Fireflies

by Ben Byrne

  A grunt came from behind us and a heavy hand fell on Ward’s shoulder. Two bulky, shaven-headed men glared at us. One pushed Ward contemptuously on the arm, as the other jerked a warty thumb toward his mouth and emitted a phrase in some Slavic language. Ward grinned.

  “Lynch, meet Gorbatov,” he said. “Boris One. The other fellow’s Agapov. Boris Two. Don’t ever get them confused or they’ll break your arm.”

  “Good evening, comrades.”

  Boris One jerked his bare head at Ward. “We drink soon,” he ordered, as they headed off together toward the bar. Ward smiled as he watched them go.

  “Friends of yours?”

  “If you ever want insight into the dark recesses of the Soviet mind, Lynch, they’re the men you should talk to. Oh, look who’s over there . . . ”

  As we worked our way toward the back of the ballroom, Ward recounted his mental encyclopedia of all those present. At the piano, the diplomat prodded the ivories to delighted applause. The notes of a Chopin sonata floated through the ballroom.

  “Anyhow,” Ward said. “We’re all in the library. Something that ought to interest you.”

  “Oh?”

  We proceeded down a corridor to an under-lit, smoke-filled room. A couple of cracked leather armchairs had been set up and dozens of foreign and Japanese newspapers were draped over wooden rails. A crowd of men, waistcoats lined with pencils, shoes scuffed, were gathered around a wide table. A man with a thick brown quiff sat, gesturing at a series of photographs laid out under a green-shaded lamp.

  “A friend from Chicago,” Ward murmured. “George Weller. Just got back from an unauthorized trip.”

  As we slid into the huddle, a couple of men nodded at Ward in greeting.

  “The Mitsubishi shelters were useless, of course,” Weller was saying. “They were at the epicentre of the blast. The factory makes a strange sight now, I must say — like a metal ribcage, only all the bones are bent outward.”

  I stiffened. I knew with instant conviction what he was talking about. We’d flown over the big Mitsubishi works at Nagasaki a month before the city was A-bombed. Torpedoes and ammunition for the Japanese navy were manufactured there, and I’d been surprised to see the place still standing. A graceful city by the seaside, just like Hiroshima, sprinkled with the spires of Christian churches.

  “Most of those that died did so straight away, or within a few hours of the blast,” Weller continued. “But then something else happened. Something strange.”

  Weller held up a photograph of a ruddy-faced Japanese girl, smiling into the camera with a knapsack on her back. I suddenly recalled the thin girl and her scarred boyfriend at the back of Ueno station.

  “This young girl escaped the blast itself with no more than a burn on her leg. She left the city that day to stay with relatives. She came back two weeks later. Days after she returned, she looked like this.”

  Another photograph. The girl was sitting up in a hospital bed now. She had the look of a scarecrow — bald patches on her head, prickles covering her skin as if she had been dragged through a thorn bush. The garbled tale of the trembling girl came back to me in flashes.

  “This is her two weeks later.”

  The girl once more. Withered almost to a skeleton now. Completely bald, her body covered in thick welts.

  Weller paused, gauging the reaction of the men.

  “But here’s the thing, gentlemen. This girl didn’t start to get sick until she came back to Nagasaki. And that was three weeks after the blast.”

  The men scrutinized the photographs as Weller handed them around. They muttered soft prayers and obscenities before passing them on. I studied the print of the girl. She looked up with empty eyes from a frayed hospital mat, dark blood clotted beneath her nose.

  “What is this, George?” Ward asked.

  Weller shook his head, lit a cigarette.

  “The doctors won’t make a diagnosis. Because they don’t know how to diagnose it. It’s sinister.”

  “Does it have a name?”

  “No. For now, it’s just Disease X.”

  Ward glanced at the photograph in my hand, then took it and placed it carefully back down on the table.

  “What’s the official take?” Ward asked.

  “Headquarters don’t buy it. Or they don’t want to buy it. They say it’s a scam. That the Japs are looking for sympathy. Easier terms.”

