This Light Between Us

by Andrew Fukuda

  Hours later he is still walking. Only he is hobbling now, his eyes bleary and unfocused.

  Asphyxiation by carbon monoxide … burning alive.

  The words still clinging, refusing to detach from the wet of his brain.

  Still he keeps walking. The sun begins its descent. Hours later it drops behind Mount Whitney. Soft dusk light streams past that raised mountain like river water around a large boulder, the light filtering across the plains, and enduing the land with softness. The barbed-wire fence catches the last of this light, its coiled metal softly glittering.

  The scenery is meaningless to him.

  Soon the air turns a cold black. The stars come out in force, piercing and sharp.

  He finds himself in Block 11. Standing before a packed mess hall. Music from a miked-up phonograph blares out. Through the doorway Alex can see tables and benches pushed off to the side, a few streamers strung between ceiling beams. It’s Dance Night. Young couples, mostly older teenagers, crowd the dance floor, jitterbugging away. Everyone trying to shake off the gloom that settled over the camp after the riot and never quite went away. Wanting to be young and crazy and carefree, or at least remember what it was once like, and forget what it is like now.

  There will be cups of water inside, he thinks, perhaps some simple snacks. It will be warm. Benches to sit on, rest his feet. He steps toward the mess hall. Stops at the doorway.

  For a long time he stares at all the teens inside. They’re worried about the lack of pomade in their hair, or if they should finally ask that person to slow dance, or if he’s holding her hand too tightly, if his palms are sweaty, if he’s going to walk her home tonight and perhaps even steal a sweet first kiss in the moonlight.

  They’re not worried about death in a slaughterhouse. Not worried if they’ll die by asphyxiation or embolism or burning or by the “good old-fashioned system” of being gunned down naked.

  “Hey, buddy, you going in or what?” someone says from behind.

  He spins around, stumbles down the two steps. Nausea bubbles up his gut into his head. He starts walking again. Without direction, only wanting distance. The ground crunching beneath his boots, the wind whistling between the dark barracks. Another emotion blooms under the soil of nausea. A tingle. Beginning in the base of his spine, spreading. That same sensation he’d felt weeks ago while watching The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

  He lets it guide him. Walks westward, toward the looming silhouette of the Sierra Mountains. Ten minutes later, the tingle has only increased into a dull throbbing that has worked its way up his spine, and through his rib cage. A tugging. A prodding. Warm, not entirely unpleasant.

  He is past Block 29 when he hears shouting. People are peering out of windows and through doorways, pointing at the sky. He glances upward.

  Towering over the barracks is a swirling black knot of a dust storm. A blackness bleeding into the starlit sky, snuffing out the moon, the stars, darkness itself as it churns toward him.

  Everyone starts running. Someone shouts in Japanese, a curse, a cry for help, it’s hard to tell. Stragglers race to nearby barracks, banging on locked doors, begging to be let in. Alex breaks into a sprint as the dust storm catches up and swallows him whole. He runs, blindly now in the swirling haze, trying to outpace it, knowing he can’t. He collapses to his knees, and curls into a fetal position as his face is pelted with dust. It is the sting of a thousand wasps and hornets and bees. Sand coats his teeth, sticks against his tongue and the roof of his mouth.

  A minute later the dust storm passes. Starlight filters down. Alex stands up, spits. He is surprised to find himself in Rose Park, a large, elaborate park built by volunteers, now in the final stages of construction. Decorative boulders and half-filled ponds glimmer dimly in the moonlight. A curved footbridge constructed out of wood and bamboo arches over one of the ponds, its frame silhouetted against the quivering reflection of stars. Across the way, a half-finished gazebo. Nobody is supposed to be in this park while construction continues, while rocks are erected and rose seedlings planted.

  But he sees someone there. Standing on the footbridge at the top of the arched crest.

  A teenage girl.

  Charlie Lévy.

  Alex stops breathing.

  Tonight there is no color emanating from her. No orange, no pink. Only a gray hue. She is staring at him.

  He walks toward the footbridge.

