by Sarah Vowell
I haven’t given up, even as, each day, at various moments, I find myself giving in. There are books to be read; landscapes to be walked; friends to be with; life to be fully lived. And I realize that this is, in some ways, just another tale in the vast book of human frailty. But this new epidemic of distraction is our civilization’s specific weakness. And its threat is not so much to our minds, even as they shape-shift under the pressure. The threat is to our souls. At this rate, if the noise does not relent, we might even forget we have any.
VIET DINH
■
Lucky Dragon
FROM Ploughshares
I.
The second dawn rose in the east, at nine in the morning. Hiroshi had never before seen such radiance. It rivaled the sun. He stood on deck with Yoshi, and the light crushed them beneath its purity. Hiroshi closed his eyes, but even so, the brightness pierced his head. The other crew members clamored to see this strange, unexpected light. But Hiroshi returned to the tasks of the day. He consulted Sanezumi about their current bearing. He examined the nautical charts, the curves and byways of the ocean unfolding beneath his forefinger. Last night, he dreamt of a large school of tuna, a flotilla so dense that the ocean became the blue-black from their scales. Their eyes flashed like diamonds in the waves. Each time the crew pulled in the nets, the smallest of the fish dwarfed him. They entered the hull without struggling, their flesh tender and firm, bellies thick and marbled with fat. When he woke, Hiroshi knew that it was an omen. Dreams were unreliable things, sinuous and slippery as eels, but morning had not yet come, and he felt the gentle listing of the boat with a single coordinate in mind: east.
But soon after the second dawn, Sanezumi pointed at a line of chop on the water’s surface. The water recoiled, and before Hiroshi had time to react, it was upon them. The wall of air thrust over the boat, an avalanche of sky. Their clothes trembled as it passed. The men shouted, necks tense and strained, but nothing penetrated the ringing deep in their ears. Hiroshi’s feet vibrated. His men gestured at the distant blaze blossoming from the horizon. Many had lived through the Toyko firebombings—Masaru’s left arm was gnarled with scars—but Hiroshi instead remembered the Philippines. His unit had gotten trapped in its position, and he hunkered down in a trench, face pressed against the mud escarpment. Mortars whizzed overhead; shrapnel fell like ice. The Americans were approaching. He felt their progress, a drumbeat in the earth. Only he and Yoshi and a handful of others were still alive. His comrades had sprung from the trench, guns raised in defiance, and were cut down before they had taken ten steps. Hiroshi should have been with them. In the creaking and moaning of the ship, he sometimes heard the voices of the fallen, calling to him from subterranean depths.
After an hour, the fire had cleared from the sky, but now came the rain of ash. It smelled of electricity. The men watched, mouths agape, awed by flakes the size of flower petals, warm to the touch. It clung where it landed, and when Hiroshi wiped it off, it disintegrated into a glittery sheen. It whispered underfoot. Yoshi flapped his arms, sending forth white plumes, as if he were dancing in a snowstorm. Some men held out plastic bags to catch it as it fell. Hiroshi looked to see from where it had come, but if the sky had once been clear and blue, it was now a peach smear. For a few minutes, the rain was a wonder, a miracle. But ash continued falling for the next three hours. It came down so heavily that the boat seemed mired in fog. The men dared not open their eyes. They left footprints where they walked. The ash gathered on the surface of the water, forming gray masses. The crew retreated inside, waiting for it to stop.
“It’s inside me,” said Yoshi. “It itches.”
Hiroshi exhaled. Residue inside his lungs. He sneezed out pebbles. “You’re imagining things,” he said.
“I feel it in my chest,” Yoshi continued. “Underneath my skin.”
That night, the men were too nauseated to eat. In Sanezumi’s quarters, Hiroshi rested a hand on his navigator’s back. Sanezumi couldn’t even keep water down; after each swallow, he retched, and the water rushed out of his mouth and dribbled onto the floor. You’ll be fine, Hiroshi told him. But in the middle of the night, Sanezumi began vomiting blood.
II.
