GETTING THAT OFF MY CHEST was a relief. Seen from my perspective now, I think that letter to Jim resolved one of the three biggest problems I’ve had to confront in my life. The first was discovering my own sexuality without buckling to outside pressure; the second, alleviated by the letter, was how to explain it all to the man I loved; and the third was the search for my child, his daughter.
I already mentioned how my sexual quest had begun many years before meeting Jim. Particularly significant was my encounter with T, whose asexuality existed in that rigid space where life was neither death nor life, but something intertwined that avoided having to choose one way or the other. Total absence of desire. Clearly, not all those I met while on my quest were victims of Hiroshima, but the first ones were. Returning to my city prompted me to question myself; it’s when I felt the need to determine my true sex. That’s how I met D. She was plainspoken right from the start, and instead of recounting her sexual adventures, she confessed even more prickly things to me: her fantasies.
D had only experienced one sexual encounter with another person’s body, but it was enough for her to realize that the reality of another body didn’t satisfy her as much as when she touched herself and reenacted in her mind contact with another being who was incapable of warfare. D didn’t want just a tenderhearted man, someone devoted or a good lover. Her sexual preference was clear: she could desire only a man incapable of bearing arms. She was convinced that the most satisfying passion could come exclusively from someone who brought her to orgasm with the peace he also practiced outside of the bedroom. She wanted a mind that was incapable of hatred, a mind from which those feelings had been extirpated, a brain that was missing a part.
I could confirm through her testimonies and similar memories of my own, that one of the aftereffects of the bomb is the permanence of what was taken away. The hole left in D by losing that equanimity when she was still a little girl filled with the weight of that loss as she developed into a woman. And somehow climaxing sexually tied itself to the obsessive need to recover that missing peacefulness.
Things around us didn’t disappear altogether because of the explosion, but they lingered as contours full of emptiness, reminding us forever of what the bomb had destroyed. If they had been made invisible, it might not have hurt as much, but seeing the remains of what no longer existed was a daily misery. I remember that after the bomb was dropped, the people closest to the point of impact simply disintegrated, leaving outlines of themselves as nuclear shadows. Their silhouettes remained on the walls against which they had been leaning, the stairs on which they had been sitting, because the radiation acted in different ways depending on the material in its path. So if the radiation had to pass through a person, the surface area the body occupied acted like a stencil. I knew a mother who believed she could recognize her daughter’s shadow against her school’s wall. For months she spent all her time trying to preserve the silhouette. She sheltered it from the rain and the wind, like someone protecting an archaeological site of cave paintings, so the outline that captured her gazelle’s last action wouldn’t fade. When the reconstruction of Hiroshima began and they tore down that wall, the mother abandoned the country.
I think it was in John Hersey’s piece on Hiroshima where I read the description of the different ways radiation affected bodies depending on the surfaces, or maybe it was in someone’s oral testimony, I’m not really sure. But if I remember correctly, there was a man who commented on how strange he thought it was to see a woman dressed in a very tight kimono after the explosion. When he looked closer, he realized that in fact she was naked, so naked there wasn’t a centimeter’s worth of skin left on her body. But the colors of the kimono, having absorbed and reflected the bomb’s heat in different ways, had imprinted the old fabric’s flowers onto her body. Reverend Tanimoto spoke of the naked victims. At first they seemed to be dressed in rags, but what looked like clothing was actually ribbons of their own skin dangling like shredded fabric. So nothing that was gone had actually vanished, but instead persisted in the most painful state: absence.
I lived through a scene in the hospital that I have never been able to forget. A little girl was placed beside me where I was laid out for a few weeks after the explosion. A young nurse removed her clothing to evaluate how well her wounds were healing. I watched how sweetly the nurse, who was probably a volunteer from another Japanese city, treated the girl. It had been a while since I’d heard a comforting voice. But when the nurse gingerly removed the girl’s shoe, she peeled, like hosiery, the skin of her entire leg off. The doctors had no idea how to treat the wounded. Not even the invaders knew what the physical consequences of the bomb would be, and it took them a long time to figure it out. The nurse burst into sobs, not knowing what to do with the hose; she didn’t dare throw it away or put it aside, because surely she must have seen, like me, the leg that was still inside of it. Again, the presence of the absence filled everything to the point of turning us all into a bunch of good-for-nothings, still stuck on caring for things that no longer existed.