  Her hair is all gone. Completely shaven off. But not a clean shave; ugly tufts are clumped randomly about. Her cheeks sallow, her eyes sunken. Skinny. She is a charcoal etching. A drab work dress flutters about her, blown by the wind. A dying moth.

  He nears, dust falling off his shoulders. He smells ash.

  “Charlie?”

  She flinches at the question.

  He shouldn’t have. Shouldn’t have said it like a question. Because who else could it be but her?

  Her eyes fall. Like death, like the blades of a guillotine falling. The light in them snuffed out.

  “Charlie!” He steps forward, onto the bamboo planks of the footbridge, a bridge of dust and ash. He stops near the crest. Now they are close enough to touch. He sees her face clearly for the first time. A plain face, she had once described herself, unremarkable. She is wrong.

  He drinks her in. The thick eyebrows, the large eyes tapering to, on her left side, a trinity of small moles. He wonders if she has always been so thin. If her cheekbones have always so protruded.

  My eyes, she also once wrote, they have a fire in them. She is right. Even now, an inferno burns. A sharp clear light that is not afraid to look at the world in the face, and stare it down.

  But she sways now, exhausted. She grabs for the rail with her left arm, and that is when Alex sees it. A curious tattoo on the soft underside of her forearm, a number. 14873.

  The smell of ash is stronger now.

  He reaches forward, slowly moves his hand to her cheek. But instead of touching skin, he feels only air.

  “Charlie…”

  Her eyes hold his, shiny and damp. And then she starts to fade.

  No. Too soon. Not yet.

  He reaches for her again. But his hand again only sweeps through air. Cold air, ashy and sooty.

  “Don’t go, Charlie!” he pleads.

  She tries to offer a brave smile, her lips peeling back to reveal a dark film of disease over her upper teeth. But she falters; her eyes fill and for a moment, magnified by the tears, the light in her eyes shines brighter. But even Charlie Lévy’s eyes cannot burn through this darkness.

  “Charlie!”

  She reaches out with her own hand to touch his face. But he feels nothing, not skin, not heat. Still he leans his face into her palm, where her hand is cupping his cheek. Tears fall from her eyes, cutting through the grime caked on her face. And as she fades away, she whispers words he cannot hear but that are clear and audible in his head.

  Find me, Alex.

  And then she is gone.

  Even the smell of her, of ash and soot, gone.

  He is all alone in Rose Park. He is all alone in the whole camp. He is all alone in the whole world.

  40

  MARCH 19, 1943

  Find me, Alex. Last night, staring out the black window before collapsing into sleep, he was determined to do just that. He’d enlist, go to Europe, find her. To hell with the odds.

  But in the morning, in the cold bright daylight, the idea is ridiculous. Of all the reasons to enlist, of all the reasons to put himself in harm’s way, it cannot be because of a vision. Even he, Turtle Boy, knows that. Even he knows the odds of finding Charlie, assuming he’s even sent to Europe, are so infinitesimal as to be negligible.

  Besides, he thinks, it was all a dream. A stupid dream. A figment of his overripe, guilt-ridden imagination, brought on by the New Republic article.

  For a long time he does not get out of bed. He cannot summon the willpower. He throws his arm over his eyes, wants to block out the light, the sound of snores coming from all around.
r />   Strange: Mother seems unusually quiet. No coughing or wheezing.

  He turns, cracks open his eyes. She is still in bed, under a pile of blankets. An empty cot is pulled up next to hers. Father’s. It has sat empty for over a year. We all need something outside these fences.

  He rubs his face. Looks again at Mother. The pile of blankets does not move.

  “Mother?”

  He rises, walks over to her. The wood beneath his feet is cold and hard as the top of a frozen coffin. He reaches down. Gives her shoulder a gentle shake. She doesn’t respond, and his throat suddenly goes dry. He pulls her around so he can see her face.

  She smacks her lips, grunts in her sleep. Relief floods him; then just as quickly, concern. Mother’s face is gray and scrunched up into a scowl. Wisps of hair dangle lifelessly down, unwound spools of wire. In the cold, she shivers like a soaked baby bird, deathly thin. She’s aged twenty years, it seems, since leaving Bainbridge Island.

