Val Hall, page 9
He did not talk about the thing that had given him his war wounds. While Myoko, the girl he had once saved and his acknowledged sidekick, had been around, he might have spoken about it with her – but it had been years since she had been a resident at Val Hall with him. When she had left, a little unexpectedly, to marry and build a life outside the Hall, Hikaru did not resent this – in face, he had encouraged it. But Myoko’s departure had seen Hikaru retreat into a citadel of silence that even Eddie was at a loss to know how to breach. Eddie, who sooner or later found a way to get through to everybody. Eddie, who considered his true vocation to be not the basic nursing and caring duties that an orderly carried out but rather the offer of himself and anything else he could bring, buy, gather or scrounge to help.
Hikaru rebuffed Eddie’s initial overtures – to the point of finally skating the edge of his icy polite distance on one occasion, when it all came to a head, and literally snapping at the orderly, giving him a sharp dressing down in trenchant Japanese. That encounter had actually drawn attention and turned heads – but Eddie had not taken the hint.
“”I’m sorry,” Eddie said, with the frustrating serenity of a pond which had just taken the full impact of a thrown stone but which had already forgotten the missile while it settled back into a memory of fading rings on the surface of the water. “It’s a bad time. Maybe later.”
He was more zen than any Japanese could have been. The calmness, the absolute tranquility of his response, began to wear Hikaru down, like water carving stone. Rage did not help; unyielding blank silent rejection did not help; pretending not to have a common language did not help. Even while trying with every fiber of his being to reject Eddie, Hikaru could not shake the constant awareness of Eddie’s presence – not intruding, not precisely, but never too far away. Eddie knew how to wait.
He knew he had won on the day he glided to Hikaru’s side – on one of those endless summer days when the man seemed most on edge, in early August – with a cup of delicate green tea, offered in silence. For the longest moment it looked like Hikaru would rebuff him again, reject him once more, either with fury or with a steady and determined refusal to even acknowledge Eddie’s existence. But this time, it was different.
The clock showed a quarter past eight, on the morning of the sixth day of August. And what Eddie saw on Hikaru’s face as he turned was almost enough to make him drop the teacup and watch its shattered remains spill the tea all over his shoes. For once, Hikaru’s face was unveiled – raw with his memories, his dark eyes full of bitter tears.
“I should have died,” he said, his English suddenly perfect. “Seventy three years ago. In this very moment. I should have died in the moment when my soul was ripped from me. Instead... I lived... to see the future that was born on that day.”
Eddie mutely held the teacup out to him, his own eyes prickling with unshed tears. Hikaru reached out with his good hand and took it, and it was a victory. Something had broken. Eddie continued to say nothing, merely offering a wordless strength and support, and Hikaru took a sip of his tea, gulping it down, trying to mask a sob he could not quite hold back.
“She will come today,” he said. “Myoko. She always comes. She has a duty, she says, and she has always taken that seriously. But she... she...” Hikaru lifted the hand that held the cup, tried to awkwardly rub at his eye with his knuckle without spilling the tea. “Her face... as long as she is here... I cannot forget...”
“Tell me what I need to do,” Eddie said quietly. “Anything.”
“They tell me it is still there,” Hikaru said quietly. “If you know where to look. Even after everything was rebuilt and everything changed and nothing remained... that is where my shadow still remains. Burned into the wall. But instead of sickening, like so many others did, I became... something else, instead. Hiroshima took away my shadow, and gave me wings. Where others lay down and died... I... was the one who could suddenly fly. I thought that I had somehow... become invincible... that it had happened for a reason. I thought that maybe I was the response, the human form of ‘never again’, and then, three days later, I found out I was wrong.”
HIROSHIMA, 6 AUGUST 1945
Hikaru Hanada noticed the plane, high up in the sky, just after eight o’clock on the morning of the 6th of August. He peered at it, his hand shielding his eyes and his round glasses from glare. He knew enough to recognize it as foreign – American – no Japanese planes flew that high. It was not the first time he had seen foreign planes in the sky. Not so very long ago some of them had delivered leaflets warning that the next plane could bring firebombs to a number of named Japanese cities – he could not remember now, maybe eleven on a leaflet he had seen – but Hiroshima had not been singled out for that threat. If this plane was coming to drop the bombs... it was going somewhere else. Not here. Not now. Too high. Too far away. He felt his heart lurch a little – it was going somewhere, after all, that plane. It had a destination. But a small human part of him could not help a shiver of gratitude that he was not the target. Couldn’t be.
He had all but looked away, ignoring it, when something made him do a double take, sharpen his gaze.
