Celestial Inventories (20 page)

That was what sat perched against the young mother’s swollen breasts, a sad reminder of her fullness craving release.

Of course I decided almost immediately that what I was sure I had seen hadn’t even happened at all. One of the things that occurs when you spend a great deal of time staring into a camera lens is that stationary things appear to move, moving things freeze, and a variety of other optical illusions may occur. Things appear, disappear, change colour and shape. Of course you don’t have to use a camera to see this—stare at almost anything in the real world long enough and these kinds of phenomena occur. That’s true enough, isn’t it? I mean, it isn’t just me, right?

The great photographers are great because they see things differently from the rest of us. So from our perspective they see things that aren’t there. I’ve long had this notion, not quite a theory, that the world changes when a great photographer looks through the lens.

As I said before, I’m not a great photographer. But when I took those first rolls home and developed them I think I got just a glimpse of what the great photographer sees. In three of the shots the baby’s eyes were open, looking at me.

I admit that upon occasion I do fall prey to a certain suggestibility. I’m wound pretty tightly at times. I get somewhat anxious in the darkroom. I’m interested in shadows in an aesthetic sense, but I’m also uncomfortable with them. Unexpected sounds can make me jump out of my skin. I don’t care for scary movies. And I’ll believe almost anything that comes out of the mouth of a well spoken man or woman.

So I wasn’t about to let myself believe what the pictures were telling me. Not without a fight.

“Liz, did you ever notice the babies’ eyes? How sometimes they’re . . . open just a little?”

I don’t know if I expected her to ask me if I’d been drinking, or suggest that I get more sleep, or maybe just stare at me with that evaluating look I’d seen her give some of the patients. But I didn’t expect the calmness, the matter-of-factness. “Sometimes the eyes don’t close all the way. When they get to the embalmer, sometimes he’ll sew the lids down, or glue them maybe. Whatever seems necessary for the viewing. Occasionally I’ll warn the parents, if I think it will upset them. Why, has it been bothering you, or is it just something you noticed?”

Relieved, I almost told her what I’d been thinking, what I’d been imagining, but I didn’t. “I just noticed,” I said.

So for a while I refocused myself on just taking the pictures, trying to relax the couples (or in some cases, single moms, and in one very complicated case, a single dad, who seemed angry about the whole thing, and frowned during the picture, but still insisted that the picture with his son was something he
had
to have. Liz was obviously nervous about that one, and hung around outside the room while I hurried the session.) My composition got better; the pictures improved.

Sometimes there would be something different about a baby: a certain slant to the shoulders, a small hand frozen in a gesture, an ambiguous expressiveness in the face that tugged at my imagination, but I withheld any response. I knew that if I brought any of these details to Liz’s attention she would give me some simple, calm, rational answer, and I would feel that I was only making myself suspect in her eyes.

Yet I felt almost guilty not to be paying more notice to these small details, as if I were ignoring the appeals of some damaged or frightened child. And what did I know of these things? I’d never been a parent, never hoped to be a parent. I knew nothing, really, of children. I had learned a little about grieving parents: how they held their dead babies, how they looked at the camera, how they held themselves.

And I could see clearly, now, the way the eyelids sometimes loosened a bit, sliding up to expose crescent-shaped slivers of greyish eyeball. I’d seen this look in people who were napping—there was nothing unusual about it. But I still didn’t like seeing this in the babies. For in the babies it didn’t look like napping at all—it looked like additional evidence of their premature deaths.

I had become more relaxed in my volunteer work. I didn’t expect any surprises and no surprises occurred. And yet still I would occasionally take those special pictures out of their folders and examine them. And it did not escape my notice that the babies in the pictures, the ones who appeared to be staring at me, had eyes which remained wide open, with an aspect of deliberate, and unmistakable intention.

