“Do they speak or are they quiet?”
“I should think it depends on their mood.”
“May I walk by your side?” says Little Boy. “May I hold your hand? May we speak to each other?”
“I will not hold your hand yet,” says Fat Man. “I am not sure you are my brother.”
They walk side by side into the waste.
The sun is falling. The clouds are frayed like Fat Man’s sleeves. A black bird settles on a lamppost knocked askew. Ash lifts on a breeze, lilts this way and that, returns to the earth. Every building’s shadow is injured. They have holes in them, or walls are missing. Fat Man finds an empty can of food. Only a sweet brown smell remains. Little Boy finds three dry grains of rice.
They find two bodies knocked dead by impacts to their heads. Their faces are crushed beyond recognition. Their bodies slim and sexless. They lay side by side. One body’s arm flung carelessly across the other body. One body’s wearing sandals while the other’s feet are bare, and curled inward, as if the toes are reaching for their matching heels. If these bodies are brothers then this is how brothers die together.
Little Boy crouches to study them more closely. From inside them maggots come up and out for air—white studs in their skin become stunted worms. First six, then a dozen, then many seething. They eat through the bodies’ faces, they fall from their ears. Little Boy startles, cries out, jumps back. The maggots calm. Some lie still on the bodies like white cashews. Others die and shrivel. Others burrow back into the flesh.
There are no flies here.
The brothers leave those bodies. They leave that place. Little Boy imagines worms inside him. How it would be to see them bursting through his skin.
Fat Man asks him when they’ll find food. Little Boy says he doesn’t know. He says Fat Man needs to be calm. Fat Man says it’s been days since he’s eaten. He says, “If you were my brother you would feed me.”
The sun goes down. Things turn blue, gray, black. The brothers find a shadow on a wall. An image of a painter on a folding ladder. He has a bucket of paint in one hand, and in his other hand a brush. He reaches for the wall to apply the paint. The folding ladder is angled sideways so that Little Boy can see the gaps between the ladder’s steps like spokes in a wheel. The painter’s posture is stiff. The painter’s body is gone. The ladder is broken in half, there, on the ground.
Little Boy touches the shadow. Cold, like the rest of the wall. He can feel Fat Man’s eyes on him. There is a surge of heat through his body. He tries to rub it away but it won’t go away. He thinks how it would be to reach out with that brush but never touch the wall. He tries to rub it away but it won’t go away. Fat Man says he should leave it alone.
“We need to leave this place,” says Little Boy.
He means Japan.
They walk together side by side in the way that brothers might do.
Fat Man asks Little Boy how he was born. Little Boy says he will tell it.
HOW LITTLE BOY
WAS BORN
Little Boy woke alone, lying naked on his side, curled inward. It was quiet. The ground was hot. He was afraid. Pink and pale.
Soft.
He pushed himself up on his feet. Faltered. Tipped forward and back. There were no people there. He called out for help. The wind was gentle but he lost his voice in it. His throat felt dry. Inside his body, a strand of whisper that couldn’t get out.
There were crooked trees in the distance, black and pulled apart. There were ruined buildings far away. Everything close was rubble and dust. There were bits of wood and glass, and concrete powder on the air.
There was no one to see him standing there. No mommy. No daddy. He held himself and shivered.
He stood on a bald white depression.
Dozens of small fires burned in the wreckage. He walked forward. He needed away.
There was a cart wheel, there was a yoke.
There was a leveled home. There was the floor of the home.
Thin black smoke rose like a solid climbing thing, gnarled as the trees.
As he walked past the ruined home, bits of glass and wood and rubble pierced his feet. He left red footprints in the ash. It hurt badly. He didn’t know what to do. He was breathing ash. He was caked with ash. His lungs burned. There was no good air to breathe. A body burned black was on the ground. Its skin had all peeled off and lay in rags around it. Its sex was burnt away, leaving only a lump or a crease between the legs. The fingers were the same. They were nubs. Its teeth had all been shaken from its head. They were scattered in the dirt like seeds. He shivered. He held himself.
Stone walls spilled broken on the ground.
There was a woman in the dirt, shielded by the wall that crushed her head. He could see her through the cracks in the wall where it was broken, where it fell. Her blood ran downhill, the hill on which he stood. She gave more and more. He stumbled on through more bodies. He walked over a stone bridge, across a stream that was white from the dust. There was a baby smeared across the ground.
There were papers from a painter’s home, torn and weighted down by rocks, lumber, and dirt.
He came to a sapling. Stripped and blackened like the rest, with several broken branches hanging from its bough. It stood at a sad, sloping angle, pointing at the sun. It looked like a hair. A loose branch fell to land among the roots.
Behind the tree a standing wall. Ten feet high, not one foot more.
Only a section, the rest fallen and scattered.
Its edges rough, uneven like an old saw.
The window blown out, the glass all gone, the drapes thrown forty feet away.
It was a square window, four feet up, two feet wide, two feet tall.
There was a thin tree shadow on the wall. A black silhouette. This was the sapling as it was before. There were seven long branches, seven delicate arms, seven reaching tendrils. They searched the wall. One shadow branch reached into the window. The leaves were small faint smudges of gray, the wall was flecked with them. He sat down beneath the tree to rest his legs and aching feet. He coughed dust and blood into his hands. He watched the shadow on the wall. The tree behind him moved, swayed slowly in the breeze, searching the sky like a finger. Its shadow was still.
“Now do you believe I am your brother?” asks Little Boy. They are resting up against a squat gray pedestal where a statue once stood. They are careful not to touch.
Fat Man says, “How long have you been born?”
“Only a few days before you.”
“So you’re supposed to be my big brother?”
“I’ll try to take care of you.”
Fat Man says he doesn’t think he can be taken care of by someone who can’t even find him any food. He says that maybe he should leave his older brother, that they should part ways. He stands and makes to leave.
“Wait,” yells Little Boy, who struggles to his feet and looks up at him with wide, pleading eyes. Little Boy steps close to Fat Man and wraps his arms around his leg. He squeezes him through the silken robe, presses his forehead to Fat Man’s rubbery hip. His little hands are warm, though also bony.
Fat Man feels how very small his new big brother is. He puts one hand on Little Boy’s back and his other on the crown of his head, which soothes the boy and relaxes his body. “Okay,” says Fat Man.
Little Boy’s eyes close. “Thank you.”
Fat Man asks his new big brother what they’re going to do.
“We’re going to take care of each other,” says Little Boy. “We’re going to find you something to eat. Then we’re going to find a way out of here.”
Fat Man says, “I don’t like it here at all.”
Nobody does.
THE SOLDIER’S BODY
It is not long before they find the shorter soldier’s body face-down in the shattered fragments of a limestone statue. The dashed pieces suggest that the statue was a furr
y creature, perhaps with a mane and clawed feet. The shorter soldier’s gun is gone. His left arm is folded under him. The right arm points outward, three o’clock. The purple blotches have expanded through his skin; they have multiplied. Fat Man squats for a closer look. Little Boy turns his back on the body.
The taller soldier is nowhere in sight.
Fat Man says, “He had a limp. He tried to hide it.”
“Why hide a limp from you?” says Little Boy.
Fat Man says he doesn’t know. He says he thinks the soldiers were afraid. He says, “They found me wandering and locked me up. They can’t have known what I did. I think I was supposed to be a hostage, or a war criminal. They never answered my questions.”
“They didn’t speak English.”
“They didn’t even try,” says Fat Man. He rocks on his heels, balancing with his hands on the ground. Chill air lifts the loose threads of his robe. “I kept asking and they didn’t even try.”
“What were you asking?”
Maggots come to the surface of the body. A spider crawls from its ear.
“I wanted to know where I was. Then I wanted to know why they were keeping me. Then I wanted to know how things had changed outside. I wanted to know if the fire was done, how many people died, how many survived. I wanted to know if they were ill. Why the short one was limping. I wanted to know their names. I wanted to know what they thought of me. What they were going to do with me. What they called me. Was I alone. Was there anyone who wanted to see me. I wanted to know if I could do something.”
“Like what?” says Little Boy.
The maggots eat of the short soldier’s neck, they sprout in his hands. They squirm barely perceived beneath the soldier’s heavy jacket. Between the fingers, worms writhe. The spider crawls over the body.
“Like help,” says Fat Man. “Like could I do some work for them, could I fix things, make them better. Could I do something to make them like me more.”
The soldier’s body begins to sag beneath its uniform. The skin is riddled with holes. The hungry things favor the purple blotches, eating them first.
Little Boy says they should leave the body. He says today is a bad day to be an American standing over a dead Japanese.
Fat Man says, “Soon there won’t be a body.”
Little Boy asks Fat Man what he means. Fat Man points and asks if it is normal for a body to decay so quickly. Another spider crawls from the ear, which so far the maggots and the worms have left intact. They have focused on the cheeks, what is visible of the shoulder, and everything beneath the soldier’s clothes—perhaps cartilage is difficult. More worms rise to the surface of the dirt. The uniform itself, now damp from inside with blood, begins to grow a cotton mold.
“Yes,” says Little Boy, “this is normal.”
“Are you sure?”
“We should go.”
Instead Little Boy folds his legs beneath him. He scoots up close to watch. Fat Man feels a warmth rising from the body and the things that grow inside it. His legs begin to ache from squatting. His hands as well, from the weight he leans on them.
“The taller soldier might come back.”
Little Boy says, “Then we should go.”
They do not go. The body becomes bones. The maggots become flies. These land on the two brothers, skitter and buzz their wings, but do not fly, keeping to the skin.
Fat Man says, “They itch!”
“Swat them.”
“Won’t they fly away and land somewhere else?”
“They won’t.” Little Boy squashes several on his left hand with his right. They do not try to move away. They become black smears.
Fat Man falls back on his ass, sore feet briefly rising up into the air and then settling back in. He holds out his left palm. There are two flies walking a slow circuit from thumb tip to pinky finger. His right hand casts a shadow over the flies. They perhaps twitch or tremble, but otherwise stay where they are—become still, in fact, where before they were crawling. Like closing an alligator’s jaws, he lowers his hand. What is left of the flies, he scrapes off on the ground, and proceeds to remove the others from his face and neck and calves, one by one, pinching them dead, flicking away their corpses.
“Good job,” says Little Boy, encouraging his little brother as he kills his own flies too. “That’s the way.”
The bones stripped clean. The uniform a mold-fuzzed tatter. The worms creep toward the brother bombs, who stand up, step back. Little Boy puts his hand on Fat Man’s stomach, pushes him back farther, to keep him safe.
Fat Man asks, “What are we?”
Little Boy says they are brothers. “Only brothers. Always brothers.”
Now there are more flies.
A cloud of them looms over the brothers—the only brothers, the always brothers.
Little Boy says, “We should run.”
Fat Man has already started. He can barely find the strength, but what’s left is enough. The cloud of flies follows them, sending dizzy scouts, which the brothers swat, or fail to swat—they flail, the flies dive and buzz around their ears and eyes. As if to say, “Look at me!” As if to say, “Listen!” They need to be heard.
“Does this often happen also?” pants Fat Man.
Little Boy says, “Sometimes this happens.” He is running with less speed than he could so as not to leave behind Fat Man, who is doing his best. He’s panting and clutching at his chest.
Now Little Boy jogs backward, the better to see the swarm, which lilts as one fly lilts, now several feet lower, now several higher, now right, now left, some stragglers and some who go ahead, and here and there colliding—a tipsy weave. A seethe. Always angled so their eyes are on the brothers—compound eyes, like black jewels. Specks on specks.
