And sometimes I feel afraid. So much fear. Afraid that everything will hush up, as spiteful people do, everything will refuse to speak to me or start talking only to the innards, and I’ll fall into an aquarium full of mouths opening without language. So I float like a sea bream searching out the eyes of another sea bream in the aquarium’s murky waters. The dread is so great that when I see a sea bream I no longer see a fish, but a person mute with fear. That’s how I recognize them at the fishmonger’s stand, on their bed of ice, the startled look in their eyes before the vision of what was exuded as a word only to emerge as a bubble of air in the water. And how it hurts, so much so that I can’t give a name to it without bubbles bursting and emptying out the nothing inside. Only then the people who love me will give me up for lost. They’ll file a report, gather the neighbors to search the fields with flashlights in the middle of the night, not knowing that missing people who die mute abandon their human form, change their skin for scales; their bones become the wobbly spines of a dead fish that was never a fish. “Mom, friends,” I’d say to them, “the missing who are mute are not underground, but in that common grave of startled eyes and scales that a fishmonger threw into the black bucket of garbage.”
But I don’t want to talk about that today, den lilla Aurora, or whatever your name is, because I’m not in a garbage bucket or in an aquarium, but on the shoulders of a man, in a treetop. And did you know that nightingales are so gutsy they’ll attack a cat? And Tyrannus is a genus of small birds that will challenge an airplane. They throw themselves against the motors. Those airplanes laden with pesticides flying over fields so low as to clip the grass deserve it. Let the pilots be charred with the flammable poison and the earless insects hear the pop and singe unknowing, or maybe aware that nobody will be fumigating again at least for a week; they have a whole week (which is a long life) for themselves. And would you just look at that. Here comes a nuthatch. The climbing nuthatch is a neckless bird. He told me why. They don’t need a neck because they look for insects while climbing up and down the tree trunk, so they have no reason to look beyond the bark in front of them.
Look over there. One is coming. Crawling up the trunk like a lizard. I take off my shoe and move my foot closer to the scuttling bird. It has an insectivore’s long sharp beak. I move my foot closer, gingerly, so as not to startle it, and swing it more or less at the height of your father’s belly. I stare at that skinny elongated hummingbird’s beak. My foot is right there now. I close my eyes. I hear the bird pecking at the bark and want it to do the same between my toenail and flesh. Get rid of parasites or dead skin cells. But the crawler continues on up the tree, now at eye level. I wonder if it might wash my face like your father does some mornings, his tongue cleaning my eyes, removing the film that dried in the corners at night. But the nuthatch gets lost in one of the branches, and I clean the sandy granules myself. I suck them from my finger, imagining them still in my eyes and the whole of me is the other one’s tongue. They dissolve.
And now the fear returns crawling up like a bird, rising with its nose stuck to my legs. The fear that all things shall fall silent. The fear that your father—or anyone else’s father, or the father who is nobody’s father—will never again hoist me on his shoulders. The fear of going from laughter in the heights to slinking on the ground, to begging for attention like a puppy nipping the pant legs of a hunter who cares only to gaze off at the horizon. But why does it have to be like this? I have nothing to fear right now because your father’s hand takes hold of my skirt and hangs it from a little branch, as if setting out damp clothes to air. It’s true, I’m not very large, but I sing like a wren. That’s what he said: “You gasp like a wren.”
“And what is a wren?” I ask.
“A wren is a bird whose song is greater than its size.” It’s true. I chirp. I chirp now as his fingers touch my seed like a bud that dilates the same as you are doing now in my womb, growing. I chirp, and maybe the sound reaches you, padded in the amniotic fluid. But listen, others are chirping too. He is caressing me and I look through half-open lids to see dozens of nests. Dozens. And in each are three or four little birds (how I wish you could see them) holding their beaks open for food. They chirp. They’re chirping too. They chirp with beaks like orange smiles, and hundreds of mothers appear to fill their little maws. Wings graze my face as he is touching me, my pink mouth behind his neck tenses in a smile full of water, and it rains over the trunk of this warbling tree.
