The depths of arcane knowledge she explored in that closet. The subject of blindfolds, for example. She came to know more about blindfolds than any human not similarly situated might ever have suspected there was to know. The different materials they were made from, the different methods of fastening them, their different purposes: concealment of the world or inducement to terror. Blindfolds made of bed sheets were most comfortable, but their tendency to loosen and slip down filled her with panic. Panic in the dark was not good. It was as limitless as the blackness and totally irresistible. When she could discern that the blindfold was no longer functioning, she would attempt to position herself in a way that she thought would indicate total noncomplicity in its failure. There she would cower. Blame was always a matter of who happened to discover her in there, concealing her wily capacity to examine the timeless dark. Cin would curse her, Zoya would roughly retie the blindfold, sometimes making it impossible to breathe through her nose, Teko would hit her, Cujo would rarely notice, and Gelina would cluck sympathetically. They put a pillowcase over her head and wound cord or twine around her neck to hold it on, but for some reason that didn’t last. Someone came up with the idea of taping cotton to her eyes, wads of surgical cotton pulled from a blue box with a big red cross on it and then taped to her face. When she wept, the cotton efficiently absorbed the tears, holding them there, a soggy memento to her despair. Plus she got a kind of diaper rash on her face. Any decent blindfold design needs to take tears into account. People who are left tied up and blindfolded in little closets tend to cry, frequently. They talked about pinning newborn-size Pampers to her face, but the Pampers were too expensive. They tried sanitary napkins instead, but they just fell off, leaving her blinking in the dark, wondering whether she was going to get killed, socked in the face, hauled over the coals, or commiserated with. Finally they just fastened sponges to her eyes with thick elastic bands. That worked all right. Everybody achieved a satisfactory middle ground with that one. It seemed to fulfill the requisite need for grotesquerie; it blinded her; it was uncomfortable but not distractingly so. Thus successfully disabled, she continued to wait. She kept expecting to cross the threshold beyond which she would take a stand, of some kind, but she surprised herself, with her ability to go farther and farther, without protest, eating when she was told, waking up when she was told, bathing when she was told, having sex when she was told, speaking the words she was told to speak. It did not strike her as weakness, not in the least. Strength, rather. Strength that she could eat such food, in the dark. Strength that she could pull herself fully awake at a moment’s notice, ready to agree with Cinque, to denounce the world. Strength that she could plod blindfolded and naked through the crowded apartment and then sink her bones into the grimy tub. Strength that she could endure the unwanted groping and gasping on the floor of her closet. Strength that she could learn to be another person, that she could empty the reliquary of herself, part with so much secret knowledge without once asking, “Is this really me? Then where do I think I’m going?” without even a moment’s nostalgia. If it was nostalgia she was after then it was a nostalgic attachment to the functions of her medulla oblongata that she developed; to her old pals respiration, circulation, and kinesthesia; to the feel of the beaten-down carpet under her skinny butt.
“So are you going to do it or what?” she asks Joan.
“I said forget about it. And not just because it is a stupid idea or because I am offended, though it is and I am. But because bright ideas like this should have come like a month ago already, while we’re still on Ninetieth Street. But they just don’t think these things through, do they?”
“Well, Mel’s is the total case in point.”
“How horrible that must have been. Well, see. It happened how? Someone got a bright idea all of the sudden. There’s a time to improvise, when you can just go off, and other time when you stick to your script.”
“There was no script,” says Tania. “That was the problem.”
“I have my own script. The pigs come out here, get us surrounded, I go out the door with my arms up in the air. That’s my script. Take me, I’m all yours. What’s jail next to a million years in a hole in the ground? I can get along in prison. I can get along in any place.”
Joan Shimada was from anyplace. She was sansei; her parents had been born in the United States, but did that mean dick all as the Christmas season approached California in 1941? No, by then all eyes were on the coastal skies, looking out for treacherous, crafty, devious, scheming, wily, perfidious Japs in their “Zekes,” “Kates,” and “Bettys,” zooming in for another cowardly sneak attack. None seemed to show up, so by and by Californians had to look closer to home, finding what they sought in the merchants and tradesmen of Japanese descent who’d settled in the state, sometimes several generations previously. FBI men came into the shops and groceries, going through vegetable bins and slitting open sealed cartons, tossing the back offices, looking for transmitters and secret communiques from the Land of the Rising Sun.
President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 had the putative purpose of directing the secretary of war to “prescribe military areas … from which any or all persons may be excluded.” In practice, this was understood to mean excluding people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast. Usefully, Governor Chase Clark of Idaho suggested before a congressional committee at around this time that Japanese would be welcome in his state if they were confined to guarded concentration camps, thereby helping solve the problem of what, exactly, to do with all those “excluded.”
Thus in March the first of those so excluded began to arrive at “relocation centers,” such as the one at Manzanar, where Joan’s mother and father found themselves one morning after a long and uncomfortable bus ride. Dust flew at them, waves of sandy grit that stung the eyes and coated the baggage that had been dumped from the trucks that had been loaded with belongings of the evacuees (as they were called) at the embarkation points. Joan’s parents were assigned with two other childless couples to share a 320-square-foot compartment in a large barracks. So the first thing to do was to further partition this small space, hanging blankets and improvising with flattened cardboard boxes and the scrap wood remaining from the camp’s construction. Even so, as Joan’s mother later made clear despite her permeative reserve, it had been something of a surprise that they found the opportunity to conceive her.
Born a prisoner. Such was the weight she and her parents were required to pull, for the USA. The loyalty questionnaire asked:
27. Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty, wherever ordered? 28. Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and faithfully defend the United States from any or all attack by foreign or domestic forces, and forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor, or any other foreign government, power, or organization?
The answers were yes, yes. They had always been yes, yes. Joan’s father had tried to join the army after Pearl Harbor and been rejected. The Japanese emperor was typical royalty, the sort of mute and bloodless enigma both set above and emblematic of his nation that either fascinates or bores the hell out of Americans. Japan itself was a sentimental memory, at best an occasional dreamy riposte to the piston force of American life, which was the only kind of life either of Joan’s parents had any familiarity with. But there they were, in suspense, yoked to this old strange multitude across the ocean. Meanwhile Joan began to grow into the memories her parents tucked away and treasured for her. Inoculated in infancy against the sorts of diseases that flourished in overcrowded conditions, she developed a terrible case of the “Manzanar Runs,” nearly perishing from dehydration. That was one of the indistinct memories she was advised to hang on to: She had nearly died; nearly died living in an American concentration camp. It was the sort of unimpeachable, irreducible, immutable fact that some would turn into a lifetime free pass. But to Joan it didn’t represent some perversion of normal life; it actually was her normal life. “Nearly” died; close, but no cigar. In other words, keep on moving. She had faint memories of her own: the Sierras peaking in the distance, the total lack of privacy, the toilets in the latrine lined up in a row of six back-to-back pairs, the carefully raked rock gardens ornamented by stones the men carried in from the desert, the absurd noise of the mess halls, the carnival-like events regularly held in the firebreak set between the rows of barracks. The soothing regularity of camp life. She was very young indeed.