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Funny how train journeys always seemed to bring out old memories.
I love him like a brother.
It wasn’t quite true. Ogata Emiko had never been a liar, but she had many times in her life had to bend the truth. She had lied once, of course. To him.
A long life and a good one, with Hideo and the children. The grandchildren. Her father had even lived long enough to become a great-grandfather. Daisuke, their eldest, had named his first boy after him - Kyohei. Emiko’s father was pleased, but this cycle of names was depressing to her - she named her other children after no-one she knew, names she’d always liked from books and movies.
So the years rolled on, and her father’s prediction never came true. Though her family grew and grew, it seemed Gojira had been an only child.
But now… there were stories. She had lived far away from Tokyo bay for a long time, but it seemed right to her for a long time to visit the place where it happened once a year, a chrysanthemum in the water, silly and sentimental and honestly not what he would have wanted, but a voice from another time and place told her it was right and she had a tiny, quiet suspicion that the voice’s name was Serizawa Emiko.
She hadn’t visited for a long time when she heard the first story. A shape in the water. Bigger, much bigger than a man, gliding through the waves on moonless nights with one huge eye that shone in the darkness. Most people didn’t believe the stories, or didn’t want to. People asked, “why borrow trouble?”, and when no ravening beast came from the depths to melt pylons and eat train carriages the rumours died down and everyone told each other it was just a lost whale, or a school of fish, or the wild imagination of those creepy Gojira fans who seemed to want something to come looking for its lost sibling.
Mama, was it really real? Was it 200 metres tall? Did it eat a ship? Emiko smiled, remembering her children’s questions. They could hardly believe in the reality of Gojira. The fact that their mother had seen it was both normal and incredible to them – let alone that their father had actually gone into the depths to do battle.
Papa and your uncle-
Uncle Shinkichi?!
No, Uncle Daisuke, you know, I’ve told you-
She closed her eyes and rested her head against the window.
Ogata was a good father. An excellent grandfather, donning his sailor’s cap and running up and down the garden with grandchildren on his back, telling tales and passing out sweets while their parents enjoyed a moment’s peace.
Serizawa would’ve been a terrible father. Would they have had children at all? He was so serious, and so consumed by his work, and so changed by the war. Is it any wonder that she’d wanted more from life than that? Going from being her father’s assistant to her husband’s, living in that strange house with the lab in the basement, wondering if some shadow from the war was going to catch up with them one day?
Oh, who was she justifying herself to now, after all this time?
The train started to slow down. She was nearly there.
---
Night time. A moonless night down at the water’s edge. The water wasn’t so deep here. Maybe 20 metres. They’d been out a lot further that day, when the water was big enough to hide a huge, strange beast.
The waves sloshed gently against the shore. She sat down on a rock and unlaced her shoes. She dipped her toes into the surf. Lights from ships went by in the distance.
She tried not to regret anything in her life. She tried.
She regretted lying to him. She had already betrayed him once, and she wouldn’t have done it twice for all the world – except all the world had been on the line. So she told Ogata everything. Even knowing what he’d said.
I’ll destroy all my papers. And I’ll kill myself.
He’d done it, too. That stupid boy. Oh, just a boy, like she was just a girl, and Ogata no better. How had they dared to face that unbelievable monster?
A sound was getting louder. She had heard it even before realising it, a low keening moan like whalesong. It pulsed to her from far out in the bay. Was that the reflection of an eye flashing out there, or was it just another boat?
Too close to be a boat. Too big to be a fish.
The keening came again. It was like a sound from a dream. She leaned forward and trailed a hand in the water.
Something was coming nearer. Its back raised out of the water, smooth like a whale’s back, but with two bony ridges, one on each side. Not Gojira-size, but large. A wave sloshed towards her and splashed her face when it hit the rocks. The water was still. She didn’t breathe, she didn’t blink.
And then a head breached the surface. A head, a neck, shoulders – a face! Emiko stared.
They regarded one another for a long moment, the waves still crashing in around her.
She blinked. The great eye looking down on her did not. That sound came again, seemingly coming from the ocean itself. She held out a hand, shaking. That sound, that heartbreaking sound! She touched the creature’s face, smooth and cold to the touch. It closed its eye and a great shudder rippled along its shining skin.
A smooth head where once there had been a shock of black hair. Instead of ears, curved fins connecting head to shoulder, and gills on the neck, but – his face. His scar, no longer covered by an eye patch, his one huge eye that had glinted and reflected the harbour lights. His mouth -- unmistakably the mouth she had kissed just once as a bus horn sounded impatiently, waiting to take him who-knew-where in an ill-fitting uniform – but not his mouth also, wider, the lips thinner and the skin translucent.
The eye opened once again and regarded her with a sadness she could hardly bear. She looked up at him, hardly believing the reality of this creature, this man that she had loved but could not marry, who had been always young in her memory, now no longer a man. She was old, but he was something else entirely.
---
The train journey home seemed to take no time at all. Her husband was pleased to have her home. He didn’t ask what she’d seen. He’d heard the rumours too and was clever enough to guess what she’d guessed. He was also smart enough not to be jealous of a dead man; she trusted he wouldn’t start now. She embraced him, and he held her for a long time. He’d held her all these years and she was so grateful.
You see, children, the H-bomb was what made Gojira, Ogata had told the children many times, those terrible tests, out at sea, they woke him up and they made him big and terrible and angry. That is the nature of the H-bomb.
And what was the nature of the oxygen destroyer? Not big, loud, angry and fiery, but quiet, efficient, sad and terrible. Enough to change a creature, a man not directly exposed to the destruction but trapped in the same water, a man ready and intending to die. Enough to change him into something that could live under the sea but that longed always for the land and the people he had left behind.