The Wild Impossibility

by Ossola, Cheryl A. ;

  “What?” That girl she’d seen, the pretty one. “But you said—”

  “Don’t worry.” He held her tighter, kissed her hair. “It’s over with her. For me, it’s been over for a long time, but I’ve been a coward about breaking up with her. I know it sounds like an excuse, but I knew she’d be hurt, and at first I didn’t know what was going to happen with us, if we’d even like each other.”

  “How can you say that?” He had doubted her, when she knew from the start that she loved him?

  “Listen, I’m trying to explain. Something happened to me—to us, I mean. When I first saw you, I thought you were only another pretty girl. Then you came close to the fence that day like you didn’t care about the guards and their guns, and I knew you were more than that. You were brave, with a mind of your own, and I liked that, but you were out here and I was in there, and it all seemed like a fantasy. Or an adventure. But that’s not what it was. What it is. I can talk to you about anything, and you know what you believe in and you don’t care if anyone else agrees or approves. And you’re braver than any girl I know. I wouldn’t have been surprised if you hadn’t shown up that first night; most girls wouldn’t have. The crazy thing is, I feel like we were destined to meet. When I’m inside that fence, I know you’re out here waiting for me, and that’s all that matters. That we exist for each other, that in some strange way you’re with me wherever I am. I feel that every day.”

  “I do too,” Maddalena said.

  Akira kissed her as if he might never have the chance again. “Shikata ga nai,” he whispered.

  “What?”

  “It’s Japanese. It means something can’t be helped. That’s how we think about being at Manzanar. I think shikata ga nai about you, but in a different way, a good way. Instead of feeling helpless, I feel like it’s us, our being together, that can’t be helped.”

  “Fate,” Maddalena whispered.

  He gathered her closer. “I will never let go of you.”

  Never. They would always be together. If she never saw him again after this night, he would be with her forever. It couldn’t be helped, he said. Her blood slowed in her veins, her muscles softened. A slow unfolding of joy—he loved her!

  Thirty-One

  August 14, 1945

  On the day we heard the news we assembled in the streets. The war was over. Every voice in the camp repeated the same words: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, atomic bombs, surrender. The war was over, the war was over! It was all we talked about. Everyone cried—for Japan, for joy, from fear, in horror. Some of us could not speak. Others laughed and cried without knowing which was which. A young woman clasped her grandmother’s hand in both of hers. A bent old man held up his cane. A woman wearing a flower-print hat sat down in the middle of the street.

  The official end of the war would come soon, we were told. We would be freed with no restrictions, allowed to resume our lives. So we were told.

  What we were not told was that there would be hatred beyond the fence. But we were not born yesterday. We would return home not as neighbors but as strangers, unwelcome invaders to people who had decided we would always be the enemy. Yet we could not contain our happiness. We repeated the news to everyone we met, at every corner and step, everywhere we waited or walked, and our voices woke the wind from its slumber. The air flung itself about with joy, leaped into gusts and tides and whirls, and we took off our hats, did not shield our eyes. We wanted the sting, the slap of it, wanted to be shocked into believing what we had come to think would never be true.

  Truth: We would pack up our possessions and board the same buses and trains that brought us here.

  Truth: We would watch the valley disappear and wonder how Manzanar could have happened. How it could have happened to anyone, what we had lived through. How it could happen to us. And how it could come to an end one day, the rules suddenly changed, the color of our skin, our Japaneseness, in an instant pronounced safe, friendly, American.

  Truth: We were overjoyed. Disbelieving. Terrified. We would go home, live free in those communities that would not refuse us. We were the same people who had come to Manzanar three years before.

  Truth: We were not.

  Thirty-Two

  April 10, 2011

  All that was left of Manzanar was the gatehouse, a compact stone building with windows so pinched they insulted the view. The auditorium still stood, reborn as a visitors’ center overflowing with photos and artifacts. On the way there Dustin had been quiet, giving Kira oddly gentle looks now and then.

  “You okay?” he said when he cut the engine.

