by Rain, David
‘We’re not at war with the Russians,’ I said.
The senator stared out at the desert. He sipped his bourbon and swilled it around his teeth like mouthwash. ‘Strange, isn’t it,’ he said, ‘the way time passes? Fifty years ago I sailed from San Francisco. It was the first time I’d left the States. The world seemed so wide – stretched before me, all there for the taking! So long ago, but sometimes I think no time has passed at all; other times, it seems that everything I knew then is gone, crumbled like a collapsing wall.’
The congressman, looking uneasy, shifted his attention to the chaplain, who had opened his little book and was intoning prayers. The general and other top brass bowed their heads; the scientists continued with their instruments; the radio operator said, ‘Zero minus two minutes,’ and the senator pulled me close. ‘I love my son,’ he said. ‘And all you’ve ever done is poison him against me.’
Uneasily, I looked around. No one had turned to watch us.
‘You’re hurting me,’ I said. Still the heavy arm bore down on my neck.
‘You’ve got to make him understand, I love him.’
‘What can I make him do?’ I dropped my cigar to the concrete floor and ground it out with my lame foot. Desolately, as if knowing it for the first time, I said, ‘I’m nothing to him.’
The senator might not have heard me. He was muttering, talking to himself, and I was mortified, though still nobody saw. ‘Ben, Ben!’ he said. ‘You’ll do anything to disgrace me. Am I to forgive you? Perhaps I should take the blame. Why did you have to see too much? You saw through me like an X-ray. You knew I was guilty. Always.’
Desert dawn flared before us, blood-red through the glass. Softly, I shifted his arm from my neck as the countdown came again: ‘Zero minus one minute.’ Warning sirens, muffled through the concrete walls, rang across the firing range. Heavy doors shuddered into place. There was nothing to do except watch the blast. I would not. I turned away, but the senator, with barely a touch, propelled me back to face it. He drew the dark glasses from my breast pocket and calmly held them before my eyes.
‘Watch,’ he said, in a hollow voice. ‘Watch and tell the world.’
Could I resist him? I donned the glasses, accepting my fate, as the countdown reached ‘Zero minus thirty seconds’ and Voice of America, caught on the same frequency as the base radio, crackled through the loudspeakers, filling the air with the anthem that began the day’s broadcasts; as a scientist in a lab coat, taking his place beside me, brought long, pondering fingers to his chin; as the numbers clicked down, ‘Minus fifteen’, then ‘Ten... nine... eight...’ and the chaplain, murmurously, as if presiding over a deathbed, continued with his prayers, and the top brass stood, hands clasped before them like embarrassed mourners, uncertain what was required of them – and the senator, just before the countdown ended, reached up in a strangely casual gesture, smudged the black glasses from his face, and gazed, like a man bravely facing death, into sudden, searing fire.
‘O say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light...’
What happened next was the work of moments, but to me it unfolded in a timeless realm: as if time split into fragments when the count reached zero and part of me and part of the world would be there ever afterwards in that bunker at Alamogordo at five-thirty in the morning on July 16, 1945.
A new sun consumed the sky. The flash, silent and immense, was brighter than any lightning that had scourged the night, brighter than the desert in the midday heat. First it was white, then all colours and none: golden, purple, violet, grey, and blue, lighting the arid plain and the mountains behind with a clarity and power never seen before on earth. Never in my life have I known such awe.
Only later, hours later or so it seemed, came the sound, at once impossibly deep and high, shrieking through the bunker’s walls and toughened glass like an express train passing and passing, as if eternally, just inches from our ears. And I am witness, I thought, to a death that has no ending. The death of air. The death of earth. The death of water and fire. I have witnessed this and I am Death.
Tears blurred my eyes. My heart was hushed, suspended between beats; the world I had known all my life was gone, annihilated in an instant; but when, impossibly, I found myself returned to the stream of time, I was the first to go to Senator Pinkerton, who stood, trembling, in the centre of the floor, hands covering his eyes. I reached for his wrists and pulled them down.
Voices said, ‘What is it? What’s happened?’
‘He’s blind,’ I said. ‘He’s blind.’
Escape, to my surprise, was easy.
