When the Emperor Was Divine

WHEN THE EMPEROR WAS DIVINE

In the beginning the boy thought he saw his father everywhere. Outside the latrines. Underneath the showers. Leaning against barrack doorways. Playing go with the other men in their floppy straw hats on the narrow wooden benches after lunch. Above them blue skies. The hot midday sun. No trees. No shade. Birds.

It was 1942. Utah. Late summer. A city of tar-paper barracks behind a barbed-wire fence on a dusty alkaline plain high up in the desert. The wind was hot and dry and the rain rarely fell and wherever the boy looked he saw him: Daddy, Papa, Father, Oto-san.

For it was true, they all looked alike. Black hair. Slanted eyes. High cheekbones. Thick glasses. Thin lips. Bad teeth. Unknowable. Inscrutable.

That was him, over there.

The little yellow man.

THREE TIMES A DAY the clanging of bells. Endless lines. The smell of liver drifting out across the black barrack roofs. The smell of catfish. From time to time, the smell of horse meat. On meatless days, the smell of beans. Inside the mess hall, the clatter of forks and spoons and knives. No chopsticks. An endless sea of bobbing black heads. Hundreds of mouths chewing. Slurping. Sucking. Swallowing. And over there, in the corner, beneath the flag, a familiar face.

The boy called out, “Papa,” and three men with thick metal-rimmed glasses looked up from their plates and said, “Nan desu ka?”

What is it?

But the boy could not say what it was.

He lowered his head and skewered a small Vienna sausage. His mother reminded him, once again, not to shout out in public. And never to speak with his mouth full. Harry Yamaguchi tapped a spoon on a glass and announced that the head count would be taken on Monday evening. The boy’s sister nudged him under the table, hard, with the scuffed toe of her Mary Jane. “Papa’s gone,” she said.

THEY HAD BEEN ASSIGNED to a room in a barrack in a block not far from the fence. The boy. The girl. Their mother. Inside there were three iron cots and a potbellied stove and a single bare bulb that hung down from the ceiling. A table made out of cratewood. On top of a rough wooden shelf, an old Zenith radio they had brought with them on the train from California. A tin clock. A jar of paper flowers. A box of salt. Tacked to the wall beside a small window, a picture of Joe DiMaggio torn from a magazine. There was no running water and the toilets were a half block away.

Far away, on the other side of the ocean, there was fighting, and at night the boy lay awake on his straw mattress and listened to the bulletins on the radio. Sometimes, in the darkness, he heard noises drifting from other rooms. The heavy thud of footsteps. The shuffling of cards. Over and over again, the creaking of springs. He heard a woman whispering, “Lower, lower, there,” and a man with a high voice singing, “Auf wiederseh’n, sweetheart, auf wiederseh’n.”

Someone said, “Just say sayonara, Frank.”

Someone said, “Bon soir!”

Someone said, “Please shut up, please.”

Someone else belched.

There was a window above the boy’s bed, and outside were the stars and the moon and the endless rows of black barracks all lined up in the sand. In the distance, a wide empty field where nothing but sagebrush grew, then the fence and the high wooden towers. There was a guard in each tower, and he carried a machine gun and binoculars and at night he manned the searchlight. He had brown hair and green eyes, or maybe they were blue, and he had just come back from a tour of the Pacific.

ON THEIR FIRST DAY in the desert his mother had said, “Be careful.”

“Do not touch the barbed-wire fence,” she had said, “or talk to the guards in the towers.

“Do not stare at the sun.

“And remember, never say the Emperor’s name out loud.”

The boy wore a blue baseball cap and he did not stare at the sun. He often wandered the firebreak with his head down and his hands in his pockets, looking for seashells and old Indian arrowheads in the sand. Some days he saw rattlesnakes sleeping beneath the sagebrush. Some days he saw scorpions. Once he came across a horse skull bleached white by the sun. Another time, an old man in a red silk kimono with a tin pail in his hand who said he was going down to the river.

Whenever the boy walked past the shadow of a guard tower he pulled his cap down low over his head and tried not to say the word.

But sometimes it slipped out anyway.

Hirohito, Hirohito, Hirohito.

He said it quietly. Quickly. He whispered it.

ON THE TRAIN RIDE into the desert he had slept with his head in his sister’s lap and dreamed he was riding an enormous white horse by the sea. When he looked out toward the horizon he could see three black ships out on the water. The ships had sailed all the way over from the other side of the ocean. The Emperor himself had sent them. Their sails were white and square and filled with wind and their masts were straight and tall. He had watched as they slowly turned toward the shore. Then he was awake and the train was rocking from side to side and in the seat behind him a woman was quietly singing. It was dawn and his sister was sound asleep. She was wearing her yellow summer dress with the little white flowers because in the desert, where they were going, it would be summer a lot.

IT WAS NOT LIKE any desert he had read about in books. There were no palm trees here, no oases, no caravans of camels slowly winding across the dunes. There was only the wind and the dust and the hot burning sand.

In the afternoon the heat rose up from the ground in waves. The air above the barracks shimmered. It was ninety-five degrees out. One hundred. One hundred and ten. Old men sat outside on the long narrow benches, not talking, whittling away at pieces of wood as they waited for the hours to pass. The boy played marbles on the laundry room floor. He played Chinese checkers. He roamed through the barracks with the other boys in his block, playing cops and robbers and war. Kill the Nazis! Kill the Japs! On days when it was too hot to go out he sat in his room with a wet towel over his head and leafed through the pages of old Life magazines. He saw the bombed-out cities of Europe, and the Allied soldiers in Burma, fleeing to India through the hot steamy jungle. His sister lay on her cot for hours, staring, transfixed, at white majorette boots and men in their bathrobes in the Sears, Roebuck catalog. She wrote letters to her friends on the other side of the fence, telling them all she was having a good time. Wish you were here. Hope to hear from you soon. Their mother darned socks by the window. She read. She made them paper kites with tails woven out of potato sack strings. She took a flower-arranging class. She learned to crochet— “It’s something to do”—and for one week there were doilies under everything.

Mostly, though, they waited. For the mail. For the news. For the bells. For breakfast and lunch and dinner. For one day to be over and the next day to begin.

“When the war is over,” the boy’s mother told him, “we can pack up our things and go home.”

He asked her when she thought that might be. In a month maybe? Two months? A year, tops? She shook her head and looked out the window. Three young girls in dirty white frocks were playing ladies in the dust— “Oh, bother,” they cried out, and, “Hullo, have some tea?”—and in the distance there were ravens riding the updrafts. “There’s no telling,” she said.

ON THE OTHER SIDE of the wall by his bed lived a man and his wife and the wife’s elderly mother, Mrs. Kato, who talked to herself night and day. She wore a pink flowered housedress, and tiny white slippers, and she carried a cane, and in the evening, after supper, the boy often saw her standing in her doorway with a small wicker suitcase, trying to remember the way home. Did she go left on Ward and then right on Grove? Or was it right on Ward and left on Grove? And when had they taken down all the street signs, anyway? Whose bright idea was that? Should she continue to wait for the bus? Or should she just start walking? And when she finally got there, then what?

“The daffodils,” the boy called out to her softly.

“Oh yes, of course. I must remember to plant the daffodils. And the fence still needs mending.”

She said she could hear her mother calling for her in the distance, but that lately her voice had begun to sound farther and farther away.

“I guess that’s to be expected,” she said.

She said, “Oh, well,” and, “So it goes.”

She said, “There’s something strange about this place, but I can’t figure out what it is.”

She said, “Everyone here seems so serious.”

THE MAN SCRUBBING pots and pans in the mess hall had once been the sales manager of an import-export company in San Francisco. The janitor had owned a small nursery in El Cerrito. The cook had always been a cook. A kitchen’s a kitchen, it’s all the same to me. The waitress had worked as a live-in domestic for a wealthy family in Atherton. The children still write to me every week asking me when I’m going to come home. The man standing in front of the latrines shouting out, “Hallelujah, Hallelujah,” had been a vagrant on the streets of Oakland. That’s him! The Hallelujah guy! The old woman who did nothing but play bingo all day long had worked in the strawberry fields of Mt. Eden for twenty-five years without taking a single vacation. Me happy, come here. Better than Mt. Eden. No cook, no work, just do laundry fine.

One evening as the boy’s mother was hauling back a bucket of water from the washroom she ran into her former housekeeper, Mrs. Ueno. “When she saw me she grabbed the bucket right out of my hands and insisted upon carrying it home for me. ‘You’ll hurt your back again,’ she said. I tried to tell her that she no longer worked for me. ‘Mrs. Ueno,’ I said, ‘here we’re all equals,’ but of course she wouldn’t listen. When we got back to the barracks she set the bucket down by the front door and then she bowed and hurried off into the darkness. I didn’t even get a chance to thank her.”

“Maybe you can thank her tomorrow,” said the boy.

“I don’t even know where she lives. I don’t even know what day it is.”

“It’s Tuesday, Mama.”

AT NIGHT he woke up crying out, “Where am I?” Sometimes he felt a hand on his shoulder and it was his sister telling him it was all just a bad dream. “Go back to sleep, baby,” she’d whisper, and he would. Sometimes there was no answer. Sometimes he heard the wind blowing through the sagebrush and he remembered he was in the desert but he could not remember how long he had been there, or why. Sometimes he worried he was there because he’d done something horribly, terribly wrong. But then when he tried to remember what that horrible, terrible thing might be, it would not come to him. It could be anything. Something he’d done yesterday—chewing the eraser off his sister’s pencil before putting it back in the pencil jar—or something he’d done a long time ago that was just now catching up with him. Breaking a chain letter from Juneau, Alaska. Flushing his dying pet goldfish down the toilet before it was completely dead. Forgetting to touch the hat rack three times when the iceman drove by. Sometimes he thought he was dreaming, and he was sure that when he woke up his father would be downstairs in the kitchen whistling “Begin the Beguine” through his teeth as he fried up breakfast in the skillet. “Here it comes, champ,” his father would say, “one hobo egg sandwich.”

HIS SISTER HAD LONG SKINNY LEGS and thick black hair and wore a gold French watch that had once belonged to their father. Whenever she went out she covered her head with a wide-brimmed Panama hat so her face would not get too dark from the sun. “Nobody will look at you,” she said to the boy, “if your face is too dark.”

“Nobody’s looking at me anyway,” he replied.

Late at night, after the lights had gone out, she told him things. Beyond the fence, she said, there was a dry riverbed and an abandoned smelter mine and at the edge of the desert there were jagged blue mountains that rose up into the sky. The mountains were farther away than they seemed. Everything was, in the desert. Everything except water. “Water,” she said, “is just a mirage.”

A mirage was not there at all.

The mountains were called Big Drum and Little Drum, Snake Ridge, the Rubies. The nearest town over was Delta.

In Delta, she said, you could buy oranges.

In Delta there were green leafy trees and blond boys on bikes and a hotel with a verandah where the waiters served ice-cold drinks with tiny paper umbrellas.

“What else?” asked the boy.

In Delta, she said, there was shade.

She told him about the ancient salt lake that had once covered all of Utah and parts of Nevada. This was thousands of years ago, she said, during the Ice Age. There were no fences then. And no names. No Utah. No Nevada. Just lots and lots of water. “And where we are now?”

“Yes?”

“Six hundred feet under.”

ALL NIGHT LONG he dreamed of water. Endless days of rain. Overflowing canals and rivers and streams rushing down to the sea. He saw the ancient salt lake floating above the floor of the desert. Its surface was calm and blue. Smooth as glass. He was drifting down through the reeds and fish were swimming through his fingers and when he looked up through the water the sun was nothing but a pale wobbly speck a hundred million miles above his head.

In the morning he woke up longing for a glass of Coke. Just one, with lots of ice, and a straw. He’d sip it slowly. He’d make it last a long long time.

A day. A week. A year, even.

EVERY FEW DAYS the letters arrived, tattered and torn, from Lordsburg, New Mexico. Sometimes entire sentences had been cut out with a razor blade by the censors and the letters did not make any sense. Sometimes they arrived in one piece, but with half of the words blacked out. Always, they were signed, “From Papa, With Love.”

Lordsburg was a nice sunny place on a broad highland plain just north of the Mexican border. That was how his father had described it in his letters. There are no trees here but the sunsets are beautiful and on clear days you can see the hills rising up in the distance. The food is fresh and substantial and my appetite is good. Although it is still very warm I have begun taking a cold shower every morning to better prepare myself for the winter. Please write and tell me what you are interested in these days. Do you still like baseball? How is your sister? Do you have a best friend?

THE BOY STILL LIKED BASEBALL and he was very interested in outlaws. He had seen a movie about the Dalton Gang—When the Daltons Rode—in Recreation Hall 22. His sister had won second prize in a jitterbug contest at the mess hall. She wore her hair in a ponytail. She was fine. The boy did not have a best friend but he had a pet tortoise that he kept in a wooden box filled with sand right next to the barrack window. He had not given the tortoise a name but he had scratched his family’s identification number into its shell with the tip of his mother’s nail file. At night he covered the box with a lid and on top of the lid he placed a flat white stone so the tortoise could not escape. Sometimes, in his dreams, he could hear its claws scrabbling against the side of the box.

He did not mention the scrabbling claws to his father. He did not mention his dreams.

What he said was, Dear Papa: It’s pretty sunny here in Utah too. The food is not so bad and we get milk every day. In the mess hall we are collecting nails for Uncle Sam. Yesterday my kite got stuck on the fence.

THE RULES about the fence were simple: You could not go over it, you could not go under it, you could not go around it, you could not go through it.

And if your kite got stuck on it?

That was an easy one. You let the kite go.

There were rules about language, too: Here we say Dining Hall and not Mess Hall; Safety Council, not Internal Police; Residents, not Evacuees; and last but not least, Mental Climate, not Morale.

There were rules about food: No second helpings except for milk and bread.

And books: No books in Japanese.

There were rules about religion: No Emperorworshiping Shintos allowed.

IN LORDSBURG, the girl said, the sky was always blue and the fences were not so high. Only fathers lived there. At night they could see the stars. And during the day, eagles.

Our father does not worship the Emperor. She said that too.

“Does he ever think about us?” asked the boy.

“All the time.”

HIS FATHER WAS a small handsome man with delicate hands and a raised white scar on his index finger that the boy, as a young child, had loved to kiss. “Does it hurt?” he’d once asked him. “Not anymore,” his father had replied. He was extremely polite. Whenever he walked into a room he closed the door behind him softly. He was always on time. He wore beautiful suits and did not yell at waiters. He loved pistachio nuts. He believed that fruit juice was the ideal drink. He liked to doodle. He was especially fond of drawing a box and then making it into three dimensions. I guess you could say that’s my forte. Whenever the boy knocked on his door his father would look up and smile and put down whatever it was he was doing. “Don’t be shy,” he’d say. He read the Examiner every morning before work and he knew the answers to everything. How small a germ was and when did fish sleep and where did Kitty McKenzie go after they took her out of her iron lung? You don’t have to worry about Kitty McKenzie anymore. She’s in a better place now. She’s up there in heaven. I heard they threw her a big party the day she arrived. He knew when to leave the boy’s mother alone and how best to ask her for ice cream. Don’t ask her too often and when you do, don’t let her know how much you really want it. Don’t beg. Don’t whine. He knew which restaurants would serve them lunch and which would not. He knew which barbers would cut their kind of hair. The best ones, of course. The thing that he loved most about America, he once confided to the boy, was the glazed jelly donut. Can’t be beat.

HIS MOTHER SAID it aged you. The sun. She said it made you grow old. Every night before she went to bed she daubed cream on her face. She rationed it out as though it were butter. Or sugar. It was Pond’s. She’d bought a large jar at the pharmacy the day before they had left Berkeley. “Got to make it last,” she said. But already she had almost used it all up. “I should have planned ahead,” she said. “I should have bought two.”

“Maybe three,” said the boy.

She stood in front of the mirror tracing the lines along her forehead and neck with her finger. “Is it the light,” she asked, “or are there bags under my eyes?”

“There’s bags.”

She pointed to a wrinkle by her mouth. “See this?”

He nodded.

“A recent development. Your father won’t know who I am.”

“I’ll remind him.”

“Tell him…” she said, and then her voice drifted off, and she was somewhere far away, and outside a hot dry wind was blowing up from the south and across the high desert plains.

ALWAYS, HE WOULD REMEMBER the dust. It was soft and white and chalky, like talcum powder. Only the alkaline made your skin burn. It made your nose bleed. It made your eyes sting. It took your voice away. The dust got into your shoes. Your hair. Your pants. Your mouth. Your bed.

Your dreams.

It seeped under doors and around the edges of windows and through the cracks in the walls.

And all day long, it seemed, his mother was always sweeping. Once in a while she would put down her broom and look at him. “What I wouldn’t give,” she’d say, “for my Electrolux.”

One evening, before he went to bed, he wrote his name in the dust across the top of the table. All through the night, while he slept, more dust blew through the walls.

By morning his name was gone.

HIS FATHER used to call him Little Guy. He called him Gum Drop, and Peanut, and Plum. “You’re my absolute numero uno,” he would say to him, and whenever the boy had woken up screaming from dark scary dreams his father had come into his room and sat down on the edge of his bed and smoothed down the boy’s short black hair. “Hush, Puppy,” he whispered, “it’s all right. Here I am.”

AT DUSK the sky turned blood red and his sister took him out walking along the outer edge of the barracks to watch the sun go down over the mountains. “Look. Look away. Look. Look away.” That, she told him, was the proper way to look at the sun. If you stared at it straight on for too long, you’d go blind.

In the darkening red twilight they would point out to each other the things that they saw: a dog chasing a porcupine, a tiny pink seashell, the husk of a beetle, a column of fire ants marching across the sand. If they were lucky they might see the Portuguese lady strolling along the fence with her husband, Sakamoto, or the lady with the white turban—she’d lost all her hair, they’d heard, overnight on the train—or the man with the withered arm who lived in Block 7. If they were very lucky, the man with the withered arm might even raise it—the arm—and wave to them.

ONE EVENING, while they were walking, the boy reached over and grabbed the girl’s arm. “What is it?” she asked him.

He tapped his wrist. “Time,” he said. “What time?”

She stopped and looked at her watch as though she had never seen it before. “It’s six o’clock,” she said.

Her watch had said six o’clock for weeks. She had stopped winding it the day they had stepped off the train.

“What do you think they’re doing back home?”

She looked at her watch one more time and then she stared up at the sky, as though she were thinking. “Right about now,” she said, “I bet they’re having a good time.” Then she started walking again.

And in his mind he could see it: the tree-lined streets at sundown, the dark green lawns, the sidewalks, boys throwing balls in backyards, girls playing hopscotch, mothers with pink quilted mitts sliding hot casseroles out of ovens, fathers with shiny black briefcases bursting through front doors, shouting, “Honey, I’m home! Honey, I’m home!”

When he thought of the world outside it was always six o’clock. A Wednesday or a Thursday. Dinnertime across America.

IN EARLY AUTUMN the farm recruiters arrived to sign up new workers, and the War Relocation Authority allowed many of the young men and women to go out and help harvest the crops. Some of them went north to Idaho to top sugar beets. Some went to Wyoming to pick potatoes. Some went to Tent City in Provo to pick peaches and pears and at the end of the season they came back wearing brand-new Florsheim shoes. Some came back wearing the same shoes they’d left in and swore they would never go out there again. They said they’d been shot at. Spat on. Refused entrance to the local diner. The movie theater. The dry goods store. They said the signs in the windows were the same wherever they went: NO JAPS ALLOWED. Life was easier, they said, on this side of the fence.

THE SHOES WERE black Oxfords. Men’s, size eight and a half, extra narrow. He took them out of his suitcase and slipped them over his hands and pressed his fingers into the smooth oval depressions left behind by his father’s toes and then he closed his eyes and sniffed the tips of his fingers.

Tonight they smelled like nothing.

The week before they had still smelled of his father but tonight the smell of his father was gone.

He wiped off the leather with his sleeve and put the shoes back into the suitcase. Outside it was dark and in the barrack windows there were lights on and figures moving behind curtains. He wondered what his father was doing right then. Getting ready for bed, maybe. Washing his face. Or brushing his teeth. Did they even have toothpaste in Lordsburg? He didn’t know. He’d have to write him and ask. He lay down on his cot and pulled up the blankets. He could hear his mother snoring softly in the darkness, and a lone coyote in the hills to the south, howling up at the moon. He wondered if you could see the same moon in Lordsburg, or London, or even in China, where all the men wore little black slippers. And he decided that you could, depending on the clouds.

“Same moon,” he whispered to himself, “same moon.”

ON NIGHTS when he couldn’t sleep he liked to think of the house they had left behind. He could still picture his old room very clearly: the One War One World map of the world on the wall, the Joe Palooka comic books spilling out from under the bed, the cowboy-and-Indian curtains his mother had sewn for him the summer before last, gently billowing in the breeze. He’d look out the window and see his father down below in the yard, plucking the caterpillars one by one off the snow pea plants with his long wooden chopsticks. He’d see the stone lantern covered with moss in the garden, and the statue of the fat round Buddha with its head thrust back, laughing up at the sky. He’d see his red Schwinn with the wide balloon tires leaning against the porch and on a good day he’d see Elizabeth Morgana Roosevelt on the other side of the white picket fence, playing with her little dog in the sun.

ELIZABETH HAD LONG YELLOW HAIR and a Pekinese dog named Lotus and was not related to the president in any way. The day before they left she had come to the house and given him her lucky blue stone from the sea. It was smooth and round and hard, like a bird’s egg. Or a perfect blue eye. “When you come back,” she said, “we’ll go to the beach.”

He had slipped the blue stone into his pocket and taken it with him to the assembly center at the Tanforan racetrack. Every night, in the horse stalls, he had slept with it under his pillow. At the end of the summer, when they were ordered to move inland, he had brought it with him on the train to Utah. He had promised to write her a letter the minute he got off the train.

THEY HAD BEEN off the train for a while now, but he had not written her a word. Still, her letters continued to arrive in the mail. She was the only one of his friends from before who had remembered to write. She told him about the blackouts in Berkeley, and the shortages of meat and butter. She said that her father was now an Air Raid Warden, and that her mother no longer wore silk stockings. She said that Greg Myer’s brother had been shot down in the Battle of the Coral Sea and there was now a gleaming gold star in the Myers’ front window. She told him she’d seen some Okies from the shipyard downtown, standing in line at the movies. They really did wear cowboy boots, she said. And she sent him things. A picture of a prancing stallion she’d seen at the Navy Relief Horse Show. A book of riddles. A tulip bulb, which he had named Gloria and planted inside of an old rusty peach can he had found behind the mess hall.

He wondered if Gloria was still alive, down there, beneath all that dirt—“Tamp it down, hard,” his sister had said—and if she was, would she be able to make it to spring?

A MEMORY FROM BEFORE: his sister arriving home from school with her new jump rope trailing behind her on the sidewalk. “They let me turn the handle,” she said, “but they wouldn’t let me jump.” She had cut the rope up into tiny pieces and tossed them into the ivy and sworn she would never jump rope again.

EVERY WEEK they heard new rumors.

The men and women would be put into separate camps. They would be sterilized. They would be stripped of their citizenship. They would be taken out onto the high seas and then shot. They would be sent to a desert island and left there to die. They would all be deported to Japan. They would never be allowed to leave America. They would be held hostage until every last American POW got home safely. They would be turned over to the Chinese for safekeeping right after the war.

You’ve been brought here for your own protection, they were told.

It was all in the interest of national security.

It was a matter of military necessity.

It was an opportunity for them to prove their loyalty.

THE SCHOOL WAS OPENED in mid-October. Classes were held in an unheated barrack at the far end of Block 8 and in the morning it was sometimes so cold the boy could not feel his fingers or toes and his breath came out in small white puffs. Textbooks had to be shared, and paper and pencils were often in short supply.

Every morning, at Mountain View Elementary, he placed his hand over his heart and recited the pledge of allegiance. He sang “Oh, beautiful for spacious skies” and “My country, ’tis of thee” and he shouted out “Here!” at the sound of his name. His teacher was Mrs. Delaney. She had short brown hair and smooth creamy skin and a husband named Hank who was a sergeant in the Marines. Every week he sent her a letter from the front lines in the Pacific. Once, he even sent her a grass skirt. “Now when am I ever going to wear a grass skirt?” she asked the class.

“How about tomorrow?”

“Or after recess.”

“Put it on right now!”

The first week of school they learned all about the Nina and the Pinta and the Santa Maria, and Squanto and the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock. They wrote down the names of the states in neat cursive letters across lined sheets of paper. They played hangman and twenty questions. In the afternoon, during current events, they listened to Mrs. Delaney read out loud to them from the newspaper. The First Lady is visiting the Queen in London. The Russians are still holding in Stalingrad. The Japs are massing on Guadalcanal.

“What about Burma?” the boy asked.

The situation in Burma, she told the class, was bleak.

LATE AT NIGHT he heard the sound of the door opening, and footsteps crossing the floor, and then his sister was suddenly there by the window, flipping her dress up high over her head.

“You asleep?”

“Just resting.” He could smell her hair, and the dust, and salt, and he knew she’d been out there, in the night, where it was dark.

She said, “Miss me?” She said, “Turn down the radio.” She said, “I won a nickel at bingo tonight. Tomorrow we’ll go to the canteen and buy you a Coca-Cola.”

He said, “I’d like that. I’d like that a lot.”

She dropped down onto the cot next to his. “Talk to me,” she said. “Tell me what you did tonight.”

“I wrote Papa a postcard.”

“What else?”

“Licked a stamp.”

“Do you know what bothers me most? I can’t remember his face sometimes.”

“It was sort of round,” said the boy. Then he asked her if she wanted to listen to some music and she said yes—she always said yes—and he turned on the radio to the big band channel. They heard a trumpet and some drums and then Benny Goodman on the clarinet and Martha Tilton singing, “So many memories, sometimes I think I’ll cry….”

IN THE DREAM there was always a beautiful wooden door. The beautiful wooden door was very small—the size of a pillow, say, or an encyclopedia. Behind the small but beautiful wooden door there was a second door, and behind the second door there was a picture of the Emperor, which no one was allowed to see.

For the Emperor was holy and divine. A god.

You could not look him in the eye.

In the dream the boy had already opened the first door and his hand was on the second door and any minute now, he was sure of it, he was going to see God.

Only something always went wrong. The doorknob fell off. Or the door got stuck. Or his shoelace came untied and he had to bend over and tie it. Or maybe a bell was ringing somewhere—somewhere in Nevada or Peleliu or maybe it was just some crazy gong bonging in Saipan—and the nights were growing colder, the sound of the scrabbling claws was fainter now, fainter than ever before, and it was October, he was miles from home, and his father was not there.

THEY HAD COME for him just after midnight. Three men in suits and ties and black fedoras with FBI badges under their coats. “Grab your toothbrush,” they’d said. This was back in December, right after Pearl Harbor, when they were still living in the white house on the wide street in Berkeley not far from the sea. The Christmas tree was up, and the whole house smelled of pine, and from his window the boy had watched as they led his father out across the lawn in his bathrobe and slippers to the black car that was parked at the curb.

He had never seen his father leave the house without his hat on before. That was what had troubled him most. No hat. And those slippers: battered and faded, with the rubber soles curling up at the edges. If only they had let him put on his shoes then it all might have turned out differently. But there had been no time for shoes.

Grab your toothbrush.

Come on. Come on. You’re coming with us.

We just need to ask your husband a few questions.

Into the car, Papa-san.

Later, the boy remembered seeing lights on in the house next door, and faces pressed to the window. One of them was Elizabeth’s, he was sure of it.

Elizabeth Morgana Roosevelt had seen his father taken away in his slippers.

THE NEXT MORNING his sister had wandered through the house looking for the last place their father had sat. Was it the red chair? Or the sofa? The edge of his bed? She had pressed her face to the bedspread and sniffed.

“The edge of my bed,” their mother had said.

That evening she had lit a bonfire in the yard and burned all of the letters from Kagoshima. She burned the family photographs and the three silk kimonos she had brought over with her nineteen years ago from Japan. She burned the records of Japanese opera. She ripped up the flag of the red rising sun. She smashed the tea set and the Imari dishes and the framed portrait of the boy’s uncle, who had once been a general in the Emperor’s army. She smashed the abacus and tossed it into the flames. “From now on,” she said, “we’re counting on our fingers.”

The next day, for the first time ever, she sent the boy and his sister to school with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in their lunch pails. “No more rice balls,” she said. “And if anyone asks, you’re Chinese.”

The boy had nodded. “Chinese,” he whispered. “I’m Chinese.”

“And I,” said the girl, “am the Queen of Spain.”

“In your dreams,” said the boy.

“In my dreams,” said the girl, “I’m the King.”

IN CHINA the men wore their hair in long black pig-tails and the ladies hobbled around on tiny broken feet. In China there were people so poor they had to feed their newborn babies to the dogs. In China they ate grass for breakfast and for lunch they ate cats.

And for dinner?

For dinner, in China, they ate dogs.

These were a few of the things the boy knew about China.

LATER, HE SAW CHINESE, real Chinese—Mr. Lee of Lee’s Grocers and Don Wong who owned the laundry on Shattuck—on the street wearing buttons that said, I AM CHINESE, and CHINESE, PLEASE. Later, a man stopped him on the sidewalk in front of Woolworth’s and said, “Chink or Jap?” and the boy answered, “Chink,” and ran away as fast as he could. Only when he got to the corner did he turn around and shout, “Jap! Jap! I’m a Jap!”

Just to set the record straight.

But by then the man was already gone.

Later, there were the rules about time: No Japs out after eight p.m.

And space: No Japs allowed to travel more than five miles from their homes.

Later, the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park was renamed the Oriental Tea Garden.

Later, the signs that read INSTRUCTIONS TO ALL PERSONS OF JAPANESE ANCESTRY went up all over town and they packed up their things and they left.

ALL THROUGH OCTOBER the days were still warm, like summer, but at night the mercury dropped and in the morning the sagebrush was sometimes covered with frost. Twice in one week there were dust storms. The sky turned suddenly gray and then a hot wind came screaming across the desert, churning up everything in its path. From inside the barracks the boy could not see the sun or the moon or even the next row of barracks on the other side of the gravel path. All he could see was dust. The wind rattled the windows and doors and the dust seeped like smoke through the cracks in the roof and at night he slept with a wet handkerchief over his mouth to keep out the smell. In the morning, when he woke, the wet handkerchief was dry and in his mouth there was the gritty taste of chalk.

A dust storm would blow for hours, and sometimes even days, and then, just as suddenly as it had begun, it would stop, and for a few seconds the world was perfectly silent. Then a baby would begin to cry, or a dog would start barking, and from out of nowhere a flock of white birds would mysteriously appear in the sky.

THE FIRST SNOWS FELL, and then melted, and then there was rain. The alkaline earth could not absorb any water and the ground quickly turned to mud. Black puddles stood on the gravel paths and the schools were shut down for repairs.

There was nothing to do now and the days were long and empty. The boy marked them off one by one on the calendar with giant red X’s. He practiced fancy tricks on the yo-yo: Around the World, Walk the Dog, the Turkish Army. He received a letter from his father written on thin lined sheets of paper. Of course we have toothpaste in Lordsburg. How else do you expect us to brush our teeth? His father thanked him for the postcard of the Mormon Tabernacle. He said he was fine. Everything was fine. He was sure they would see each other one day soon. Be good to your mother, he wrote. Be patient. And remember, it’s better to bend than to break.

Not once did he mention the war.

HIS FATHER HAD PROMISED to show him the world. They’d go to Egypt, he’d said, and climb the Pyramids. They’d go to China and take a nice long stroll along that Great Wall. They’d see the Eiffel Tower in Paris and the Colosseum in Rome and at night, by the light of the stars, they’d glide through Venice in a black wooden gondola.

“The moon above,” he sang, “is yours and mine….”

THE DAY AFTER THE FBI had come to the house he had found a few strands of his father’s hair in the bathtub. He had put them into an envelope and placed the envelope beneath the loose floorboard under his bed and promised himself that as long as he did not check to make sure that the envelope was still there—no peeking, was his rule—his father would be all right. But lately he had begun waking up every night in the barracks, convinced that the envelope was gone. “I should have taken it with me,” he said to himself. He worried that there were large messy people now living in his old room who played cards night and day and spilled sticky brown drinks all over the floor. He worried that the FBI had returned to the house to search one more time for contraband. We forgot to check under the floorboards. He worried that when he saw his father again after the war his father would be too tired to play catch with him under the trees. He worried that his father would be bald.

FROM TIME TO TIME they heard rumors of spies. Takizawa, people whispered, was a government informer. Possibly a Korean. Not to be trusted. So be careful what you say. Yamaguchi had close ties to the administration. Ishimoto had been attacked late one night behind the latrines by three masked men carrying lead pipes. They say he was providing the FBI with the names of pro-Japan disloyals.

“WHAT DO I miss the most? The sound of the trees at night… also, chocolate.”

“And plums, Mama. You miss plums.”

“That’s right, I miss plums. I’ll always miss plums.”

“Maybe not always.”

“True, maybe not. There’s something that’s been bothering me, though.”

“What is it?”

“Did I leave the porch light on or off?”

“On.”

“And the stove. Did I remember to turn off the stove?”

“You always turned off the stove.”

“Did I?”

“Every time.”

“Did we even have a stove?”

“Of course we had a stove.”

“That’s right. The Wedgewood. I used to be quite the cook once, you know.”

SLOWLY THE BOY SPUN the dial. He heard organ music playing on the Salt Lake City station. Then rhumba music. A swing band. An ad for Dr. Fisher’s tablets for intestinal sluggishness. “Folks,” a man asked, “do you feel headachy and pepless in the morning?” “Nope,” said the boy. Then the news came on, and the Western Task Force was landing in Morocco, and the Central, at Oran, and in the Pacific Islands the American forces were dying all over the place.

He closed his eyes and imagined himself fighting with Hank and the Raiders down in the Solomon Islands. Or flying reconnaissance over Mindanao. Maybe he’d take a direct hit over Leyte and he’d have to eject. He’d float slowly down to earth beneath a flaming silk parachute and land softly in some bushes, or on a white sandy beach, and General MacArthur would wade up onto shore and give him the Purple Heart. “You did your best, son,” he’d say, and then they’d shake hands.

NOW WHEN THE GIRL UNDRESSED — always, the quick flick of the wrists and then the criss-crossing arms and the yellow dress billowing up over her head like a parachute in reverse—she asked him to turn away. She told him about the seasons and hibernation. She said that any day now she’d be bleeding. “It’ll be red,” she said. She told him that Franklin Masuda had a terrible case of athlete’s foot—“He showed me”—and that someone had stuffed a newborn baby into a trash can in Block 29.

“What did it look like?” the boy asked.

“You don’t want to know.”

“Yes I do.”

She said that Mrs. Kimura was really a man, and that a girl in Block 12 had been found lying naked with a guard in the back of a truck. She said that all the real stuff happened only at night.

The boy said, “I know.”

One night he found her squatting outside beneath his window with a tin spoon from the mess hall.

“I’m digging a hole to China,” she said. On the ground beside her lay the tortoise. Its head and legs were tucked up inside its shell and it was not moving. Had not moved for several days. Was dead. My fault, the boy thought, but he had not told a soul. Night after night he had lain awake waiting to hear the sound of the scrabbling claws but all he had heard was the banging of a loose door in the wind.

She placed the tortoise in the bottom of the hole and filled up the hole with sand and then she shoved the spoon deep down into the earth. “We’ll dig him up in the spring,” she said. “We’ll resurrect him.”

HE WAS THERE, above his mother’s cot. Jesus. In color. Four inches by six. A picture postcard someone had once sent to her from the Louvre. Jesus had bright blue eyes and a kind but mysterious smile.

“Just like the Mona Lisa’s,” said the girl.

The boy thought He looked more like Mrs. Delaney, only with longer hair and a halo.

Jesus’ eyes were filled with a secret and flickering joy. With rapture. He’d died once—“for you,” said his mother, “for your sins”—and then he’d risen.

The girl said, “Mmm.” She said, “That’s divine.”

LATE AT NIGHT, in the darkness, he could hear his mother praying. “Our father, Who art in heaven…”

And in the morning, at sunrise, coming from the other side of the wall, the sound of the man next door chanting. “Kokyo ni taishite keirei.”

Salute to the Imperial Palace.

NOW WHENEVER HE THOUGHT of his father he saw him at sundown, leaning against a fence post in Lordsburg, in the camp for dangerous enemy aliens. “My daddy’s an outlaw,” he whispered. He liked the sound of that word. Outlaw. He pictured his father in cowboy boots and a black Stetson, riding a big beautiful horse named White Frost. Maybe he’d rustled some cattle, or robbed a bank, or held up a stage coach, or—like the Dalton brothers—even a whole entire train, and now he was just doing his time with all of the other men.

He’d be thinking these things, and then the image would suddenly float up before him: his father, in his bathrobe and slippers, being led away across the lawn. Into the car, Papa-san.

HE’LL BE BACK any day now. Any day.

Just say he went away on a trip.

Keep your mouth shut and don’t say a thing.

Stay inside.

Don’t leave the house.

Travel only in the daytime.

Do not converse on the telephone in Japanese.

Do not congregate in one place.

When in town if you meet another Japanese do not greet him in the Japanese manner by bowing.

Remember, you’re in America.

Greet him in the American way by shaking his hand.

NONE OF THE OTHER FATHERS had been taken away in their slippers. Ben Okada’s father had been arrested in his golf shoes while practicing his swing on the lawn. Woodrow Teshima’s father had been arrested in black wingtips and a rented tuxedo at a Buddhist wedding in Alameda. And Sugar Sawada’s father, who had already lost a foot and some of his memory—only the bad ones, Mrs. Sawada had always insisted, with a friendly wink and a smile—in the First World War, had bowed once toward the east before being hauled away drunk in his single black boot, waving his crutches and shouting, “Banzai! Banzai! Banzai!”

