Precursors

Mari didn’t believe me until I’d proven it. But who would? She was the first and only person I’d told about my heart, and even with her, I’d waited. Waited until we’d been seeing each other for more than a year. I’d wanted our relationship to feel certain. Trusting. Predictable.

We’d met on the flight from Vancouver to Tokyo, both of us hired after university by the same Japanese English-school chain and flown into Tokyo. I never imagined we’d be placed in the same guesthouse, or end up working at the same school in Toranomon. But there we were. Destined, I thought. Joined at the hip. Mari and I spent our days, then weeks, commiserating over confusing supermarkets; over the students, who were chiefly businessmen hoping to up their chances of promotion; and over the shabby state of our 1960s flats in Higashi-kasai, with their worn tatami mats, musty cupboards, and scuttling roaches. Then after-work drinks became after-work sleepovers, and it wasn’t long before we were dividing our nights between her flat upstairs and mine on the ground floor.

When I decided to tell her, we were in my ratty old flat, on my ratty old futon, our limbs tangled together. And I explained that I could stop my own heart.

It’s not difficult, not like a heart attack. Not a struggle, like holding some frightened animal. For me, it’s like placing your hand on a friend’s arm as if to say, wait a moment. And he waits. My heart listens.

I told her how, as a child, I’d cautiously polled enough other kids to learn that no one else could do this. I’d never dared tell my health-obsessed mother, with her cupboard full of supplements, fearing I’d become the subject of some endless medical study. But I imagined I was special. Special in the most bizarre possible way. And for a while, I imagined myself as some kind of superhero. I’d been granted a gift. But among the comic-book characters with bullet-proof skin and psychic blasts, what good was a hero that could stop his heart?

“Basically, I was born with the world’s most useless mutant power,” I said to Mari, as she stared, propped on one elbow beside me.

“Er, okay.”

A quill of irritation stabbed at me. She was using the tone she reserved for eccentrics and braggarts. It was the first time I’d ever heard her use it on me, and it stung.

“Put your head down,” I said, guiding her toward my chest. “Can you hear it?”

“Why no! You’re right!” her eyes glittered with sarcasm, “That’s amazing!”

“I haven’t done it yet.”

She moved her ear side to side.

“It’s on the left. Same as most people.”

“Jerk,” she said. “Okay, okay. I can hear it.”

I stopped my heart, and her hand clenched around my wrist. Her eyes were huge.

“Holy shit…”

I let go, got the head-rush. Stars swooping in my vision. Mari sat up. Slid ever so slightly away. “How?” she said.

“I don’t know. I just… squeeze. I call it squeezing.”

“Ew?”

“Well, what would you call it then, smart ass?”

“How about cardiopulmonary arrest?”

“I’m pretty sure that one’s taken.”

She looked at me for several seconds, her face more flushed than mine.

“Freak!” she said, finally. But she was laughing. She jumped on top of me, kissing my nose, my forehead, then my neck — her lips lingering there against my pulse.

“I’ll tell you something else,” I said later on, with the pushy, red-lipped scent of sex filling the room, “There’s going to be an earthquake today or tomorrow.”

“So you’re psychic, now, too?” she asked. But it was a hesitant sarcasm, now.

“No, it’s the squeezing. When I squeeze, I can feel the really little earthquakes. The ones that only seismometers detect. The ones that most people think are nothing, just their own body moving. And there’s… I don’t know, a kind of rhythm to them.”

I squeezed out of habit. Felt my body go dead. The room was perfectly still. No earthquakes. No soft rocking or juddering. I let go again.

It was calming to squeeze. It gave me a sense of control over my world. Anyone could hold their breath, but I could hold my heart. I could pause that timer ticking my life away. Halt the endless commuter rush of my blood.

“It’s like…what? Like someone is building a house next door, and they’re hammering all day, right? You don’t know how many nails they have to hammer, but you get sort of used to the rhythm of it, and if it stops for a long time, you anticipate it starting again. The longer the gap is, the more you expect the hammering.”

“So, in this metaphor, are earthquakes the silence or the hammering?”

I rolled my eyes.

“The point is that there are little quakes almost every day. They’re the precursors to bigger ones every couple of months or so. I just have the feeling like there’s going to be a bigger one soon.”

“Today or tomorrow.”

“…Probably.”

She was about to call me a freak again. I could see it.

“You absolute freak.”

I smiled. Mari had her rhythms, too.

There was no bigger earthquake the next day. Or the day after that. And at some point, I lost track. Yes, I’d been wrong this time, but it didn’t matter. I would read the patterns. Adjust my predictions.

