Fire Flowers (38 page)

I stumbled toward the railway arches, where pan-pan girls were hunched around the wide puddles, bedraggled from the rain. I gazed at them as I walked unsteadily into the underpass that led beneath the tracks.

I stopped in the middle of the tunnel and perched upon the railing in a pool of streetlight. My fingers trembled as I lit a cigarette, sucking it hard and feeling myself enveloped by white smoke.

Footsteps were coming toward me. My stomach quivered. With my fingertips, I slowly drew aside the fabric of my kimono to show my white thighs.

The footsteps stopped and I felt a light hand on my shoulder. “Miss?”

I opened my eyes.

A boy was standing there, holding out a palm full of notes and coins. His face was horribly disfigured and scarred.

His eyes widened. The money fell to the ground.

The lights of the tunnel whirled around me as Hiroshi's clammy fingers reached out to touch my face.

T
here is a stretch of the Hudson Highlands where the cliffs shoot straight up from the river, deep and wide now as it curves around Mount Storm King. Heavy beech and oak line the ridge, an outpost of the green panoply that stretches over the whole northern half of the state. The Eastern Chief
 
rides alongside here for a while, cutting through the forest as if through virgin land, before the track curves around, and on the distant horizon the spires of New York City appear, stabbing up into the sky.

I'd ridden trains all the way across America. Along the coast from San Francisco to Los Angeles, then inward over the arroyos and canyons and red earth of the southwestern states. I crossed the Mississippi and the endless, flat wheat plain of Kansas, curved up into the Midwest, finally arriving in Chicago on a grey, humid day in July. I ate a pizza pie in a red-stone Italian joint, and back at the station took a seat in the waiting room amongst a gang of long-bearded Amish men, dressed in white shirts and black pants, who spoke in singsong voices about the price of grain and chickens. Later, they sat contentedly in the observation carriage as I went to my cabin and sipped whisky and looked out over the vast, lonely expanse of the Great Lakes until I finally fell asleep for the last, long stretch to the Eastern seaboard.

The train paced itself like a steady racehorse as it rode the track high up above the tenements of Harlem, the first foundations of grand housing projects being laid down below. Then came the towering brick apartment buildings of Manhattan, the shining glass skyscrapers, and then the gargantuan mechanical workings of the city, grimy with oil and dirt, the screeching tunnels and dark galleries drifting away on each side as we pulled into Grand Central Station. I slung my kit bag over my shoulder and clambered out onto the platform. I stood there alone as the commuters pushed past me, not knowing where the hell I was going next.

I took a room in a boardinghouse on West 28th Street, not far from Penn Station, where I lay low, sweating in a box room, smoking cigarettes and taking no other diversion than the occasional slaughter of a cockroach beneath my shoe heel. The Sicilian operetta of the couple who ran the place drifted endlessly through the floorboards. New York was wilting hot. The sun poured right down from the sky. I prayed in the evenings for the summer storms, for the thunder that would crack open the night and drench the earth for a few sacred minutes, before the moisture evaporated and the restless heat rose up to smother the city once more.

 

The Yokohama road had been as bad as I remembered, pitted with holes and craters. Life along the highway had grown more vigorous now—shanties extending along each side, swarms of people, young and old, eking out an existence amongst the crinkled tin, chicken wire and tarpaulin. Garden plots lined the perimeter, tended by withered old men and women with babies on their backs. Stray dogs and naked children watched from the side of the road as my taxi passed, no longer curious enough to either wave or bark. At the dock, young GIs stood fresh off the boat, laughing and joking as they sold off their gear to grinning yakuza men in white summer hats and vests.

The press club had been all a clamour when I'd stumbled back there the night before, alive with the day's events. The prime minister's residence had been stormed; troops were still out on the streets; the government was about to fall. The faces of the newspapermen were alight as they traded rumours and swapped war stories, snapping their fingers for drinks. Chaos was their amphetamine, I thought, as I sifted the room for any trace of Mark Ward. Sally Harper from
TIME
was comforting a graceful blonde woman who sat on the piano stool, dabbing her eyes in a daze. Judy Ward—Mark's wife.

