Despite the burns on his face and forearms, his ruptured eardrums, Tsutomu Yamaguchi navigated shattered buildings, melted flesh, smoldering bone, forded through floating bodies, and returned to work the next morning, where, while describing the flash bright as a magnesium flare—silent as the empty frames at the start of a film—and torrents of ash he’d seen the day before to his supervisor, he looked out of the office window to see a single airplane cut through the clear Nagasaki sky.