Radiance (30 page)

Mr. Takahura stands on the rubble of his own house, calling for his daughter, a long shard of glass embedded between his shoulder blades. He turns and holds up his hand, shouting at her not to go, but Keiko picks her way across the tile-strewn yard. All the houses in the street have been knocked down, plaster, stones and beams collapsed into heaps, except for one home, which stands like a doll house with the walls blown away, so that she can see every room. Wooden shelves hold pots and a wire egg basket.

Dust falls like snow. She feels it on the skin of her thighs. Looking down she sees that she is naked except for a black tracing of the waistband of her underwear. Something hangs from her cheek, a translucent sheet. She plucks away a piece of skin as large as her hand. This frightens her, and she calls out for Mama, running now towards the bridge that spans the Ota River.

D
AISY GOT OFF THE TRAIN
at Stoney Creek, then hurried along the highway to the path by Strickland’s. She traversed the two fields, corn reaching to her shoulders, crossed the bridge, then rushed up the trail to the schoolyard, empty of teenagers. It was just after one o’clock. They must have stopped smoking, burning bits of grass, necking, in order to go home, participate in family lunches. As Daisy crossed Old Middle Road, the suburb lay ahead of her, and she could hear sounds of dishes being cleared, a baby crying, the radio.

There was still time, she was thinking, still time to stop the Project in its tracks. It was all-out warfare now: Daisy had accused Irene of using the girl, then, to top it off, knocked coffee onto her skirt. This, Irene would not forgive. As for Irene using the girl, making her over into something sly, a fox woman—well, Irene was that voracious, that determined. I’ll offer you a sum, she had said to the girl. A large sum. Yes, such a conversation seemed likely. Keiko might even, with her many-layered silences, have managed to negotiate a reasonable price. Daisy could imagine a small figure met by silence, a larger by silence, until the largest was met with that standard, indispensable phrase: “You are kind. Thank you.”

Daisy had taken her hands in the darkness, cradling her.
You don’t have to go on,
she had said, though a part of her had also thought
, Tell me everything, I need to know it all.
But Keiko hadn’t listened, either to what the voice said or what it meant. She had only paid attention to what was ahead—the necessity to tell what had been hidden: by this step, and by this step, and by this, I fled from the burning city. As though that was what she was, after all.
A
hibakusha
and nothing else—oh, that strange word, which sounded like a radioactive wind moving through branches.

As Daisy rounded the crescent onto Linden Street she imagined the letter she would take to Dr. Carney. Yes, she would write a letter, and not just to Carney either: to the Project, to Dean Atchity and Bertha, to the press, if that was what it took. She would expose the lot of them. She began to write the letter in her head, describing the vulnerability of the girl, then the blast—a blast so terrible it burnt itself not just into the body but into the mind—then the girl’s flight to America to escape. The sentences composed themselves in her head as she strode up Linden Street, white-hot words lighting up her skull.

A
S SHE RUNS THROUGH THE STREET
the seasons change. Huge flakes fill the air and every landmark she has known is no longer there. She looks to her left, trying to locate Hiroshima Castle, but sees a blackened hill. This is terrible, like a dream: the castle has always been there. The noodle house by the river is gone too, collapsed: beneath a heavy beam she sees the stocking feet of the owner lady, dirty white
tabi.
A dead man lies in the road, a piece of wood sticking from his eye.

Ojii-chan, she calls, though he is miles away. Ojii-chan, she wails.

Now a line of people move out of the smoke like sleepwalkers, walking towards her from the direction of the bridge. She runs towards them, but stops, aghast, because they hold their hands in front of them, and the skin hangs from their wrists, ragged gloves.
Faces swollen red like pomegranate. They walk past Keiko. One bumps into her and says,
Excuse me.

To her right a house catches on fire, all on its own.

D
AISY PAUSED IN FRONT OF HER HOUSE.
Strange to hear noise drifting through the window: it sounded like a party. She went up the steps and opened the door.

It wasn’t a party; it was a television set, shining at the end of the living room. A lustrous, purple-grained television—its cherrywood doors neatly retracted, exposing a black-and-white image of Lucille Ball dressed as a tramp, freckles the size of moles covering her cheeks, mascara-lashed eyes popped wide open. Canned laughter.

