I remember being in Osaka in Honchu many years ago. We were standing at a street corner. A small man approached us with a square of photographic paper. He showed it to us.
The man said it was a photograph of his father, who had been lost in the heated vapors of August 9th.
He said, “My mother said he was an unlucky man. She said he disappeared in a great burst of light.” He laughed. The man seemed not to believe what his mother had said but could neither confirm nor deny the truth.
In the photograph, which was very old and had the consistency of worn tissue paper, I could make out the mere outline of a figure, a fragmented traceline, washed out by sun or over-exposed lamp light, little more than a blank image.
“Why is it,” I asked my brother, “that in almost all the photographs we have of Dad he’s laughing but I really can’t remember what his laughter sounds like? I never remember him laughing.”
“I have three cameras in my house and we never use them,” my brother said.
One day, my mother was on her porch laughing with friends. One of her friends had brought a jar filled with oil from the Gulf of Mexico. I walked up the steps of the porch. Large bees hovered heavily among the flowers. I held my hand up to one of the bees and it veered away.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
The women, many of whom were alone and visited my mother frequently, threatened that they would all someday live together in the house and frighten children on Halloween, that they would die together in forgetfulness. I rarely visit my mother.
One of the women said, “It’s oil from the Gulf. I dipped it for a souvenir.”
“That’s horrible,” I told her.
“Take a picture of it,” my mother said, grinning.
“Yes, take a picture of it,” said the woman who’d brought it. “Take a picture of me drinking it.”
All the women were drinking wine and had obviously had more than one glass.
A woman in a baseball cap said, “Laura, your son reminds me of every man I ever hated.”
My mother said, “You mean Bill or Henry?”
“Both those assholes,” the woman confirmed.
Years ago I asked my father about his father. “He was a train engineer,” my father said.
“An operator?” I asked.
“Something like that,” he said.
On another occasion, perhaps over some dinner out, my father said, “My father had just one hand. He lost the other hand because of his inexperience with a chain saw. He worked in lumber. He used to poke us with his stump, just jab us with it, and he’d say, ‘Got ya, got ya.'”
“I thought you said he was a train engineer,” I remember saying.
“Well,” my father said, “whoever told you that’s a goddamned liar” and then he raised a glass to his father’s hand–“A toast,” he said, “a toast to my poor father’s lost hand, lost in the woods, buried by leaves, and to his stump, the stump he turned into a sword”–and we joined him in the toast and I asked my father no further questions.