Little Boy trips on something unseen, some piece of rubble, and tumbles. Fat Man stops to yank him up. The buzz of the flies is momentarily damped by a whistling gust of wind. Everything is quiet. The ground is covered in a fine gray powder, some smashed statue or wall. The powder, kicked up by the gust, enters their nostrils, burns in their throats.
Fat Man tries to catch his breath. Little Boy watches, helpless, as the swarm descends on his brother. They crowd his eyes and ears, his mouth—some seem to fly, quite intentionally, inside him—and crawl on his hands, his neck, under his collar, beneath his robe. He flaps his arms like useless wings.
“Brother!” calls Little Boy.
He picks up a road sign—something yellow, he doesn’t know what it means—and uses it to crush the flies on Fat Man, flogging his brother. Fat Man might tell him to stop if he could speak through the flies. Now the flies remember Little Boy and crawl over him also. He can barely see his brother’s shadow through the swarm. Reaches in, finds his brother’s wrist, and yanks. “Run!” he screams, tasting a fly. Fat Man struggles out again.
The flies have gotten old. They’re going gray. As the brothers flee, the swarm begins to fall. Landing in small puddles, in cups and bowls (some broken, some intact among the ruins of what were once homes), on cars with melted tires, on roads. Each fall punctuated by a sound, a small brittle dry snap, like the crackle of a fire: for every fly, the sound of one spark. Some pelt their backs and bounce away. Some land beneath their feet just as they’re stepping.
They slow again as the flies die all around them.
They breathe.
Fat Man chews what they left in his cheeks without seeming to know that he chews. Little Boy ignores the crunching sound.
There were families here once. The brothers can tell from the books that lie here and there in the streets, like bodies.
They can tell from the bodies.
HOW FAT MAN
WAS BORN
They don’t find anything. They can’t. They try to sleep but Fat Man’s rumbling keeps them up. They search the wastes. Fat Man takes a tube of flavorless toothpaste off
the ground, rubs off ash with his fingers. The packaging is plain and white. The tube is half-empty, squeezed flat from bottom to middle. It curls in on itself like a rolled-up tongue. This is all that remains of somebody’s home. Fat Man looks to Little Boy. He says, “Do you think it’s safe?”
Little Boy says he’s not sure. He says, “I don’t think it’s food.”
Fat Man says he knows it isn’t food. “What I’m asking,” he says, “is whether I can eat it.”
Little Boy says toothpaste can’t be poison if you’re supposed to put it in your mouth. It might, however, be very bad for you, and it can’t taste good at all. Fat Man twists off the cap and drops it. He squeezes out the white paste along the length of his thumb. He sniffs the paste—smells nothing, nothing different from the taste of teeth and spit. He tips back his head and squeezes out the whole tube into his mouth. It fills his cheeks and throat, he nearly retches, but does not retch; he chokes it down. He drops the tube when it’s all gone. He wipes his mouth.
“That’s disgusting,” says Little Boy.
“It’s. Been. Days,” Fat Man says, glaring down at Little Boy. “Wait. I see a cricket.”
He runs away, kicking up ash and pebbles, heedless of his feet and the flapping of his robe. There is indeed a cricket poised perfectly still on the end of a curling iron pipe embedded in the dirt. He sinks to his knees and crawls toward the insect. He gets up close. It is still quite still. He opens his hands and prepares to clap, to clamp the little fiddler, which does not twitch, does not leap, sing, flutter. He squeals in triumph as he closes his fingers around this morsel and corks the cage with his thumbs.
The cricket does not struggle. Fat Man does not feel the expected frantic searching of his hands for exits. In fact he feels nothing. He opens his hands. The cricket stands unmoved at the curling pipe’s end. He pinches the dead thing and drops it down his gullet.
Little Boy asks if there is anything Fat Man doesn’t plan on eating tonight.
Fat Man and Little Boy Page 2