So as I was saying, D imagined herself making love to a man whose DNA lacked the gene for violence. Who made love from a place of peace. It was the only sexual experience that brought her pleasure, rising from the absence that she carried everywhere. D’s loneliness was mostly affixed to this weight of what was gone, and so too was her peculiar sexual obsession. At the time of the bomb she lived in one of the few cement buildings in Hiroshima. She liked to play at helping her mom whenever she cleaned the windows of their third-floor apartment. She stepped up onto a chair so she could reach up high. They could both see her father swinging her brother in the park below. Her mother dipped the cloth in the bucket, watching the to-and-fro of the swing, and as if she could intuit something, she stopped paying as much attention to D and refocused on what was going on in the park. Pushed from behind by his father, the boy seemed to rush toward them, only to recede again, steadfast in the game. She said the explosion catapulted the boy upward in a last swing, and through the shards of the shattered window she watched her brother transform in the arc of flight from the air to the ground. His entire being blackened in midflight without his ever losing his shape as a boy. It was no longer flesh that was flying, but dust pressed into human form that became a shower of ashes as it fell. She watched the same thing happen to the birds in flight. In the flapping of their wings they went from being birds to being carbon molecules. No fire, no wounds, just birds in their most logical metamorphosis: perpetual weightlessness, the nimblest flight, free of effort and wings. Birds forever became for D the flying shadow of her little brother, always somewhere above her, and perhaps what led her to find orgasm in the peacefulness of painless flight.
* * *
I wasn’t like D. Real men aroused me. When I met Jim, I desired him with everything I had in me. His knowledge of botany, of ornithology, and the way he conveyed it, excited my libido. I had never really considered the more elemental forms of life before, like birds and plants, and to discover them, like a breath of air under the sun, stirred me physically.
That day when we met in the Cloisters at Fort Tryon Park, he brought me to his apartment. We sat on his bed and watched a movie together. I was afraid of what it might lead to. I was nervous to be on a bed with a man that I desired, but I also liked it, because I knew it could all be over in a flash, in that instant of penetration when the thrill of our encounter might fade away. Penetration was similar to expulsion for me. It drove away the chance of a second date, negated the care I took to fix myself up and explain who I am in a dignified way; it expelled me from my own self. I hadn’t yet written my letter to Jim, so I wasn’t interested in any sexual contact with him. I used to get around things by turning off the light. But it never really worked; it simply put things off because the scars always gave me away. This is what usually happened: If the man caressed my tits gently, he’d feel the stitches from the implants. If in contrast he squeezed them passionately, he’d feel that the texture, the
density were off, and know they weren’t natural. But breast implants weren’t what scared men off, it was the other thing: the artificial vagina that was reconstructed after the explosion, over several procedures that took years to complete. I had all of that on my mind while I lay on the bed with Jim, so I asked him to give me some time, that all I wanted was to be held and to rest together.
I remember Jim talking to me while I leaned my head on his chest. I was so tired and had a hard time paying attention to what he was saying. The words tumbled into the ear that wasn’t touching Jim’s skin and gathered there inside of me, swinging back and forth in a rhythm that lulled me into a reverie where real life and fiction got mixed together as they do in dreams. The reality was that Jim was very tall, and though I’m of medium stature, beside him I seemed tiny. The reality was that Jim seemed to know all the secrets of botany and ornithology. The reality was that we’d met only a few hours earlier and had ended up watching a movie in his apartment, where I learned the meaning of the first words I had heard him pronounce: den lilla Aurora. First he told me about the sun, something like what I wrote at the opening of my testimony, which I copy now, though they aren’t the exact words: “The sun strengthens the bones. You’ll need it if you spend the winter in this city.” And then he said what I only came to understand later: den lilla Aurora.
