Before it was born, before it was christened with its name, Little Boy was no more than an abstract pattern in the brains of countries competing against one another to decipher it. It was so powerful and it changed my identity so drastically that for a long time I thought of it as a living being, and not of the men who created it. I imagined its gestation, how it could perceive the brain waves moving to and fro among the rival scientists racing to finish it. How it let itself be carried along the electrical currents, gliding through the neural pathways of the era’s most brilliant physicists. Often I fantasized about using the image of a CAT scan in which sections of the successful brain were illuminated, the one that discovered the formula, won the race, the sharpest of them all: J. Robert Oppenheimer’s. And I imagined how his little organic lantern, his firefly, must have stimulated the pleasure circuits in the satisfied physicists’ brains, whose intelligence had impregnated North America with Little Boy, its favorite son (or daughter?), the atomic bomb that defended the Allies in those difficult hours and, crucially, allowed them to win the war.
Since I was still so young and immature those first few years, I personified the bomb as an extension of my own identity, but eventually I shuffled the weight of responsibility to where it belonged: the man, the manifold who were capable of creating and detonating what is still the most lethal weapon known to humanity. But I don’t want my story to linger on these well-known facts. Allusions to the event are meant only as a backdrop over which something personal is being highlighted. If I can be so extravagant as to imagine a victim whom the bomb benefited, then I’m that victim. I forfeited limbs, whole chunks of my flesh, and my relatives, and though nothing could ever compensate me for these losses, I gained other important things. So my life is poised between grief over what the bomb took from me and celebration over something marvelous it gave me.
* * *
Morning had broken on what seemed like an ordinary day when Little Boy fell. It promised to be one of those placid, clear-skied days that lull you into thinking a place’s peacefulness extends over the rest of the planet. Same as every other day on earth, thousands and thousands of mothers were spreading their legs to give birth, bearing the pain children inflict as they make their way to the outside world. Legs didn’t open for Little Boy, though, but the bomb bay doors of a B-29. Many mothers were focused on breathing through contractions and the pain of labor while a bombardier was preparing the greatest contraction of them all: the global gash.
Little Boy was born and gave birth. It was at once deliverer and delivered, a nativity that gave birth to a colossal luminous mushroom-shaped cloud. For some, it meant total annihilation; for others, peace; and for all, it was light. A light so intense that people who saw it detonate before hitting the ground lost not only their sight but also their eyeballs. He (I can’t help giving it a personality) watched all the people looking up as he fell. He was the last thing they ever saw. Light. His father released through the gray ink of equations an eternal light that was bequeathed to the world. The formula could have been presented with the words “Behold, my son, the light of the world.” He’d never imagined it. Nobody had seen the shining until detonation, so it wasn’t until after Hiroshima that we knew our race would never be in the dark again.
Oppenheimer brought the most radical promise of light. This latter-day messiah, this higher god of theoretical physics, built a formula that could never be expunged, a weapon that outlived Little Boy, that would inseminate other countries at the speed of a rabbit, and today there are over twenty thousand bombs more potent than the one dropped on Hiroshima. Others claim there are many more than that. Whatever the case, there are at least twenty thousand rabbit-fucks and pyromaniacs who could incite a planetary inferno capable of liquidating us all in the ejaculation of a single sun, should nations get annoyed with one another. Forget Hiroshima. Little Boy’s nature is being cloned into thousands of iron-skinned brothers. As long as their creators keep them hidden, these clones will remain as lethargic as a hibernating bear, but when they are awoken, all the heat of all the summers will enter the lair, and all the caves, all the houses, all the mouths will open black as a door that wasn’t able to resist the heat when someone closed the oven. Then Hiroshima will be nothing but a piece of historical fluff. The time hasn’t come yet, so you who think of the planet as an everlasting place will think my testament outrageous. It seems outrageous to me too, but I know the world’s mechanism is being lubricated to make Hiroshima nothing more than the tangle in a strand of hair that has fallen out and been swept into the corner of that perpetually filthy house we call history.
