Fire Flowers (21 page)

Two yen. It really wasn't much. A packet of cigarettes alone cost twenty. But I bowed my head, feeling a painful itch between my thighs and a sharp desire for one of my little pills.

Junko came very close and pressed her fingernail against the skin of my cheek.

“Holiday season for the yankiis,” she mused. “Plenty of work for a pretty girl like you.”

The other girls had abandoned their games now and crowded in front of the big mirror, painting their faces and trying on different pieces of clothing.

“Well, then,” Junko said, “time to get ready.”

Nervously, I prepared myself behind the scrum of girls. After half an hour, Junko clapped her hands, and the girls gathered in a wide circle, turning to face each other. One of them pulled me in, stretching out her tongue. All the other girls were doing the same, placing little tablets into each other's mouth as they stared into each other's eyes. The girl beside me gave me my tablet, and I felt my heart pounding as it dissolved. The big bottle of shochu went around the circle and I took a deep swig, washing the pill down my throat.

The girls held each other's hands. We stepped forward and swooped them into the air.
Banzai!

Excited and nervous, the girls streamed toward the door. As I passed, Junko gripped my wrist.

“You see?” she hissed. “You were one of us, all along.”

 

The night was freezing and there were patches of black ice on the ground. The girls were dressed in all the colours of the rainbow, their hair styled in rumpled permanents, their lips swollen like dark petals. Restless from the pills they had taken, they screeched out vulgar comments to nervous passersby.

Junko walked beside me with Yotchan following. The faint smell of the sea drifted toward us from the nearby bay, and as we passed the pale green roofs of Hongwan Temple, girls peeled away down side streets. Junko prodded me in the back to indicate that I should carry on. My throat was very dry and my heart was beating fitfully as I thought about the night ahead.

The streets grew busier as we crossed the Ginza and turned north toward Yurakucho, following the brickwork of the over-ground train track. Deliverymen rode by on bicycles, their baskets piled high, and Americans strode muffled up against the cold, grinning and clapping hands with each other.

“Over there,” Junko commanded. We were at the back of Yurakucho Station. She pointed to a low-slung tunnel beneath the train tracks and I went in and leaned against the cold, glazed tiles. Junko stood beneath a nearby streetlamp in a freezing cloud of mist.

Soon enough, an elderly Japanese man approached, peering into the tunnels like a nervous crab. His breathing was heavy as he inspected me through his glasses.

“How much?” he asked.

“Eight yen, sir,” I said. “Worth every penny.”

He grunted and wrenched my arm so violently that I cried out.

“Not so rough!”

“Hurry up,” he said, already unbuttoning his trousers.

Junko was standing against the streetlamp as he pushed me deeper into the low tunnel. Her arms were folded, and her face was filled with triumph.

Headlights blazed white. Sirens blared and there was a roar of engines as military trucks careened wildly toward us. The old man thrust away my hand and hobbled off as fast as he could. Jeeps screeched to a halt on each side of railway track, men leaping down from the cabs, searchlights flashing in bright beams. Women ran out of the tunnels like rats from their holes, screaming as American and Japanese police caught hold of them. They hauled them by the waist and swung them into the open-backed trucks as if they were sacks of rice.

I was blinded for a second as a truck veered toward me, its wheels sliding across the icy gravel. Two Japanese policemen leaped out, advancing upon me with torches. I gasped as one of them grabbed my wrists and jerked so hard that my arms nearly came out of their sockets. The other gripped the collar of my dress, and I heard the fabric tear as he dragged me toward the back of a truck like an animal.

“What are you doing?” I shrieked. “Get off me!”

“We're clearing up tonight,” the policeman snapped. “You whores are giving Japan a bad name.”

Us?
I thought, speechless with rage, despite myself.
Us, giving Japan a bad name?

“How dare you,” I cried. “We're the only honest ones left!” I kicked at his leg, but he shoved me heavily into the back of the truck and I tumbled onto the cold, rumbling metal floor.

As I pulled myself up, I could smell cheap perfume. Girls were perched on the narrow benches that lined each side of the truck bed. All of them were pan-pan and they had covered their faces with their hair in shame.

