Free Hiroshima in the Morning by Rahna Reiko Rizzuto Page B

know little about my mother’s dementia and less about how it will progress; until she dies, we can’t even be sure which one she has. The poet in me takes refuge in this, or perhaps it is the child, imagining that it’s not my mother who is confused and losing, but interaction that has become too much work.
    There is then and now for my mother, just as for the ABCC. Then I often locate in my late teens, when my mother and I used to eat Ritz crackers with cream cheese and mango chutney after school and talk about my day. I had an endless stream of friends who wanted in on those chat sessions, who wanted the kind of advice and comfort their own mothers couldn’t give. My mother sparkled—so precise, so empathetic. So intelligent that no one could believe she hadn’t finished college.

    Now I am sworn to silence. There’s a ban in my family against anyone knowing—my father’s request, his worry that it will depress her if anyone says the wrong thing—and we honor it, even if it draws us inward as a family, as friends and colleagues see less and less of her so information doesn’t leak. If it’s lonely sometimes, it also means that I can forget, for stretches of time, that this is a death sentence. From far away, my mother is always healthy; the slips of mind, of memory, become an impossible dream. From far away, though, I can be lulled into turning toward my mother—for advice, a commingling that can no longer be had—until the small, stubborn “no” in my head reminds me that it’s less painful to forget what I had with my mother than it is be reminded of what I’ve lost.
    Perhaps it is the dead spilling down the hill below me, but suddenly, I’m in tears.
    I am surrounded by lies. Tea and plants, a name change—these should be the poorest camouflage. It is more than the ABCC: I have a sheaf of claims that the group’s mere existence is proof that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were no more than experiments on human rats to see what these two new and different weapons could do. I’ve read proof that Roosevelt knew the Nazis had given up on their nuclear research before the Manhattan Project began, and that Japan had exhausted its manpower and weaponry by 1945 and was no longer a threat to America. There is compelling evidence that Japan was trying to surrender gracefully; that the US bombed Japan to gain advantage over Russia in the terms of surrender. That the top-secret meetings
to select Japanese targets for the two A-bombs focused on a list of cities that were as untouched and self-contained as possible, so that the new weapons’ powers could be accurately measured.
    These facts have not been hard to find, either. And if competing theories have also been published, the enthusiasm for measurement—in site selection, in photos and surveying teams, and in a team of scientists to record the effect on living bodies for the last fifty-five years—seems to clinch the proof. Even if these facts are spun, if they are layered and reassembled, still no lies can change what happened. The bomb was dropped, many people died. And in that moment, Hiroshima became indelible. This is what the Peace Museum should be saying. For all its smiles, the RERF should be ashamed. Here in Hiroshima, at ground zero, there should be a grand purpose in getting these truths out there. But not even the hibakusha will talk to me about these things.

MAIDENS
    It is 1955. Twenty-five young girls, bomb victims, “monstrous reptiles” as one will describe herself, are flown to Mount Sinai Hospital in New York for plastic surgery to reconstruct their faces, their fused fingers, to remove the thick, keloid growths that make it difficult for them to eat
and sleep. These are the Hiroshima Maidens, the gembaku otome . The first girl to undergo surgery will die almost immediately on the table from complications from the anesthesia, the others will have multiple surgeries—twenty, thirty—which will take more than a year to