ALTHOUGH IN HIROSHIMA it was described as a single instant, there would have also, invariably, been those who had waited, like Aunt Marianne. Ginny considers this.
There would have been those, necessarily, Ginny thinks to herself—as, out from the museum, they begin to make their way across the Aioi bridge, toward the gas station, blinking, on the opposite shore—who had written the letter, tested the equipment, readied the plane … But, no. It was impossible to think of it. Easier, instead, to imagine the instant, the flash. Like the earth had, without warning, collided with the sun. One moment: there had been a dragonfly, alighting somewhere. And the next … ? Who could calculate the distance between one single moment and another? It had long seemed to Ginny that things happen not at any particular or recordable time, but at an indeterminate midpoint. Somewhere, that is, between the verifiable and measurable tick and the ensuing, and otherwise unremarkable, tock … in that incalculable interval of both space and time. As in the moments after a bad fall—when, for a long, extended moment that is not a moment, you are unsure if you exist at all, and it is only by great effort that you locate, at first, your elbows, your fingers, your knees, and then begin to understand again in slow successive waves that you are alive, returned to your body. A hand is raised, and a shout, and it is your own throat that has yelled it out—to say, before you know yourself that it is true, that you are all right, that no great damage has been done. And it is only in that moment of speaking, in the use of an I, in the channelling of a voice—your own—through a singular throat, in sending it out from its central point in the middle of your chest, that the moment comes, and you realize that you have fallen; that you have raised yourself again. And in the moment of return, the long interval (in which you felt yourself to be diffuse, hardly corporeal) disappears almost completely. You realize that, in fact, it has been only a fraction of a second, the slight effects of a shock. Hardly worth mentioning.
THE BABY HAD NOT been a baby, Marianne said, but, instead, “a cluster of cells.” Years later, it was only because this description corresponded perfectly with the description of the cancer that was to cause her mother’s death that Ginny realized the connection between the two things. Returning to California, after her New Mexico summer, Ginny had confided the new information to her best friend, Valerie, telling her everything she knew about the non-baby that, over the summer, her mother had not had. Valerie, though—who always thought she knew everything—had only snorted through her nose. “All babies are ‘a cluster of cells,’” she’d said. “That’s all anybody is.” Ginny asked Marianne about this later, on the telephone, and Marianne had explained. The difference, she’d said, was that this baby’s cells had been put together in a jumbled-up sort of way that made a sickness, and not a human being. It had confused, but rather comforted, Ginny to think that the line that separated what was good from what was bad was a tangible thing that could exist inside someone like her mother. It wasn’t until three and a half years later, when her mother died, that Ginny realized her mistake. There was nothing, it turned out, that separated good things from bad, or that kept the bad things from happening. Still more years went by before it first occurred to her that what had happened to her mother had begun all those years ago, in the summer she had spent with Marianne and Pauly in New Mexico. Uterine cancer was the actual disease that had killed her mother, she learned, finally. Though with her own family they had always just referred to it as being “sick.”
But if there wasn’t a line, there were certainly still distinctions that needed to be made. That was what it meant to be a grown-up person. Still, it was appalling the extent to which a person could come to think of herself as autonomous, singular, accountable for certain things, but at the same time remaining always as if in between everything. Incapable, finally, of extricating herself from a sequence that led, moment to moment—always, and without recourse—to a final and inevitable conclusion. It was horrible. To think of it. Simply sitting, toes touching, and ankles crossed … To think of simply floating chronologically room to room, as one did in a museum. Getting closer: ’43, ’44. Now February, now March; just waiting, and waiting.
“FAT MAN,” Susan says. They have reached the centre of the bridge, and stand, looking down at the river, which is black, and calm.
“What?” says Ginny.
“Fat man and little boy,” Susan says. “Isn’t that something.”