“Where are they taking us?”

Nobody answered. Through the canvas flaps, I could see lights and decorations and Americans crowding the Ginza. We came to a juddering halt by the Continental Hotel, as a line of staff cars dropped off men and women in dinner dress. As the truck jerked forward, a sleek American sedan pulled up, and a bellboy rushed over, saluting as he opened the back door. A man in white dress uniform climbed out, holding out a hand to his companion. A petite Japanese woman emerged, taking a second to smooth the black velvet of her cocktail dress as she handed the bellboy a white fox coat.

“Michiko!” I screamed, leaping up. “Michiko!”

For a second, I thought she had heard me. She cocked her head to one side. Then, as the officer took her hand, she stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. His hand slid down her back and he guided her up the red-carpeted stairs toward the lobby.

The truck pulled away, the figures shrinking as we accelerated up the avenue.

We crossed the Kanda River and turned onto the Edo Road. We would pass through Asakusa next, I thought, picturing the Sumida Park to one side of the road, the charred remains of my neighbourhood on the other. As we passed the Kototoi Bridge, an ominous feeling came over me. I had an sudden inkling of where we were being taken.

The Yoshiwara canal was dark, the water low. As we crossed the bridge, I had a vivid memory of Hiroshi, standing on the high bank as I floundered down there, fire pelting from the sky.

I groaned and pulled my hair over my face. Thank heaven he couldn't see me now, I thought. Thank heaven he was dead.

The truck crunched to a halt. The canvas flaps were pulled aside to show a huge, solitary building with flat grey walls lit by floodlights. Women shouted and screamed as policemen hauled them from the trucks, and I climbed down, shivering in the freezing night. American soldiers and Japanese doctors herded women toward a gatehouse, and from high above came an eerie shrieking. I gazed up at the towering building, shielding my eyes. Women were leaning out the windows on each level, waving and howling. We swarmed toward the building as truck after truck rolled up to deliver yet more girls, and the women called down in a dreadful chorus, their hair falling wild about their shoulders, tattered white gowns swaying in the wind. It was as if they were a horde of screaming souls, welcoming us to hell.

18
P
UBLIC
R
ELATIONS
(
Hal Lynch
)

 

 

 

 

 

T
he corridors of the Continental were quiet and the peace of the Sabbath reigned throughout the building. A smell of roasting chicken drifted from the basement dining room and from the recreation hall came the echoing tap of an eternal game of ping-pong. I locked my door and heaved my knapsack onto the bed and retrieved my rolls of film. Jittery and exhausted, I needed to sleep, but felt a deep and anxious need to develop my photographs straight away.

I figured I could use the darkroom in the basement of the newspaper office without being disturbed, so I took a taxi without changing my clothes. As I'd hoped, the newsroom was empty, the building silent.

I felt a tightening in my stomach as I drew the first spool of glistening negatives from the reel. On the train, I'd been gripped by an irrational fear that something would have gone wrong with the exposure, that radioactivity in the city would have somehow damaged the film, that all I would be left would be blank prints and uncertain memories. But now the tiny scenes threaded out in miniature under the red glow of the safety lamp, mute testament to all that had occurred.

Once the negatives were dry, I lined up the paper beneath the enlarger head and fed the strip through. I exposed the paper to the light, ticking off the seconds until they were done. One by one, I shook the sheets in the developing fluid. Slowly, the mysterious images welled back into existence.

As the pictures hung there, dripping on the drying line, a deep sensation of loneliness washed over me. The mangled pile of bicycles in the riverbed. The curving ribs of the ruined dome. The silent Buddha, smiling enigmatically as snowflakes settled upon his head. I recalled a strange story the ambulance driver told me, of how people's shadows had been seared into the stone of the bridge at the moment of the flash, and as I looked into the ancient eyes of the dance instructor, the frail, smiling face of the withered railwayman, I had a sudden comprehension of the deep, lingering malaise the victims had complained of, the terrible void that had developed within them, as if a cancer had consumed some vital part of their souls.

