Celestial Inventories

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  “No Japs wanted here,” the signs had said as they evacuated east.

  *

  The old man followed Tom out of the meeting hall. Tom watched as he gestured excitedly with both hands, his grey eyes feverish, rheumy. He motioned toward the alley and the dark, unmarked door in the shadows.

  “Everything changed … so quickly!” the man said. “I had been sleeping, and in the dream, or after waking from the dream, I cannot be sure, I felt such a power, such a brilliant light consuming all the world! I’d been dreaming of defeat, defeat I was sure must happen, when this wonderful thing happened! You may think I’m crazy, addled, to call such a happening wonderful. But all had to be burned away, all had to be changed, before this new thing could come to be. Flashing eyes, bronze skin I could see him! I’ve worshipped him since, always!”

  Tom held him upright, the old man so overcome by religious fervor his legs had collapsed beneath him. Tom looked again into the alley’s dark shadows, and around at the drabness of the neighbourhood. It seemed an unlikely setting for a god.

  *

  Tom’s family was sent to Granada in southeastern Colorado. Eight thousand Nisei there. The family lived in a 16’ by 20’ room, wood sheathing covered with black tarpaper. Furnished by a stove, droplight, steel grey cots and mattresses. Three hundred people packed into the mess hall. Soft alkaline dirt and sagebrush.

  His father grew steadily worse. Crazy, said the other boys. Tom got into many fights.

  Dust under the loose fitting window sash, dust under the doors, gritty floors, dusty bedding. People weren’t meant to live in such desert. It reminded him of the Jews, when they had been cast out of Egypt. Why should the great white god punish them so? He could not understand. And where was their god? Didn’t the Japanese have a god?

  Earl Warren said that the release of the Nisei from WRA camps would lead to a situation in which “no one will be able to tell a saboteur from any other Jap.”

  Tom remembered his father bending over backwards not to offend. Bowing and apologizing to the sadistic young white soldier who had tripped him on the way back from the mess hall.

  The American Legion wanted them deported. Tom could still see the windshield stickers: “Remember a Jap is a Jap.” The Denver Post demanded a 24-hour curfew on “all Japs in Denver.” There were rumours of bloodshed at the Tule Lake camp the papers said it was full of disloyals.

  His father was never the same. Tom couldn’t really think of his father as a human being anymore. Almost as if he had never existed … wiped away in the conflagration … gone instantly from the face of the earth.

  *

  Shino’s brown suit fit perfectly. Months of exercise had brought her down to her old figure. The spots of seconds ago had disappeared from her face; the mirror had flowed back to normal. She was startled to find a slight smile on her lips, as if the smile belonged to someone else, another woman hiding under her skin.

  There was no pleasure in her anticipation of her visit with her cousin; she did not enjoy associating with other hibakusha, the survivors of the bomb. But her cousin was a nice man, and she had no other family left.

  She kept her hair combed over the scar and pretended to know little of the bomb horror stories; she didn’t want to talk about it. She didn’t want people connecting her with the Hiroshima outcasts, those living dead. The bomb people, they all die, some people would say. She wasn’t sure this was true, but why argue with common opinion? A dying woman was not meant to be loved; love belonged only to the living. She was hibakusha, and those people, they never recovered.

  She had never married. Her body remained fallow; there had been no children, although she knew it was medically possible. At twenty-five she had loved a young man named Keisuke, a lawyer. But his old mother had objected to their marriage, said that she bore the A-bomb disease, that the babies would surely be deformed. After years alone Shino too had this fear, that she might give birth to something other, something never before seen on earth. Males gave birth to strange things through their extremities; she found it difficult now, even to have a man touch her.

  She hurried out of the house. She would be late.

  As the morning sun rose high over the treetops of Asano Park she remembered the park as it had been that day: the huddling corpses, the silent stares of the living dead, the fire raging in the distance, flame and dark smoke floating over the trees. Everything she had known had suddenly become nothing.