In the chaos, I forced back the blast doors, found the jeep that had brought me, and reversed on to the road before I even considered what I was doing. Checkpoint guards saluted me as I passed: Major Sharpless, VIP. What had the senator said? He could have Trouble court-martialled – imagine that! Now he could do the same to me: Major Sharpless, AWOL.
As in a dream, I sped past arid mountains. The scholarly Maybee, with patrician drollery, had said that the Conquistadores had dubbed this desert the Jornada del Muerto: the Journey of Death.
The sun was high and the heat burning by the time the rough road crossed Route 66 at Albuquerque. I turned westwards, drove until Route 66 was a blur, then stopped at the first motel I could find. It was the middle of the afternoon, but I fell on the bed, fully clothed and slept.
When I woke it was morning; raging hunger possessed me, and in the diner next to the motel I amazed the waitress by devouring plate after plate of greasy sausages, potato waffles, buttered toast, and eggs over easy, washed down with several pots of strong black coffee. I left her a tip worth more than the meal, staggered out to my stolen jeep, and drove on.
That night, in another motel, I wondered if the military police might be on my trail; I thought of them pounding on the door, ripping me from my bed, and was not afraid. But what crime had I committed worse than the explosion called Trinity? I dreamed of it: sometimes all I did was close my eyes and the memory rushed upon me. Again I felt that shuddering through the ground, that rolling heat; on and on went the express-train roar, on and on the searing brightness. What thoughts possessed the senator in that last moment I would never know; I imagined that his self-immolation revealed a longing to be redeemed.
Two days passed before I reached the coast. On a bright afternoon, a Wednesday, I pulled into the drive at Wobblewood West. The house was quiet and the blinds were drawn, but I found the door unlocked.
‘Aunt Toolie?’ I entered the flagstoned hall; I passed through the broad, open rooms. How empty this house seemed! Low chairs on spindly legs, flowers in brushed-steel vases, and bright abstract paintings loomed out at me, but none of it had anything to do with me, or the world, or what might happen next. Everyday life was the merest façade, a brittle shell that a shout could crack. I peeled back slats in a blind and peered out at the sunlit terrace. How long had it been since that evening of Antigone? I climbed the stairs.
‘Aunt Toolie?’ I longed to see her; she might have been the last link that tethered me to the world. In the upstairs corridor I heard a radio playing low. Caressingly, a song curled towards me – the one about taking a sentimental journey, the one about putting your heart at ease – and I crept forward to meet it. At the end of the corridor, a door stood ajar, and I pushed it open to find a room in shadow. There, marooned on a sea of soft carpet, was a big bed with Aunt Toolie sitting by it. She turned towards me, unsurprised, as I entered.
Again I said her name, fearful now as I saw the inert figure in the bed, the head deep in the pillows, the hand in Aunt Toolie’s hand. Her tongue moved over her lips, moistening them as if after a long silence. There was sadness in her eyes, but a strange happiness too.
In the bed, skeleton-thin, was Le Vol.
‘Tallulah, I’m back!’
Hours might have passed, though perhaps it was only minutes, before the automobile pulled up in the drive. When I went to greet Uncle Grover, he shook my hand with what might have been relief and I asked h
im when Le Vol had arrived at Wobblewood West.
‘Three days ago, four. We tried to call you, but that base of yours said you were off somewhere.’ He clattered about the kitchen, putting groceries in cupboards. ‘Your friend collapsed on the doorstep. To think, they’d let him out of a military hospital! Well, that’s military hospitals for you.’
‘But what was he doing here?’
‘Why, looking for you, Woodley! That was all he could think to do, to come looking for you.’
Le Vol, after all these years! ‘It’s like a ghost coming back.’
‘No ghost.’ Uncle Grover held up cans of Campbell’s soup: one cream of chicken, one pea and ham. ‘He sleeps, but that’s not all he does. We’ll have that young fellow on roast beef and mashed potatoes, apple pie and ice cream before the week’s out, mark my words.’
‘But missing so long! Has he said where he’s been?’
‘They picked him up in the Pacific, that’s all we know. Some nasty foreign island, Okin-something – is that what they call it? God knows what those Jap monsters have done to him.’
‘He’s said no more – nothing?’
‘He will, Woodley. He’s been waiting for you.’
