Hiroshima in the Morning Read Online Free PDF Page A

FINALLY, TRUTHFULLY, maybe if I hadn’t called home. Not in this mood—though if I can’t talk to Brian when I’m frustrated, when can I call him? And who else can I call? There is no one—then maybe I wouldn’t be hearing his voice, the voice of a man I spent my entire adult life with, and finding myself unable to speak. In his voice, I can feel the embrace of the life I had, a sweetness, a fat that fills the rooms that he walks in, that would wrap itself around me if I walked in them too. I want to tell him that there are good moments here, that I have learned to drink cold coffee from a can out of a vending machine and that tomorrow the sky will be blue. I want to share that with him, and also to show myself that, although I may be inexperienced and not as prepared as I’d hoped, I am strong enough to meet these challenges, and those moments should not feel so thin. I have lived alone for a week: it is done, complete, no longer potential. Why does it feel so paltry in the grand scheme of all he has at home?
    I am trying to make my tears as soundless as possible,
though of course he can hear them. And I know he is also crying, and even though I have been away from home for eight impossible, ridiculous days, he asks, in a voice that cracks, “What are we doing?”
    That’s when I realize that we are doing something. Not watching or waiting or marking time to the end, but taking action. My tears are not simply a bit of homesickness, they are for loss. We are in the process of change. I don’t know why we’re doing it, or what it is, and I dread it as fiercely as I want it.
    But the fact is: it is already done.

JUNE 29, 2001
    ON MY BOOKSHELF, there is a photograph of a fat, naked infant. In his mouth, his mother’s nipple. On his arm: a long black burn. His belly is white and creamy. His head is bald and scarred; it is the surface of the moon, pulling on his mother. Dark, pocked, thirsty.
    Turn the page and see a girl in a white blouse lying on tatami. Stained tatami, on her back. Her hair is intact, and one unharmed hand that waves in the air, afraid to land. She is alive, for the moment, but her face has been burned away. Her nose and lips flattened into feathery, white ash. The oval between her collar and her hair: white, grey, black,
charcoal, dust. This girl lives on the bookshelf; she is alive in my mind. Her faceless image resides in me, her head without eyes. And the irony does not escape me that she was left, before the final darkness, with the flash of the atomic bomb—a vision, some say, of great beauty—and I am left with hers. I am looking for her in the Peace Museum, life-sized as she should surely be; I’m like a child digging at a wound to relish the pain, to extend it, feel it travel down my arm, into my elbow, until it rings in my ears. I want to face her. I want her to save me.
    She is not here.

PEACE MUSEUM
    FOLLOW THE MAP TO THE PEACE MUSEUM. Cross the bridge, past the heat shimmers, stay on the concrete. Where the Otagawa splits and becomes two rivers, there is a peace park. It’s the slim finger of land that lies almost directly under the bomb’s hypocenter, the spot that Hiroshima now calls “ground zero.” It was once a town called Nakajima, a thriving neighborhood that served as a hub for shipping and open air markets; now, it’s a subtle oasis of more than seventy monuments, statutes, and broken stones, with names like “the merciful consoling Kannon for the mobilized A-bomb victim students.” Look for the Peace Museum at
the base of the park: it’s the grey block building on the grey stone plaza; it sits perpendicular to the grey slab walkway extending to, and through, the elegant, arching stone cenotaph that contains a register with the names of all the confirmed victims of the A-bomb—seventy-seven volumes in size. If you stand in the center of the plaza, on the other side of the Peace Museum, you can line up the cenotaph so that it frames the A-bomb Dome. The dome is one