This vocation of bereavement photography is hardly a new one. From the earliest days of photography you will find pictures of dead people staring at the camera, sometimes with the surgeon’s or embalmer’s stitches all too visible around the scalp or chest. The adults are in their best clothing, sometimes slouched in a chair, sometimes propped up in bed, a Bible underneath one hand. Sometimes the women are holding flowers.

Many, of course, appear to be sleeping, caught by the sneaky photographer as they nap the afternoon away. Others look terrified: eyes wide and impossibly white, the enlarged dots of their pupils fixing you in a mean, unforgiving gaze.

These gazes are artificial, of course: the eyes painted on to the closed, dead lids. They look, I think, like stills from some badly animated cartoon.

In those days portraiture was quite a bit more formal, and sittings a special occasion. Few families owned cameras of their own, and you might have only two or three photographs taken of yourself over the course of a lifetime. Sometimes a grieving relative’s only chance for a photographic record of a beloved’s life was after the beloved was dead.

This was particularly true in the case of children. Infant mortality in the days of our great-grandparents was so high that without the photographic proof people might not ever know you’d ever been a parent. You dressed them up as angels and paid the man good money to take their everlasting portraits, money you doubtless could not spare. You put those portraits up on the mantel or in an honoured place on the parlour wall, and you showed them to friends and neighbours, even salesmen come to call. And you alternately preened and choked with grief when they commented “how precious,” “how handsome,” and “how terribly, terribly sad.”

The issue returned with the Wilson child.

Did I mention before that most of the children I photographed were stillborns? Of course that would make sense as there would be no opportunities for school pictures or family portraits or any of the other usual domestic photo opportunities. The need for my services was greater.

But occasionally an older child of one or two years would be signed up for the service, accompanied by parents who were always a bit ashamed for not having engaged in that normal, parental obsession of incessant snapshots and home movies.

I have to say I was glad this particular age group didn’t come up too often. It was awful enough to take pictures of parents devastated by the loss of a dream—a child who might have been anything, whose likes and dislikes, the sound of the voice, were completely unknown. Worse was the child who had developed a personality, however roughly formed, who liked toy trucks and hated green beans, who smelled of a dozen different things, whose eyes had focus.

The Wilsons were older than the usual couples I saw. She was in her early forties; he had to be on the far side of fifty. They had a small chicken farm twenty miles outside the city. Mrs. Wilson smelled of flour and of makeup carelessly and too thickly applied. In fact I think make-up was a rare accessory for her. She had pupils like little dark peas, washed up in cup of milk. There was something wrong with her hip; she shuffled and bobbed across the room to the metal chair I’d set up for her. The nice chair was being cleaned, and the appointment had been hastily arranged. I felt bad about that. I knew nothing about her, but I would have liked to have photographed her in the finest hotel in the city.

This reaction was all silliness on my part, of course. She wouldn’t have cared—she was barely aware of her surroundings. Her eyes were focused on another piece of furniture in the room: a gurney bearing a small swaddled bundle, an elderly nurse stationed nearby as if to prevent its theft or escape.

Mr. Wilson also came to me in layers. Floating above it all was the stink of chickens, of years of too much labour with too little reward. Under that was a face like sheared-off slabs of rock, and eyes scorched from too little crying, no matter what. Unlike Mrs. Wilson, there appeared to be nothing wrong with his body, but he shuffled across the floor just the same, a rising tide of anger impeding forward progress. He stopped dutifully by the rigid metal chair, gripping the back with narrow, grease-stained fingers, a little too tightly because he thought no one would notice. He watched as his wife made her way painfully over to the gurney and stood there patting and stroking—not the sunken little bundle, but the sheets surrounding it.

He didn’t move another step. He knew his place.

The nurse asked if they’d like to “get situated,” and then she’d bring them their son. I couldn’t imagine what she meant—it sounded as if they were moving into a new place, or starting a new job. They appeared to understand her better, however. Mrs. Wilson dropped into the chair and held on to her knees. Mr. Wilson straightened up as if to verify the height listed on his driver’s licence.

