“in a single day and night … disappeared into the depths of the sea.”
- Plato on the city he called Atlantis, ~360 B.C
He was floating, muttering some mantra, some drum song of the warrior, out among the wreckage, clinging to a bit of his tiny home, a part of his tin roof, but it was quiet, placid, nine miles from the death and destruction, nine miles from the loud despair, the clanking bell toll of the coastal town collapse.
His home in the town of Minami-soma was torn from its roots, in the first crash of a tsunami, a phantom from the hallways of Lucifer’s schoolhouse, a pendulum sent by cries of fallen angels to wipe out every trace of the past. And though hell broke loose in the shape of a wave with the litheness of a jaguar stalking prey, it did not succeed completely. Utter destruction shook homes from their foundations, and the wave plunged with fervor and hazardous movements that hit rock and sheet metal, man and woman, and swept it all away with a motion so simple as a broom sweeping leaves, but it could not shake him from his roof.
And he floated for two days, through the sunrise and moon fall, quiet, secluded, the old man and the sea, and all that remained of his home. He was discovered late Sunday morning, still on his rooftop, the one he shared with his wife before she was washed away. He knew there would be no more petty fights, no declarations of love, no singing in the streets, nor frenzy of desire, just floating. He held a makeshift red flag fashioned from a bit of detritus and waved it in the air, brandished it overhead for an airplane or the heavens, for someone to take note of, but there was no body or object to reverberate his call, just floating bits of humanity, some books, some papers, wooden beams from houses, mute artifacts, and him.
And all around him, the world fell apart; fell like the ashes of hell from the heavens.
On shore feet with no shoes stuck out from beneath floorboards. Oil slicks from broken cars and maimed vessels made ironic rainbows in pools of water. Heaps of worm eaten wood sat atop concrete blocks, markets and churches collided, pulpits and priests, friends and foes, the ruins of a civilization, wandered helpless. Flattened plains of discarded hordes, shoes, survivors, and remains of the victims, were left for the air. Imposing ships sat on concrete rooftops exposing their underbellies, barnacled asses no one asked to see. Cars bayoneted front porches. Homes stacked, one on the other, like Jenga pieces. Faces in photographs peered from under mud blankets, rubbed thin by the rapid lapping of water.
Soldiers squinted at the touch of cold flesh. People cried in the street and old women slept beneath staircases in their destroyed homes, but he floated. Parents found their children, children their parents, husbands their wives, and young girls wept on the roadside, and he floated. Legs crossed and centered.
An old woman with her cane cried as she searched for her missing husband, waterfalls of tears enough to match tsunami waves. Sticks and stones broke bones. A nightmare, a warzone, the lost city of Atlantis, a marshland, a bogland, a homeland, no more.
And yet he remained, a warrior on the sea, a talisman of hope, a traveler without luggage. At night a thick ocean haze did not dull his resolve. Cold temperatures could not freeze his conviction. 494 people dead. More than 2,200 missing. Just in Minami-soma alone. He floated. And we pray.
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