  “Fine. Why?”

  “Nothing. You just seemed a little, I don’t know, shook up or something back at your grandma’s place.” He came around the truck and offered her a hand.

  “I’m fine, really,” Kira said.

  At the entrance to the visitors’ center Dustin blocked her path, his hand on the door. “It’s just that the way you were lying there on the bed, it was like you were waiting for something to happen.” Ignoring her surprised look, he opened the door and gestured her in.

  For two hours they explored the exhibits. Crafts and games must have helped to pass the time in this place where days stretched long into evenings of ennui and where nights were tests of endurance. Display cases held bird pins of painted wood and wire, crude metal fishhooks, goh game pieces of smooth stone, bracelets made from melted-down toothbrushes. In one room, a guard tower mockup buried its searchlight in the ceiling. Photos showed daily life, work and school, mess hall lines that snaked around buildings, women making nets, men tending to machinery. Kira searched each photo for a face that might be Akira’s. She wasn’t sure which would be more disappointing, his absence from the photos or her inability to spot him.

  Outside, three reconstructed buildings, two barracks and a mess hall, crouched together in the whitewashed desert, surrounded by broken concrete, rocks that had once adorned gardens, and the same unforgiving wind and dust Akira had endured. A fence replaced the barbed wire barrier that had once circled the camp, only this one contained nothing but lizards and birds and rodents. A guard tower, also reconstructed, dominated the land along the highway. There had been eight of these sinister lookouts, eight points of anchor for miles of barbed wire. Kira couldn’t imagine living beneath their gaze; just the one was enough to put a stamp of violence on the place. But then, Manzanar was a concentration camp, after all. That’s what Roosevelt had called it and the other nine camps where the Japanese were held, but people didn’t like that. No one wanted to admit that Executive Order 9066 had stripped American citizens of their rights and thrown them into prison. Calling these manifestations of racism and injustice “relocation centers” and “internment camps” was far easier on the conscience.

  Kira and Dustin wandered past markers pointing out where latrines, laundry rooms, churches, and gardens once stood. Heat lay on Kira’s skin like plastic wrap; breathing was like swallowing smoke. And Mike had said it wasn’t hot yet. Kira twisted her wind-whipped ponytail into a knot, wondering how the women of Manzanar had managed to maintain their waved bobs and smooth upsweeps. How had they managed anything in this hellhole?

  Not far from the camp’s western edge, a marker announced the hospital site. Kira tried to imagine a sprawl of wards and operating rooms and offices, hallways with gurneys and wheelchairs and linen carts. Strange to think of Manzanar as a real city with a hospital, a city where people came into the world or left it, gave birth or gave up hope. An instant city built with haste and apathy, it overpowered the valley’s nearby towns, depositing ten thousand Japanese in a place where only white people had lived since the Native Americans were displaced. With the government yelling about traitors and spies, who could blame the valley residents for being terrified by their new neighbors? Yet there was no excuse for intolerance, for hating and distrusting people because of their appearance. What damage had Manzanar done to Akira, a
vulnerable teenager? Kira kicked at a stone, sending up a small duststorm. What damage? It killed him, this place. It fucking killed him.

  A small cemetery lay beyond the fence, anchored by a pointed stone tower adorned with kanji, a memorial to all those who died at Manzanar. “Soul Consoling Tower,” it was called. Chains of paper cranes blanketed the base, neon confetti against the bleached stone. Kira wondered how quickly the desert would erase them.

  “You know what I can’t get used to?” she said to Dustin. “How short the fence is. I pictured it ten or twelve feet high.”

  “I guess the guns were enough to keep people inside,” Dustin said. “Besides, where would they go? There’s nothing around for miles, and even if they got as far as Lone Pine or Independence, what good would it do? They couldn’t exactly show their faces.”

  “Imagine living in a prison next door to a town called Independence.”

  “No kidding. My grandpop said the searchlights lit up the valley. He and his buddies used to joke that Lone Pine didn’t need streetlights after Manzanar was built.” Dustin wiped his face with the hem of his shirt. “You ready to go?”

