by Traci Chee
Bette slaps her.
It stings, but Yuki welcomes the pain, the heat spreading across her cheek like ice hissing on a hot stove, because it’s an easier pain than that raw, cutting grief inside her.
Yuki leaps to her feet. “Don’t be stupid, Hiromi!” She’s screaming now. She’s sobbing and spitting. “He’s gone! He’s just gone! You don’t know where he is any more than the rest of us!”
And she runs.
She runs out the door. She runs down the steps. She runs through the streets until she reaches the fence, but she doesn’t slow down. She leaps the barbed wire, quick and elegant as a deer, and races into the desert.
She runs. The sand dimples under her feet. She runs until she can’t breathe, until the air is caught somewhere between her lips and her lungs, and she bends over, hands on her knees, trying to scream.
* * *
We hear the news. We hold our breath, imagining the weight of his soul being lifted from the earth. We try to remember what we were doing on October 29.
Did you know, when it happened?
Did you feel it?
Did you see him streaking across the sky, open-armed for the angels?
Mrs. Hashimoto swears he visited her at Topaz when he died. She was powdering her face, she says, and in her compact mirror, she saw him. He was standing behind her, just there, by the stove, grinning. You know that grin of his: straight, white, blindingly handsome. She saw him only for a second, because when she adjusted her compact again, he was gone.
But she saw him.
Keiko, who’s sitting with Mrs. Hashimoto, looks at the place, just there, by the stove, looks and imagines him grinning and hopes it’s true.
But she doesn’t believe it.
* * *
We make a wish. We read the letter again and again. It’s from Frankie, who was there to see Twitchy brought in on a stretcher. Frankie, who never writes.
Jesus, he says. Jesus Christ. I’m so sorry.
My company walked out of there with seventeen guys, you know? Seventeen guys. Out of two hundred. King Company . . . Twitchy’s company . . . they walked out with eight. But Twitchy wasn’t with them.
Frankie tells us he found three things in Twitchy’s pocket.
The first was a photograph of Keiko.
The second was one of Minnow’s sketches. It’s of the boys, Frankie says, sitting on Mr. Hidekawa’s stoop. Everyone, he says. Mas, Shig, Minnow, Frankie, Stan Katsumoto, Tommy . . . and Twitchy, leaping down the concrete banister. It’s signed: To Twitchy. Love Minnow.
The third was an unfinished letter to Mrs. Hashimoto.
Hey, Ma, remember how you used to yell at me for climbing stuff? The fridge, the fire escape, the trees? Well, they want us to climb this hill tomorrow to rescue a buncha guys who got themselves stuck up there, so it’s a good thing I got in all that practice when I was little, huh? Guess it goes to show
But we never learn what it goes to show, because he never got to finish the letter.
He never got to finish a lot of things.
We want to say he died like a hero. We want to say he was brave until the end. And maybe he was. Maybe he was.
But he was also just a kid. He was a scared kid who died far from home, in a country that wasn’t his, a country that took his blood and his weight and his tears and didn’t give him back to us.
“It should’ve been me,” Frankie says to Mas in an assembly area outside of Nice. “I’m the delinquent. I’m the asshole. I’m the one who should’ve died.”
Mas runs his thumb along the handle of Twitchy’s butterfly knife. Frankie didn’t feel right keeping it, he said, so it went to Sgt. Masaru Ito, Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, 442nd RCT, who didn’t cry when Frankie told him the news, who went cold and hard as a stone or a fossil.
“It should’ve been me,” Frankie repeats, rubbing tears out of his eyes. “Not Twitchy. He was a good kid. He was the best kid. He loved this world so fucking much, and now he’s not in it anymore. That seem right to you?”
There’s a flash of silver as the light glances off the knife handle, and for a moment, Mas is blinded. For a moment, he thinks of Twitchy’s smile. “No,” he whispers.
* * *
We hear the news. We close our eyes. We make a wish.
Give him back to us.
We hold our breath.
In Topaz, Yum-yum plays the pianos at the music school. She plays Twitchy’s favorite songs, the fast ones, her fingers moving so quickly over the keys, they barely touch. She skips notes, more and more of them, the faster she goes, leaving so many holes in the melodies, the music collapses, and she’s left with silence.
She plays songs backwards, like reversing them will somehow make time run in the opposite direction. The sun will rise in the West. Streams will flow uphill. In the elementary school yard, children will bound backwards, and on that battlefield in France, Twitchy will get up. He’ll get up, and he’ll sail back home, guided by a long, white wake. The camp gates will open. The bus will back up. He’ll appear in the doorway, grinning and waving, like he never left.
But it’s not Twitchy who comes back.
It’s Shig, who’s taken the train from Chicago. Shig is back. He’s home . . . as much as it can still be home, after so many people you love have left it.
He and Yum-yum hold hands as they walk to the Itos’ barrack, and she taps out Chopin on the edge of his palm.
As soon as he steps through the door, he drops his suitcase.
