Viral

by Emily Mitchell

  At some point she realizes that she has said to herself that “they” felt close to each other and “they would determine” to finally take the time to spend together, but in fact she doesn’t know whether it was only she who felt these things, the closeness and the renewed goodwill toward their marriage; she supposes that her husband shared these same emotions. But it is just as likely, given what happened later, that he was feeling and thinking something entirely different, although what it was she cannot know. He is a sealed box to her now, his mind and heart entirely opaque, and what is worse she understands that he always was this way; it only seemed that she could see inside him, all the way to the bottom of him as it is possible to see through shallow water at the edge of the sea.

  Is she still concentrating on hearing the sound of the ocean, as Dr. Francus suggested? When she tries to call it back, all she can get her mind to produce is the grating sound of different kinds of engines, the hyperactive shrieking of a leaf blower or the nasal buzz of a lawn mower or the slicing, snorting sound of a motorcycle. Now the motorcycles multiply, there are many motorcycles all driving slowly through her head together. They rev their engines. There must be ten or twelve of them at least. She turns on the bedside light and fumbles on the floor for her glasses. The light coming out of the lamp is like a bouquet of knives. Is that too overwrought? How else to describe how piercing it is? It is made of levitating shards of glass. Tomorrow, if she still can’t get to sleep, she will make an appointment to see her doctor and get some sleeping pills. She doesn’t want to do this quite yet. Because what if the phone rings again, late at night, and she is too sound asleep and she misses it? Maybe she will give it just one more night before she gets the medication. Or maybe two.

  The following night, she cannot get the idea out of her mind that someone is going to come into the apartment. She cannot picture the person’s features, only his unusual height and bulk, which is masculine in a general way without taking on the concrete features of an individual man. He is not white or black, but he does appear to be wearing her father’s favorite old cardigan, which was gray with round leather buttons and leather patches on the elbows. This is his only distinguishing characteristic. She doesn’t know how he is going to get into her apartment. She has already checked that both doors and all the windows are locked. And yet, every time there is a noise close by, either from out in the street or from somewhere inside the building, she starts, convinced absolutely that it is the footsteps of this man. She can hear him coming down the corridor, approaching the door of her apartment. Now, somehow, he is inside her apartment. He is right outside her bedroom. He waits in the hall outside her door, until she has almost forgotten he is there and then he makes a noise.

  She tells herself that there is no man, but the more she tries to convince herself of this, the more clearly she can picture him. His eyes are green and one is slightly higher than the other. His nose is flat and broad at the bottom, so he looks like a figure in a painting by Picasso. He does not appear to have a mouth at all, as though whoever made him forgot to give him one, but rather than being horrifying as you might imagine a person with no mouth to be, this gives him a quizzical kind of expression like he is listening with genuine curiosity, his head tilted slightly to one side.

  What would she do, she wonders, if there really was a man outside her bedroom door? The door has a lock on it, but she does not usually lock it at night because there is no one else in the apartment and because she worries about what would happen if there was a fire in the middle of the night, whether if she locked her door it might not make it more difficult for her to escape or for the firemen to come in and rescue her. She has to balance the concern that someone might get into her bedroom with the concern that she might not be able to get out in an emergency. She imagines the fire chief shaking his head sadly as the local news reporters hold microphones out to him in front of the burned-out husk of her apartment building, and talking about how they managed to get everyone out except for one woman up on the seventh floor who had locked her bedroom door and they couldn’t reach her in time. Asphyxiation, the fire chief says. People don’t think about these things. Why would she lock her door like that? Was she worried about someone coming in? That is just ridiculous.

  But is it so ridiculous? These things do happen, men breaking into women’s homes and stealing things or assaulting them or worse. If she heard someone outside her door, what would she do? She could call 911 and hope they arrived fast enough to rescue her. She could try running out of her room suddenly, hoping to surprise the man so much that she would have a chance to get away, run out of her apartment, sound the alarm. She could try talking to the man, finding out what he wants, trying to appeal to his human side not to hurt her.

  Outside her door, there is a sudden, loud, creaking sound, like the noise made by a stomping foot. He is right there. She sits up in the bed and turns on the light; the part of her that believes there really is someone in the apartment screams at her not to do this, that she has just given away her presence and now, surely, he will come in and—what? Kill her most likely. She tries to reason with herself. There is no one there. She needs to go out of her room and make certain of this. Maybe then she will be able to go back to bed and get some sleep.