  Weller unfurled a newspaper. To my dismay, I saw it was a copy of Stars and Stripes — the same copy, in fact, that had our piece on Himeji Castle printed toward the back, just before the sporting green.

  “This is from one Colonel Warren, of the University of Rochester medical school.”

  “That august institution,” Ward murmured, to snorts of amusement.

  “He states, quote: ‘There absolutely is not, and never was,’ — note that,” said Weller, his finger raised, “‘any dangerous amount of radiation in that area.’”

  He paused. He had the men’s entire attention now.

  “‘The radioactivity of a luminous dial wrist watch is one thousand times greater than that found at Nagasaki.’”

  He set the newspaper down on the table.

  “Do any of you gentlemen wear a luminous dial wristwatch?”

  A few raised forearms.

  “Ever find your intestines choked with blood? Blood spots in your bone marrow?”

  Furrows spread across the assembled brows.

  My mouth was dry. I raised my hand. “Mr. Weller?”

  He glanced up. I swallowed as the faces of the other men swivelled toward me.

  “Disease X. Has it been reported in Hiroshima also?”

  Weller shrugged.

  “God alone knows. Both cities are now out of bounds. Under penalty of court-martial.”

  I pictured the MPs loping along the platform, scrutinizing the Allied carriage for passengers. Vast cogs seemed to be moving, somewhere far out beyond my vision. The bomb made her sick? The boy’s fervent nod. “So, desu.”

  Ward stepped forward. “When’s this going out, George?”

  Weller stubbed out his cigarette with sudden bitterness, then slumped back into his chair. “It’s not.”

  Incredulous noises came from the assembled men.

  “How so?”

  “I was fool enough to file it in Tokyo. Headquarters have killed it. Every last word. Diller told me I was lucky to still be in the country. I doubt I will be much longer.”

  Noises of anger and disenchantment came from all sides of the room. Ward slid behind Weller’s chair and raised big, calming hands.

  “Okay boys, here’s what we do. We form a delegation, we go to Diller. We impress upon him that this is unacceptable censorship . . . ”

  I barely heard him. The photograph of the girl was propped up against the lamp, her eyes boring into my own. The newspaper had fallen open at our story, and I saw the photograph I’d taken outside Himeji Castle: Eugene holding up a samurai sword, baring buck teeth with a ferocious expression.

  I pushed urgently out of the library. The noise and chatter of the ballroom washed over me again, along with the frenzied crescendo of the Chopin sonata. I signalled urgently to a boy for a drink and when it came, I threw it back, feeling the alcohol liquefy the pressure in my temple, my pulse slackening. The men began to stream out of the library as the meeting wrapped up. They lit cigars and made a beeline for the bar. Ward approached me, thick eyebrows raised.

  “Everything okay, Lynch?”

  “Fine. Little claustrophobic.”

  He nodded. “Pretty strong salts, huh?”

  “Yes. Pretty strong.”

  “Another drink?”

  “Some other time.”

  “Okay Lynch. Make sure you come again.”

  A thick cloud of blue smoke curled over the animated crowd as I we
aved out and took the elevator back down to the lobby. I strode into the cold night, stumbling through the refuse and mud. Just before the junction, I glanced up at a building. The front was still there, but the back was missing, like the façade of scenery in a cheap Western. You could see right through the walls, and where the roof should have been were stars.

  I bought a pint of whisky from a hood at the Ginza crossing, and swigged at it as I strode back home. At the Continental, I lay down on my bed and swilled some more. Then I switched off the light, still fully clothed, and drank in the darkness until the face of the skeletal young girl had dissolved from my mind.

  ~ ~ ~

  Down in the dusty basement of the press club, I scoured archive boxes of newspapers for any article concerning the A-bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There was precious little to read. Access to both areas was interdicted now, and there were no official reports on the state of things in either city. The London Express had carried a report by a correspondent named Burchett who had raced down to Hiroshima in advance of our lines. “The Atomic Plague!” screamed the ghoulish headline — but the article itself had been suppressed and the copy in the archive was scored with thick black ink that stained my fingers. There was the set of photographs in LIFE, the surrender issue, which showed the familiar ruined plain of Hiroshima from above, and made the brief, tantalizing reference to the reports from local doctors of bleeding gums. But the article abruptly cut to a consideration of the future of war and the place of the atom bomb within it, and no more reference was made to its victims.

