by Weston Ochse
The sight, the pain in Itoro’s cheek and the realization that a horror had occurred locked him in place. The only thing that dared move was his heart, which longed to be a thousand miles away where the cherry blossom bloomed in a heaven of goose-white snow and clean air, far away from the devastation that had slammed into Hiroshima, making his once great home a funeral pyre to an ambition.
He’d ran with the others into the train station when the sky flashed brilliant, five hundred of them, pushing and shoving and screaming as each tried to climb over the other for the presumed safety of inside. They’d counted on the concrete walls and iron-beamed ceiling to protect them. But when the wave of impossible heat swept over them, shredding their clothes, peeling their skin and super-heating their breaths, they knew that they’d chosen wrong. Those who didn’t die right away saw the roof shorn clear by tempest winds. The walls crumbled, crushing those nearest. A lone beam as long as a train plummeted a hundred feet, shearing through the bodies of half a hundred men, the ticket counter and the rows of women who’d gathered to sell rice cakes and fruit to commuters.
Careful not to move his head, Itoro strained his eyes until they felt like popping. He glimpsed yellow sky and broken skyline. Fires burned everywhere. Even the edges of the crowd still smoldered – blackened, twisted men who’d been too close to the platform transformed into desolation mimes trapped in their last act of life.
What had happened? It was as if the city had exploded. They’d heard the air raid sirens, but thought nothing of it. The wails of warning had become as common as the call for leaves every morning by Mr. Nagata. No. It couldn’t have been an attack. Where were the bombs? Where were the planes? Instead, something horrible must have happened; something bad enough to make the land want to shed itself of humankind and start anew; something perhaps the Americans had done by dealing with the devil.
Itoro felt a movement to his right – a jostle, then a pull as an old man with blacksmith arms peeled himself free of his neighbor with a great yowl. Kicking as he continued to shriek, the man – head burned black, skin flayed from his arms – climbed atop the men next to him, using the shoulders and heads of the dead for leverage. An immense wound covered his back, dripping gouts of blood, a flap of skin hanging free. As the man began to spider-walk across the dead, the skin seemed to reattach itself, the edges fluttering to the man’s back as if they had free will and determination.
Did Itoro just see what he thought he saw? He closed his eyes, but by the time he’d reopened them, the man was far along, heading towards a space where the men hadn’t melted so that he could run free. The pain was making Itoro see things.
But the man had the right idea. Itoro needed to leave. Being one conjoined mass denied him not only his individuality, but his freedom as well. Cheek melted to the man in front of him, some unknown connection to the men behind and beside him, he was a part of the sum of grand dead beast with a thousand heads and one nationalistic soul. Where did he end and where did it begin? The idea of being someone other than himself offended him. He wasn’t part of a machine, nor was he an appendage of a beast. He was a man, an individual, a husband and a father. He was…
Katsumi! What of his wife? And Mynami his son? Was their fate the same as his? Panic slammed adrenaline into the chains of pain that held him in place, shattering them. Placing both hands on the man’s shoulders in front of him, Itoro pushed off, the skin of his cheek ripping free, the sound like rice paper tearing on a winter’s morning. So great was the pain he couldn’t scream; only a high-pitched squeal escaped lips burnt black as breath refused to flow through his lungs for almost a full minute.
He had to get to his family. He’d spent too much time as part of this terrific mass of men. No telling what had happened to Katsumi. The last time he’d seen her was in the door of their home. He’d kissed her. She’d watched him walk down the hill as she always did.
With another wrench, he freed himself from the man’s arm on his left and the hip against his back. The pain was incredible, but somehow manageable now that it had become a way of life. Free at last from the jumble of bodies, he turned to look where the explosion had occurred. The radio towers and tall buildings that had once been the Hiroshima skyline were gone. Only fires raged in their absence, flames licking the underbelly of a sickly yellow sky.
Remembering how the old man had removed himself, Itoro sought to lever himself up. Placing his hand on the shoulder of a man next to him, he pushed until the backs of the dead supported his weight. Itoro followed the path of the old man, his hands seeking heads and backs and shoulders, anything to keep him upright and moving. He caught the gazes of many melted men who were alive and attached, either unable or unwilling to separate themselves from the beast, destined now to die as part of a greater thing. These he felt nothing from. Yet as he touched the dead, he felt strange emotions – surprise, jealousy and anger seeping into him. Stranger still, these weren’t his emotions. It was as if each touch generated new thoughts within him.
When Itoro finally found a clear area at the edge of the mass, he gently lowered himself. When his feet touched ground, he fell to his knees and began assessing his wounds. His pants hung ragged, barely covering his private area. His shirt had been burned away. Charred bits of skin covered his chest, peeled away from the man who stood in front of him. His arms were blistered and red. Pieces of skin were already falling away. His hair came out in clumps when he ran his hands through it. His cheek, back and side, where he’d been attached to the others, hummed with agonies only held in check by his refusal to scream.
