Flavio said nothing. He just walked by us. He fought with the rust-covered green door and disappeared outside. The coast guard officer who had commandeered the launch tried to hold him back as the rest of us stared out at him from inside the lighthouse, but he stopped when he saw Flavio throw himself down and roll around in the underbrush like a flea-bitten animal. He was barefoot, shirtless, and in a land where snakes are as abundant as ants; it was only a matter of minutes before he encountered one. We heard a howl of pain and the officer ran outside to fetch him, lifted him in his arms, and brought him back into the lighthouse. They closed the door behind them. We all turned to the doctor, but the doctor admitted then that he was really a dentist and had no idea what was in the medical kit; someone had given it to him like a prop for playing the role of doctor. We opened the kit, but nobody knew what we were looking at. There were bandages, plenty of gauze bandages, and a bottle that by its smell turned out to be nothing more than alcohol. Nothing that could be an antidote.
Two little red puncture wounds just below Flavio’s knee dripped blood. Even the most ill-informed person would know that if he had been bitten near the ankle, the poison would take longer to reach his heart. But now there was less distance for it to travel, which gave the venom an advantage. If it took an hour for one of the bites to finish off a man, then this one would take half a leg less. Jim made a tourniquet to slow the venom’s pace and we used a sheet as a stretcher to transport Flavio to the boat. The leg swelled up immediately. It was the first time since Hiroshima that I’d seen an organ three times its normal size. Everything reminded me of the horror of that day. The serpent skins like my sex, my empty penis. The swollen lump of what only minutes before had been healthy and strong. The distortion of what had once been something else entirely. Flavio kept silent. He stared up at the sky, motionless, as if he were sedated. I too felt numb, like a walking automaton, unconcerned that the way back was as dangerous as the way there had been, the same number of poisonous snakes and a dentist without an antidote.
The day was sweltering, and not even the breeze of the speeding boat could relieve the heat. We were all sweating. We radioed for a boat to come out and meet us with the serum. Jim loosened the tourniquet every ten minutes so that the blood could irrigate the leg enough so that necrosis didn’t set in, but he did it against the opinion of one of the officers, who said the only alternative was to cut the leg off right then and there, though I have no idea how he figured we could do that without a doctor and proper instruments. The venom, being a strong anticoagulant, made blood seep like water from the two red puncture wounds, but the consensus was to allow it to bleed out because some of the poison would be removed that way. Flavio’s calmness was good because it kept his pulse steady, which slowed the toxin’s race to his heart. He couldn’t be allowed to sleep, so the crew kept talking to him, though he seemed completely unperturbed. Neither the fear nor the pain had upset him. He seemed no different after the bite than he did before, except that he had started to tremble in spite of the heat. He was dripping with sweat, his hair was soaked, but he trembled like he was lying on a sheet of ice. When the medical boat arrived they administered the serum, an anti-inflammatory drug, analgesics, and an antibiotic. On the way to the hospital, Flavio’s sweat turned rancid and sour-smelling.
We spent a week there, visiting the hospital every day, hoping Flavio might tell us something once he recovered, might offer some clue as to where Yoro had come from or gone—at the very least a story, an anecdote, a memory, another photo. Anything would make the journey, the effort, the hope, worth it. Gestures of brotherhood, acts of compassion or understanding, they had the soothing effect of smoothing out the difficulties we’d face in preparing for the next step of the way. So we bore witness to the process of recovery. The leg turned a deep, intense shade of green. It took his body three days to neutralize the venom. Black and blue marks appeared over his arms and legs from the difficulties of coagulation, but the most impressive of all was the huge lump that formed around the wound itself. And for me that was it, I didn’t need another thing to finally make my mind up, to throw in the towel—me, someone who cringed whenever I saw a bulge, a cyst, a tumor, even a mere sty. The trip was a fiasco. Too many things had yanked me back to memories of Hiroshima, and how I too had lived in anticipation of bulges, in my case seeping with radiation. When the doctor lanced Flavio’s flesh, a huge mound of pus oozed out. But the lumps on my body, the ones I waited for with trepidation, couldn’t be extracted. They were like manifestations of a venomous tubercle that brought in its life, death.
Flavio spoke not a single word over all the days we spent there waiting, and the only time he got out of bed by himself was to go to the bathroom, sliding silently from under the sheets to crawl along the ground. As I had supposed from the beginning, there was nothing to be done in that place. Flavio had turned forever into a snake himself.
THAT LAST TRIP RUINED ME. I’d grown accustomed to delicate health, but never had I felt the fear of death so near. Not even in the months leading up to Little Boy had I known that panic of sudden death. The fear of dying used to come in the form of a panic attack from time to time, but feeling it could happen in a split second, just like that, was a new sensation. During the days following the explosion and for years afterward, many of the hibakushas went to bed at night never to wake up again, even though they had survived and apparently been able to enter the ranks of those who can envision a ripe old age. I always knew I belonged to the same at-risk group, but the panic that gripped my mind from time to time never actually found purchase in my spirit; it continued along its path while I attended the specific remedies of the little or medium-sized illnesses that I patched up with Band-Aids. But the episode with Flavio triggered a deep-seated fear inside of me, a wick just waiting for the flame. Who could’ve imagined that a stranger, a man-serpent who’d never hurt me beyond the infliction of his silence, would spark the fear of sudden death, like a virus, like dying without being able to say goodbye, not even to myself. But there was a certain logic to it after all, seeing how an invisible evil occupied that man, how the venom expressed itself by deforming his body, reminding me that in a day, an hour, a minute my sick body could transubstantiate. Though my soul yearned to live, though it yearned to love and loved so much, it was no more than a wounded bird subject not to other people’s care, but to the whim of some superior being who insisted on testing its existence through nonexistence.
Though conscious of the fact that others were in a situation similar to mine, I nevertheless felt as though I were unique to my species. That feeling I had first experienced in the Natural History Museum in London only got worse when I realized there was nothing else like me there, not among the specimens bottled in formaldehyde, not among the people who were accompanying me. It isn’t that I thought of myself as some special case among victims; I felt as though I truly was the only member of a different race, like the strange creature pecking its way out of an egg from a different planet who is condemned to live among humans without any knowledge of its own species, its life expectancy, precisely what I most craved to know. I was an alien raised without a father or a mother, with nobody whose DNA was remotely similar, a person with more questions than answers, principal of which was that key piece of information about time: When was I supposed to die? How long do people of my race live? Eighty years? One hundred, two hundred? I was a stranger among a strange race, and at times I thought I hadn’t the slightest indication of what might become of my own flesh.