The nurse carried the package over, whispering comforting things into its open top. She unwrapped the child and fussed with him in mock-complaint, trying to position him in his mother’s lap so that the large dent in the side of his head wouldn’t show. She almost managed it by laying the dent against his mother’s chest and twisting his pelvis a little. She pretended not to notice the mother’s profound shudder.

Then the nurse quickly backed away from the house of cards she’d just constructed, holding her breath as if even that might trigger collapse. She retreated to the back of the room, with a gesture toward the family as if presenting some magic trick or religious tableau.

The couple stared straight ahead, slightly above me at the dark wall behind. I didn’t bother telling them to look at or reposition the child. They were done with me and what I represented.

All that was left for me to do was to gaze at the child and snap the shutter.

Even slumped inwards like that, he was actually a pretty sturdy kid. Broad-faced with chubby arms and legs. The head a little large, and I wondered briefly if there had been a spreading due to impact and I shook slightly, a bit disgusted with myself. This couple’s beautiful little boy.

But the head wasn’t quite right, and the composition was made worse by the couple’s hunched forward, intense stares. I moved the camera and tripod a little to the left, while gazing through the viewfinder, ready to stop moving when things looked right.

The little boy opened his eyes, the pupils following me.

I looked up from the viewfinder. The eyes remained closed.

Back with my eye to the lens and the boy’s eyes were following me again, as I moved further left, than back right again. It was probably just the position of his head and the slump of the shoulders, but he looked angry. He looked furious.

Finally I stopped. The eyes closed. But as I started to press the button they opened again. Bore down on me. Impatient, waiting.

I took shot after shot that afternoon. Most of them were unusable. What was he so angry about? It was as if he didn’t want his picture taken with these people and he was blaming me for it.

After that day the children opened their eyes for me now and then, although certainly not during the majority of these sessions. I don’t believe I’d still be doing this work today if it had happened with every child. Most of the time my volunteer work consisted of calming the parents without actually counselling them—I don’t have the temperament or training for it. Positioning them, feeling out what they would be comfortable with, and finally taking the shot. That’s what it’s all about really, taking the shot.

The children who opened their eyes to me hampered that work, since obviously I couldn’t send those poor couples home with that kind of photograph. Increasingly they seemed angry with me, and increasingly I was irritated with them for the obstacle they had become.

“Okay . . . uh, could you move her to the left just a bit? There, that’s good. That’s perfect.”

And she is. This child, this Amy, my flesh, my blood, my niece. Tom grips Janice’s shoulders a little too firmly. I can see the small wince of discomfort playing with the corners of my sister’s mouth. I look at Tom, he looks back at me, relaxes his hands. He looks so pale—I think if I don’t take this family portrait soon he might faint. The twin boys stand to each side of him, beautiful and sullen, yet they pull in closer to his body for his support and theirs.

Janice looks up at me, her little brother, not sure what she should do. I offer her a smile; she takes it, attempts to make it her own, and almost succeeds.

Then I look through the lens. I look at Amy, and she’s otherworldly, beautiful as her mother. And then she opens her eyes, giving me that stare I’ve seen a hundred times before, but it’s different this time, because this is Amy, this is one of my own. I see the anger coming slowly into her eyes, but I smile at her anyway. I make a kiss with my mouth, and I hope she understands it is just for her. And I take the shot, this one for me, and she closes her eyes again, and I take the other shot for them.

“The flash that covered the city in morning mist was much like an instant dream.”

—Kyoku Kaneyama

He was not very old, as gods go. He could still remember that brief instant of his creation, and would remember it for all time. But without the need for understanding.

The winds like silver and black hair for him, fire like speech, uncontrolled, the power giving him wings, filling the sky with flame as he rose into the air. Turning the ground below into fire and light, discolouring concrete to a reddish tint. Granite surfaces peeled like onion skin. A pedestrian incinerated, his shadow a bas relief on a stone wall. Wide cracks in buildings, upturned faces gone white, metallic . . .