Sometimes the boy comforted himself with the thought of Tommy Tanaka’s father, who had been wearing white toe socks and an old pair of wooden geta when the FBI had caught him red-handed in the garden, cutting down last year’s chrysanthemum stalks.

Geta, the boy decided, were worse than slippers.

Much worse.

“SOMETIMES,” SAID HIS MOTHER, “I’ll look up at the clock and it’s half past five and I’m sure that he’s on his way home from the office. And then I’ll start to panic. ‘It’s late,’ I’ll think to myself. ‘I should have started the rice by now.’”

THE TREES APPEARED suddenly, and without warning, on a sunny day in late November. They were willow saplings, trucked in on flatbeds from some faraway place. The mountains, perhaps. Or the banks of a river. Someplace where there was water. All day long the men in each block planted the trees in front of the mess halls and at evenly spaced intervals along either side of the firebreaks. Sweat covered their brows as the broad blades of their shovels twisted and flashed in the sun.

At the end of the day, when nobody was looking, the boy plucked a small green leaf from a tree and slipped it into his pocket. The next morning he put it into an envelope and sent it to Lordsburg.

“THE SOIL’S TOO ALKALINE,” said his mother. “Those trees won’t last through the winter.” She stood by the window in her nightgown slowly brushing her hair. Outside it was beginning to snow. Two searchlights crossed in the darkness and fanned out across the fence and then they went out. A few seconds later they went on again. She pulled out a gray hair from her head and let it fall to the floor. “I’ll sweep it up in the morning,” she said. Then she turned to him. “I lost an earring on the train. Did I ever tell you that?”

He shook his head.

“It fell off somewhere between Provo and Nephi. I haven’t felt right ever since.”

He watched as she twisted her hair into a rope and pinned it up in a bun. Her hair was dark and shiny in the light but her eyes were tired. “You look okay,” he said. He did not remember his mother wearing earrings on the train.

She closed her eyes for a moment and then she opened them wide. “I wonder where it went.”

“What did it look like?”

“It looked like a pearl,” she said. “It was a pearl.”

“Maybe it rolled behind the seat.”

“Or maybe,” she said, “it’s just gone. Sometimes things disappear and there’s no getting them back. That’s just how it is.”

He picked up the gray hair off the floor and held it up to the light. She looked at him and then at the strand of her hair in his hand and then she turned off the light and they stood there quietly in the darkness watching the snow fall across the black barrack roofs. The snow was clean and white and blowing in gusts. “I had no business wearing those earrings in the first place,” she said after a while. “No business at all.”

BY MORNING the snow had turned to slush and a bitter wind was blowing down through the Wasatch Mountains. “Bundle up,” said his mother. She ripped out the pages from the Sears, Roebuck catalog and stuffed them into the cracks in the walls. She covered the knotholes with the lids of tin cans. She brought back buckets of coal from the coal pile that occasionally appeared in the middle of the road and she lit a fire in the stove. When the War Relocation Authority announced it would be distributing military surplus from the First World War she stood in line for two hours and brought back ear-muffs and canvas leggings and three size 44 navy pea coats.

The boy put on a coat and stared at his reflection in the broken mirror. His hair was long and uncombed and his face was dark brown from the sun. The coat hung down past his knees. He narrowed his eyes and stuck out his two front teeth.

I predge arregiance to the frag…

Whatsamalla, Shorty?

Solly. So so solly.

He poked his thumb through a hole in the wool. “Moths,” he said.

“Try bullets,” said the girl.

Their mother pulled out a needle and a spool of black Boilfast thread. She pulled out a thimble. “Let’s have a look,” she said.

THE TEMPERATURE DROPPED to ten degrees. Five. More than once, to twenty below. Ice weighed down the thin black branches of the trees and the sheets on the laundry lines froze into strange wind-blown shapes. They are frozen white sails, the boy thought to himself. Some days the wind blew from every direction all at once and the boy could not walk without falling. Small birds lost their way and dropped out of the sky. Hungry coyotes crept in beneath the barbed-wire fence and fought with the stray dogs for scraps of food. A man disappeared and was found frozen to death three days later, ten miles west of the mountains. His face was calm and smiling, they said. His eyes were closed. He had simply lain down beneath the stars and gone to sleep. Below his head, folded into a perfect red square, was a piece of tattered old silk. In his hand was the tin handle of a bucket. They could not pry it loose from his fingers.

THE GIRL STOOD in front of the cracked mirror, staring at the red dot on her chin. She touched it again and again. She said, “Darling, kissy kiss.” She said, “Just one.” Then she frowned and she bared her teeth. They were small and bright and round, like hard glittering stones.

Gently he tapped her arm.

“What?” she said, but she was not talking to him. She was talking to her reflection in the glass. “What? What? What?”

“The horse meat.”

“What about it?”

“Where do they get it?”

She puckered her lips. “From horses.”

“What kind?”

She looked at him in the mirror. “The dead kind.”

He turned the mirror around so it faced the wall.

She went to the window and looked out across the black windswept barracks. Far away, on the other side of the fence, giant tumbleweeds were slowly rolling across the basin. Some of the horse meat, she explained, came from the racetrack. If a horse went down with a broken leg they destroyed it after the race and sent it to the cannery. But most of the horse meat came from wild horses. “They round them up in the desert,” she said, “and then they shoot them.” She asked if he remembered the wild mustangs they had seen through the window of the train and he said that he did. They had long black tails and dark flowing manes and he had watched them galloping in the moonlight across the flat dusty plain and then for three nights in a row he had dreamed of them.

“Those are the ones,” she said.

THREE IN THE MORNING. The dead time. Empty of dreams. He lay awake in the darkness worrying about the bicycle he’d left behind, chained to the trunk of the persimmon tree. Had the tires gone flat yet? Were the spokes rusted and clogged with weeds? Was the key to the lock still hidden in the shed?

But it was the little tin bell that troubled him most. His father had not fastened it securely to the handlebars. “I’ll put in the screws tomorrow,” he’d said. This was a long time ago. This was months and months ago, when the air still smelled of trees and freshly cut grass and the roses were just beginning to bloom.

“You never did,” whispered the boy.

By now, he was sure of it, the little tin bell was gone.

On December 7 it will have been a year since I last saw you. I read your letters every night before I go to bed. So far the winter here has been mild. This morning I woke up at dawn and watched the sun rise. I saw a bald eagle flying toward the mountains. I am in good health and exercise for half an hour after every meal. Please take care of yourself and be helpful to your mother.

FOR FOUR DAYS after his arrest they had not known where he was. The phone had not rung—the FBI had cut the wires—and they could not withdraw any money from the bank. “Your account’s been frozen,” the boy’s mother had been told. At dinner she set the table for four, and every night before they went to bed she walked out to the front porch and slipped her house key beneath the potted chrysanthemum. “He’ll know where to look,” she said.

On the fifth day she received a short note in the mail from the immigration detention center in San Francisco. Still awaiting my loyalty hearing. Do not know when my case will be heard, or how much longer I will be here. Eighty-three Japanese have already been sent away on a train. Please come see me as soon as possible. She packed a small suitcase full of her husband’s things—clothes, towels, a shaving kit, a spare pair of eyeglasses, nose drops, a bar of Yardley soap, a first-aid book—and took the next train across the bay.

“Was he still wearing his slippers?” the boy asked her when she returned.

She said that he was. And his bathrobe, too. She said that he had not showered or shaved for days. Then she smiled. “He looked like a hobo,” she said.

That night she had set the table for three.

IN THE MORNING she had sent all of the boy’s father’s suits to the cleaners except for one: the blue pin-striped suit he had worn on his last Sunday at home. The blue suit was to remain on the hanger in the closet. “He asked me to leave it there, for you to remember him by.”

