Hiroshima in the Morning (13 page)

He will get to that later.

No.

That’s not acceptable.
He
is the one helping
me
. He will control what he says, and when I can leave. I am clearly ungrateful, so he will no longer speak to me. After pizza, he will talk about the Sentai Gardens, but no one will be allowed to translate. There is more, much more, on the topics of how the day will proceed from this moment forward and of my abysmal ingratitude—I can tell by the spit coming out with his words—but it is met with smiles and nods and absolute silence in English.

What can I get from this man who will not speak to me? What does he remember, what of it is true, and if it’s not true, then what is it? If I cannot believe, or even understand,
then I must find a way to listen to what he’s
not
saying, and in what order, compared to the person I think he is. I have not yet abandoned questions—at least not in my interviews—but I’ve stopped trying to force people into the world I understand; I let them offer what they remember as the most important things they carry. These are their gifts to me, the keys; they are part of a personal narrative far more important than my questions. And if I must now allow a world to grow from the Colonel’s silences, then I must ask:

So this man—this didactic, belligerent man—what is he telling me, really?

He can’t bear the past. He wants to be a hero, he can’t entertain any blame against any group he was associated with: the army, Japan. If he can brag about his ability to keep his head and direct the Akatsuki unit through their famous relief efforts amid the fires and atomic haze, then he can snatch something good out of the wreckage. He’s not interested in memory, or in different perspectives, or even in the truth. He is forging his own identity, and no one else can refute him.

 

HERE IS A MAP. Move away the box of pizza. This is a map of the city as it looked just before the war. Over here was the military headquarters, here is where the Emperor and Empress used to sleep, and here the Sentai Gardens, where those girls that she wants to know about intercepted radio signals and propaganda from the Allies. Of course, it was close to the epicenter, and was completely burned, but look.
There is a small black and white photo of the mansion at Sentai on the back.

At our headquarters, there was a girl we called “Kikubo”—the mascot girl in the medical department. She was a sixteen-year-old student, and she was injured terribly in the blast. I had a niece, too, Kyoko Yoshimura, only thirteen years old. She was seven hundred meters away from ground zero, pulling down houses to clear the fire breaks with her classmates. Kyoko got home that night, but she died within a few hours.

You can’t imagine what we saw: terrible deaths, miserable scenes. It was hell.

Is it 3:15 already? Then you can make a copy of this for her. It is a picture I drew of the day of the bombing. This is the basement of Honkawa elementary school, a baby sucking its dead mother’s milk. It looked just like this. There is another one, of the survivors at Miyuki Bridge, in one of the books on the table. Please give me five more minutes to improve her understanding of this tremendous tragedy for Hiroshima.

She is lucky to have me to answer her questions.

THE CLOUDS HAVE gone mad. Against the bright blue sky, clouds of every shape and size vie for my attention. There are streaming bubbles, cellophane lakes of haze, proud feathers, and the sharp, renaissance boils of cumulus—these last just the caps in a field of mushrooms, just the ghosts of motionless anger and old pain.

The blue is like nothing I’ve ever seen. Not turquoise, not royal, but some rich mixture of the two. It is now very hot, and the sun adds a molten, buttery sheen to the surface of things.

Some of that could be sweat.

Living alone, a stripped down life, I have returned to pen and paper. It is scratch and sketch, by nature undigested; I can put down whatever occurs to me without giving it a purpose. I am writing my days, not editing, sometimes not even finishing an entry if life carries me away from the page.
Grab what is fresh and put it away—
that’s what Aunt Molly recently wrote to me. In the quiet, where I am getting acquainted with the company of my own voice, these little notes are part of my new dialogue. My book is changing. I am writing something else.

It’s hard to imagine now that, in that old world, there was a time when Japan was just a word in an advertisement. I found it in a magazine
—a fellowship, a six month stipend—
I rejected that for being too long, but kept returning to the
page. What made me fold the corner, what made me show it to Brian without comment? That disquiet in me—if now it seems that it was not only about the war or my project—it was still so slight then that I had my excuses in hand when Brian brushed them aside and told me to apply. Now I see that, having been given permission, I could not have refused. It would have meant admitting fear, dependency, locking the door to a cage whose bars I didn’t even feel. And yet, when the secret door is revealed, who wouldn’t want to open it? How lucky I was to have someone to urge me to step through.

It’s been three months now, and I’m not homesick any longer. Not for New York, or for the US, those places I’ve lived in but never claimed. Hawaii was my home and not quite America. New York was never my choice—I moved there to be with a man who could not imagine living anywhere else, and I stayed because I could never name a place I needed as much as he needed New York. His business, his pace, outweighed my occasional yearning for peace and for the ocean; it was more practical, and so it was.

This place—Japan—is not mine either, but it’s a fine place to sit and wait in, to wait, not for the new world to begin, but for all the expectations and needs and responsibilities of my old world to spin down.

I am changing—not because I don’t belong, but because I can. Without identifying anything that was wrong with my life, any part of my persona that I’ve grown weary of, I am losing things. Like sarcasm. Like planning. Like fear. And it’s not that I’m becoming Japanese, either. I’m
not exchanging one projection for another. Somewhere, beneath the borrowed New York tempo, I am beginning to recover an even earlier lifetime—the barefoot girl, the child running through the pastures behind her house in Hawaii, writing bad poetry beside the waterfall, embraced by hills that look very much like the ones that surround Hiroshima. Her heart beats more slowly. She doesn’t need to lead.

