A psychologist studied the men who were exposed to these bombs and later became ill, and found in them an obsession to establish the truth. But he also discovered that, when they became enraged at the government for denying the truth, they felt guilty for their rage.
What did she feel, Nelle, on the first day she could not return home after school? This is not impossible to imagine. She did not tell her friends and therefore she had a secret of which she was ashamed. Girls learn shame very early and in many different ways. Once I was in a dressing room with a group of girls who were just adolescent. They were whispering among themselves, plotting to trap one of their group while she dressed because they had guessed that this girl did not wear a bra. Girls do not display themselves but try to hide.
Once when I was a girl myself a boy my own age tried to push me down and take off my underpants. He was behaving in a violent way, and his voice commanding me as he pushed me sounded insane. I yelled and he ran off, and later, when I told on him, the whole event was handled discreetly. Except for a long time I associated the clear madness in his voice with the part of my body he had wanted to see.
When Nelle went home that day, if she had forgotten, she then had to remember. The feeling at the dinner table was stiff and uncomfortable and she knew that her mother knew and that her sisters knew because she was the youngest. But no one said a word about it. And she felt nauseous. It was not only her father who was not the same to her, no one was the same. Not herself, not the world. It could never be the same again.
Nor could the world ever be the same for Israel Torres. He never regained his normal sight. He started to go blind. But he was troubled at night with another kind of vision. By things he had seen on the day of the test. Two of the men he commanded had disappeared. He never saw them again after that day, and yet they were not listed as dead. And he had seen something else, a vision that pressed in on him and weighed him down as much as the symptoms of his own illness. In the hospital he told the nurse what he had seen. The next day he was wheeled into a private room and questioned by two doctors and another man who was not identified. These men told him that he had been hallucinating. The next morning a doctor attempted to hypnotize him, but the attempt failed. And the morning after that he was flown to a hospital in San Diego, strapped in and wheeled to another private room where he was questioned by four men. This time the men called him a liar. And a large pill was forced down his throat. When he left that hospital he was warned never again to tell the story about what he had seen.
Two years before, another man, who had never met Israel Torres, had seen a similar vision in the same desert. When he told what he had seen he was given drugs which were supposed to make him calm. And afterward he was sent to a psychiatrist who, whenever he tried to tell the story of what he saw, would show the young man films which were made up of a strange juxtaposition of images: Mickey Mouse and then Hitler, Donald Duck and then the bombing of Hiroshima.
There are many things that we know but we are not supposed to know. Sometimes there is a conspiracy to silence us. But at other times it may be that what we have to tell is something no one wants to know because what we say does not fit into the scheme of things as they are understood to be. A child tells a doctor she has been raped by her father. She may even have signs on her body of this rape, a tear or a fissure. But the doctor refuses to see. A young woman remembers that she was raped, but the doctor hearing this story tells himself he hears only her fantasy.
Recently a woman who grew up in Germany during the Second World War told me this story. She and a friend went to the American base to get some papers signed, and there they saw a display of photographs of people who were in concentration camps. This is a lie, she said out loud, not wanting to believe what she saw. So an American soldier, who overheard her, offered to take her to the camps so she could see for herself. She went and afterward suffered great trouble in her mind, for everything she had believed in had been transformed by what she saw. And I could tell that the woman who told me this story felt it was somehow wrong for the soldier to show her friend what he knew.
What Israel Torres and another soldier at another time saw in the desert could have been an image from a concentration camp, from the laboratories of Dr. Mengele where medical experiments were carried out on human beings. Or it could have been an image from Hiroshima, somehow detached from its proper place in time and moved forward, to remind the soldiers what the meaning of their test was. Or, perhaps more frightening to us now, an image from the future traveled backward through time, with the same message.
Torres was in a truck traveling over the desert when one of the men in his platoon cried out and pointed. Israel turned to see a group of people, ten or twelve, in a stockade formed by a chain link fence and barbed wire. Their faces and their hands were deformed. Their hair was falling out. And he thought he saw that their skin was peeling off. He said that they tried to cover their faces with their hands and that they looked more dead than alive.
Two years earlier the second young man, whose name was Jim O’Connor, saw a group of people ushered into a bunker that was closer to the explosion than he would soon be. After the explosion, he moved closer to ground zero and tried to approach the bunker. Then he began to smell flesh burning, and finally he saw a man, on the ground, in agony, blood running from his mouth and his ears and his nose, trying to tear away wires that had been attached to his head.
O’Connor could not forget what he saw. For several years he tried to make his knowledge public. He wrote the Pentagon asking for an investigation. In the response he received there was this sentence: We can neither confirm nor deny what you saw.
It is a strange feeling. No doubt Nelle had it too. A memory over the years takes on an air of unreality, hidden as it is in a private unacknowledged world. And yet it persists. Even undefined it retains a vividness; it nags, and will not disappear.
I could feel it in myself. Since I read the story in another history of the atomic testing, I too was haunted. It was on a bright day in late winter that I drove up the coast to a town just north of Santa Barbara, where Israel Torres lived. I wanted to hear the story from him directly.
