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I lingered for a split-second. I stared pointlessly at one of her wrists. Veins still stood out against white flesh that seemed touched with milky green, like a pebble underwater.
A howl came from above. A black and white van, red lights flashing, descended from the off-ramp to the west and stopped in front of our building. Two young uniformed men vaulted out and sprinted to the woman. After they checked her pulse and found nothing, they ignored her.
They marched to either side of me. One was tall and lean, the other short and squat. "Did she fall?" asked the short one. "Did she jump?" asked the tall one. I pieced together enough vocabulary to say she was my neighbor, and that I didn't know anything about her. If I knew the language better, I could've said more, but it wouldn't have made any difference.
The young men scribbled my answers on pads enclosed in luxurious-looking covers whose surfaces were embossed in silver with the ornate logo of whatever city department they belonged to.
A group of bystanders gathered across the street. The giant boomerang of the freeway hung over their heads. Had it collapsed, it would've pulverized them. A woman with startled eyes held a small girl close to her side.
The men finished questioning me. They snapped their notepads shut. They pulled a gurney from the van. They concealed the woman with a white sheet, dropped her on the gurney, and carted her away.
###
Hanako and I had moved into the strange apartment a month before all this happened. The college was closed for summer break, so we didn't have to teach. We decided to use the time to move into our new home. After settling in, Hanako planned to visit her parents in Tokyo. When she came back, we were going to take a day trip to Hiroshima before the semester started.
The apartment had problems, but the real estate agent convinced us to take it by touting the low price. Hanako and I planned to get married the next year. Until then, we wanted to live together in a convenient, cheap place until we could afford a better one closer to the college.
The apartment was convenient. From our first-floor apartment, it was only eight minutes' walk to Nishinomiya-kitaguchi station, five if we cut through the parking lot of Hankyu Stadium, and all the stores we needed were within walking distance. The key money, the cash-gift that renters have to pay new landlords in Japan, was only 100,000 yen, about a fifth the usual price.
The benefits came with problems. The biggest one was the freeway. When we stepped out our front door, it loomed over our head, like the rim of a massive metal and plastic serving dish. It was so large that even when we stepped onto the small concrete rectangle behind our apartment, which we jokingly called a "patio," we could still see the cold steel arc hanging above the building, ready to drop.
A vast, curving structure of orange plastic sheets latticed with gray strips was erected on either side. It muffled the thunder of passing cars. Through the plastic, we could see shadows and lights of vehicles trundling by thirty feet above.
The second problem was that we needed to clean up after the last tenant. The person, apparently someone with a mental disability, had left the place in a calamitous condition. Dollops of decayed food were everywhere, even in the bathroom. We spent our first week throwing things away. Stacks of tarnished silverware and cracked cups, piles of old clothes, moldering futons, towels and sheets. We found mysterious objects too: a rusty tool that looked like a double corkscrew, a pile of old newspapers whose pages were folded into bizarre shapes, a bunch of old antennas. Hanako and I kept piling trash into boxes. When a box was full, I carried it to the pick-up site in front of the apartment.
Tucked away in the crawl-space above the futon-closet, concealed in a paper bag, I found a tormented doll. The dress it wore had been green, but was splotched with grease and marred with burns, as if someone had poked it with a cigarette. I tossed the doll on the top of the box I'd just filled. I threw on my shoes and carried the box outside to the trash site.
When I came back, I went into the kitchen. "How's it coming?"
Hanako was on her knees, her hair tied in a ponytail, scrubbing the refrigerator door so hard it sounded like sandpaper on wood. She turned around and held up a grimy rag. She'd uncovered a bright flower pattern underneath the grease, cheerful yellows and greens. "Look," she said. "Color."
"Cool."
"Are you enjoying the trash?"
"Wonderful." I looked at my hands. They were splotched. "I'm starting to appreciate the beauty of it," I continued, "the textures, the scents, the flavors."
Hanako smiled slightly and turned back to the refrigerator. "Leave me
alone," she said.
A tapping was coming from our entranceway. "Someone's here." I left the kitchen and opened the front door.
A lady stood outside. Her face was heavy with wrinkles. She stared up at me with one of the warmest smiles I'd ever seen.
When she spoke, her Japanese sounded strange. She'd blast out a rapid
sentence, pause, and before I could decipher what she said, she'd let loose
another string of syllables. Her eyes were bright in her baggy face, and seemed to move forward when she spoke, while the rest of her remained still. She had a sausage-shaped mark on her left cheek. After a few blasts, I pieced together that she lived in our building and was interested in the doll. Didn't I need it?
"Iie, iranai," I told her, I don't need it. She said thank you twice, bowing deeply each time. "Arigatou, arigatou."
When I returned to the kitchen, Hanako was standing, the rag bunched up in her hand. "Who was that?"