Any other day he’d rush to a hospital, the pain of his wounds, the damage to his body, supplanting any desire to continue. But today wasn’t like any other day. Something horrible had come to Hiroshima today, something that had yet to be written in the history books but was destined to be the focal point for generations of rage. He turned to look at the others, melted together. How selfish was it to care so much for himself, when they remained unheralded and uncared for.
No.
His wounds could wait. He needed to think of his family. He needed to find them. He needed to see if they still lived.
God, please let them live.
Itoro lurched to his feet and took off at a slow jog towards his home in Ushita-Machi, away from the center of the explosion.
Half an hour later it began to rain. The moisture was a salve to his ruined skin. He stopped, arched his neck back and opened his mouth. He hadn’t realized how thirsty he’d become. Yet as cold and rejuvenating as the rain was, there was something strange about it. The water felt heavy as it filled his cheeks. He swallowed once, then coughed. Small hard pieces lodged in his throat.
Then the memories hit him...
Sweeping the cobbles in front of the shrine.
Watching the sparrows cavort in the willows.
Scooping up the ball to throw it back.
Loneliness seeping through every pore.
Running across the street and dodging cars.
Five, ten, a thousand memories slammed into Itoro, sending him to his knees. He retched the grit onto the street, particles collecting in his teeth. He rubbed against them madly, trying to divest himself of the pieces, pulling them out with his fingers.
The aroma of fish and pickled vegetables.
The feel of a cold rice tatami beneath his knees.
The sound of children’s laughter.
The grunt of satisfaction of a job well done.
As the rain puddled black around him, an inkling of what happened seeped through his pain and confusion. The rain wasn’t just black from the soot from burning, but also from the explosion. Those who had disintegrated at the point of the blast had shot into the air along with the cars and the buildings and the animals and the flowers, all seeding the clouds. Now the people and places were returning to earth, Hiroshima falling with the rain. And along with them came their memories.
/> Like the dead he’d touched while escaping the train station, these emotions were eager to inhabit him as if they hadn’t realized that they were dead. Itoro wondered if the devastation had come so fast and fierce that people weren’t prepared on an elemental level. With instantaneous death came the splintering of their souls, millions of pieces of self, scattered and not understanding that things would never be the same again.
He staggered to his feet. A sickness burned within him, tendrils of nausea slithering into every movement as other people’s memories struggled to take hold. Even his equilibrium was affected. Twice he fell, his head suddenly too heavy for his body to control.
The memories wanted to stay within him. They didn’t want to go. He had to remind himself who he was. Itoro Haruki. Worker at the Tobacco and Salt Public Corporation. He had a wife and a child. He lived near Ushita-Machi in a one bedroom home built by him and his uncle, Naruka.
It became a chant.
Itori Haruki.
Itoro Haruki.
I am Itoro Haruki.
Until the memories of the dead were no more. Thirst still hovered at the edge of his will, but he dared not quench it, for the rain was as deadly to him as the explosion. He’d survived one, he wanted to survive the other. Perhaps when he returned home he’d cleanse the memories with saki, but until then, he’d have to suffer.
He’d encountered so much death. Everywhere bodies and parts lay, piled and scattered like rice after a military parade. Buildings he’d known were broken ruins. Some had completely disappeared as if a divine hand had reached down and plucked them away, perhaps to keep them safe or hold them until a better time. Throngs of bloodstained people, naked or half-naked, dragged themselves painfully along, trying to find solace. The skin of those who’d been burned by the heat was peeling or left hanging in strips. The completely dazed sat on the ground pleading for help.
Itoro stopped by what was left of an elementary school that Mynami was supposed to begin attending next year. Itoro had passed it every morning for two years, the bright faces of the children revitalizing even on the most dower of mornings. The blues and yellows of their uniform color splashed against the bougainvillea stands bordering the buildings were a feast for sleep-rimmed eyes and had always served to fuel him for the three mile trek to the train station. But there were no more children. There were no more flowers. The entire frontage as well as several interior walls had disintegrated. All the desks and chairs had somehow remained intact, and been pushed to the far end of the building where they now stood like an impassible thicket. Spots colored the concrete in the shapes of children. Here and there, pieces of bodies lay camouflaged by the occasional piece of wood and rubber.
A girl lay against a snapped power line, foot long shards of broken glass jutting from her body in every direction. Like the men who’d turned to watch the explosion, her eyes had smoldered and burned.
Itoro felt himself drawn to her. Perhaps it was the way she leaned against the pole as if she were waiting for a ride. Perhaps it was that she was so alone in death, only the shadows of her schoolmates to keep her company. He wasn’t sure what it was, but he staggered to her and fell to his knees.
He felt as if he needed to bear witness. He wanted to see her face, but her head was bowed so low, her face was lost in shadow. He reached towards her to lift her chin, but jerked away as a movement caught his eye. A foot-long length of the girl’s skin on her stomach seemed to move, undulating towards him. He could see the ribbed texture of her abdominal muscles revealed by the flap of skin that hung across her lap, but it couldn’t have moved. There was no wind. She was most certainly dead. His mind was playing tricks on him. He shook his head. The skin hadn’t moved. The skin couldn’t have moved.
