The Hummingbird (5 page)

“A great many sunrises, you said. Have you lived here a long time?”

“That is the only way an academic can afford a palace such as this,” Barclay Reed sniffed. “By purchasing his house decades before a glorified pond becomes a domain of luxury and wealth.”

“That reminds me.” I moved in front of him. “A strange thing happened today. I went to the university library to check out one of your books.”

“That is indeed strange, Nurse Birch. My work is not the sort of popular pulp with which I suspect you normally amuse yourself.”

I was learning to let the Professor’s insults go. They were a habit of his, condescension by reflex, and had no sting. “Actually, the strange thing was that they didn’t have your writing there. Not one copy of one book.”

His eyebrows rose. “Is that so?”

“I’m all done fibbing with you, Professor.”

“Blast it all.” He was grinning. “How perfectly proper of them.”

“You’re not surprised?”

His smile vanished. “What if I told you that in August of 1945, after two mass murders by atomic detonation, the American military possessed two more bombs, ready for use? That, had the Japanese not surrendered, our nation was prepared to destroy two more cities and kill everyone in them?”

“Is that true?”

“You tell me, Nurse Birch.”

“I don’t know, Professor. I’ve never heard about two more bombs.”

“But do you believe me? That is my primary concern.”

“I guess. Why wouldn’t I?”

“Why not, indeed.” He rubbed his bony hands together. “Furthermore, what if I told you that the Allies dropped thousands of leaflets on Hiroshima and Nagasaki beforehand, urging people to run for their lives?”

“We warned them? How could I have spent a full year of high school history on World War II and never heard about that?”

“And yet you believe me?”

“Well, you’re blowing my mind a bit. But sure, I believe you.”

“Fair enough.” The professor spun his wheelchair to face me. “In my view, both uses of atomic weapons were justified. More to my point, however, may we stipulate that there remain significant untold stories from the Pacific theater of World War II?”

I had no idea how these questions connected to his books not being in the library. But the Professor was more fervent than I’d seen him. This was energy far beyond his insults, and I would not interrupt. “All right.”

“Might we also agree that there could be keen interest among the public in learning such things? Might a scholar expect that his research on this topic would be in high demand?”

“Which topic? I’m not quite following you.”

But the Professor was not speaking to me any longer. He had wheeled his chair back and was orating to the lake. “Now to the heart of our argument. Let us take as given that human ambition is a vile, pernicious form of entropy.” He was not lecturing. He was ranting, and at an increasing volume. “Let us imagine a doctoral student, bright and able and oh so ambitious, an acolyte whom a professor therefore entrusts with certain discoveries in confidence, in advance of their publication. Might that young scholar experience a temptation to appropriate the findings for himself?”

“Wait. Someone stole your ideas?”

His fists pounded the chair arms. “Yes, blast it, yes. He might have succeeded too, but for a fortuitous coincidence. A faculty member on his thesis panel also served as history editor of the university press. When the young man presented a dissertation abstract nearly identical to my new book proposal, the editor knew at once that someone had plagiarized. He confronted the student, who alleged that I had filched his work.” Barclay Reed shook his head. “It was admirably brazen.”

“You put up a fight, of course.”

“Nurse Birch, try to understand.” Barclay Reed held out both hands, weighing each side of the argument as if he were a scale. “The young man was my protégé, whereas I was one semester shy of retirement. He stood at the dawn of his career, while I hardly needed one more publication for my résumé.” He lowered his hands. “I believed it would be gallant to step aside, a graybeard making room for the young novice. Moreover, I assumed that with my imminent move to emeritus status, the whole dispute would evaporate.”

“So what happened?”

The Professor took a moment to regain himself, clearing his throat, making a little circle with the point of his chin. “I miscalculated.”

“What does that mean?”

“Seniority and reputation cannot solve all problems. Instead, the young man was lionized, whereas I experienced academic exile. Forget thirty-eight years on the faculty. Colleagues snubbed me in the hallway and department meetings. They declined to return my calls. There were no fond farewells, no retirement dinners, no valedictories.”

“What about your book?”

