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Where No One Belongs by Adam Zang Competition: Short Story Challenge 2008, First Round Genre: Historical Fiction Subject: Sewing Original Illustration by Yevgenia Nayberg
Dr. Jonas David Mendelssohn has one hand. He
sewed up his wrist on a Japanese island and now he sews up the seams of
torn skin of these prisoners in Topaz, Utah. He prescribes aspirin and
water and morphine. In makeshift barracks, he diagnoses bronchitis and
sprained ankles. The internee doctors send the ones with cuts his way
even though he only has one hand. They call him Dr. Mender. Rioko is sick. She is sick in her heart and in
her foot. She has a fever and no water. Rioko lays in a small cot under
an itchy green blanket with her little sister, Cola. Cola says Rioko
stinks. Cola says that maybe she won’t sleep with Rioko anymore if she
keeps farting. Cola shifts, sticking her butt out, and immediately falls
back asleep. “Sorry,” Rioko thinks she says. She thinks about
how her shoes are the same color as the Utah desert. They used to be
bright white but now they are burnt like the earth. She always wears
them to bed. She is scared. She is sick. Dr. Mender stares out into the empty Utah
desert. He drinks coffee and tries not to think about old Mr. Ryu and
the gaping hole in his face, and Paul, the sentry guard standing
stupidly and arrogantly over the dead body, believing he has done no
wrong, ready to shoot again. Dr. Mender tries to think about the day
ahead and not the days and lives and limbs that are behind him. Rioko does not want to wake up for breakfast.
Cola shakes and shakes and shakes her sister’s body. Rioko can see her
sister as if through a peephole in a door, disproportionably comic.
Rioko is thirsty. Cola rips the covers away, a crowd growing around
Rioko’s bed. Some noses wrinkle at the stink. A hand brushes across her
foot and Rioko would scream if she didn’t feel so far away. Rioko is in
the middle of the desert and so is everyone else. They are where no one
belongs. Dr. Mender contemplates the girl’s shoes. The
left shoe is burnt orange and dry, the shoelace carefully double
knotted. The right shoe is dark red, wet and swollen. Dr. Mender does not scare easily but he is
frightened for the girl. He has given her morphine and she has fallen
asleep. Her face is narrow. She has chapped lips and her chin has an
upward tilt. Her name is Rioko and this is the name he whispers
soothingly as he cuts the canvas of her right shoe with a pair of
stainless steel scissors. Her name slides out of his throat like cool
water. Rioko Rioko Rioko… The seams break easily, and the shoe falls
away like a soggy husk. Her sock is an amalgamation of desert dust
turned mud, blood, puss and cotton. There is a small hole in bottom the
sock, directly in the middle of the sole of Rioko’s foot. Dr. Mender
starts the cut at the hole, gently moving the scissors up her ankle, the
stump of his left hand holding the girl’s leg steady. Rioko Rioko Rioko… Rioko wakes up and she does not scream. Maybe it
is because she has morphine coursing through her veins. Maybe it is
because she has been locked in this prison for seven months. Maybe it is
because she hears her name softly echoing off the white washed walls of
this cinder block infirmary. Rioko Rioko Rioko…
She stares at the man holding her foot, his fingers wrapped around her
ankle, the stump of his left wrist gingerly tamping the arch of her
foot, her big toe, the sole of her ankle. She cannot feel him do this.
Her foot, she thinks, has been invaded by the Utah desert. It does not
belong to her anymore. She wants to tell this white man, his name is Dr.
Mender—he once gave Cola some anti-septic after she was stung by a
bee—she wants to tell Dr. Mender that she is sorry, but this isn’t her
foot any longer. Nothing escapes her throat except dust. She is thirsty.
