The Story of H

by Marina Perezagua

  Being in Tokyo again brought all of it back, all these images I’m describing returning as fresh as the newly delivered fish at the Tsukiji market. I jotted things down in my notebooks—impressions, descriptions that I could draw on now—but even if I was to lose these notes, I think I’d be able to re-create them anew, word for word, not because my memory is so precise, but because my senses react to these memories the same way now as they did then. I mean, I could write in these same notebooks for the first time, over and over again. Time’s fish never rots in my memory. That was Tokyo. The city we re-encountered was like a huge fresh-smelling tuna that took the edge off our appetites but never actually provided nourishment. The harder Jim and I looked for Yoro, the tighter things closed around us. And so the fish’s scales constricted into a slick airtight surface that slipped from our hands. Jim was right; we’d never find a lead there. Tokyo closed its doors to us; in fact it never even let us glimpse the doors.

  As often happens when one is just starting out on an undertaking, before one’s strength begins to flag, I had such a surfeit of energy that it clouded my ability to distinguish between fact and fancy. Since Jim had launched this endeavor much earlier than I did, he was in that place where exhaustion forced him to prioritize and conserve energy. Be that as it may, it was during this trip that the link was created between my own maternity and the search for Jim’s daughter. Locating her offered the greatest chance life had manifested thus far to actually make me a mother. So the daughter of the man I’d fallen in love with at first sight also became mine, with the simplicity and truth of things that don’t need an explanation. I was twenty-eight years old. He was quite a bit older. Both of us were old enough to know what we wanted.

  Of course Jim knew from the start that he had been given custody of the baby only temporarily. He knew from the first time he held her in his arms that the clock was ticking toward the day she’d turn five and he’d have to give her back, no questions asked, knowing he’d never see her again. It had all been put in writing, as if the girl were a military report. Jim would be her first foster parent, and each subsequent family would know the circumstances from the get-go; Yoro would stay for the same fixed five-year period.

  Yet the proscribed detachment didn’t work as easily as planned, not with Jim and not—as I later came to discover—with some of the other foster families. I suppose Jim’s stretch was one of the most painful but also the most beautiful in Yoro’s life: a baby’s first days, when she eats and grows thanks entirely to you, and the transformation, the metamorphosis from baby to little girl. Jim was never one for sharing emotional details, but every once in a while he’d let one escape in the middle of a conversation. He’d express himself with a kind of strained reserve, yet the substance of his narrative was always powerful and his subdued tone never undercut the strength of his emotion. He told me once about a night he’d gotten out of bed to soothe Yoro in her crib. He had scooped her in his arms and given her a bottle. But Yoro wouldn’t be pacified. Jim spent half an hour trying to get her to suck the milk. She simply wouldn’t take the bottle. Jim snuggled her in closer to his chest. He slept bare-chested in his underclothing, and while he was trying to calm her, the baby’s mouth fastened onto his nipple. He was about to pull it out of the baby’s mouth when he realized she was finally quiet. She slumbered and suckled peacefully. He understood maternity in a flash and didn’t care that he hadn’t gestated the baby, because the contact with a mouth that wasn’t hungry for milk but for human warmth was all it took to turn him into a mother.

  The mission papers he had signed stated that Yoro had but one father and one mother: the army. The army, as we all know, has nipples too; it’s just that they point inward. The army is a body that doesn’t nurture, like a dog that instead of suckling her puppies saps the litter’s strength. Jim had an impeccable military record, and from what he told me, he’d participated in other missions that had wiped him out. It’s what made him such a good candidate for Yoro. But twenty-four hours was all it took to undermine an entire career as an anonymous military man. What he first accepted as just another mission quickly morphed into his worst fear. From the first day he knew it would be difficult to give Yoro up. From the second, he knew it would be nothing short of impossible.

  Jim had already been looking for Yoro for five years by the time we met, and at that point she must have been around ten years old. He had been court-martialed for refusing to hand her over, but the trial was set aside because of the military’s desire to keep the case under wraps. He was discharged from the armed forces for disobeying orders that forbade him from establishing an emotional bond with the baby, to avoid his wanting to keep custody of her, as of course happened. So his crime was disobeying a ridiculous order, the kind that resists being given, let alone carried out: an emotional one.

  From one day to the next, Jim found himself deprived of both Yoro and a military career. But he still had friends, and thanks to them he found a string of clues that he worked down one by one for a long time, including documents proving that the girl had been given to a family in the United States. When we met in New York, he was nearing the end of his painstaking investigation, which culminated two years later with our trip to Tokyo. Yoro’s foster family, or at least the last one we could find out about, was living in New Mexico. Who could have imagined my setting foot in a place like that: Los Alamos, the exact spot where the first atomic bomb had been developed and the Manhattan Project secretly coordinated.

  WE LANDED IN LOS ALAMOS to call on the National Laboratory in July 1963, thanks to Jim’s contacts. It was sweltering, and I couldn’t help but connect that heat with the atomic bomb tests that took place that same time of year, in that same enclave. It was here that the thirty-eight-year-old Robert Oppenheimer received General Leslie Groves’s proposal to head a team of the world’s most brilliant scientists, nearly all of them older than he was. Jim went into detail about that mission, one of history’s best-kept secrets: the race with the Germans to see who could develop the first atomic bomb.

