For years I gathered details about exactly what took place in the air while those of us on the ground went about our daily lives. Knowing the facts about the airplane and the launch of the bomb made me think I might fill some of the gaps in my own story. I used the same method to piece together what happened just after the explosion, while I was unconscious. For several years it was the best I could hope for, to fill the gaps in my memory with reports written by the people responsible for those gaps, and for hundreds of thousands of casualties, for the sick who still today are passing their sicknesses on from one generation to the next. So you see, sir, I was clutching at straws. It’s a sad method to have to put myself together with what was responsible for pulling me apart, and an impossible one too. After all, how could I lift myself up with the same tools that were meant to annihilate me? But this was what I had, and I grabbed on to it as a means to scar over part of my amnesia.
Once it released the weapon, the Enola Gay enacted its escape protocol, tracing a 155-degree turnaround toward the northeast. The crew put on their dark glasses and braced for the shock waves, which came a minute later, when they were nine miles away. In my case, the data was much less precise. I had no idea how long I had been unconscious or what time it was when I left the school. I remember that all the clocks had stopped at the same time: 8:16. But I have no idea how I got to the hospital. Maybe the person who brought me there doesn’t remember either.
Details of the following weeks spent among the huddled masses of the wounded are fuzzy. Later we learned there had been one doctor per three thousand victims. And though I didn’t know it at the time, I had burns over 70 percent of my body. My eyelids stuck together after a few days. I couldn’t open them. I thought I’d gone blind. No medicines, no tranquilizers, vicious pain. My only treatment was having my position readjusted. Someone came in to turn me over every once in a while. The pain was so severe I couldn’t tell if I was being placed faceup or facedown. My whole body was red-hot, in excruciating pain—my chest, my stomach, my knees, all part of the same incandescent slab with shoulder blades, buttocks, the back of my legs. Pain made my body lose texture, as if the front and back of me had melded into a single flat, uniformly blistering griddle. The first sign of recovery came when I felt the wetness of my urine. That’s how I could figure out my position. If the urine dripped downward, I was faceup. If it came straight out and formed a little puddle, I was facedown. They cleaned my eyes and I could open them again, so when the pain subsided just enough for a slight effort, I picked my head up to view my raw skin and discovered that while the shape of my extremities was intact, the area from my lower abdomen to my thighs was an unrecognizable pulp. The area was so swollen that I couldn’t be sure, but everything seemed to suggest that the bomb had been particularly vicious with my sex.
First Month: 1960
I realize now as I’m writing this that you may consider certain particulars unnecessary for delivering your verdict. But believe me, your judgment is not my only concern. I wish to write certain things down without taking you into consideration, perhaps to re-experience the events, or because way down at the bottom of my heart, I would like to be understood by someone who is far removed from revenge and close to deep human emotion. These personal details serve as my defense before the powers that be, a valid defense regardless of the punishment. There’s also absolution. The absolution you aren’t going to grant me, though I have faith that others may find it in themselves, if they ever read what I have written.
I remember the first time I slept with Jim. We weren’t acquainted enough to spend an entire night in each other’s arms without feeling awkward, though he clung to me, or I clung to him, with a kind of naturalness that comes only with the passage of time. I’d never felt that way with a near stranger. It was as though he required my full presence as he slept, my full attention, yet at the same time he was fully aware that this kind of intimacy comes only by way of affection, and though he wouldn’t let me pull away from him, he held me so gingerly that I slept with an uncanny sense of autonomy. I came to associate his holding me that way with something he explained later on. One of the ways insanity would present itself among the prisoners on the Oryoku Maru, he said, had to do with how a prisoner would suddenly seize another and grope his face, his body, like a blind person from out of his darkness frantically trying to scrutinize the features of a loved one. It’s something I also read in George Weller’s ship chronicles. There were so many prisoners jammed into the compartments that most of them were forced to sit with someone else nestled between their legs and that person in front of them also had someone nestled between their legs, and so on in a herringbone pattern, and the excessive clutching and groping by the crazy ones resulted in the death of more than one of them. Jim never told me whether he had needed that type of contact or had avoided it however he could, but what matters is that when I learned about it, I reckoned that this particular way of clinging to me was his manner of holding on to life itself, to whatever still breathes in the blackness of night.
Most of the experiences Jim told me about took place after the war. He spoke about them distantly; not that the events hadn’t affected him, but his tone of voice, his eyes, denoted the type of distance born from years of effort. The few things he shared with me about his experiences as a prisoner of the Japanese were conveyed from inside not only of his own suffering but of the suffering of everything he named. When he described a companion scratching his flea-ridden scalp, the story had implications far beyond the idea of a companion who wouldn’t let him sleep; it included all that this single flea, and not another one, suffered during the onslaught of the soldier’s fingernails in its struggle to survive. In a single sentence he declared the destruction of the world order, the vibrating strings of a violin—sheep guts to cat guts—conveying wave after wave of massacre, from the hand that wields the bow to the eardrum that receives the sound and repeats the chain of sorrow like a tolling bell.
The only points of reference I had for concentration camps were the Nazi camps. But I heard Jim say several times that he found the situation with the Japanese concentration camps more perverse, partly because of the lack of awareness about what had happened in them, since most people have paid exclusive attention to the pain of the Jewish people, relegating the Japanese victims to the worst agony peace can inflict: obliviousness. This obliviousness wasn’t perpetrated by the enemy, but by the Allies themselves. I remember thinking about this so many years later when I read a plaque that had been placed above one of the ovens in Ebensee, a subcamp of Mauthausen, in Austria. There were a few verses written in German by the Austrian poet Peter Rosegger, which I jotted down in my notebook. Rosegger professed himself a friend of heat and light, so he asked to be incinerated and freed of the worm that in the earth penetrates the body: