Free Into the Forbidden Zone by William T. Vollmann Page A

laundry indoors. The drapes closed again. The workingman said, “This is the stay-at-home area. This is my area. We’ll leave soon. There’s a cat we left to stay inside, and we felt so sad not to let it out. I’m the head of the fire department here, so I come back every day, and every day I check the radiation level at the village office. Today is 0.38 millisieverts. On the seventeenth, everyone evacuated. . .” 39 He worked on, never stopping until I made him a present of my best respirator, at which point he paused to bow deeply, then hurried back to work.
    With the cool wind still at my back and the sound of the brook louder than almost anything else, I inspected a very young bird on the grass, rust on a guardrail, manicured pines, then gazed over blank empty pavement. I went up one more driveway and rang the bell. The chimes echoed on and on; the door was locked.
    For some reason, what I remember most is the bicycles leaning neatly up against the empty houses that shaded them.
    Every time I looked at him, the driver eagerly started the engine. He reminded me of the forlorn boy who must stand on the snowy sidewalk just outside the hot springs near Sendai, ready to bow if any guest comes in. Finally I asked how he was. “I’m not really concerned,” he said, “but somehow I feel uneasy.”
    “What makes you the most uneasy?”
    “I see the cars but no people.”
    Taking pity on him, I told him to commence our return, driving very slowly down the smooth pavement to the fork of highways 399 and 36, and then as the road began to rise back up into the hills, but long before we reached Mr. Sato’s home, I made the driver stop again, for I now perceived one more chance to accomplish my journalistic vulture-swoop, for here again was human life—namely, a middle-aged couple wearing those nearly useless paper masks over their mouths and striding out of their house and down the gravel driveway to their separate cars. I rushed to halt them, and the interpreter bowed with her best politeness, requesting the favor of five minutes, just five minutes, but the wife said, “We don’t have time. This is the first occasion that we have checked our home since we evacuated to Tochigi.” “How long ago was that?” Shedding all remnants of that celebrated Tohoku patience and politeness, she cried, “We don’t have time; we don’t have time!”—at which they ran into their cars without bowing goodbye, the man sweating around his mask, and drove off at nearly reckless speed, up Highway 399 toward Koriyama and then Tochigi.
    The driver remarked that they seemed afraid.
    Reascending Highway 399, terraces and plum blossoms, my wrists stinging strangely, no doubt simply from sunburn or that potassium iodide, we proceeded toward Koriyama; now we descended the mountainside, a brown stream glinting white in the sun, at which time the dosimeter reading increased to 2.8 millirems. I said nothing. Looking into the rearview mirror, I saw the sad bewildered fear in the driver’s eyes.
    “My eyes have been pretty watery for the last two or three days,” he said. “Is it related to the radiation?”
    This gentle, stolid rule-follower, who had been born in a traditional thatched-roof house and who was proud of his eighty-six-year-old mother’s health, who had prepared the receipt for me in advance and therefore firmly refused payment for the extra two hours that my loitering had required—never mind the hazardous-duty bonus I tried to give him (he did take a fraction of it)—he struck me as one of those innocents so useful to authority everywhere. I asked him whether he knew what radiation was, and he said, “I don’t know. Does it evaporate? Is it a liquid?”
    “Should Tepco be punished?” I inquired.
    “It was the government’s policy,” he said loyally. “They did it for the nation.”

Kawauchi police guarding the entrance to the inner ring. Photo by William T. Vollmann.

IV: CHERRY BLOSSOMS
     
     
    ON THE DAY I