Hiroshima in the Morning (15 page)

 

“This is the lesson Japan was taught to its bitter sorrow the last time anyone hit us this hard, the last time anyone brought us such abrupt and monumental pain.

 

“When roused, we are righteous in our outrage, terrible in our force.

 

“When provoked by this level of barbarism, we will bear any suffering, pay any cost, go to any length, in the pursuit of justice.”‘I tell you this without fear of contradiction. I know my people, as you, I think, do not. What I know reassures me. It also causes me to tremble with dread of the future.”

WE ARE TALKING ABOUT nuclear war here. The
Miami Herald
is talking about nuclear war. The peace activists raised the possibility immediately, but when I tell Brian, he thinks I am nuts with the same speed.

It’s where I am living, I know, but even though this is the right statement, the best statement, it’s also the most ridiculous thing I have heard since I left home.

One of the boys is refusing to go to school, Brian tells me
when it’s clear I’m not responding. He’s been banging his head on the wall.

I can still hear my son saying,
Mommy, a big plane came and crashed the Twin Towers. There was paper all over the school yard. It is very sad.
I can still see Brian’s email: “[He] told me not to speak about the WTC yesterday cause it would make him cry . . . Dunno where that came from.”

I have my theories, but Brian has other ideas. He thinks my children’s mommy has been away too long.

Why don’t you guys come to Japan now
? I ask him.
In case there’s another attack
?
Or a war
?

Forget it. What would we do there
?
Sit in your apartment and hide
?

What else can I offer? What else to say when two of the tallest buildings in the world can collapse in ten seconds flat? I can’t say,
Why don’t you go to Barnes and Noble and get a book on how to help children who are worried about war
? Brian saw the plane through the slats of the Brooklyn Bridge. He was there, yards away, before any of the relief workers. The events I saw on the television unfolded over his head. Wasn’t this, at least, something we shared?

Yes, I think, let’s sit in my apartment. Let’s stop. Hold hands. Be together here, where it’s safe.

Forget it
, he says again in my silence.
We’ll be fine
.

I was searching for war when I came to Japan. How stupid to be searching for war. How strange that in Brian’s mind, now, war is not the subject. Perhaps he’s right: there is no one to declare war on. Terrorism is an act; it is improvised,
isolated, and singular. The future does not involve nations, or armies, or arsenals.

A-bombs are a thing of the past.

But here in Japan, in Hiroshima, we are waiting. There is a sense that, from the moment the bomb was dropped, we have simply been holding off the end of the world. And we are about to lose our grip.

 

Today, lower part of Manhattan was open for the first time. My friend Cindy and I took our bikes down to Little Italy and Chinatown, which were bustling with newly re-opened shops and markets. We made it all the way to Battery Park where the smoke became quite heavy and we realized the wet streets were not from the rain but from the massive cleanup effort. We never got to Wall Street because of blockades manned by the national guard who asked for ID, but we were able to see a lot of the debris and damage and connect with fellow New Yorkers who were piling out of the subways in droves to see what they could see.

 

Some of the images I won’t forget include the group of people on the edge of Battery Park holding cardboard signs with their addresses scrawled on them hoping for someone to escort them behind the blockades to their homes; Trinity church obscured by smoke but standing tall; the burned skeleton of the Tower at the end of Church Street with the smoldering pit behind it; the ASPCA rescuing tons of pets from apartments behind the barricades; and, most creepy, the two flattened cars parked along the side of the street . . . flattened to about two feet tall, covered in dust and debris as well as flowers that people had put on them as a memorial.

 

As we rode back up to the Village, it seemed Manhattan was getting back to normal. People shopping, eating at outdoor cafes and being New Yorkers on Saturday. Only the occasional emergency vehicle to remind us of the permanent change that has taken place in our
city. Tonight my friend Chris and I went to a movie to do something “normal” and to laugh and forget. We found the perfect film . . . a movie from Thailand, a true story!, about a volleyball team made up of drag queens who ended up winning the country’s championship match. Hysterical!

 

Luv,

 

n

AMI SAYS IT IS SURE NOW that Bush is going to declare war on Afghanistan. She says ninety percent of Americans support war.

Afghanistan? A country? The home of already devastated citizens who had nothing to do with the attack? When I call Brian and begin to rant, my left-wing, nonconfrontational husband says, “Well, they can’t just expect us to do nothing.”

I wait. He doesn’t retract it.

This is the man who wanted to join the Peace Corps. Who says, every Thanksgiving, that we should be serving food in a soup kitchen on the Bowery. Who cannot kill anything bigger than a cockroach. This is the son of a high school teacher who has the soul of a parish priest.

This
was
the man.

In the silence, I can hear his words repeat, exactly, with the same lift and toss, the same fall.
They. Us. Do.
It’s the kind of statement that loops, disembodied, on a playback button: it will never fade, never soften; it can never be explained.

