She remembered something else, and decided she was sufficiently hidden from the bridge by the high, thick pipes of the valve cluster. She took out the cigarette lighter from the fatigues' breast pocket. It sputtered, clicking. She blew on it, shook it hard, then tried it again, using her other hand as an umbrella. The lighter hissed, made a series of clicking noises at the same time, then lit. The clicking noises stopped. Still sheltering it, she held the little yellow flame to the open white cavity of the pump controls. The flame lessened, shrank, and the hiss decreased. She shook the lighter but its light continued to fade, running out. Never mind; she'd seen all she wanted.
She snapped the lighter off. Peeped at the bridge. No sign of concern; just the one man, scanning. The rain sang on the metal deck and pipes around her. She waited. The lightning preceded the thunder by ten seconds, then by five, then one or two. She put her hands on the switches.
Lightning flared and thunder bellowed all around the ship; probably hit it, she guessed. She turned the switches. The echoes of the thunder were still dying away as the pumps beneath her feet started up, making the deck thrum. Red lights appeared in front of her eyes.
She heard hisses and gurgles, then, over the noise of the rain, the rumble of the thick oil pouring out through the pipes and into the lake.
She wondered how long it would take them to realise. She watched the bridge for a few seconds. Nothing. Same man, same actions. Quite undisturbed. She felt the deck tremble as the pumps pulled the oil from the tanks and threw it into the lake. She watched the man on the red length of the bridge for a while longer, her eyes screwed up, trying to drill her sight through the waves of rain. Nothing; nada. Hadn't even seen the damn stuff spewing out from the sides of the ship. Hadn't noticed the lights on the cargo-handling board on the bridge. She looked at the lighter in her hand, thought about trying to set fire to the torrent of oil pouring from the pumps over the side of the boat and into the lake, then looked up, mouth opening, into the night, and with a last hurried look at the lighter, put it away, squatted on her haunches, and thought. She nodded once to herself, then spent a long time looking through the rain, through a small space between two pipes she reckoned would screen her from the nightscope and the lightning, watching the man on the bridge. She started to worry about the lightning.
After a while she got dizzy with tiredness. The storm was departing; the rain had settled to a steady downpour; the lightning had become less dramatic and urgent, the thunder less immediate and crackly.
She felt the deck resound beneath her, and lay down in the pouring rain, only half-sheltered by the thick pipes above. She curled up, and slept.
Hisako Onoda dreamed of a lake full of blood and a sky full of fire. She watched from the depths of space and saw a great lever strike the world; it rang false and shattered, disintegrating into all the separate states and creeds, beliefs and prejudices that had riven it over the years, blowing like seeds from a flower.
She kept waking up, thinking she'd heard steps, or voices. Or maybe she only thought she kept waking up, she thought later.
Blood and fire, the dreams were always there waiting for her when she drifted off again.
When she did awake, properly, finally, the rain was gone, the first light of dawn was trying to burrow under the dark lid. of the sky, the deck still trembled beneath her, the air smelled thick and the lake was full of blood.
12: The Heart of the Universe
Her father died three months before she was born; she had never been held by him. They told her she was lucky, all the same; she might have been born deformed. It was years after the Pikadon, and maybe he'd have died of cancer anyway. That was the way it worked, by statistics. It came down to probabilities, a cellular image of the jeopardising indeterminacies that lay beneath the physical world, and were its absolute — but absolutely uncertain — foundations. So maybe the bomb did kill him, eventually, or maybe it didn't.
They'd opened him up, hoping to deal with the tumour in his belly, but when they saw what was inside him, they just closed the incision again. He stayed in hospital, went home for a while to be with his pregnant wife, but after a few weeks the pain got so bad they took him back into the hospital once more.
He'd been with his unit in Kaita, a town a few kilometres from the city suburbs, when the Pikadon came. They'd seen the lone bomber from the barracks; tiny in the sky. One of the men claimed he'd seen the bomb itself, a dot falling. They heard the sirens from the city, went back to cleaning their rifles.
Then another sun lit the parade ground and the barrack buildings. They shielded their eyes, felt the heat, and watched dumbly while the light faded slowly and the vast cloud rose soundlessly into the sky, like the leg of a giant boot that had stamped upon the city. The noise came much later, like continuous heavy thunder.
On the way to the city, to help, they met the burned people, and once passed a group of soldiers; young men like themselves, but looking like black men, stumbling along in a crocodile line down the dusty road, each man with one hand on the shoulder of the man in front, following the leader. The soldier at the head of the strange, silent column had one eye left; the others were all blind. They weren't Negroes. They were Japanese. They'd been closer, and watched the bomb all the way, until it exploded in the air above the city, and that was the last thing they were ever to see; the light had melted their eyes. The fluids were still wet on their charcoal-black cheeks.
Through the increasing damage and the smoking wreckage, to the stripped centre, where the buildings had almost all gone, wiped from the ground-plan of the city as though by an immense scrubbing brush.
On the walls, he saw the shadows that had been people.
His unit stayed in Hiroshima, in the ruins and dust, for a few days. They did what they could. Ten years later, a quarter of the men who'd been there with him were dead. Eleven years later, so was he.
His widow went into labour just down the corridor from where he'd died. Hisako got tangled in her own cord, stuck and struggling, and had to be removed by Caesarean section; pulled from her mother's womb by the same surgeon who'd discovered the metastasising shadow of death in her father a season earlier.
Sanae was the first lover she'd ever told about it all. She told him the night she told him she would not marry him, and she cried as she told him, thinking about her father and the man she'd killed, and about something else she hadn't told Sanae about. He looked hurt and meek and pleading, like a beaten kid, like a whipped dog. She couldn't bear to look at him, so said what she had to say to the cup of coffee before her. They sat in a little kissaten in Roppongi, and he wanted to touch her, to hold her hand, to take her in his arms, but she wouldn't let him, couldn't risk him doing that and her dissolving, giving in. So she shrugged him off, took her hand away, shook her head. He sat, slumped and dejected on the stool, while she told him, but could not explain. It just didn't feel right. She wasn't ready. She'd hold him back. He mustn't distract himself from his career. She — here she had to swallow hard, fighting the tears again, biting her lip hard, squinting hot and angry into the brown dregs in the little white cup — she didn't want to have children.
It was the truth, but it was the hardest thing she could have said, just then.
Sanae left, eventually, in distress and despair, unable to understand. Her tears collected in the bottom of the coffee cup, turning the thick brown dregs watery again.