It is the dream that overtakes. A usurper of the mind. Happy dreams. Sad ones. Nightmares filled with clawed monsters and breakup texts. At any given moment, I might turn and see it: the mushroom cloud. Like a brushstroke in the background of a painting, it blooms against the blurred edges of my consciousness. The sky turns the color of grapefruit. Rivers boil. Trees burn. The heat is here, and it squeezes and squeezes until the dream bursts and I open my eyes, sticky with its warmth.
On August 6th, 1945, a nuclear bomb was dropped on the city of Hiroshima. It was planned to go off at 8:15 AM, the same time my alarm goes off each morning. People must have made breakfast that day. Some might have hurried to work, or been about to start the day's chores. People kept their lives going, even with the war. A woman puts on a kimono, not knowing that its delicately patterned weave will become scars, burnt where the garment caught fire and clung too tightly to its owner. I spend my mornings waiting for the kettle to boil.
The plane, lovingly named for the pilot's mother, Enola Gay, arrived right on time. Thirty minutes before, inside the beating heart of the plane, one of the crew armed the bomb while another removed the safeties. I imagine them, crouched together, hands steady as if trying not to wake a colicky child. Once they were over the target, the bomb dropped from its stomach and spiraled downwards before bursting in air. The whole process took 45 seconds from launch to explosion. I think about that every time I reheat leftovers in my microwave.
The event was watched by several other aircrafts, including the later named Necessary Evil (a joke, perhaps?) which had only one goal: to observe and record. That’s how we get those pictures, black and white, softened by age but not by time, of the mushroom clouds. The seconds it took to drop must have felt like hours, waiting with a camera stuck to the window of a plane, observing as the mouth of the explosion eats away the city that had only just woken up. Did they feel like heroes, taking pictures as the shockwave rocked the plane? Or was it only when they returned, greeted with cheers and praise, that they were assured of the necessity of the act?
Someone must have been proud, because the next day, they dropped leaflets featuring the mushroom cloud all over Japan. The text read EVACUATE YOUR CITIES as if there was anywhere else to go. The author surely must have been smiling, writing those words. After all, their team won the game in a single move. Absolute devastation was assured. The second bomb was merely a glory lap.
The Symptoms of Radiation Poisoning are as follows:
Within a few hours, you might experience vomiting, fever, and confusion. Exposed areas of skin might develop burns or become red and inflamed. Seek medical treatment immediately, assuming there are any doctors left. Assuming that ground zero was not a medical clinic. Assuming that you’ll want to keep on living, having seen what you have seen.
Within a few months, your red blood cell count will have decreased significantly, which can result in increased infections, low blood pressure, and significant muscle weakness or fatigue. Bruising and hair loss are common as well. Your life will be markedly different now. There was before, and now there is after. Eat breakfast and get sick from the taste.
Within a few years, you’ll realize that there is no cure, just a continuous, ongoing process of healing that never quite reaches all the way inside. There is no undoing the radiation. By this stage, you’ll have likely developed complications from the previous symptoms. You’ll have developed stories.
And then, within a few generations, the dreams will arrive.
My mother told me stories, about her childhood, about the panic that would arrive whenever the rice ran out. My grandmother, despite her new white last name, would become inconsolable, certain now that they would starve. How could she not? On her ninety seventh birthday, I counted backwards in my head until I reached 1945 from the day’s date. Then, in terror, I did it again. For some reason, I had always assumed she was a child, young enough to be terrified but not quite old enough to understand. It’s easier to swallow that way, to picture a scared child clinging to a parent who shields them from the worst side of war. That’s how I’ve imagined it, time and time again.
But there was no shielding her from those horrors. She was only eighteen when the bombs dropped. Her own home had been the target of firebombs and leaflets. She lived in Nagoya where the US military ran test missions, to ensure the real bombing wouldn’t have any technical issues. It would have been impossible not to understand.
My house always had rice growing up.
The long-term nuclear waste warning template reads: Sending this message was important to us. We consider ourselves a powerful culture. This place is not a place of honor. No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here. Nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us.
Yet, I feel that some part of me must love the bomb. That I might not exist, if such a horrible thing did not happen. I am as repulsed as I am fascinated by it, by all-American movies that play classic music over CGI explosions, by the post-apocalypse genre’s love of irradiated wastelands. Some part of me thinks that this Stockholm love is not from my grandmother, but merely from being an American, who dreads the day that someone else might do unto them what they have done to others.
I don’t look like my grandmother. We have different eyes, different hair, different face shapes. We think in different languages and were raised in different countries. Yet, the danger persists, the feeling of anxiety when the kitchen becomes empty, or when the sun is dyed red from summer’s smoke. The danger is still present, still felt by the body, and still known in the back of the mind.
The room is still warm from a summer day’s heat, despite the night’s encompassing presence.
“I had the bomb dream, again.” Hot sweat begins to cool against my spine as he rubs my back. I’ve thrown the blankets off of me in an effort to rid myself of the phantom flames. It’s still too hot in the room.
“Tell me about it?” He asks, his voice still heavy with sleep.
This mountain has no name, no temperature, no clouds or grass or snow, a barren rock below clear blue sky. A cave mouth calls to me, just ahead, burrowing deep into the earth. I try to run for it, scrambling across the sharp edges and stones.
“You were there, this time. We were on a mountain.”
In a dream, sometimes you just know something. I know that people are inside of that cave. Friends, family, lovers past and present, all praying, or hoping, or hiding from what comes next.
“What happens next?”
“The bomb happened. Same as it always does. I didn’t even see it fall.”
The bomb’s red fingers grasp at the sun, and the world is bathed in heat. In the distance, I see the distinctive mushroom cloud bloom from a rising wave of dust. For a moment, the world is still. The sun is gone. The mountain is next.
Terror, in its kindness, does not keep me here long.