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Flip

Mr. Fukuoka was one congenital Shintoist who could not abide the reek of incense. Three birthdays of his boyhood had been asphyxiated by the rank stuff, starting with his tenth: April 24, 1942, which was exactly one chaotic, humiliating, world-destroying month after FDR signed executive order number 9066. This piece of paper allowed the Secretary of War to designate the entire west coast of the United States a "militarily sensitive area," from which "any persons (read nips) could be excluded."

The Fukuoka family had been driven from the groves of northern California, whose gentle hills and rivulets of sweet water had more or less comfortably harbored his homesick parents' thousands of Shinto deities. And they landed in a concentration camp near Topaz Mountain, in the orange and white desert of deepest Utah.

Dispossessed of virtually everything, but most reluctantly of her joss sticks, Fukuoka's mother had to make do with some loose, smelly grains of a medium-grade Papist manufacture. In what he called a political act, Fukuoka's older brother had liberated several boxfuls from the jeep of a chaplain who descended weekly into hell for the dispensation of something facetiously called a benediction.

Okaa-san fastened onto her older son's combustible gift, and proceeded systematically to neglect, then abandon her younger son outright, the better to adulterate with smoky magic the single wholesome aspect of the otherwise miserable place to which they'd been transported.

Today, Fukuoka found himself unable to imagine, much less remember, the few puffs of that healing desert atmosphere, arid, limpid, and sage pungent, which his boyish lungs had been permitted to inhale free of the sickly perfumes of propitiation.

Born citizens of the right age and political leanings could emerge from behind the barb wire a few afternoons a week to attend classes at the local junior college, one of the worst in the entire free world. For those unwilling to submit to the racist jibes of the backwater professors, the War Relocation Authority had another offer. They showed up in camp with their turquoise megaphones, and, along with facile apologies for exceeding their authority in detaining "conceded loyals," they blasted out pre recorded propaganda, aimed especially at the young nisei, about vast economic opportunities in places like Oklahoma, and offering permanent leave clearances to anyone willing to resettle in the midwest or east.

Then came the most unrefusable offer of all for the few young men, like Fukuoka's older brother, who wouldn't allow themselves to be reeducated in cow colleges or deported even further away from California, which they considered their rightful home: the draft finally found its way to the relocation center. Rather than being packed off to Europe in a brigade of second-generation nips and placed on the front lines to see if any Nazis would shoot, Older Brother promptly started a one-man resistance movement.

For all the photos he'd saved, it wasn't until well into middle age that Fukuoka was able to remember what Older Brother had looked like in those courageous days. At the time, Fukuoka's Hollywood-saturated eyes could not see properly. His half-formed, boyish brain had lacked some inner apparatus for recognizing an oriental male who didn't wear Coke bottle glasses and suck voraciously on a set of buck teeth that hung down past an Adam's apple pointed and protuberant as the prow of a mackerel boat; who wasn't treacherous, cringing or bloodthirsty, but straightforward, vigorous and kind. In short, all-American: a kind of compact, long waisted Erroll Flynn with almond eyes and no facial hair.

Fukuoka always wondered whether his big brother had been able to apprehend his own beautiful self as he dashed about in the dry night air, performing stalwart acts of subversion, sabotage and requisitioning. In any case, for his gift of frankincense to Okaa-san, Older Brother was tried, convicted and sent back homeward after all, to California's Tule Lake Camp, reserved for troublemakers, thence to the federal penitentiary on Alcatraz.

Mother's response was not to take advantage of whatever vestigial legal recourse remained to people of their kind, but to hunker even further down into her dowdy labyrinth of superstition. She improvised a family shrine from the only things resembling lumber to be found in that quadrant of the New World: salt-preserved splinters of century-old, coolie-laid railroad ties, relics from an earlier era of the Yellow Peril. She burrowed in and began releasing extra clouds of noxious fumes, slipping into epileptic trances, reverting under duress to a seemingly prehistoric style of pure shamaness Shinto, where she daily spread her metaphysical thighs and allowed herself to be possessed by a succession of garrulous demons.

"I'm intrigued," said a honeyed voice from over her younger son's shoulder one searing afternoon. "Everything is so delightfully immanent with your little mommy-san!"

And that was the first time Fukuoka noticed the tall, blue and golden missionary-not one of the Pope's hirelings, but an official emissary in his own right, from another denomination, an all-American one, headquartered in Utah's capital city in the remote, cool, mountainous north.

