Fracture

by Andres Neuman

  Three Mile Island hadn’t even happened yet. If you add up the people affected by that catastrophe and those living in the vicinity of power plants, uranium mines, and nuclear test sites, as well as the officials participating in all those maneuvers, you realize that upward of a million Americans have been exposed to atomic radiation.

  * * *

  How relationships fall apart is a mystery. We don’t know when it happens or why. All we know is that it takes us by surprise, like one of those natural disasters made worse by human intervention. In my and Yoshie’s case, I couldn’t say exactly what happened. We lived together peacefully. We were more attuned to each other than ever. When we were together, we gave off an unsettling appearance of happiness.

  Everything had become predictable. Our gestures, our responses, our Sundays. Our arguments and reconciliations, our positions in bed. The novelty was over. Peace was killing us. Then it hit me. I didn’t know how to live, let alone love, without adrenaline.

  You spend years creating rituals with someone, and then one day you realize that you don’t like that person anymore. You’re just in love with the ritual. And yet you feel incapable of separating, so you spend the rest of your life cultivating the perfect ritual with the wrong person.

  In all fairness, the situation at work didn’t help, or it confirmed what I was already feeling. The Chronicle’s circulation was dwindling, it was in debt, and then came the first round of layoffs. The atmosphere at the office became hostile. We no longer went out for beers together, we didn’t even go on marches. We would work late. Everyone wanted to prove that they were making more sacrifices than the person next to them.

  We veterans had our backs against the wall for a while, watching as they canned our colleagues, and kept assuring ourselves that it couldn’t happen to us. After each layoff we feigned indignation and heaved a sigh of relief. It was like a fucking Brecht poem. The newcomers at the bottom of the pay scale survived. So did a few seniors whose dismissal (like mine) would’ve been too costly. I felt lucky and wretched. In other words, salaried.

  Everywhere there were budget cuts, downsizings, zero-hour contracts. Although the situation at Me was never as drastic, it, too, suffered the effects of the recession and the oil crisis. Behind the calm that Yoshie maintained (which could set my teeth on edge), he seemed more anxious than usual. Sometimes he would come home after dinner and find I wasn’t there.

  The evening of Nixon’s resignation, I threw a party with a few friends. Yoshie was away, and he caught an earlier flight back. We invited the guests to our apartment. Fed them everything we had in the kitchen. We debated, got drunk, got high, danced, and then collapsed, exhausted. When we got up late the next day (was it a weekend?) I could see with alarming clarity, despite my headache, or maybe through that pain, what had been wrong for a while. I had the feeling, I don’t know, of a rude awakening, like when you’re dreaming and suddenly someone pulls up the blinds.

  We held out one more summer. But that morning, I knew it was over. We’d been waiting so eagerly for the start of a new era, and we were barely able to celebrate it. I wonder to what extent political hopes fill the gaps in our lives. Whether a shared rejection does more to bond us than any of our virtues.

  * * *

  I was the one who took the initiative. I conveyed my doubts and disappointments to Yoshie. At first he seemed surprised. He interpreted my attitude as an attack, and he denied the seriousness of our problems. During that last year, it seemed he’d been living with someone much happier than me.

  After that, we had some bruising arguments. He fluctuated between bitterness and exaggerated indifference. I tried to not lose my cool. Assuming he was telling the truth, this was the first time anyone had dumped him. His male pride had lost its virginity and gained something hard to define, which you get only when someone dumps you.

  I think I’d grown bored of our life together, or I’d started to check out other people, or possibly both. I suspect the same went for him, even if he hadn’t the courage to admit it. I was particularly attracted to a young intern I’d been flirting with at the newsroom. I laughed a lot more with him than I did with my boyfriend, and for me, that has always been the sign.

  Yoshie couldn’t understand my unwillingness to fight for our relationship. He spoke to me about strength, endurance, perseverance. I tried to explain to him that for me a couple wasn’t like a battle that you refused to lose. When it stopped working, moving on was the least bloody outcome for both parties.

  Little by little, he accepted the situation, or at least he stopped resisting the inevitable. I came back one day from covering an event in Philly, only to discover that, without a word of warning, he’d moved out his stuff. I mean all of it. Our apartment had been left precisely half-empty and spotlessly clean. As if nobody had ever lived there with me. What struck me most were the walls stripped of banjos, the tiny perforations. And the bare space in the center of the floor, right where the rug used to be. He had left his keys on my side of the bed.

  I soon found out that Yoshie was living in a loft in Tribeca or SoHo, I’m not quite sure which. I moved into my present apartment in Brooklyn, near the Gowanus Canal. I found it thanks to that young intern, with whom not much happened in the end.

  During that period, I broke my personal record for eating chocolate bars. And for the first time in my adult life I heard my mother ask me if I had gained weight. Ralph seemed sad that we had split up, I even thought I saw his eyes grow moist when I told him. He embraced me warmly, and told me I could stay at his house for as long as I wanted. You never know how my brother’s going to react.