* * *
Jim and I spent a few years stumbling around in the fog in our search for Yoro. We were entirely at the mercy of strangers, or if not complete strangers, at least nobody close enough to us to risk sharing confidential information. But one day a package showed up in our mailbox. It was from a friend of Jim’s, the one who suggested we travel to Los Alamos. We opened it to find letters that he had copied, but without their envelopes, and a note explaining that for security reasons, the letters and their envelopes had been separated and filed away in different places to make the sources more difficult to locate should anyone try to find them. Unfortunately, he hadn’t seen the postmarks, which would have allowed us to configure a timetable of Yoro’s whereabouts. I don’t doubt this friend’s sincerity, but it wouldn’t be a stretch to think our access to these letters, which he thought he was copying and sending clandestinely, had in fact been planted to placate us, keep us distracted in a never-ending journey that appeased us by the mere fact of keeping us on the move, but that in truth held us captive to a search leading nowhere.
Our friend had searched out the letters that had clues to Yoro’s possible origin, which he ran through a database of foster families tied to military projects during those years. Some of this information proved very useful, but in general, he warned, he couldn’t guarantee that the letters had actually been sent from these places; it was all the result of mere speculation, trying to decipher the cryptic content of a few sentences. The rest of the pages were from a medical chart with multiple-choice boxes—never / rarely / sometimes / often / always—reports sent by Yoro’s different foster families, apparently meant to communicate any changes in the state of her health.
I never understood all the secrecy. But eventually I got used to the nomadic nature of Yoro’s imposed life and even came to accept it as something natural, since Jim never disputed the notion. I supposed the girl couldn’t be adopted because she had a biological mother who must be temporarily unable to care for her, so the only thing left was foster care. But it was a lot trickier to try to reason away all the detailed reports on Yoro’s health. Not only her health, but in the words of our friend, “the progress of her health.” What did they mean by progress? Progress toward where? Could Yoro be sick? A person like me, who has suffered so much, avoids asking for explanations because you know they can be given only when those who can explain are ready and feel a need. In the worst of times for me, I felt that explanations had a will of their own, so when people asked me for a reason and I couldn’t come up with one, it wasn’t because I didn’t want to, or not always, but because the life cycle from infancy to adulthood and the release of what could be explained hadn’t been completed yet. But Jim’s case was different. He hadn’t explained things to me, he said, because he (and this included me) was held back by a threat. When the package arrived, he said he’d been waiting for the letters anxiously, since they’d granted him one right in exchange for keeping it all to himself: to be kept up-to-date regularly on Yoro’s state. But the letters had come all at once and through an unexpected channel, a friend calling in a favor, and without addresses, deciphered solely on the friend’s speculation, together with a note informing us that Yoro had not been relocated this time because apparently she’d disappeared. Jim could have broken his silence that day and explained many things to me, but now I realize there were other reasons at work, personal reasons that went far beyond a soldier’s vow of silence.
Yoro was sixteen at the time she disappeared, lost not only to us and to her other families, b
ut also to those charged with her guardianship, military top brass I imagined, though now I suspect, as I began to at that point, that her custody had fallen to civil servants who treated her life like one more administrative drawer to close with relief at day’s end. If finding her had ever been truly vital for us before, from that moment forward it became vital for her too; she was too young to be left on her own or in bad company.
Jim quickly shuffled through the letters. As I said, many were responses to some kind of medical questionnaire. At first I didn’t understand anything. It looked like the standard multiple-choice form that requires you to check boxes. Next to each of the questions was a space for comments and observations, and another longer space for the same purpose at the end of the document. They’d all been left blank, though. Nobody had offered additional observations. And a quick comparison showed that all the checks, or all the answers, coincided, meaning there’d been zero changes in Yoro’s condition, so she must have grown up healthy. I can’t recall the precise questions anymore, but what I do remember was being struck with a sense of dread when I realized that every single question focused on the side effects of a very specific thing, something with which I was all too well acquainted: radioactivity. So Yoro was another victim of my own disease, radioactive contamination.
