When You Are Engulfed in Flames (25 page)

The museum was full of stories like this, narratives that ended with the words “But he died / but she died.” This came to seem like something of a blessing, especially after we passed the diorama. The figures were life-sized and three-dimensional, a ragged group of civilians, children mainly, staggering across a landscape of rubble. The sky behind them was the color of glowing embers, and burnt skin hung in sheets from their arms and faces. You couldn’t fathom how they could still be upright, let alone walking. One hundred forty thousand people were killed in Hiroshima, and more died later of hideous diseases.

There were a dozen or so displays devoted to the aftereffects of radiation, and in one of them a pair of two-inch-long black rods, curled, and the circumference of a pencil, sat on a pedestal. It seemed that a young man had his arm out the window when the bomb went off, and that some time later, after most of his wounds had healed, these rods grew from his fingertips and took the place of his nails. Worse still is that they had blood vessels inside of them, and when they broke off they hurt and bled and were ultimately replaced by new rods. The narrative was fairly short, no more than a paragraph, so a lot of my questions went unanswered.

The museum was crowded during our visit, and nobody spoke above a whisper. I spotted two Westerners standing before a photograph of charred bodies, but because they were speechless, I have no idea where they were from. After leaving the main exhibit, we exited into a sunny hallway filled with drawings and video monitors. The drawings were done by survivors and were ultimately more haunting than any of the melted bottles or burnt clothing displayed in the previous rooms. “Jr. High Students’ Corpses Stacked Like Lumber” was the title of one of them.

March 11

A booklet in our hotel room includes a section on safety awkwardly titled
Best Knowledge of Disaster Damage Prevention and Favors to Ask of You.
What follows are three paragraphs, each written beneath a separate, boldfaced heading: “When you check in the hotel room,” “When you find a fire,” and, my favorite, “When you are engulfed in flames.”

Further weird English from our trip:

•   On an apron picturing a dog asleep in a basket: “I’m glad I caught you today. Enjoy mama.”

•    On decorative paper bags a person might put a gift in: “When I think about the life in my own way I need gentle conversations.”

•    On another gift bag: “Today is a special day for you. I have considered what article of present is nice to make you happy. Come to open now, OK?”

•    On yet another gift bag: “Only imflowing you don’t flowing imflowing.” (This last one actually gave me a headache.)

March 12

Saturday night’s dinner included small pieces of raw horse meat served on chipped ice. It wasn’t the first time I’ve eaten horse, or even raw horse, for that matter, but it
was
the first time I’ve done it while dressed in a traditional robe, two robes actually, the first one amounting to a kind of slip. The woman who served us was a little on the heavy side, young, with big crooked teeth. After showing us to our table on the floor, she handed us steaming towels and then looked from Hugh to me and back again. “He is you brother?” she asked, and I recalled Lesson 8 of my instructional CD. “He is my friend,” I told her.

This same thing happened last month at a department store. “Brothers traveling together?” the clerk had asked.

Westerners often think all Asians look alike, and you don’t see the ridiculousness of it until it’s turned in reverse. Back home, Hugh and I couldn’t even pass for stepbrothers.

March 19

It was cold yesterday, and after lunch, armed with an out-of-date guidebook, Hugh and I went to Shinjuku Station and then changed trains. The neighborhood we wound up in was supposed to be packed with antique stores, but that, most likely, was back in the eighties. Now there was just a handful of places, most selling stuff from France and Italy: pitchers with “Campari” written on them, that type of thing. Still, it was well worth the trip. Few of the buildings were more than three stories tall. Architecturally, they weren’t that interesting, but their scale gave the area a cozy, almost familiar feeling.

We wandered around until it started getting dark and were heading back toward the subway station when we came upon what looked like a garage. The door was open, and leaning against a counter was a naive painting of a beaver, not the kind you’d see on all fours, building a dam or whatever, but breezy and cartoonish, wearing a shirt and trousers. I had just stepped forward to admire it when a man appeared and held an electronic wand to his throat. The voice it created was completely flat, never varying in tone or volume. Robotic, I guess you’d call it. Otherworldly. It’s how movie aliens used to sound when they asked to be taken to our leader.

