Читать книгу Dandarians - Lee Ann Roripaugh - Страница 11

HIROSHIMA, MON AMOUR

Spasmed jerk and gutter of Hiroshima newsreels unwinding inside a movie set in Hiroshima, where the actress in the movie plays an actress making a movie about Hiroshima and peace. A movie about (re)membering the (dis)membered. A movie about the horror of forgetfulness.

It is here, inside this movie, where I will walk tonight, along black-and-white streets of borrowed time, framed within the movie set of a movie set; where brazen neon flickers numinous promises, fictional lovers first illuminated, then dowsed, like a candle pinched between thumb and forefinger. Can you see me? Will you follow?

You’re destroying me / You’re good for me.

Late-night café. Crisp pale beer. Shadows of moths’ small black hearts charred by the sudden flash and immolation of rice-paper lanterns. Insatiable koi mouthing the surface of the garden’s pond: like an agitation of insects against a lit window; like your face, illuminated by the quiet electric glow of your computer screen as you read; like my face, lit by my words as I write them to you.

Here, on the other side of your screen, inside the movie taking place within a movie about Hiroshima, about the illusion of love, about the illusion of not forgetting, I will fabricate this story rising like wild iris from a cancerous gourd of ash. I will tell you I love you. I will promise never to forget. Here, at ground zero, it will all be true.

She: Hiroshima was blanketed with flowers. There were cornflowers and gladiolas everywhere, and morning glories and day lilies that rose again from the ashes with an extraordinary vigor, quite unheard of for flowers till then. I didn’t make anything up.

He: You made it all up.

Here, on the other side of your screen, by the river called Ota, which runs by the city of my Japanese ancestors, near the American occupation camp where my Japanese mother met my American father while typing like the sound of rain dropping, the clouds are slung low and bruised like sulky pansies, and glimpses of the sky behind are a surreal, too-bright Dali blue. Here, I will walk deeper, and deeper still, into the black-and-white interior of the narrative’s narrative.