This Light Between Us: A Novel of World War II

That night searchlight beams slash through darkness like slicing scissor blades. Everyone retreats into their barracks. MPs patrol the roads, their holstered weapons bigger and darker than ever. No one comes out of the barracks, but voices grumble out, angry voices, pained and shattered.

After midnight, the mess-hall bells start to toll. From every block. Over and over, urgently, continuously, solemnly. They ring all night like cathedral bells that toll for the dead. MPs drive over and force the men to stop. But as soon as the jeep drives away, they recommence. The bells ring as night cedes to dawn; they ring through the morning hours when nobody leaves their barracks, not for work, not even to eat. They ring until noon in a seemingly deserted city of tar-paper barracks.

They are the only sound in those vast empty plains of windswept nothingness.

33

DECEMBER 11, 1942

What surprises Alex most is the laughter. Five days after the riots, after he’s been forced to report to work because—surprise, surprise—no one wants to work there anymore. He he

ars it almost as soon as he steps into the staff mess hall. A tinkling, relaxed sound, with a carefree country-club quality. Over the next half hour as he maneuvers between tables with arms piled with dishes, he hears all kinds of laughter, in all its varying permutations: cackling, chortling, giggling, sniggering. He has never thought of laughter in quite this way, but it strikes him that laughter is actually a form of violence.

He carries utensils and glasses on a tray. He can barely breathe. He nears a table of off-duty MPs, the utensils rattling on the ceramic plates, the water sloshing up and down in the glasses. These MPs are young. The same age as James Kanagawa, who died with bullet holes in his back. Who died with his stomach and pancreas ripped up, who died pleading, I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die. The same age as James Ito, also riddled with bullets in his back, who died a few days later. These white young men here are laughing and full of life and enjoying a nice dinner. James Kanagawa and James Ito are presently not far from where they sit, except they are six feet under, except they are not laughing but silent; they are cold and smelly with decomposition; they are in small, cheap coffins.

Eleven others are still in the hospital recovering from bullet wounds. All shot in their backs while retreating. The Military Board of Inquiry that came to investigate tried to get the doctor on duty at the hospital that night to change the autopsy report. But Dr. James Goto refused and stood by his report: the eleven injured and two deceased were all shot in the back and sides. Days later, Dr. Goto was unceremoniously shipped off to another camp.

“—and then I tell him, ‘Yo skinny bones, time to pump some iron, why don’t you?’” Laughter. Grins.

It’s not what they’re saying that upsets Alex. It’s the silliness of it, the lightness of this banter. As if, just a stone’s throw away, ten thousand people aren’t grieving and fuming under a heavy cloud. Like they don’t matter. Like they don’t exist.

“And I want to tell him—ya know, Mr. Celery Sticks For Arms—that it doesn’t matter how much you pump, gals ain’t never gonna…”

Alex sets the glasses down, places one before every soldier. The MPs laugh, grabbing at the water. None of them thank him, none of them even look at him. They wrap their fingers around the glasses and Alex wonders if those white fingers were the ones that pulled triggers a few days ago. He wonders what they did that night after everyone had scattered, after the dust had settled, after they returned to their staff housing. Did they talk softly? Did they toss and turn, have nightmares?

Or did they laugh? Did they boast to one another?

A minute later Alex is in the kitchen, getting their entrees. From the dining hall, someone thumps the table appreciatively at a well-told joke. Alex lifts the tray of entrees. He realizes this is the last time he’ll carry food in this mess hall. This will be his very last minute in this building.

A strange calm settles over him.

“Your spaghetti with meatballs,” Alex says as he reaches the table. He tosses the first plate onto the table; it bounces, half the spaghetti sliding out of it.

“Yo, watch it kid.”

“Oh, you want some spaghetti, do you?” He tosses the next plate even more roughly, and this time all the spaghetti slides off the plate and into the lap of the MP.

“What the hell!” The young man stands up, outraged. A large dark splotch in his groin area, spaghetti strands dangling off like pubic hair. “What the hell, kid?”

“Spaghetti for you, too, sir.” Another plate flung to the far side of the table, the whole plate bouncing like a skipping stone, striking the man in the chest. Pasta sauce and spaghetti drapes across his narrow chest. He looks like a man shotgun-blasted in the chest.

All the men are rising out of their chairs now. Everyone in the dining hall has turned to look. Alex glares at their white skin, their blond and brown and ginger hair, their green and blue eyes.

“I’ve got spaghetti for all of you,” Alex says. “And spaghetti for you, and you, and you”—each you punctuated with a tossed plate. The plates are crashing to the table now, smashing into broken porcelain. Spaghetti and red sauce and meatballs flying around.

A hand grabs his shoulder, upending the whole tray. A ridiculously loud clatter like a cymbal dropped. People at other tables are half standing out of their chairs.

“Who the hell do you think you are?”

Alex responds with a calm he never thought he could possess in the heat of such a moment. His unpremeditated words: “I am James Ito.”