  Shino opened her eyes and stared at the two old women huddled over her. She had fainted, and one lady was offering her water from a pink paper cup. The sky was clear again; the smoke had been long ago. It is 1965, she reminded herself. That was so long ago.

  The other lady had brushed back Shino’s hair and seen the scar; Shino saw her pass a knowing look to her friend.

  *

  One evening Tom went to a double feature of old Japanese science fiction films. Gojira no Gyakushu, Godzilla’s Counterattack, and Uchujin Tokyo ni Arawaru, Space Men Appear in Tokyo. He had seen them both as a kid but he found himself reacting to them quite differently this time. They had been fun then, although a little scary, and he hadn’t seen all that much difference between Americans and the Japanese based on the evidence of those two films.

  Now he had to wonder what the reaction of the young Japanese must be to these two films. What must they think, watching the enormous Godzilla, a deliverer of monstrous and bizarre death and destruction, and who is described as a creature born of nuclear tests? Surely he must be something from their own childhood nightmares, completely visualized and made concrete.

  At least the Space Men movie seemed a bit more positive. In this invaders come to Japan for advice concerning all the nuclear tests being done on earth. The aliens are worried about them. Japan’s unique knowledge of the bomb becomes a positive thing. And yet the aliens possess awesome power; Tom wondered if this was still another example of the Japanese feeling that they had all been guinea pigs, and that Hiroshima was an “experimental city.”

  The movies made the bombing seem even larger than before, mythic. Tom couldn’t help thinking they were the stuff of which religions were made.

  *

  The water the women gave her was cool and reminded Shino of how different it had been twenty years before. There had been rumours that people were not to give water to the injured, or it would aggravate their sickness. Such a denial had been difficult to maintain; it was natural for the victims to request water. Water was thought to restore life by returning the soul to the body. The injured had been so polite: “Tasukete kure!” they had said, Help, if you please!

  She could not forgive herself for ignoring them so, but she herself had been injured. She had walked as one in a dream, ignoring their pain. She had passed by the curtains of skin hanging off their bodies, her hands clasped over her own slashed breasts. She had been half naked and cowered in shame. Even knowing what they were, she had walked upon human bowels and brains.

  She would be late for her visit with Fujii, but she needed some time to rest. Across the street, they were performing a shinto rite at the grand opening of a new department store. They had done the same when she was a girl. But the military had fooled them into blind support with shinto, the religion and the country become one. How could it ever be the same again? How might she trust either?

  She was hibakusha, a person of the bomb. A new deity had been born into the world, a deity born of the loins of little, petty men. But he was greater than they. Man had brought him from the sun at the centre of the world for slaughter. He turned and faced her from the street in front of the department store, a slight smile on his lips. Amused by their petty nationalism. Appeared from the crowd, as if he had stepped out of their massed bodies. Flash off his teeth of metal and lightning and suns. He did not speak, but his loud breathing hurt her ears. Bright eyes and dark hair:

  very handsome.

  She thought it strange that he looked only vaguely American; his face seemed to blur in and o
ut of focus. Shaven eyebrows, almond skin. Sometimes he looked like her cousin Fujii.

  The god thrilled her; how very handsome he was. Isamashii, brave. With him standing there, the breeze from the ocean lifting his long silver and black hair and laying it back against his shoulder, it seemed as if they were the only people really alive: she, the other hibakusha, and this new god. He spoke inside her head, and the power in his voice made her aware of the great responsibility they had; she could feel bombs exploding, giant mushroom clouds of red, yellow, blue and white, like flowers over the globe. People burned with an incandescent flame, then disintegrated into their basic elements, back into the earth to become trees, flowers, the very materials from which the bombs themselves had come. They would all be united; there would be no separation.

  The dark-haired god smiled and this movement in his face seemed to harden his features, set lines firmly around his hawk nose, his black steel eyes. A square, mechanical jaw. Lines of sweat down the sides of his face.