It had happened so quickly. After the Cloisters and the gardens, the subway to his apartment. It was getting dark. First we watched the movie, and then I had to say that I only wanted to rest in his arms. The crucial word for me, which I didn’t want to discuss yet, was sex, and also child, but above all sex. His crucial word was daughter. And both words came together in a dream because I was so relaxed that I fell asleep while Jim was talking.
Unable to become a mother, I dreamed about my pregnancy until slowly the desire for Jim began to rouse me. I didn’t wake up, but I did dream, and I woke up inside of that erotic dream. I was (I dreamed that I was) so tired. I could hardly react to his caresses. I half opened my eyes. Night had come. I calculated by the heaviness in my arms that I must have been asleep for about an hour. I wanted to tell him how tired I was, but words form more slowly than desire. So I accepted. In the space of dreams I could feel, I desired, metamorphosis. He was hard and that hardness entered my flesh still tender from the dreamy lightness. First my neck tensed and I heard a sound escaping through my nose, like a change in matter, like a cold log crackling toward the heat of firewood. And then, as if I were pregnant, I spoke to my daughter, a fetus only a few weeks old. When I woke up, realizing that such a thing could never happen, I jumped right out of the bed and said goodbye to Jim.
When I got home, I wrote something for that unborn girl, mostly images from the dream, stories, and a few of the things Jim had told me about flowers and birds. The experience was so vivid it was as though I had a real vagina. In my dream I told Jim that I didn’t want anything plastic inside me and allowed myself to reject one of the things I most envied from those days, but that mostly stuck or tore in artificial vaginas: condoms, forgetting entirely, in my sleep, that a large part of my body was, and is, made of plastic. To date, that was one of the most merciful moments life had ever given me, a vagina by birth, the possibility of saying no to a condom. But it wasn’t real. More important, there was another unreal thing in that dream: I had felt maternity in my fake dream-state flesh. I imagined that I was four months pregnant in that dream that took on physical sensations. Don’t ask me why four months exactly. Maybe because I’d heard that the fetus is more settled after three months and there is less chance of a miscarriage. Or maybe because I had read a few weeks earlier that the genitals are perfectly distinguishable by then, and though I didn’t care whether it was a boy or a girl, what I didn’t want was both in the same body and having to blame myself for passing on my sorrow of indetermination. Following this first experience, I felt the same sense of maternity several more times, right up to the very last. I’ll come back to that in a little while. Right now I imagine you going back to read everything again in order to catch what I’ve said about the last event that changed my life for the good while ending other people’s lives. But right now I don’t want to talk about that. You can go ahead and skip straight to the end, but if you decide to follow the order of things, I’m going to make you wait. If you wouldn’t ask gravity to explain why it holds you to the earth, then don’t ask me for an explanation either. But let’s put this last chapter aside. What’s coming now is a transcript of what I wrote to my unborn daughter that first time I felt another life inside of me, thanks in part to the goodwill of Jim, he who was still a stranger to me.