  “Not yet. I want to walk the perimeter.”

  “I’ll drive back to town and pick up some lunch. Meet you in the parking lot.”

  “Deal. I’ll buy,” Kira said. Beneath her sweat, her skin felt tight.

  At the hospital site, she climbed five concrete steps that led to nothing. If Akira had used this staircase to go to work, where might it have taken him? Nowhere but another place in a prison three layers thick—flimsy walls, flesh-rending metal, and in the mountains that hemmed the valley, impenetrable rock. A terrible place, yet she felt at home here, like Manzanar was hers now because of Akira. She knotted her toes, digging into this mournful place. What would he have done with his life, her grandfather, if he’d had a chance to live it? What stories would he have told her about his childhood in Berkeley, about life in a desert prison? She imagined him laughing, his voice deep and rich, imagined walking with him, her small hand in his, or lying tucked in bed while he read to her. Scenes straight out of a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie, shallow and sentimental, but she could do no better. She couldn’t trade soft-focus, imagined family memories for real ones because this place had taken that possibility from her. Taken everything from her family.

  The wind clawed at her hair and she looked south across the stunning, brutal terrain toward Lone Pine. Two kids in love. They must have felt that a continent stood between them.

  Kira walked. At the southeast corner of the camp, the strangled trickle of Bairs Creek cut through what had been a picnic area. Some playground that must have been, with a guard tower looming overhead. The wind grabbed handfuls of dust, tossed them joyfully. In their wake, only loneliness and the feeling that the wind could abrade a person, scrape away skin and muscle and bone until nothing was left.

  She’d had enough. Limping, Kira hurried to the parking lot, ignoring the signs and markers and their impossible task of re-creating the past. Nothing could reveal the truth about life in this horrific place. Barracks, churches, hospital—little but wood and tarpaper, cheap imitations of life outside the fence, desperate attempts at refuge. They said nothing about the spirit of the people who lived here. People who suffered, like Akira. He lived here by force, loved someone forbidden to him because of who he was.

  The desert filled Kira’s mouth, coated her skin. Manzanar was too barren to trigger any fragments, too stripped of meaning and memory by wind and blowing sand. The remnants of life here lay long buried in dust. When people left this place at last, they took everything with them. Manzanar was a ghost town without the town, without the ghosts.

  

  Back at the motel Kira showered, then flopped down on the bed, her wet hair wrapped in a towel. A crack in the ceiling ran from corner to corner, pointing to an abandoned spider web.

  Her phone chirped. Hey. Want some company? A wave of guilt because Dan didn’t know where she was, then irritation that he wasn’t keeping his end of the bargain. Not that she had been either. She texted back—Not yet. Soon. xx—and turned off the phone. Dan could wait. Dan had to wait.

  She toweled her hair and combed it, wet and heavy and sleek. Looking in the mirror, she searched for evidence of Akira. One minute she was sure he was her grandfather; the next, afraid Dan was right, that her link to Akira was wishful thinking. She’d never thought of herself as a romantic, but apparently she was an expert at romanticizing. The only proof she had about Akira, if she could call it that, was Maddalena’s letter to Rosa, and that didn’t exist anywhere except inside her own head. All she knew for sure was that her grandmother had a Japanese boy for a lover, and he’d written her a song, and he’d been murdered. Just because Maddalena named Kira after Akira didn’t prove she was his granddaughter.

  And yet…

  She got the cigar box and sat on the bed. Strange keepsakes, the seven rocks. She took one, rolled it between her palms to feel its smoothness. It grew warm, and warmer. Cupping it in both hands, she willed the heat to intensify, the color shift to begin. Nothing. She waited. There—a glimmer of pale pink. It cooled, deepened to an evening blue, and joy flooded through her, the headiness of falling in love. Blue became black velvet wrapped around her body, and the room disappeared. She floated, suspended, separate from time and place, where nothing existed but this joyful nothingness. Then, gradually, the blackness thinned and the room reappeared.

