You Know an Atomic Bomb Makes No Noise?

9

We

Are

All

“You know an atomic bomb makes no noise?”

So began the conversation that made Rhona squirm, especially now that the shaken quakehomeless camped tense and testy amid basketball three-point lines were daily reality.But not fearfully.Simply from not knowing where this obsession welled.

Her eyes panned the poster enlarged from a halfcenturyold photograph of Hiroshima after it was obliterated by an American atomic bomb one sultry August morning forty-nine years ago—an event as remote to her as the ichthyosaur.She’d gazed at that poster for two years, wondering what on earth provoked its display.

It showed diverging estuaries around an island, forlorn abandoned bridges, blownout buildings like eyeless skulls amid a somber wasteland of burned rubble spreading to a distant ridge of misty, gentle hills.This was no romantic Saint Francis jostled by God, where a paltry 2,000 checked out, Caruso jolted from Carmen inked self-portraits and groused, “Give me Vesuvius,” Jack London rushed from Sonoma to immortalize, and welldressed crowds appraised “the damndest finest ruins” born of spectacular inferno.

No, not this desolate, barren scape born of the dementia of man:no sign of life, anywhere.She found it easy to believe that in that inferno-swept hell, two hundred thousand people died by whatever did that.A million billion.Whatever.

“So many of them were outside,” he continued in lunatic calm. “They shut off the air raid sirens because they saw only one plane.B29s with their conventional firebombs came in fleets.This was just one little plane.They thought it was a weatherspotter, maybe a recon.Middle school girls were clearing fire lanes.It was eight o’clock in the morning, hot and sticky.Nearly everyone,” he repeated, “was outdoors.

“You know what blow-’em-to-hell target the bombardiers of humanitarian democracy fixed their crosshairs on?” he hollered—

When the bomb fissioned five football fields above the bridge by downtown ShimaHospital, it spat twelve thousand degrees in a searing silent flash.Human silhouettes etched on concrete like photographic negatives.DawnCity blasted in wood conflagration.

“The ones, miles from the hypocenter, who survived, the Japanese call ‘hibakusha,’ literally, ‘children of the Abomb,’“ he said. “The imperial Pearl-Harbor bushwhackers and their spawn treated them like the shit all victims inherit sooner or later, no better than we did testdriving our wonderful new weapon in the ashes of a war already well over.

“All the luminaries who cheered our fission audition would easily have been certified as sane by any psychological test we deploy,” he said. “Most especially one Mr. James V. Forrestal.”

Buttondown banker, conservative Rooseveltappointee, first Secretary of Defense after Our Little Boy ravaged Nip schoolgirls by the Avegadro’s Number.Solid war hero, Mr. Business, acclaimed by the warring War Room services as military messiah, heir to a zenith of a power no mortal had previously known.

“Who, late one balmy spring night in 1949, threw himself out the thirteenth floor of BethesdaNavalHospital, leaving a book open to a Sophocles verse about the loss of mind leaving no reason to live.”

Rhona allowed that what she didn’t know about James Forrestal would fill BethesdaNavalHospital to the hundred and thirteenth floor.Could it be that photo?she wondered, gazing at the wall.Makes me wanna hurl.

“History being one detail that rarely afflicts history texts,” he murmured, “why should we be surprised at the polite silence that this first-magnitude star of America’s VDay giants, our philosopher-king at the Button, knotted a bathrobe around his neck and took the big swan dive to hell?A little scary, is it?No one knew why!You want to know why?”

Another aftershock rumbled eastward lightly whispering:this, girl, and many things you have no choice about.

“Four years to the day before, he’d been told in NC-17 explicitness by a talking nukehead just what even a witsy atom bomb would do to a city of wood.That the detonation would beget three thousand degrees centigrade in a three-mile radius of downtown, incinerate schools and occupants by the legion, skeletonize a jillion mophaired kids, flash trees into writhing matchsticks, etc. etc.He signed on anyway.Mr. Team Player was our man James V. Forrestal.

“Afterward he saw the spoils ‘eyes only,’‘way more than the rest of us unclassifieds ever appreciated.Year after year it ate at him.He broke.Friends said, musta been the pressure of being America’s first Secretary of Defense.Lame.That guy was Navy Secretary after Pearl Harbor—he could take some shit.It’s right up there on the wall:The ghost of Hiroshima pushed him out.America’s premier hibakusha.Truman called him ‘the last casualty of the War.’“

Rhona shook her head, never sure when he was indulging hyperrave: “Fuck what they say.What do you know?”

“Daughter...” he began, then paused. “When I see those stories in the Metro section about some drunk who mowed down a kid on a little tricycle, or raped a child in some deranged demon torment, I hoped I’d have the basic decency to step off the face of this earth by my own booze-stinking paw if I ever did anything like that.

“So it is,” he said slowly, “part of the illusion of my alleged adulthood that I’d like to think—however pathetically, however laughably, I’d like to think—that at least one guy who helped blow two hundred thousand people to carbon dust for no reason would come to the same conclusion.Gazing at that same picture we see every day.I blew it kids!You’ll never read about my ass in Weekly Reader or Our American Heritage!