  Oppenheimer agreed to oversee the project. Nearly all of them stepped up to the challenge. Scientists and military men worked day and night shut away in that reserve, their sole obsession to find a way to bring their theoretical formulations into reality. And to do it before the enemy did. The team was highly motivated. At first the atmosphere there was something like a summer camp. It was a race, after all, and not just any old race—here the most competitive, brightest athletes were poised for a sprint. When genius is challenged to outperform genius, not even the knowledge that the result will be the creation of a monster is enough to make it stand down. Intelligence gets restless once it’s engaged, eager, and ethical considerations are not going to dampen the pleasure of discovery, of cracking a highly complex problem. The opportunity to extend the very limits of the mind trumped any moral quandary.

  Initially the scientists and the military clashed over ethical and political issues, but the day they found out the Germans were nowhere close to developing nuclear weapons and that surrender was imminent, it became obvious that their disagreements were only superficial. The scientists had been tasked with beating the Germans in building the most destructive weapon known to man, but had just lost their purpose. From that point on, all that mattered was how to create the monster, not in order to destroy the other one but only to see its face, to give birth to it, and unbeknownst to them at the time, to christen it among so many Japanese civilians. So Colonel Boris Pash, commander of the Alsos Mission in charge of investigating the Nazis’ atomic weapons program, sent a telegram to General Groves in November 1944. I haven’t had a chance to check the exact wording, but according to Jim, the telegram read something like “Mom didn’t have a baby; she’s not even pregnant; the doctors have declared her sterile.” Germany’s infertility, the fact that it was incapable of developing the bomb, left the race uncontested, wide open for the minds at Los Alamos, and winning was no longer a matter of peace but one of war. Robert Oppenheimer expr
essed himself after the first Trinity tests by quoting the Bhagavad Gita, a sacred Hindu text: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

  So here we are now, in Los Alamos, knocking at a stranger’s door to ask after Jim’s daughter, my daughter. “To catch a glimpse of her,” Jim said as we drove, “just to know she’s alive, that she’s healthy and happy, that’s all I need.”

  A blond woman with a sophisticated hairdo opened the door. I felt like a beggar. Surely this family was part of the same operation, expected to raise their girl without ever bonding. They probably went through the same range of emotions as Jim did. And I wasn’t far from the truth. Three minutes later we were sitting in the living room, on the family couch, and the woman was telling us that Yoro was no longer with them. They’d already come and taken her away. She gave us information on her whereabouts, but it wasn’t very reliable, she warned. Alcohol had debilitated her to such a degree that she lacked the strength for what could only be an impossible search—how could she or her husband find someone the military was trying to keep hidden? But she talked at great length about a project her husband had been working on before he was retired. It was called Project Orion, and she spoke excitedly, saying it’d been the only beautiful thing to come out of all those years in the industry of death.

  She said her husband had worked in Los Alamos with Stanisław Marcin Ulam, the Polish mathematician who first presented the project in 1946, which the physicist Freeman J. Dyson went on to develop at General Atomics, the nuclear physics center in San Diego, keeping the dream alive even today, despite the naysayers. For most of the team, Orion was about salvation: how to avoid the extinction of the human race if it came to having to evacuate the planet. Then, as now, there was no means for reaching the distances needed to find habitable environments in space. So Orion was based on nuclear propulsion systems for spaceships that could outlast the fuel insufficiencies of chemical rockets and travel longer interplanetary distances. A series of atomic bombs were placed at the rear of a vessel so that the ripple effects of consecutive explosions could propel the craft into speeds reaching up to a considerable percentage of the speed of light. Taking into account that the human body cannot withstand prolonged periods of acceleration beyond 49 m/s2, scientists calculated the number of atomic bombs it would take to reach a viable escape speed with thrust enough to punch through the earth’s gravitational field. Their conclusion was two to four bombs per second, which would initially require one thousand atomic bombs only to keep it out of orbit. Most of this information, she said, had been classified as top secret in 1959. The radioactive element strontium 90 had been found in the baby teeth of children living near the nuclear test sites, and the global population was taking a stand against the arm’s race and nuclear energy, just as Project Orion was proposing not a single bomb but thousands of them. And this led to another immeasurable danger, details of which could be found in the reports: alternative ways of producing nuclear materials on the cheap. Access to this intelligence could allow any country to produce atomic weapons en masse and cheaply. That’s why most of the project had been kept secret aside from the relatively trivial details the woman gave, which were declassified.