Minnow hasn’t gotten up for days. Why should he get up? Why eat? Or wake? Or care?
Above him on the barrack wall are dozens of drawings of Twitchy: Twitchy running, Twitchy laughing, Twitchy doing tricks with his butterfly knife. He idolized Twitchy, we think. He would have worshipped at Twitchy’s feet if that boy had ever slowed down long enough.
Dropping his suitcase, Shig goes to Minnow’s cot and falls on him. The weight of a brother. For a second, the breath goes out of Minnow’s body. Tears leak from the corners of his eyes.
If Twitchy were here, he would have dogpiled on top.
The missing weight of a brother.
Yum-yum sits on Mas’s empty cot, and on the edge of the mattress, she replays the Chopin in reverse.
* * *
The news still doesn’t seem real. We don’t want it to be real. We want it to be a nightmare, because nightmares you can still wake from.
Sitting on his cot in Tule Lake, Tommy cuts a map from an atlas and, using Twitchy’s letters to guide him, traces King Company’s path through Europe. Anzio. Belvedere. Monteverdi. Red X’s in every place Twitchy ever mentioned. A boat from Naples to Marseille. A train to Lyon. To Charmois-devant-Bruyères.
Some of the villages are so small, he has to hunt down their names on the library shelves, and many of the locations, he can’t find at all—the hills, the numbered peaks, the railroad crossings—so he has to guess, X-ing unmarked countrysides and green woods.
“This is where he went?” his sister Aiko asks, her finger tracking a red line up the Italian coast.
Tommy nods. He closes his eyes and imagines what the trees smelled like, how the air tasted, because these were the last things Twitchy smelled, the last things he tasted, the last memories he made before he couldn’t make any more.
In Topaz, Keiko walks to the post office, hoping for mail.
She knows he’s dead. Of course she knows that. But she still got letters after he was gone. On November 1, she received a letter from PFC David Hashimoto, postmarked from Marseille. He was dead, even though she didn’t know it yet, but somehow, he was still writing.
On November 6, another letter arrived.
On November 8, another.
The day of the telegram—The Secretary of War desires me to express his deep regret . . . —she got another.
So she walks to the post office every day, even Saturdays and Sundays, even national holidays, when she knows the building will be closed, the doors shuttered, hoping they’ll keep coming, thos
e battered envelopes, bearing dates from a month ago: October 21, October 25, October 26 . . .
She hopes the post office has misplaced letters. She hopes they’ll discover them a year from now, ten years from now, the letters finding their way to her, across oceans and continents, wherever she might be, so he can keep writing. Just like he promised.
* * *
The news connects us. We hold it in our hearts, and although we are scattered like windblown seeds, like we are a wish made on the head of a dandelion, we are still together somehow. We are joined in our missing him.
In Topaz, we sit with Mrs. Hashimoto—Yuki, Yum-yum, Keiko, Shig. Especially Shig. We sit with her and hold our breath, because breathing feels like a betrayal there, in that silent barrack, with that grieving mother, whose boy isn’t breathing anymore.
In France, Mas sits alone. He still has the butterfly knife, but he doesn’t use it. He doesn’t practice with it, and the blade remains still and cold in his pocket. It just doesn’t seem right to use it with Twitchy gone.
Sometimes at night, in his slit trench, he feels like he’s underwater, like he’s at the bottom of a river, everything coursing over him, so fast and so strong. He used to think he was strong, but now, at the bottom of the river, staring up at the watery white moon, drowning, he knows that he’s not strong enough for this.
In Tule Lake, Aiko has started folding paper cranes, one after another until her fingertips are sore. A dozen cranes made out of comic-book pages and candy-bar wrappers. Thirty. Fifty.
There’s a legend that if you reach a thousand, you are granted one wish.
We join her—Tommy, Stan, Mary, even Kiyoshi. No one talks about the wish, as if talking about it will jinx it, as if our silence will make it come true.
So we fold. Again and again, we fold.
A hundred cranes. A hundred and one. A hundred and two.
We keep wishing.
* * *
Time passes. The heaviness on our chests eases. The news is no longer news.
In the Itos’ barrack, Minnow finally moves. He tears down his drawings. He peels them from the walls, the ceiling, and they fall in long, wide ribbons, like wakes.
Keiko finds him in the middle of the barrack, pulling pages from his sketchbook: bridges, windmills, Ocean Beach. She joins him, the paper crinkling beneath her as she sits.
They are surrounded.
Twitchy’s dimples, Twitchy’s ear. Twitchy’s arm. His calf. She thinks for a minute that they could reassemble him here, out of paper.
“I loved him,” Minnow says.
“We all did,” she murmurs automatically.
Because it’s expected.
Because what do you say?
What can you say? What do you have but platitudes? We’re sorry for your loss. He was a good boy. We loved him. The words mean nothing, and that’s why you say them. Because you need that fog, that barrier of obscurity, between you and everybody else, or your grief will blind them in its rawness, in its brilliance.
