Fireflies

by Ben Byrne

  “Have you been robbed?” I asked him urgently, cringing as I imagined some brutal gang of ex-soldiers, beating him. “Are you hurt?”

  He stood motionless as I buried my face in his chest. I held him for a long moment. Then I realized that he wasn’t responding. Something was wrong. I stepped back and looked at him. His eyes were downcast, and his arms hung loosely from his sides. Finally, he lifted his head and gazed at me. He placed his hands upon my shoulders, with a gentle, almost tender motion.

  “Hal-san,” I murmured. “What is it?”

  His mouth twisted into a terrible smile. Rain dripped down from his hair onto his cheeks.

  I somehow knew that something dreadful had happened, something final and irrevocable. A hard lump rose into my throat as I pictured the hours I’d spent in Mrs. Ishino’s parlour room that afternoon, as she brushed my hair and softly spoke to me, as if soothing a jittery horse. I’d imagined Hal and I, sitting on this bench in the last of the evening sunlight, his face crinkling, his deep blue eyes filling with wonder as I told him about our baby that was growing inside me. This wasn’t how I’d imagined it. No, this wasn’t it at all.

  He was shaking his head. Over and over, he was shaking his head.

  He took my hand. Barely able to swallow, I let him lead me through the park to the battered arcade where we sheltered beneath the eaves of an overhanging stall.

  He swept the water out of his hair with one hand, attempting to wring the rain from his dripping jacket. He patted his pockets for his cigarettes, and finally lit one with his metal lighter. His fingers were trembling. Then he turned to me with a terrible smile.

  “Well, Satsuko,” he said. “I’m going home.”

  Rain tapped on the wooden roof as I looked up at him. With my heart in my mouth, I held a hand up to his cheek.

  He stared at me.

  A sharp image came into my mind. The day of the surrender, as we’d all knelt down in the gravel of the factory yard, the cicadas whirring, the hot sun on our backs, listening to the emperor’s speech. I remembered how, just for a second, my heart had leaped when I thought his Imperial Majesty had said that Japan had won the war; before Mr. Ogura’s sudden groan, his pounding fist in the dust.

  “Take me,” I whispered. “Please.”

  He started to laugh. He took my hand, kneading and squeezing my palm. His laugh became wilder, and suddenly, he dropped my hand and slammed his fist against the wooden shutter of the stall. I leaped with a shriek as it rattled in its frame. He put his head in his hands.

  Rain was falling all around us, making patterns in the wide puddles in the gravel path. His clothes were saturated, his face hidden away. A wave of hatred and revulsion suddenly clawed its way through my heart.

  Mrs. Ishino had been wrong, after all. I had been right. He was just another American, like all the others.

  “I’m so sorry,” he was whispering, pitifully.

  So sorry. I felt a cold sense of calm. He would go. I would stay. “Okay.” I felt a sudden urge to batter his face with my fists. Instead, I leaned down and grasped him under the arm.

  “Get up.”

  He tried to clutch my hand again, but I slapped him away. Slowly he faced me, dripping in the darkness.

  “You,” I said, pointing. “Come.”

  I stalked away beneath the scaffold of the Treasure House Gate and into the precincts of Senso Temple. The hem of my kimono was heavy and wet. Stray dogs lurked by the ginkgo stumps and darted around the stacks of timber that lay soaking in the yard.

  The rain blew in fine, blustery clouds. At the far side of the shrine, I paused until I heard the American trudging behind me. He was calling out my name. I waited until he was a dozen paces behind me, and then turned sharply down Umamichi Street.

  ~ ~ ~

  The patch of earth was overgrown with tall, wild grasses and littered with saturated lumps of charred wood and broken brick. Ghostly walls seemed to hang around me as I stood and imagined the eel tank, the rows of tables. Up above, the overhanging wooden balcony where we used to sit in the summer as the smell of broiling food floated up in the air. The room where Hiroshi and I used to fall asleep to the sound of the shop sign, creaking like a frog in the summer rain.

