Radiance (31 page)

“Hold on, miss,” Keiko heard a journalist say, close to her ear. “Tell us what you think of the H-bomb.” She stepped into the revolving door, a triangle of muffled seclusion, and left them behind.

The seventh floor was clean and modern. The blue linoleum created the illusion of stepping across the sky. The walls smelled of bleach. Keiko had to fight off a sense of panic as Dr. Carney greeted her. “Your big day,” he said jovially, handing her to a nurse. She helped Keiko change into a medical gown, then led her to the hospital room and told her to lie on the bed. Instruments sat at a table to her left: a roll of bandage, packet of gauze, sterile
cream, a beaver scalpel, tiny, sharp scissors, as well as a strange metal scoop, like the ones they used at home to scoop rice.

Dr. Carney closed the door behind him

“You can go.” That order puzzled the nurse, but he had to be alone, no observers.

“Now,” he said, when the nurse had left. “How are you feeling?”

“I am fine, Dr. Carney.”

“Up to snuff, eh? Good for you. Still, we must take your temperature.” He took the thermometer from the side table and gave it a shake. “Open up, Keiko.”

As soon as he spoke he saw her spirit desert her body, go into retreat, while she opened her mouth passively, a hole surrounded by the white bandages. She closed her lips around the thermometer.

“Under your tongue,” Dr. Carney said. “Right under,” and he pushed it into the soft cavity beneath her tongue. He saw her flinch, but never mind, it must be done. He counted out the seconds on his watch. After a minute he asked her to open and she let her lips go slack.

“A slight temperature. Nothing to worry about. Now let’s look at your face.”

He said it routinely, as though it were one of a number of small requests. He asked her to turn to one side, exposing the bandaging on her unscarred cheek. It was safer to begin snipping here. With one hand he pressed lightly against her forehead, balancing himself, and then he began to snip. He knew what he was doing—this diminutive, bulky-shouldered doctor, with his fingers smelling of soap. Scissors nipped the layer of tensile bandaging first, three snips and it sprang loose. “Easy now,” he spoke abruptly as she winced.
Easy now.
He placed the scissors under the next layer, an eighth of an inch of gauze, and snipped. The humming and ticking of the clock on the wall was the loudest noise.

He could tell she was frightened. Frightened by the lightening of weight on her face. It had all been coming to this. She closed her eyes, seeing—once again—the march of the dead, the blast of light that sent the mossy stones flying.
Shi no hai,
that was what she had carried all this time, until this very second: twirling, spinning, trying to shake the black seeds from her body. Telling lies, when it was necessary, telling the truth.

Please let it be all right, Daisy prayed, waking early, standing alone in the kitchen, the curtains in her hand, holding her breath.

Tom in the lobby, having agreed to pay for the damage to the camera, prayed too. And so did Joan and Fran and Walter. Even Ed Warburgh was thinking of Keiko. Only Evelyn Lithgow had forgotten, and was smoking a cigarette in the bathroom while taking curlers from her hair.

With tweezers Dr. Carney pulled away tissue-thin strips of gauze. He drew them back one by one. He was reminded of the slow disinterring of a mummy. Though her eyes were to the ceiling, Keiko moved her hand and fumbled for the edge of the steel bed. She flinched, shaking her head. Something had gone wrong. She could feel it.

“Please,” she said to the doctor. “This is hurting. Can we do it tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow?” He laughed. “After all this wait?”

“I think I might be stronger tomorrow.”

“You don’t know yourself, Keiko. You are strong enough now.”

But what hurt? He was surprised. Was it the air touching her skin through the last layer of bandage? Was it the tip of his scissors?

“It has to be done. Keiko. You know it has to be done.”

For two minutes he snipped, bent over, pulling back the last layer of custard-stained gauze. Keiko tried not to wince. He drew it back inch by inch, away from her undamaged cheek, away from her nose, from the indentation above her lip, which
he knew was called the philtrum; the moist gauze stuck to her cheek but then—with a tug of the hook—away it came, revealing her face.

It was a trick of light that made her scar show like a slick of oil. As Dr. Carney stood back, the better to gaze at her, he saw that her skin was shiny and taut, yes, but except for that tautness, her skin, her cheek, her face were perfect.

He shook his head. Took out a handkerchief, wiped his face, the palms of his hands: grinning, disbelieving—then he reached out and hugged her gently. “Too much,” he whispered. “A wonder to behold.”

