What if no one was able to sleep anymore? What if we created a world of such uncertainty and such loneliness that one by one everyone in America found that they were unable to fall asleep? Each one of us is awake in our separate apartments, which we don’t share with anyone else because we didn’t want to stay with our parents and we couldn’t get along with our spouse and fewer of us than ever have children and even then, our children don’t stay with us for very long. Each of us is wandering around our lit-up rooms, our minds scurrying down corridors like mice in a maze, unable to find our way to the soft place where we feel blessed, able to stop striving and allow ourselves to float along for a while on the currents of the world, which is so much bigger and more mysterious than we can imagine. Maybe we are lonely for a world that we do not and cannot understand, that swirls around us in a beautiful storm and for which we cannot be held responsible.
She realizes that she is falling asleep. She feels her body softening, her bed starting to sway gently like a boat on a lake. Her room is filling up, flooding, with a substance that looks like dark ink but that she knows will not drown her. It is up to the edge of her bed. Then it spills over, traveling down the channels in her sheets and bedspread, buoying her up so she starts to float away.
And then the phone rings. It slices through the softness of her dream with its hard, bright, electronic sound. She is not surprised to hear it, however; she has the sensation that she had been expecting it would ring just then, just at that moment. She gets out of bed and feels light and certain. The leaden haze of the last week, brought on by sleeplessness, has gone and her head is clear and her movements are sure and graceful. Even though she is just walking down the hall in her apartment she can feel the swish of her nightdress against her legs in a way that is pleasant and sensuous, her bare feet on the cool floor. She reaches the kitchen as the phone is on its third and final ring and she plucks it off the counter and answers it.
On the other end of the line, she can tell without him even speaking, is her husband. He says: “Don’t worry. You don’t need to disappear. Everything you do is valuable for its own sake. I love you and this love illuminates all that you do and everything about you. Even if I’m not there now, this is still true.”
“How did you know that I was thinking about disappearing?” she asks.
“Because you are dreaming,” he says. “Because this is a dream.”
“Then I’m asleep?”
“That’s right.”
Of course this is a dream, she thinks. He is not really calling her. In real life he never used words or phrases about love and illumination. Strangely, though, she is not disappointed because she can feel the truth of what he has said, whether he really said it or not. She wants to hear him speak again, so she asks: “Will you always love me?”
“Yes,” he says, “in a way I will. I will think of you every day of my life and often I will wish that I had not left. But that does not mean that I’ll come back.”
Again this seems right to her. She happens to glance down at her feet and it occurs to her that, since she is dreaming, she would like to float a little way above the floor, and so she does, feeling herself lift off the ground, her body growing weightless in the middle of the air. She is still holding the phone against her face, but she is no longer paying attention to her husband or what he might say next. She drifts toward the window of her living room, which is open although she knows that is not how she left it when she went to bed. Outside, there is the nighttime street, with its pools of light, the complicated maps the trees make against the sky. Her husband asks: “Do you miss me?” and she remembers that he is there, on the other end of the line. His voice sounds like an insect. If she reaches out, she can pull herself over the sill and swim out into the night. “I have to go,” she says. She puts the phone in the pocket of her nightgown.
And then she is away.
No-No
They are called to the meeting in the gymnasium by number. The Takagawa family, number 1205, cross the camp with the other families whose numbers start with 12. It is a cold, bright January day. The ground is caked with snow. Wind funnels down the valley from the north, blowing the snow up into white, ghostly wings.
When he looks back years later, Karl Takagawa will remember most vividly the constant wind. It is as if even the air is bored and restless, turning this way and that like an animal going crazy in its pen.
• • •
Other things will stay with him, too, fragments of memory clear and frozen as photographs: the fence that encloses the camp on all sides, the guard towers along its length, the armed sentries at the main gate, the little creek that comes in through a culvert nearby. In the summer the children waded in the creek, but for months it’s been too cold. Now they all walk quickly, hugging their coats around them, to the looming, barnlike building where they’ve been told an important announcement will be made.
When they get to the gymnasium, the Center Manager is standing at the front of the room. He’s a tall, broad-shouldered white man. He wears wire-rimmed glasses and a brown felt hat with a wide brim, which for some reason he keeps on indoors. This gives him the genial look of a scout leader or a park ranger.
The Center Manager waits until they are all seated. He looks around at the sea of faces. Then he coughs to clear his throat.
“You are being asked,” he says — he uses this word, asked, as though they have some choice—“to fill out a questionnaire giving information about yourselves to the government. Once you’ve done this, you can apply to work or go to school away from here. To gain this privilege”—he uses this word, privilege—“you just have to answer the questions in a way that shows you are a loyal citizen of the United States. You’ll have three days to complete the forms.”
“Are there any questions? Raise your hands if you have questions.”
No hands go up. There are, apparently, no questions.
While the Center Manager is speaking, two assistants walk around handing out the questionnaires. When they come to Leigh Takagawa, Karl’s wife, they stop, confused because she isn’t Japanese. Should they give her a form or not? They pass her by. They give forms to Karl’s mother and father. They move on to the next family.
Karl reads over the form. It has twenty-eight questions and is three pages long. It asks if he is married and what his wife’s race is. It asks where his parents were born, if he has siblings, what their names are. It asks whether he sends money regularly to foreign countries. It asks about his hobbies, what magazines he reads, where he went to school.
At the very end are the following two questions:
27. Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States wherever ordered?
28. Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and faithfully defend the United States from any or all attack by foreign or domestic forces and forswear any form of allegiance to the Japanese emperor or any other foreign government, power or organization?