. . . like his own face, he somehow knew, and the word they were thinking, the name they were giving him . . . the “flashboom.”
Pikadon. The new god.

September 14, 1965

Tom woke up in his hotel room, feverish, shaking. Again he had had the dream of burning up in the holocaust, only to rise phoenix-like and spread the destruction outward, back to his home in America. In the dream he tried to stop himself, but was completely out of control. He was surprised at the depth of his anger toward his country. He was beginning to understand how profoundly his father had been affected by the war, the division in loyalties. And, uncomfortably, he was seeing in himself signs of his father’s obsessions.

Tom had come to Japan to do a story on the “New Religions,” the numerous sects which had sprung up since the defeat. He knew a major reason he had been selected was his Japanese-American ancestry. There had been another, more experienced, Religion reporter on his paper. This bothered him, but he thought the trip to Japan might help him understand some things. It was a religious quest, really. A search for context, for meaning.

Even though his family had been in the States almost a hundred years, he felt some ambivalence about America’s role in the war. He dreamed about Hiroshima regularly. More than once he had screamed himself awake, feeling his skin burning from his body. The most disturbing aspect of those dreams, however, was that he was also the pilot of the plane carrying the bomb.

In the dream he prayed before dropping the bomb. The bomb was an offering, a gift to his god. A sacrifice. A return home. He wasn’t sure, the dream kept changing.

During the last months of the war Tom, just a boy, had seen a dramatic deterioration in his father’s mental condition. He could not understand how his father could change so quickly. It seemed magical, evil. He sometimes imagined his father had been kidnapped and that the FBI had put this impostor in his place to spy on them.

It was a crazy time. There were rumours of hostile warships cruising off the California coast.

His father had been a religious man. But toward the end he was cursing the “white” god, and wouldn’t allow his children to go to white churches. He imagined he was under surveillance. Tom remembered his father’s shock and outrage when Japanese products and art objects were burned or buried by angry neighbours.

His father clipped pieces out of the newspaper, hateful things, and read them to the family at dinner. “This one says we should be deported! This one that we are liars, barbarians, not to be trusted!” Later Tom heard a violent argument between his parents, and discovered by eavesdropping that his father was taping these articles above his bed.

A Jap’s a Jap . . . no way to determine their loyalty. You can’t change him by giving him a piece of paper.

—Lt. General John L. DeWitt, 1943

California was zoned, the Japanese-Americans barred completely from Category A zones: San Francisco’s waterfront, the area around the LA municipal airport, dams, power plants, pumping stations, military posts.

Earl Warren, California’s Attorney General, said that the fact that there had been no sabotage on the Pacific Coast was “a sign that the blow is well organized and that it is held back until it can be struck with maximum effect.” He contended that the fact that Issei and Nisei had not committed sabotage was a sign of their disloyalty.

—Dec. 7, 1941 Pearl Harbor. Executive Order 9066

Germans and Italians were considered separately. It was believed their loyalties could be better judged.

They are cowardly . . . they are different from Americans in every conceivable way, and no Japanese . . . should have the right to claim American citizenry.

—Sen. Tom Stuart, Tennessee

The rumours of sabotage setting flaming arrows in sugarcane fields to direct the Japanese planes, blocking traffic to delay rescue efforts, arson committed by the Japanese during the attack on Pearl Harbor proved to be totally untrue. FCC investigations discovered no illicit radio signals guiding Japanese submarines off the California coast. But their white California neighbours apparently did not hear of these refutations.

An old Japanese man, a survivor, had promised to lead Tom to the strangest religious group of all, a sect which practiced its rites in secret, so afraid were they of public reaction. The old man claimed he had actually seen this new deity, “a young wind with flaming hair.”

