Hiroshima in the Morning (19 page)

It depends . . .
I begin.

There is a second explosion on the other end of the phone. What Brian hates most is when things “depend.”

Look at the writer on the sidewalk—for that is what I am now, clearly no longer a mother or a wife—she is almost in tears. She is flaunting personal strife in the street, of all places, publicly inconveniencing one of her benefactors (a
chaos she can feel even in the bend of her elbows though it would mean nothing at all to Brian); she is completely unable to comprehend the man she’s spent all her adult life with. His words enter her ears—he wants to come to Japan for eight weeks—she can hear the anger, the challenge, the test. She cannot hear his pain. She knows, but cannot feel, what his life is like, and she clings to avoidance, to his now-expired statements that everything is fine. Her expectation that he would support her journey—that he agreed—is long-dead, but she won’t concede that. He talks often about how he “gave” her this opportunity, but there is no gift in this anger.

There is my world, and his world, and although both are duly described, neither can conjure the other. He is running a business, raising two kids in a city that’s been attacked, and he doesn’t have the time to look at the long emails I send about my adventures. It turns out he knows nothing about my trips to Tokyo or any of the main events of the last three months; the last thing he read was a brief description of the fisherman outside my window. He knows nothing of what the writer writes, of how I am recreating my life and why, only that I must be creating something because I am never available. And strangely, incomprehensibly, he has decided that he hates Japan, the place I have pinned my life on.

He hates it.

And me? I have lost the world I lived in; my ability to see him. I have lost my sense of myself, even my understanding of what I’m saying. I am telling him the eight weeks he’s proposing is a long time. Japan is expensive; there’s no child-care and I know he doesn’t want to be a househusband. I
get around by bicycle, and in Japan, people don’t take their spouses and children out with them to work or social functions. If he wants to live here, make a life for himself, if there is something he wants to study or explore, then he can come now and be welcome. But he has no particular interests in Japan; he has not had any time to think about it because he has no time, period. No time to think, no time to breathe . . .

We could be speaking in a foreign language for how far off the truth our statements are.

I say:
Of course I want you to come. Whenever and wherever; when you are ready; for however long you want.

I can’t hear myself, except from a distance. I can’t see myself—how can I tell my own story, be my own narrator, how can I live my own life if I can’t hear my lack of attention the way he can, my desperation to escape? Panic—is it panic?—has set in; it has risen, fallen, swelled like the ocean, dropped like darkness, like a net from the sky. It tightens around me, and I am talking now, in circles and loops, compulsive in his silence. I am relying on logic, have blocked out all feeling, and yet I am backtracking, protecting, because there’s a breaking point here; this is no simple fight. I am giving in—perhaps this is guilt, then?—because I’m suddenly sure he will not.

And yet, and still, protection has to reach into the future. I make one last pitch against my losses: if he wants to travel, to sightsee as a family, then three weeks might be better. I’m telling him how expensive things are, how traveling as a family means four times the price of one. I don’t even know what’s possible: I’ve barely left Hiroshima, except under
someone’s auspices; have never asked for a hotel room, never tried to rent a car. This is the truth, and reasonable—precisely, exactly—but we are beyond mutual definitions, and these are not reasons he can hear.

And the greater truth is, I don’t want to lose the last third of my fellowship. I don’t want to be forced to re-make the choice, minute to minute, between my work and my family. It seems I must already make that choice daily, that I’ve been fighting an unnamed, unlocateable “it” that believes I should not be here, and now, as it locates inside Brian, I wonder whether it has always been there or whether it has just possessed him. I want my husband back, the man who loves me, not the man who swallowed him, the one on the telephone. I don’t know how to reach him. I don’t know how to assure him I’m still there.

He tells me how. That, even in the face of his fury, I can measure my love for him in days.

He wants a yes or a no, and he wants it now. And so I am caught, making a decision I don’t want to make, not this way, in all this swirling resentment, with all the possible dangers I’m trying to convey, but he’s no longer listening and not even I can shift through all my excuses anymore.

 

JANE IS STANDING. It has been more than thirty minutes and I must get off the phone.

Pick a date, Brian is saying. Just pick one. Any date.

This reunion has all the markings of a disaster, but cutting his time short would be even worse.
Your dates are fine
, I tell him.
Your dates are great. November 16 to January 14.

THOSE WERE THE DAYS when I was invisible.

My mother sits beside me on the subway train. It’s New York City, I am just out of college, in the days when the soles of my shoes still stuck to the dried soda on the vinyl flooring and the graffiti-stained windows would have shone like a church if they were not underground. In memory, the car is almost empty. We have our long, grey bench to ourselves; no one stands between me and the pole in front of me that I will swing past when I explode, flinging my body onto the opposite bench to glare across the way at my mother.

