painful, perceptible to the touch when I lay just like this with my back arched, and she left the room to return with a plastic skeleton on wheels, “See, this is your rib cage, and see these here?” pointing to two semi-arcs at the base, “these two that don’t connect? They’re called floating ribs,” and until she prodded at my own stomach in tandem with the model’s rib tip I didn’t get that she was saying, honey, it’s your rib, and it hurts because you’re poking it.

As plainly as possible, I recite my symptoms for the Japanese doctor, the soft-spoken middle-aged notetaker with soft features and hooded, meandering eyes like my father’s wearing a white smock with a Red Cross logo on his breast that makes me imagine I’ve been wounded in action. I read from the back of my wrinkled Snake Phobia notebook where I’ve written down all of the words I think he might use along with their Chinese characters and English translations and probably cry, as I always cry in this part of the appointment where I’m asked to talk while everyone else listens, the hour of permission, but then the doctor goes off-script. He wants to know about my history. Headaches, I think might be relevant. I’ve always had a lot of headaches. Migraines are newer, since college, sometimes several times a day, often days in a row, that start with the time-lapse black moss creeping across the top left corner of my vision into fullscreen pixelation and descend into cranial dubstep rave cave. But this feels different. It feels like it’s been since the earthquake. It’s not painful. It’s, I’m sitting still, but my brain is on a multi-axis trainer preparing for space travel. It makes walking awkward. It makes me feel insane. Wonder if I’m asleep. We have entered a tilted plane of post-superdisaster existence. Memai, he says early on, and finally, and I am struck with a familiar, dreaded feeling. There is Nothing Worse for Hypochondria than a Diagnosis. I’m given pills, a powder, really, to dissolve under my tongue twice a day. The only other time I’d taken medicine this way was in high school, after Dad shamed me out of therapy and SSRIs and Mom took me to see a homeopath in Santa Cruz, where I was prescribed snake venom. “Like cures like,” goes the credo. When I look up the ingredients for my vertigo powder, I can’t find a translation.

As far as I know, I’ve never been bitten by a snake.

I’ve had the same headache for six weeks now. It presented as I’m going blind in my left eye and got worse when I remembered a photo I paid extra money for at my eye appointment last December that showed a small bubble in my eyeball the doctor said would either go away, pop and do nothing, or pop and severely impact my vision, but I am The Patient with the Floating Rib so for the first two weeks, I opted to convalesce to the sound of British people baking and complain to my boyfriend over the phone until his pleas to see a doctor annoyed me into action. I outlined my symptoms plainly, tearing up briefly, as I walked a tight rope of please order me into irradiating imaging but only if critical, keeping in mind I have two friends younger than me with brain tumors and one with chronic headaches and sweet memory lapses who died after a series of mini strokes in her twenties, not to mention my dad whose stomach aches were lymphoma and confusion was sepsis and giddiness liver failure and death familial collapse and was shocked and relieved to hear her say, “sounds like a migraine.” Yeah! It could be a migraine. It could totally be that moss creeping part without the dubstep step, that feels right. I know those and they haven’t killed me yet so I’ll take that. But the medicine she gave me, the medicine I always take for migraines, does nothing for the sensation, and now I want to go back and tell her, the eye thing, the vision stuff, that’s either gone or I’ve adapted to it, I can live with and without it, but the headache, I can see now, I’ve been touching my brow bone and can tell it’s like the ones I got in middle and high school, like immense sinus pressure made immenser upside down, except without the congestion, and the mucus, and everything else that makes a sinus infection a sinus infection, so maybe now we should think about imaging? That is presuming I have a clear recollection of what my head felt like then enough to create a reliable map of internal shifts when I can’t even remember what I did yesterday—which is another thing.

I’m at That Age. Memory loss is expected, neural pathways between today and times tables, state capitals and old friends’ last names are eroding. There is a such a glut of information and who-can-tell-anymore inherent and forced interest in foreign statistics and politics I won’t ever touch directly that most of it gets power-washed away with less and less delay, less and less preciousness. I can’t remember what I don’t remember, can’t forget what I forgot, though the way it happens is not the way I thought it would be, with dark spots, clean cuts. There are crumbs. Flavorful, textured aerosols around a locked case, continually emanating, proof the cat is in the box though I can’t call to mind, “CAT,” and the more I try to chase it the more it obscures itself and all similar things retreat with it. DOG, MOUSE, RABBIT. The things that have given me joy and purpose no longer give me joy and purpose but the smell of them still makes me salivate. So does pizza. That feeling of melting into the couch with my legs draped over the length of my boyfriend pulling my socks off from the toe is as satisfying as anything. I feel I can give up everything, adapt to anything. Maybe I’m well-adjusted, or maybe I’m sick. I could be sick. There are many types of sickness and the book of their names and definitions is 991 pages, just for the ones in my head.

At the same time we were told there was no causal relationship between radiation exposure and cancer, and once “no adverse health effects” at all, we were told to avoid produce grown in Fukushima, Sendai and Iwate prefectures. As recently as 2022, commercial black rockfish was found in Fukushima with 180 times the legal amount of radioactive Cesium-137, which makes me wonder how much Cesium-137 is permissible, and who decides, and how many times has that decision changed. How many milliSieverts is that anyway, exactly, and where does it factor into the 3 mSv of background radiation the average American gets every year, if 1 mSv equals 14 lifetime cigarettes or 25 cups of peanut butter, the latter of which may also reduce the risk of esophageal and breast cancer, the latter of which three of my friends, all active and healthy and under 40, with and without a family history of breast cancer, have had already. Documents are still being declassified that undermine and undermine Manhattan Project statements that there was “no radioactive residue” in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombs were dropped, that radiation sickness was a “pleasant way to die.” We still don’t and never will know the death toll from those blasts, only that the estimate only ever increases, and that as of now, “very few or no detectable cancers are expected as a result of accumulated radiation exposure” from the Fukushima disaster, though there was an I-guess-totally-unrelated increase in thyroid cancer, and fatal alcoholism, and depression, and stress.

The question of liability circumvents investigations into causality creates dark spots that could or could not be radiation or radiophobia. At a certain point, it doesn’t matter.

What remains after so much disappears must then be precious. Memory lapse isn’t terminal, or it is, it will be, and lost words, dark spots in your brain may be age, lethargy or brain cancer. “The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” starts One Art, a favorite poem of mine by Elizabeth Bishop I just tried to look up as The Art of Forgetting, which is maddening, appropriately maddening. Why it is my favorite, reading it for probably the twentieth time now, I don’t know. I don’t understand the poem. Every time I visit it, less sense. “The art of losing isn’t hard to master.” Cloaked in singsong cadence it becomes a refrain, puts our most sacred attachments on a collapsing bridge and waits until you’ve turned away to blow them down, and then it taunts you with it. “The art of losing isn’t hard to master.” Neener neener neener.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

I don’t know when it happened, but between all the Loss, lived and anticipated, mastered and unmasterable, quantum mechanics has challenged Einstein’s theory of relativity. Still no one knows whether the cosmos is fundamentally deterministic or built on uncertainty. It depends, so they say, on your perspective. Zoom in and you’ll catch two electrons influencing each other instantly from a mile apart; zoom out and you’ll see gravity pulling the strings of all the orbiting planets and colliding galaxies. Make them make sense together in an expanding universe and the energy will reach a point at which its mass will make it collapse in on itself, creating a universe-sized black hole. Whenever you do learn, if you are granted consciousness of it, what the cause of your great Loss will be, will it matter? They’re all great stories, aren’t they?