  * * *

  Fed up with losing money, one of the owners of the Chronicle decided to cash in his shares. A few of the section heads got together and bought him out. This changed the internal dynamic of the paper. There was more opinion, less news. That was our new style and it was less costly. The editorial line became more radical. We gave more space to militant movements, and yet it became increasingly difficult to disagree with the editors. A few colleagues proudly declared that we weren’t journalists but activists. Sales continued falling at the same rate as our spirits.

  It was around that time that Phil Ochs took his own life. According to him, he had died a long time ago. Later it was revealed that the FBI kept a five-hundred-page file on his activities. It still considered him a dangerous individual even after his death.

  Just like the country, I began a new life. I met up again with Richard. I think we had always liked each other, but when he was available I was with someone else and vice versa. We had unfinished business. Despite claiming to be a liberated woman, I hadn’t yet learned how to live alone. I avoided the grieving process by eagerly moving on to the next challenge. Which part of me identified with Yoshie in this?

  In the meantime, Carter seemed better at winning people over than at making decisions. He might be the only guy who did a better job governing after he left office. In spite of everything, there was some good news. The Egypt-Israel peace treaty and the agreement with the Soviets to restrict nuclear warheads. I felt sad for not being able to celebrate that with Yoshie.

  After a prudent silence, we met up again. We both avoided asking questions about the other’s love life. It was all very civilized. In other words, we were terrified of being hurt.

  Every New Year, Ralph would send him a card with drawings by my nieces and nephews. I invited him to one of my birthday parties, which I’m afraid was unforgettable. In the summer of ’77, during that damned heat wave.

  My guests had just arrived when the power went out. It was the blackest of nights, both indoors and out. Richard lit every candle we had, and announced that the entire apartment was my birthday cake. There were fires, looting, chaos. They arrested so many people that they didn’t know where to put them all. Nor do I understand how they managed to identify them in the dark. My guests had to sleep on the floor. Yoshie and I agreed that this proved we shouldn’t meet too often.

  I heard
from him until he moved to Latin America. After that we lost touch. That wasn’t all I lost. All of a sudden, everyone seemed young except me. I had always been young, I had to go on being so. Even my drugs (which by then I rarely took) started to sound antiquated. Crack was all they talked about in the media.

  The paper’s editorial line became more moderate. We criticized Reagan, but sounded only cautiously Democrat. Sales rallied a little, then took another nosedive. We started to get paid late.

  Before the end, the editors made a last-ditch attempt by aligning with the new green parties. I was asked to start writing about art and the environment. I actually enjoyed it. Our readership less so. In the end, the Chronicle filed for bankruptcy and closed for good. Almost everything in my memory has closed down.

  Fortunately, I had racked up a lot of years in the profession. I had made my name, as they say, so I managed to get by. I continued to freelance for various publications, some better than others, including some magazines that reminded me of the ones I’d cut my teeth on. Then I realized I had aged more than my métier.

  We haven’t heard from each other since. To be honest, I’m not even sure what became of him. I saw his name mentioned somewhere a couple of times, that’s all. It amazes me how seemingly important people are in your life, and the ease with which they cease to be.

  * * *

  I still live alone, in the same small apartment in one of the less pricey areas of Brooklyn. I don’t have a lot of expenses or a lot of savings. I think I can feel proud of that. It’s all that remains of our revolutions.

  Sometimes I find it hard to believe just how much these streets have changed. I can still remember what they were like when I was young. Transvestites, criminals, cheap dives. Those were crazy times. Worse times, I suppose. A long way from these indie stores with their tattoo artists and their artisanal beers in the backyard.

  There’s a toxic canal close to where I live. I’m not quite sure why, but dirty water makes me think about the past, more so than clean water. That ugly canal, lined with workshops and warehouses, once had its glory days. Now it’s just pollution and expectation, a mixture of waste and opportunity. As soon as you cross a bridge, you’re back in the present.

  I know there are voices in the depths of those waters. Voices of all the people who navigated them, poisoned them, gazed into them. Stagnant voices. One day they’ll need stirring. Everything I see speaks to me of what I can no longer see. My city is an echo.

  That’s why I was surprised to remember Yoshie like this. I had rarely thought of him until that Argentinian journalist contacted me and sent me all those questions. Some were way too personal. Even so, I told him nearly everything I knew. Let’s call it professional solidarity.

  Except this time it wasn’t just his face that came to me. A face that no longer exists. Suddenly, I could hear his voice, too, seeping back to me like a gas. It was just for an instant, in the kitchen, as I read the news about that bonsai.

  Apparently, at the National Arboretum in Washington, D.C., there is a four-hundred-year-old white pine bonsai. A master gardener from Japan gave it to us for our bicentennial, around the time Yoshie and I split up. Not much was heard about it until a few months before 9/11. In the spring of that year, two Japanese brothers went to the arboretum to see their grandfather’s bonsai.

  The family owned a nursery in Hiroshima, barely two miles from ground zero. The tree was strong enough to survive the bomb. Strong and fortunate. As the story goes, it had been planted behind a thick wall, which protected it from the shock wave. I’ve seen in the papers the photos they took of it after the explosion. There it is amid the rubble, intact, the little pine.

  If the fact that they presented us with such a tree is incredible, equally incredible is that it has already doubled its life expectancy, and spent a tenth of its history transplanted in Washington. For the tree to have lived this long, many people must have cared for it. I don’t know what that means exactly. But hell.

