Vista Dome

"We'd better get you to your room," he heard her saying, then he felt her hands under his arms, lifting him gently, guiding him up...

He followed her down the steep stairway, then forward, until Crossfield was aware of Polk again, and of being helped into his compartment. He was on the bed now, felt his shoes being removed, collar unbuttoned and the tie around his neck being loosened, a cool compress placed across his forehead.

He had to get a hold of himself, and right now! He cleared his throat, took the washcloth and cleared his eyes. "Sorry," he said. "I don't know where that came from."

"What's your name?" He heard her ask, but there was something new in her voice that hadn't been there a few minutes ago. What was it? Compassion? Something new, but what? Was it simply professional concern? No, he was sure there was something else, but what?

"Crossfield. John. Captain," he said mechanically, and he caught himself before reciting his service number.

He heard her laugh a bit, but a light-hearted expression of understanding came though nonetheless. "It's alright, Captain. The war's over..."

"No. It's not. No, it's not over at all..."

She wiped his brow with another cool compress, then: "Tetsuko? Would you tell me about her?"

Crossfield struggled with the idea of talking to someone about what had happened, what he had seen and experienced. Just about anything he might possibly say about his time in Japan would be classified "Top Secret" or beyond, and soon, so he really couldn't tell this woman anything beyond the merest generalities. Yet he felt he needed to talk to someone, that he'd been holding too much in, too much and for far too long.

So Crossfield nodded his head. "I'm not sure how much I can tell you, but I'll tell you what I think I can."

And so he began to talk.

He'd always been a sort of "wunderkind", almost a savant, but particularly gifted at math, then physics. He'd won his appointment to Annapolis solely on the strength of this gift, and of course many of his professors were working at the Naval Research Laboratory developing radar and sonar technologies, and they had nabbed him upon graduation - a few years before the war broke out. It wasn't long before his reputation became known to men like Fermi, Oppenheimer, and Teller, and late in 1941 he was transferred to the newly created Office of Scientific Research and Development, then to the ultra-secret S-1 Committee, the so-called 'Uranium Committee'. At a time when most of his classmates were struggling to attain any rank above 'Ensign', Crossfield had been, two years after graduation, summarily promoted to Commander, simply because this rank gave him almost unimpeded travel privileges, and during the early months of the war getting around the country had become unimaginably hard to do. He had bounced between Washington, D.C., Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Berkeley, California, working where he was needed, but by mid-war, he continued, he was posted most of the time to New Mexico and working on the then-theoretical aspects of what would happen in the moments after an atomic explosion, most especially on what stresses might be experienced on the delivery aircraft. Soon he was shuttling back-and-forth between the high desert and Seattle, working with Boeing engineers as development of the B-29 Super Fortress concluded.

She was, he noted, a keen listener, and appeared very interested with what he was telling her, so he decided to press on, to get it all out. So, after the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and right after Japan's surrender, Crossfield had been dispatched to Tokyo to make the first ground-based bomb damage assessment of the event. This was of course the world's first "atomic" BDA, or Bomb Damage Assessment, and while he had been tasked to record the physical devastation in painstaking detail, it was during this posting that he first encountered Tetsuko, or Sister Mary Madeleine, on a walk in the hills outside of Hiroshima in the autumn of 1945.

+++++

On his arrival in southern Japan in late September 1945, the first thing Crossfield noted was an almost overwhelming US military presence in the area, but what struck him most of all about this was that the personnel were almost always 'Military Police' - U.S. military police. A Japanese film crew trying to record the scene was detained, their reels of film confiscated. Anyone outside of the U.S. military recording or measuring anything, anywhere within the confines of the city would summarily find themselves in a world of trouble, and fast. So Crossfield was assigned a driver and a freshly minted U.S. Naval Academy ensign to help carry out his initial observations and measurements.

The driver was a short, somewhat pudgy, freckle-faced kid from Bremerton, Washington with the unlikely name of Hieronymus Bosch; he'd been assigned to Crossfield because he was an MP, but also a skilled photographer. Bosch had taken to shooting images of fire damaged areas around Tokyo soon after the armistice was signed and American personnel had moved ashore, and he had a keen sense of how to move through the local populace without creating tension and, more importantly, avoiding conflict. It took Crossfield about a minute to size up Bosch: he was smart as could be but had never developed the confidence to fully utilize his intelligence.