“No,” Minnow says. He looks frightened. He swallows. “I mean, I loved him.”
To Twitchy. Love Minnow.
Keiko doesn’t mean to start crying, but she does. Someone who loved him like she loved him? Acutely? Passionately? Bodily? Someone who misses him like she misses him? With blood and bones and desire? The fog around her burns away, revealing her in all her rawness, all her bright, bleeding sorrow.
Because he knows. Minnow knows. He knows the way her skin aches. He knows the way she wakes, choking, in the middle of the night, remembering Twitchy is dead. And it is a relief to be known. To be seen. To be not-alone.
She cries, and Minnow gathers her to him. They put their arms around each other, and they know these aren’t the arms either of them need, but these are the arms they have, the only arms they have.
They hold each other among Minnow’s drawings, among pieces of Twitchy Hashimoto, and they don’t let go.
* * *
We cling to one another. We are the roof we touch when we drive over the railroad tracks. We are the breath we hold when we go through the tunnel. We are our own wishes and our own answers.
Back in New York City, Bette writes a letter to Frankie.
Dear Frankie, she says, don’t you ever let me hear you talking like that again. Twitchy would not want to hear you complaining about how you’re not good enough to be here. He’d want you to do better. Love better. Love harder. Love more. He’d want us all, I think, to love the way he would have loved, to live the way he would have lived. If we can do that, for him and for us, I think that’ll bring some light back into this world.
In sum, she writes, don’t be an ass. I won’t stand for it.
But she signs it xo.
In the Katsumotos’ barrack, we scrape together our food stores and hold a feast in Twitchy’s honor. We eat. We drink contraband sake. We toast. We tell stories.
See, Kiyoshi never got the chance to meet him, but we make sure he knows about Twitchy Hashimoto.
The time Twitchy and Shig tied up Minnow and left him in the bathtub for Mr. Ito to find. The time Stan dared Twitchy to chug a gallon of milk and it all came back up in minutes. The time Twitchy got Frankie out of detention by pulling the fire alarm, which got them both detention again the next day. The time Twitchy gave Mary her first softball mitt.
We laugh.
And for the first time in a while, we don’t feel guilty about it.
* * *
It’s been weeks since we got the letter, the telegram, the news, and the camp rings with Twitchy’s absence. The loose floorboard in the commissary icebox where he hid that bottle of Jack. The rocks he threw over the fence, now lying still in the desert. The firebreak where he hit Bette with the first snowball of his life.
We are still splintered. We are still rough-edged. But we are also knitting together in the places where we were broken; we are finding each other in the darkness; we are holding fast.
We eat.
We sleep.
We breathe at last.
XV
JAPANESE/AMERICAN
TOMMY, 19
DECEMBER 1944
JAPANESE
In the mornings,
we wake before dawn
to run the dusty roads of Tule Lake.
We are no more
than the whisper of gray cotton sweats,
our frozen breaths.
Through the snowfall,
the bugles call, red as suns
on white flags.
At sunrise, we assemble
in front of the administration building,
and bow to the East.
AMERICAN
I don’t always bow.
When we were little,
and the other kids
pledged allegiance
to the flag
of the United States of America,
Shig and I would cover our hearts
and sing “I’m Popeye the Sailor Man.”
And to the republic—
I’m Popeye the Sailor Man!
for which it stands—
I’m Popeye the Sailor Man!
Our teacher’s frigid glare—
our pyrotechnic laughter.
We were indivisible
then.
Now
I watch everyone bend
like waves collapsing,
breakers red with daylight.
Now
I am surrounded,
waist-deep in their rising sea.
JAPANESE
To understand the origins
of Hokoku Seinen Dan,
the Young Men’s Organization
to Serve the Mother Country,
one must first understand:
They were American boys once,
fearless, patriotic, wholesome, polite,
but then the evacuation,
then the camps, then segregation,
and if these things did not happen
to American bo
ys, then they could not be
American boys, but they wanted to be
something. Not American?
Okay, then, Japanese.
They were going to prove themselves
dutiful, loyal, courageous, good,
healthy, strong, and mentally sharp,
if not for America, okay, then.
For Japan.
AMERICAN
After the announcement that the camps are closing,
the army sends interviewers to Tule Lake.
Will you renounce
your American citizenship?
Will you renounce
and stay in Tule Lake?
Cut off from civilization,
we don’t have many sources:
gossip, propaganda, hearsay.
So when we get a piece of news
(like that slippery word and),
we seize upon it feverishly
and circulate it like a disease.
Choose a side, Tommy.
Renounce and stay.
Be American and go.
You cannot have both.
JAPANESE
But why be American? We hear
America only promises
wholesale bloodshed and violence—
nurseries burned, barns bombed,
wounded soldiers, back from Europe,
shot in train cars. In America,
it’s still open season on Japs.
In here, we are safe,
as long as we’re disloyal
Japanese.
So my parents request repatriation.
My mother ties obi made from wire.
My father wears the fence like armor.