* * *
Since my life and my transgressions can’t be separated from Jim’s story, allow me now to return to him, he who was, like me, a victim. He told me the heat in the belly of Oryoku Maru was unbearable, but this vague adjective does not really convey any true sense of the heat. You might get a better sense if I tell you that according to George Weller’s accounts, the heat must have reached nearly 130 degrees Fahrenheit. A hundred and thirty degrees Fahrenheit. Way too high, and yet approximately 10,830 degrees lower than the temperature of the earth where the atomic bomb exploded. It’s like a slow roast versus spontaneous combustion. The throats of the prisoners dried out slowly. The Japanese used panels to cover most of the hatches, so ventilation was nil. The first ones to pass out were those located at the extremes of the compartments. The only way to distinguish an unconscious passenger from a dead one was by his pulse; the heat was so intense that even the postmortem cooling process was halted. But nobody bothered to take anyone else’s pulse. The more people who died, the longer the oxygen would last. Weller recounts how the prisoners removed their clothes to breathe through their skin when they weren’t able to use their lungs. The ship’s wood absorbed the humidity of all the men piled on top of one another and oozed droplets of sweat. When their thirst became unbearable, the men would lick the little pearls of collective sweat. When the prisoners moaned because the air was so scarce, the Japanese man in charge, Mr. Wada, threatened to seal the hatches completely. Yet when the North American aviators circled the ship ready to bomb it, thinking there were only Japanese on board, Jim said, they all mustered one last morsel of energy to panic at this new threat of death—ironically, at the hands of their own. Yet the sound of the hatches rattling under the aviators’ bombs also brought hope, with fresh currents of light and air. And another thing: the Americans in the hold, delirious and half-mad by now, opened their mouths thinking it was water—or maybe they knew better—and drank the blood filtering down from the wounded Japanese on deck. Any liquid coming from the outside world was refreshing.
The accounts detail ever-increasing acts of madness as a result of the dehydration and the lack of fresh air. The Japanese finally brought pails into the hold for the prisoners to relieve themselves. But when the body breaks down, the mind adjusts its mechanisms arbitrarily, and what was once considered hideous was now material for buffoonery. Some men amused themselves by switching the pails of excrement for the pails of food—they were so alike.
JIM COULD NEVER HAVE SUSPECTED then that his true journey would begin fifteen years later, and that he’d make it hand in hand with a compatriot of his torturers. What ran through me was pure Japanese blood, not a drop of anything else that might decontaminate it for him. But the baby was as Japanese as I am, and the two of them had already sealed a pact of reconciliation, though I think the process of forgiveness was under way even earlier, when Jim had to walk among thousands of people, homeless children, roaming spaces where bedrooms had once been, carrying buckets into which they’d thrown whatever seemed even remotely attached to the memory of a loved one. Jim said they basically collected anything that wasn’t dust. I think he realized that while he was agonizing on the Oryoku Maru, my people’s humiliation was in gestation, the most devastating the world had seen to date. Walking a few months later through the ruined city among bodies maimed by his American colleagues must have allowed him to accept his da
ughter and then me in peace. Jim said not even the doctors in the American occupation forces were there to help. His sole mission was to observe, to study the effects of radioactivity, and they didn’t intervene even in the simplest stages of reaction, like vomiting or infant diarrhea. Unawares, some of the victims were still being used as part of the investigation linked to the Manhattan Project.
