The Heat of the Sun

it; if guardsmen’s boots pounded across
the marble hall below and up the stairs, we would remain oblivious – oblivious too, as fists, then shoulders, crashed against the locked doors like battering rams. There was no world outside,
only this classical drama where a blind man, crazed and raving, staggered against a flagpole and made it topple; thudded to his knees, sank to his haunches, hunched his shoulders, then raised his
torso, clutched the dagger in both hands, positioned it below his diaphragm, and thrust it abruptly upwards.
    No , I thought to say, but I never wanted him to stop. The machinery had worked its way to the end; the ticktock motion begun in Nagasaki so many years before had at last achieved its
rest.
    When a guardsman splintered through the doors, he cuffed a light switch, disclosing in the dazzle of the chandelier two corpses, one collapsed across the other. Half draped over the
senator’s shoulders was the fallen Stars and Stripes.

 
Curtain

 
    And that, I thought, was the end of my book. I pulled the last page from the typewriter with relief. Of all the books I had written, this had been the
hardest. After the war I felt as if a curtain had come down, dividing me decisively from the world I used to know. There was so much I wanted to forget. I ignored articles about Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. I appeared indifferent to campaigns against nuclear weapons, angering my students at the liberal arts college in Monterey where I taught for many years. Only a sense of duty compelled me
to tell my story. Now I need never look at it again. My neat stack of pages, bound in twine, would lodge in a drawer of my filing cabinet, undisturbed until their author was dead. I was finished. I
could forget.
    Soon I received a letter that changed my mind. PEN, the writers’ organization, was sending an American delegation to Japan to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the atomic bombings.
As arguably (I liked the ‘arguably’) America’s most distinguished living biographer, would I... ? Would I! My first reaction was a rage I could neither control nor explain. I
crumpled the letter and flung it across my study. But I knew it was a summons I would not be able to resist. Rage gave way and I retrieved the ball of paper, smoothing it flat with a sorrowful
reverence, as if it were a love letter from long ago. Would I...? Of course, though I told myself I was a fool. I was old. I expected to die soon. Perhaps I would die in Japan, overwhelmed by
memories.
    I need neither have feared nor hoped. The world of skyscrapers and neon, salarymen and pachinko parlours that confronted our delegation when we landed had nothing to do with me. Modern Japan has
about it the quality of a stage set. The modernity so strenuously imitated seems likely at any moment to vanish, revealing the eternal country beneath. Nothing seems real.
    In the days that followed, we travelled in a plush coach, a sort of movie star’s Greyhound, from Tokyo to Kyoto, Kyoto to Hiroshima, Hiroshima to Nagasaki. Even when our travels provided
us with visions more picturesque, I saw them unfold like a film, outside me: the toppling tiered rice fields, the temples and torii, the painted geishas, the Shinto shrines, the statues of the
Buddha. This was Japan, and Japan was pictures.
    Piously, my fellow delegates clicked their cameras. I suppose they found me remote. Arwin Janis Quirk, the prolific feminist novelist, made no attempt to interest me in her denunciations of
patriarchy. Earl Rogers, a boozy literary lion some twenty years my junior, who had published a ‘searing’ war novel in 1948 and not much since, lost all respect for me when he learned I
had spent the war as what he called a ‘pen-pusher’; I resisted saying I had never respected him. Schneider Kipfer, the Beat poet, had few interests other than smoking marijuana and
reading the I Ching. I had hopes of friendship with Hooper McGee, the Southern short-story writer, but while she warmed to me when she thought I was Southern, she cooled when I told her I had grown
up in France. Chip Striker, the black activist playwright, whose political pronouncements had made him even more notorious than his taboo-defying plays, had too much to do in speechifying on race
prejudice, war, and American imperialism to pay much attention to me. On the coach stereo, our Japanese driver played American country music. Chip Striker complained, to little effect, about
‘redneck shit’.