“The hell?” The seven men, glaring at him, moving toward him.

More chairs sliding back, footsteps quickly approaching.

“You have it coming, kid,” one of the men says, wiping off spaghetti.

“Don’t call me kid. Call me James Ito. Call me James Kanagawa.”

“You’re dead.” The man grabs Alex by his shirt. Right at the base of his neck. “You son of a—”

“Stand down, officer!”

Everyone freezes.

It’s Director Ralph Merritt. His face bright red, yelling from across the cafeteria. “I said stand down!”

The man lets go of Alex.

“Get out, kid,” Ralph Merritt says.

Alex doesn’t realize his hands are bunched into fists. He relaxes them, his fingernails leaving crescent marks in his palm. He walks through the group of men, refusing to turn his shoulders to slide through. Shoulders bump, elbows graze. Alex walks across the cafeteria, undoing his apron, letting it drop to the floor.

34

DECEMBER 1942–JANUARY 1943

Winter arrives in earnest, baring its merciless fangs.

Everyone yearns for just one hour of warmth, one hour to bask in the blazing sun in T-shirt and shorts, to sweat, to pant, to swear never to complain about the heat again.

Old men and old women dream of hot public baths where steam rises from the water like ghosts and ciphers.

Children dream of fireplace hearths; of feet toasty in warm bunny slippers, and marshmallows held out on sticks and roasted into a perfect char, shadows and firelight flickering across their faces.

Teenagers want to stop shivering in cold empty barracks. Want to stop envisioning their alternate selves living full lives back in their hometowns, a world untouched by war and filled with parties at the beach; double features at the local drive-in; breakfasts of unlimited, unrationed bacon and butter; and nighttime drives in the Model T, the warm summer wind in their hair.

Young lovers are not anymore; not young, not lovers.

During the cold endless nights, Alex stares for hours at the rafters overhead. He wonders if his tussle with the camp staff is the reason Father’s second release petition was just denied. He wonders if his rash action has doomed Father, slammed shut all doors. The guilt gnaws at him.

He worries about Charlie. All the time; it borders on obsession. He hasn’t heard from her in four months, and he wants to believe she made it safely out of Paris and is now in Nice. But at night the worst thoughts—that she is in prison somewhere, languishing—keep him awake.

Some nights he simply wants to curl up and shut himself off from everyone, from the world. He feels himself becoming callous inside, his heart becoming as hard as the icy ground outside.

He is not alone. Everyone around him seems to be hardening. Their hearts hardening against the camp staff. Against the MPs. Against parents. Against each other. Against, at last, America.

35

JANUARY 24, 1943

Alex is watching a movie when a strange feeling comes over him.

He’s in a converted mess-hall-turned-movie-theater with several dozen other viewers. In the warmer months when the night is balmy and stars shine overhead, movies are shown in a firebreak between blocks. Hundreds lay their blankets on the ground and watch Road to Zanzibar or Here Comes Mr. Jordan or Sweater Girl on a screen as large as a drive-in screen. But in the winter, movies are moved indoors.

Alex is sitting beside Sandy Soto, a girl who had unexpectedly spoken to him th

at morning in church just as service ended.

“Want to see a movie tonight?” She was in the pew in front of his, returning a Bible to its holder. Her large eyes were on his.

“Me?”

She straightened her back. “Come on. Alex.”

“Huh? What?”

She blew the bangs out of her eyes. “This is awkward enough, a girl asking out a guy. But we’re in the middle of a desert with absolutely nothing to do. What excuse could you possibly think of?”

Not a single one, apparently. Because hours later, with the sun beginning to set outside, he finds himself seated next to her. The “theater” is crowded, surprisingly so. Alex had expected the place to be half-full at best. But almost every chair is taken.

Perhaps people are simply stir-crazy from being cooped up in their barracks for weeks on end. After the riot, the city of ten thousand ground to a halt. Martial law was imposed. Schools were shut down for over a month. Children were forced to remain indoors by nervous parents. People refused to report to work, and basic services came to a screeching stop. Barracks stayed dark at night.

But maybe that is coming to an end, Alex thinks, looking around. The young can take confinement for only so long.

The opening credits of the movie, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, begin to roll. When Maureen O’Hara’s name appears in the opening credits someone yells out, “Ohara? She’s Japanese?” And there is group laughter, the first such sound in weeks.

The movie, to Alex’s surprise, lures him in. He’s mesmerized by the scenes of Paris even though he knows the movie was likely shot on some Hollywood soundstage. Sucked into the screen, he’s transported from the dust-ghetto of Manzanar to the bell tower of the Notre Dame cathedral. Even in black-and-white, Paris is beautiful. The city of lights. The city of splendor. The city of dreams. Of love. The city of Charlie Lévy. He can almost smell its air, feel its cobblestones beneath his feet.

By the time the hunchback rages to Maureen O’Hara, “I’m not a man, I’m not a beast, I’m as shapeless as the man in the moon!” Alex has all but forgotten his immediate surroundings. He’s in Paris.