They spent two weeks at sea, slowly chugging back to Yaizu. Hiroshi radioed that they were returning home, that an unspecified illness had overtaken them, but they could not move any faster. The crew scratched without end. No one slept. They rolled on the ground, unable to ease their burning. They ate as little as they needed to to survive. Kaneda, the cook, served them rice watered down to a milky broth. Even so, nine days after the fall of ash, Sanezumi died. The crew debated whether to preserve his body or put him to rest. It wasn’t auspicious to keep a corpse onboard, some argued. But others demanded respect: If you had died, what would you have us do with your body? Yoshi insisted on a sea burial. It was Yoshi’s tatami mat in which Sanezumi had been rolled, and it was Yoshi’s blanket that draped Sanezumi’s body down in the cold hull. “He lived at sea and died at sea,” Yoshi said. “It’s only fitting that the sea take him back.” The next morning, they gathered on deck, steadying themselves as the boat bucked and shuddered in the waves. They bowed their heads, and Hiroshi heaved Sanezumi’s body over the side. For a short time, he trailed in their wake, but Ryujin seized him, embraced him in foam, and took him to Ryūgū-jō.
The men feared that they would follow Sanezumi into death. But when Hiroshi saw the single character—kori—glowing on the horizon, he knew that they were saved. He steered toward the kori until he could see the wall of the ice house on which it was painted. The other members of the fishing co-op waited on the dock to gather and unload the catch. Miho was waiting to greet him. Sanezumi’s widow was there as well, and when they delivered the news, her wails filled the sky, and the other women crowding around her in a rustle of silk and sympathy could not keep the sound from clutching her throat.
The next day, Hiroshi went to the Shizuoka prefecture doctor, who looked at Hiroshi’s body and clucked his tongue inside of his mouth, like a wood-boring beetle. The doctor prodded his skin with a metal rod. Across Hiroshi’s chest and legs, roseate patches had spread, the centers peeling off in thick flakes, and underneath, skin the shade of twilight. The doctor shook his head and suggested that he try Tokyo University Hospital. Their appointment was scheduled for a week hence. “In the meantime,” he said, “try vigorous bathing.”
Miho drew Hiroshi’s bath and poured water on his body. He winced as it sluiced over him, washing away the ash and salt in his scalp. But when Yoshi went to the sento to bathe, the boisterous chatter near the main tub stopped when he entered. The tub emptied of people when he stepped in.
“At least my skin has stopped itching,” said Yoshi. A small comfort, at best.
At their appointment in Tokyo, he and Yoshi were greeted by a reporter from Yomiuri Shinbun. He bowed and introduced himself as Nakamura. He held a slender notebook. Pens were clipped to his shirt pocket. “A student informed me of your condition,” he said. “You were near the Rongelap Atoll on March 1, correct?”
“That is correct,” Hiroshi said.
“Ah.” Nakamura lowered his voice. “We believe that your illness may have been caused by an atomic bomb that the Americans detonated on the Bikini Atoll.”
Were they still at war? Hadn’t they already been thoroughly humiliated?
“A test,” Nakamura continued. “A hundred times more powerful than what had been dropped on Hiroshima.” It made sense now: fallout, a black rain that sickened those with whom it came in contact. Yoshi’s arms drooped at his sides, as if they were boneless. “If I may,” Nakamura continued, “I would like to accompany you during your examination. Your struggle is the nation’s struggle.”
Hiroshi nodded, as if there were any other answer to give.
III.
Hiroshi no longer recognized his own face. This was not the fault of the photographer—he truly could not recognize himself, not even in a pool of water. His skin had dried and cracked
and rehardened into an unfamiliar form. His cheeks were broken into grooves and crevices. The flesh had discolored to the color of algae on the side of a boat. The black-and-white picture could not capture this color, but he saw it on his hands, his legs. He rubbed his finger on the newspaper until his stippled image smeared, and he had merged into shadow.