A miracle, in other words.

“Keiko,” he said. “You’re beautiful.” She continued to stare at the ceiling, her self submerged beneath the surface of her intact, perfect skin, concentrating on something only she could see.

“Do you have a mirror, Dr. Carney?”

“A mirror, of course—how foolish!” He rushed to the door, called for the nurse. There was bustle and noise, and then he returned with an opened powder compact. Not perfect, he thought, but it would have to do.

“Look.”

He held up the thing. She fixed her gaze on it, saw the skin taut across her gorgeous cheekbone. Saw herself unscarred, no longer wearing the face of a survivor.

Carney reached into the mouth of the medical bag at his feet, never taking his eyes from her face, his fingers finding his Brownie camera. He unsnapped the case, adjusted the lens, held it to his eye, and she watched him, not protesting. Just as he found the focus, she spoke, in her pure, sweet uninflected voice.

“Please,” she said. “I need you to look behind my ear.”

Dr. Carney lowered the camera. She turned to show him what she meant. Behind her left ear, in that secret crease, a new keloid
had bubbled up from the pearly line of the incision—hot purple flesh mushrooming between the stitches.

D
AISY WOKE BEFORE DAWN,
thinking about Keiko, never letting her out of her thoughts. She imagined the drive to the hospital, the reporters, the rush of silence as Keiko stepped through the revolving doors. She didn’t let her thoughts slip, even as she put on the coffee and laid the table for breakfast. When she stepped outside to hang dishcloths, Fran was out already, pinning up diapers.

“Nothing yet,” Daisy said, turning to go back in.

“You’ll tell me when you hear.”

“I promise.”

Inside, Daisy picked up the phone and called Irene at home. No answer. She tried Mount Sinai. Seventh floor. Dr. Carney’s office. Irene answered.

“Daisy—I can’t speak.”

“Why did you pick up the phone then?”

Irene sighed. “What can I do for you?”

“Are the bandages off?”

“Can I ring you back?”

“Irene, please.”

There was a long pause.

“I’m sorry, Irene,” Daisy whispered. “I need to know. I’m worried.”

Daisy could hear Irene rearranging her skirt. Then she said, “I suppose I’m the one who’s going to have to tell you.” Her voice
became cold, no-nonsense. “Everything was just fine,” she said. “The skin graft on her cheek was a good match, the sutures hardly showed.”

“Thank God.”

“That’s not all.”

She described the keloid behind Keiko’s ear, how it had sprouted between the stitches–—hard, bubbled flesh with a mind of its own. Well, it was a most delicate thing, it turned out, to get blood to pump through new skin in an area of keloid growth: you couldn’t force it. And so keloids often did grow back on burn victims—and A-bomb victims must, Carney thought, be particularly prone. Something in the skin itself.

“Seeds,” whispered Daisy.

“I beg your pardon.”

“Shi no hai.
”

Anyway, Irene continued, that was the terror of the thing, the fundamental risk—there was always the danger that the new skin around a keloid simply would not be as powerful as the old, bubbled flesh and would get pushed aside in time. They had known this from the beginning, Irene said, though it was the first time Daisy had ever heard of it.

“We’ll have to cut it away immediately.”

Daisy closed her eyes. She imagined Dr. Carney explaining all this to Keiko. He must have taken refuge behind scientific and medical explanations, words like
contusion
and
malformation.

“When can I see her?”

A pause. Daisy imagined Irene searching for her cigarettes.

“I’ll ring you.”

“Did she ask for me?”

“As far as I know, Keiko never asked for you once. Far from it. As for your seeing her, we’ll have to wait: there are only
three days until
Ask a Doctor
and Keiko is, as you yourself know, very eager to make herself useful.”

“You’re lying to me, Irene.”

Irene hung up.

Daisy stood in the hallway, holding the telephone until it began to buzz, then she replaced it in its cradle.
It grew back,
Keiko had whispered as she woke one night, palm pressed to her bandaged ear. Daisy had pulled the hand away, telling her it was a nightmare.

Daisy imagined her small body covered by a sheet. She saw the girl’s knobbly knees, finely boned feet, stretched out before the doctor. A massive steel-necked lamp would be rolled into place and then, in an instant, the fluorescent glare would illuminate the new bad skin, hidden in its secret crevice. Daisy could feel the fug of fear Keiko gave off as the big light seared her eyes. When Keiko shut them, the light would be so bright it would cut through her eyelids, making things red.