In the face of such a crisis, Dr. Fujita wondered, who can say how a human being will react?

For Christ’s sake
, he said to me—was it only days ago?
We’re not going to drop a bomb on anyone.

What does he know that I don’t know? In what scenario is this retribution okay? One of my own aunts is forwarding
me hate-filled op-eds, and when I try to write my own op-ed about this opportunity for empathy and self-reflection, my agent tells me I am out of touch and flatly refuses to send it out. Far better for us to kill them, because their friends might have tried to kill us. Before they can act again, before they think of acting, because they are weak, unaware. In a far off place, in a foreign country, small children dance to the news of September 11 while my friends wrap their grief and their sandwiches in cellophane.

Kill Mowgli, before he can grow into a man.

A rift has opened—between me and Brian, me and my country—that I’ve been trying to ignore. It’s as if I’m watching the tower fall again: always seeing, never understanding, never believing, unable to accept. I would like to accept, intellectually; I would like to do something more than look on in horror, but my gut does not allow my brain to function. How, in this world that makes no sense, can we make requests of each other? How can we share our feelings when we don’t know what we feel? Any development in Brian’s life is nothing in the face of terror, and any report from mine is too fortunate. And though we say almost nothing in our daily conversations, still misunderstandings trip us. We try to stand up, brush ourselves off, toss each small, stubborn obstacle away, but they are everywhere. He doesn’t see the world the way I do.

We no longer live in the same world.

 

 

[That would be the sound of deafening boredom crashing around my ears. . . .]

 

So WHAT’S UP OVER THERE??????????

 

L

I
HAVE BEEN OUT. No longer inside, hiding; no longer whispering my worries in my head, voicing them to Brian who will not listen. I’ve been plucked off the ground—running from interview to interview to bar. If I’m not home, I don’t have to answer the midnight calls from well-meaning friends about anthrax. If I’m out, pumping more alcohol into proper Japanese women than they have ever drunk before, I’m in a world where people will reveal themselves; they will confess to me, worry, ask me questions I can answer; they will give in to me, race down the center of deserted streets on their bicycles in the early morning. Here I am, wind in my hair of my own making. Behind me, a whoop of warning that my companion is gaining inches.

Behind me, white poison, and unease about where the next envelopes will be mailed.

Do you want to come to Japan now?
I ask Brian again.
Maybe now, with the anthrax . . .

He scoffs into the phone, and then lets the sound sink beneath the careful calm we’ve been trying so hard to create. Even though we have not stated it so baldly, the camel that was our life together, which had always seemed infinitely hardy, has become so burdened we’re afraid to add to the load. I have ranted at him, in my own cloaked terror at not being able to recognize—not him, not my city—I am navigating by old snapshots of before. He has dismissed me: I
have no idea
. This is his mantra, this and the fact that he is
waiting for this to be over
. These are the gates we must pass through every time we pick up the phone.

In the chasm between us, black and white are beginning to edge each other, and the flexible grey that was our life together no longer has the strength to lead us through.

While we are gathering ourselves, waiting for the echoes to fade, he does
not
ask me whether I want to come home. This omission is immediately obvious, and all the louder for remaining unsaid. Am I being judged on my inability to get on an airplane to return to the center of the storm? I jump to this, read threat into it because that’s how we communicate. If he asks, then he will be responsible for my loss of my fellowship; if I offer, the choice is mine. His silence is my chance to give up my life here, to choose him and the web that has always supported me.

This is my old world, the one I excelled in: of “shoulds” and “supposed tos”; of definitions and absolutes ready to jump on any offered word. The questions, refusals, agreements, counter responses—the permutations have a calculus of their own, with volumes and surface areas that change
depending on who says what, who says it first, on the exact formula of the sentences. But none of the equations are harmless.

He is waiting for me to respond.

The children
. . . but that’s a vague start. I would interject:
you can bring them here where it’s safe
. And he would finish: . . .
are fine
.

Death is a crapshoot. It doesn’t matter where you are.

It appears, on the silent surface, that we’re in perfect agreement. We are struggling to see the war as “not a big deal”—each one continuing to live a life, equally, separately, in the way we once agreed. The anthrax is nothing; it is not connected. In the space where there are no answers, it is better to pretend it’s not happening at all.

If I once thought my trip would be easier on him in his own environment, it is now easier for me in some ways, because I can fill my head with another war, with the question of war, its nature, philosophy, with its broad history that has nothing at all to do with us, and little to do with what he’s feeling. If only he would tell me what he was feeling, if only he knew. He will not admit to injury, and neither of us imagines that I might also be hurt. All our conversations are now edged, but there’s nothing personal in our talk of the war. I am delving into the feelings and fears of other people, a subject that he is emphatically not interested in, and when I ask him a direct question about his own feelings and fears, I cannot shake the story that he’s okay. That he’s “ignoring things mostly.”