  The American was standing behind me. I pointed at the black, abandoned earth.

  “Here,” I said, in Japanese. “My house.”

  He nodded, a muscle trembling in his forehead. He tried to put his hand on my shoulder, but I jerked away.

  I sprinkled my fingers in the air.

  “Your planes,” I said. “Fire.”

  A strange look came over his face, and he slowly squatted down. He looked up into the sky, as if he could see them now, roaring in over Tokyo.

  I remembered the first vibration on the horizon, the air quivering like the struck string of a shamisen. The American was weeping, crying like a child left alone in the dark, and I hated him then, and I was glad, because I had never wished to hate anything as much before in my life.

  ~ ~ ~

  The high wind came from the west, batting at the paper lanterns along the alley and rattling the wooden shutters of the shops. The last thing my mother did that night was to feed a few pinches of crumbled rice cracker to the goldfish that she kept in a bowl in the family alcove and which she insisted was a lucky charm against fire.

  I woke around midnight to a dull thudding. The roar of the American planes in the sky grew louder and louder until it sounded like a continuous peal of thunder. Then the house was shaking and Hiroshi and I sat up in bed, the room flickering with shadows. Outside the window the sky was as bright as day, filled with whirling orange flame.

  Just then, there was a flash and a trail of blue sparks shot across the room. I screamed and leaped out of bed, pulling Hiroshi with me as he struggled to put on his padded air-defence helmet. Together we tumbled down the stairs to go to the underground shelter, but it was already too late. Outside the house, the world was like a glowing orange playground, the wind blowing fiercely hot as incendiary bombs pelted down from the sky. Our screaming neighbours filled the street, dashing wildly to and fro, some with coats over their heads, others trying to throw hopeless buckets of water at the incendiaries as they landed. Mrs. Oka stumbled out of her house carrying her cedar buckets of pickles; the bran was bubbling with heat and smeared along their sides.

  I heard my mother’s voice calling my name and I looked up: she was leaning over our balcony in her nightclothes, screaming at us to get away.

  “Hurry, Mother!” I shouted back at her. “Please hurry!”

  I stood there clinging onto Hiroshi’s hand as great gusts of hot wind blew around us. A tongue of blue flame was crawling up the eaves to the roof. I screamed at my mother: “Jump, Mother, please jump down!”

  She dashed inside, wasting precious seconds, before she finally emerged in a loose blue kimono. The roof of our house suddenly crumpled behind her in a shower of sparks.

  Most of the street was on fire now, the flames crackling in great swirls, the heat terribly intense as the fire ate away at the buildings. My mother was in the street now, waving at us. Just then there was a blinding flash behind her. Heat blasted toward us. The store beyond ours that sold cooking oil had exploded. I felt my eyelashes crinkle away and I looked up with streaming eyes. My mother was running toward us, screaming. Her kimono was a sheet of flame and her beautiful hair was a dancing halo of fire. She tottered forward, still holding out her arms, then collapsed onto the ground a short distance in front of us, writhing as the flames devoured her.

  People were running past us now screaming, “We’re going to die!”

  Hiroshi started shouting, refusing to move as I tried to drag him along the street.

  “Come on!” I shrieked.

  “Father’s pot!” he shouted. “I promised him! I need to go back!”

  “It’s too late!”
/>
  Flaming beams crashed around us in showers of blazing sparks. The sky exploded with shells that spurted flame and hissing blue tendrils like blazing morning glory. People were running helplessly toward the Kamiarai Bridge, and we were swept along with them, past the police station and Fuji Elementary School. The shelters at the side of the public market were full of panicked people who pushed away the newcomers, shouting that there was no room left. As we approached the Yoshiwara canal, fireballs began to pelt down from the sky and thick, smoking wind gusted along so strongly that it almost swept me off my feet. We were in hell.

  Through the cloud of whirling smoke, I saw that the buildings on the other side of the canal were on fire, red flame belching from inside the windows. The dark water was alive with dashing reflections, bobbing with people who had jumped in, steam rising from its surface. I held Hiroshi’s hand, and together we leaped from the concrete bank, splashing down into the scalding water. When we came to the surface, he cried out. His face was yellow as we looked up at the burning buildings on the bank.

