Hiroshima in the Morning (24 page)

When her face rises at the level of my feet and I see it for the first time, her eyes are wide, pinned back, panicked, her hair flying away from her head as if she is falling, though she’s rushing in the opposite direction. The wrong direction, impossible, but I know it is her, even though she looks nothing like herself. She is a cartoon, a spooked horse; her terror startles me and so she’s past me before I can catch her, ahead of me on the stairs, and before I can move—I’m not frozen, just dumb, just unable—the stairs begin to crumble, each stair she has touched falling away and I’m in a hall suspended in space, the sky in front and beneath and above me, the stairs falling.

I do not know if I can’t, or won’t, or didn’t follow. All I’m aware of is the ringing footfalls of my mother above me running up the endless, crumbling stairs.

IT IS NOT UNTIL it happens that you realize it has been happening all along—like my telephone ringing when we get back to Hiroshima, so many requests and invitations. When
did I collect so many people in my life, and how could I have thought myself alone with all these calls? If, in my first weeks in Hiroshima, I was having trouble rummaging up a single interview, now they are pouring in. How could I have believed myself unproductive when I’ve done so much and there’s so much more to do?

Although it seems torn from the pages of fiction, a woman I called during my first week here has suddenly decided she’s ready to talk to me. I remember that first contact, my inability to secure a yes and her offer of tea. Now, I can’t remember what her story was, and whether I have “gotten” it already. This calculation is more than ugly—my encounters with the
hibakusha
have become a kind of healing, less about my own need for information than about their re-experiencing the bomb in safety—and I’m not sure where it comes from. I’ve been in Japan long enough to have mastered my own demur: my family is here. Perhaps there might be time later, yes, when it is convenient.

I wish it could be true.

I have gotten into the habit of letting the phone ring, then checking my messages. A man I spoke with last month, who treated me to a five-course lunch made entirely from tofu so that he could lay out his full argument in favor of a Japanese “fighting force,” now wants to take me to see the kamikaze museum in Kagoshima, at the southernmost tip of Japan. He has called three times in the last week, and I have not answered. I can feel myself pulling away, though I don’t know what from, exactly; there’s a disconnect in my life I will not look at, but that I expect will become clear.
Meanwhile, I am home, returning only those calls I can say yes to. Which are Jane and Kimiko—
Yes, we are home safe. I will see you soon
—and Ami.

Ami calls in the evening, after Brian is asleep. Her father will be performing again. This time, he wants to invite us backstage. And the doctors she’s been trying to reach for me have suggested a time when we can meet. There are two of them, friends, men who were working in the Red Cross Hospital when the bomb fell. One of my characters is a doctor, and I have always said I need to understand how they moved in the world during the war and how they coped with the bombing, that I need to be able to describe the inside of crumbled buildings, where the dead, dying, and damaged were indistinguishable for weeks. It has taken more than a month for Ami to get these two men together, but she has done it at last and she’s bursting with the news.

I haven’t told her about my promise to Brian. Every time I try, the words sound wrong.
He doesn’t want me to. I need to be with them.
It makes no sense that I’m in Japan but
not
doing interviews, though when I made this offer, in Kyoto, it seemed like the only choice.

When we were apart, Brian did everything. He refused all help; he made cookies for the school bake sale instead of buying them like the rest of the working parents; he cooked for the children
and
my parents every night of their month-long visit instead of getting takeout. Instead of doing what I begged him to: go out, go away for the weekend, take a photography course, try to relax. He hollowed himself out, inspired by his friends’ comments that he was “a saint” to let
me go to Japan, rehearsing the shorter fact that
he was letting me do this
. It was his gift to me, and the harder it was to give, the more proof that he loved me; the more synergy he could create—however postponed and long distance—to bind us together when we were reunited.

It
was
a gift. It was for me. But in its giving, both of us are miserable. There’s no gesture I can make to match it, not even giving up my interviews. He has no faith, not in me, not in my promises. Anything I do for myself now just throws his sacrifices in his face.