Those were the days I can’t remember, unless I try, and then only in shards. In shatters—not a word or at least not the right one, but it’s the one that comes to me now and how I felt then. Who knows what was wrong, where this frustration and anger came from? I can’t remember if I was still in therapy then—as a teenager I had the disconcerting ability to cut people dead if ever they hurt me, at least beyond the trivial, and I spent some fruitless time discussing that with a college-subsidized shrink. In instances of betrayal, I cut off my own heart for safety. And if it was a pulsing, poisonous safety—heat and nausea that washed through me every time I saw the person—at least I’d found a way to identify the enemy and remove myself from further risk; a solution for which therapy had no such guaranteed alternative.

But perhaps that period in my life was not this time.

I was not married yet. I must still have been starting the career that would go nowhere, of catering to people who wanted to be famous, and who either believed they were not because I was bad at my job, or that my success in garnering attention for them was not really mine but the natural consequence of their wit, their magnetic personalities. In my mother’s presence—and why ask where we were going, where we were coming from, why “the guys” weren’t there?—I was suddenly struck by the feeling that no one really knew me. What was inside did not fit the outside, and I wasn’t sure where the outside came from or what the inside was. Just as now, it was unclear: I had no alternate identity or unacknowledged talent to claim. But I had rage. The wrong persona had been ascribed to me, and I accused my mother, flung it at her that she didn’t even know who I was.

I was afraid. Afraid of not recognizing myself, suspicious that the split I felt in my persona was proof that my true self was unacceptable. Worse: unlovable.

It was not just those dreams I had that I was registered for a class I didn’t know about, whose final exam I now had to take—in those dreams I always had a day when I might still try to learn everything in the textbook, there was a gauntlet to run, an interlude in which I could try to change the future, even knowing the future was unchangeable, that I would fail. I was not just a perfectionist, not just an overachiever with deep insecurities—in those dreams I was face to face with a world that was not what I was led to believe it was. I was bewildered, inadequate, but still somehow preoccupied
with control, tormented by the possibility that I might still be saved, salvaged, that this class could be passed and then swept under the rug, and I wouldn’t have to be other than I was.

There was no reconsideration in my dreams. No way to drop the course, change the major, to open oneself to an alternative universe and trust in the future.

My mother said, that day on the train, underground, that of course she knew me. Calmly, as if—
you are my child
. It was both impossible in its assumption and deeply scary. She offered to prove it. What if she was wrong and I was truly invisible in the world?

What if she was right?

There were things my mother said. I don’t remember the words. I can see it happening, but I cannot hear. I have lost my mother’s declaration of love; her words vanished, no one to say them, no one to remember, as if it never happened, but I cannot allow that. There were things my mother said; these must survive. These things were true, more real than any thought I’ve ever had about myself, and I need them now. I need to hear my mother’s voice, the mother who loved me—
you are my child
—and if I cannot, just now, remember her words, still, the feeling of being unearthed, the strike of the shovel and the slow release of pressure from the soil on my head, these I will never forget.

I AM STANDING in the dark, in the cold, trying to see some trace of where the old kitchen might have been behind this pre-war house that has no electricity. This is the coldest part of Hiroshima prefecture, where the ski resorts have begun making snow for the winter on this late October day, and I am increasingly underdressed in my fleece pullover. Just before all the light left the sky, I was being shown an old, rusted
furo
—an iron tub I could barely have crouched in. Then, a heavy container for water, and then the night was pitch black—no moon or stars; all the houses were lightless since it was 6:30 p.m. on a Sunday night in the country. Minatoya-san, the woman who brought us here, is still valiantly trying to explain what this house she grew up in looked like, but I can’t see anything and Kimiko, who stayed up all last night telling me her story and has been translating nonstop all day, is no longer making sense—though it could be me who can no longer hear. This day has been long in the making, Kimiko has been mulling and rejecting towns to find the perfect suburb for me, a country village to set part of my novel in, and Minatoya-san has given the gaijin at least seven hours of her time so far. For my part, I got into the back seat of the car and promptly fell asleep because, on the winding mountain road with no food in my stomach, the alternative was to be sick.

Since my last conservation with Brian, I have been saying
yes
to every opportunity that presents itself, even if it means dinner at eleven p.m. and writing in the few, fading minutes before sleep. I’m surprised to realize I’ve been doing so for quite a while. I’ve reached a point where I am gathering, collecting life without requiring it to be relevant. I am doing what Ami’s friend talked about—
ichi go
something—engaging in each moment. Before, I was doing it in leisure, turning a tea cup in my hands time and again and slowly, not to catalog every detail and therefore own it, but to acknowledge its existence. Now, though, with the premature finale of my life in Japan looming, I’m getting greedy.