And above her, above me, there is a painter’s dream, where time has no bearing. It is past and present, overlapping, until one
is
the other, and all logic is lost.

This is where the girl is now, enjoying the silence. It is where she waits for me to fall back beside her, back to the moment in my life where I can begin again and learn to leap. Solitude has led me back to the last time in my life when choice was not collective.

In the realm of memory, which could be now.

 

“
Moshi, moshi
. . . ”

 

“Rei? It’s Ami. Am I calling too late?”

 

“No. What’s up?”

 

“Well, I don’t know. I mean, I’m fine, but I think something happened in New York. My father was watching TV and they said there was a plane crash . . . I’m not sure what happened.”

 

“What did he say?”

 

“I don’t know. It might have been two planes, the little ones, maybe they collided in mid-air, I don’t know. Maybe it’s nothing to worry about, but my dad . . . well, he said, ‘Doesn’t your friend, doesn’t she live in New York?’ so I thought . . . I don’t know. Maybe I shouldn’t have bothered you.”

 

“No, that’s okay. Thanks. Let me call home and find out. I’ll let you know if it turns out to be anything . . . ”

 

 

 

 

“Mom?”

 

“Yes?”

 

“It’s me, Mom. Reiko.”

 

“Oh, Reiko! Where are you?”

 

“I’m still in Japan. So, what’s up over there?”

 

“Oh, you know, not much. How are you?”

 

[Sound of second phone being picked up.]

 

“Reiko? My God, how did you hear so fast? We just hung up with Brian. He’s on the Brooklyn Bridge. He saw the plane. He said it was huge and he knew something was wrong, and then, boom! He called to tell us to get Ian out of school. That’s where I’m going now. Talk to your mother . . . ”

 

“Out of school?” [Second phone goes dead.] “Mom, are you there?”

 

“Hi. Reiko?”

 

“Are you okay?”

 

Your father said not to let Dylan near the TV so that’s my job. It’s so great to see the boys.”

 

“What’s on the TV, Mom?”

 

“It’s that jet that smashed into the World Trade Center. Isn’t that why you called?”

 

 

 

 

“Hi, Kimiko.”

 

“Have you heard? Have you talked to your family?”

 

“Yeah, they’re fine. My parents are visiting, so everyone’s in New York. All accounted for.”

 

“You should come over. I’m watching it on TV.”

 

“Oh, God, no. Those newscasters and all their drama . . . . It’s okay. Everyone’s okay.”

 

“Reiko, they attacked the Pentagon.”

 

“What?”

 

“They’re saying there are eleven planes still in the air. Maiko just called—her son is in New York and all the lines are down—she can’t get through. You’re lucky you did. Do you want me to come get you?”

 

“No, I—Eleven planes?”

 

“That’s what they’re saying.”

 

“Who’s . . . ?

 

“They just said hijackers. They don’t say. You shouldn’t be alone right now.”

 

“Hijackers?”

 

“You really need to see this.”

 

“I don’t think . . . I mean, I’m . . . ”

 

“Oh . . . .” [sound of phone being fumbled]

 

“Kimiko?”

 

[silence]

 

“I’m coming to get you.”

 

“What? What happened?”

 

“The tower—”

 

“What? What tower?”

 

[silence]

 

“Kimiko? Are you there?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

is everyone okay out there???

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

all is well in harlem and its environs

 

HOW Hiroshima is this?

HOW MANY TIMES can I say, “what”? It’s a statement now, no way to answer. Too many things that could not happen coming at me. Skyscrapers . . . do . . . not . . . fall.

Down.

Except that, I was watching it. Watching TV with Kimiko when the second tower fell. I thought it was another rerun—of the first tower, which I still didn’t believe—except that, the running Japanese commentary out of the box, Kimiko’s leaps to grab the essence of the meaning and turn it into English before the next shock arrived, these things, they couldn’t seem to explain why there were no towers left. I was just coming in, maybe that’s what it was; just coming off my bike, my five minute ride across the river, across the empty streets, to her apartment. It was normal—a ride I often take, a familiar route, a familiar entrance without the usual hello. I could have gotten there even more quickly after I promised her I would come, but I didn’t know . . . So I stopped downstairs first, at the convenience store, drifting through the aisles alone, the cashier watching me in silence, finally choosing a bottle of sake and some chocolate because . . . I had to buy something, right?

In situations like this, though, what do you buy?

 

 

Sadness and exhaustion are the words to describe the second day of this tragedy. New Yorkers are wandering the streets looking for something to DO. This morning I went to St. Vincent’s to volunteer but there are no victims coming in. They asked for sandwich baggies and saran wrap to send food to the relief workers. I went to a nearby store and bought all the baggies they had.

 

I’ve spent most of the rest of the day down on the West Side Highway which offers an unimpeded view of the rubble. We stood along the street to cheer on the steady stream of National Guardsmen, firefighters from all over the country, buses of rescue workers and dump truck convoys as they headed down into the War Zone, like soldiers going off to rescue our city. We waved for hours and held up signs that said THANK YOU and OUR HEROES. Later the dump trucks began returning, filled with the carcasses of cars and twisted beams that were being carted off to barges somewhere uptown. I met a woman from Battery Park City who had literally run from her apartment with nothing but the clothes on her back as the towers fell around her. She had to dodge body parts and an airplane tire before getting to safety in the Village.