This Is Only a Test (12 page)

Though we have at last obtained our 98.6, I refuse to be satisfied. Mainly, because I know it can't be true. I convince myself that the fever has merely evolved, found a way to hold its hot breath until after the nurse's thermometer passed by.

You can trick them
, I think as we pull into the Walgreens parking lot.
But you can't trick me
.

I return home with a new thermometer—top of the line—and insert it into my son.

Together, we wait for its beep just like always, and when it does—when Henry mimics the sound with which he's become so familiar—I glance the truth in the tiny screen.

How can it be?
I wonder.
How is he already back to burning?

89.1

I have no choice but to protect my son the only way I know how—by rigging the thermometer readings. I stick the probe halfheartedly beneath his arm and wait for the result.

“There. That's better,” I smile as I read the screen. “A perfect 89.1.”

All of this is lunacy, of course, but I am going mad. A part of me convinces the other part that there is logic in tricking the thermometer into giving me the reading I require. That same part of me dismisses my own powers of observation. It doesn't matter that Henry's acting the same and eating the same and playing the same—the thermometer counteracts everything I once knew to be true.

Prior to Henry's birth, a seasoned father warned me of the perils of fatherhood. He told me I would doubt myself and fail often, but that these transgressions were all par for the course. But then he offered a far more troubling thought: that although I would love every moment with my son, exhaustion would make certain that I hardly remembered any of it. At least not the first year, which he'd dubbed The Year of the Great Forgetting—a phrase I'm just beginning to understand.

Yet even now, midway through Henry's second year, my forgetfulness remains great. I can't help but feel as if the fever senses my weakness, pegs me for an easy mark by the crow's feet in the corners of my eyes.

Let me just sneak in a quick catnap
, I think as my eyes droop toward my boy,
then I swear to God I'm coming for you
.

99.5, 99.5, 99.5, 99.5, 99.5

On Henry's 613th day of life we run the tests—all of them—anxious to learn the fever's name. We can't help but think that we know it, though we don't want what we think to be true.

On the doctor's orders, I lay Henry flat on the table and cover his body with my own.

“You're going to be fine,” I say. “It'll all be over soon.”

The lie is so real I believe it.

Henry has no reason to doubt me, so he grins, then begins babbling in a language I'll never know.

I steady him as the nurse readies the needle, then inserts it into his arm. The flesh of my flesh is broken, and for a moment, the babbling stops. Henry's body buckles, turns rigid, and then he lets loose, wailing as if trapped in the Mark Twain house or aboard a ship in Salem harbor.

The only word he knows to be of any use to him is no: “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.”

“It's going to be fine, boy . . .”

“No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.”

I press down hard upon his body as the vials fill with blood.

With each rise in pitch, my body trembles.

I think:
Give me the ram, the altar, the sharpened knife. I am ready to make good on my promise
.

TEMPERATURE UNKNOWN

The tests come back, and since the doctors still don't know what it is, we settle for what it's not. It is not cancer, it is not Lyme disease, it is not anything we have a name for. Our pediatrician is pleased
to inform us that the blood culture is negative for bacteria, that the white blood cell count looks good.

“So what is it?” I ask.

He says that's a little less clear.

When I ask what to make of the continual low-grade fever, he reminds me that temperatures fluctuate, that some children just run warm.

The easiest fix, we're told, is simply to lay off the thermometer for a while.

My jaw drops, though I soon admit this seems like sound advice.

Two months later, our boy is back to being a boy. Just some kid who will quickly forget what we will always remember.

Of all my parental trespasses, the one I'll never forget is how I placed my faith in numbers and not our son. How many afternoons had he hugged pylons in the stream to assure me he was fine? And how many times had I ignored him? Why was it easier for me to trust a beep and a screen than the person I loved most?

Some days I want to wear a button that reads
IT
'
S MY FIRST DAY ON THE JOB
. But I want to wear it always, because every day feels like the first day, and every lapse in judgment feels wholly my own.

Today is my 670th day on the job, though I am no better at it than I was yesterday. As proof, you need look no further than my forgetting to zip Henry's coat as we sit on the deck and watch the leaves fall alongside the outdoor thermometers. We grip the porch railing and peer into our backyard wilderness.