  The only other piece was in the New York Times, by a man named Laurence. He’d flown as official observer upon the Bockscar to Nagasaki. His writing was lyrical, almost poetic, as he described the swollen tub being loaded into the bomb bay on Tinian.

  “A thing of beauty to behold, this gadget,” he wrote, as if extolling the virtues of a new refrigerator or vacuum cleaner. The pilot had taken the bomb up to 17,000 feet, and from there, in the air-conditioned cabin of a reconfigured Superfort, Laurence had pondered the fates of those on the ground below.

  “Does one feel any pity or compassion for the poor devils about to die? No. Not when one thinks of Pearl Harbour and of the death march on Bataan.”

  I’d heard the line so many times already, it seemed almost worn smooth by repetition.

  His tone became rapturous, almost sexual, as he described the blast and the mushroom cloud exploding into the sky:

  “The smoke billows upward, seething and boiling in a white fury of creamy foam, sizzling upward, descending earthward . . . ”

  Floating over that desolate plain. The city swept away. Poor devils.

  The end of the article was puzzling. As if in pre-emptive defence, Laurence emphasized the official line: there was no “mysterious sickness” caused by radiation in either of the two A-bombed cities. Any such reports were “Jap propaganda,” wily attempts to wring concessions from the Allied powers, a cynical ploy to win sympathy from the American people, with their big hearts and deep pockets.

  I lay the paper down, and closed my eyes.

  ~ ~ ~

  Hibiya Park was located auspiciously. To the north lay the Imperial Palace, aloof and remote behind its moat and thick stone walls. At its eastern corner stood the granite fortress of the Dai-ichi Insurance Building, now General Headquarters of the Supreme Command of Allied Powers — SCAP — as contained in the body of General MacArthur, Japan’s most recent and now omnipotent emperor. The country’s feudal past and democratic future faced off, so to speak, across its patchy fields, and the park had become Tokyo’s premier site for demonstration, a rallying point for the new political parties that had burgeoned in the wake of the war’s end.

  A small crowd was gathered when I arrived. Up on the bandstand, a stout man in a green jersey was striding about like a boxer, bawling through a whistling microphone. Jeeps lined the flowerbeds, military policemen observing the events. The crowd seemed very much of a type — early middle age, circular spectacles, drawn faces. Despite the bitter cold, they were rapt, cheering loudly as the speaker’s hoarse voice rolled across the park. Red flags and banners were unfurled and then came the first, eerie, ululating note of a chant. It was haunting and somehow melancholic and it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. The men began to sing in chorus, their voices welling up above the mud of the park, floating high into the crystalline fall air.

  I saw a familiar, bulky figure, who clapped gloved hands and cheered along. I strode over and touched the arm of Mark Ward’s thick black woollen overcoat.

  He turned to me, his eyes bright behind thick spectacles. “Intoxicating, isn’t it?”

  A phalanx of men and women started to jog back and forth, waving their banners with balletic fluidity. They danced forward, halted on a dime, then went back the other way. I had a sudden impression of migrating geese, of brittle red maple leaves drifting down along the Hudson. I stood there for a moment, letting the feeling wash over me.

  Ward was cheerfully nonplussed by the whole affair. He scribbled briefly into his leather notebook, then slammed it shut.

  “Well, that’s about enough for one day. How about we get ourselves a drink?”

  “That would be grand.”

  The night’s first hookers stood shivering against the trees at the edge of the park, scuttling over in pursuit of the GIs who sauntered along in pairs. All were very young — their breasts hardly made a bump in their sweaters — and they wore motley, mismatched woollen skirts and dowdy jackets. Not many were pretty, but there was a certain sharp eroticism in the air that sprang from their brazen approach. After brief negotiation, they pulled their man off into the melding shadows, and, as the sun went down, the edges of the park came furtively alive with the faint, mingled caterwaul of swift, preprandial copulation.