“You are here . . . seeking this god,” the old Japanese man had said to Tom that afternoon, with such certainty it disturbed him.

“Yes,” Tom had said distractedly. Then unaccountably had added, “I guess I need a new god.”

On September 14, 1965, Nagasawa Shino stood in front of her bedroom mirror, brushing her hair. She planned to visit her cousin Takashi Fujii. He had been a patient in the A-Bomb Hospital, Sendamachi, Hiroshima City, for three months suffering from leukemia. The early morning sun flashed through the blinds, filling her mirror with a white light.
Kyokujitsu shoten
, a gorgeous ascent of the morning sun.

She pulled long black hair away from her forehead, revealing a narrow, bright red, keloid scar. Her hair slipped loose of the brush, fell to her shoulders. Then one by one the strands eased from her scalp and fell like dark streamers to the floor. White patches were spreading on her bald pate. Tiny spots of red, green, and yellow bled like an exotic makeup into the skin of her face. Raised, puffy skin.

She reached frantically for a glass of water on the edge of the basin and it broke under her hand. Her hand rose slowly in front of her face, bleeding from the base of the thumb. It kept bleeding, the blood soon covering her hand, her forearm, creeping up the white silk sleeve of her robe. She knew the bleeding would not stop until her body had been completely emptied.

The spots on her face blended into a brilliant rainbow that flowed down her neck, across her breasts, staining the length of her body.

She remained silent, stared into the mirror growing muddy with her colours, searched out the young, unfocused features of her face hidden within the mirror. Thirty-four, but everyone always said she looked twenty: they often wondered aloud if the bomb had done that to her, kept her young.

Always so many silly rumours, tales of magic. She had always kept the scar hidden under her hair.

Too much light. Too much to be said. The mirror burned, looking rich and jeweled, much like Japan’s imperial mirror, the mirror the sun goddess Amaterasu had seen when she was lured out of the cave. Shino even looked like Amaterasu, under the swirling colours, the light of the
flashboom
, the Atomic bomb. A goddess; she smiled despite herself. Shamefully. She imagined that thousands of people had just disappeared from the streets of the city.

The immense cellar stank of fish and stale grain. Tom leaned back against an old crate in the back of the chamber, breathing in the smell as deeply as he could, thinking of it as the atmosphere breathed by his ancestors, wondering if any of them might have known this cellar. It seemed so familiar, some space from a remembered past, perhaps from before even his father’s birth.

He could see now that there had been no reason to hide. The hundred or so Japanese crowded into the room were intent on the service before them, or lost in trance. Many were dressed in his own western style garb. An older man stood before them, head bowed, apparently praying. There was an altar behind him: a metal bowl on a table surrounded by flowers, and above that a stylized painting of a mushroom cloud.

Tom stared at the painting, mesmerized by the vibrant colours, the boldness and energy of the brush strokes. He could imagine ground zero, the leveled field that had once been city, the souls suddenly liberated in the flaming wind.

The bomb had been the climax of a series of humiliations visited upon his father, the memories of which would eventually unhinge him, leaving him saddened and diminished until his death in 1960. They’d taken away his small hardware business. The country he’d loved took him away from the house he’d spent much of his life building, and threw him and his family into a concentration camp in Colorado. Then they’d given him a new name. Nisei.

His god had forsaken him, and sealed this dishonour with a hell on earth.

His father could not believe the bomb; the first reports left him shaking in angry disbelief. Then as the truth became clear the old man fell into a depression from which he would never recover. He could not believe what his own country had done, what God had allowed, what evil power they had created and unleashed upon the world.

As an adolescent Tom had at first been confused and frightened by the changes in his father. Then frustrated, later angry. His father had been weak and silent when he had most needed him. He had let the American government defeat him as devastatingly as the Japanese homeland had been defeated. Tom was ashamed of his father and all the others who had let themselves be humiliated. He made a decision then that he would always be American, American in every way. They had the power. They had the bomb.