Daisy closed her eyes.

Save yourself,
the woman on the bridge had whispered.

The feeling came to Daisy—and later she could not explain it, not to Walter or to anyone, because it didn’t come from her brain but rushed up through her body, radiating from the ache between her breasts. She could hear the rustle of the shrine papers. Tears burnt her swollen eyes. She was praying to gods whose names she did not know, and at the base of her skull she felt the first of them arriving behind her in the hallway—a gust of old meat on its breath.

She didn’t faint.

She didn’t fall to the ground and jerk like a chicken with its head cut off (something a girl at Sacred Heart once did). She opened her eyes and saw the phone still in its place, beside the china shepherdess in its murky mirrored alcove. Yet the thing
stood behind her, of this she was sure. Freezing water poured down her arms, just below the surface of her skin.

She turned.

Walter stood at the doorway to the bedroom, face groggy, cheeks unshaved. He looked frightened.

“It’s Keiko,” Daisy whispered. She took a step towards him and he took a step back. Her voice, Walter told her later, was not her own. But Daisy didn’t care—she was only thinking that she must rush to Mount Sinai, through the brass door, up the seven flights, to find Keiko where she lay, under the terrible glare of operating-room lights; that if she could unstrap her, lift her, hold her body close—burnt and terrified, full of dark seeds—she might still save her.

I
N HER DREAM,
the city has just been struck or is about to be struck. Either way it is eerily quiet, smoke and ash consuming the sky. Urgency stirs in the pit of Daisy’s stomach: miles separate her from the city, miles of countryside full of animals with yellow eyes. Sometimes she travels with Fran, sometimes with Walter. Once, she sat on the train with an entire delegation of Riverside women. Ella Strickland wore a hat the size of Tokyo, layered like a wedding cake.

Always she is trying to get to Mount Sinai.

To travel from Riverside Meadows to the hospital was a trip of one hour and seventeen minutes. This included the transfer at Penn Station, and took in every stop dotting the length of
western Long Island, a series of names like beads on a rosary—Hicksville, Carle Place, Mineola, New Hyde Park, Jamaica. However, the trip took Walter and Daisy longer than an hour and seventeen minutes, because they had to debate whether it was faster to take the train or drive—it was faster to take the train in rush hour—and they had to dress and search for Daisy’s purse.

Daisy has dreamt this trip so many times that she has trouble distinguishing actuality from fantasy. She can imagine Manhattan ahead, its gaunt towers, the perfect spire of the Chrysler Building bisecting the sky, but she cannot see the city, not for hours and hours. The train takes a minute and a half at each station, then lurches and heaves, picking up speed. She is no longer in her seat; she is in a boxcar, the doors of which have slid open. Children run beside the train, and everything is green: the legs of the children and their feet and the grass. As Daisy watches, rain begins to fall. “Black rain,” an ancient man beside her says. A voice of calm acceptance. The next moment the boxcar doors slam shut and the children are left behind.

Though she had taken the train a thousand times, she never realized that the countryside around the city went on for so long, that there were so many water towers, cement foundries, church spires, rusted cars, graveyards. She glimpsed a basketball court, boys playing beside a pile of wooden ties. They had to wait forever at Jamaica, where the conductors called out for other stations, then at last they gained speed, rushing past a broken billboard for Shredded Wheat, past a shed covered in Virginia creeper, and at last the city was glimpsed, misty and pale, before being obliterated by the boiler-room blackness of the East River. In the tunnel, Walter squeezed Daisy’s hand:
Steady on, girl,
that pressure seemed to say.
It’s going to be all right.

If they had travelled more swiftly, would things have been different? It felt like that afterwards—hence the dreams, not just of
the city, unreachable and green with ash, but of failing to find her purse, searching for change, looking for her gloves or a hand mirror or a hat with a pink bird nesting in the rim.

At Penn Station they raced through the station and up the steps, feet ringing on the diamond patterns, hands on the cold rail. Outside, Macy’s towered above them, flying its flags. Walter waved down a cab. “Mount Sinai,” he said curtly and the cab took them past Broadway, crowded with shoppers, then up Madison, past the Whitney, past the black canopy of the Carlyle, past a string of boys in yarmulkes and forest-green knee socks. The street hulked up and down as they crested the hill, making Daisy nauseated.