Radiance (15 page)

“They’re as real as you are,” she had said, “probably realer. Eloise can speak French, and you can’t.”

French. That was rich.

“What does she say then?”

And before his startled eyes Emmy had leaned back, as though to yodel, and a wealth of French had poured from her lips.

During the war, he kept picturing her as that girl of eight, though in fact she’d been eleven when he left, taller and leaner. But upside down over Rouen and Dieppe, squeezed into the tail of a B-
17
, disoriented by the thudding of steel, which both surrounded him and came from the cavity of his torso, it was Emmy at eight whose face swam into view if he closed his eyes—bright pale eyes, pigtails, red knuckles. Her fury at the world for getting so much wrong!

In dreams he walks up the road towards the farmhouse. To his right is the ditch, full of oak leaves and mud. A fence post has been knocked down. The sight of barbed wire trailing on the ground, beside the ditch, makes him sick. His father is so careful with the fences. Beyond the ditch, the east field is dry and brown. No snow yet. The house ahead looks empty, though in his dream the border collie, Mitch, will soon come out wagging his
whole body. He steps along the road towards home, but then, always, a woolly blankness like cotton batten invades the corner of his eyes. He tries to move but cannot swing his legs: he has forgotten how, or they grow limp, boneless and flabby. When he wakes, he is often sobbing.

In fact, the fence was intact the day he came home. He entered the farmhouse without incident, except that he surprised his mother at the stove, and she dropped a can of hot grease on her foot. She held him tight in her swallowing embrace, while Tom’s father came down the steps behind them, the black jacket he wore on Sundays flapping at the arms. And where was Emmy? He looked over his mother’s shoulder at his father—that gaunt, haunted face—and asked for his sister.

His father told him how Emmy had woken up one morning and called out, “I can’t move my legs.” This was the sort of highjinks she always used to be up to, and at first they thought it was a joke.

“You
thought it was a joke,” Tom’s mother corrected. “
I
knew.”

He tried to picture what they had lived through, the gradations of the disease—first hours, first days, the doctors, the specialists; the encroachment of the paralysis; poliomyelitis; until here they were—wiped clean by it.

All through the story, Tom kept expecting her to run downstairs, holding the rabbit.

They took him to the infirmary, a treed place, expensive, called Carling Memorial. The private room had green floors, yellow curtains in a plastic material, like shower curtains, that the nurses wiped down with sponges. Emmy at eighteen—that was a shock, almost as much as seeing her in the iron lung. She had become a plain girl, with sunken eyes close together, though she had the same overlapping front teeth. The machine expanded and contracted her chest, did her breathing for her.

He sat beside her and listened to the machine wheezing as it pushed her lungs in and out. Emmy’s pale eyes looked back at him from the pillow, all resistance taken from her by the complications of breathing. Her braids had gotten messy, and that was upsetting because she always cared about their neatness. One of the things he had always liked was how she braided her hair right to the tip, so that they got thin as a rat’s tail. “Real China Man braids,” their father called them.

Emmy-Mae. Emily Mae.

What he had seen, as the girl got off the plane? What expression transmuted into the shadows and sepias and creams and opaque blacks of the photograph? Not Emmy at eighteen, or Emmy at eleven, or eight even—but Emmy as she had come to him upside down, the propellor of the B-1
7
thudding in his heart.

For a full thirty seconds before the lights and the darks took their solid forms, his sister had appeared in Keiko’s place—bossy, determined face, wide forehead—before the photo showed someone else, another person. Only the flash of resistance the same—a glint of something so fast only he had caught it. He could imagine her grabbing the camera from his hands and smashing it on the ground. Or sitting beside him, teasing, provoking, as Emmy used to:

Look—you’re holding the rabbit wrong.

You’ve put too much salt on the porridge.

That was the problem with everything now. Nobody could get inside him any more, tell him crazy things—things that made him laugh, or believe in French voices, or made him jealous of every wild idea that could pour out of a person’s mouth.
I hear voices.
That was rich. He had hated her for it at the time, because it wasn’t just any voices she heard, that wouldn’t be enough for Emmy. It had to be French voices.

“I know how to breathe out of my eyelids,” she had said another time, when she was about nine. That was during the period, for months, that she’d been afraid of the undead. Not the dead—not ghosts. The undead. Creatures half dead and half alive.

“What is it now?” Tom had said, exasperated, when she’d woken him by standing at the foot of his bed, just standing there, calling his name. He’d been cross as anything. For about the thirtieth time he had let her crawl into bed with him. “What is it now?” Course he didn’t have to ask—he knew it was the undead again.

Now how was he supposed to live without those shadows? Nobody had mentioned the undead since. Without a word his little sister had taken them with her—all the shadow people, all the zombies, all the walking corpses, all the inhabitants of the half-light.

    STORYTELLER

T
HESE WERE THE RULES
Raymond Carney followed, obvious once you knew them.
We must debride the edges!
In the midst of the operation he had shouted that last instruction, as though the unyielding thickness of the scarred skin was the nurse’s fault. Had he panicked? No—but he had had no way to gauge, until after the actual excision of the tissue, just how crusted the edges of the wound would be, how difficult to pierce with skin hooks, almost impossible to undermine with the scalpel. But that was over now—thank God.