He horrified Miho—he knew it. She washed her hands constantly. She handled his bowls and utensils as if they were made from lightning. She flinched from him, avoiding even accidental contact. He slept on the ground in front of the door, like a dog. The doctors had said that he wasn’t contagious, but what did they know? They hadn’t been able to arrest the spread of the illness. Even now it crept down his neck, onto his back. Specialists on radiation sickness from America had flown in. They waved Geiger counters over his body, and the wands crackled like sap-rich pine on fire. The poison was so endemic that it was inseparable from his being.
The government had towed the boat to Tokyo, quarantined where nobody could reach it. It still emitted high doses of deadly, invisible glow. Even so, as captain of the Lucky Dragon, Hiroshi’s responsibilities now bore down on him more heavily than before. Hardly a day passed without a news agency coming to interview him, flashbulbs popping in his eyes, microphones recording every breath. Every picture promised a new deterioration—Look what the Americans have done! But not to him alone: his entire crew. They had all been similarly afflicted, but Hiroshi was the only one who had been photographed.
Nakamura showed him letters from around the world: China, Russia, South Africa, and so, so many from America itself. You are in our prayers, they said. Our heart goes out to you. Many included money, the stray bills here and there growing into a considerable sum. Yomiuri Shinbun had established a fund for the crew, but the money addressed to Hiroshi was his alone. He shared what he could, but this did not stem the tide of resentment. You should have joined Sanezumi, he imagined his crew saying, their hearts full of mutiny.
Yoshi remained steadfast: their bond was thicker than blood. They had seen things more horrible than an extra flap of skin growing between their fingers and toes; they had witnessed things more disturbing than the red sores appearing along throats like slashes.
During the escape attempt from the No. 12 Prisoner of War Camp in Cowra, Hiroshi watched his commanding officer, Sugiro, remove a fork from his boot. The tines had been compressed, like fingers inside a tight mitten, and scraped along the concrete floor until they had sharpened to a point. Amidst the machine gun fire, the alarms and claxons, the screaming to run left, right, forward, Sugiro unbuttoned his shirt from the bottom, parting it like he was opening a curtain. On his bare stomach, he pressed the point of the fork into his skin until it dimpled and bled. He dragged the fork down, then to the left, using both hands to keep it steady. Hiroshi bore witness to his bravery, his determination, even as Yoshi hissed at him to hurry, to run. The prisoners-of-war had taken a gun tower. Now was their chance.
Sugiro kept his face inexpressive, his mouth twitching only as the fork caught on something tough, gristly. But Sugiro cut through it and passed into someplace else, a place without walls, barbed wire, sandbags. What did he see when his eyes rolled heavenward? He knelt to one knee before collapsing, his pants cuffs and boot laces blackened with blood. Only after he had fallen did his mouth relax into a smile, a blissful release.
Hiroshi tried to smile now, watching his reflection in his bathwater. Miho had added salt—the only thing that soothed his sores—and the undissolved crystals lay at the bottom of the basin like sand. His lips refused to form the shape his mind commanded. His face was no longer his own.
IV.
Hiroshi had not spoken to his father since after the war, and he had not expected Nakamura to contact him, but the past was beyond his power to change. Nakamura had wanted a quotation, and his father said this: “I have no son. He died during the war. My son would have died rather than allow himself be captured.”
Forgiveness would not come in this world, nor the next, but after Nakamura ran the quotation, his shame was exposed for all to see: he was a failed escapee, one of the ignoble. He had returned to Japan with his head hung low, chin attached to his chest. He walked, eyes locked upon the ground, as jeers fell upon him, as if from heaven itself: Coward. Traitor.
Then, something further unexpected happened: someone wrote to defend him. Countless others had condemned him: FALSE HERO; A CELEBRATION OF COWARDICE; A SHAME UPON OUR NATION. But the letter supporting him—A VICTIM TWICE-OVER—filled Hiroshi with not so much hope as a fleeting, momentary peace.
“Look at this,” Hiroshi said to Yoshi, handing him the newspaper.
Yoshi set it aside without reading. His lips were as thick and rubbery as caterpillars, his skin the color of new moss. “We were cursed even before we went to war,” he said. “Our skin matches our souls.”
“Nonsense,” Hiroshi said—though he sometimes thought the same thing.
