Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

Joan’s father spoke to the prisoner for an hour or more, attempting to urge forth helpful information. Helpful to them all, he suggested. The man called him an inu and mocked his accent. Glancing at the clock, Joan’s father could see that he would miss the last ferry to Eta Jima. The MPs shared their headquarters with the Japanese police, so when the MP sergeant grew tired of waiting, he simply walked the prisoner down the corridor to his good Nip buddies and had Joan’s father explain the situation to them. The cops, who had been playing cards and drinking whiskey, were delighted with the diversion presented by the prisoner. They all headed for the motor pool, which was empty at that hour. Near the edge of the enclosure, by the chain-link fence, there was a concrete stanchion that had two eyebolts driven into it on opposite sides. The purpose of these became clear when one of the police, a plainclothesman, fed the chains manacling the prisoner’s hands through the bolts, securing him to the stanchion. He then took a gasoline can and, carefully pouring out its contents, circled the post. Done, the plainclothesman lit a Lucky Strike and assumed a posture that you might call thoughtful or reflective, standing back from the bound man as if evaluating at a distance, taking in the whole of a thing. Joan’s father noticed that the plainclothesman’s suit was soaked through with sweat between the shoulder blades. The cop took his hat off and then reseated it on his head, gripping the crown of the fedora where it was crimped and tilting his head back into the gesture so that the lank strands of hair falling across his forehead were swept under the crown. He then reached for his handkerchief, but what unfurled when he removed it from his breast pocket was a clean white sock. There was a still moment as everyone measured the extent of the plainclothesman’s discomfiture over the exposure of this improvisation. Rather artful, really. Everything everywhere was running short, why not a sock? The cop balled it up and put it in his trousers pocket. Until then Joan’s father had thought that the tying up, the circle of splashed gasoline were merely features of a type of performance. But the sock incident had put the plainclothesman on edge, tensed him up, and the balletic series of slow relaxed gestures came to an end, and after pulling the Lucky from his mouth and taking a last look at it, he tossed it without warning at the prisoner’s feet, where the immediate flames erupted so high that for an instant it was all Joan’s father could do to see the terrified shape within them.

Eta Jima itself was a beautiful place. Joan became Japanese there, something her parents felt pretty ambivalent about. She got friendly with a girl whose family had lived in Hiroshima. Akiko had a good story. She had been a baby when she was sent away to NijiMura a day or two before the bombing. Then the bombing had taken place, and that basically was the end of the story. The story did have clarifying footnotes, like: This cousin was never seen again, that sibling died of radiation sickness two months later, this uncle had no face, really. Akiko talked about it to Joan in a lively voice, passing on with great authoritativeness the secondhand information that had been instilled in her with the mesmerizing force of ritual. The story’s appeal came from its balancing unities, the simple serendipity of the girl’s having been sent away just before the singular holocaust and the horrorscience fascination of all the human burn and spatter that was its yield. It was the first time that Eta Jima’s proximity to the wrecked city on the other shore became central to Joan’s perception of the world.

The A-bombed city. The place did not seem as if it were quite there. There was the ghost of itself that stood just behind it. Tourists moved in search of the ghost. They strolled through the neat grid of streets taking pictures and more pictures of the blandly pleasant city that was there in the place of nothing. Beneath it all, seared like a pitiless brand, the trilobites of human indecency. The city had wholeheartedly embraced the industry of its own devastation — as if the 350 years of its history preceding the bombing had been consequential only insofar as they had led up to the incandescent moment — while rigorously reconstructing itself in a manner that exhibited an aloofness from the experience. Municipally, the legacy of total war became a mandate to celebrate and aspire to peace. It was all strangely flaccid, curiously devoid of rage, though this Joan was too young to notice. She picnicked in a Peace Park. After the city had been burned to a crisp, the official ambition of Hiroshima, according to an English-language pamphlet, was “to keep advocating to the world people that ‘Peace’ is more than the absence of war, and it signifies a state in which the world people live together without prejudice in a safe and amicable environment, where each person can live a dignified and worthy human life every where in the world, seeking to resolve the various problems confronting humanity … by cooperation and collaboration on a global scale aiming at the realization of everlasting world peace and prosperity of humankind.”

That, plus world-known Mazda passenger cars were produced there and distributed the world over.

Joan forgot her English. This was pretty hard to believe. The language was all over the place. But her parents had dropped the use of it at home, mostly for her benefit; Joan had her hands full just trying to be Japanese. Some schoolgirls told her that she had a wave in her hair; she must be part white. There was a certain impertinence to her that her teachers claimed to discern, chalking it up to some residual Americanness. But after a while she stopped being exotic, and to others she became just another kid with a funny way of talking who kept to herself. She got good at art. A light touch she had, delicate.

The language left her gradually, until what remained was her knowledge of the letters of the alphabet, the sort of simple expertise with which children flatter themselves. She was a Japanese girl. A Japanese girl. A Japanese girl.

She was basically happy. She had a few friends. She kept to herself. She had a cat named, in English, Bunny. A light touch that pleased her art teacher in school. Unusually precocious ability with watercolors. Basically happy.

The usual mixture of excitement and dismay when they moved. Her friends gave her a sendoff. She spent time recording the green peaks of Eta Jima in a sketchbook. They were going to a place called Fresno, which was supposed to be very flat, and she wanted to get these mountains down, these mountains that just came right up and joined you for breakfast. Trunks and suitcases were taken out of storage. Her parents made gifts of household goods to friends and neighbors, as mementos. Nothing too big or too practical, lest they be insulted. They just happened to be some of Joan’s favorite things. Joan came home one day to find that Bunny was gone. It was a big rush. Their home filled with boxes. The rooms echoed strangely. Her parents began speaking to each other in English again. They tried it out on Joan, but who knew what they were saying? Then the family was gone. It had been such a slow process, cumulative, but ultimately they reached the threshold, crossed it, and no longer were there. The difference was one inch, one door shut and locked for the last time, but it was all the difference that was needed. Joan’s equanimity crumbled. She sat on the bed her last night in Japan and cried. They were in a hotel near the airport, no place at all. Early the next morning they would begin their long journey to San Francisco. She cried.

It was, finally, the no-place of where they’d come to rest at the end of that final day, the random placement of all the familiar shapes that she could see out the window, the streetlights and white lines and the grassy rises, leading nowhere, packed behind retaining walls, the feeling that no one really belonged there or could possibly miss it once they had gone, that this, at the end, was what she was left with to say goodbye to: That’s what got to her, and she cried. These were the shapes people invented so they would never forget loneliness, so that it could greet you anywhere, vast and numbing and repetitive, one anonymous landmark succeeding another, each standing alone. Her father stood over her. “You stop that. I don’t need this. Just stop it right now.”