“One guy that realized in advance what my entire growing-up was gonna learn,” he said finally: “From now on, we are all hibakusha.”

Rhona squirmed.She was no longer a child, listening incomprehendingly to what adults made her attend to.Until now, she’d never much thought about the Bomb.Just one more thing that can happen.Still, she forced herself to sit up, prop her elbows on his knees, make him—as he’d done many times for her—finish where it would go.

“Don’t you see?Like all hurlers of violence, we got the wrong people!We hated Tojo’s Pearl-Harbor and Bataan and Nanking butchers, and we were right!And who the fuck did we fry?A mega-thousand folk on their way to work, middle-school children slaving in a hot morning under orders to clear fire lanes!

“There were forty thousand little girls with faces destroyed from being outside during the bombing.We brought a couple dozen stateside for plastic surgery for their keloids.One died, bad p.r.Into this sensitive delicacy thumps TV Americana, ready to hurl black-and-white realisms at its viewers from a 1955 screen that looked like a front-loading washer.They put the Hiroshima minister who accompanied the bombed-faced little girls on ‘This Is Your Life,’ the crusty old game show.Then surprise surprise who should be the star walk-on but the copilot of the Enola Gay, the plane—“

Rhona abruptly shuddered hard, grabbed her own shoulders.

“—He was shitfaced drunk.Wouldn’t you be?Swinging from Jim Beam all day.So maybe he was another one who had the rattle in the head.All he could do on national camera was babble the line from his notebook as he saw the city go up: ‘My God, what have we done?’ Can you imagine, girl?

“Of course you can.” He took her dark face in his hands. “This is the obliteration of the soul.It is about having no home to remember with the happy abandon of childhood, no ancestral ground to wander in awe of the past, no root, no center, no serenity that memory is truth or the most intimate experiences have any meaning.You, of all people, understand that.”

He recomposed in long silence. “In first grade we had this bomb drill.The civil defense sirens wailed the five short ones, we got prodded out in the hall, forced to kneel and put our heads under our crossed arms like that was gonna do shit (“and kiss your ass goodbye!” a truly educational poster nowhere near any school taught).We had a huge air force base a few miles down the interstate, so we knew we were gonna get it from the shoe-pounder Nikita K. big time.Right there, playing tetherball and sevenup and foursquare, we knew that in the backs of our little skulls.

“Those of us with the sack to think about it at all wished we hadn’t:the adults running the world were jake fucking nuts and would sizzle us all in a second while the big kahunas amused themselves re-playing Bobby Thompson Belts The Big One and Larson No-No’s Flatbush in the leadlined bunkers Weekly Reader so reassuringly told us about.While we disintegrated in a broiling silent flash under our blond formica desks and cute inkwells.Call it a confirmed sighting of the truth about the grownups of my species, but no matter.We knew who was important and who wasn’t—loud and clear.They... don’t...care.

“And they wonder why we scarfed all the mindblasting drugs we could get our razor-slashed hands on, why we screwed like aphrodisiacized lemmings, rioted and shrieked ‘fuck you’ at Guv’nor Ron and V.P. Hubie and the ilk as soon as we got big enough to split!Sure, Nineties pop shrinks and media pricks are firing baseline shots at the Sixties!—but it’s really so simple.Do you have any idea how that little social studies lesson destroyed our image of the people raising us?Why we weren’t about to take any president’s or five-star general’s word for ‘Nam or anything else?

“I admit it:in the declining years where you find me, I tried to understand more about my generation and what it grew up with and where it went so badly wrong.And in some strange way, it goes back to that morning in 1945, when dealing with the end of the species became part of being a little kid.We got it loud and clear!Mr. President, so much bigger than anyone else in our circle-jerk Boy Scout handbooks, would save his own ass shattering ours to dust!For damn near no reason!!”

He waved at the portrait of atomic doom on the wall.

“Hibakushaintraining!The ones of us who deny that are the mindless NouveauReagan New-Democrat Gestapo of the Nineties.So what if our power-plant bombings consigned two hundred thousand Iraqi children to death by cholera and dysentery while sparing the one Saddam we were really pissed at!The ones who face echelon-lunacy are the confused mass of fuckups who can’t even tie our shoes without the “Stomp ‘Em With Jesus, Asshole” motivideo!Just pick, little boy!

“So I read, I gazed at the pictures, at a much-too-later time I decided to go back to school in a worthless superstition in order to understand one thing:how come our most powerful officials can perpetrate five-alarm mega-insanities we would never tolerate in a single thug?Why do adults hate children so much that we can’t curtail our most elemental savageries to let you grow up without terror and rape and strontium-90 and barrel-wearing ripoffs and downtown tundras?

“And why,” he murmured, “every once in a while, when someone at the nub of power jumps out his high-echelon window, is it because he finally figured out the answer?”

But, Rhona thought, I do know what it was to grow up like that.It’s in my head.Body.I don’t need a picture on the wall.

