Hiroshima in the Morning

Prologue

9 p r o l o g u e 11| Leaving| I can tell you the story but it won’t be true. It won’t be the facts as they happened exactly, each day, each footstep, each breath. Time elides, events shift; sometimes we shift them on purpose and forget that we did. Memory is just how we choose to remember. We choose. it begins in our house, on the top floors of a nineteenth century brownstone. I’m sitting at our long dining room table across from my husband Brian, my two, brightlypajamaed sons asleep—finally—after slipping downstairs for water, and then just one more kiss between the banisters. The year is 2001, the place New York City, and in the quiet of the last, warming days of May, I am making a list. I am a list maker, a super-organizer who measures her success in life by how many of the items she’s checked off. This is who I’ve always been, and it’s never occurred to me 12 to question it. It occurs to me only that I have a goodbye party to throw for myself, which will involve a twentyfive -pound pork butt, Hawaiian rock salt, and ten yards of purple plumeria-patterned fabric that I’ve ordered on the internet but has yet to arrive. If I think about plates, about feeding fifty of my dearest friends who will come to wish me well, I will not have to think of this trip of mine—my first trip away, my first trip alone, my six-month long “trip” to the other side of the world. Brian watches me busy myself. And then the question: “Why are you going to Japan?” I lift my eyes—the answer so obvious that it hardly seems possible his question is real. It is, in fact, impossible to consider his question, to glimpse just the broad shoulders of his doubt before it escapes into the shadows, to hear the bass notes of sadness in his voice. Impossible because these things would trap me. Even looking around my home would hold me here. I will come to believe, months from now, that life is a narrative. That who we are, what roles we choose—that these are deliberate characters we create to explain what we did and find a way to face tomorrow. That memory is not history. That we rewrite ourselves with every heartbeat. At this moment, though, my life is still a given. It does not— despite the contradiction of reality—change. My life is what surrounds me; I subsist on it so entirely that I can’t begin to see it. The air I breathe is the air that still shimmers in the spot, just above me, where my enormous belly and I once stood on a scaffold, in a bikini top and a pair of baggy sweat- 13 pants, spackling the ceiling three weeks before my oldest son was born. I still draw sustenance from the echoes over the kitchen floor where my children love to dance during dinner. Echoes that shrink, cool, fade but do not, even over lifetimes, completely disappear. I am more than anchored to my world; I am tied tight like Gulliver by the tangle of past poses and years—mine, Brian’s, my children’s—toe here, breast, belly button, wedding ring. In the room, in the trophies from every trip Brian and I have taken since we were teenagers, there are so many flags that say we were there, and there, and there. There are decades of a life that’s far more tangible than I am. And it’s not just the there, the good life, that I am dangerously, paradoxically blind to—it’s the lack of my own identity, the utter, unqualified we. Instead, I take inventory: I have stocked the freezer with food, put all the “to do” papers together for my sons’ upcoming school year; I have rearranged our babysitter’s schedule so Brian will be able to get to work on time and won’t have to race home in the evening. He was there when I did these things. When I found the ad for the fellowship, he was the one who urged me to apply. I had rejected the idea: it was too unplanned...