The man was so difficult to understand that for the first minute, I couldn’t tell if he was speaking English or Japanese. I sensed that he was asking a question, though, and, not wanting to offend him, I agreed in both languages. “Yes,” I said. “Hai.”

I’d guess the guy was about seventy, but youthful-looking. He wore a baseball cap and a collarless leather coat that left his throat unobstructed and open to the cold. I pointed once more to the painting, and after I said how much I liked it, he brought me a brochure. On its cover was this same cartoon beaver, only smaller and less charming.

This time I said, “Ahhh. OK.”

It was hard to tell what this shop was all about. One entire wall was open to the street, and most of the shelves were lined with what looked like junk: used newspapers, grocery bags, a championship cup made out of plastic. “My daughter,” the man droned in English, and he held the cup aloft and gave it a little shake. “She win.”

I was then shown a photo of a smiling fat guy with his hair in a bun. “Amateur sumo champion,” the shopkeeper told me.

And I said, in Japanese, “He is a big boy.”

The man nodded, and as he returned the photo to its shelf, I asked him what he sold. “Ah,” he said. “Yes. My business.” Then he led me to the street and pointed to the roof, where a handmade sign read, “Cancer Out Tea.”

“I have cancer,” he announced.

“And you cured it with tea?”

He made a face I took to mean “Well . . . kind of.”

I was going to ask what kind of cancer he had, but then I thought better of it. When my mom got sick, people would often push for details. It was their way of setting her at ease, of saying, “Look, I’m acknowledging it. I’m not freaked out.” But when they learned that she had lung cancer, the mood tended to change, the way it wouldn’t have if the tumor was in her breast or brain.

Because of the electronic wand, I assumed the man had cancer of the larynx. I also assumed, perhaps unfairly, that it was prompted by smoking. What shocked me, standing in that ice-cold garage, was my certainty that the same thing will not happen to me. It’s so queer how that works. Two months without a cigarette, and I’m convinced that all the damage has reversed itself. I might get Hodgkin’s disease or renal cell carcinoma, but not anything related to smoking. The way I see it, my lungs are like sweatshirts in a detergent commercial, the before and after so fundamentally different that they constitute a miracle. I never truly thought that I would die the way my mother did, but now I really,
really
don’t think it. I’m middle-aged, and, for the first time in thirty years, I feel invincible.

Part III (After)

One

On the return flight from Tokyo, I pulled out my notebook and did a little calculating. Between the plane tickets, the three-month apartment rental, the school tuition, and the unused patches and lozenges, it had cost close to twenty thousand dollars to quit smoking. That’s 2 million yen and, if things keep going the way they have been, around 18 euros.

Figuring that I bought most of my cigarettes duty-free, and annually paid about twelve hundred dollars for them, in order to realize any savings I’d have to live for another seventeen years, by which time I’d be sixty-eight and clinging to life by a thread. It’s safe to assume that by 2025, guns will be sold in vending machines, but you won’t be able to smoke anywhere in America. I don’t imagine Europe will allow it either, at least not the western part. During the months I’d been gone, France had outlawed smoking in public buildings. In a year’s time it would be forbidden in all bars and restaurants, just as it was in Ireland. Italy, Spain, Norway; country by country, the continent was falling.

Hugh and I flew British Airways to Tokyo and back. Most of the flight attendants were English, and as one of them roamed the aisle with the duty-free cart, I flagged her down. “Ordinarily I’d be buying cigarettes,” I told her. “This time I’m not, though, because I quit.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well, that’s all right then.”

As she turned to leave, I stopped her again. “For three decades I smoked. Now I don’t anymore.”

“Lovely.”

“Cold turkey, that’s how I did it.”

Then she said, “Brilliant,” and hurried off down the aisle.

“Why did you do that?” Hugh asked.

“Do what?” I said, and I turned back to the movie I’d been watching. The truth, of course, is that I’d wanted some praise. I’d denied myself. I’d done something hard, and now I wanted everyone to congratulate me. It was the same in 2000 when I lost twenty pounds. “Notice anything different?” I’d say — this to people who had never seen me before.