My people’s great misfortune caught me with a thermometer in my mouth. The fever should have kept me home in bed. I was only thirteen and it was my place to obey my mother, who preferred that I not attend school that day. But I couldn’t miss recess because my friends and I had left a game unfinished the day before, and I used every excuse in the book to coax my mother into letting me go. I had no idea this little act of defiance would set in motion what a few months later turned me into what I’d always wanted to be. The thought of playing at recess, of the game, was enough motivation for me to fight with my mother, and by eight o’clock sharp, after an hour in the car traveling to school, there I was sitting at my desk. My memory of the next few days has been wiped clean. I’ve never been able to remember anything, but the victor’s version of history offers some very precise data for reconstructing the things that went on while I sat at my desk, unaware of what was being dropped from the sky above, and a few seconds later, when I was prostrate and unconscious on the floor. I know the exact second when William Sterling Parsons, captain of the Enola Gay, released the bomb, checked the gauges, and began measuring the seconds it took for the artifact to fall the 31,000 feet from the plane’s altitude to the estimated point of detonation at 2,000 feet. I also know the crew expected the explosion to happen within forty-two seconds of release, so at forty-three seconds they were starting to get anxious. Tension built to a peak as they tallied the seconds in their heads. The experiment worked with a three-second lag: when the forty-fifth second struck, I was blown into another room. When I came to, nothing was left standing; there were no walls. The whole school had become a big playground, a playground without monkey bars, a gaping expanse open to a gaping city. Of the 152 pupils in school that day, I was the only one left. I watched a naked lump approach me in what had been the bathroom. It asked for water. I was frightened. Its head had swollen to three times the normal size. Only when the lump said her name did I realize it was my teacher. I ran away.
For years I gathered details about exactly what took place in the air while those of us on the ground went about our daily lives. Knowing the facts about the airplane and the launch of the bomb made me think I might fill some of the gaps in my own story. I used the same method to piece together what happened just after the explosion, while I was unconscious. For several years it was the best I could hope for, to fill the gaps in my memory with reports written by the people responsible for those gaps, and for hundreds of thousands of casualties, for the sick who still today are passing their sicknesses on from one generation to the next. So you see, sir, I was clutching at straws. It’s a sad method to have to put myself together with what was responsible for pulling me apart, and an impossible one too. After all, how could I lift myself up with the same tools that were meant to annihilate me? But this was what I had, and I grabbed on to it as a means to scar over part of my amnesia.
Once it released the weapon, the Enola Gay enacted its escape protocol, tracing a 155-degree turnaround toward the northeast. The crew put on their dark glasses and braced for the shock waves, which came a minute later, when they were nine miles away. In my case, the data was much less precise. I had no idea how long I had been unconscious or what time it was when I left the school. I remember that all the clocks had stopped at the same time: 8:16. But I have no idea how I got to the hospital. Maybe the person who brought me there doesn’t remember either.
Details of the following weeks spent among the huddled masses of the wounded are fuzzy. Later we learned there had been one doctor per three thousand victims. And though I didn’t know it at the time, I had burns over 70 percent of my body. My eyelids stuck together after a few days. I couldn’t open them. I thought I’d gone blind. No medicines, no tranquilizers, vicious pain. My only treatment was having my position readjusted. Someone came in to turn me over every once in a while. The pain was so severe I couldn’t tell if I was being placed faceup or facedown. My whole body was red-hot, in excruciating pain—my chest, my stomach, my knees, all part of the same incandescent slab with shoulder blades, buttocks, the back of my legs. Pain made my body lose texture, as if the front and back of me had melded into a single flat, uniformly blistering griddle. The first sign of recovery came when I felt the wetness of my urine. That’s how I could figure out my position. If the urine dripped downward, I was faceup. If it came straight out and formed a little puddle, I was facedown. They cleaned my eyes and I could open them again, so when the pain subsided just enough for a slight effort, I picked my head up to view my raw skin and discovered that while the shape of my extremities was intact, the area from my lower abdomen to my thighs was an unrecognizable pulp. The area was so swollen that I couldn’t be sure, but everything seemed to suggest that the bomb had been particularly vicious with my sex.
First Month: 1960
Jungle Versus Man
I realize now as I’m writing this that you may consider certain particulars unnecessary for delivering your verdict. But believe me, your judgment is not my only concern. I wish to write certain things down without taking you into consideration, perhaps to re-experience the events, or because way down at the bottom of my heart, I would like to be understood by someone who is far removed from revenge and close to deep human emotion. These personal details serve as my defense before the powers that be, a valid defense regardless of the punishment. There’s also absolution. The absolution you aren’t going to grant me, though I have faith that others may find it in themselves, if they ever read what I have written.