They are the names of the dropped bombs, Ginny knows, but for some reason it makes her angry the way that Susan has said them. Casually, like that, and out of the blue, with the cars whizzing by over the bridge and the lights from the JOMO gas station blinking on the corner. In the end, there was only the river. And the lines of traffic on either side. The dragonfly, or not. The bicycles. The world had continued. It had gathered its relics, and proceeded on. On and on without pause. The letters, the stopped timepieces—these were only the after-effects of a thing that hadn’t even happened yet. It was all, Ginny thought, just—a waiting. A waiting to end, a waiting to resume. And it continued. In the museums and the history books, which were always, inevitably (therefore) incomplete, and obscured. The ankles crossed. The carpeted floor. For lesser or greater degrees of renewal and of destruction. For the dragonfly to lift. For ourselves, finally, to realize—and with startling accuracy—the intricacies in the body of the fly, which, previously, had gone unnoticed for the wing. For example, the length of single moments. The proximity of things, object to object. Waiting; and then again, waiting, for everything to settle, and resume itself. Object to object again in a blur, moment to unchecked moment, wing to unconsidered body. Again.
IN A FEW MOMENTS, Ginny will turn and—following Susan—continue slowly to the opposite shore. For the moment, however, this is very difficult to imagine. Even her return to Paris seems remote suddenly—too much to ask. There, Ginny thinks, there will be, again, the inevitable longings, and corresponding wearinesses; the relative smallness and bigness of things. The limits—or lack thereof. She feels a sharp, caught feeling. High in her chest, as though she’s drawn up—fixed. Pulled into sharp focus, somehow—as the T of the bridge had one time been.
Maybe she should take Susan’s advice and stay. Find a small house to fit inside. Or, if that was impossible—go home instead. Repaint the flag at the end of the drive with her father for the Fourth of July. Drive out to the city limit—maybe even buy a plot of land out there. Go to the supermarket on the weekends. Bump into people she knew from high school in the aisles. Valerie, maybe. With one or two of her “clusters of cells” in tow.
But no, that was wrong, too. She could not just pick up and move—to Japan, this time, like Susan, or even home again, to California, if the spirit moved her. Could not begin there—wholly anew—as if an entire other life spread out before her there. That was just it. It could not be done, and yet—the desire persisted. In that respect, at least, she had something in common with her dimly remembered relatives—and with the world. She was caught, at that exact point of intersection between impossibility and desire. Trapped into it, just like everyone else, no matter how—or how variously—she attempted to extract herself. Without faith, and yet … an errant sense of direction, and of purpose, all the same. Always that—yes. The very process of everything as it occurred (always as if for the first time, and so without contrast) leading to the perpetual and most likely false conviction that there actually existed, at the under-layer of things, something infinitely resilient, immutable, and forgiving; that it would be possible, always, to pause … to defer … to destroy, even, if necessary; begin over again.
“FAT MAN!” Susan says again. They have once again begun in the direction of the opposite shore, Susan closest to the rail, looking down at the river, which is flat and calm. “Little Boy! It’s just sick,” she says. “To have named them something so—benign.”
Ginny does not look at the river. She looks straight ahead, across the bridge instead. To the gas station at the corner, which is blinking. Then the impossi
ble thing happens: the crosshairs, at that moment, hover and click so that of exactly that one moment she is perfectly certain. (She pauses, almost imperceptibly, her foot hovering for just a fraction of a second in the air; Susan does not alter her pace.) Prior to that, however—and of whatever happened afterward—she would never be entirely sure.
“What would you,” she says to Susan, when, after a moment or two, she catches up, “have named them, then?”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
With many thanks to those who read these stories and offered their indispensable advice and support: Mikhail Iossel, Fiona Foster, Kate Hall, Heather Jessup, Linda Swanson-Davies, Michael Ray, and John Melillo. Extraordinary thanks, also, to my editor, Nicole Winstanley, for her belief in, and affection for, these stories. Her editorial insights, as well as those of Shaun Oakey, have greatly strengthened this work—many thanks to them both. I would also like to thank my agent, Tracy Bohan, whose support, encouragement, and friendship I am continuously grateful for. Finally, I would like to express my love and unending gratitude to John, and to my family—my mother and stepfather, Janet and Sandy; my sister and brother-in-law, Kristin and Scott, and their four beautiful children, Mairianna, Lilah, Oliver, and James.
This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories Page 12