Young as he was, this missionary called himself "Elder," in place of a first name.

Fukuoka hastened to interpret Mother's babble for the beautiful Elder, to demonstrate that there was absolutely no reason to be intrigued with anything, prayer or scent, that might waft out from under her scrawny rectangle of shade. Even in the extremity of her tongue-lolling, eye bugging, saliva-frothing fits, this woman conjured gods capable of nothing more profound than rote recitations of platitudes. Her utterances suspiciously resembled those issuing from the painted lips of Charlie Chan in the camp movie tent on Friday nights. Okaa-san even sobbed a word that her little boy was sneeringly and gigglingly obliged to translate as Number-One-Son.

And then the letters from Number-One-Son started coming from Alcatraz, long letters in uncensorable kanji. Fukuoka's parents tried to hide them-but where could even a piece of paper be concealed in such a featureless landscape? There was no chest of drawers. Not so much as a hollow tree stump was available.

Fukuoka always located and devoured these letters, for the nutriment his soul found in the elegant handwriting. He practiced long hours in the molten sand with a cactus spine, hypnotized by the varied strokes, the only things in the world that could make him feel even remotely Japanese. But he never could approximate a single one of the myriad beauties of his big brother's hand: the almost musical intermingling of form and content, the spontaneous yet meticulously controlled whips of the brush, producing uncanny marks of "flying white" that preserved not only the horrible and wonderful prison experiences (which Fukuoka hardly comprehended at the time), but also the very act of expression itself-infinitely more important. And everything was concentrated into a single flow of perfect proportion and balance, qualities lost on his sun-squinting parents.

Younger Brother would at times find himself swooning over the smell of these letters. It seemed almost capable of covering up the family shrine's embarrassing miasma. He would reach up and wave the pages under his new friend's long, white nose, to share the complex aroma of black institutional ink on yellow prison stationery.

The golden Elder, of course, being a gaijin, could only assume Fukuoka valued the letters for their content; so he coaxed a translation from boyish lips. He seemed to enjoy especially those passages in which Fukuoka's big brother spoke of "blossoming like a little plum bud" under the tutelage of an enormous Negro, a draft dodger who held court in the prison laundry; and the loss of one's rectal virginity being not quite so wrenching as one might have anticipated throughout one's conscious life.

"Black on yellow, indeed," smiled the Elder. And he would gaze patronizingly on those products of a less vigorous civilization: wasting away Father and amulet-fidgeting Mother. It was no problem prying their remaining son away from them.

And, as an eleventh birthday present, along with a forty-minute adventure in the wilderness like nothing the previously sheltered little Fukuoka had ever experienced, the Elder rechristened him.

People of the Elder's faith were not allowed to utter the first syllable of Fukuoka's surname. Indeed, they could hardly bring themselves to think it. Since they traditionally euphemized it flip, that became the child's new name.

And, from that instant of naming, itself the most fundamental form of possessing, the Elder took it upon himself to pray over and lay hands upon his little Flip, to make and destroy and remake his little Flip's entire mind and soul, to conceive and set into motion most of his little Flip's behavior over the following half century.

* * * *

In the desert concentration camp, individuals and families could, with bribes, obtain furloughs. They were permitted to help the local dry farmers scratch up various meager, juiceless and puckered harvests, in return for a by-the-bushel wage that would amuse a Mississippi field slave.

But his older brother was a thief and a political agitator, a federally imprisoned undesirable; so, according to a strict reading of the law of guilt-by-association, little Flip was considered a poor candidate for such luxuriant freedoms. Far from getting a work release to go coax sugar beets from the irrigated foothills of Mount Topaz in the company of his more or less happy coevals, little Flip was allowed only forty minutes on the other side of the barb wire, on one occasion, when the young Elder had wangled him permission to wander in the wilderness.

The Elder more or less commanded him to go out in search of spiritual ecstasies and insights regarding monotheism versus his ancestral animism. There being no need to starve the boy first, the Elder just pried open a padlock with his mighty fingers and discreetly followed his little Flip out into the great desert of the southwestern United States of America.