“At the university press, the proposal died of editorial neglect. I sought publication elsewhere, without success. One day I spotted Townsend, a former colleague, at a restaurant here by the lake. I confronted him, and he delivered the truth. No one believed my proposal was true. Oh, they could verify certain details to know it was not complete fabrication. But the rest was less easily confirmed, and my credibility too damaged.” He chopped a hand down. “It was like a guillotine blow.”

“That all sounds so unfair,” I said. “But it only involves your last book. Why take your old ones off the shelf? It’s not like they stopped being true.”

The Professor was calming now, or tiring, and he only shrugged. “It was a scandal. Universities experience them routinely, yet never know what response will be appropriate. I suppose I didn’t either, or my self-defense would not have been as much of a nolo contendere.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Perhaps you will look it up, when next you visit the library.” The Professor pulled his blanket tighter. “Bring me inside, please. I’m feeling chilled.”

NORMALLY MICHAEL WOULD HAVE BEEN HOME
by the time I arrived. Somehow I knew without going inside that the house was empty. But I did not panic. He’d had to work out a ride, and that probably meant waiting. I took out my phone, confirmed that there were no messages, and put it away without calling him. Pestering would not help, nor bring him home any sooner.

The day had turned humid, and our home was not air conditioned, so I went through all the rooms, opening windows. I started the fan in the kitchen.

That was when I noticed that Michael had forgotten to turn my computer off. I sat and slipped off my sandals while the screen saver paged between photos of a slideshow I’d assembled years back: Michael in uniform about to ship out, my grad-school commencement in cap and gown, the kite surfers soaring behind our wedding.

As a social work student you find yourself opening all kinds of websites, to observe all sorts of social ills. So I’d been taught to clear the history after every online session. Michael said I was fooling myself, the Internet was designed to be the opposite of privacy. But I’d continued the practice at home, maintaining the hope that my searches, emails, and purchases were somehow not subject to snooping and tracking. Michael might have been right, but it was what I preferred to believe.

At that moment, the screen saver photos showed only one thing to me: temptation. I could spy on Michael’s searches, and he would never know. Or I could honor his privacy, and he would never know. He might be shopping for a truck, checking bus schedules, ogling breasts. None of it was my business, unless I chose to make it so.

No. I was not going to be that kind of wife. Michael deserved an uninvaded life. Besides, I didn’t need to spy. In general terms, I already knew what his issues were. What my husband needed was the tincture of time. That phrase comes from the bereavement part of hospice work, based on a crude but accurate truth: Emotional pain, no matter how severe, does diminish after a while, because time is somehow merciful.

No. His dignity mattered more than my curiosity. I moved the mouse to shut the system down, only to find that he had not even closed the sites he’d visited. One by one they refreshed before me. I was about to see some revelations in spite of myself.

The first one was an update on Iraq, towns secured, offensives under way, who controlled which cities. To my eyes it was chaos, as if Michael and his fellow soldiers had never been there. I clicked to end his session.

But one of the blogs remained up, three screens of it, so I had to close each one separately. There was no way to avoid looking.

It was called “Coming Home.” The first screen was called “Great Expectations” and it offered five steps for convincing friends, family members, and co-workers to lower their expectations of you. When I closed that one, the next was “Guilty Conscience.” It opened by describing a unit that had received incorrect intelligence and killed an innocent family, and how the soldiers were struggling to re-enter home life. That one I wanted to read, because I knew Michael’s conscience was what kept him awake.

The last one bore another headline that hooked me: “Eight Signs Your Mental Health Is in Trouble.” The first sign, in bold: You contemplate acts of violence. I closed that one as fast as I could.

And then the screen was blank. By habit, I went to clear the history, and discovered that I could also review any site visited since the last clearing. I hovered the cursor over that command.

“Hey, Deb.”

I wheeled in my chair, heart in my throat. “God, you startled me.”

Michael leaned against the doorframe. “Sorry. Just got home.”

I took him in, his forehead shiny with sweat, his shirt darkened on the chest and under his arms. “Did you walk the whole way from the shop?”