In the meantime, we carried on. I hated my job. Most days, I felt like a clown, not a teacher. But when I was with Mari, the world made sense. We explored Tokyo’s esoteric bars and cavernous clubs; we took time off together when we could and travelled to onsen towns; we drank with our co-workers at beach houses in the summer, and sat in fields with thousands of others to watch firework displays so huge they made the ground shake. This was our life: teach until our brains were numb, then reset with travel and booze.

So, when Mari grew slightly distant that autumn, I assumed it was the job. I knew she was ready for another holiday, or maybe even another company. And I had it all planned out.

“We need to get out of Japan. This place is making us both crazy,” I said one day. We were in her flat this time, on the second floor. There were instant-noodle containers on the counter, empty. Two beer cans from a vending machine between us on the tatami.

“You’re not wrong,” she said. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you…”

“I’m thinking Bali. We’ve got some goodwill built up with HR. I bet we can convince Haruka to give us two weeks off together. We’ll save money, stay at a hostel for backpackers. And when we get back, we start hunting for better work.”

Her pause was a chasm between us.

“That’s not really what I had in mind,” she said.

I remember my first earthquake in Tokyo. It woke me like a hand gently rocking me back and forth. Above me, the overhead lamp swayed on its cord, and for a moment, I couldn’t imagine why. Then, when the realisation hit, it was a conduit for adrenaline. My heart kicked at my ribs.

I sat up, listening, as a team of poltergeists rattled, tapped, and creaked in every corner of the room. I didn’t know whether to stay or run out the door, and I had no furniture to duck under. But after a few moments, the noises settled even though the lamp continued to sway. The quake had been tiny.

Was it over? With my heart pounding, I couldn’t be sure. So, I squeezed.

The frenzied thudding subsided. My limbs fell quiet. And there it was: the slightest sway in the room, still carrying on for just a moment more.

I was obsessed.

I read everything I could find about plate tectonics, learning words that sounded like branches of philosophy: subduction, strike-slip faulting, hypocentres, epicentres. I marvelled at the destructive power of the ironically named Love Waves.

But above all, I discovered that Tokyo was a ticking time bomb. On maps of faults and tectonic plates, Tokyo didn’t just rest on a fault line — it sat pinched in the grip of three, like a grape ready to be crushed.

For weeks after that, I would wake in the middle of the night, certain the room was moving. Just to be sure, I’d squeeze. Often, it was just my own body, the rush of my blood, the leftover motion of some seaborne dream. But other times, it was, in fact, a tiny quake rocking us all in our beds. I knew that studies had shown earthquakes to be random, unpredictable. Even the best science could find no pattern. But I didn’t care. My ability finally had a purpose, and so I started to keep track of the smaller quakes — the precursors I was certain would reveal bigger events. There was a rhythm to the world. A slow and complex beat that only I could feel, and I was finally in the right place.

“I’m thinking of leaving Japan,” Mari said.

A little bit of the world collapsed, crumpled like a building made of paper.

For a moment, I could barely speak.

“When?”

“I don’t know, yet. I mean, I was never planning to stay for long. You knew that. I thought a year, maximum, but it’s already been more. I just can’t do this much longer, you know? I need to get home again, find something serious to do. Get on with my life.”

There was something practised about this. It was a monologue that she’d been running in her head, practising. Waiting for a moment to tell me. Find something serious to do. Get on with my life.

“Well, yeah. I can understand that, I guess,” I lied.

“Yeah,” she said. Then nothing.

“So,” I snorted, “I guess that’s it then, huh?”

It came out angry. But it was too late to take it back.

“What?”

“I mean, basically, you’re telling me that you’re leaving. What am I supposed to do with that, Mar? You’re not happy, so now you’re just going to bail out on me?”

“Bail out? I mean, first, I don’t even know when I’ll leave. That’s why I’m talking to—”

“Yeah, but it’s not going to be another year or two, is it? You’re talking about soon.”

“Not soon soon, but yeah. A few months, maybe?”

She stared at me, like I wasn’t getting it. Like I was too stupid to understand that she was leaving me. Where had this come from? Had I missed something? We almost never argued. Mari’s world, like mine, ticked along like clockwork. Nothing ever changed. Now, none of it had been serious?

“It’s not like I’ve never brought this up,” she said.

“That’s exactly what it’s like.”

“You’re joking, right? How many times have I asked you if you’d consider going home eventually to find a job? You said you think about it, too!”

“Everyone thinks about leaving! But you’ve been planning it!”

“Don’t shout. I didn’t want this to turn into a fight. I…I just wanted to ask you.”

Her eyes were wet, and I hated it. I wanted to comfort her and scream at the same time.

“Ask me? Ask me what? If you can leave? What am I supposed to say to that, Mar?”

“Ask you if you’d come with me, obviously. You asshole.”

She sat staring at the floor, her breath ragged.

