Emily Mitchell - Viral - Stories

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.

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?

• • •

Karl thinks to himself: Now that we have you and your family locked up in a camp in the middle of nowhere, will you swear allegiance to the state that put them there? How about serving in our armed forces while your parents, wives and children are in jail for doing absolutely nothing? How does that strike you? From inside his chest, where the anger and disappointment have taken up permanent residence, come answers clear and certain. Will he serve? Will he swear allegiance? No and no. The government can take its privilege and go to hell.

Karl arrived in the camp five months before, in September 1942. All Japanese had been ordered to leave the western coastal states. He accompanied his parents, leaving his wife and daughter, exempt from banishment, behind in San Francisco. He thought he might not see them until the war was over.

But Leigh followed him a few weeks later. During their one phone call after the evacuation, as it was called, Karl tried to tell her not to come. She and May should stay in the city. Their friends in the Party would give her money until she found a job. In wartime San Francisco there were jobs even for women, even for Reds.

Instead of countering what he said, Leigh simply asked: “Which books do you want me to bring?”

When he saw her step off the bus, holding May on her hip, he was seized with such emotion that for some minutes he found it difficult to speak.

They sleep in Building No. 147, a cabin with unfinished walls and a tar-papered roof. They share its one room with Karl’s parents and another family, the Shinedas. They’ve hung a sheet across the middle of the room for privacy. Mrs. Shineda is a nosy gossip, so this barrier seems insufficient but it is better than nothing.

They have two beds, and Karl built a table and chairs from scrap lumber begged from the camp authorities. At night, the wind comes through the gaps in the walls. It wakes up May, who sleeps between them. They have tried to fill the cracks with newspaper but it seems as if no matter how many crevices they stop, the wind always finds a new way in.

The evening after the questionnaires are handed out, Karl tells Leigh that he’s going to answer no to the last two questions. His parents are still at the mess hall eating dinner. May is playing outside with other children who sleep nearby.

Leigh listens to him quietly.

“What do you think will happen if you answer no ?” she asks when he’s finished speaking.

“I don’t know,” he says. “All I know is that I can’t just pledge allegiance and say I’ll go into the army. Not after this.”