Hiroshima in the Morning (14 page)

 

The test for all of us will not be getting through the initial attack, but how we will try to move forward. Our IDs are checked each time we cross Fourteenth Street like it is a border. Right now the wind has shifted and the smell is getting stronger as the cloud blows over the island instead of out to sea as it did yesterday. I’m thinking of relocating for the night to a friend’s uptown although the mayor is saying the air is not toxic. I’ll wait a bit and see. All New Yorkers are
gaining a great new respect for our controversial mayor and feel in good hands with him at the helm.

 

That’s all for now. I’ll keep you posted. Keep us in your thoughts. n

I HAVE BEEN WAITING in my apartment for something to happen, for nothing to happen. It’s so still here, in the silence; I can hide here, I can believe the dreams of yesterday are just that. I will wake up, and if I don’t wake up, I will be passed over, unharmed, just as I imagine that my family will be safe in our house if they stay inside and wait. I have friends in New York who are venturing out, searching the wreckage, roaming the ruined city. Except, it is not exactly ruined. They are fine, seem safe. They are snatching life from the debris.

New York is not Hiroshima. The world is safer if New York is not Hiroshima. Not a ruin where it was impossible to sightsee in the first stunned months, impossible to visit the epicenter as a tourist from a place of safety and normalcy for years.

Still, I imagine that my family is inside, like I am, all of us in the closet in the dark, waiting for the footsteps to fade,
waiting until there are no more planes in the air—it seems, now, that there are no planes in the air. There is no word—no news, no more threats, no explanation or assurance to coax us out of this nothingness, this refuge where grief cannot move through the vacuum. Not yet.

There is nothing to do yet. I don’t have anything to jump at, like Nathan, no way to move to prove that I’m not dead. Of course, I am not dead. My home is raining pieces of paper and bits of fiberglass and I’m not even affected.

I am the only person left on the planet who has no experience of war.

THE CALLS HAVE BEEN COMING steadily, into the silence. One of Kimiko’s friends, Maiko, calls at ten a.m. Her son is in New York and she still hasn’t been able to get through to him. She wants to know how I am. She wants to know if she should cancel the interview she’s arranged with Dr. Fujita this afternoon.

Cancel the interview?

What is today?

I have an interview.

I have been up for hours; I am showered, dressed. I have nothing to do but sit by the phone, knowing that it cannot
be Brian and wondering if perhaps it might be. Nothing to do but write in my diary. I haven’t eaten; I haven’t looked at my calendar.

Will anyone mind if I don’t cancel my interview?

I have been waiting to speak with Keiko Fujita since I arrived in Hiroshima. She was a practicing doctor in Hiroshima during the war—one of the few still alive. I am writing a doctor into the novel, so I need Dr. Fujita’s information.

Need is enough, I know. Fulfilling an obligation in Japan is enough reason, enough excuse to go out. But the fact is, I
want
to talk to her. I want to talk to someone. I want my life to move again, more recognizably, more truthfully than the sound of my voice on the telephone saying: “Yes, I heard. Everyone is fine. Yes, it’s lucky isn’t it? No, don’t worry.”

But Maiko’s son is in New York.

“Hmm,” I say. “What do you think? Perhaps it’s not a good time for you?”

“No problem,” she says. “I am fine.”

Keiko Fujita has not just the promised two, but a full four hours of energy to give me. She has been telling her story, and helping others tell theirs, for decades, so she has more versions than I’m used to, with more details. Since she was badly injured in the bombing, she can’t report on the hospitals, but she’s delighted to go off the track and gossip about the colleague who stole her lunch in the waning days of starvation before the bombing; about husbands and families; about how she made a choice to care for her mother instead of being married; about wedding hairstyles; about
hats. For the first time during one of my interviews, there is no need to keep her talking or press for details. Either she has an incredible memory or something has opened in her today. But today, there’s nothing for me to do, nothing but listen, but watch. Amid these anecdotes are vivid descriptions of her wounds, her back sliced open, of the blackened post-bomb rush to get out of the city—some of the most powerful, certainly the most personal, descriptions I have ever heard. I feel myself relaxing as she talks, though I had no sensation that I was not relaxed before. Perhaps it’s that I have found myself doing what I was doing before the World Trade Center fell, something I know. Perhaps it is that the narrative of Hiroshima is now familiar, soothing in its utter destruction, so much worse than now. The emotional blanks of Hiroshima have suddenly become reassuring: if Hiroshima is too terrible to be reexperienced, even from the distance of time, if it cannot be described, then it is intangible, just a nightmare. Something too aberrant to be repeated.