“Where is he?” I asked above the din. Sally stared at me in astonishment.

“I thought you were his friend!”

“What happened?”

“Haven't you heard? Where have you been?”

“Heard what?”

“Mark's been arrested. They're saying he's some kind of subversive!”

I wondered if he'd still been wearing his Japanese robe as the burly MPs stormed through the screen door. Seizing him by the arms, dragging him from his wicker chair. The ballroom was heavy with smoke and the furore of relentless gossip and confusion. I crept away, helpless, behind the curtain and lay down on the carpet.

I walked over to Mrs. Ishino's the next morning. The place was a wreck. The curtain was gone from the entranceway and chairs were tipped over on the floor. Big tin signs were nailed to the wall, warnings scrawled in red paint over the front of the building: “Off-Limits to Allied Personnel. VD.”

Upstairs, my room had been trashed. Everything was gone. My notes, my cameras, even my typewriter. All that was left were a few ripped paperbacks and the zinc pail on the floor, overturned, water saturating the tatami. This, then, was the reason for the untimely visit from the public health inspectors. For my extended interview with Wanderly and Ohara. Just another thing to add to my conscience. With a prayer on my lips, I knelt down in the corner of the room, pulled up the mat and prised up the floorboard.

The cigar box was still there. I picked it up and held it in my hands, my eyes closed, breathing in the smell of cedar and tobacco. Then I stuffed it deep into my jacket. Downstairs, I paused in the wreckage and took one last look around. I scribbled a hopeless note for Satsuko: the name of my ship and the time of its sailing. I took out most of the remaining yen notes from my wallet and left them in a useless stack on the splintered bar.

 

Over the rail of the USS
New Mexico
, I gazed down as Japanese girls hugged their American boyfriends, as kisses, tears, and fervent promises were exchanged. The ship gave a great mournful bellow as the massed turbines cranked up. The last of the lovers hugged each other and the men hastened up the gangway as it was pulled home. On the dock, the girls waved white handkerchiefs, calling out in plaintive, high-pitched chorus to the GIs who jostled around me on deck, shouting out wild endearments, pledges of eternal love and return.

The horn gave a deep bellow, and a quickening vibration pulsed through the deck as the chains drew up the anchor. With a great shudder, the ship began to pull unmistakably away from the quay. Another high-pitched wail came from the assembly below; the men around me whistled and shouted. A sea of handkerchiefs fluttered up and down, and my eyes searched the crowd restlessly for Satsuko. Up and down, up and down the handkerchiefs went, every one a love story, every one a heartbreak.

No part of me wanted to leave. And yet, here I was, suddenly on the deck of a vast, oceangoing ship, Japan drifting irrevocably away from me. A yawning gulf opening up, a chasm that grew wider, deeper, and more achingly lonely with every inch that we pulled out to sea.

The island was finally lost beyond the carved sapphire horizon as the lonely screams of seabirds gusted around me in the sky. I went below deck and climbed onto my bunk. A young, ratlike man in uniform lay on the bed beneath mine, his leg in a plaster cast. He was reading the funny pages of the
Stars and
Stripes
, chuckling to himself.

“Going home, huh?” he said, without looking up. I grunted forbearingly, but he carried on talking. “Old Nippon sure is a swell place. No place like home though. Say, where's home for you, fella?”

I willed him to shut up. I desperately wanted to be left alone in my despair, as if the banality of his conversation might somehow impinge upon the purity of my bitterness.

“New York,” I muttered.

“New
York
,
 
huh? You don't say . . . ”

He appeared to contemplate the feasibility of human beings inhabiting New York City for a while, and then, apparently satisfied, he began to speak again, his voice brimming with knowing locker-room insinuation.

“Say. How about those Jap girls, huh? Sure are cute, ain't they?”

Satsuko's face arose before me—her dark, harrowing eyes.

“Foxy little geisha girls . . . You ever have one of them? Huh? You ever have one of them little geisha girls?”

Her look of distress. Of fury.

Take me. Please—

I buried my face in my blanket with an uncertain noise, my hands over my ears.