Hand in hand they explored, briefly, a world of monolithic stone reefs and arches. It was the same as the deserted Iraqi landscape surrounding Ur of the Chaldees, where Abraham's whole life, and the life of humanity, was wrenched inside out by the one and only son-devouring Yahweh. All the sumptuous variety of little Flip's native California was here desiccated into the stern, unyielding Absolute, the dazzling gemstone of truth that outshone his Yamato parents' moral relativism, and their moist, nectar reeking, fur-bearing pantheon.

All the while the golden Elder preached directly into little Flip's ear about one God, an individualistic Father, a single-minded, single-bodied, unbent anthropomorphic thrusting sand-Jehovah, with a purple-turbanned head, and a hardened torso, hairless as a gila monster, standing manly, erect in posture, upon the roughly twin orbs of the Doctrine and the Covenants.

"Forget beets, Sugar," the young Elder had uncharacteristically quipped up close from behind, once the spirit had descended upon little Flip. "You're cut out for a different kind of stoop labor."

In the momentary irreverence of his passion, the Elder's silver voice had aged prematurely; and, for one cloven sub-instant, little Flip, in the deep insecurity of his incarcerated prepubescence, wondered if there was something funny in all this, if the Elder considered it a joke, if he was just another profane Caucasian when the act of emission scratched his proselytizing veneer.

Separating his lids after the first grimace, Flip saw no eyed wheels, no flaming chariots or burning bushes-no bushes of any description-but seemed to have eyes only for the palisades of troops that hooted and cheered on the featureless horizon, and fought over a pair of government issue binoculars to view the scrawny rice-rat's deflowering.

Wobbling in the salted heat waves, they seemed much closer than they really were: whole detachments of guards, white soldiers, melanomizing nicely in the sun, gangling Caucasoid pimple-faces feeling unmasculine because they'd been deemed unworthy to join the struggle overseas, ready at the slightest encouragement to engage in fisticuffs, their thigh-thick arms describing arcs so broad and slow that, to any Japanese, even a nisei like Flip, it seemed anybody with a penknife and the inclination could move in, transplant both gaijin kidneys and return in time for the elephantine fist to obliterate his whole head, and blast a hole deep inside of him.

Flip was a minor, and his parents were aliens, native Japs who couldn't leave the confines of the relocation center; so the Elder tried to lure him away with an offer of a nice orphanage in the green Wasatch foothills up north. "Cool white sheets and pillowcases, sans grit," he snickered. But, in an unacknowledged burst of filial piety, Flip elected to stay with his natural father and mother until his thirteenth birthday.

By that time they had been aged, like lean bacon, with repeated external applications of the salt that traditionally destroyed their compatriots from the inside out. Parched as Palestinians, they were terrified now of the very society they once had seen as a comfy Utopia. Following the vaporization of downtown Hiroshima, Okaa-san and Otoo-san actually had to be forced to leave the concentration camp, expelled from Hell just as from Eden only three years before.

On August thirty-first, 1945, they finally abandoned their younger son in disgust at his new gaijin friends, religion and airs. This was no facile feat; for, in doing so, they rendered themselves spawnless-a bottomless and irrevocable perdition for a couple of familistic Confucians of the old school.

Big Brother, feeling their anguish through long-distance telepathy, tried to re-enter their good graces by renouncing the citizenship he enjoyed by virtue of being born on American soil. But the federal court declared the renunciation void, as made under duress. They would have had to let him out of Alcatraz to repatriate, and they weren't about to let a proved subversive get next to the Soviet Union that easily.

So Mama and Papa cut their losses, pocketed their governmental compensation of ten cents to the dollar, and took advantage of the free ride under Army auspices to Douglas MacArthur's little kingdom in the Pacific, where they promptly and deservingly died, in rapid succession, of blowfish poisoning or stomach cancer or something agonizing and slow and smelly and demeaning like that.

The Elder, convinced of their little boy's visionary prowess ("a shapely prepubescent Christ to confound the elders," is what he dubbed him), used his connections, of which he had many even then, to declare Flip an orphan after all, and to concoct a dead mother complete with proxy baptism in the Mormon Temple and forged genealogical hard copy. The theology had to be orthodox even if the whole transaction violated every immigration law on the books.

No local family court judge would dare challenge such impeccable credentials. So, after being legally adopted by the Elder and a documented spirit-mother, Flip became the mascot and house boy of one of the more unconventional mission homes to be found along the Wasatch foothills. His baptism by full immersion in a side-freshet of Little Cottonwood Creek was an afternoon to be remembered.

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