Sure:there was the photo of blowntoshit city.Parables of persecuted Okie prodigy.Elegies of Sixties Lost.Supplications to androgynic salvation.But Dad... that stuff ended ‘way long ago!Half of it’s intellectual crap to begin with.Hating adults ain’t gonna solve what isn’t.None of this adds up to your permafury, your isolation from people as boundless as your patience with my growingup, this endless craving to... study, to tear apart, rip into, to know—

“I don’t get it!” Rhona yelled. “You’ve had twenty years. ‘way more than I been alive, to get over this shit, but it’s right here like it’s still 1968 or ‘45 or ‘06 or any awful thing that ever was!It never ends for you!You’re a psychology type—why can’t you learn to live with your pissedattheworld bullshit?”

“Because I don’t want to live with it,” he mimicked bitterly, hugging himself left and right in a weird gesture Rhona caught herself imitating. “When I met you, it started an eerie sensation about why I am so alone.I envied you for your simple, perfect explanation.I didn’t have one.Sooner or later I was going to be seen through!So I had the Fifties Schoolboy Blues, Bomb Anxiety, Sixties Rebel-With-a-Cause alienation, no worse than millions of my growing-up.”

“And now I... know,” he ground out. “Mine... everything I loved or worshipped about my confused people and the long long adolescence we shared... is an evil lie.I really believed in Aquarius and I-have-a-dream.I was a kid.I was so fucking wrong.Your mom, her beloved child-raping men, were only one kind of the evil my generation denies.I thought we were gonna save the world, and I was wrong—worse than wrong, a reeking joke!I hate my generation.It was so much of me I hate myself.

“We had such beautiful hope, and we killed it with a sickening selfish grasping.I hate myself because I’m trapped in a catastrophe I can’t even stand to watch, buried under newstime lies.And I still can’t get at where we tumbled faster and faster down the wrong path.

“Oh, we really were the flower kids.We fucked, we acided, maybe there was some foggy we’d-love-to-change-the-world sincerity at first, back when our hippie hides were in the crosshairs.But in the end we proved there was no revolution.We whined endlessly about ‘finding ourselves,’ an’ by god an’ by guru we did:we grooved to the sucker beat of loot ‘em and lie!Yes, any adult generation throughout history could’ve flexed its muscle and lavished itself abandoning its kids, but my generation is the first that actually did it!What in the fuck is wrong with us?!

“We have now arrived at you.So we deploy our techno-media, psuedo-psychobabble, and baby-boom-moralist presidents to beat up on our children, make you think the rot is in you.Because we couldn’t face the truth about how the Sixties Aquarius Agers segued into the Eighties Plastic Rip-Off Band.

“See, Rhona, I always thought I was immune from that evil.Until I met you.You had real problems.You put my life up to a mirror, and I realized I’m just one of them.My hatreds are just as poisonous, my isolation just as self-centered—and I wanted all of it!I had no commitment, I don’t even understand what the word means.”

“So I get pissed at you every three months, I’m no match for the way you rip the shit out of yourself,” murmured Rhona.Yeah, your problem might be halfway fixable if you’d just stick to hating yourself, she thought, shaking her head at his ad in L.A. Weekly’s “Alleged Adults Seeking Something Else” column: “Lover wanted more or less, F, anti-racial age-indifferent post-boom senolescent no picture no portfolio please.Must be gone a lot.”

“All I wanted is for the world to leave me alone!” he ranted. “At least I did children an immense favor by never having any—”

“You did just fine with this little girl.”

“One personal thing I ever did right.Rhona, I’ll be damned if I know how you blew my hell-with-people superiority to nothing in a few short hours that Friday you found me in the park.”

“I didn’t do anything,” she said sincerely. “I was gonna die, fucked to death this way or that, if I didn’t get away from home and off the street, ‘n quick.”

“Murder by Fuck.Perfect.Sums up the whole age.Girl, you’re exactly what was missing from me—a way out of this.One time, I made up this shit about ‘basic male-female affection’ because hey, what’s more hopeful to us boomer-gloomers than a pretty theory that can’t be proved?But you were that hope, for real.You are right out of our Doors acid-raving:wild child, not your mother’s or your father’s child.Your generation’s already paid the price to do the Sixties right, and that’s why we converted hippies hate our kids.We’re gonna use our time on the wire to whip the hell out of you because we can’t face ourselves.

“Oh yeah, Rhona, you’re gonna remember us.An’ I hope I’m long gone when Generation Z builds its bomb.”

Now he was gazing at the purple envelope Xenia sent, that Rhona brought from school and was now looking over his shoulder to see unveiled.He slashed it open.

It was a card to commemorate his April and happyfortytwoandahalf years.The card depicted Chardin’s (16991779) epic hound yearning up at cornucopic buffet;inside, Xenia’s (1976 ) colorful artpen scrawls, drawings of arching flowers and palmetto sprays, a winking cat, waterfall surf breaking on a beach of naked bathers.