  She goes to the door. She takes a deep breath. She opens it, quickly, and sees that her hall is empty. But of course he could have withdrawn into another room, be hidden right now somewhere out of sight but watching her. She walks around her home, turning on the lights in each room, opening the closet doors. Soon the whole apartment is bright from end to end. She sits down at the kitchen table and remembers that when she would get scared like this in the past, which didn’t happen very often, her husband would do what she herself has just now done. Walk through the house, turn on the lights, prove that there was no one hiding, no ghosts, no people, no one there but the two of them. Sometimes he would do it impatiently: stop being so silly. But sometimes he would do it gently, quietly, showing her the rooms with nothing in them to be frightened of. When he did this, she would calm down immediately. She would sleep happily and without interruption for the rest of the night. She would be aware of his body stretched beside hers in their bed, appreciative of its presence, because who else would have cared for her in this small, absurd way, even some of the time, except for him?

  Now she sits down at the table in her dining room, with all the lights blazing around her, feeling extra bright as they do late at night. She puts her elbows on the table and her head in her hands. No one comes either to comfort her or to harm her. She is all alone.

  She tries, in this order: valerian root tea, which makes her lose feeling in her tongue so then she is lying in bed awake with a numb tongue in her mouth that feels like something someone else left there promising to come back and get it at the end of the day but then forgot to do so; melatonin, which makes her more wide awake through the night so that even the fitful sleep she has been managing to get evaporates; a strange kind of herbal tea that she buys from a hippy herbalist store near her home that smells like armpit and looks a bit like armpit hair but that cannot, she tells herself, possibly be in any way really related to armpits. None of these things works. She keeps her phone in the same spot on the counter in her kitchen where it was when she got the first phone call from France, but it does not ring.

  Then, one night, about a week later, she is lying in bed thinking about global warming. This is a topic that she has been returning to at night quite often, thinking about how the difficulty with trying to solve global warming is that anything you do, any effort human beings make, whether it is holding a conference or publishing a book or making a movie to try to spread the word and convince people that global warming is real, only adds to the problem. Almost everyone, in America at least, who goes to see the movie will have to drive a car to get there, or if they watch it at home, they’ll watch it on a television that was made in China in a factory that uses fossil fuels and then sent to the United States on a freigh
ter that also burns fossil fuels, and while they are watching the film they will be using electricity that also probably comes from fossil fuels. Similarly, if they hold a conference, all the people who travel there will have to fly and stay in hotels and use taxis. Basically, the only thing you can do that will have a positive effect on climate change, unless you are a scientist who is working to invent some brilliant alternative to gasoline and coal, is nothing. If you do nothing, travel nowhere, eat nothing, use no light and don’t drive, you will not be contributing to the problem. Otherwise, you will be. Is there anything I do, she thinks, actually worth the damage that I cause just by being alive in this time and place? Really, the only time when we aren’t damaging things is when we are asleep, in the dark in our beds, and now she doesn’t appear to be able to do even that. Maybe it would be better not to exist, to disappear.

  What if no one was able to sleep anymore? What if we created a world of such uncertainty and such loneliness that one by one everyone in America found that they were unable to fall asleep? Each one of us is awake in our separate apartments, which we don’t share with anyone else because we didn’t want to stay with our parents and we couldn’t get along with our spouse and fewer of us than ever have children and even then, our children don’t stay with us for very long. Each of us is wandering around our lit-up rooms, our minds scurrying down corridors like mice in a maze, unable to find our way to the soft place where we feel blessed, able to stop striving and allow ourselves to float along for a while on the currents of the world, which is so much bigger and more mysterious than we can imagine. Maybe we are lonely for a world that we do not and cannot understand, that swirls around us in a beautiful storm and for which we cannot be held responsible.

  She realizes that she is falling asleep. She feels her body softening, her bed starting to sway gently like a boat on a lake. Her room is filling up, flooding, with a substance that looks like dark ink but that she knows will not drown her. It is up to the edge of her bed. Then it spills over, traveling down the channels in her sheets and bedspread, buoying her up so she starts to float away.

  And then the phone rings. It slices through the softness of her dream with its hard, bright, electronic sound. She is not surprised to hear it, however; she has the sensation that she had been expecting it would ring just then, just at that moment. She gets out of bed and feels light and certain. The leaden haze of the last week, brought on by sleeplessness, has gone and her head is clear and her movements are sure and graceful. Even though she is just walking down the hall in her apartment she can feel the swish of her nightdress against her legs in a way that is pleasant and sensuous, her bare feet on the cool floor. She reaches the kitchen as the phone is on its third and final ring and she plucks it off the counter and answers it.

  On the other end of the line, she can tell without him even speaking, is her husband. He says: “Don’t worry. You don’t need to disappear. Everything you do is valuable for its own sake. I love you and this love illuminates all that you do and everything about you. Even if I’m not there now, this is still true.”