  “Father!” he started to shriek. “I promised him!”

  “Come back!”

  I scrabbled for Hiroshi’s fingers in the water, but he plunged over and seized hold of the iron ladder that led up to the bank. He clambered up, crouching down as he approached the flames. He turned back to face me, silhouetted by fire.

  “Stay there, Satsuko!” he shouted. “I’ll come back! I promise!”

  It was madness. Overhead, the entire sky was filled with thundering silver planes, so low now that I could see the figures of the pilots behind the glass noses.

  “Hiroshi!” I screamed, but he started sprinting along the bank, straight toward the firestorm.

  A sharp whistle came from above, and there was a deafening explosion. The water swept up in a great scalding wave. The chemical works along the canal had exploded. The sky turned phosphorus white as I splashed forward and desperately tried to hoist myself up out of the boiling water onto the ladder. The iron rail was scorching and the metal stuck to the skin of my hands. I wrenched them away in agony, the skin tearing away, sticking there like flapping cloth as I rolled onto the bank. People were crawling around me on all fours, their faces black, their clothes all burned away. Blazing timbers crashed into the water behind me and whirling figures screamed in pain as incendiaries pelted the water. I desperately searched for Hiroshi. There was nothing but fire. To the side of the street I saw an irrigation ditch and I crawled blindly toward it. A rushing cloud of black smoke blew toward me, and then the ground disappeared beneath me, and I was tumbling down the steep banks to the bottom.

  ~ ~ ~

  The American was hunched over on the ground, rocking back and forth. I knelt down and wrenched his hand away from his face. It was wet with tears. I forced him to look at me.

  “Why?” I asked. “Why?”

  His lip trembled as he raised a hand to my face, but again, I struck it away.

  “I’m so sorry —” he whispered.

  I stood up. “You go. I stay. Okay.”

  Leaving him in the wet earth, I strode away, past the ruined houses, along the incinerated alley. I heard a strangled noise behind me, half sob, half shout, but I didn’t look back.

  Asakusa Market was bustling with people and I walked on until I reached a group of low stalls. There, ignoring the looks brought about by my sodden clothes and tangled hair, I ordered a glass of shochu from the ugly stallholder and drank it down in one before ordering another. The rough liquor burned in my belly, and I drank another glass, and another, before stumbling along the alleys in the direction of Matsugaya, then Inaricho. Without knowing how, I found myself climbing the metal steps of the bridge overlooking the mass of shimmering train tracks that snaked out of Ueno Station.

  Trains were shuttling in and out, their carriages lit, their wheels sparking. Speckles of rain flew against my face as I watched the white and red lamps of the carriages worming into the violet black night that covered the distant hills.

  Almost without thinking, I took a pot of rouge from my satchel, and with my fingertip, smeared it heavily across my lips and cheeks. I tugged the combs from my hair and hurled them over the railing so that my wet hair dangled loose around my face. I started to walk across the bridge, my sandals slipping on the metal as I crossed over the tracks and walked down toward Ueno Station.

  On the other side, I took out my pocket mirror. I grimaced in satisfaction. The reflection was that of the cheapest kind of slut. This is what I am, I thought. This is what I have become. I laughed out loud, my voice uncanny and shrill in my ears.

  I stumbled toward the railway arches, where the pan-pan girls were hunched around the wide puddles, bedraggled from the rain. I gazed at them unsteadily as I walked through the underpass that led beneath the tracks.

  I stopped in the middle of the tunnel and perched upon the railing in a pool of streetlight. My fingers trembled as I lit a cigarette, sucking it hard and feeling myself enveloped by white smoke.

  Footsteps were coming toward me, and my stomach quivered. With my fingertips, I slowly drew aside the fabric of my kimono to show my white thighs.

  The footsteps stopped and I felt a light hand on my shoulder.

  “Miss?”