The Academy graduate, on the other hand, was another matter entirely. J. Winston Stafford III was a classic in Crossfield's eyes. Entitled, effete, almost boorishly patrician looking, Stafford stood six foot five and might have weighed 145 pounds on a good day, but his pale skin and patently sickly demeanor struck Crossfield as ample evidence that the kid's good days were few and far between. What saved the day was Stafford's almost insane sense of humor and a "can do" attitude that had more than likely gotten him into the Academy in the first place, and then seen him through the four years of Hell that followed. The word was, almost gratuitously, that Stafford wasn't quite the sharpest tool in the shed, and if under your command to plan accordingly. The latest fitness report Crossfield had seen seemed to imply Stafford had a knack for getting into trouble, and could at any given moment grievously offend a small rock.

Once the group was formed, they were quartered at a naval base, one which had until quite recently been manned by forces of the Imperial Japanese Navy, and more than a few Japanese were still working at the base when Crossfield and his team arrived. There was as yet no BOQ - Bachelor Officer's Quarters - on the base, so the three were quartered in adjacent rooms in a spartan barracks-styled building that would have seemed right at home on any naval base anywhere in the world. Soon Crossfield's team was criss-crossing it's way through the ravaged city's rubble-filled streets taking measurements and photographs of anything and everything that even remotely appeared to have been effected by the blast.

"And then one day," Crossfield said in the morning quiet as the California Zephyr rolled across Utah, "out of the blue, Bosch said something quite odd. And interesting. At least to me."

He'd mentioned that all Crossfield seemed interested in was the city. The physical destruction.

"'What about the people?', Bosch asked that day. And I didn't know what to say to him. In fact, I really didn't have any idea what was happening to any of the people there. The injured... the dead...you couldn't... well... they were almost nowhere to be found."

"What happened to them?"

Crossfield looked at her, realized he didn't even know the girl's name, but he did recognize the quiet revulsion on her face. He'd seen it before. First, on the faces of American diplomats and other government personnel who'd come to tour the scene - on the expressions of the faces on men and women who weren't used to the perplexing look death took on the battlefield. The real meaning of atomic warfare, Crossfield soon learned, took on a new, sharply defined relief in the metallic hues of Hiroshima, and that was simply because no one was prepared for what they found beneath the rubble. No one ever was.

Then one morning he'd seen that revulsion in the mirror as he shaved - on his own face, in his own eyes. And now, here on this train, this girl's eyes had become a mirror of his own.

"I hate to say this, but I don't even know your name," he said after a pause.

"Clair, Clair St Cloud," she replied, but there was no pleasure in those eyes now, no mirth.

"You're from France?" Crossfield said.

"Swiss. My father's parents lived near Geneva. My grandfather was an architect, he moved here to study with Frank Lloyd Wright, and then decided to stay. They settled in San Francisco."

"You grew up there?"

"Yes."

"I'm sorry. You obviously don't need to hear..."

"You're wrong, Captain Crossfield. I think...", she began, but her gaze trailed off with her words. She seemed to measure her next words carefully, against Crossfield's need, and her own. "Maybe I'm way off base here, but I think everyone needs to hear what you have to say."

Crossfield chuckled. "That'd be a fine way to end up in prison, Miss St Cloud..."

"Clair," she said. "Please."

"Clair." He was surprised how good that name sounded, or more precisely, at how good that name sounded - to him, but maybe that was because he'd seen so few girls the past - what? - three years? Or would nine years, or thirteen years be more accurate? Had he ever really taken an interest in girls before, or had he simply been more infatuated with the infinite dancings of protons and neutrons in their precisely defined orbits?

"Are you alright, John?"

"Sorry. Guess I faded out there for a moment."

"What were you thinking about?"

Crossfield closed his eyes, because he knew he couldn't hide what he was feeling from Clair St Cloud.

Then he felt her fingers running through his hair, and the pure shock of physical intimacy destroyed whatever inhibitions he might once have had; he felt himself trembling, felt his face in his own hands and how foreign they felt, then he felt her hands on his and as suddenly he knew everything was as it should be. There was order in every universe, and he was finding his place in the one he shared with Clair St Cloud.

+++++

"So. Where did you meet Tetsuko?"

"One day, late October, early November, 1945, not that it matters, Stafford got our Jeep and we drove out of the city. North into the hills. There was drizzle, maybe just a mist, but I remember those hills looked like something out of a Chinese watercolor. Shades of gray and green. Everything was shades of gray..."

And they'd come upon a dirt road marked by a sign with a red cross, and Hieronymus Bosch had taken that road so obviously less traveled. They, the three Americans, those Three Wise Men, had driven up into the mist, deeper into the gray light of day, until they had come upon a wall. A white wall, rendered blue by the mist, capped by the sweeping lines of a sloping blue tile roof, a solid wall, held up by ancient timbers, timbers white with age, timbers that stood as muted sentries might guard a fortress.

They stopped in the pale shadow of the wall, conscious of it's age, of it's obvious sacred nature. The three talked it over, then got out of their Jeep and approached a broad wood gate, their holstered Colt 45s suddenly feeling conspicuously out of place. There was a small bell hanging beside the gate, and Stafford pulled on the affixed lanyard two times.

Footsteps in the distance. A grating of metal on metal.

An opening door.

A face. Old. No, ancient. As ancient as the timbers that sustained this fortress in the mist. A woman...a nun, in habit.

There was something about her eyes. Kindness, perhaps, was a word that first came to mind, but perhaps there was a spirit of forgiveness in the mist, because ultimately there were no truly appropriate words to describe what those Three Wise Men saw in the pale blue light that afternoon.

Without a word the ancient-eyed woman opened the gate and motioned the men to enter, and stepping across the threshold was like stepping into a dreamscape where time had stopped countless centuries ago. Mist held no provenance in the courtyard beyond that gate, and the air inside seemed pure, clear. But there were distant footsteps on loose gravel, leaf-borne sighs as autumn winds breathed through golden trees, and there was a scent not unlike the seashore. Iodine. Iodine, and bandages.

Death. The Three Wise Men felt it almost immediately. Death was all around them, waiting, watching.

They moved through another gate, into another courtyard. This one was larger, and apparently much older. There were walls of precisely carved gray stones, huge, unyielding to time and season, the unmistakable traces of a Buddhist past defined by the orderly rows of trees within.

Then they saw the cots. Row after row of cots. Pale bodies aglow in the sheen of failing light and fading life, open-mouthed incomprehension and wide-eyed horror, all surrounded by dutifully attending women in habit, changing dressings, bringing cups of cool water to fevered lips.

"So there, behind those walls," Crossfield said into the morning, "were they sick from Hiroshima." There was, he sensed, too much shame in dying such an undignified death, so the sick and the dying walked into the mountains to die behind those old walls. To spare the survivors such memories.

"Oh, my God," Clair St Cloud said. "But, was the old lady... Tetsuko...sick too?"

"Yes. And no."

Crossfield felt sorrow for the look in Clair's eyes, because he didn't know how to describe what he'd learned that day. There was the woman that had been Tetsuko, the woman who had found Christ and dedicated her life to His teachings, the woman who had sacrificed and learned new meanings of love, and forgiveness, during her journey, and how he too had seen the strength of Will that had allowed this woman to open the doors to her world - to this Bringer of War. Then there was the woman borne of Hiroshima's need; the savaged, gale-blown visage Crossfield had first seen, her green-gold eyes flecked with infinite sorrow, islands in an inland sea where love and forgiveness held no sway over death.

"God, what it must have cost her to open that door. To look at me and not hate me."

"But, she was a nun. What else could she..."

"I know, I know. But that's the easy answer, isn't it?"

Because there was more to Tetsuko-san's grief and sorrow than the simple explanation of self-pity - or even the easy gravitas of hate. There was a complex harmony in the dance of lightness and darkness that she held in abeyance, just as there is in the interplay of love and hate. And it was all there, all alive in the inland sea of her eyes. The woman she had been, and the woman she had become, molded in war's unhinged forge.

"She could have just turned us away, been done with us, but I think she wanted us to see...the truth of our labors, and hers." No, Crossfield said to himself. She wanted me to see. Me to open my eyes. So, did God act through her? Did this thing called God want Me to see what I had helped bring to this world? Or, as reason dictates, had the universe simply conspired to put me in this place, at this time, for no other reason than to let me find a monastery in the rain? To find death. To find meaning and purpose in...death?