Earnestly I joined the vigil at Le Vol’s bedside, delighted when he stirred, offered desultory words, or sipped from spoons we held to his lips. What sufferings he had endured we dared not imagine; his eyes were haunted and his skin was yellow, clinging like parchment to his hollowed face. The doctor said he was undernourished, that was all, and would rally soon. Only one thing was certain: when Le Vol smiled at me, grasped my hand, and said he was glad to see me, I knew it was true.
After some days he was well enough to sit up. He said he missed the sun, so we took him down to the terrace, where he reclined on a wicker chaise longue and I read him stories by Somerset Maugham. Whether he listened I could not be sure, but perhaps the lulling, elegant words were enough; the words and the wash of the sea and the summer laving the cliffs and the blue Pacific, as if there were nothing wrong in the world and never could be.
That night Le Vol ate with us in the dining room. Uncle Grover, in his excitement, had prepared too much; Le Vol took only a little; but within days, as my uncle had predicted, we had him on roast beef and mashed potatoes, apple pie and ice cream. The hollows left Le Vol’s face: the ghost was alive again. We began to take walks on the cliff paths. At first Le Vol used a stick, like me, but soon discarded it. He would stride ahead of us as if he were our leader.
Our days fell into a dreamy rhythm. News barked from the radio, but I paid it little heed. The war dragged on in the Pacific. There was something called the Potsdam Declaration: some ultimatum to Japan. It meant nothing to me. My world was Wobblewood West.
I must have been home for ten days before Le Vol told his story. We were all on the beach with a bottle of Scotch and a pack of Pall Malls. Le Vol, as I recall, wore a pair of ragged shorts and a Hawaiian shirt – forced on him by Uncle Grover – that hung open over his bony chest. He had drawn up his knees and leaned forward, hugging them; he pulled back, hard, on his Pall Mall and, all at once, as if the time had come, began.
Much that he said was shocking; often, it was all the rest of us could do not to exclaim, but we did not exclaim.
All that mattered was the story he was telling.
Le Vol’s Story
‘I guess I owe you an apology, Sharpless,’ he began. ‘You must have wondered what happened to me after they threw me out of Nagasaki. I meant to write to you but never did. The tramp steamer that took me away could have been bound for Cloud Cuckoo Land or Timbuktu, I didn’t care; those days in a cell at Yamadori’s pleasure had left me shaken and ashamed. The place was a dungeon, a medieval dungeon. Christ knows what they would have done if I’d been there for keeps; as it was, I’d been stripped and beaten and doused in cold water so many times I thought my teeth would never stop chattering.
‘So there I was on the tramp steamer, looking out morosely on the East China Sea, when a shabby fellow with a red nose offered me a cigarette.
‘“Wainwright,” he said, and held out his hand.
‘I was hardly in the mood to talk, but didn’t need to; Wainwright could talk enough for both of us. Quite a voice he had too: that dreadful, snide bray of the upper-class Englishman, except there was nothing snide about Wainwright. He was an “old China hand”, or that’s what he called himself. Been in the war, the first one, when he wasn’t much more than a boy. Came back from the Somme an invalid. Lucky to be in one piece, but did he appreciate his luck? Don’t bet on it. Fell apart. Couldn’t settle to anything. There was a girl he was going to marry – Cousin Essie, he called her. If the Garden of Eden were in Aldershot, Essie would be Eve, or so Wainwright said. But, before he married her, he wanted to be worthy. And there lay the rub.
‘His next years were a nightmare. Sent down from Oxford. Drinking, gambling. Job in finance, arranged by Essie’s father. The firm was a family one, which was just as well, because when Wainwright was caught embezzling the father said, “Did you know we’ve got a branch in Hong Kong? I think you’re going to get itchy feet, my boy, because that’s where you’re headed. Last chance. Make good and we’ll take you back; you can even marry my daughter. Disgrace yourself and we never want to see you in England again.”
‘Of course, he never went back. Wainwright lasted three months in that Hong Kong office before the demons claimed him. Don’t think he hadn’t gone with good intentions. There’d been solemn, tearful promises to Cousin Essie; to himself too. He said he’d end it all if Hong Kong didn’t work out.