 

Throughout those dog days of summer, I walked the New York streets like a hunted animal. It seemed almost overwhelming in its banality. Cabs went up and down Lexington Avenue. Steam rose from the manhole covers. Old women walked their poodles in Central Park and messenger boys sprinted between the office buildings. At five-thirty sharp, men in suits poured out from the skyscrapers into the bars by Grand Central Station, before hurrying off to their air-conditioned lives of domestic bliss.

The city was like an impenetrable fortress. The world might lie in ruins, but it was business as usual in New York, heir to the postwar world, its citizens engrossed in their buying and selling, eating and drinking, their greatest victory this vast, blithe antipathy—this insurmountable wall against which I pounded my head. I stopped in the middle of the streets as the crowds rushed past, clutched onto walls for support. The cars and the people went by like an endless zoetrope, and it was all moving so fast that I was terrified of stepping into the current, of being swept away entirely.

I was standing outside the 42nd Street subway station one evening when a chubby man asked me for a match for his cigarette. As I held out my lighter, he made an amiable remark on that evening's performance by the Brooklyn Dodgers. A sudden, liquid fury passed through me. Before I knew it, I was clinging onto his shirt, shaking him furiously.

I saw myself suddenly from above—a madman, gripping onto another like some desperate succubus. I slowly forced myself to release him. He sprinted off up Broadway, clinging onto his hat as he glanced back at me in terror.

I walked all across Manhattan that night. The next morning at the boardinghouse, I settled up with Mrs. D'Annunzio and told her I'd be leaving later on that week. Something had to change. Something had to give.

 

At a photography studio in Murray Hill, I methodically worked up my Hiroshima prints. As I stood in the dim red light, leaning over the enlarger and counting off the seconds, the trip came back to me in vivid bursts. The lonely train guard in the ruined station. Snowflakes, hovering in the air outside the police station. As the images swelled in darkening hues from the developing fluid, I stared once again into the eyes of the aged dance teacher; studied the faint, fragile smile of the railway man, who thought that the wind would come and carry him away like a feather. It occurred to me that they would all now, most likely, be dead. As the prints hung dripping on the line, I felt a profound affinity, as if I, like them, were now just a ghost, a restless shadow on the fabric of the world.

I packed sets of the prints into envelopes and over the course of the next few days delivered them personally, with a short typed note and full release, to the offices of
TIME
,
Atlantic Monthly
,
LIFE
and
Harper's
. Then I knew that I needed to rest. I went up to Vermont and rented a cabin in the White Mountains. I fished and swam in the nearby lake, chopped wood, took long walks in the forest. I retired early and lay in bed, listening to the wind in the pines and thinking of Satsuko.

Gradually, I felt my strength start to return. The great perpetual roar that had been in my ears for so long was slowly beginning to fade.

Every other day, I hiked the five miles to the village to pick up groceries at the mom-and-pop store. They had the occasional magazine there, and one morning, I arrived to find that month's edition of the
New Yorker
on the rack. The cover showed a typical Manhattan summer scene: a cartoon of cheerful citizens playing games in the park. As I leaned down to pick it up from the stand, I noticed a strip of paper binding the magazine, printed with an editorial message.

“Hiroshima,” it read, in underlined type. “This entire issue is devoted to the story of how an atomic bomb destroyed a city.”

A strange, distant sensation coursed through me. I paid the old lady and walked away up the street, reading. The whole magazine had been given over to a piece by a correspondent whose name I didn't recognize: John Hersey. A writer who'd just returned from Japan. It followed the stories of five survivors of the A-Bomb, from the moment of the blast until now, more than a year later, when the city had finally been opened up again. I sat outside my cabin that morning and read the magazine from cover to cover, over and over again.

It painted a picture of fractured lives, of souls caught outside of time. It depicted citizens shocked and confused, still struggling to comprehend the thing they had witnessed in those bright, searing seconds that fine August morning. I recognized much of the description: the points of reference, the landmarks and cardinal points. Then, toward the end of the article, I gave a great cry of vindication. To my fierce delight, the story began to talk of radiation disease, of “Disease X.” The story documented its victims, its symptoms and its causes. And it presented it all as medical fact. Not as propaganda. Not as a bargaining tool. Not as “horseshit.”