  I opened my eyes.

  A boy was standing there, holding out a palm full of notes and coins. His face was horribly disfigured and scarred.

  His eyes widened.

  The lights of the tunnel whirled around me as Hiroshi’s clammy fingers reached out to touch my face.

  PART FOUR

  Night to Next Day

  August 1946

  35

  THE YOKOHAMA ROAD

  (HAL LYNCH)

  There is a stretch of the Hudson Highlands where the cliffs shoot straight up from the river, deep and wide now as it curves around Mount Storm King. Heavy beech and oak line the ridge, an outpost of the green panoply that stretches over the whole northern half of the state. The Eastern Chief rides alongside here for a while, cutting through the forest as if through virgin land, before the track curves around and the distant shapes and stabbing spires of New York City appear on the horizon.

  I’d ridden trains all the way across America. Along the coast from San Francisco to Los Angeles, then inward over the arroyos and canyons and red earth of the southwestern states. I crossed the Mississippi and the endless, flat wheat plain of Kansas, curved up into the Midwest, and finally arrived in Chicago on a grey, humid day in July. I ate a pizza pie in a red-stone Italian joint, then walked back to the station and took a seat in the waiting room amongst a gang of long-bearded Amish men, dressed in white shirts and black pants, who spoke in singsong voices about the price of grain and chickens. Later, they sat contentedly in the observation carriage as I went to my cabin and sipped whisky, looking out over the vast, lonely expanse of the Great Lakes until I finally fell asleep for the last, long stretch to the Eastern seaboard.

  The train paced itself like a steady racehorse as it rode the track high up above the tenements of Harlem, where the first foundations of grand housing projects were being laid. Then came the towering brick apartment buildings of Manhattan, the shining glass of skyscrapers, and then the gargantuan mechanical workings of the city, grimy with oil and dirt, the screeching tunnels and dark galleries drifting away on each side as we pulled into Grand Central Station. I slung my kitbag over my shoulder and clambered out onto the platform. I stood there alone, as the commuters pushed past me, not knowing where the hell I was going next.

  I took a room in a boarding house on West 28th Street, not far from Penn Station, where I lay low, sweating in a box room, smoking cigarette after cigarette and taking no other diversion than the occasional slaughter of a cockroach beneath my shoe heel. The Sicilian operetta of the argumentative couple who ran the place drifted endlessly through the floorboards. New York was wilting hot. The sun poured rig
ht down from the sky. I prayed in the evenings for the summer storms, for the thunder that would crack open the night and drench the earth for a few sacred minutes before the moisture evaporated and the restless heat rose up to smother the city once more.

  ~ ~ ~

  The Yokohama road had been as bad as I remembered, pitted with holes and craters. Life along the highway had grown more vigorous now — shanties extended far along each side, swarms of people, young and old, eking out an existence amongst the crinkled tin, the chicken wire and tarpaulin. Garden plots lined the perimeter, tended by withered old men and women with babies on their backs. Stray dogs and naked children watched from the side of the road as we passed, no longer curious enough to wave or bark. At the dock, young GIs, fresh off the boat, laughed and joked as they sold off their gear, exchanging dollars with beaming yakuza men in white summer hats and vests.

  The press club had been clamouring, alive with talk of the day’s events, when I’d rushed back the night before. The prime minister’s residence had been stormed; troops were still out on the streets; the government was about to fall. The faces of the newspapermen lit up as they traded rumours and swapped war stories, snapping their fingers for drinks as they boomed and brayed. Chaos was their amphetamine, I thought, as I sifted their ranks urgently for news of Mark Ward. I finally found Sally Harper from TIME, comforting a tall, blonde woman who sat sobbing on the piano stool. I remembered a photograph on Ward’s kitchen table: Judy.

  “Where is he?” I shouted, above the din. Sally stared at me in astonishment.

  “I thought you were his friend!”

  “His what?”

  “Haven’t you heard? Where have you been?”

  “Heard what?”

  “Mark’s been arrested. They’re saying he’s some kind of subversive!”