  Then the woman offered a more personal perspective. To her, the project meant that for once the devil’s artifact that is the atomic bomb might find a positive purpose: to pluck a handful of humans away from this inhumane planet. Though she didn’t number among the select few fortunate enough to abandon Earth, it was enough to know that someone would be given the chance to start anew in some faraway place, and with time our planet would turn into that blue globe people pointed at as a symbol of well-deserved abandonment. Now that she was a recluse in a world where the only thing that didn’t look phony was death, Project Orion became the only outlet for her fantasy. Mateo de Paz, a close friend of her husband’s, would call on them from time to time; he was one of the most lucid scientists at San Diego’s General Atomics. She thought his name, de Paz (meaning peace in Spanish), was yet another beautiful reason for using the bomb as an instrument of survival and not of murder. She slept with him several times because of that name, and because it put her in touch with her Mexican origins. But it happened only after the treaty came along that shattered her dreams of evacuation, the so-called Partial Test Ban Treaty, or Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapon Tests in the Atmosphere, in Outer Space and Under Water. A long name she’d never forgotten.

  Orion dwindled away after that, once they’d prohibited nuclear testing. I thought about her again when I read an article by Freeman J. Dyson in Science magazine titled “Death of a Project.” What caught my attention was how Dyson had highlighted something not typically associated with the aims of the atomic bomb: the opportunity to redeem humankind, to counterbalance what the bombs had done to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. According to my notes, he wrote:

  It is perhaps wise that radical advances in technology, which may be used both for good and for evil purposes, be delayed until the human species is better organized to cope with them. But those who have worked on Project Orion cannot share this view. They must continue to hope that they may see their work bear fruit in their own lifetimes. They cannot lose sight of the dream which fired their imaginations in 1958 and sustained them through the years of struggle afterward—the dream that the bombs which killed and maimed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki may one day open the skies to mankind.

  Jim and I had arrived late, but at least we had a new lead that, even if uncertain, was nevertheless better than nothing. Hope was what kept all of Yoro’s parents clutching at straws. But the best part of the visit was seeing photos of Yoro from her time with them. It allowed Jim to fill in the gaps, at least about her physical appearance. Apparently Yoro had had a difficult time adapting to them the first few months. She had missed her father. Being told as much was a precious gift for Jim, though back in the car he admitted it made him feel selfish; it would have been so much better for Yoro if she hadn’t missed him, yet he was relieved to know she remembered him. He repaid the woman’s kindness by showing her a few photos he kept in his wallet. Yoro as a newborn. Yoro at two. At three. Just before she left. Between the two of them, they composed the most current image of Yoro possible, given the circumstances.

  You’ll probably have asked yourself by now, several times, why that woman considered looking for Yoro a lost cause too, why they were hiding her at all, and why at best we could track only the girl’s itinerary, but never her present location. It was like some macabre race to pick up body parts scattered over a variety of geographical locations and put them together again in the hopes of bringing Yoro back to life with the final piece, the most important one, the one it seemed we would never locate before the worms had liquefied it forever. The clues seemed valuable at the time, but now I know they were just gold-plated distractions whose bogus sparkle only sidetracked us and kept us from searching for what was essential. I’ve even suspected we were purposefully fed false leads to slow us down, to keep us distracted and thinking that our research was actually bearing fruit. But this is all speculation on my part. I could answer the other questions too, but things wouldn’t be clear for you yet, so for the time being, allow me to keep you waiting. This delay is necessary, because what you’ll have found out by the time you finish reading is so hard to explain that you’d never put the pieces together unless I dole out the information gradually, allowing meaning to collect in your consciousness over time, eventually catching fire in an instant when you finally understand what can only be comprehended over time.

  SO I LEARNED JIM’S STORY slowly but surely. He too fed me the information a little at a time. I’m convinced that if he hadn’t gauged carefully what he told me about himself, I probably wouldn’t have remained at his side. I had always figured I would fall in love with someone a little less weather-beaten than me, whose ingenuousness would help ease the weight of my own life’s story. I thought if I had a preference for one type of man over another, it was the kind who had experienced little pain.
So each time Jim went into his past, I would stare back silently, trying to conceal my surprise over having fallen in love with him. And I was so good at hiding my feelings that I think it would have been hard for him to identify my surprise, but still I worried that he’d realize how I felt by the expression on my face.

  Sometimes an object would spur a memory and Jim would go into the details of the story. Once the object was a bicycle. Jim had always seemed to retreat into himself when he watched people riding their bikes in Central Park, enjoying a bit of exercise. One day as we were just strolling along, Jim opened up about his time working on the railway in Burma.

  Neither he nor his companions had been equipped to survive the Burmese jungle. The working conditions—he assured me—were worse than combat. Besides their tanks and their weapons, the Japanese employed something else: a perfectly pacific mode of transportation meant for recreation. Slowly but surely, though, a capillary system for the blood of war was built with them: bicycles. I came to realize over time just how obsessed Jim was with bicycles. I imagined it was because of how inconspicuously they can move while still being speedy and agile. The Japanese used them to haul artillery over difficult terrain. But they had become more than just a means for transport. Having survived not only forced labor and torture but also episodes of malaria, diphtheria, dysentery, and beriberi, Jim prized the ease of the cyclist, who was always moving forward, and the idea became a fixation: a wheel moving forward toward the end of the war. At night, on edge though trying to sleep despite the humidity and mosquitoes, the diarrhea and vomiting—whether on his part or someone else’s—he’d fantasize about a bike that would suddenly materialize and carry him away.