It was a small home I entered, one of a kind that has come into existence since the end of the last World War. Flat, stucco, small rooms, usually built as part of a tract. I lived in a similar house once myself, and my mother is still in that house. This was the first and only house Israel owned. He paid for it in two years. I used to love to work for a living, he told me. But now illness had made him unable to do that.
I asked him about his family. His great-grandfather, he told me, had come from Spain. One could hear traces of Spanish in his English. His mother died before he left home. He remembered his father used to sit with him and his brothers and talk to them about life. How they should be kind to others less able or fortunate than themselves. And how they should stand up for the truth, especially if there was an injustice.
His father had been a marine. He fought in Belgium in World War I. He told stories about how gas was used on those battlefields, but he was not gassed himself. After the war he worked for the border patrol. Was this a natural transition, I wondered, to trade one uniform for another? After this his father owned land and raised cattle, and eventually a couple of bars. All his sons enlisted in the marines. Israel’s brothers both fought in Korea. One lost his right ear; the other lost three fingers when a grenade exploded in his hand. Israel enlisted when he was only sixteen. He lied about his age, he told me, because he wanted to follow his brothers.
He was a thick, barrel-chested man, powerful in his appearance despite the illness which had made him frail. Yet there was a softness about him, not in his body so much as in his manner and the atmosphere of his speech. This was perhaps because of the continual presence of his family in his life, in the household with him, and in his memory. His mother and father, both no longer living, his sons, his daughters, his brothers, his wife, his grandchildren. It gave him a different feel
than another kind of man, one who does not think of himself as connected to past and future generations.
He was ill immediately after the blast. Nausea. Double vision. Exhaustion. Numbness. A debilitating pain in his bones and muscles. He had been married just months before. Now he suggested to his wife that she was free to leave. But she did not leave.
What gave him the most pain, besides his guilt over the two missing men and the unnamed men he saw in the compound, was fear for the health of his children. Over the years since that time, his wife had had five miscarriages. Twice, he told me, he thought of taking his own life. Once was when his son was ill. The symptoms were so much like his own: hair loss, skin turning yellow, and his blood was abnormal. But his son recovered. The second time was when his grandchild began to pass blood in his stool and urine and Israel said to himself, That’s me again. He had bled this way intermittently since the test.
The effects of the experiment also continued in his mind. In one dream, he tried to run from the blast while his superior officer shouted, You’re supposed to stay here. You’re a leader of men. That was not the way it happened. I did stay, he told me. But the dream still troubled him. Many times he dreamed that the wind returned, the same wind that came with the blast and tore the helmet and gloves right off his body. In these dreams the wind tried to pull him up and out of the earth. In still other returning dreams he tried to find his missing men, and of course he would see the men in the compound again, burned, monstrous, covering their faces with their hands.
Do you know what it is, he asked me, for a grown man to break down and cry? I could imagine what it was for him. Not only the pain of all he had endured becoming in one moment no longer endurable, but the shattering, at the same moment, of a sheltering, encircling notion of who he was, a strong man, a protector, responsible to care for those more tender than he, those given to tears, but not the one who breaks down, never breaking down himself.
Many nights he would wake screaming and be unable to sleep again. At two or three in the morning he would come into the living room alone and turn on the television. Once at four in the afternoon he found himself reliving the atomic experiment. He was seeing melted tanks, the mushroom, the medical trucks, dirt flying, the smoke. The whole thing, he told me. His sons had to hold him down on the bed until it was over.
I have been in the house with my mother when she, unable to sleep past three or four in the morning, would go into the living room. I would know she was there from the sound of the television, loud through the thin walls of her postwar house. At those times it has seemed to me as if the illness that woke her disturbed the surrounding air, and the television was just another part of this strange cacophonous world, purgatorial, at the fringe of a consciousness belonging to our age.
Israel had been diagnosed with leukemia. He asked me to place my hand over the lumps on his back. They were scattered all over his body. Small and hard like stones. He wanted me to witness their presence in his body. And it was crucial to him that I believe his story. Almost since the day of the blast he had been engaged in a terrible struggle to be believed.
He told me he was afraid to go to the veterans’ hospital. They wanted to remove cancer from his prostate gland. But he did not trust them, he said, while he was under anesthesia. There had been that trip to the hospital at Camp Pendleton. The curious holes in his memory. And the dreamlike quality of what he did remember. White pills shoved down his throat in the middle of the night. Waking at Balboa Hospital, six hundred miles away, with no memory of traveling. And the weird, fat, red-faced little captain who had held up a coin, swaying it before his eyes, and had been so angry because he would not cooperate.