But whenever the boy thought of his father on his last Sunday at home he did not remember the blue suit. He remembered the white flannel robe. The slippers. His father’s hatless silhouette framed in the back window of the car. The head stiff and unmoving. Staring straight ahead. Straight ahead and into the night as the car drove off slowly into the darkness. Not looking back. Not even once. Just to see if he was there.

CHRISTMAS DAY. Gray skies. A bitter cold. In the mess halls there were pine trees decorated with stars cut out of tin cans and on radios throughout the barracks Bing Crosby was singing “White Christmas.” Turkey was served for supper, and candy and gifts from the Quakers and the American Friends Service were distributed to the children in every block. The boy received a small red Swiss Army knife from a Mrs. Ida Little of Akron, Ohio. May the Lord look down upon you always, she had written. He sent her a prompt thank you note and carried the knife with him in his pocket wherever he went. Sometimes, when he was running, he could hear it clacking against his lucky blue stone from the sea and for a moment he felt very happy. His pockets were filled with good things.

THE WINTER SEEMED to last forever. There were outbreaks of flu and diarrhea and frequent shortages of coal. They had been assigned only two army blankets per person and at night the boy often fell asleep shivering. His hands were red and chapped from the cold. His throat was always sore. His sister left the barracks early in the morning and did not return until long after dark. She was always in a rush now. Her cheeks were flushed from the cold. “Where are you going?” “Out.” She ate all her meals with her friends. Never with the boy or his mother. She smoked cigarettes. He could smell them in her hair. One day he saw her standing in line at the mess hall in her Panama hat and she hardly seemed to recognize him at all.

Their old life seemed far away and remote to him now, like a dream he could not quite remember. The bright green grass, the roses, the house on the wide street not far from the sea—that was another time, a different year.

WHO WAS WINNING the war? Who was losing? His mother no longer wanted to know. She had stopped keeping track of the days. She no longer read the paper or listened to the bulletins on the radio. “Tell me when it’s over,” she said.

On days when there was hot water she went to the laundry room and washed all their clothes on the wooden washboard. Otherwise she had no tasks. She did not apply for a job as a nurse’s aide at the hospital, or as a timekeeper down on the project farm. The pay— sixteen dollars a month—was not worth it, she said. She did not give blood to the Red Cross or sit with the other mothers knitting wool socks and mufflers for the GIs who were fighting for freedom overseas.

Most days she did not leave the room at all.

She sat by the stove for hours, not talking. In her lap lay a half-finished letter. An unopened book. She wore a thick woolen scarf around her head to keep in the heat. A pair of baggy trousers. A heavy sweater. When the dinner bell rang she sat up with a start. “What is it?” she asked. “Who’s there?” In her mind there were always men at the door. We just need to ask your husband a few questions. She would stare down at her hands in her lap, as though surprised to find them still there. “Sometimes I don’t know if I’m awake or asleep.”

“You’re awake,” the boy would tell her.

SHE SAID she no longer had any appetite. Food bored her. “Go ahead and eat without me,” she said. The boy brought back food for her from the mess hall—a plate full of beans, a mound of pickled cabbage—and pressed a fork into her hand. But before it had even reached her mouth she stopped and stared out the window. “What is it?” he asked her. “Tell me what you want. Do you want rice?”

She said she didn’t want rice. She didn’t want anything anymore. Not a thing.

But every once in a while she got a faraway look in her eyes and he knew she was thinking of some other place. A better place. “Just once,” she told him, “I’d like to look out the window and see the sea.”

ONE DAY she said she couldn’t bear it anymore. The wind. The dust. The endless waiting. The couple next door constantly fighting. She hung a white sheet from a rope and called it a curtain and behind the white curtain she lay down on her cot and she closed her eyes and she slept. She dreamed. Of warm nights in Kagoshima and chirping bell crickets and red paper lanterns drifting one by one down the river. “I was a girl again. I was five years old and fishing for trout with my father.”

“What kind of fishing pole?” asked the boy. “Was it bamboo?”

For the first time in months he thought he saw her smile.

“Yes it was,” she said. “Bamboo. Bamboo.”

IN THE HOUSE where his mother was born there were rice paper windows and sliding wooden doors and tatami mats that lay side by side on the bare wooden floors. In the evening she would catch fireflies in the rice paddies and bring them home in a brown paper bag. All night long she would sit at her desk and practice writing Chinese characters by the fireflies’ pale glowing light.

She said she’d had six older sisters and one younger brother who’d died of scarlet fever when he was four. “I still think of him every day,” she said. She said that once a year, on her birthday, her mother would make her rice with red azuki beans. “That was a treat,” she said, and then she grew quiet. She closed her eyes and lay very still on the cot. She lay there for a long long time, breathing slowly in and out until the boy could no longer tell if she was awake or asleep.

TWO NIGHTS BEFORE they had left for Tanforan he had helped her bury the silver in the garden beneath the statue of the fat laughing Buddha. It was spring, and the earth was black and damp and full of worms. He had watched them squirming in the moonlight.

“Hurry up,” his mother had said.

He had touched the worms with his shovel. Some of them he had cut in half. Then the moon disappeared and a light rain was falling and water was dripping down through the leaves and the branches and onto his mother’s face.

But even before the rain, he remembered now, her face had been wet.

“WHEN I FIRST MET your father I wanted to be with him all the time.”

“I know what you mean.”

“If I was away from him for even five minutes, I’d start to miss him. I’d think, He’s never coming back. I’ll never see him again. But after a while I stopped being so afraid. Things change.”

“I guess so.”

“The night of his arrest, he asked me to go get him a glass of water. We’d just gone to bed and I was so tired. I was exhausted. So I told him to go get it himself. ‘Next time I will,’ he said, and then he rolled over and went right to sleep. Later, as they were taking him away, all I could think was, Now he’ll always be thirsty.”

“They probably gave him a drink at the station.”

“I should have brought it to him.”

“You didn’t know.”

“Even now, in my dreams, he’s still searching for water.”

IN THE MIDDLE of the night the boy thought he heard a sound. The steady thwack of a rope against dirt. He sat up and looked out the window and saw his sister jumping rope in the moonlight in her yellow summer dress. Her legs were long and thin. Her knees were scabbed. Her calves were pitted with scars from the sand and grit that blew night and day in the wind. She shouldn’t be wearing dresses, he thought to himself.

He went out and stood to one side of the door in the darkness. She did not see him and continued to jump. First on one leg, then on the other, then with her arms crossing and uncrossing until the rope pulled up short on her shoe and she tripped. She stomped her foot once in the dirt and tossed down the rope. “You better come in now,” he said quietly. “You’ll catch cold.”

She looked over at him. “How long have you been standing there?”

“A long time.”

“How did I look?”

“Good. You’re a good jumper.”

“I’m terrible. I don’t even deserve to hold the rope.”

He walked over to where she was standing and picked up the rope and looked at it. It was white and frayed. A piece of old clothesline she must have cut down from a pole. He imagined a line of white sheets sailing up into the air and out beyond the fence. “You better come in now,” he said again.

“I’m not here.”

He did not answer her.

“I’m a terrible jumper.”

“You’re awful.”

“The worst.”

He held out the rope to her. “Take it,” he said.

She grabbed one end of the rope and with the other end held tightly in his hand he led her slowly back into the barracks.

IN THE MORNING she woke burning with fever. Their mother brought her a tin cup filled with water and told her to drink but the girl refused. She said she wasn’t thirsty. “Nothing’s passing through these lips,” she said. She pulled back the blanket and began to pick at a scab on her knee. The boy grabbed her wrist and said, “Don’t.” She turned away and looked out the window. A woman in a pink bathrobe walked by carrying a chamberpot toward the latrines. “Where are we?” the girl asked. “What happened to all the trees? What country is this anyway?” She said she’d seen their father walking alone by the side of the road. “He was coming to take us away.” She looked down at her watch and asked how it had gotten to be so late. “It’s six o’clock,” she said. “He should have been here by now.”