He took a long draw from the glass of water in his hand. “I guess I did.”

“Aren’t you roasting?”

“Times two. But I liked it. I liked moving slowly.”

“Oh. That’s good, honey.” By then I had collected myself. “Welcome home. Be with you in one second.”

I turned to finish shutting the computer down, then spun the chair back to stand and give him a kiss, but Michael had already put his glass in the sink. He stood at the kitchen door. “I’m going to walk some more, Deborah. It might be good for me.”

“Want some company?” I reached to pull my sandals back on.

But he shook his head. “Don’t hold dinner.”

Just like that he was gone, out into the sweltering evening. The screen door slammed behind him. And I wondered: What are they? Those eight signs that your mental health is in trouble?

IN ADDITION TO JAPANESE CULTURE
and military successes, one other ingredient was critical to the I-25 submarine’s Oregon mission: anemic American morale.

The effectiveness of Japan’s warring had given the United States an unprecedented sense of vulnerability. President Roosevelt articulated as much in one of his fireside chats: “The broad oceans which have been heralded in the past as our protection from attack have become endless battlefields on which we are constantly being challenged by our enemies.”

Anxiety found nationwide expression. The day after Pearl Harbor, based on rumors that an attack was imminent, Oakland closed its schools and ordered a blackout. Lieutenant General John DeWitt of the Western Defense Command proclaimed: “Last night there were planes over this community. They were enemy planes. I mean Japanese planes.”

Similar rumors struck the East Coast. Fighter planes scrambled from Mitchel Field on Long Island to intercept enemy aircraft less than two hours away. Schools closed. Stocks on Wall Street plummeted.

There were no planes over Oakland, no bombers approaching Manhattan.

In 1942, only months prior to the I-25 mission, Los Angeles also experienced a panic. Air raid sirens sounded throughout the county. Just after three
A.M.
, the Thirty-seventh Coast Artillery Brigade began firing antiaircraft shells. The shooting lasted an hour, with more than 1,400 shells fired—approximately one every three seconds.

Afterward, no one in a position of command could state with clarity what the troops had been firing at. Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox declared the entire incident a false alarm. Knox’s diagnosis: “war nerves.” After the war ended, Japanese officials said they had no aircraft in the vicinity at the time.

If hearsay could generate panic on that scale, imagine the power of actual fires. Civilians would scatter like ants. Dousing the blaze would require massive resources. Americans, convinced of superior Japanese military organization and ferocity, would lose their stomach for fighting the sons of samurai.
Shouri.

Or so went the reasoning within the Imperial Navy. Thus did the admirals dispatch the I-25 to Oregon. It was one of twenty submarines of a new design. At 2,600 tons, these ships were large by the standards of the day: 357 feet long and 30.5 feet across. They were powered by twin diesels, 12,400 horsepower each, plus two 2,000-horsepower electric motors for silent running.

This class of subs was fast. Submerged, they could make 8 knots (9 mph), but their surface top speed was 23.5 knots (27 mph). Thus they could cover some 600 miles in a day. Perhaps their greatest value, however, was range: 25,928 miles—three times the extent of Allied subs. These vessels could sail around the globe without refueling. They were therefore dangerously well suited to conducting offensives all the way across the world’s largest ocean.

The I-25 carried several deck weapons, including a pair of 25-mm machine guns. The main gun fired 5.5-inch shells, the explosive portion of which measured nearly 18 inches and weighed 60 pounds. This gun had a range of nine miles and sat on the stern for two reasons. The first was to leave room for a catapult on the bow, more on which in a moment. The other was to enable the ship to be shelling as it escaped.

Lastly, the I-25 had six torpedo tubes. It had sunk the British
Derrymore
, as well the
Fort Camosun,
a Canadian freighter carrying war supplies for England.

Yet in September 1942 the submarine’s primary weapon was its passenger. He sat below while the weather stormed. Imagine the atmosphere: diesel motors chugging, water leaking in one seam or another, sweaty sailors, food odors, smoke from Kinshi cigarettes, and under it all the sharp scent of human fear.