  As he pulls the blanket up over her shoulder, he feels the outline of something hard beneath. He peels the blanket back, and sees it: a photo frame clasped in her cold hands. It’s Mother and Father’s wedding photo. He stares at her youthful face in the photo taken decades ago, then at her sleeping craggy face—somehow even more colorless than the black-and-white photo—next to it. The shock of this contrast, not between youth and age, but life and death.

  Without Father, she’s free-falling into the grave.

  Unable to stand the inertia and staleness of this cold room anymore, he throws on his coat, pushes out. A frigid brisk wind sieves between the barracks, cuts through him. He walks quickly, trying to stomp warmth into his cold feet, get his blood circulating. But an hour later, having circled the camp several times already, his face is a frozen carcass, his feet blocks of ice.

  Dark clouds gather over the Sierra Nevada. A gray settles over the camp.

  At the main entrance, he notices a bus that’s just pulled into the camp, its engine clanking loudly, the dust left in its wake still afloat behind it. Only a handful of people inside.

  Curious, Alex watches.

  The door swings open and a pair of uniforms steps off.

  A moment later, an old Japanese man stumbles out. His disheveled hair white, his frame wiry and hunched.

  Alex’s heart seems to miss a beat.

  But it’s not Father. Just another Japanese man, of similar age. Actually, as Alex takes a closer look, it’s someone he recognizes. Mr. Muramoto from Bainbridge Island. A strawberry farmer from the other side of the island. A man who’d also been detained by the FBI. And who, if he remembers correctly, had also been sent to Crystal City, Texas.

  His family steps into view now. A mother and a young girl. They’d been waiting for his arrival by the administration building, and now, as the shriveled old man stares bewildered about him, they walk toward him. Their surprise at his withered appearance—shock, more like it—is written all over their faces. This man, their husband and father, has aged into something ancient. Erica Muramoto, the six-year-old daughter, does not run up to him, despite her mother’s prodding. She pulls back, fingers in her mouth, blinking away tears. She’s afraid. Scared of this shell of a man who is her father but who is also not.

  Mrs. Muramoto gives up. She leaves her daughter behind and walks over to her husband. A few feet from him, she stops and bows. He bows. They do not look at each other.

  An MP walks up to them. Offers them a ride. Mr. Muramoto shakes his head vigorously. He picks up his suitcase, starts to walk, lopsided against the weight. The wife catches up to him, tries to take his luggage. But he waves her off.

  He doesn’t last long. A minute later, only a few yards from Alex, he drops the suitcase. “Where the hell is Kenji?” he says in Japanese, wheezing. “That good-for-nothing son of mine.”

  The mother doesn’t say anything.

  “He signs up to go to war but can’t be bothered to wake up early to greet his old man.” He spits to the ground.

  The wife takes the suitcase. He lets her now. They shuffle past him, the father bent over against the wind, rasping for air, the young girl clinging to her mother.

  Alex is suddenly thinking of the white lieutenant from the recruitment meeting.

  If you enlist I’ll personally see to it that your father gets brought here.

  That must be what has happened here. Kenji Muramoto enlisted. And then his father was released. It cannot be a coincidence.

  Alex watches the family stumble past a broken window, their reflection rippling across the cracked glass. Broken. But together.

  They turn a corner and disappear behind a barrack. But after they are gone, Alex does not move. He is thinking of Mother, sickly and fading away. He is thinking of Father, probably wasting away, too, in Crystal City. He is thinking he must do whatever it takes to bring him home.

  If you enlist I’ll personally see to it that your father gets brought here.

  Yet he stands paralyzed with indecision. He cannot make up his mind. In one ear, he hears Frank telling him not to kowtow to a country that’s spat on them all. In his other ear, he hears his Mother wheezing, her health failing, needing Father. He cannot decide. He cannot move the needle, one way or the other.

  Black dense clouds slide quickly across the sky, drawing darkness like a blanket over the camp. Rain begins to fall, and the first drops are big and heavy, and make dark splats on the dusty ground. Within a minute, the raindrops become a downpour, drumming loudly on the barracks’ rooftops and turning the ground to mush. Alex heads back, not bothering to run. He will be drenched regardless. He is already almost soaked through.