Dr. Mender looks up at her and smiles. Through the lenses of his
glasses, Rioko sees that his eyes are far away, like her. She imagines
he sees this place through a telescope like she does. He sets down the
foot and helps her take a sip of water. “I’m glad you’re awake,” he
says, catching a rivulet of water on her chin with a handkerchief. “I
was getting a little lonely.” Dr. Mender tells the girl that her foot will
have to come off. She tells him to give it to the desert, to bury it and
to sew up her leg so that the desert cannot take that too. “They are
trying to take it all,” she says. “Everything we had we no longer have.”
Dr. Mender tries to make a joke, something about how she can tell her
children that she lost her toes in Topaz. He feels stupid after saying
this. She gives him a forgiving look, allowing him to try again. “How
did this happen?” he asks.
“Suddenly,” she says. Cola says that she is sorry for calling Rioko
stinky. Cola cries and cries and cries… This makes Rioko want to cry but
her tear ducts have been fire blasted, wiped bone dry.
Dr. Mender stands at the foot of the bed, his chin resting on his stump.
“How is your bee sting, Cola?” Dr. Mender asks.
“F-fine,” says Cola.
“I really like your name,” says Dr. Mender.
Rioko watches Cola gather her composure and she is proud. She is proud
of Cola’s long straight black hair and the way she blinks her eyes, not
ashamed of the tears on her red cheeks. “Thanks,” says Cola. “I made it
up myself.” “Will this make me feel better?” Rioko asks.
“It should,” says Dr. Mender.
“What if it doesn’t?”
“My job is to make sure you get better and I promise I will.” A nurse asks Dr.
Mender if he would like her to thread the needle, but he insists on
doing it himself. He holds the needle against his chin with the stump of
his wrist and pushes the thread through the needle’s empty eye with his
good hand. He is cross-eyed and his tongue sticks out of his mouth when
he does this. It is a funny sight, this one-handed doctor threading a
needle, but the nurse does not laugh even though Dr. Mender wishes she
would.
Rioko’s leg stares back at him. The bright red of her calf muscle, the
glaring white of her tibia, the dainty circle of her fibula—it is
perfect. It is all how it should be. He has already stitched the blood
vessels and now he and the nurse fold the flaps of Rioko’s skin like
wrapping paper, evenly and with care. Dr. Mender removes the needle from
his lips and sews the seams with delicate and precise movements. He
hopes, in time, that Rioko will not be able to see her scar, that she
can fool herself into thinking this is how she has always been. Rioko wakes up. A nurse brings her water. Rioko
drinks it down. Her throat is scratchy. She drinks more water. She is
still thirsty. No matter how much she drinks, it is not enough. Her leg,
wrapped in a fist of white gauze, throbs in time with her heartbeat. There are families of Japanese in the northern
states now, Dr. Mender knows. They are finding new homes, but they are
not really home. Dr. Mender is the color of the desert. He is up to his
shoulders in a hole he has dug with a military shovel. The cactus above
him provides no shade. It is difficult to dig with one hand, but he
manages. He remembers the trenches he helped dig on a Japanese beach,
taking breaks to remind captains to remind soldiers to keep hydrated. He
used two hands then. He wanted to save lives, not bury them. They swam
in the ocean and waited to get bombed. “Can I touch it?” Cola asks.
Rioko shakes her head. No.
“Why not?” Cola asks.
“You might get infected.”
Cola’s face clouds over, the blood slowly percolating under her skin.
She takes a tiny step back. Rioko knows that she has given Cola a
horrible thought that she might never forget. Dr. Mender redresses
Rioko’s leg. “It is healing beautifully. The stitches can come out
Tuesday,” he says. “Pretty soon, we’ll be able to get you out of this
bed and send you back—” Dr. Mender stops immediately. Out of old habit,
he was going to say home.
He checks Rioko’s face to see if she has caught his slip. She has.
“How did you lose your hand, Dr. Mender?” she asks.
