This Light Between Us: A Novel of World War II

Hours later he is still walking. Only he is hobbling now, his eyes bleary and unfocused.

Asphyxiation by carbon monoxide … burning alive.

The words still clinging, refusing to detach from the wet of his brain.

Still he keeps walking. The sun begins its descent. Hours later it drops behind Mount Whitney. Soft dusk light streams past that raised mountain like river water around a large boulder, the light filtering across the plains, and enduing the land with softness. The barbed-wire fence catches the last of this light, its coiled metal softly glittering.

The scenery is meaningless to him.

Soon the air turns a cold black. The stars come out in force, piercing and sharp.

He finds himself in Block 11. Standing before a packed mess hall. Music from a miked-up phonograph blares out. Through the doorway Alex can see tables and benches pushed off to the side, a few streamers strung between ceiling beams. It’s Dance Night. Young couples, mostly older teenagers, crowd the dance floor, jitterbugging away. Everyone trying to shake off the gloom that settled over the camp after the riot and never quite went away. Wanting to be young and crazy and carefree, or at least remember what it was once like, and forget what it is like now.

There will be cups of water inside, he thinks, perhaps some simple snacks. It will be warm. Benches to sit on, rest his feet. He steps toward the mess hall. Stops at the doorway.

For a long time he stares at all the teens inside. They’re worried about the lack of pomade in their hair, or if they should finally ask that person to slow dance, or if he’s holding her hand too tightly, if his palms are sweaty, if he’s going to walk her home tonight and perhaps even steal a sweet first kiss in the moonlight.

They’re not worried about death in a slaughterhouse. Not worried if they’ll die by asphyxiation or embolism or burning or by the “good old-fashioned system” of being gunned down naked.

“Hey, buddy, you going in or what?” someone says from behind.

He spins around, stumbles down the two steps. Nausea bubbles up his gut into his head. He starts walking again. Without direction, only wanting distance. The ground crunching beneath his boots, the wind whistling between the dark barracks. Another emotion blooms under the soil of nausea. A tingle. Beginning in the base of his spine, spreading. That same sensation he’d felt weeks ago while watching The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

He lets it guide him. Walks westward, toward the looming silhouette of the Sierra Mountains. Ten minutes later, the tingle has only increased into a dull throbbing that has worked its way up his spine, and through his rib cage. A tugging. A prodding. Warm, not entirely unpleasant.

He is past Block 29 when he hears shouting. People are peering out of windows and through doorways, pointing at the sky. He glances upward.

Towering over the barracks is a swirling black knot of a dust storm. A blackness bleeding into the starlit sky, snuffing out the moon, the stars, darkness itself as it churns toward him.

Everyone starts running. Someone shouts in Japanese, a curse, a cry for help, it’s hard to tell. Stragglers race to nearby barracks, banging on locked doors, begging to be let in. Alex breaks into a sprint as the dust storm catches up and swallows him whole. He runs, blindly now in the swirling haze, trying to outpace it, knowing he can’t. He collapses to his knees, and curls into a fetal position as his face is pelted with dust. It is the sting of a thousand wasps and hornets and bees. Sand coats his teeth, sticks against his tongue and the roof of his mouth.

A minute later the dust storm passes. Starlight filters down. Alex stands up, spits. He is surprised to find himself in Rose Park, a large, elaborate park built by volunteers, now in the final stages of construction. Decorative boulders and half-filled ponds glimmer dimly in the moonlight. A curved footbridge constructed out of wood and bamboo arches over one of the ponds, its frame silhouetted against the quivering reflection of stars. Across the way, a half-finished gazebo. Nobody is supposed to be in this park while construction continues, while rocks are erected and rose seedlings planted.

But he sees someone there. Standing on the footbridge at the top of the arched crest.

A teenage girl.

Charlie Lévy.

Alex stops breathing.

Tonight there is no color emanating from her. No orange, no pink. Only a gray hue. She is staring at him.

He walks toward the footbridge.

Her hair is all gone. Completely shaven off. But not a clean shave; ugly tufts are clumped randomly about. Her cheeks sallow, her eyes sunken. Skinny. She is a charcoal etching. A drab work dress flutters about her, blown by the wind. A dying moth.

He nears, dust falling off his shoulders. He smells ash.

“Charlie?”

She flinches at the question.

He shouldn’t have. Shouldn’t have said it like a question. Because who else could it be but her?

Her eyes fall. Like death, like the blades of a guillotine falling. The light in them snuffed out.