And there was more. The doctor from the Veterans Administration who told him his radiation count had been low but would not put this in writing. And the other VA doctor who told him that if he wanted his own medical records he would have to hire an attorney. When he returned with a lawyer, this doctor claimed Israel had never been treated by him or anyone at that hospital. There was the private doctor in Lompoc who had spent hours with him, and began to write letters to the Veterans Administration on Israel’s behalf, trying to get his radiation count and his record of treatment. One day when Israel showed up for his regular appointment with this doctor, he found the man had disappeared, with no prior notice, and leaving no forwarding address. Had the Veterans Administration approached him? Had someone threatened him? It was like a nightmare with no resolution, or one of those eerie films, made in the decade after the war’s end, in which crimes are committed with no clear reason by no clear perpetrator.
And then there was the newspaper article. At the time of the tests Israel was not allowed to tell his young wife where he was or why, but she read the newspapers. And she saw a picture of him in a local paper with a caption that connected him to the tests. Years later, when Israel began to make inquiries about his own case, and his missing men and the men in the compound, the Veterans Administration claimed they had no record of his participation in these tests and that, as far as they were concerned, officially, he had not been there. It was then that his wife remembered the newspaper.
He wrote a friend in the area where it had been published, who went for him into the newspaper’s storage room, what is called the morgue, where they keep back issues. Israel’s wife was right. The friend sent three copies. Immediately Israel sent one to the VA. What ensued was a travesty of bureaucratic correspondence, worthy of the travails of Joseph K. in Kafka’s The Trial. Would he send another copy? Would he send the original? He sent another copy. But he could not send the original, since he did not have it. Could he send the name of the newspaper and the date of publication? And still another copy? Yes, he said. He could tell them the name and date, and he did, and did he send another copy? He cannot remember now. Because, when they asked in still another letter for still another copy, he could not find it. So he wrote his friend again. Would he make more copies from the original? Yes, he said he would. And then the next day he received a call. His friend had tried to do this for him, but the original was no longer there. It had vanished.
It is odd how the character of a century should be captured by a novel written at its inception. As I write in the last decade of this century, the word Kafkaesque has earned a place in the dictionary; it is defined as nightmarishly strange, mystifying and bizarre. There is, though, to my mind, something lacking in this definition: the particular historical circumstances of the strangeness. Franz Kafka was employed by the Workers Accident Insurance Company for the kingdom of Bohemia from 1908 until near the end of his life, in 1922. He was working there when he wrote The Trial, which were also the years of World War I, when Israel’s father was fighting in Belgium. Photographs taken of the stairwell and a corridor of the insurance company resemble the airless and dim upper corridors of the court which Joseph K. visited.
In an annual report for the company, a passage written by Kafka concerning accident insurance for wood-planing machine operators is illustrated by a grotesque drawing of seven hands, one whole, one missing the top of the index finger and thumb, another missing all the index finger and part of the thumb, another missing the top of the middle finger and the baby finger, and so on. Apparently Kafka, trained as a lawyer, would go into the tenements where injured workers lived, to interview and take testimony from them. And he must have followed these cases, as requests and responses made on pieces of paper and various forms accumulated to make increasingly voluminous files.
Kafka was frail. He suffered from terrible headaches. Did this make him compassionate toward the wounded wage earners whom he met? On December 15, in the first year of the First World War, he records in his journal, the joy of lying on the sofa in the silent room without a headache, calmly breathing in a manner befitting a human being.
One must have the experience of illness over a long period of time to grasp the significance of these words, in a manner befitting a human being. One’s body, shivering, exhausted, or feverish, wet, be
comes alien to one’s own existence, and even to all existence. If at one time there was a self who felt as if human, that self has been shaken loose and, as the shaking continues, is ebbing away, disappearing as certainly as a vanished document, spirited by some strange and nightmarish wind.
One does not remember what it is to be well. But something more than absence remains. The finger lost in an accident feels pain, nerves as if extended into a ghostly appendage. Events forgotten reappear in dreams. And fragments of memory left in the mind cry out as if for the connecting knowledge. Unless of course another false order of events has been created from the fragments so that even the scent of memory is threatening.
Just before his death my father wrote a letter to his mother. Though she had written him many times before, he always disdained to answer. What made him respond this time? She sent him a photograph. He showed it to me. A woman standing alone. Middle-aged, rounded, wearing a dark somber skirt and sweater. I did not think of her as my grandmother. Her image in black and white irritated me. What was she doing on my father’s bureau? Why did I have to look at her now, and why did I have to remember the image of this stout body printed on a little frayed piece of paper?
In 1922 Franz Kafka left the Workers Accident Insurance Company. He was ill, and he would die just two years later. Was he aware that in this same year the physicist Niels Bohr had conjectured a new model of atomic structure, one that explained the irregularities of the periodic table of the elements? One would not, immediately, link the imaginings of these two men together. Yet history has linked them, in an odd, unpredictable way. For the clarifying perceptions of nuclear history soon entered the obfuscating history of bureaucracies, courts that would not respond to petition, a privileged knowledge denied to those most affected, secret corridors, and conversations bending toward absurdity with nameless judges. In this way meaning was wedded with meaninglessness.
A Chorus of Stones Page 5