Yoshi spread his robe to reveal how the skin on his stomach had separated into scales, each as hard as a turtle’s shell. “I wake up each night with my mat in shreds.” Yoshi tapped his abdomen. “I bet it could deflect bullets,” he said.
“It’s still skin,” said Hiroshi.
“If we were bulletproof,” Yoshi continued, “think of what we could do.”
This new Yoshi worried Hiroshi. Yoshi had always been solitary, but now, the village people shook their omamori when he approached, and none would look him in the eye. None of his former shipmates, none of the workers at the fishing co-op. He remembered the old Yoshi, whose eyes widened each time they reeled in a catch, wondering aloud how much these fish would garner at Tsukiji Market. The old Yoshi stroked the sides of the tuna, thanking them for providing him a roof over his head and a mat on which to sleep, and when the fish stopped struggling, he licked the brine off his fingers.
The new Yoshi’s fingers fumbled with his robe, the rough claws and scales fraying the cotton. He ripped the sash loosening it. He bared his chest, where the scales were as thick as a thumb and cupped the area above his heart. From his pocket, he produced his old service revolver.
“Shoot me,” he said.
“Don’t be foolish.”
“It’s a test. If the bullet bounces off, then this is a blessing. If I die, then you will have simply hurried me to my next life.”
“I will not.”
Yoshi dropped the gun to the floor. “I am unworthy of your friendship,” he said, contrite. “Your loyalty.”
Hiroshi placed a scaly hand on Yoshi’s shoulder. He remembered their escape attempt from the POW Camp. Hiroshi covered the barbed wire with his blanket and flung himself over it. They clambered over the wall surrounding the prison, where Hiroshi found a dead Australian guard at his feet. He’d been bludgeoned, his forehead collapsed. The other prisoners spread out, and floodlights scoured the surroundings, picking out shadows fleeing into the nearby farmland. The prisoners had shed their maroon caps, which were scattered on the ground like pools of blood. The guard couldn’t have been older than eighteen. Another boy pulled into war. Hiroshi felt at the guard’s waist until he found his gun.
Yoshi ran ahead blindly, flailing his arms, deeper into the darkness. Searchlights arced above their heads. Yoshi’s movements were panicked, like a small animal caught in a snare. Hiroshi caught a glimpse of Yoshi’s arm, his neck. Yoshi stumbled and fell, and Hiroshi aimed the gun at where Yoshi scrabbled in the dirt. A quick and honorable death. He could kill Yoshi and then kill himself, and when their bodies were returned to Japan, his father would wet his lips with water and cover the family shrine with long sails of white paper. His mother would hold the juzu in her hands, repeating a sutra for each bead, before offering incense to him, once, twice, three times. Yoshi would never even know that the bullet had come from him.
Hiroshi, Yoshi whispered, where are you? Don’t leave me alone.
Close behind them, the prison guards called to each other. No matter where they ran, Hiroshi knew that the
ir recapture was imminent. If they were captured with the dead guard’s gun, they would be executed on the spot. Why was one death better than another? What was honorable about smashing in the skull of an Australian boy who was still too young, perhaps, to know pleasure? Had he died for his country so that they could honor their own? Hiroshi clasped both hands around the gun and flung it as far into the distance as he could.
I’m here, Hiroshi responded. Keep going. I’m right behind you.
V.
Masaru took a job in an American sideshow. THE HORRORS OF ATOMIC WAR. The poster showed him surrounded by oval cameos: midgets, bearded ladies, legless men. He made a good wage, the villagers said, and he sent back money to his wife, who moved up in the village’s esteem. Miho overheard this at market, where she was overcharged for even rice, flour, and salt.
Nakamura had invited Hiroshi to appear on television, but he demurred and referred Nakamura to other crew members. They were men untouched by cowardice, and public opinion of them had swayed from disgust to pity, and now, to sympathy. It was possible that people thought differently of him too. Perhaps they were willing to forgive his conduct in the war. Strange: when he was a man, he had been a monster; now that he was a monster, he was once again a man.