  A Coca Cola truck passed, spraying dust in its wake. She realized the opening ceremonies were completed; the people had all left. That day … sometimes it seemed like yesterday. She had stayed home that day; she had told her mother she was too ill to go to school, but she had lied. Her class of girls had been assigned to clear fire lanes in case the American B-29s dropped incendiary bombs. She admired the way the people had accepted this; many tore down their homes and buildings because they were in the path of a designated fire lane. But all this destruction saddened her; she couldn’t bear to help. Her mother left her at home with her sister, who knew she was faking but kept silent. It was just after breakfast, the hibachi stove was still smouldering. At 7:45 her mother left to catch a train downtown. The bomb must have struck when she was still on the train. Shino knew her mother had almost expected it, some disaster like this had worried her for a week, the way the American planes had flown over every day.

  The dark-haired god smiled out in the street, people walking by. Shino couldn’t remember what year it really was; she breathed noisily. Everything silent, all she could hear was her breathing, the god’s breathing. What year was it? She imagined herself a girl again, at the side of the dark-haired god. He smiled and embraced her, searing her breasts with his flaming hands. She did not cry out in pain.

  *

  Tom thought that Hiroshima looked much like any busy port city, although perhaps the setting was lovelier than most; the seven fingers of the Ohta river supported it, and it was ringed by low mountains. There still seemed to be much of the small, provincial town here in the people and their life styles. Certainly nothing to suggest the dramatic event which had once occurred here. But the castle, shipyards, and municipal buildings had been rebuilt. The Aioi Bridge, target site of the Enola Gay, once more spanned the Ohta river. So many Tom talked to still expressed surprise that things could get better so soon.

  The new downtown seemed western with its wide streets and attractive storefronts, arcaded shopping areas. The new pride of the city was their baseball stadium and their team the Hiroshima Carps.

  But he was aware of something else here, whose presence betrayed itself in an accumulation of small clues: a bit of fused metal, a warped post. Imprinted in the steps of Sumitomo Bank was the shadow of a man who had sought refuge that day twenty years before.

  *

  The god drifted in the pollution staining the rooftops, the pollution defiling the wind, the sea. All the old gods of sea and air, defeated so easily by people.

  By people’s creations, which they themselves could not even control.

  The god sensed without thinking the great stupidity of people, their lack of control.

  The god disdained the attempts of the followers of his own religion to influence him, seek his favours.

  The new god Pikadon knowing something like incompleteness even in his instincts of stone… .

  Anger.

  *

  Tom spent the day in the Peace Park. The skeleton of the Industrial Exhibition Hall dome made an eerie backdrop. The park was full of children, and Tom thought how all that he had become obsessed with had happened long before any of them were born. He wondered what their parents must tell them.

  He wandered around the Cenotaph, the official Atomic Bomb monument, where the names of those who perished, and continue to perish, are inscribed. Some had told him that the souls of the dead reside there. Tom stared at the sculpture, feeling like a survivor himself, drawn in to their horror, guilty. Many hibakusha, he knew, resented the nine story office building which had been built behind the park, as they thought it profaned this sacred place. There were conservatives in Hiroshima, however, who even wanted to tear the “Atomic Dome” down. Times change. People forget.

  There is another statue in the Peace Park, an oval granite pedestal, symbolizing Mt. Horis, the fabled mountain of paradise. Atop this stands the image of Sedaho, a child who died. She holds a golden crane in her outstretched arms. Beneath her are tangles of colourful paper leis that people have left her, each lei consisting of a thousand paper cranes.

  A crane can live a thousand years. If you fold a thousand paper cranes they will protect you from illness. At the base of her statue—”This is our cry, this is our prayer: peace in the world.”

  Tom spent a long time in the Peace Memorial Museum. A regular art gallery, he thought. First the “Atomic Sculptures,” twisted metal, tile, warped stones, fused coins and convoluted bottles, a bicycle wrenched into a tangled snarl, a shattered clock stopped at 8:10, a middle school boy’s uniform that had turned to rags from the gamma rays of the bomb, rows of life sized dummies modelling the remnants of clothing, a face black with ash, skin hanging from swollen faces.

