“Unfortunately, I’m gonna have to roll you all the way in there,” the technician explains, “so we can get really good shots of your head. But just push this button if you need to get out.”
She nods. “I think I’ll be just fine.” Tamiko is not the type to hit panic buttons.
Ever since she was a young child, people commented on how still Tamiko was. “Our kokeshi,” her grandmother called her, in Japanese: Our little doll. The pediatrician noticed it. So did her dentist, and her teachers, and even the school photographer, who scraped a plastic comb over her straight black bangs, then stepped back with a skeptical look on his face. “Alright, say cheese,” he said, then the camera flashed and Tamiko didn’t blink—or say cheese. “She’s just so still,” people would exclaim, some with a hint of reverence—because she was indeed a beautiful, doll-like child—and others with a subtle unease, because her gaze was inscrutable, unrelenting, and not exactly becoming for a small child. Whatever their feelings though, everyone seemed to notice how seemingly watchful she was—her face unmoving, unmoved.
Grownups wondered what was going on behind those dark eyes.
“There’s something strange about her,” the mothers at the park whispered, tucking their heads into their shoulders as they leaned towards one another.
“All children are different,” reassured the pediatrician.
“Is she . . . special?” asked a nosy neighbor.
It seemed that no one imagined that this impassive, silent child was simply absorbing everything around her. In fact, she was strange, and she was different, and she was special, though not in the way that the neighbor had meant it. The truth was that from a very young age, Tamiko noticed everything, and was constantly trying to take in and incorporate every word, every gesture, every shift in the air which only she sensed.
As a young child, she struggled to understand it all. One of her first memories was as a little girl when her grandmother commented on her mother’s rice– “Too sticky today.” Tamiko noticed the tiniest flicker in the light of her mother’s eyes, and for a moment she felt the vibrations in the air hum at a higher frequency. She held her breath and stared into her rice bowl as the particles floating around the little kitchen table settled. And she wondered what it all meant.
As she got older, she began to understand more. One day in high school, Tamiko was in the school office when she saw the principal’s elbow brush his secretary’s arm ever so slightly, and Tamiko watched the thin blond hairs on her arm rise like a field of wheat. The secretary’s voice tightened somehow, like the tuning of a guitar string, and the air felt charged. Tamiko returned to class, pondering. When, months later, the principal left his wife and ran away with that secretary, everyone seemed surprised. Tamiko wasn’t, of course. They’re in love, she knew.
They have been for months.
When her husband Ken‚who was then just her boyfriend Ken—brought her home to meet his parents, Tamiko watched his mother’s shoulders soften, just a millimeter, the moment her eyes landed on Tamiko’s. And when Ken’s father shook her hand she felt the tips of his fingers squeeze gently, gratefully.
“Your parents didn’t know I was Japanese,” she’d said to Ken later. “You didn’t tell them?”
He’d laughed. “I thought I’d keep them guessing. How did you know?”
She shrugged.
A smile tugged at one corner of his mouth. “I knew the minute they found out I was dating a nice Japanese girl they’d start planning the wedding.” They both laughed softly. Their eyes fell to their laps.
Although she absorbed everything, she didn’t always understand people. Some carried around sadness, which Tamiko felt in them as an emptiness like the silence at the end of a song. Some carried anger, which tasted bitter on the back of Tamiko’s tongue, and sometimes caused a ringing in her ears so high, and so incessant, that she couldn’t fathom that no one else could hear it. These people often had smiles on their faces, and Tamiko was bewildered at the effort that that must take.
Even now, at the age of 50, Tamiko was still sometimes left perplexed by people. It exhausted her at times; there were so many faces to scrutinize, word choices to interpret, gestures to decipher. Except in this machine. Here she is, blissfully, alone.
As the spinning and the banging slows, Tamiko emerges from sleep. Her slab rolls back out from the machine, and the boy stands waiting for her. “You did awesome. I’ve never seen anyone lie so still!” As she eases off the table, holding the paper gown shut behind her, he adds, “Hopefully these images will help your doctors figure out what’s causing your headaches.”
Tamiko nods.
Headaches. The word feels inadequate. Anemic. Almost laughable. Headaches doesn’t capture the shock of pain that wakes her every night. Headaches doesn’t even hint at the eye-watering, nightgown-soaking, teeth-grinding vice inside her skull. And headaches certainly doesn’t convey the terror the first time she noticed the empty, spectral blur in the corner of her vision, which, every time she tried to focus on it, leapt away. Headaches. It’s like calling a monsoon a raindrop. Calling a forest fire a flame.
The boy’s face is blank as he takes the panic button from her hand, and Tamiko suddenly wonders what he has seen. Did he notice something? Does he know? Is he allowed to tell me? She searches his face, his hands, the air around him, but there is nothing. She pads out into the hall, and unlocks the little locker where she placed her belongings.
She closes the door to the small changing room, holding her pile of carefully folded clothes to her chest, but instead of placing them on the bench, she turns and sits. Her body feels suddenly heavy. She lowers her head and curls, fetal, and squeezes her eyes shut. She takes a deep, slow
breath in, holds it, and pushes her fists into the sockets of her eyes. Warm tears stream down her
wrists. She allows her lips to part in a silent scream, and a wave of sobs rises from her gut and
shakes her with violence, with urgency, by the shoulders. It only lasts for a moment—that’s all she’ll allow. Then, just as suddenly, she sits up, perfectly straight as her grandmother always reminded her. She takes a deep breath, which wavers at first. She forces it to steady. She wipes her eyes and gets dressed.
She arranges her face into a smile, and brushes a hair from her face. “Yep! All set.”
She drives home, and she thinks about that boy. She waits for the phone to ring, knowing that for Ken, and her children, the doctor’s call will mark a transition—a line between the Before and the After. But for Tamiko, the After has begun.