While the prints dried, I went upstairs to the empty newsroom. At my desk, I fed a sheet of carbon paper into the drum of a Smith-Remington. I stared at the blank page for what seemed like an eternity. Then, almost without thinking, I began to press my fingers on the keys and a confusion of words and letters slowly clicked out onto the page.

“
The Aftermath of the Atom
,” I titled the piece. I described the day simply and clearly, from the moment I arrived at the station to the second my train back to Tokyo passed into the tunnel. Darkness had fallen outside the big plate windows by the time I was done. The pool cast by my lamp was the only light burning in the building. I rolled out the final sheet and read the last paragraph out loud.

“
While most of the victims of ‘radiation disease' are now dead, it seems clear now that this terrifying new weapon has a capacity to destroy even beyond that which its creators foretold. It has the capacity to plant the seeds of a lethal sickness into men's bodies, to scatter poison into their very souls. Whatever the justification for the atom bombing of Japan, any government that believes in justice surely has a duty to help those that it has unwittingly—or wittingly—exposed to this sickness, this creeping death that still lurks in men's bloodstreams so many months after the smoke has cleared.
”

The heavy newsroom door creaked open and I lurched up in my chair. A tuneless whistle came from the corner of the room and the big overhead lights glimmered on. Eugene. He assumed the comical expression of a boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

“Hal!” he exclaimed, striding toward me. “Don't tell me you're working? On a Sunday night?”

I smiled, hastily covering up the pages on my desk.

“How about you, Eugene? Feeling guilty about something?”

The corners of his mouth turned down.

“Let's just say I forgot something.” He opened the drawer of his desk and palmed a package of prophylactics into his overcoat pocket. He parked himself on my desk with a grin.

“Where have you been anyway, Hal? We never see you anymore.”

I felt a pang of sympathy for my old roommate. He'd never seen any action, just like all the other fresh recruits now garrisoned in Japan. The country was like a playground for him.

Grime and dirt were ground under my fingernails and developing fluid stained my skin. As I looked up at his cheerful, freckled face, the crooked wire-rimmed glasses beneath the wild thatch of hair, I felt a curious collision of instincts. After a moment of hesitation, I gathered the sheaf of papers on the desk and handed it to him.

“Proof this for me, Eugene.”

He licked his thumb and forefinger as he flipped through the pages. Surprise, astonishment, confusion progressed across his face as he read. I slumped in my chair, aware of the sour reek of my unwashed body. When he finally finished, he gave a low whistle.

“Boy oh boy, Hal. Do you think Dutch'll go for it?”

I laughed, despairing. “You know I wasn't planning to file it to the
Stars and Stripes
, Eugene.”

He adjusted his glasses. “Right. So—where are you going to file it?”

I shook my head. “I've no idea. One of the nationals, maybe.”

His face crinkled with apparent distaste. “So you're a Fancy Dan now, Hal?”

I shrugged.

“I don't get it Hal. Why are you so bothered about the Japs all of a sudden? They started it, right?”

I didn't know what to say. I just led him down to the basement and gestured at the prints. He examined each in turn, pausing every now and then to take a closer look. He became silent for a long time, brow furrowed.

“They're quite something, Hal.”

“Thanks Gene.”

“SCAP was upset enough about the rat guy.”

I laughed, picturing Dutch in his office, accusing me of being morbid.

“They sure were, Gene.”

He glanced at me in doubt.

“You're sure you want to do this, Hal? You know it means trouble. Why not let sleeping dogs lie?”

“I can't.”

“You can't?”

I shook my head.

“Discuss it over a drink?”

I shook my head again. I suddenly yawned, my eyelids like lead.

He sighed. “Well. Okay, Hal. Suit yourself.”

He patted me on the shoulder. “You get some rest, Hal, do you hear me? You'll be here tomorrow, right?”

I nodded.

“Okay. See you around.”

There was a vague sound of whistling as he climbed the stairs, and the heavy office door closed with a thud. I was hopelessly fatigued. The lights and the scent of chemicals made my head swim as I unpegged the prints from the line. Upstairs, I peeled the carbon from the line and slid the photos and the story into my drawer.