  A girl in a grubby yellow dress skipped over and slid her arm through Ward’s, as if we were all out for a pleasant Sunday afternoon promenade.

  “Okay, Joe — very cheap!” she promised, swinging his arm from side to side.

  “No, sweetheart,” Ward said. “I’m not your John. Get on home.”

  She frowned. “Very cheap —”

  He raised a thick finger in warning, and she dropped his arm, glaring at him. With a muttered curse, she peeled off along the path.

  “And so the country truly surrenders,” Ward said gloomily.

  The note of the puritan surprised me. He had mentioned a young wife back in Chicago, whom he hoped to bring over as soon as he was settled.

  “At least we pay for it. Unlike our Russian buddies.”

  He glanced at me sharply. “What good capitalists we are.”

  The windows of the Dai-ichi building were still lit, the teams of bright young men burning the midnight oil as they drew up their plans for Japan’s future. In the plush bar of the Imperial Hotel, an old Japanese band played Ellington covers, while colonels in well-cut uniforms lounged in armchairs, enjoying the first drinks of the weekend. The waiter brought us whisky and I sipped at mine gratefully.

  “So, Lynch,” Ward said, settling back. “How goes life at the Stars and Stripes?”

  I shrugged.

  “That well, huh?”

  “How should I put it, Ward? It’s not quite what I visualized when I decided to become a reporter.”

  “What did you have in mind?”

  I considered the question. I pictured the shrewd eyes of the correspondents at the press club, the slumped form of George Weller as he told his uncanny story.

  “Something other than ‘The Touristic GI.’”

  Ward nodded as he slid a large cigar from his breast pocket. He puffed away, squinting at me through the smoke.

  “Something eating you, Hal?”

  As on the train, I felt encouraged to confide in him. I told him of my hunt through the archives; of the trembling girl at Ueno; of the MPs se
arching the train at Himeji Station.

  He looked at me, then studied the glowing embers of his cigar.

  “I’m afraid I’m not a psychologist, Hal.”

  I hesitated. “I never implied that you were, Mark.”

  He pointed his cigar at me. “But you must understand that what you witnessed from up there was the greatest feat of destruction in all human history.”

  “What’s your point, Ward?”

  He jabbed the air with his cigar for emphasis.

  “The fall of Troy. The Sack of Rome. The Mongol Horde. Nothing compared to what happened here. The destruction we achieved in the space of, what, six months? It’s no wonder you’re a little . . . stunned.”

  I was grateful for his tact. “Shell-shocked” was no longer the current expression in any case.

  “What’s your take on Disease X, Ward?”

  He raised his heavy eyebrows. “You heard Weller. He’s a strong reporter.”

  “You think they’re still dying?”

  Ward shrugged. “Who knows? You can see why SCAP would want to keep it quiet. It’s embarrassing, to say the least. Especially if it turns out they knew it would happen all along.”

  “I read an article in the New York Times. A man named Laurence —”

  “William Laurence?” he said, archly.

  “That’s him.”

  He shook his big head. “Man’s a stooge.”

  “He is?”

  “Sure.” He screwed the remains of his cigar into the ashtray. “He’s on the army payroll. He’s their cheerleader for the bomb.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yes I am.” He nodded, then grimly swallowed the remains of his drink.

  “Are you interested in chasing this, Lynch?”

  In my mind’s eye, I saw the sparkling inland sea, temple roofs, fishing boats unloading their catch at a silver harbour.

  “Might help you sleep at night.”

  I laughed. “I doubt it.”

  The place had filled up now. Tables of military men brayed and drank, and I gestured to a passing waiter for the cheque.

  “Did you ever meet Wilf Burchett?” asked Ward, as we stood for our overcoats. “The reporter who went down to Hiroshima after we landed?”