When Dr. Fujita is finished and has passed on other people’s tales of horror, it must merely be politeness, then, that turns her attention to how awful the terrorist attack was and how happy she is that my family survived.

She makes no relative judgment between the two, so I am compelled to. What happened to her, I point out, and to Hiroshima, was a hundred times worse. An entire city, an entire network of roads, shelter, medicine, families destroyed vs. downtown Manhattan cordoned off but with email access and intermittent telephone. I tell her of the stream of messages
I’ve received from every friend and acquaintance in my address book: “
We are fine
.” “
Family Flood is safe
.” “
It is very, very weird here
.” “
I have a cold
.” Everyone alive, home, safe. Some even with humor intact. Brian wrote to me about the guy who called his office several hours after the attack to rant about the rat running around his apartment.

But in Dr. Fujita’s eyes, there is a break in the timeline, a union of past, present, and future. And it doesn’t lessen her sorrow.

Her sorrow for me.

WHAT IF, INSTEAD OF PLANES, they had used nuclear weapons? My parents, children, my husband would all be dead. My friends would be dead. Everything I own, everything I know, would be gone in an instant.

Just as the
hibakusha
have described.

This “instant” is where my head is now. I have known, intellectually for a while that, from the instant the bomb was dropped, the world was never the same. Not only crushed, not only gone, but also threatened by the very weapon we created. If anger brought me to Hiroshima, and if that anger was based in fear, then I am beginning to understand why I’m frightened. It’s impossible to know
anything
about the bomb and not be frightened. The less you know, the more the gaps terrify you. The more you know, the more difficult it is to sleep. It’s this haunting that my Aunty Molly passed on to me. It is not so much the effects of the atomic bomb that we have no protection against. It is, as one of the creators of that bomb once said, its mere existence.

And now, in the middle of a new attack, I realize that the possibility of war, the possibility of terror, has been with us all along. Why didn’t we see it? Why couldn’t we all feel it, in enough time to face it, in enough time—how naïve am I?—to stop it? What must it have been like to see it happening, to see the bomb dropping and have the time to wonder—just as Brian did when he saw the hijacked plane,
too low amid the buildings in front of him, and realized something was not right? So there is that moment, then; the last breath of
before
: when life is about to change, utterly and forever, into something we have no way to conceive of. When the trajectory is already being drawn and there is no way to stop it.

Have we been living in that moment all along?

And when does
after
begin? In Hiroshima, there were thousands of people who were trapped in the rubble as the fires approached after the bomb itself had fallen; in New York, there were thousands of people who were hijacked in the air, or trapped in elevators or in their offices, with the full knowledge that there was no escape, that they were dying, that there was
not enough time
. And there were those of us who couldn’t get through, who didn’t know what was going on. Those who will retrace the steps that left us alive, that led our loved ones to the wrong place and the wrong time, who will finger our scars, the smooth skin where our ear used to be, and wonder if we should feel blessed or guilty.

This is the
hibakusha
twilight, the uncertainty that even the strongest of them dwell in today.

 

Hey,

 

Bush is coming to town. What the fuck do we need him for? He says he wants to hug people. Can you imagine? The kids are back in school. Mike was digging yesterday. He said it is far worse than anything they show in the media. Took me two and a half hours to get home last night with the car.

 

Slept like shit last night. Thunderstorms are running through town. Must be miserable digging today. They pulled five guys out yesterday though, in an SUV.

 

Running out of milk at the delis in the neighborhood. I feel alone despite all the people around me. The office is quiet as hell. I’m here earlier than usual, though. There was police action in the train this morning. Kind of weird. About six cops got on and looked around. People are obviously edgier than usual.

 

I continue to love you despite everything.

 

B.

 

 

they pulled five guys out alive?

 

i feel very alone here too. i know it can’t compare to what you are going through. here, i have shifted in status from “different because i am american” to “different because of tragedy.” even though technically, i have no tragedy.

 

i would love to hold you, i would love to have you in my sight and know that you are safe. i keep thinking we should get the hell out of new york and go back to hawaii. live a simpler life together, the kind i am living here.

 

i have been loving you always. “despite it all” you say? because of it all, i say.

 

always.

 

r

 

 

 

For those of you who didn’t see it, great article in Wednesday’s
Miami Herald
. . . click on the link, but here’s a taste:

 

“You’ve bloodied us as we have never been bloodied before. But there’s a gulf of difference between making us bloody and making us fall.