‘But Hong Kong didn’t work out and Wainwright didn’t end it. He picked up work as a stringer for Reuters, enough to keep body and soul together. Over the years that followed he rattled around China and Japan and Indochina. Sometimes he told himself he’d go back to England, but another year slipped by, then another, until he realized that something had happened he’d never expected: he’d fallen in love with the Far East. This filthy hole he’d been sent to in shame had gotten under his skin. Oh, his dreams wouldn’t let up; sometimes in his cups, or in the arms of some almond-eyed whore, he’d sob for Cousin Essie, but for all that, Wainwright was happy, or as happy as he could be.
‘Needless to say, I didn’t learn all this on that first morning; still, I discovered enough to know there was a connection between Wainwright and me, something broken in me that responded to what was broken in him. By the end of that voyage we were fast friends, and when he learned I was a photographer, he said I was the man of the hour. Reuters would be more than interested in the snaps I could take in China. Wainwright could do the words and I could do the pictures. What a team we’d make! Suffice to say he was on the money.
‘We ended up in Peking. For Wainwright this was an old stomping ground, and as spring turned to summer that year he initiated me thoroughly into its bars, its brothels, its opium dens; if it’s true that every man has one special talent, Wainwright’s was for immersing himself in the lowlife of any place he visited and dragging any half-willing accomplice down with him.
‘But our pleasures were short-lived. Just over the border in Manchuria – Manchukuo, as its Jap masters called it now – the drums of war were beating. The Tosei-ha faction, wresting control of the government in Tokyo, was intent on fresh hostilities in China.
‘When the “incident” happened at Marco Polo Bridge, just outside Peking, I don’t think Wainwright turned a hair, but war had never come so close to me, and I was frightened. A minor skirmish, that’s all it was: Jap troops, there to protect their embassy, firing on a party of Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese Nationalists. But we knew what was really going on. For the Japs to conquer Korea was one thing, but how could they hold Manchuria? Chiang Kai-shek would never stand for it. For the Japs, there was no going back. There was nothing to do but defeat him utterly. They couldn’t stop until they possessed the whole of China. Now the “incident” gave them a pretext for new incursions. It was the Chinese! The Chines
e had started it!
‘Wainwright was in his element. There’s something fearless about a fellow like that; I suppose if you’ve lost so much, you don’t care if you lose the rest. The next few years saw us knocking around China as the Japs continued their relentless advance. Reuters got more than their money’s worth. We were there when Shanghai fell; we were there when the Japs stormed into Nanking, taking possession of the city in an orgy of pillage and plunder.
‘They say the Rape of Nanking shocked the world, but only if you’d been there could you understand the horror of those days. Who cared if you were a civilian? Who cared if you were a POW? The Japs had turned into monsters, driven by primitive hatreds. Their savagery knew no bounds – and I took the pictures. Remember that little pigtailed girl screaming and cowering as the Jap’s bayonet lunges towards her? That was one of mine.
‘Wainwright and I were lucky to escape with our lives. How many times did we fling ourselves on the last train out of a city that burned behind us? How many times did we trudge with refugees over devastated fields, always just one step ahead of the Japs? On and on they came, like locusts. Soon, pretty much all of China was in Jap hands, except the provinces of Szechwan and Yunnan, but there was no end in sight to the war. Chiang Kai-shek wasn’t giving up, and the Japs became more determined to bring him to his knees.
‘Strange, how war changes time! China seemed like the world to me then; I barely seemed to have had another life, and if I had, it was so far away there was no going back. If you’d told me I’d be sitting one day on a beach in California, I’d never have believed you. America was unreal to me, as unreal as Wainwright married to Cousin Essie. We heard there was war in Europe and shrugged. We had enough going on in China, but never dreamed that the Chinese war would fan out to consume the whole Pacific.
‘By the end of 1941 we’d holed up in Hong Kong. It was a relief to be in a British colony. We needed a rest and Wainwright’s talents had found a new outlet. I’d always known that Oxford accent of his was worth its weight in gold, but never quite how much until he infiltrated the finest club in town. He’d put it out that he was Lord Somebody, a relative of the British royals. There wasn’t a member of that club he didn’t fleece blind. Our plan was to rake in as much as we could, then take a little vacation. Wainwright said he fancied a nice Pacific cruise. Well, I hardly need tell you what happened next.