Even when he’s asleep—as they all are now, my childhood sweetheart on his back, arms out like Christ ascending, a small boy tucked into each crook—Brian’s cheeks are sunken and his eyes bruised by his long ordeal. While I was in the shower, playing these same, terrible grooves in hope of an answer,
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
folded itself around his exhausted thumb and in less than five minutes, the three of them lost the bedtime story and drifted away. The thing I do not forget, cannot forget, amid Brian’s distress and the boys’ wild sally forth on their saucers of need, is that I love them. I chose them.

“Brian . . . ” I say into the telephone. There must be some way to make Ami understand. “He’s so tired and he’s had the kids for so long . . . ”

“Of course he can come too,” she says. She means to the Noh performance. In true Japanese fashion, she has heard my words, but more than that, she’s heard my silence and she understands this is serious. While I’ve been running through my mind, she has been spinning a plan. Has he seen
Tomo-no-ura? she asks. Of course, there’s been no time, not yet. But he could go there, while I am doing my interview. He could rent a bike—it’s a beautiful fishing village with narrow streets on the Inland Sea, so easy to navigate—and of course someone else will watch the children. She will fix it. It is set then. He will love it. He will love Japan.

I can’t suggest this to Brian. I know what Ami’s saying to me, that I have put her in an awkward situation, that she will lose her credibility if I say no. I know the reputation she has been building with me is important to her work as a peace activist, and that she believes these interviews will save the world. This is what she’s telling me, with her force-fulness. I am being squeezed on both sides and I don’t know if there’s any leeway on either. I know something else too, even as I take in my sleeping family: there is yet another interview I’ve been trying to arrange, the most important interview of my time here, and I have recently received an email that it might come through.

I can’t fight this. I don’t know what to do, except to do nothing.

“Why don’t you call back in the morning?” I ask her. “You can say hello to Brian. He is so looking forward to meeting you.”

FIFTEEN MINUTES BEFORE show time, and Ami has slipped me behind the great stage curtain, where we can watch her father getting ready for his role. The first play is the story of the moon princess who comes down to earth to bathe in a pool and the fisherman who steals her robe. Ami’s father plays the goddess; he is seated in a wide chair, draped in a kimono and
hakama
of gold and orange. The costume, deliberately bulky, is being tweaked into perfect drapes by the dressers who are helping him get into his role. The fabrics swirl in a cacophony of colors and patterns; the final, clashing layer of orange and gold is perhaps deliberately too brilliant to hold the human eye.

If Brian was here, would he see it as I do? Would the Japanese indifference to coordinated clothing that’s evident daily on the street of Hiroshima flicker into his head? This is joy for me, crazy as it seems—these fleeting glimpses of sense that pass through whenever I’m not trying to make sense. When I first came to Japan, I would have analyzed this clothing preference, written a little paragraph on it; just before Brian came, I would have experienced it and let it go. Though I can guess, I’ll never know which reaction Brian would have to this. We couldn’t bring the children, so Brian wouldn’t come.

The goddess ignores us and the fussing dressers. He is gazing at his reflection in the full-length mirror that’s been
placed in front of him. On his head, an elaborate female hair-piece, and over it, in front of his face, a spray of ornamental gold. The goddess’s mask is set quite high—her forehead above his, which leaves quite a fat lower jaw protruding and gives his silhouette a hunched appearance.

Ami’s father is still, absorbing his reflection. No effort has been made to hide this man inside his character, and yet he’s disguised just the same. This effect is noticeable on the stage, but up close, enough to see his pores and jowls, something I have come to sense about Japan suddenly comes into focus. I remember, when I first arrived here, being preoccupied with opposites and lies. How could we claim one thing, yet be another? Americans view ‘duality’ as deception: they pride themselves on being transparent, on being one thing—only and always—and turning that “true” face to the world. The Japanese, though, show their allegiance to society, and their respect, by being different in the outside world than they would be at home. In Japan, dichotomy is commonplace, and yet it is less like division, and more like addition. We can be both indirect and forceful; victim and savior; mother, yet child. We prize the Noh dancer because we can see the essence of both creatures—the heavy body moving lightly—and we understand the achievement.