Two

It was one thing to be a quitter, but I didn’t have to call myself a nonsmoker — to formally define myself as one — until I returned to the United States. By the time I landed, I hadn’t had a cigarette in exactly three months, almost an entire season. My hotel had been booked in advance and, upon my arrival, the desk clerk confirmed the reservation, saying, “That’s ‘King Nonsmoking,’ right?”

The first word referred to the size of the bed, but I chose to hear it as a title.

Adjusting my imaginary crown, I said, “Yes, that’s me.”

Now when I travel, I like the hotel to have a pool, or, better yet, a deal with the local YMCA. That’s been one thing to come out of this: a new hobby, something to replace my halfhearted study of Japanese. Though I haven’t yet learned to enjoy the actual swimming part, I like all the stuff around it. Finding a lap pool, figuring out the locker system. Then there’s the etiquette of passing someone, of spending time alongside them in the water.

In Tokyo once I complimented a fellow Westerner on the gracefulness of his backstroke. “It’s like you were raised by otters,” I said, and the way he nodded and moved into the next lane suggested that I had overstepped some fundamental boundary. It’s the same in the locker room, apparently. Someone can have a leech stuck to his ass, but unless it’s a talking one, and unless it personally asks you a question, you should say nothing.

I was in El Paso one afternoon, changing out of my swim-suit, and a young man said, “Excuse me, but aren’t you . . .” When I say I was changing out of my swimsuit, I mean that I had nothing on. No socks, no T-shirt. My underpants were in my hand. I guess the guy recognized me from my book jacket photo. The full-length naked one on the back cover of my braille editions.

My other bad experience took place in London, at a community pool I used to go to. It was a Saturday afternoon and very crowded. I’d just reached the end of my lane and was coming up for air when I heard the sound of a whistle and noticed that I was the only one left in the water. “What’s the problem?” I asked, and the lifeguard said something I couldn’t quite understand.

“What?”

“Poo,” he repeated. “Everybody out while we clean the water.”

As I walked toward the changing room, a second lifeguard fished out the turds. There were four of them, each the size and shape of a cat’s hair ball. “Third time today that’s happened,” the person at the desk told me.

At the pool I currently go to, one of the regulars is a woman with Down syndrome. She’s fairly heavy and wears an old-fashioned swimsuit, the sort with a ruffled skirt. Then there’s this bathing cap that straps beneath her chin and is decorated with rubber flowers. Odd is the great satisfaction I take whenever I beat her from one end to the other. “I won three out of four,” I told Hugh the first time she and I swam together. “I mean I really creamed her.”

“Let me get this straight,” he said. “She’s obese. She’s as old as you are.
And
she has Down syndrome?”

“Yes, and I beat her. Isn’t that great!”

“Did she even know you were having a race?”

I hate it when he gets like this. Anything to burst my bubble.

I no longer tell him about the old people I defeat. Older than I am, I mean — women in their late seventies and eighties. Then there are the children. I was in Washington State, at a small-town YMCA, when a boy wandered into the lap lane and popped his head, seal-like, out of the water. I would later learn that he was nine, but at the time he was just this kid, slightly pudgy, with a stern haircut. It’s like he went to a barbershop with a picture of Hitler, that’s how severe it was. We got to talking, and when I told him I wasn’t a very good swimmer, he challenged me to a race. I think he assumed that, like most adults, I’d slow down and intentionally let him win, but he didn’t know who he was dealing with. I need all the confidence I can get, and one victory is just as good as any other. Thus I swam for my very life and beat the pants off him. I thought this was it — he’d accept his defeat and move on with his life — but five minutes later he stopped me again and asked if I believed in God.

“No,” I told him.

“Why?”

I thought for a second. “Because I have hair on my back, and a lot of other people, people who kill and rob and make life miserable, don’t. A real God wouldn’t let that happen.”

I was happy to leave it at that, but before I could resume he blocked my path. “It was God who let you win that race,” he said. “He touched you on the leg and made you go faster, and that’s how come you beat me.”

He really looked like Hitler then, eyes blazing like two little coals.