“Hey, boy,” I say as we shiver, “how about you and I look for some deer?”

“Deya,” he says.

“Deer,” I correct.

“Deya,” he says again.

I smile, pull him close, and save every last breath I've got for a moment he might remember.

Before there was nothing, there was everything: a flash like magnesium, followed by the darkness. By 1945, the people of Hiroshima had grown accustomed to the flashbulbs that preserved them in photographs, though they remained unfamiliar with the curious light they glimpsed in the sky one early August morning.

What
, they wondered,
could possibly cause such a
—

Across the ocean, there were men who could measure destruction to the kiloton, men who had done it just three weeks prior, while hidden behind dark glasses. In the hours leading up to the test, scientists and soldiers gathered in New Mexico's desert and placed bets on their creation's destruction.

Will we incinerate the entire planet
, they wondered,
or simply some small part of it?

Sixty-six years later and seven hundred miles from Hiroshima, a high school buddy of mine—let's call him John—glances up at a squawking speaker in his classroom in Sendai.

The voice on the speaker tries to warn him of what's soon to come, but the warning comes too late.

Please prepare yourself for
—

It is Friday, March 11, 2011. John doesn't yet know it, but Japan's most powerful earthquake in modern history has just struck the east side of the island, triggering a tsunami that is soon to swell the city's shoreline.

This is not John's first earthquake, but it's his first earthquake like this—a world-churning undulation that grinds his teeth to dust. The event itself is indescribable, even for John, who for years will struggle to find a language to match its power. All he will say is that the quake broke his frame of reference, forced him to rethink all he knew of rock and water.

Growing up in Indiana, John and I had never known disaster. Sure, we'd huddled alongside one another in our school's hallways in the midst of tornado drills, but they were always just that—drills—and thus the fear we felt was fake.

The real disaster came for him years later, in the form of an earthquake, a tsunami, and multiple partial nuclear meltdowns in the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant just fifty miles away.

This was no drill. The fear was not fake.

Let it end
, John prays while clinging to the carpet,
please God, let it end
.

Fifteen-year-old Taeko Teramae glanced up from her place in the telephone office to spot a strange shape in the sky. She leaned toward a friend, but before she could speak the building crumpled around her—not an earthquake, but an eruption of another sort.

The kind that brought silence, followed by a dozen cries of
Mother!

The school-age girls' accumulated voices rose up through the dust.

Mother! Mother!

A deafening roar followed by a deafening wail until their teacher, Mr. Wakita, told them to behave.

Taeko behaved, staying mostly mum as she freed herself from the rubble. She breathed, only to find that the world now smelled like the ash from Mount Aso.

Come
, Mr. Wakita called to her,
can you swim across the river?

She could so she did, following her teacher to the river, then into it, then to the safety on the other side.

She was reunited with her parents—
Mother! Father!
—both of whom lied to their daughter's broken face.

Your wounds are not serious
, they assured her.

They knew nothing of radiation back then.

Once the shaking stops, John runs to his girlfriend—let's call her Hanako—and together, the pair retreats to their apartment. Hanako is native to Japan, an expert in earthquakes, and she, too, knows this one was different; that this was the kind that shakes snow from the sky as if shaking the leaves from the trees.

Suddenly, that snow is everywhere—a thick-flaked confetti drifting across John and Hanako's faces. For half an hour they
huddle at their bus stop, but when the bus does not come they continue on foot.

The streets are cracked but quiet, nothing but the ceaseless sound of idling cars going nowhere. The sidewalks are mostly the same, and though small clusters of people pass one another, no one speaks to anyone.

This silence isn't out of the ordinary, nor is the sound of the idling cars. In fact, aside from the cracked window and crumbled walls, for the moment their world remains almost unchanged. The only indication that something is awry is the long line of people outside the convenience store, all of whom are anxious to buy their bento box of food.

John and Hanako don't need food; a six-month supply awaits them in their apartment. As they bypass the line, John is grateful for his foresight, glad to have thought of everything in advance.