THERE WAS NO TIME TO WASTE. I remember how anxious we felt now. If our lives had already been committed to finding Yoro, we now realized that returning to everyday life was impossible until we did; there could be no inner life, no living for each other. Not because our relationship had deteriorated in any way, but because it had transformed into something else; we were no longer merely a couple, we had become a search-and-rescue team. Nothing mattered to us that wasn’t focused on Yoro’s whereabouts. Not even food. No time was wasted talking about food; we just ate whatever occurred to us to put on a plate that day. Our love prevailed, but now it had a focal point beyond individual feelings, and kept our band of two tight. Our lives were governed by the need to conserve, not waste a thing—not the heat of our bed, not a single calorie in superfluous efforts that didn’t sustain this single purpose. And so we prepared for our next journey on our friend’s advice and on what conclusions we had been able to draw.
We arrived on a September evening. It was the first time we had ever stepped foot in Europe. Lyon, France. The airport taxi left us off downtown. Everything was dark, save the intermittent headlights that lit the streets every once in a while. We walked along the bank of one of the city’s two rivers. The streetlamps were out, and the houses were steeped in shadows. We walked in silence along a row of small houses with candles in the windows. These hundreds of flames alone lit up the town—ancient light, medieval, cave-like—the light of my childhood, of the walks through the dark with my grandfather, dogs barking in distant fields, when flames burning the rice were the only source of nocturnal light. We could just make out a hill at the end of this strand of little flames, an even darker mass farther in the distance, crowned by an illumined basilica. The whole structure bathed in yellow. It was the only artificial light. The following day someone in the market explained the reason for that ceremonious darkness. The basilica was Notre-Dame de Fourvière, and every September a pilgrimage takes place, a river of men, women, and children carrying the candles that have lit their windows at home for a week. Four centuries adoring the Virgin who spared them from the epidemic that devastated Europe. Four hundred years of flames in silent thankfulness for saving them from the plague.
Walking among those candles was hard for me. The city was welcoming me with the only thing that might seem familiar to me in a European city. The candles reminded me of the paper lanterns my parents and I used to place in the waters of the Motoyasu River when I was a child, together with hundreds of people who gathered for the Toro Nagashi ceremony, commending our little floating lights to guide the souls of our dead. They were beautiful memories, but I’d distanced myself from them a long time ago because they were inevitably tied to traumatic ones too, since the river had turned into something very different after the attack on Hiroshima. It became a symbol of the city’s tragedy, the place where the wounded, in flames, had thrown themselves, or where thousands of cadavers had been dumped afterward. For several days, more bodies than water flowed down the Motoyasu River of my hometown of Hiroshima, and a person could cross it by skipping from one corpse to another without even getting wet. There were so many people at the first service commemorating the explosion, and so many who wished to place their lanterns in the water that volunteers had to wade into the river up to their waists to deposit the little floating lights, and despite the river’s current that carried them off, they were so numerous there wasn’t room enough along the stretch of river near the Genbaku Dome, the only building lit up, offering a vision of its metal frame. It was the only structure that hadn’t buckled under the explosion, standing close to a mile from the center of the detonation, and being a government building, it seemed—lit up like that, destroyed but still imposing with its fleshless dome—not unlike the basilica that welcomed us from the darkness of that tiny French town. These memories were painful ones, especially given that all there was in Lyon’s river was water, no lights floating in the current, no messages written on rice paper to continue guiding my beloved parents, my neighbors, all the people who had faded away beside me in the hospital after the attack. The river in Lyon seemed to me to lack compassion, to be selfish. A river that fails to carry messages for our ancestors has always seemed to me like a waste of water’s communicative faculty.