I told her about the lady, and gestured out the window. The woman stood at the trash site, lifting the doll from the box. She held it tenderly by its tiny underarms. She pressed it carefully to her bosom, rubbed its back, and stared up at the freeway. Her lips were moving. Hanako shook her head. She stooped again to the fridge. "Poor old thing."
###
When Hanako returned from Tokyo the next day, she responded to the news of the woman's death with the same words: "poor old thing." What else could she say? She wrapped her arms around me also, her eyes big and worried, and asked if I was okay. "It must have been terrible."
"I'm okay," I said. That night I had a dream of a banquet in a big room where all the waitresses were little girls in grimy, burned-up skirts and all the food was corrupted with a diseased shade of orange.
Two days after I found the body, we'd finished most of the cleaning and were
ready for our vacation. I'd managed to get all but one bag of trash out to the site before the last trash day. I put the lone remaining plastic bag, filled to the brim with worthless odds and ends, on the fake patio in the back. The next trash day was on Monday, the day after we would come back from Hiroshima.
We chose Hiroshima because we wanted to visit the Peace Park. Being a mixed American-Japanese couple, we'd wanted especially to visit there together, although the war and the bomb seemed as distant to our lives as the Crusades. We also wanted to go because with a JR discount ticket from Osaka, Hiroshima was one of the cheapest places to go.
We were lazy about leaving from Osaka that morning. We slept late and made love. After that we stopped at a convenience store to get two individual-sized cartons of fruit juice, some packaged lunches, a bottle of sunscreen and a disposable camera. Then we set out for the first city in history to be destroyed by an atomic bomb.
We arrived in Hiroshima so late we worried the park would be closed. We made it with only an hour to spare. We took a quick bus to the bakuhatsu domo stop, and sprinted to the entrance. Aside from a yellow-brown arc of clouds resting on the horizon, the sky was clear. A beautiful day for a walk.
A simple monument, piled with flowers, marked the beginning, but we barely glanced at it. We walked along a winding sidewalk. Trees dotted the peaceful landscape. Hanako chattered about her friends' new babies. No less than three had been born in one month. She poked me. "When are we going to have one, huh?"
That stupid question again. The same with marriage. She talked about both so casually, as though starting a family were no more serious than buying a pet. "Babies aren't dolls," I answered. She hit me on the shoulder, grinned in my face, and said, "lighten up."
I frowned. "I'm serious, Hanako."
"You," she interrupted, poking me in the chest with an extended finger, "can't have a baby now because you," she poked me again, "have no sense of humor."
I kicked at a rock. "Do you know," I answered, my tone melodramatic, "that scientists have created a tomato that looks exactly like a fish?"
She stopped in her tracks. Her mouth hung open. "Are you serious?"
"Yes."
"Does it taste like a fish too?"
"Not yet."
We continued silently, hand in hand, smiling, through the atomic bomb park.
We arrived at a statue. A small stone girl held a small stone crane in her outstretched hands. Its base was crowded with flowers and colorful strings of origami cranes. A few empty juice cartons huddled on the cement. An empty potato chip bag bobbed drunkenly in the breeze.
I'd seen the cranes before, when I'd gone with a friend to a hospital in
Osaka to visit his sick mother. Hanako read the Japanese on the plaque silently at first. The brightness drained from her face. She translated.
"It's for a little girl who died." The girl, exposed to the bomb's radiation, had developed leukemia. The bomb destroyed her city when she was two years old. She died when she was thirteen. Believing they'd make her well, she spent the years before she died folding paper cranes.
A jet screamed overhead. Yellow-brown splotches were moving through the sky, stretching themselves from the western horizon. From across the street, where some private homes pressed together, sudden animal cries shattered the quiet of the park. In front, jumping around the trash pick-up site, cawing horribly, crows pecked at a trash bag.
An ancient woman, wearing a ratty orange janitor's uniform, meandered past.
Her head was bowed. Every few feet, she stooped to pick up trash and put it in an orange plastic bag. She didn't look at us. Further down the sidewalk, like crushed orange blossoms blowing slowly across the land, other old women in uniform also moved with their bags.
The sun was descending. We skipped the rest of the park so we wouldn't miss
the museum. We paid the tiny admission fee and tiptoed past multi-media displays detailing the time before, during and after the drop of the bomb, the rising and culminating furies of two countries long before we were born. The museum wasn't crowded. A few children scuttled around the legs of adults, who shooed them away.
When we reached the second floor, an announcement sounded over the loudspeaker. The museum would close in ten minutes.
We glanced for a few seconds at a wax sculpture display, backgrounded by fake walls of shattered brick and backlit by a hidden red lightbulb. Dazed human beings, wax flesh dripping from their arms, stood in frozen approach.
In the next room, displays protected by transparent barriers, fragments found in the post-bomb refuse. A broken copper-colored watch halted at the exact moment of the detonation, a charred satchel, twisted and pockmarked kitchen utensils, a fried shoe. A small outfit rested on a platform behind a thick plastic sheet. Half of it was burned away; the rest was wounded by circular holes whose fringes were black. Its story, in Japanese and English, was written on a panel in front. It was the school uniform of a junior high
school student. Her mother kept the uniform after the girl died.