“Charlie!” He steps forward, onto the bamboo planks of the footbridge, a bridge of dust and ash. He stops near the crest. Now they are close enough to touch. He sees her face clearly for the first time. A plain face, she had once described herself, unremarkable. She is wrong.

He drinks her in. The thick eyebrows, the large eyes tapering to, on her left side, a trinity of small moles. He wonders if she has always been so thin. If her cheekbones have always so protruded.

My eyes, she also once wrote, they have a fire in them. She is right. Even now, an inferno burns. A sharp clear light that is not afraid to look at the world in the face, and stare it down.

But she sways now, exhausted. She grabs for the rail with her left arm, and that is when Alex sees it. A curious tattoo on the soft underside of her forearm, a number. 14873.

The smell of ash is stronger now.

He reaches forward, slowly moves his hand to her cheek. But instead of touching skin, he feels only air.

“Charlie…”

Her eyes hold his, shiny and damp. And then she starts to fade.

No. Too soon. Not yet.

He reaches for her again. But his hand again only sweeps through air. Cold air, ashy and sooty.

“Don’t go, Charlie!” he pleads.

She tries to offer a brave smile, her lips peeling back to reveal a dark film of disease over her upper teeth. But she falters; her eyes fill and for a moment, magnified by the tears, the light in her eyes shines brighter. But even Charlie Lévy’s eyes cannot burn through this darkness.

“Charlie!”

She reaches out with her own hand to touch his face. But he feels nothing, not skin, not heat. Still he leans his face into her palm, where her hand is cupping his cheek. Tears fall from her eyes, cutting through the grime caked on her face. And as she fades away, she whispers words he cannot hear but that are clear and audible in his head.

Find me, Alex.

And then she is gone.

Even the smell of her, of ash and soot, gone.

He is all alone in Rose Park. He is all alone in the whole camp. He is all alone in the whole world.

40

MARCH 19, 1943

Find me, Alex. Last night, staring out the black window before collapsing into sleep, he was determined to do just that. He’d enlist, go to Europe, find her. To hell with the odds.

But in the morning, in the cold bright daylight, the idea is ridiculous. Of all the reasons to enlist, of all the reasons to put himself in harm’s way, it cannot be because of a vision. Even he, Turtle Boy, knows that. Even he knows the odds of finding Charlie, assuming he’s even sent to Europe, are so infinitesimal as to be negligible.

Besides, he thinks, it was all a dream. A stupid dream. A figment of his overripe, guilt-ridden imagination, brought on by the New Republic article.

For a long time he does not get out of bed. He cannot summon the willpower. He throws his arm over his eyes, wants to block out the light, the sound of snores coming from all around.

r /> Strange: Mother seems unusually quiet. No coughing or wheezing.

He turns, cracks open his eyes. She is still in bed, under a pile of blankets. An empty cot is pulled up next to hers. Father’s. It has sat empty for over a year. We all need something outside these fences.

He rubs his face. Looks again at Mother. The pile of blankets does not move.

“Mother?”

He rises, walks over to her. The wood beneath his feet is cold and hard as the top of a frozen coffin. He reaches down. Gives her shoulder a gentle shake. She doesn’t respond, and his throat suddenly goes dry. He pulls her around so he can see her face.

She smacks her lips, grunts in her sleep. Relief floods him; then just as quickly, concern. Mother’s face is gray and scrunched up into a scowl. Wisps of hair dangle lifelessly down, unwound spools of wire. In the cold, she shivers like a soaked baby bird, deathly thin. She’s aged twenty years, it seems, since leaving Bainbridge Island.

As he pulls the blanket up over her shoulder, he feels the outline of something hard beneath. He peels the blanket back, and sees it: a photo frame clasped in her cold hands. It’s Mother and Father’s wedding photo. He stares at her youthful face in the photo taken decades ago, then at her sleeping craggy face—somehow even more colorless than the black-and-white photo—next to it. The shock of this contrast, not between youth and age, but life and death.

Without Father, she’s free-falling into the grave.

Unable to stand the inertia and staleness of this cold room anymore, he throws on his coat, pushes out. A frigid brisk wind sieves between the barracks, cuts through him. He walks quickly, trying to stomp warmth into his cold feet, get his blood circulating. But an hour later, having circled the camp several times already, his face is a frozen carcass, his feet blocks of ice.

Dark clouds gather over the Sierra Nevada. A gray settles over the camp.

At the main entrance, he notices a bus that’s just pulled into the camp, its engine clanking loudly, the dust left in its wake still afloat behind it. Only a handful of people inside.

Curious, Alex watches.