On the second day, Jim and I went into a small boutique and bought a little music box. They didn’t have the melody I was looking for. The salesperson insisted that I buy a waltz I hadn’t ever heard before. I still don’t know the name of the piece of music. When I agreed, the salesperson didn’t want to charge me. I forgot about the box until it was time to go to sleep. I saw it on the nightstand in the hostel when I crawled into bed. I opened it. I cranked the little handle and the music trickled out. Back in New York, for months I turned that little handle every night before falling asleep. Its music brought back memories: our nighttime trek from doorway to doorway; sleeping in sheets fragrant with southern lavender, wondering if Yoro had ever fallen asleep with the same scent of purple fields; the little cuts in my fingers from shucking oyster after oyster for lunch, adding a sort of aphrodisiac element to the vigor of the steps we were taking forward; the woman who saw me crying as I sat on a step in the middle of the block and who told me to stand up, then gave me a hug before continuing on her way.
I cried bitterly on several occasions, and whenever the sorrow overtook me in a public setting, I would just sit down until it went away, because I didn’t want Jim to know how deeply the lack of traces of Yoro was consuming me, to the point where I wasn’t sure how much longer I could stand it. But the music from that little box reminded me more than anything of the strolls I took with my guide, a wizened blind man who showed me the city, its labyrinths, and what became over time the symbol of that frustrated trip: the so-called traboules, secret passageways that connect one street with another, which used to be an effective way of dodging the authorities. These hidden corridors, invisible from the outside, allowed a person to disappear and then reappear in a parallel street like magic. That’s exactly how I felt in that place because every time it seemed we were getting closer to Yoro, things suddenly emptied out, as if from one instant to the next she’d gone from being in front of me to being in a parallel street, the passageway to which I couldn’t locate. The door finally swung open and then closed again on her nonexistence, since the place we were looking for was now an empty lot, no building, nothing but a huge warren of cats.
* * *
As I was exploring my sexuality, S was the most significant person to cross my path, and she’s become a beloved friend over the years as we’ve continued to be close up to today. I met her before Jim, when connecting with like-minded people or others in my situation was as important to me as mater
nity.
S’s place in this story involves more than her role in my personal life. She is woven into the narrative itself, since she is the one who gave me the weapon of my crime, the matériel of my offense, and something far more crucial besides. My first intention is that the reader who is not you, sir, may have the chance to know S, since besides being a wonderful friend and the element who brings my story to a close, she is one of the most fascinating women I’ve ever met.
It was the season of rains in Japan. I remember I had just turned twenty-two. The rain was falling in that slanted way that makes an umbrella useless. I found refuge in an archway to avoid getting drenched, telling myself it would be the last time I ran out of the apartment in a storm like that. But then I recalled the Tokyo apartment I was living in at that time, nearly bare, and on second thought I figured nothing could be worse than staying inside those four dreary walls. I couldn’t have been more than five minutes on that corner when a wheelchair-bound neighbor came up behind me and rudely ordered me to move along and stop making puddles with my sopping clothes. “No problem,” I responded, “at least I can walk,” and I took off. I hadn’t noticed the presence of someone else there, S, who mentioned when we were outside that if I wanted to get out of the rain, she could show me a business that was to have its grand opening shortly, but that was meant to be clandestine. She piqued my curiosity and I accepted the invitation. When I discovered the nature of her business, in that time and place, a humble neighborhood in Tokyo, it felt like setting foot on another planet.
It was a five-minute walk down a few streets. Houses made of brownish wood, mostly two-story structures, lined either side of the street. The street was so narrow you could peep straight into the facing one, in the style of a ferret sniffing out the interior spaces, nests of atmospheric and corporal humidity. The humidity revealed itself in little clusters of sweating moss growing between the wooden planks in the corners. I stopped to observe one. The moss stored water in its rhizoid down, and as I looked closely at it, I thought of it as a domestic kind of dew that had nothing to do with the crisp cold outside. I brought a bit of the murky green to my tongue and it tasted exactly like wet skin. S saw me do it. At first I felt a little shy, as if I had been caught in an extravagance, but then she tasted a little piece of moss too. As we walked along we tried other mosses, terrestrial and scratchy, that resisted disintegrating in my mouth. I chewed these as if ruminating on what type of place S was taking me to.
The Story of H Page 10