  It is only as he is passing Rose Park that he stops. A voice is filling his head, and it is not the voice of the lieutenant. Or Frank, or Mother. It is the voice of another.

  Find me, Alex.

  He stands for a long time. Very, very still. Then he lifts his head to the sky. A small movement, but seemingly decisive. His clear eyes do not close or even blink at the raindrops falling down on him.

  41

  APRIL 5, 1943

  He didn’t plan on telling Mother for another day or two. But that Monday afternoon he finds himself alone with her in the room. The unseasonably warm day has lured almost everyone outside, and this unexpected privacy is too good to waste. There will be no better moment.

  “Mother.” He sits down at the table across from her. “I need to talk to you about something.”

  Her shoulders pull together. She knows already. Or has at least suspected.

  Still he fidgets. Still he tries to find the opening words.

  She sees the misery etched on his face. “You’ve decided to enlist,” she says matter-of-factly.

  He nods slowly. “I’m sorry.”

  She sets down her knitting. Her chest rises and falls, rises and falls. She asks, without looking at him, “I thought you were against joining the war.”

  He doesn’t say anything.

  She looks at him. “Then why?”

  “It’ll help Father,” he finally says in a soft voice. “If I enlist, he’ll be released from Crystal City. He’ll come here to Manzanar.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “A lieutenant promised me. Said if I enlist, Father can join us here.” He looks at her. “I know you want that.”

  Her jaw trembles. “That’s not reason enough.”

  “Of course it is.”

  She blinks once—a slow blink that seems to take forever. When she looks up at him, her damp eyes seem to see right through him. “There’s another reason, isn’t there?”

  He pauses. He thinks of what he could say: I want to see the world. I want to be a man. And of course, floating invisibly in the background, another reason he’d never admit, not to her. I want to find Charlie. Ridiculous, even to him. Even to Turtle Boy.

  She’s quiet. Still waiting for his response.

  He settles on something cryptic yet true. “If I don’t do this I’ll regret it my whole life.”

&nb
sp; Her lips tremble; she has a hundred things to say. But when she speaks, it is but a single word. “When?”

  “I’ve already spoken to the enlistment officer. And signed the papers. The first bus for boot camp leaves Manzanar in five days.”

  Her lips silently whisper five days. “You should have told me earlier.” She shakes her head, over and over. “Please don’t. Please—”

  The front door swings open. Wind gusts into the apartment. Heavy thumps on the floorboard, moving toward them. The partition is roughly shoved aside as Frank strides in.

  “Don’t mind me,” he says without a glance. “Just getting my cigs.” He goes to the dresser, riffles through a drawer. Grabs a pack, is heading out. Stops. Looks at their somber faces. “What’s going on?”

  Alex speaks before Mother does. “I’m enlisting.”

  Frank’s face blanches with shock.

  “What?”

  “I said—”

  “I must be going deaf. Because I thought I just heard you say you’re enlisting. Which can’t be true because only idiots and stupids enlist. And we all know that Alex Maki ain’t no idiot and Alex Maki ain’t no stupid.”

  “Frank—”

  “And especially after I spoke to you about this.”

  “I’m leaving in five days.”

  His pack of cigarettes is crushed in his fist. “How could you, Alex? After everything they’ve done to us.”

  “I’m not joining them, Frank—”

  “Oh, then who exactly are you joining?” He sneers at Alex with raw contempt. “Captain America and Batman? The Justice Society of America? The Seven Soldiers of Victory?” He snorts. “They’re gonna throw you out to the most dangerous missions, guaranteed. And this ain’t the comics, you get that, Alex? You can actually die.”

  Alex wills his voice not to shake. “Look. Frank. I’m not getting into this again. I’ve made up my mind.”

  Frank points at Mother. “And you’re just leaving her to fend for herself.”

  Alex bristles. “Last I checked, she’s got another son here. Or did you forget how to be a son—”

  “You shut the hell up—”