  The paintings, the photos: victims packing the barracks and warehouses all that death in a moment eyeballs melted across a cheek, peeling skin, gutted torsos.

  There was a mechanical fountain in front of the peace museum. The Fountain of Prayers, offering fresh water to those who had died begging for it so long ago. Too late.

  A few hundred yards downstream from the dome Tom discovered the Kanawa floating restaurant whose specialty was fine Hiroshima oysters. But he could not eat. He kept seeing the restaurant patrons as corpses, the people in the street as corpses, their stiffened forms accusing him, their eyes singling him out.

  Tom looked into the stream and saw himself: his hair burned away, his skin melting like tallow, and he began to weep. Even his own eyes accused him.

  And the all seeing eyes of an unknown deity, whose face Tom saw a moment in the water, but which disappeared with a passing ripple.

  *

  Shino had this fantasy. At last she has a baby, her own. A miracle! But the umbilical cord is rotten, and the skin peels off the face like decayed cloth.

  *

  For a long time Tom was reluctant to visit the A Bomb hospital itself. He knew that most members of the cult visited there, seeking recruits. It was an essential part of the story. But he was afraid.

  So he spent much of his time researching the hospital before making his first appointment there, with one Takashi Fujii. In the meantime Tom made many notes:

  *

  The A-Bomb Hospital

  A-Bomb hospital completed 1956, 120 beds. Each admission disturbs the survivor community. Each death creates a new wave of hysteria. Local newspapers keep a faithful obituary list.

  People suddenly dying, a bomb ticking within them. Severe anemia, need periodic blood transfusions. Depressed areas of the city often called Atomic Slums.

  A reporter found all these abnormal children, all micro cephalic with small heads and mental retardation. Mothers three or four months pregnant and within two miles of the hypocentre. Others, twenty-four years old, mental age of three, size of a ten-year-old. The Mushroom Club first the cloud, then they’re all growing like mushrooms in the shade.

  176 leukemia victims since the hospital’s founding in 1956. Coming down suddenly with leukemia twenty years after, with no previo
us signs.

  Failure to marry many of those who are still living cannot find happiness.

  *

  Tom had made a long list of questions for Takashi Fujii, yet still he did not know what he could say to the man.

  *

  The young reporter … Tom … that was his name … had come to visit. He was a young American, but with a Japanese face. His curiosity irritated Fujii. He did not like to be thought of as someone odd. He was just a man, a strong man, like many others. But he admired Americans as a whole; he had to admit that. They had brought the bomb, and the bomb was a big thing. It had been like a new beauty in the world, a terrifying beauty that had changed everything. And he really did enjoy talking about the bomb; he had little else to do.

  The young American turned on his tape recorder, and, after some fidgeting with his bed covers, Fujii began to speak:

  “I was in the midst of a well deserved vacation. There had been some repair work needed on the steel substructure of the Fukoku Seimei Building, and the owners knew I was the man for the job. But I did need a rest, so I told them they would have to wait. Of course, they held up the work just for me. They knew I was the right man. Unfortunate that I didn’t get a chance to finish the job.” Fujii twisted in the bed, a wide smile stretching his nose.

  “I had been lying in bed, drinking some fine Suntory whiskey. Then I was buried under my home. Much later I woke up, blood running from my nose. Much as it did recently, when I first discovered I had been stricken with leukemia. Ah, the bomb gets us all in the end. It hides in your body for years sometimes before it strikes. But I am a brave man; I don’t complain.

  “When I got out from under the house I saw many terrible things. The city, it was gone, smashed like a nest of insects. People ran about like beetles, pulling possessions, their fellows, out of the wreckage. The great atomic bomb had done this; Hiroshima was a great religious experiment for man.

  “The great dome of the Industrial Promotion Hall was but a skeleton. Hiroshima Castle had been flattened. The entire western sector was a desert. A reddish brown powder over everything. The Fukoku Seimei Building had only been 380 metres from the centre of the blast; I certainly would have died if I had gone there.