Clair was looking at him again, and there was deep concern in her eyes. "Perhaps she was a teacher? Aren't nuns teachers?"

"Some are, I guess. I don't know if she had been before..."

But yes, Tetsuko had become a teacher that day. And while she had much to pass on, there wasn't all that much time, was there? She had shown these Three Wise Men, and the children of all men, humanity decaying along predetermined rates, all within her own inland sea. The sepsis of untreated third degree burns beckoned here, the inexorable replication rates of radiation induced mutations over there, the lack of sanitary facilities, the absence of knowledge, and ultimately, the finality of exhaustion despair hopelessness. These were the 'things' Sister Mary Madeleine had time to teach that day.

"...but one day, maybe a year later, I learned that Tetsuko means 'Lady of Steel'. Well, that's one meaning, anyway. But appropriate, I think. We learned that at her funeral."

"She died? From radiation?"

"She had been in the city the night before, and was walking back out to the monastery when the, well, you know. She wasn't far enough away to be killed quickly. She was far enough away to linger."

"You spent a lot of time up there, didn't you?"

"Some, yes. I lingered, too."

"What did she teach you? That first day."

"Me? My eyes. To open my eyes."

+++++

Clair stayed with Crossfield all that day, and Polk brought them lunch as they approached Salt Lake City, then dinner after they'd crossed into Colorado. He told her what he could of his remaining time in Japan, of taking medicine and other supplies to the monastery, of Sister Mary Madeleine's life, and death, and sometime late in the evening their talk moved on to other things, things like how he was now thirty one years old and hadn't been with a girl since high school. He talked about the simple trajectory of his life, what his current mission was, and how he had grown sick of all he'd seen, and what he had become. They talked of the choices they'd each made over the years, the good and the bad, those they'd yet to make, and talked of destiny, the possibility of change, and at one point Crossfield was sure he loved this woman, but then it occurred to him that he really had no idea what love was. He'd felt an inseparable bond to Tetsuko-san, and eventually to Bosch and Stafford, but those were ties borne of impossible circumstances, not a longing for the infinite. Still, when he looked at Clair in the light of their time together he felt something he'd never experienced before, and the pure shock of the emotion was unsettling in the extreme.

Sometime in the early morning, just as mighty Orion was ruling over the heavens once again, they'd made love. There had been tender kisses, then the infinite longing of impossible emotions, and finally, deep, deep sleep.

And when the sun rose the next morning, when Chicago was not so very far ahead, John Crossfield awoke only to find that she was gone.

November 1958

Chicago, Illinois

"Well, I'll be damned! Polk? Is that you?" Walking along the platform at Chicago's Union Station, a nervous walk deep within that peculiar subterranean world, ever awash in the deep, penetrating rumbles of dozens of caged diesel locomotives, John Crossfield approached the California Zephyr's Silver Planet observation car and immediately saw the old porter who had accompanied him to Chicago ten years ago.

"Why, it's the Cap'n! Holy smokes! How long's it been? My-oh-my!"

"Been a while, Polk. How've you been?" Crossfield held out his right hand.

"Fine, Cap'n, just fine." Polk took Crossfield's hand and shook it warmly. "You ridin' with me today?"

"Yup! All the way to Frisco!"

"San Fran-cisco! Got your ticket, or you gonna play hobo today and ride up top?"

Crossfield handed his tickets over with a grin.

"Room A again!" Polk exclaimed. "Well, I'll be!"

"Took some doing, Polk, that's for certain." Crossfield was amazed at the old man's memory even as he recognized the pale beginnings of milky cataracts in the old man's eyes, but Polk was still standing tall and looked as strong as ever. "Well, I know the way."

"Okay, Cap'n. I'll see you after we leave the station. Watch your step now."

Crossfield climbed up the steep stainless steel steps and turned left down the narrow teal-toned corridor that led to Drawing Room A, and as he approached the door he was instantly awash in memories of that long ago day...and that night...but he stepped inside and swung his small grip up into the luggage bin above the small toilet compartment. He turned and looked at the teal colored upholstery covering the swivel chair, and the roomy sofa with it's fold-down bed...it all looked the same to his practiced eye...even the silver-embossed California Zephyr stationary and postcards stacked neatly under the window in their own little cubby looked unchanged.