It is two in the morning. He stabs a morphine needle in Private Kramer’s
forearm and dry heaves when he sees most of Private Kramer’s guts
spilled out onto the beach. Bullets, shrapnel and sand fly around his
ears like a hive of angry bees, slicing, diving and howling. He reaches
back to his med pack for another syringe but something is wrong. He
roots his hand into the bag, but he can’t move his fingers—he can’t
feel
his fingers. There is a bright flash of a flare and he pulls his hand
out and he sees that he has no hand. He calls Private Kramer’s name, but
Private Kramer is dead and he realizes that he has not saved anyone, not
one person. He thinks this is some
kind of joke, maybe even some kind of cruel dream. And then the pain
comes and it is no dream.
“Suddenly,” Dr. Mender says. Rioko is sick. She is sick in her heart. She is
thirsty even though she has had as much water as she can drink.
Dr. Mender carefully takes out the thread from her leg. A nurse holds a
mirror so that Rioko can see. Dr. Mender undoes what he has done, stitch
by stitch. There is a bright red zigzag across the stump. It reminds
Rioko of the sunset here, the image that crosses her field of vision
after she clamps her eyes shut as hard as she can.
Dr. Mender shows her how to use her crutches, to let them walk ahead of
her. She trips. She falls. Dr. Mender holds out his wrist for her to
take and she breaks. She feels the flood pouring out of her and forgets
all of the lessons she was ever taught. Respect your elders. Children
should be seen and not heard. Don’t raise your voice in anger.
“You lost your stupid hand and because of that, you got to go home! I
gave my leg to you and you still won’t let me go! You got to go home!
Why can’t we? You didn’t make me better! Why can’t—” She stops as
abruptly as she started, her lungs and belly as empty as a barren well
waiting to be filled in with silt and dust. Dr. Mender drinks his coffee and calls all of
the friends he knows. He tells them his story. Rioko eats liver at
the mess hall. She asks Cola to sleep in her bed but Cola is too scared.
Rioko uses the open-stalled bathroom, not caring anymore if anyone can
see her and her abbreviated leg not quite touching the floor. She dreams
about Dr. Mender sewing her eyelids shut but this still doesn’t keep out
the dust, her vision a permanent zigzag of scarred sunsets. She wakes up
and asks Cola to sleep in her bed, but she will not. Rioko lets her
crutches walk ahead of her. She eats hearts and kidneys at the mess
hall. Rioko’s stomach fills up with sand, like an hourglass. She thinks
that Dr. Mender sealed the desert up inside of her and the invasion will
never end. She calls old Mr. Ryu’s orphan dog many names of hope and he
will not come to her.
Dr. Mender has a picture and a letter. These are
good people, he knows. They live in the cold weather, but they are warm
and caring and want to help. Rioko stares at her shoe. She sits in the dust.
The adults gather in the shade, talking quietly. Cola plays with the
fish in the cement fish pool with the other kids, screeching and
laughing. Rioko takes off her shoe and wiggles her toes. She struggles
upright and lets the crutches walk her to the fence. Squinting against
the sun, she glares up at the sentry tower and hurls her shoe over the
fence as far as she can. It lands next to a rock and settles. She glares
at the sentry tower. Everything is silent. She can feel their eyes on
her. She tests the strength of the fence and contemplates the barbed
wire overhead. She jams her good foot in a hole and starts to climb,
awkwardly and ferociously. She sees herself through a telescope in an
overhead view, an awkward tripod scaling a wall in the middle of
nowhere. She wants her shoe back. She wants them to shoot her so she can
bleed out all of the sand in her guts. She weighs a million pounds, but
still she climbs skyward.
“Where’s Minnesota?” Cola asks. Rioko looks over her shoulder and sees
her sister with an envelope and a picture. Dr. Mender stands about ten
feet behind Cola and stares at the sentry tower.
“Someone wants us to live in their home,” Cola yells. “Do you want to
go?” Rioko does not move. Dr. Mender catches the glint of gunmetal in the sentry tower and then turns back to the scene in front of him. In another world, this one-footed girl stuck on a fence in Topaz, Utah is a funny sight. Dr. Mender wishes someone would laugh, but no one does.
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