Keiko and Walter sat on the couch. Walter had his arm slung along the couch back, and he was chuckling; Keiko sat with ankles crossed, hands in her lap, wearing the outfit she had worn her first night at Riverside Meadows—a burgundy cotton dress, crunchy with hidden layers of tulle.

Daisy didn’t say a word; she just stood at the door. Walter got up and turned off the set.

“A thing of beauty,” he said gently. “Black-cherry veneer, heirloom quality.” He used the words pointedly, knowing they sounded like ad copy, but with pride in his voice too. “Today was delivery day.”

Keiko stood up, not meeting Daisy’s eyes, and slipped down the hall, closing her bedroom door. “She’s leaving in half an hour,” Walter said.

“What?”

“Yes.” He described what had happened. The telephone call from Irene, while he and Keiko were making breakfast. No, he hadn’t heard what they said to each other. He’d gone outside, smoked a cigarette on the porch.

“I asked you to keep an eye on her.”

“Well, that’s what I did.”

Later he had looked out the window and seen the top of the delivery van, over on Elm Street, and so he’d run after it, directing it to their house. In that time Keiko had put in a telephone call to Dr. Carney, requesting that he pick her up. “She’s happy about the television set,” he said. But still, she’s decided she wants to spend her last night, before the bandage removal, in town. At your friend Irene’s house.”

“She must be so confused. I’ll speak to her.”

He took her arm. “She needs to finish packing,” he said. “Better give her some privacy.”

Daisy looked at him blankly. “I have to talk to her,” she said.

“Let her pack first.”

She shook him off. But she did as he said. Instead of going down the hall, she went into Walter’s study and sat down. The room was an empty-looking place without the many
Dark Night
boxes, the mountain of Walter’s past. Daisy rolled paper into the typewriter, then began to compose a letter.
Dear Mr. Atchity,
she wrote—then stopped, hardly knowing how to start. Angry phrases, like spasms, composed themselves in her mind.

This girl is not a guinea pig.

I won’t let you hurt her.

Over my dead body.

She bent her head to the typewriter, resting her forehead against the keys. Nothing coherent or dignified came out. She ripped the paper out of the machine and threw it into the garbage,
among the last remnants of David Greenberg notes, and then went through the kitchen and onto the back porch, letting the screen door hiss closed behind her. She looked out at Ed’s greenhouse, the crazy monster of a hole, blocked by the fence. The door opened behind her, but when she turned she saw it was Walter, cigarette in his fingers, long, crooked body leaning against the doorframe. Daisy sat down with a groan and put her head in her hands. “They’re going to hurt her. They’re going to force her to speak—and this is your solution? Go along with everything she says. Buy her a television set, for Christ’s sake!”

Walter sat down and put his arm around Daisy, but she shrugged it off. “A television set!” she repeated bitterly. “Did you think that would make a difference? That you could buy her?” Then she laughed. “Funny thing is, it’s probably the best idea yet. Too bad you didn’t think of it sooner.”

They sat in silence for a while, her words soaking the air. Then he said quietly, “Nobody can decide what’s right for another person.”

“I can.”

He shook his head, a quaver of motion.

“Walter, please.” Daisy turned to him. “I need you to help me. I can’t fight this alone.”

“She’s got to make up her own mind.”

“But she’s so upset—don’t you see? She doesn’t know what her own mind is!”

He looked at her shrewdly, then butted his cigarette out on the underside of the porch banister. “I’m going in.” She heard him in the kitchen, mixing a drink. Keiko came out of her bedroom and stood beside Walter, as she had the first night, cutting a lime into thin, precise slices. After a while Daisy heard the screen door open again.

Keiko stood on the porch.

“So off you go,” Daisy said.

“Mrs. Lawrence—”

This made Daisy want to cry. “And why am I
always
Mrs. Lawrence? I asked you ages ago to call me Daisy.”

“Daisy.”

“You’re safe here, you know that. Nobody can touch you.”

“I am sorry, Mrs. Lawrence.”

“There you are again.
Mrs. Lawrence.”

“Forgive me.” A small bow.

“You won’t be able to do what they want—it will hurt too much. I know you, Keiko.
I know you.”
She felt the force of those words slip through her. Yes, it was true: she knew the girl through and through, better than Keiko knew herself even. She turned to see how that felt, her face full of reproach, but Keiko had slipped back inside, moving so softly that Daisy had not heard the door close.