Lifting her chin, he gazed at her. She reminded him of his sister when she’d been little, her nose as small and delicate as a doll’s. Then something grabbed his wrist. The skin of her stomach had him, stretched from where it hung by a mere inch of skin attached to her body. It quivered as it strove to pull Itoro towards the girl. He jerked is arm and lurched to his feet, coming away with the length of skin, ripping it from the girl like flowers ripping free of a stem. Holding his arm before him, he screamed. The skin was somehow alive. He watched as it crawled onto his arm and covered it. Memories immediately invaded his mind.
... morning rice steaming from her mother’s favorite pot.
... joy at finally understanding the math problem that had haunted her for a week.
... confusion about the shaking of the school, wondering if it was an earthquake or a volcano that caused the pictures to clatter, the books to fall and the vase holding a single white lily sitting atop Ms. Naruki’s desk smash to the floor.
Still screaming, Itoro peeled the skin away, using his left hand to claw and rend. The effort caused him to stumble, his ankles twisting as his body spasmed, rejecting the very thought of the invasion. More skin ripped free of the girl’s body as if it sensed him and needed to be connected. It began to creep towards him. Ridding himself of the last residue of the girl, Itoro ran as fast and as far from the scene as he could, knowing that Ms. Naruki had been the little girl’s teacher, and knowing that he’d never known that until the skin had imparted the knowledge.
Twenty minutes later he passed the police barracks. Usually four rows of glistening white buildings, two had been destroyed and the others were fully engulfed. To Itoro’s surprise a fire brigade was busy fighting the fire, carrying buckets of water ran from the Miyiku River to hurl onto the raging barracks.
Power lines along the river had burned so that only six feet of their once forty-foot lengths stood blackened and charred out of the scorched earth, looking like matchsticks sunk into the soil by a giant hand. The stones of Hiroshima castle on the other side of the river were blackened like charcoal. The tiered roofs had been swept away, five-hundred years of architectural mastery reduced to a smoldering firepit. Everything was so tragic. This was not how he remembered it. Itoro’s memories were clear. He’d passed this point a thousand times and knew the area near the river to be one of the most beautiful sights. Old women who’d once worked in the castle tended flowers and trees to make a ring of beauty around the harsh stones of Hiroshima Castle. After more than four hundred years of gardening, the result was spectacular, the beauty of some of the gardens bringing tears of joy and wonder to first-time visitors.
But no more.
Whatever foul thing had come to Hiroshima had not spared the gardens. Itoro didn’t know what saddened him the most, the loss of life, or the loss of the cultivated beauty. It shamed him to compare the two, because part of being human meant that he valued humanity more than anything else.
A shout drew his attention. One of the firemen had paused in his running, only to remove his mask and, with an expression of supreme horror, point back down the street the way Itoro had come.
A throng of two hundred marched up the street, the sound of their shuffling feet like angry whispers in a cave. They held their hands and arms out and above them, their burns too painful to touch, clearly unwilling to allow their arms to come into contact with anything. Like Armageddon zombies, they lurched along, vocal chords sizzled by the blast, unable to make any other sound except moans of pain. Where they went, a trail of skin and blood traveled behind. From pieces no larger than a hand to swathes of several feet, the skin crawled along the ground following the throng.
As Itoro watched, a piece of skin fell away from an elderly woman’s arm. The people behind her trampled it, but once it cleared the traffic, the skin lurched forward as if tugged by an invisible string. Unwilling to be left behind, it followed, as if given the chance it would reattach itself and become whole once more.
A memory surfaced. April on the shoulders of Mount Fuji when he and Myomi spent the whole hanami in silence. They didn’t need to speak to each other. They felt a kinship through their touching fingers as they witnessed the snow
falling along the cherry tree boughs, catching like blossoms and twinkling in cold air. God how he’d loved her then.
Itoro spun and found a yard-long length of skin wrapped around his left leg. He clawed at it, and with the help of his right foot, was able to pry it away. He kicked it and stepped back. When the skin hit the ground, it stilled for a moment, then came for him again.
Backpedaling, true fear spired through him. Fear of living, fear of pain, fear of fire, every fear paled in comparison to the fear of losing self. He’d never thought he’d need to worry about it, but the unbidden memories terrified him. Where was the dividing line between self and others? In the train station it was that melted connection that separated everyone. But what about memories? How many of someone else’s memories could a person have before they were no longer themselves and became that other person? Was it the way a person looked that defined them, or who they were inside?
He’d never been to Mount Fuji. He didn’t know a woman named Myomi. Whoever’s memory that had been, Itoro had felt the bottomless chasm of love the man had possessed for the woman, and in feeling it, realized that the owner of the memory was dead and would most certainly never feel that way again... unless Itoro allowed the skin to become a part of him.
Once again he ran.
Past the fire brigade.
Past the ruined gardens.
Past the market where he’d bought flowers for Katsumi last week to commemorate their anniversary.
People lay dead and dying everywhere. Occasionally he passed a man or woman staggering in the street, odd pieces of skin clinging desperately to them. Itoro knew what that meant and shuddered at every iteration. Did they even know who they were anymore?