His feet make her step mincing. His fan flickers with her grace. We want to see his skill beneath her face and hold onto both at the same time.

Him and her, simultaneous. Both visible. Both real.

ON THE DAY BEFORE, we tiptoe. When we walk together to the train station to buy his tickets to Tomo-no-ura, to get film for his camera, I point out the stairs to the platforms and confirm the number of the one where he will wait in the morning. Brian is more like himself today, the former intrepid traveler. I write down a few basic questions for him in Japanese—
jitensha wa . . . doko desuka?—
so he can rent a bicycle to get around and he mutters them, testing and tasting the words. I don’t know how Ami did it, but he seems excited to be going out on his own. He has decided to be happy, to enjoy Japan, and if the day means that I will also be enjoying a different, separate Japan, he seems to have accepted that for the moment.

We do not voice the fact that I am doing an interview when I said I would not. We do not declare it the last one.

And on that morning, Ian wakes up just as Brian is leaving and comes into my room to snuggle under my futon. We lie together and look through the gauzy curtains to the river. I give him a hug and he whispers: “I love you, Mommy.” Then turns his head and pukes all over my pillow.

The front door is opening. I wait until it closes.

The interview is not until noon. The interval between vomiting is getting longer, but Ian can’t hold water down. He’s so tired he will curl up on the linoleum floor of his own volition, which is a good thing since I can’t put him in the
tatami rooms or under the quilted and borrowed
kotatsu
in case he vomits again, so I lay a towel down on the linoleum, cover him with blankets, and pull the small space heater over to him.

He sleeps.

I think.

Dylan devours two pre-manufactured pancakes from 7-Eleven, one squashed chocolate pudding
manju
shaped like a fish, a banana, and toast.

I could live without this interview if I had to. My child is sick, and my work is much less important that he is. But . . . the boys have shown a great capacity to puke and recover within hours. Ian will spend his day sleeping. And Brian is gone.

I circle this dawning conclusion, poised to cast it off if it’s revealed to be too self absorbed. But it sits there. Inert.
No one is pressing me, or angry to be picking up my slack, so why am I even questioning whether I should drop the interview for a bad bite of chicken or a touch of the flu?

I am losing the novel. Once my story haunted me, but now I’ve handed it over, tried to buy peace with it, even though I know it’s not the right currency and peace cannot be bought. I ignored the bombing once, and I am doing it again, numbly putting it off to the side until my life is more stable, focusing instead on our travel schedule, waiting for that future day—“when nothing else is going on”—and hoping that I’ve already gathered everything I will need then. But what if I haven’t? What if my memory fades, just as theirs has or through some other, more ominous manner?
What if I lose myself, and the book dies? I used to think I owed this book to my Aunt Molly. Then I owed it to the
hibakusha
, who tell their stories so that their loved ones will not have died in vain.

But now, I want it back. I miss my ghosts.

I call Ami and begin to broach the subject of the vomit. She’s the one who will stay with the boys—they’ve met her and it seemed to be the best choice—so I’ve asked another friend to do my translation. She assures me she will come, no problem; she has friends with children, she has borrowed lots of toys and books—so many things to do at my house for the afternoon. Don’t worry about the kids, don’t worry about
Harry Potter
, the movie they will now no longer go to, don’t worry that she’ll get sick too . . . By the time Ami arrives, Ian has not thrown up in hours, though he’s not eaten anything in hours either, and from his prone position, he even seems mildly interested in her wealth of goodies.

Of course. Look at Dylan.

Dylan is already tossing his way through the pile of books, looking at the drawings. I promise to be back in two and a half hours.

Better make that three.