T
HE RIVER TO HER LEFT IS FULL
of rowboats on fire, but then she realizes they are people, bodies charred, some still burning. The fire eats the wooden houses, leaps the walls of rubble meant to act as firebreaks. Now she has reached the bridge. She hears a blasting noise, the booming of flame. Looking into the grotto she sees strings of shrine papers in flames.

A woman sits at the other end of the bridge, cradling something in her lap, her back to Keiko. It is burnt. Keiko sees a pattern, leaves of bamboo from a summer kimono, printed there, like a tattoo.

Mama, Keiko calls.

Mama.

A little boy runs past them screaming, his padded headcovering in flames.

She is in hell, this is true, because when she looks again at the woman, she sees her face. She is not Mama, she is the faceless woman of her nightmares, crouched beside the stone parapet, clutching a baby that does not move.

A
S SOON AS
D
R.
C
ARNEY PARKED
in the driveway, Daisy ran across the lawn and leaned down to speak to him through his window, even as he opened the car door.

“Dr. Carney—”

“Nice afternoon,” he said, ignoring her panic. He got out of the car, holding his medical bag. It smelled of disinfectant and leather. Next door the Warburghs had had their driveway repaved; what Daisy remembered later was facing off with Dr. Carney against the smell of chewy tar.

“I don’t want her hurt!” Daisy’s voice was louder and lower than she meant it to be.

“What on earth do you mean?”

“She says she wants to go, but I don’t believe it—”

“She’s opening up. That’s good.”

“It’s not good! It’s wrong!”

He was walking up the path towards the house and she caught at his sleeve, a rough gesture. He stopped in his tracks. “She won’t be made into your puppet,” Daisy said. “If you want to
photograph her, you have to talk to me first. If you want people to interview her, you come to me. And don’t you dare have her appear on your show.”

Dr. Carney looked at Daisy’s hot face and he laughed. “I think you’re out of your depth, Mrs. Lawrence.” He turned again and walked up the steps.

“If you exploit her,” Daisy hissed, “I’ll go to the press. I’ll tell them that you’re using her to advance your career. Using her like a guinea pig. I’ll talk to the State Department.”

He took a step towards her, and for a moment Daisy thought he was going to hit her, but instead he merely patted her on the shoulder. “She will speak out, Mrs. Lawrence.”

“Not if I can help it. It’s the worst thing for her.”

“You’re the expert, are you?” He went up the steps and put his hand on the doorknob. “She’s in here, I take it. You haven’t spirited her away to some hiding place. Taken her underground?” Dr. Carney’s eyes, which often looked blurry, were sharp now, studying Daisy.

The door opened. Keiko stood in front of them, clutching her shell-encrusted purse. Walter stood beside Keiko, skeletal and sardonic and handsome as ever, holding the girl’s moon-shaped valise, greeting the doctor amiably, shaking his hand, man to man.
Don’t bother with my wife, Doctor
—his handshake seemed to say—
she’s given to hysterics. Mood swings. Bouts of fevered irrationality.

Within moments Keiko was sitting in the front seat of the doctor’s mushroom-coloured car. She would not look at Daisy, and Daisy for her part turned her face, but Walter smiled, closed-lipped, and waved. The car seemed to take a long time to drive down Linden Street and round the crescent, but in less than a minute it was out of view.

A
T DAWN
, in a place called Yucca Flat, an atomic bomb thirty-three times more powerful than Hiroshima’s bomb was to be detonated. “The self same morning,” Irene had repeated in her telephone calls to the press, “that Keiko Kitigawa, our Hiroshima Maiden, enters the hospital for the removal of her bandages—one might say that destruction and redemption have been packed into a single American morning.” The press had taken the bait. As Keiko and Irene stepped from their taxi in front of Mount Sinai Hospital, they were overwhelmed by photographers, reporters, even a newsman making a sound recording. They ran at Irene and Keiko, as they had at Mitchell Air Force Base.
Will you say a few words, Miss Kitigawa?
A flash went off and Keiko covered her face instinctively. But now a familiar large and freckled hand reached out, grasped the journalist’s camera, held it lightly like a toy, then flung it to the ground. “Keiko,” Tom Orley called out. “I’m over here, I won’t leave—” but Irene pushed by him.