GETTING THAT OFF MY CHEST was a relief. Seen from my perspective now, I think that letter to Jim resolved one of the three biggest problems I’ve had to confront in my life. The first was discovering my own sexuality without buckling to outside pressure; the second, alleviated by the letter, was how to explain it all to the man I loved; and the third was the search for my child, his daughter.
I already mentioned how my sexual quest had begun many years before meeting Jim. Particularly significant was my encounter with T, whose asexuality existed in that rigid space where life was neither death nor life, but something intertwined that avoided having to choose one way or the other. Total absence of desire. Clearly, not all those I met while on my quest were victims of Hiroshima, but the first ones were. Returning to my city prompted me to question myself; it’s when I felt the need to determine my true sex. That’s how I met D. She was plainspoken right from the start, and instead of recounting her sexual adventures, she confessed even more prickly things to me: her fantasies.
D had only experienced one sexual encounter with another person’s body, but it was enough for her to realize that the reality of another body didn’t satisfy her as much as when she touched herself and reenacted in her mind contact with another being who was incapable of warfare. D didn’t want just a tenderhearted man, someone devoted or a good lover. Her sexual preference was clear: she could desire only a man incapable of bearing arms. She was convinced that the most satisfying passion could come exclusively from someone who brought her to orgasm with the peace he also practiced outside of the bedroom. She wanted a mind that was incapable of hatred, a mind from which those feelings had been extirpated, a brain that was missing a part.
I could confirm through her testimonies and similar memories of my own, that one of the aftereffects of the bomb is the permanence of what was taken away. The hole left in D by losing that equanimity when she was still a little girl filled with the weight of that loss as she developed into a woman. And somehow climaxing sexually tied itself to the obsessive need to recover that missing peacefulness.
Things around us didn’t disappear altogether because of the explosion, but they lingered as contours full of emptiness, reminding us forever of what the bomb had destroyed. If they had been made invisible, it might not have hurt as much, but seeing the remains of what no longer existed was a daily misery. I remember that after the bomb was dropped, the people closest to the point of impact simply disintegrated, leaving outlines of themselves as nuclear shadows. Their silhouettes remained on the walls against which they had been leaning, the stairs on which they had been sitting, because the radiation acted in different ways depending on the material in its path. So if the radiation had to pass through a person, the surface area the body occupied acted like a stencil. I knew a mother who believed she could recognize her daughter’s shadow against her school’s wall. For months she spent all her time trying to preserve the silhouette. She sheltered it from the rain and the wind, like someone protecting an archaeological site of cave paintings, so the outline that captured her gazelle’s last action wouldn’t fade. When the reconstruction of Hiroshima began and they tore down that wall, the mother abandoned the country.
I think it was in John Hersey’s piece on Hiroshima where I read the description of the different ways radiation affected bodies depending on the surfaces, or maybe it was in someone’s oral testimony, I’m not really sure. But if I remember correctly, there was a man who commented on how strange he thought it was to see a woman dressed in a very tight kimono after the explosion. When he looked closer, he realized that in fact she was naked, so naked there wasn’t a centimeter’s worth of skin left on her body. But the colors of the kimono, having absorbed and reflected the bomb’s heat in different ways, had imprinted the old fabric’s flowers onto her body. Reverend Tanimoto spoke of the naked victims. At first they seemed to be dressed in rags, but what looked like clothing was actually ribbons of their own skin dangling like shredded fabric. So nothing that was gone had actually vanished, but instead persisted in the most painful state: absence.
I lived through a scene in the hospital that I have never been able to forget. A little girl was placed beside me where I was laid out for a few weeks after the explosion. A young nurse removed her clothing to evaluate how well her wounds were healing. I watched how sweetly the nurse, who was probably a volunteer from another Japanese city, treated the girl. It had been a while since I’d heard a comforting voice. But when the nurse gingerly removed the girl’s shoe, she peeled, like hosiery, the skin of her entire leg off. The doctors had no idea how to treat the wounded. Not even the invaders knew what the physical consequences of the bomb would be, and it took them a long time to figure it out. The nurse burst into sobs, not knowing what to do with the hose; she didn’t dare throw it away or put it aside, because surely she must have seen, like me, the leg that was still inside of it. Again, the presence of the absence filled everything to the point of turning us all into a bunch of good-for-nothings, still stuck on caring for things that no longer existed.
So as I was saying, D imagined herself making love to a man whose DNA lacked the gene for violence. Who made love from a place of peace. It was the only sexual experience that brought her pleasure, rising from the absence that she carried everywhere. D’s loneliness was mostly affixed to this weight of what was gone, and so too was her peculiar sexual obsession. At the time of the bomb she lived in one of the few cement buildings in Hiroshima. She liked to play at helping her mom whenever she cleaned the windows of their third-floor apartment. She stepped up onto a chair so she could reach up high. They could both see her father swinging her brother in the park below. Her mother dipped the cloth in the bucket, watching the to-and-fro of the swing, and as if she could intuit something, she stopped paying as much attention to D and refocused on what was going on in the park. Pushed from behind by his father, the boy seemed to rush toward them, only to recede again, steadfast in the game. She said the explosion catapulted the boy upward in a last swing, and through the shards of the shattered window she watched her brother transform in the arc of flight from the air to the ground. His entire being blackened in midflight without his ever losing his shape as a boy. It was no longer flesh that was flying, but dust pressed into human form that became a shower of ashes as it fell. She watched the same thing happen to the birds in flight. In the flapping of their wings they went from being birds to being carbon molecules. No fire, no wounds, just birds in their most logical metamorphosis: perpetual weightlessness, the nimblest flight, free of effort and wings. Birds forever became for D the flying shadow of her little brother, always somewhere above her, and perhaps what led her to find orgasm in the peacefulness of painless flight.