The old man was speaking to the congregation. “Pikadon brought a change all over the world; life will never be the same. One can gain power over the everyday problems of life by emulating the power of the great god Pikadon!”

The message was clear and simple. Tom could understand it even with his rough skills in the language. The theme, like that of most of the newer religions, was one of practicality. “Man built the bomb and brought a powerful new deity into being. This only confirms the great power latent in every man. If you meditate on the image of Pikadon, visualize the god within yourself, then you may utilize this power within your everyday life!”

Tom left the gathering secretly during the
zadankai
, a get-together after the ceremony for discussing specific problems and firsthand encounters with Pikadon. The old man who had told him about the group was speaking when Tom left. “The light, so brilliant. . . .”

Tom knew that soon he would have to visit the hospital.

Takashi Fujii tossed restlessly in his bed in the Atomic Bomb Hospital. The flash of light had moved east to west, as he remembered it, a curtain of pure white fire. It was August 6, 1945. He had been thirty-six, a journeyman welder at the time. His eyes had been giving him trouble, his lungs were congested, so he took the day off from his repair work at the Fukoku Seimei Building and stayed in bed. After the flash there was a burning heat, then a violent rush of air that flattened his wooden home and buried him under planks, clothing, and heavy roof tile. He could not understand; the “all clear” sirens had sounded but minutes ago. At the time his thoughts had returned to his biggest job: work on the domed Industrial Promotion Hall. Welder and rod had worked out of his padded arms like a cripple’s hooks; but these were no handicaps. They spewed fire. And in the gathering darkness his fingers, arms, entire body became fire, welding metal and burning the superfluous to ash. Unseen people applauded; his children were proud. In his vision he could see his young cousin Nagasawa Shino approaching his bedside. She was fourteen, beautiful; he was very attracted to her. A bouquet of goosefoot and morning glories rose from her hand and floated down over the bedspread. Only a few flowers, but they covered the entire bed.

This is a race war . . . The white man’s civilization has come into conflict with Japanese . . . Damn them! Let us get rid of them now!

—Rep. John Rankin of Mississippi

Religious men, all of them, Tom remembered.

Tom’s family was given a week to pay bills, sell or store belongings, say goodbye, close up the house, get rid of the car, and assemble at a nearby centre with other frightened, confused Japanese-Americans. He could still recall the intense anger he felt. An old man died while they were waiting. Someone said he had a weak heart, but young Tom knew better.

At first they lived in a converted horse stall at the racetrack. Whitewashed, manure speckled walls. Spider webs and horsehair carelessly painted over. April 28 to Oct. 13.

Folded spring cots, boiled potatoes, canned Vienna sausage and two slices of bread. A bag of ticking to be stuffed with straw for a mattress. Hot. The grounds a mud pit in the rain.

Then they were forced to move again. Colorado, they were told. Some place out in the plains. Young Tom dreamed of tornadoes lifting him and his family up, casting them away. He dreamed that the Japanese-Americans had committed some terrible, secret sin, and that a great white god was punishing them. The Japanese nation had better watch out, he had thought, else this god would send tornadoes against them too.

“No Japs wanted here,” the signs had said as they evacuated east.

The old man followed Tom out of the meeting hall. Tom watched as he gestured excitedly with both hands, his grey eyes feverish, rheumy. He motioned toward the alley and the dark, unmarked door in the shadows.

“Everything changed . . . so quickly!” the man said. “I had been sleeping, and in the dream, or after waking from the dream, I cannot be sure, I felt such a
power
, such a brilliant light consuming all the world! I’d been dreaming of defeat, defeat I was sure must happen, when this wonderful thing happened! You may think I’m crazy,
addled
, to call such a happening wonderful. But all had to be burned away, all had to be changed, before this new thing could come to be. Flashing eyes, bronze skin I could
see
him! I’ve worshipped him since, always!”