I was dumbfounded. I felt like I’d been derailed into some other conversation. And instead of apologising, instead of saying sorry, or I’d follow you anywhere, I said:

“And what if I don’t?”

Mari looked at me like I’d lost my mind. And I think I probably had. It felt like the room had shifted beneath me, my life crumbling. She was supposed to leave with me, not the other way around. I had all this frustration, and I just…

I squeezed to calm myself. Just to stop the spiralling. My body went still. The pounding in my head quieted. And I felt it: the softest rocking of an earthquake. Mari didn’t notice. No one else would. But to me, it felt like a threat.

I picked up my work bag and told her I’d have to think about it. Then I left. I thundered down the fifty steps to my own flat, fumbled with the key, threw my bag against the wall, and slammed the door.

I slept, or tried to. Mari’s announcement, the tiny earthquake, all of it had led me into fitful dreams. Argumentative and hopelessly cyclical. Dreams where I fought with Mari over how long it had been since the last earthquake. Over when she would leave. And when my sleeping mind finally gave up, I touched my phone to check the time. It was 3:49 a.m.

I went into the kitchenette and poured a glass of water. The dishes were unwashed. My clothes and some of Mari’s were strewn around the flat. Spare sheets lay rumpled in a corner.

Outside my window, the street was empty and cool.

I couldn’t go back to bed. And I wouldn’t wake Mari to apologise at this hour. But I couldn’t stay in this mess. This chaos. So I dressed quickly, left my phone on the tatami, and stepped outside to walk in the early morning darkness alone. Where I would normally have turned right to go to the station, I turned left. I wanted to get lost. I wanted to see the neighbourhood as if I didn’t know it. As if I’d never lived there. As if I might not see it again.

I walked past modern houses. Small apartment buildings. I turned again, and passed a ramshackle house running a mom-and-pop bamboo business — tall poles bundled together against its walls. As I came close, some of them shifted, making me jump. The burst of adrenaline sang through my blood, and I paused to exhale.

Suddenly, everything seemed clear and simple. Why should anything be different? Mari and I were still in the same place we were before. Why did it matter who decided to leave first? I'd been stupid. Mari wanted me with her. At least, I hoped she still did. And that was all that mattered.

The clarity of this hit me like a wave, and I laughed out loud in the street. I felt elated, almost drunk. I staggered to one side, thinking that the road had a slope I hadn’t noticed in the darkness.

But then I felt the shaking.

I heard the sounds, too. First, it was the electronic shrieking of distant phones — the earthquake early-warning system that had not come early enough, sounding from cellphones inside every house and flat around me. But the warning was soon swallowed by the creaks and clattering of buildings. It quickly grew to a roar, a crashing, the sound of a truck loaded with scrap metal juddering over endless train tracks.

And under all of that was the impossible low-frequency growl, an amplitude between hearing and feeling. The collision of continents beneath my feet.

A sideways sway tossed me onto one knee in the middle of the street. I winced in pain. When I looked up, I saw the power lines whipping and snapping like skipping ropes. Buildings pitched and leaned. Christ, I thought, they’re going to collapse. And then one did — a house that folded in at one wall as though exhausted, the roof tilting to the ground, tiles clattering onto the pavement.

A violent upward thrust sent the asphalt crashing into my cheek. Then the streetlights failed, and in the new darkness, there was a final gentle sway to one side, as though the ground might float away on a tide of magma. But it arrested itself, and everything slowed and finally stopped.

I found myself face down in the middle of the street. My cheek felt numb, and when I touched it, my fingers came away with blood and grit.

Mari. I thought.

Mari on the second floor. Mari in our cheap 1960s flat. Mari terrified and alone when I should have been next to her.

In the lampless dark, I started to see the crumbled garden walls, the broken windows and missing roof tiles. People were emerging from houses now, too. There were muted calls. Muffled shouts. Children crying. Coughing.

And for all my faith in rhythms, I had predicted nothing and saved no one. I was not the hero. I was just an asshole — Mari had said as much. An asshole who thought about nothing but himself.

I got to my feet, dazed. My right knee ached, and I took a few limping steps. Uncertain steps. Everything was uncertain now. And so, I squeezed, just to see if the ground was still moving.

Nothing happened.

My heart pounded on. It pounded on without me. I tried again. Tightened the grip. But my heart had become a caged animal. A frantic rat inside my chest, rattling against my ribs. And nothing I did would make it listen.

So, in the rubble of order, with everything crashing down around me, I retraced my steps. First walking, then loping through the pain, as fast as I could go. All around me, I heard the cries of strangers, awake now and stumbling out into this disordered dawn, this new day of chaos and fear. And as I limped onward, my heart hammered its stubborn countdown. But it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter because I had to get back. Back to Mari. Back to the only thing that made sense. Back to the last place that I’d asked my heart to stop.