I needed air. The room was too hot. It seemed as if someone were pumping smoke from burning rubber through the vents in the ceiling. I breathed through my teeth. My hands started to sweat. Was there a fire?
I glanced around and was shocked to see other people moving, unafflicted, past the displays. They were pointing, chatting, even smiling, as if the air were clean and the boxes of scavenged misery were displays at an interesting art show.
A tug at my shirt. I turned and Hanako's face, pale and sweating, terror in her eyes, was at my shoulder. She pulled at me hard, toward the door.
We burst out the front doors of the building, and sucked in great lungfuls of air. While it was better outside, it was still suffocating. The oily clouds had thickened. The sky was pregnant with dust and water. Near a cluster of leafless trees near the building, we collapsed on a park bench, panting.
Night closed in. The sun was touching the tops of the trees, casting fiery pieces of itself on the clouds behind it. We sat with each other a long time, our heads pressed together.
A big dark thing followed us onto the train. In our seats, Hanako and I gripped each other's hands. We didn't speak. The car was choked with people. A
dirty rain began to fall as we pulled away from the station. Flecks of mud on the windows floated in midair while a landscape of buildings, vacant lots, and billboards came into view and vanished. In the diminishing light, an old woman huddled under an umbrella, a child sobbing at her side, and was gone.
When we reached our apartment in Nishinomiya, an envelope was tucked in our door. Hanako, frowning, read the page inside. "It's from the city. It says
they can't figure out how that lady died." She squinted. Her eyes were red. "They want us to fill out this form. They ask if we saw anything strange
before she died. Did she have any visitors or anything."
We shook our heads at each other. Other than the time she came over asking about the doll, we'd never spoken to or seen her. I wasn't even sure which
apartment she lived in.
I thought of something. "You know what? I didn't tell them about that
doll. That was pretty strange."
"What doll?"
"You know, the doll we found in the closet. The one she pulled out of the
trash."
"Oh, yeah." Hanaka held her hand to her mouth and yawned. She looked at the closet. "But that wouldn't be important, would it? I mean, she was just a crazy old lady, right? Like a bag lady or something, with no name. How can
I put this? The doll was just, I don't know, a random detail?"
I was exhausted too. I wasn't sure what she meant, and was too tired to figure it out. "Yeah, maybe a random detail. Let's fill out the form in the
morning, okay?"
"Okay." Hanako couldn't stop yawning. "In the morning, let's do it."
We prepared for bed. Hanako came out of the bathroom, a toothbrush in her hand. A beam of cold yellow light from the bathroom made a stripe across her face. "Doug?"
"Yeah?"
"What was her name?"
"Who?"
"That dead lady."
I shook my head. "I don't know. I didn't ask."
Hanako frowned. She turned her back and returned to the bathroom.
A moment after we laid on our futons and turned off the light, Hanako nudged me. "Doug, the trash."
I groaned.
"It has to go out tonight. The garbage men come tomorrow morning."
I rolled over. "I can't. You do it."
"You do it. Please?" She kissed me and scratched my ribs.
I got up, groped in the dark for my shirt. I heard Hanako's voice. "Why don't you turn on the light?"
"I'm okay." I moved along the wall until I reached the end of the room. I found the sliding door and opened it. Warm summer night air. I stepped onto the cement slab. A breeze carried automobile exhaust and the muted engine roar from above. The freeway was so large and high it towered almost directly above me. A dull glow shone from panels along the big curving wall. Although dim, the light still filtered through to the patio in an oblong orange spotlight.
An animal had been at the trash. The bag was opened. Garbage was scattered away from it, like chunks of dirt broken off and flung when a large clod hits the earth. I bent and started collecting the debris. An empty milk carton, a potato chip bag, a fractured picture frame. A few chunks rested in the gloom outside the perimeter. I couldn't see what they were until I moved closer. Remnants of a cardboard box, a bouquet of plastic flowers, a rusty eggbeater, a doll--
My heart was beating fast. There was no doll when I took the trash out here. I picked it up and held it up to the glow from the freeway.
Burns. The ruined green of a tiny dress. Mangled curls of black hair. A sausage-shaped spot on the face that still smiled, despite everything. No doubt about it. It was the same doll the woman saved from the trash.
How did she get there? The lady must have put her outside, next to my trash on the patio, just before she died. I rubbed the doll's back. Despite the heat of the summer night, the fabric felt cold. My fingers came across a bump. I turned her over. A folded bit of paper was taped to the dress. I ripped it off and unfolded it. One word, in childish scrawl:
Arigatou.
I kissed the doll on the forehead, and brought her to my chest. I cradled her for a long time, until she was warm.
In the morning, the men took her away.
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