  “How did you know that I was thinking about disappearing?” she asks.

  “Because you are dreaming,” he says. “Because this is a dream.”

  “Then I’m asleep?”

  “That’s right.”

  Of course this is a dream, she thinks. He is not really calling her. In real life he never used words or phrases about love and illumination. Strangely, though, she is not disappointed because she can feel the truth of what he has said, whether he really said it or not. She wants to hear him speak again, so she asks: “Will you always love me?”

  “Yes,” he says, “in a way I will. I will think of you every day of my life and often I will wish that I had not left. But that does not mean that I’ll come back.”

  Again this seems right to her. She happens to glance down at her feet and it occurs to her that, since she is dreaming, she would like to float a little way above the floor, and so she does, feeling herself lift off the ground, her body growing weightless in the middle of the air. She is still holding the phone against her face, but she is no longer paying attention to her husband or what he might say next. She drifts toward the window of her living room, which is open although she knows that is not how she left it when she went to bed. Outside, there is the nighttime street, with its pools of light, the complicated maps the trees make against the sky. Her husband asks: “Do you miss me?” and she remembers that he is there, on the other end of the line. His voice sounds like an insect. If she reaches out, she can pull herself over the sill and swim out into the night. “I have to go,” she says. She puts the phone in the pocket of her nightgown.

  And then she is away.

  No-No

  They are called to the meeting in the gymnasium by number. The Takagawa family, number 1205, cross the camp with the other families whose numbers start with 12. It is a cold, bright January day. The ground is caked with snow. Wind funnels down the valley from the north, blowing the snow up into white, ghostly wings.

  When he looks back years later, Karl Takagawa will remember most vividly the constant wind. It is as if even the air is bored and restless, turning this way and that like an animal going crazy in its pen.

  • • •

  Other things will stay with him, too, fragments of memory clear and frozen as photographs: the fence that encloses the camp on all sides, the guard towers along its length, the armed sentries at the main gate, the little creek that comes in through a culvert nearby. In the summer the children waded in the creek, but for months it’s been too cold. Now they all walk quickly, hugging their coats around them, to the looming, barnlike building where they’ve been told an important announcement will be made.

  When they get to the gymnasium, the Center Manager is standing at the front of the room. He’s a tall, broad-shouldered white man. He wears wire-rimmed glasses and a brown felt hat with a wide brim, which for some reason he keeps on indoors. This gives him the genial look of a scout leader or a park ranger.

  The Center Manager waits until they are all seated. He looks around at the sea of faces. Then he coughs to clear his throat.

  “You are being asked,” he says—he uses this word, asked, as though they have some choice—“to fill out a questionnaire giving information about yourselves to the government. Once you’ve done this, you can apply to work or go to school away from here. To gain this privilege”—he uses this word, privilege—“you just have to answer the questions in a way that shows you are a loyal citizen of the United States. You’ll have three days to complete the forms.”

  “Are there any questions? Raise your hands if you have questions.”

  No hands go up. There are, apparently, no questions.

  While the Center Manager is speaking, two assistants walk around handing out the questionnaires. When they come to Leigh Takagawa, Karl’s wife, they stop, confused because she isn’t Japanese. Should they give her a form or not? They pass her by. They give forms to Karl’s mother and father. They move on to the next family.

  Karl reads over the form. It has twenty-eight questions and is three pages long. It asks if he is married and what his wife’s race is. It asks where his parents were born, if he has siblings, what their names are. It asks whether he sends money regularly to foreign countries. It asks about his hobbies, what magazines he reads, where he went to school.

  At the very end are the following two questions:

  27. Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States wherever ordered?

  28. Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and faithfully defend the United States from any or all attack by foreign or domestic forces and forswear any form of allegiance to the Japanese emperor or any other foreign government, power or organization?

  • • •

  Karl thinks to himself: Now that we have you and your family locked up in a camp in the middle of nowhere, will you swear allegiance to the state that put
them there? How about serving in our armed forces while your parents, wives and children are in jail for doing absolutely nothing? How does that strike you? From inside his chest, where the anger and disappointment have taken up permanent residence, come answers clear and certain. Will he serve? Will he swear allegiance? No and no. The government can take its privilege and go to hell.

  Karl arrived in the camp five months before, in September 1942. All Japanese had been ordered to leave the western coastal states. He accompanied his parents, leaving his wife and daughter, exempt from banishment, behind in San Francisco. He thought he might not see them until the war was over.

  But Leigh followed him a few weeks later. During their one phone call after the evacuation, as it was called, Karl tried to tell her not to come. She and May should stay in the city. Their friends in the Party would give her money until she found a job. In wartime San Francisco there were jobs even for women, even for Reds.