  5

  EYE INWARD

  ON THE AFTERNOON HE LANDED in New York for the first time in his life, Mr. Watanabe recalls that he made his way to his hotel in the Financial District with a company representative, who eyed him warily, as one scrutinizes a superior of the same age.

  During the journey from the airport—which at the time, unimaginably, everyone still called Idlewild rather than Kennedy—he at last made out the silhouette of that city which for him had been only a collection of myths, photographs, and preconceptions. This collection of prepossessed images made him feel that the city somehow already belonged to his past, even before he’d seen it. Contrary to what he’d imagined, the real New York made him feel as though he were dreaming; it seemed more fictional than what he’d seen in any movie.

  As he took in the East River through the car window, mesmerized, his host murmured, in an unmistakably southern Japanese accent: Yes, it’s awful, but you get used to it.

  His arrival at the hotel, the name of which he has forgotten, was far from glorious. Due to some mix-up with the reservation, they weren’t expecting him until the next day. And as the hotel was fully booked—terribly sorry, sincerest apologies, and so on—they wouldn’t be able to offer him a room that night. Flushed with embarrassment, the representative from Me fell over himself to apologize to the branch’s new marketing director. Perhaps, Watanabe thinks, the man was also secretly pleased.

  After finding another hotel nearby and taking leave of his vexatious host with the excuse that he felt tired (which was actually true), he decided to go for a short walk and have dinner at the first place that caught his eye. Then, in a momentary fit of madness, as he wandered through the SoHo neighborhood, Watanabe stopped at all the hotels he came across, and reserved a room in each of them. At every reception desk, in his as-yet-faltering English, he gave alternative versions of his arrival, adopting a different identity and profession. Each time, he finished by assuring the receptionist that he would return straightaway with his luggage to make the payment and complete the other formalities.

  In doing so—as he remembers with a smile—he felt he was a number of different travelers in the same city, numerous guests on the same night, always a new arrival.

  * * *

  Once settled in New York, Watanabe went through a phase of conflicted fascination. Despite his serious misgivings, he couldn’t help feeling a frisson of admiration when faced with the emblems of this nation that had devastated his own. He walked around gazing up at the sky. He felt that he expanded in the wide avenues. He took up jogging on Sundays in Central Park. He grew dizzy at the top of the Empire State Building. He dined at every jazz club recommended to him. And he crossed the Brooklyn Bridge in the evenings, feeling that it was injecting the night into Manhattan island.

  Yet, as if it were a final inner bastion, he refused to visit the Statue of Liberty.

  Watanabe had hoped that working in the country that had bombed his people would have a liberating effect. He saw himself as a child, petrified of the monsters in his room until suddenly, he looks below the bed and wriggles underneath. New York was a city as young and expectant as he was, full of strangers who made him feel at home. In the circles he started to move in, he was always meeting people who claimed they were horrified by the memory of the bombs, and who considered it their duty to take their own country to task. This was so typical—he reflects now—quaint, even, of American liberals.

  These individuals, often introduced to him by Lorrie, treated him with an obsequiousness that at first he found comforting, and then, as time went on, humiliating. In their eyes he was, forcibly, a victim. A perpetual casualty of war, whose status was only emphasized by reassuring pats on the back from those who did not share the same burden. And who, thanks to their solidarity with victims like himself, were subtly exonerated.

  Mr. Watanabe realized that most of his acquaintances, including those with the best intentions, needed to identify good and evil as mutually exclusive. Rather than a debate, they wanted a pain
killer. They seemed content once they had clearly determined the heroes and villains, victims and executioners, regardless of who was what to whom (the Nazis, the fascists, the Japanese, the communists, the traitors, the American bombers).

  As he began to adjust to his new environment, his anger became tinged with confusion. He rejected the version of the story his American friends had learned about the genbaku, yet he couldn’t help but understand; the Japanese hadn’t received an impartial education, either. Lorrie’s conservative brother, who would eventually earn his respect, had taught him more about the country’s sensibilities than those liberal journalists whom she so proudly introduced to him.

  The idea that seemed to predominate in the media, schools, and families of the country that had welcomed him so warmly was a kind of self-justification, elevated to the point of military conviction: the attacks had been terrible but necessary. In addition to ending the worst of wars, the bombs had dissolved forever the possibility of such a conflict ever being repeated. This was what they told themselves, and this was what the majority of people there sincerely believed. Which is why living among his former enemies, Watanabe reflects, taught him that memory is more than just the effort to not forget. One should also remember the way in which one remembers.

  Possibly the biggest shock he had in New York was bumping into Yukio Yamamoto, his former classmate and rival from his school in Nagasaki. Over lunch on the Lower East Side with executives and investors from the Japanese community, Mr. Watanabe was forced to take in too many things at once: that Yukio had survived; that he also worked in the audiovisual technology business; that he had grown into an athletic thirtysomething guy with slicked-back hair and stylish glasses; that he had recently moved to New York City and was working for one of Me’s competitors. Sometimes, he thinks, our lives seem contrived by a satirical scriptwriter.