IN FEBRUARY a team of army recruiters arrived looking for volunteers, and the loyalty questionnaire was given to every man and woman over the age of seventeen.

Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty, wherever ordered?

The man next door answered no and was sent away along with his wife and his wife’s mother to join the other disloyals at Tule Lake. The following year they were repatriated to Japan on the U.S.S. Gripsholm.

Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and faithfully defend the United States from any or all attack by foreign or domestic forces, and forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese Emperor, or any other foreign government, power or organization?

“What allegiance?” asked the boy’s mother. She said she had nothing to forswear. She’d been in America for almost twenty years now. But she did not want to cause any trouble—“The nail that sticks up gets hammered down”—or be labeled disloyal. She did not want to be sent back to Japan. “There’s no future for us there. We’re here. Your father’s here. The most important thing is that we stay together.”

She answered yes.

They stayed.

Loyalty. Disloyalty. Allegiance. Obedience.

“Words,” she said, “it’s all just words.”

INSIDE THE RUSTED PEACH TIN, a sudden burst of yellow.

The boy touched the petals with his finger again and again. “Gloria,” he whispered. It was March, and the nights were no longer so cold. The scorpions had become numerous again, and the earth was beginning to soften. The girl shoveled up spoonfuls of sand from beneath the barrack window but she could not find the tortoise. “He left without us,” she said.

Only the willow trees had not survived the winter. Their sap had not risen. Their branches were still bare. The girl broke off a twig and put it between her teeth. “Dead,” she said.

Secretly, the boy blamed himself. I shouldn’t have plucked that leaf….

He began taking long walks again, only alone now, without his sister. Beyond the fence he saw the dark shadows of the clouds floating across the sand. In the distance, the mountaintops still dotted with snow. Sometimes a jackrabbit crossed his path, or a stray dog hurried by carrying something dark and furry in its mouth. Horned toads leaped across the dry white stones. Lizards basked in the sun. And somewhere out there in the desert a lone tortoise was wandering slowly, steadily, toward the thin blue edge of the horizon.

THERE WERE DAYS, after rain, when the air suddenly filled with the sharp tang of sage. His mother would rise up from her cot and go to the window and take a deep breath. “Unearthly,” she’d utter.

ON A WARM EVENING in April a man was shot dead by the barbed-wire fence. The guard who was on duty said the man had been trying to escape. He’d called out to him four times, the guard said, but the man had ignored him. Friends of the dead man said he had simply been taking his dog for a walk. He might not have heard the guard, they said, because he was hard of hearing. Or because of the wind. One man who had gone to the scene of the accident right after the shooting had noticed a rare and unusual flower on the other side of the fence. It was his belief that his friend had been reaching out to pick the flower when the shot had been fired.

At the funeral there were nearly two thousand people. The casket was strewn with hundreds of crepe-paper flowers. Hymns were sung. The body was blessed. Years later the boy would recall standing beside his mother at the service, wondering just what kind of flower it was the man had seen.

A rose? A tulip? A daffodil?

And if he had plucked it. Then what?

He imagined exploding ships, clouds of black smoke, hundreds of B-29s falling down in flames from the sky. One false move, pal, and you’re dead.

THE HEAT RETURNED. The sun rose higher and higher in the sky. The war did not end. In May the first group of army volunteers left the barracks for Fort Douglas, and a four-year-old girl in Block 31 was stricken with infantile paralysis. Several days later, the street signs appeared. Suddenly there was an Elm Street, a Willow Street, a Cottonwood Way. Alexandria Avenue ran from east to west past the administration offices. Greasewood Way led straight to the sewer pump. “It doesn’t look like we’ll be leaving here any time soon,” said the boy’s mother.

“At least we know where we are,” said the girl.

Now he’ll know where to find us, thought the boy.

The days were long now, and filled with sun, and there had been no mail from Lordsburg for many weeks.

EVERY DAY SEEMED to pass more slowly than the day before. The boy spent hours pacing back and forth across the floor of his room. He counted his steps. He closed his eyes and recited the names of his old classmates whenever a dark ugly thought—he’s sick, he’s dead, he’s been sent back to Japan—tried to push its way into his head. He asked his mother when she thought the next letter from Lordsburg might arrive in the mail. Tomorrow, maybe? “Tomorrow’s Sunday.” What about Monday? “I wouldn’t count on it.” What if he stopped biting his nails and remembered to do everything the first time he was told? And said his prayers every night before bed? And ate all of his coleslaw even when it was touching the other food on his plate? “That might just do the trick.”

SUMMER WAS a long hot dream. Every morning, as soon as the sun rose, the temperature began to soar. By noon the floors were sagging. The sky was bleached white from the heat and the wind was hot and dry. Yellow dust devils whirled across the sand. The black roofs baked in the sun. The air shimmered.

The boy tossed pebbles into the coal bucket. He peered into other people’s windows. He drew pictures of airplanes and tanks with his favorite stick in the sand. He traced out an SOS in huge letters across the firebreak but before anyone could read what he had written he wiped the letters away.

Late at night he lay awake on top of the sheets longing for ice, a section of orange, a stone, something, anything, to suck on, to quench his thirst. It was June now. Or maybe it was July. It was August. The calendar had fallen from the wall. The tin clock had stopped ticking. Its gears were clotted with dust and would not turn. His sister was sound asleep on her cot and his mother lay dreaming behind the white curtain. He lifted a hand to his mouth. There was a loose molar there, on top, way in back. He liked to touch it. To rock it back and forth in its socket. The motion soothed him. Sometimes he’d taste blood and then he’d swallow. Salty, he’d think to himself, like the sea. In the distance he could hear trains passing in the night. The pounding of hooves on the sand. The faint tinkle of a tin bell.

He’d close his eyes. That’s him, he’d think. He’s on his way.

HE COULD COME BACK on a horse. On a bike. In a train. On a plane. In the same unmarked car that had once taken him away. He could be wearing a blue pin-striped suit. A red silk kimono. A grass skirt. A cowboy hat. A halo. A dark gray fedora with a leaf tucked up under the brim. Maybe he’d touch it—the leaf—and then he’d raise his hand slowly into the air, as though he were Jesus, or the man with the withered arm, or even General Douglas MacArthur. “I have returned,” he’d say. Then his eyes would light up and he’d reach down into his pocket and pull out a single white pearl. “I found this by the side of the road,” he’d say. “Any idea whose it might be?”

It could happen like that.

OR MAYBE the boy would be lying in bed one night and he’d hear a knock, a soft tap. “Who is it?” he’d say. “It’s me.” He’d open the door and see his father standing there in his white flannel bathrobe all covered with dust. “It’s a long walk from Lordsburg,” his father would say. Then they would shake hands, or maybe they’d even hug.

“Did you get my letters?” he’d ask his father.

“You bet I did. I read every single one of them. I got that leaf, too. I thought of you all the time.”

“I thought of you too,” the boy would say.

He’d bring his father a glass of water and they would sit down side by side on the cot. Outside the window the moon would be bright and round. The wind would be blowing. He’d rest his head on his father’s shoulder and smell the dust and the sweat and the faint smell of Burma Shave and everything would be very nice. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he’d notice his father’s big toe sticking out through a hole in his slipper. “Papa,” he’d say.

“What is it?”

“You forgot to put on your shoes.”

His father would look down at his feet and he’d shake his head with surprise. “Son of a gun,” he’d say. “Would you look at that.” Then he’d just shrug. He’d lean back on the cot and make himself comfortable. He’d pull out his pipe. A box of matches. He’d smile. “Now tell me what I missed,” he’d say. “Tell me everything.”