I remember the first time I slept with Jim. We weren’t acquainted enough to spend an entire night in each other’s arms without feeling awkward, though he clung to me, or I clung to him, with a kind of naturalness that comes only with the passage of time. I’d never felt that way with a near stranger. It was as though he required my full presence as he slept, my full attention, yet at the same time he was fully aware that this kind of intimacy comes only by way of affection, and though he wouldn’t let me pull away from him, he held me so gingerly that I slept with an uncanny sense of autonomy. I came to associate his holding me that way with something he explained later on. One of the ways insanity would present itself among the prisoners on the Oryoku Maru, he said, had to do with how a prisoner would suddenly seize another and grope his face, his body, like a blind person from out of his darkness frantically trying to scrutinize the features of a loved one. It’s something I also read in George Weller’s ship chronicles. There were so many prisoners jammed into the compartments that most of them were forced to sit with someone else nestled between their legs and that person in front of them also had someone nestled between their legs, and so on in a herringbone pattern, and the excessive clutching and groping by the crazy ones resulted in the death of more than one of them. Jim never told me whether he had needed that type of contact or had avoided it however he could, but what matters is that when I learned about it, I reckoned that this particular way of clinging to me was his manner of holding on to life itself, to whatever still breathes in the blackness of night.
Most of the experiences Jim told me about took place after the war. He spoke about them distantly; not that the events hadn’t affected him, but his tone of voice, his eyes, denoted the type of distance born from years of effort. The few things he shared with me about his experiences as a prisoner of the Japanese were conveyed from inside not only of his own suffering but of the suffering of everything he named. When he described a companion scratching his flea-ridden scalp, the story had implications far beyond the idea of a companion who wouldn’t let him sleep; it included all that this single flea, and not another one, suffered during the onslaught of the
soldier’s fingernails in its struggle to survive. In a single sentence he declared the destruction of the world order, the vibrating strings of a violin—sheep guts to cat guts—conveying wave after wave of massacre, from the hand that wields the bow to the eardrum that receives the sound and repeats the chain of sorrow like a tolling bell.
The only points of reference I had for concentration camps were the Nazi camps. But I heard Jim say several times that he found the situation with the Japanese concentration camps more perverse, partly because of the lack of awareness about what had happened in them, since most people have paid exclusive attention to the pain of the Jewish people, relegating the Japanese victims to the worst agony peace can inflict: obliviousness. This obliviousness wasn’t perpetrated by the enemy, but by the Allies themselves. I remember thinking about this so many years later when I read a plaque that had been placed above one of the ovens in Ebensee, a subcamp of Mauthausen, in Austria. There were a few verses written in German by the Austrian poet Peter Rosegger, which I jotted down in my notebook. Rosegger professed himself a friend of heat and light, so he asked to be incinerated and freed of the worm that in the earth penetrates the body:
May no slimy worm
Drag itself across my body someday!
May the purest part of me be consumed
Since my love for heat and light was constant
Burn me, and don’t bury me.
This is something the Austrian poet wrote from his love of life, his love of warmth and of light, being used as an adornment for horror. That plaque must have been read by countless eyes as the cadavers were being cast into the ovens, and regardless of who read it—Germans, Jews, homosexuals, or whoever else—the context allows only a single interpretation: the first-person narrator of the verse is begging for cremation. So ironically the last thing left to be taken from the prisoners about to be incinerated was removed: not their voices in life but their voices in death, foisting upon them the desire to be cremated beside the anonymous multitude. Placing these verses above the horror of the ovens was an act of perversion, as if trying to make it seem as though not only did the Jews accept their death, unafraid, but that they were asking for it, even offered justification for it. But as fate would have it, the unsought precedence of this despairing anonymous multitude unwittingly overshadowed another disgrace: the parallel atrocities committed during the Asian holocaust.
The Story of H Page 3
