Nightlight

When I was young, the “grandfather” I knew was Thorold, the husband of my “grandma” Mary, who cleaned the house and helped take care of my brother and me. He and Mary were salt-of-the-earth Midwesterners, folks who said “sir” and “ma’am” and ate meatloaf and mashed potatoes, Buick owners, quilters, and good Catholics who laughed from their bellies. Thorold’s hair was thin and had gone entirely white, and he had to carry an oxygen tank with him, but when my brother and I stayed at their house, as we often did when my parents needed a night out, he stood and gestured with his free arm as he told us of America before and during the war, holding forth for a rapt audience.

If we were lucky, Thorold would show us his inventions and tools—he’d been an inventor before and after his time in the military, and had an array of welding equipment and wires, circuit boards and bulbs. He had American flags, posters of servicemen in uniform, and advertisements for American automakers on the wall of his shop. He told stories of that world, which was to say, of his past: piloting biplanes through tricks and stalls, punching out unmannerly men in barracks and bars. I liked Thorold’s unambiguous Americanness, the Kansas of his origins, the same as Superman. I was obsessed with He-Man and Superman, with their muscles and confidence, their heroic masculinity. In school, I’d been made aware that I was a short, slight Japanese boy in the taunts of classmates at recess, and so already I wanted to be someone else—if not extraordinary, then at least ordinary enough to be left alone.

Thorold said that sometimes you had to learn to “put ‘em up.” He gave me a small silver knife with a broken blade tip that had been his back in the war, and when I cut myself with it, he helped me bandage the cut and come up with a story so my parents wouldn’t take the knife away. In the last year of his life, he gave me a nightlight that bore a grave history—I remember that was how he said it—because he had fashioned it from empty bomb canisters after the war, and because the switch that he had used was the same trigger switch he had designed and installed on his greatest project: the Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The lamp’s sides and base were the bomb canister, stainless steel like my mother’s prized cooking pan but unshiny, matte and dull and heavy with the purpose and judgment of the thick sides and base the canister had been made to render. The fixture had been screwed in at the top where the wires and mechanism would have rested, an unassuming wire cage that enclosed a single yellow bulb. The shade was burgundy, and the light that shone through it was a dark red, the red of stage curtains and coffins. The lamp switched on with a startingly loud clack like a trigger and then bathed my room each night in a pale arterial glow. Thorold passed, but I slept beneath that light through high school.

In seventh grade, at Monroe Middle School where I was one of two Asian students in a school of five hundred, I was assigned a report on World War II history. I decided to write about the crew of the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb bearing the switch in my nightlight. I brought the light to school, and looking as it did like a piece of World War II ordinance, boys gathered around my desk. When I told them what it was, there was silence then a burst of noise as they fought to touch it and exclaimed over its deadliness. Only my friend Jeremy Kramer, a white kid from the trailer park who wasn’t going to betray excitement over anything, stayed back and instead slapped me on the back and shook his head. “Man, you’re COLD. I mean, that thing was made to murder Japs.”

“Why is that—cold?”

He raised his eyebrows. “I mean, you know.” He raised both hands and made a picture frame with his fingers, enclosing my face.

I turned so he couldn’t see my face flush. “Oh. Right.”

I didn’t bring the nightlight out during my presentation, instead keeping to the history the books had told about the “grave” necessity of dropping the bombs on densely populated urban areas. I shared how the men on the Gay described the lightening clank as the bomb left the bay—how they cheered like a stadium crowd, how it was eerily silent until the shockwaves struck. They were men who’d done their brave duty, and we could all agree the world was made a better place. I saw no irony in my celebration of the bombing of families, grandmothers and grandfathers and infants and children. I believed the problem was that my face betrayed me as Japanese.

I stopped sleeping with the light, but I could not understand. I knew Thorold had loved me in his way, and I knew Thorold had made that bomb explode. How could I have known that good and evil are not discrete provinces, that a man gentle with his mother can beat his lover to death? How could I have known that so many of the gifts of whiteness were meant to kill me?