Fourth Month: 1965
You Gasp Like a Wren
Before I got pregnant, there were times I didn’t notice the little squirt at climax. But ever since I realized you were there three weeks ago, I feel the warmth of the liquid along the walls inside of me and I can imagine the semen of your origins splashing against the water where you are floating, making the little boat rock in the waves. Drink it, daughter, now that you’re fortunate enough to absorb it everywhere, since your mouth, your belly button, your anus have yet to be formed. I envy you that. I’m sorry. You haven’t even been born yet and already I envy you. Sometimes I don’t know in which orifice to receive the fluid, so I change position, undecided, holding who knows what parts of your father, and then, caught in the trance, I make him move, and I don’t know how I do it because he’s so big and I’m so small by his side. Perhaps he moves on his own, waiting for me to decide. And holds off. Holds off until I can adjust myself and tell him it doesn’t matter which organ: here inside, it’s fine here. Someday I might beg your pardon for talking to you like this (though I doubt it), but take into account that I’m not your mother yet, and you are no more than a little pea without a princess. A pea without a mattress. No, not a pea. At four months you’re a little bigger than that. Rounded, like a four-inch piece of fruit between my legs. And your father’s down there. Look! He lifted me onto his shoulders like a little girl and he’s running with me through French cloisters. Plenty of flowers and trees. He knows the names of all the plants, down to the most insignificant herbs, and he recites them to me, pointing an enthusiastic finger here and there, even invisible shoots that appear only when he names them, suddenly, like instantaneous flowers, flowers that refuse the tedious gestation of a bud. Shattering the cyclical rubrics of the botanical. I laugh. It’s so much fun. I laugh as we run in a circle, dodging the stems that grow beneath the gallery of arches as if they are mines. No, the stems are not mines. We’re mines, the weight of a woman and a man running on two single legs, trying to avoid massacring a shrub. Something rubs against my hair. It’s the ceiling. The wooden ceiling. I’m so much taller now I have to protect my head. I put a scarf on as if it were a soft helmet, a strong and flexible helmet made of some advanced material. And on his shoulders I reach the center of the cloister. This must be the main tree. It’s leaf-laden, and I push the branches from my face.
“It’s a yew,” says the mouth that speaks beneath my body, “a sacred tree because it’s immortal, and before dying, when it’s rotting, one of its branches is given space in the already hollow trunk, and the branch grows downward, cleaning the rot away like one of those little fishes that clean the walls of an aquarium.”
“The little branch eats the rot?” I ask.
“Yes,” the mouth answers, “it’s how the branch gets nourishment so that it can continue growing until it reaches the ground and takes hold there, but by then it’s no longer only a branch but a healthy root that will sustain the tree for a thousand years more.”
“And what did you say the tree was called?” I ask again.
“It’s called Aurora.” Aurora? All right then, Aurora. That’s the name your father gave you when he saw me. Den lilla Aurora were his first words, and his hands touch me in the subway. (“Hey, lady! What are you looking at? This car isn’t made of steel, it’s organic like the wisteria branches climbing the trellis in the p
ark where the raccoons play. And the families walking beneath it praise the scent of the flowers. They don’t realize that the fragrance is a blend of the heat of animal pelts, urine, chewed seeds, and the sweat of the rings around the raccoons’ eyes and tails. Lady, don’t get uptight, the ambergris in the perfume you want to buy is whale vomit.”) And he said Den lilla Aurora again, giving you a name before knowing mine, a name with a Swedish adjective because Swedish is the language of the birds, he said, and it’s pronounced this way: Dein lilya Aurora. He said it very slowly—Dein (my ear), lilya (my groin), Aurora—the strain in his trousers, a vapor, a gasp in the space between skin and fabric, reduced, in excitement, to the taut cotton, rained-on, wet fuzz of the flower still on the branch. And in these unhurried words I had time to tell myself that I’m allergic to plastic but what does it matter, there’s no pharmacy in this train, and what’s more I don’t want the time to buy anything; in these three words there was only time enough to say that this man must be healthy and I don’t admit condoms in my body and let’s go to my place without justifying anything to him or to me even though we’d met only five minutes ago. And after we met we watched a movie, and you were newly born into his big hands on the screen, and he kept saying Den lilla Aurora as he looked at you and I said that if I have a daughter I wouldn’t give her a name because when I was born my father called me S without ever knowing my real name. And he expected me to respond every time I heard S. And I didn’t respond, but it was his fault, not mine, for daring to give me a name without knowing me, when I was only seven pounds of bloody flesh. And the yew leaves graze my face, but I find a clearing inside the tree and perch a little solider on the shoulders that sustain me. The distance between my two thighs measures the exact width of your father’s neck, which is in the middle of them. I’m so tall. And I’m surrounded by greenery.
The Story of H Page 9