Afterwards, he would never be sure if some supernatural transcendent moment had made his eyes more than human, if he had actually seen the bomb leave the belly of the aircraft and start down. All he had to go on was a moment of instinct so pure that it might just as well have come from the Gods. He did not stop to think at all. He simply turned, there in the street, and wrapped his arms around the nearest person walking beside him , a young woman who responded with a startled squawk of outrage and a frantic squirm to get away just as the final seconds ticked by... and then the world exploded in a bright, blinding light, followed by a dull boom of sound and a shockwave that lifted both him and the girl he was still protecting completely off their feet. It flung them against a building, which would forever after carry the imprint of Hikaru’s blasted shadow, before their bodies slammed into the wall and they slid down into a heap of tangled limbs as rubble rained down around them. Hikaru fought for breath in suddenly dust-choked air, and lifted his head in time to see the mushroom cloud rise into the heavens above him.
A whimper from somewhere near his midriff almost startled him; he had all but forgotten about the girl. He unfolded himself from around her and met her wide, terrified eyes.
“Who are you?” she whispered. “Where is my sister?”
“Sister?’ He had not noticed anyone else. He had thrown himself between the flash and the thunder and one person, one other person, he had not even noticed anyone else. But now this girl, the girl he was even now releasing from the circle of his arms, was looking frantically around at the ruined street and the flames that licked at the sudden darkness that had fallen around them as smoke and ashes began to descend. Helping them both struggle to their feet, Hikaru himself cast a frantic look around. There was nobody who might have been the girl’s sister. But he saw a crumpled body against a wall a few steps away; he saw other human beings, scarecrows of soot and blood and burned flesh and shredded clothes keening as they tried to struggle to their feet, as some of them began to register pain.
The girl had asked who he was. There was no point in giving her a name. Just an identity.
“I am a doctor,” he said. “Almost a doctor. I have almost graduated. Are you all right? Excuse me, please...”
He let her go, and she staggered a little as he did so, whimpering. But he was already on one knee beside a woman sprawled a few steps away in the street, debris covering her legs. And then, with a shudder, he left her because her wide staring eyes and open mouth told their own story, and skidded over to where he thought he could hear a child whimpering underneath another pile of rubble. He dug with his bare hands, tossing unidentifiable pieces aside, unaware at first that he had a helping pair of hands, that the girl he had protected had come to his side and had quietly started on the other side of the debris pile. Hikaru noticed, with a distantly appraising look, that the hands were small, gentle, girlish, with neatly trimmed nails – he watched them start clean and then get streaked with soot and ashes, and then, finally, blood.
They extracted the child, who was bleeding from a gash on his scalp, bleeding like only head wounds bleed; heedless of that, Hikaru hoisted him in his arms and struggled to his feet. There was a hospital nearby – a hospital where they had facilities. Where they could help. He registered that the girl had fallen into step beside him, clutching the hand of another bloodied child, who in turn held the hand of a smaller child, barely a toddler.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“To get help,” Hikaru said. “We need help...”
They set off in a direction – Hikaru was far from certain it was the right one; people with glassy eyes and empty faces moved past them in the other direction, in eerie silence, as though equally sure that things were better that way, any other way, in any other place than the one in which they had been when the fire found them.
Hikaru found himself, at the head of his little cavalcade, on a bridge across the river, without having the first idea of how he had got there or where he was supposed to go from there. He hesitated, the bloodied child in his arms a dead weight. He saw a man in uniform – a soldier – come slowly out of the dust and darkness on the far side and start crossing in their direction.
“Wait,” Hikaru said. “The hospital – that way?”
“No hospital,” the soldier said. “Many dead.”
“Soldiers?” the girl asked, her voice very faint. “Soldiers are dead?”
“Many,” the soldier said nodding.
The girl’s breath caught on a sudden sob. Hikaru turned his head a fraction. “You have family...?”
“My father is a soldier,” she said. “My mother is dead. There was just my sister, and me, and there was my father. Now there is only me.”
“What is your name?”
“Myoko Shizuma,” she said, after a small hesitation.
“My name is Hikaru Hanada,” he said, with a small bow. The gesture dislodged the arm of the boy he was carrying, and it fell, lolling lifeless, dangling straight down from the shoulder. Hikaru frowned at the child in his arms, the small body very still, eyes closed, head thrown back, mouth slightly open. He was a doctor. He knew what he was seeing. He was a man. He did not want to know.
“Where are we going?” Myoko asked again, standing with her head bowed, her feet together, one hand closed around the hand of the child she was still leading who was stumbling in her wake. They appeared to have lost the second tiny hanger-on along the way without anyone noticing.
“I don’t know,” Hikaru said, standing on the miracle of the solid bridge, staring at the smoke and the darkness and the fires. He glanced down at the child in his arms. It was clear that there was nothing else he could do for him. He stooped and laid the boy, very gently, against the balustrade of the bridge, sitting up, his head resting on the pillars and his legs stretched out in front of him. The boy left bloody smears on Hikaru’s arms.
He heard Myoko trying to hold back sobs, tried to think of something comforting to say, but the inside of his mind was just as empty and blasted and burning as the city around him. There were no words of comfort there. He simply started walking again, and she followed, silently, crying as quietly as she could, tears leaving streaks in the ash and soot smearing her face.