“My dear girl,” he had said when Keiko awoke. What words to use? The atomic scar, the bubbled anguished flesh, the flesh requiring debridement and filing, the toughest wound he had ever excised—“The scar is gone,” he had said to her. He saw her eyes register this fact, and in another moment her lids had closed.

Now Keiko lay in bed, her face completely bandaged with sterile gauze and a Tensor mask. Pressure on the skin after a graft must be above twenty hectograms for a full ninety days, to create a force greater than the intracapillary pressure. Hence the elastic garmenting over the sterile strips, the gauze, the peroxide cream. Against the white bandages, Keiko’s eyes and mouth stood out like holes. To Raymond Carney she seemed immensely small and drained, as though she had been adrift on an ocean for years, then cast up here, in this bed.

He pitied her, he really did. What she was attempting was immensely difficult. And her evasions were admirable, almost like poetry. Such winged struggle. Such dark burrowing, all to avoid the one central question.

Where were you on August 6?

He must be careful, he told himself: the girl was tremendously delicate and had been more so since the operation. He must draw on deep and hidden reserves of gentleness. He must be very kind to her, even as he pushed her in the right direction.

Raymond sniffed deeply, checking beneath the high notes of antiseptic cream, the bleach used to wash the sky-blue tiles, for the lower tones of putridity. He smelled nothing, and that was good. The chances of infection in this early period were high.

Keiko was watching him now, but dully, dully; she might be in this world and might be in some other. That was good too, because it was time to check her bandages, and he did not wish (he checked his watch), seven hours and seven days after the operation, to have any repeat of The Unfortunate Incident. He had not yet found the best words in which to describe the Incident, which had occurred two nights before, though soon he would need to draft a memorandum alluding to it—a memorandum, addressed not to Dean Atchity and the Hiroshima Project, but to scientists of the Atomic Energy Commission. He was a man with two masters
now: the Hiroshima Project organizers, who wanted to fix the girl’s face, and the Atomic Energy Commission, with whom he was consulting on other aspects of the Project. They had agreed to fund his psychoanalytic sessions. They were eager to explore, just as he was, the effect of the bomb on the human psyche. They had masses of money too, which they siphoned through various universities. How people lived after the bomb, how they adjusted, remembered, resisted, set up defence mechanisms (or didn’t)—this was crucial information for a country threatened daily by an armed and belligerent Soviet Union. What Dr. Carney was exploring was groundbreaking. The fellows from the AEC had said as much to him (after he had used those words himself, but still, groundbreaking was groundbreaking).

The Unfortunate Incident would have appalled Dean and the other Project organizers. No amount of calm explanation would have clarified Carney’s position. This was one of the great pities about the Project and those who led it: they were, in the end, bleeding-heart liberals, with soft, mealy attitudes towards the future. They wanted to stop the Superbomb, and to create an international system of governance, and to abolish atomic weapons testing, but not one of them could look squarely at the thing they were attempting to abolish. They were like children, covering their eyes with blankets. In some ways Carney felt a deeper kinship with the soldiers at Yucca Flat, setting up their simulated towns, detonating all that atomic might, and then running into the blast, bayonets raised.

There were times when Carney actually felt he hated the Project organizers, especially Dean Atchity. They lacked that fine scientific impulse—the urge to know, the urge to look, simply to stare at what humanity had created. If you couldn’t look at a thing, how on earth could you oppose it? How on this earth could you even begin? For a moment he saw them scurrying
from the blast while he stood on the desert sand, successive waves of heat and light staining his skin, whipping his hair, turning his belt buckle red hot.

His attention shifted back to the bandaged girl in the bed. She was still watching him.

“Keiko,” he said. “Can you hear me?” Her eyes stayed focused on him. The eyes of a listening child. Eighteen the girl was—half child, half adult. He remembered the lines of an anonymous poem from the Edo era, which he had read the night before. It was called, merely,
“Song.”

From: Dr. Raymond Carney
To: The Atomic Energy Commission
May
21, 1952

The following letter does not constitute a medical report, but rather rumination on the Hiroshima Project’s surgical and psychoanalytical aspects. Please
read it in that light. Medical reports have been filed at Mount Sinai (records
24–26/0001
–May
21
/Kitigawa) and delivered to the Hiroshima Peace Project.

Surgery:
The subject had an atomic burn scar covering her left cheek from the hairline of her temple, running horizontally to her left eye, and diminishing to a point at her chin. Scar tissue had the colouring of a port wine stain
(naevus vinosus),
and was heavily bubbled and hypertrophic. Manual probing indicated a second-degree scar with intact subcutaneous tissue. In addition, the subject had a nodular keloid of
2
.
2
cm attached to the posterior portion of her left earlobe.

On March
30
^th
the keloid was excised using standard excision surgery.

On May
12
^th
the hypertrophic scar was removed. This operation required complete anaesthetization. Using No.
15
gradle scissors, a local flap of healthy skin from the subject’s neck was undermined and stretched to cover a portion of the excised area. Where the subcutaneous area was damaged, near the left temple, and in all locations where the undermined flap could not be employed, a split thickness skin graft was utilized. A graft was rolled back from the subject’s inner thigh, excess fat trimmed and the skin perforated to prevent haematomia. The edges of the wound were debrided and sutured with nylon thread. Pressure-gradient elastic garments will cover the face for no less than ninety days. Morphine, followed when appropriate by a standard pain relief formula, will be administered while she remains in hospital.