  Shaken, Kira dropped the rock. She flicked on the bedside light, then the overhead, ran to the door and checked the deadbolt, downed half a beer left over from lunch, took the photo out of the box, touched Akira’s face with a shaky fingertip. Whatever it was that she’d just experienced, it wasn’t a fragment—it was more intense, pure, a glorious sense of being held, of being loved. Yet in its wake, all Kira felt was fear. Why? Wasn’t this what she wanted? There was risk in any discovery, she knew that. And maybe joy and fear had to coexist here, in this place that both welcomed and threatened her.

  She went back to the box and took out Akira’s song. There must be a piano or guitar around, someone who could play the song for her. Dustin would know. She’d call him; they could go get a beer.

  Dustin picked up her call, said that a bar on Main Street had a piano and he played a little; he was happy to help her out. Not a question in his tone, not a hint of curiosity, as if he knew patience would lead to revelation.

  Kira put the song in her bag, everything else back in the box, and the box in the bottom drawer of the dresser underneath a sweatshirt. Outside, shivering with the breeze on her damp hair, she gazed at the dark sky. Akira’s sky, a tapestry of points of light.

  That feeling—floating, joyful. She wanted it back.

  Thirty-Three

  August 15, 1945

  On a day that had seemed like it would never come, Maddalena rode to meet Akira. The war was finally over. Akira would be free. The thought carried joy and sadness with it. How would they find a way to be together?

  Maddalena tipped her head back, gazing at the night sky that opened like a blue-black umbrella with no handle piercing its middle, a vast sweep of darkest blue that seemed to end at the mountains to the east and west, and at the valley floor to the north and south, but didn’t actually end at all. Because the truth was that the universe was endless and that space stretched out so far into forever that time became elastic, something you couldn’t measure no matter how many times you tried. That’s what scientists insisted on, what schoolbooks stated in solemn black and white. Maddalena had accepted it as truth, but she’d never been able to think that big. The universe was like a soap bubble, there to admire but nothing you could grasp. And so its endlessness had never seemed true to her, fact or no fact. Not endless the way the war had seemed. The sky, to her, had always ended at the clouds, or at the canopy of stars, or in the fringes of pink and lavender where the sun rose, or where the full moon hung
over the Sierra like a gigantic Ping-Pong ball. But on this night, she could believe the universe had no end. If she held her breath and let her mind float free, her thoughts whirling around her like the desert dust—which she knew was real because she saw it and felt it, smelled it and tasted it every morning, noon, and night—then she could accept that the miraculous stuff of science was true. She could do this now because she had learned that the impossible could be true—that Akira and she would both be in Owens Valley, that they would see each other and not look the other way, that they would fall in love. Impossible that the war was over at last and the people of Manzanar would be free. Yet now suddenly possible, and Akira would be free. It was only a matter of time.

  On this night, the stars were thick as sifted flour, silver smiles that outshone the quarter moon. Maddalena was part of the night, part of the desert, the valley, the world, part of a universe that never ended. Akira too. They were alone together in their universe, where no one else was riding through the silent desert, no one else was risking as much as they did for love, for the wild impossibility of love. The stars were watching as she made her way to Akira, counting Scout’s steps as if they were the minutes, the seconds until she would see him there in the silvery, silent shelter of the apple trees. And the stars approved.

  Sensing Akira before she saw him, she slipped off the horse and into his arms. “It’s over,” she said.

  “Yes,” he replied, the word filled with disbelief.

  “When will you leave?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She kissed his neck, then his mouth, her body erasing the space between them. As they moved into the trees, Akira told her what Manzanar was like that day, how the people had filled the streets, looked at one another as if they’d only then, at that moment, realized there would be goodbyes to say, friends to write to and remember and miss. The moment passed quickly, tossed aside by the swift confluence of emotions, of bodies restless in the streets. Over and over again, the words, “The war is over,” said calmly, dully at first, because the news couldn’t be real. Then, as the day lengthened, the words gained strength and joy. The war was over. They would go home.