Almost a mile from where they had started from, Hikaru stopped for a moment when something that couldn’t possibly be right tried to impinge on his consciousness, staring at a barely-singed spreading old gingko tree which stood a little way from a demolished building; he had to fight an impulse to simply stand and laugh at that improbability. But there was no time to laugh. There was no time to do anything, no time to think.
About fifteen minutes after the explosion, something heavy and wet began to fall from the sky, leaving dark smears on their clothing, drops big and substantial enough to hurt when they hit – a rain that was a curse, a black rain, a water of death that came in the wake of fire. Hikaru and Myoko and the child sheltered under an overhang of a ruined building, trying not to think about whether they were sharing their sanctuary with corpses or, worse, ghosts, sitting very still, watching as the black rain slap into the ground, oozing like blood.
“I need to find a hospital,” Hikaru said, after a silence that felt as though it had lasted for years.
“Are you hurt?” Myoko said, rousing, sounding scared.
“I? No. No... I am fine. But I am a doctor. I can help. I have to help. And you. I need to find your...”
“They are dead. They are all dead.” Her voice choked on the word. “Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me alone!”
“I won’t leave you,” he said.
They found a hospital, or something that passed for one, after the rain stopped, after they walked for what seemed like hours. At first, all they could do was fall down on a pallet which they were shown, and somehow – incredibly – pass out, into a heavy dreamless sleep which gave their bodies some respite but their minds no rest. When he rose from his pallet, after, Hikaru reported to the overworked, exhausted, pitifully few medical personnel as an assistant; they did not care when he said that he had not – quite – graduated yet, he was close enough to a doctor in that massive catastrophe of blood and tears and suffering for him to be grabbed and put to work. He helped cut off clothing burned onto people’s bodies, leaving a tattooed imprint of the pattern of the fabric seared into their skin. He bandaged. He set bones. He tried to soothe terror and loss, to bring down fevers. He worked until he was exhausted because there was nothing else to do. And then, only two days after he had arrived there, he straightened his aching back in one sharp movement that made him wince, staring into thin air as though he was hearing a warning nobody else could hear.
“They are coming,” he said, to nobody in particular. “They are coming again...”
He laid down the patient he had been tending and staggered towards the door, towards outside, somewhere from where he could look up at the sky. Myoko saw him go, and followed, as she always did – she could hardly bear to let him out of her sight. She was still at the hospital and volunteering as a nurse, working as tirelessly as Hikaru did, but with no training and with no reserves of strength – she was alone and adrift in a broken world, an orphan, a solitary human, and Hikaru was all that was still familiar in this nightmare world, all that was left that she could call family. They had tried asking about her father. Everything they heard pointed to the worst. And they both knew that it was only a miracle that Myoko was here...and that he, Hikaru, had been that miracle Her sister was ash, somewhere out there, on the street where Hikaru had left his shadow etched onto the wall. Where he went, Myoko followed, softly, unobtrusively, insistently, seared to him by the fire through which they had come. Now she padded out after him and stood beside him, hesitant, apprehensive, watching him watch the sky.
“They are coming again,” he said, this time to her, desperately, glancing down into her eyes. “I can’t let it happen. I can’t let it happen again.”
“What can you possibly do?”
“Stop it. I can try to stop it.”
“But how do you know where they are coming? How are you going to get there? How can you possibly get there in time...?”
“I know. I can feel them. I can follow them. As for getting there...” He reached out and squeezed her arm in reassurance. “I will be back,” he said. “I will be back for you.”
“Don’t leave me alone...” Myoko whispered, as she watched him drop into a crouch and then launch into that sky which he had been raking with his eyes. But he did not hear her. He was already gone.
Some people had been dealt death by the fire and the fallout. Hikaru Hanada had been given the power of flight, and a strong, uncanny link to the thing that had changed him. There are those who say that a man’s shadow is the visible manifestation of his soul. Hikaru’s shadow, ripped from him, had been a small price to pay.
NAGASAKI, 9 AUGUST 1945
There was something wrong – Hikaru’s instincts aimed him at a target, but by the time he got to Kokura he realized that circumstances had dictated a change. Smoke from a nearby firebombing of only a few days before, and industrial smoke, and cloud cover – all combined to make for a thick concealing blanket over Kokura, and the American aircraft that carried a bomb which was an equally lethal cousin to the one which had flattened Hiroshima could not get a clear sight line. By the time Hikaru realized this, and allowed his connection to the mission to tug him towards the secondary target, it was late morning. The bomb was already above Nagasaki. And it fell just as Hikaru came there, he was close enough to be hurled out of the sky by the blast as he saw his second mushroom cloud blossom over a Japanese city but too late to do anything to prevent the bomb from making its fatal appointment with Nagasaki.
