by Piper Daniels
Japan, 2011. A magnitude nine undersea megathrust earthquake hits Tōhoku with such force it causes the earth’s axis to shift by several inches. Along the coastline, fifty fires ignite at once. An oil refinery explodes into flame and a thick black smoke billows from that burning. Moments later, a 133-foot tsunami rushes over the land, swallowing buildings and fishing vessels with terrifying, inevitable speed. Bridges and roads are annihilated, and at the Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant three reactors experience level seven meltdowns. From video recordings, a man can be heard screaming, “We’ve lost everything. Here is like hell on earth.”
The lucky few who aren’t swallowed up that day climb to the highest points of their roofs waving white flags in a desperate attempt to be rescued. From an aerial view, the flags look like ghosts floating up from doomed bodies, spirits tethered to the flesh in a rush to evacuate.
As children raised in the evangelical faith, the Book of Revelation, which prophesies the end of the world, was little more than a bedtime story to my sister and me. To lie on our backs in the tall grass and look at the sky was an act of meditation meant to prepare us for the End Of Times, when Jesus would return and bring the whole galaxy crashing down.
In spring, we watched the migratory birds head north for nesting, praying for their safe return along the flyway, between the breeding and wintering grounds.
We read these birds have a neural connection between the eye and the part of the forebrain known as “Cluster N,” which becomes active during migration, enabling birds to literally see the magnetic field of the earth.
We wanted to go where they could go, see what they could see. We wanted our bodies to be built like their bodies, all mental maps, compass points, instinct, and light.
J. touched down into our lives one spring like a squall, then stayed on: a foul-smelling fog, a thick marine layer that would not lift.
J. was a hero in town because a cop who was chasing him shot him in the back of the head with a taser and somehow, he ripped it out, hopped a fence, and kept running, managing, that time, to escape.
We were not raised that way, to love boys like him, but she was tangled in him anyway.
Forest for the trees.
At a very young age, long distance migrant birds go their separate ways, forming strong attachments to potential breeding and wintering sights. Once the attachment is made it is rarely broken—the birds visit the same wintering sites every year.
In the aftermath of natural disasters like the one in Tōhoku, reports of supernatural experiences increase exponentially.
Five years after the earthquake and tsunami in Tohoku, Yuka Kudo, a sociology major, began writing her senior thesis on potential supernatural experiences that had taken place in the wake of the disaster. Kudo interviewed one hundred taxi drivers in Ishinomaki, the area that had been hit hardest. Many drivers refused interview, but seven of them reported remarkably similar stories—that of Phantom Fares. In each instance, a fare entered the cab, requested to be taken to a decimated location, and before reaching their final destination, vanished into thin air.
“No ghost was ever seen by two sets of eyes,” wrote Thomas Carlyle.
The most frequently cited of Yuko Kudo’s studies involves a cab driver in his fifties and the woman who got into his cab near Ishinomaki Station. The woman asked to be taken to the Minamihama district.
“The area is almost empty,” the driver said. “Is it okay?”
“Have I died?” the woman replied in a shaking voice.
Perplexed, the driver looked over his shoulder and found that the woman was gone.
Tōhoku police are now collaborating with exorcists in the area.
She says it was good between them in the beginning. I tell her Heaven is ephemeral. That since Eve and Adam, Paradise has proved unsustainable. That even for far-ranging migratory birds who’ve made it to the tropics, paradise lasts but a single season.
When the world breaks apart the way it did in Tōhoku, ghosts rise up to fill the void.
In addition to the Phantom Fares, firefighters are repeatedly asked to respond to calls from a street that’s been washed away by the tidal wave. Mothers report that the toys of their dead children are moving on their own.
Following the Antofagasta Landslide in Chile, sobbing and screaming has been ringing through the darkness for decades. A four-year-old boy dressed in white walks through walls and peers in people’s windows.
Again in Chile, following the 2010 earthquake, shadows and disembodied screams rise from the bowels of the devastated parts of the city. Shadows can be seen crossing the Cardinal Raúl Silva Henríquez Bridge. Cell phones light up with incoming calls from disembodied voices that never quite connect.
After the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, locals reported the spirits of wealthy foreigners stranded, lost.
106 years following the 1910 Avalanche in Wellington, WA, reports of a ghostly woman humming and singing, reports of children playing, and screams so eerie they could only rise from the throats of the dead. “A century later,” one woman reports, “they’re still trying to find their way home.”
I went once to the trailer park where my Sister and J. lived together. The furniture was expensive but littered with liquor bottles and overflowing ashtrays. I saw four-dozen holes in the wall she’d covered with posters. She was uncharacteristically quiet, and he stuck to her like a sun-warmed lozenge to a sweater. His pitbull ate my leather boot in a single bite.
The night following the visit, I dreamt of the Odyssey, of Odysseus sailing beyond the dawn to the untouched, sunless edges of the earth. I watched the ghosts in the meadow of Asphodel flit like shadows.
I woke with traces of the river Lethe on my tongue, remembering that to drink there was to be stripped of one’s identity.
Sometimes a boy is not a boy at all. He is only a way to disappear.
Despite what sophisticated navigators they are built to be, there are times when migrating birds lose their way. They fly past their destination in the spring overshoot, ending up too far north. Or in the case of reverse migration, a young bird’s genetic programming fails, and they end up as stranded vagrants thousands of miles out of range. Or in drift migration, when birds are simply blown off course. Or in abmigration, wherein birds from one region join those from another and end up migrating back, immersed in their new population.
In many cultures, birds are seen as harbingers of death. They steal souls from the dying, embody spirits of the dead, or act as psychopomps, shepherding souls of the departed from this world to whatever comes next.
Sparrows, for instance, are built slight and hollow of bone so they may carry home lost spirits of the dead.
Sisters are similarly made so that whomever is lost may live on in the other one lightly.
Many experts have tried their hand at explaining supernatural phenomenon that follows disaster.
Theology Professor Hugo Zepeda claims that the psychological damage suffered by survivors of a single tragedy is so similar that they achieve a “collective projection, which means that they feel or see more or less the same things.”
“The perceiver [of ghosts] is prepared for the experience on the basis of his or her having, so to speak, been eaten by pests. The condition is one of eroded defenses, of vulnerability,” Elizabeth Robinson writes.
Some people believe ghosts roam the earth because of unfinished business.
Others believe they remain because we are unable to let them go.
I am hoping this boy is a broken mirror I can bury by moonlight.
I am hoping my sister knows that the story of migration is a story imbued with the hope of returning, and because of that, I will lie in the tall grass between the wintering and breeding grounds, and I will watch for her.