Fat Man and Little Boy

by Mike Meginnis

  There is a dead girl seated on the empty air beside him, plucking her eyebrows thinner and thinner. A bra hangs from her shoulders, unbuckled in the back, cups veiling only the tips of her nipples, the bruise-colored aureole setting suns above the lacy fringe. Her yellow high-heel shoes hang from up-curled toes, back ends bobbing. She watches herself in the mirror, checking her teeth and stroking her hair intermittently as she grooms. Her image is not in the mirror.

  Masumi checks his teeth as well. He does up his hair in a tight ridge that climbs the crown of his skull like a centipede. When he puts on his hat he looks and feels a man again—feels his balls descend a little, feels his prick unfurl. The hat is white with a brown band, some kind of leather, perhaps calf skin—he doesn’t remember. It has dimples on its sides. He flicks it askew. What a charmer. He drinks the lukewarm dregs of his flask, a peppermint schnapps, and sets it on the vanity. There is another half-finished bottle, whiskey, that he decants into the flask through a dented brass funnel he considers an old friend. The schnapps cost him too much, and the whiskey was worse. He’ll have to win it all back.

  As he stands up from the chair before the vanity, the dead girl slides horizontally into his place without seeming to notice, passing through the armrest, coming to rest in his chair. She plucks and plucks her eyebrows, bobs her heels, checks her dead girl teeth. The mirror does not see her, will not countenance her face.

  Masumi sits on the bed to put on his shoes. There’s a dead boy hiding underneath, peeking at his ankles. The dead boy doesn’t wear a shirt and there’s a dark pit in his throat where sound would leak if he really made any—that is, if he still used air for words. Masumi has not asked him where the hole came from or why he doesn’t cover it. That’s where his audience would go first. He prides himself on avoiding the obvious. In this case that doesn’t leave a lot to discuss. The boy fingers the edges of his absences—the wound, the gums of his missing teeth—incessantly.

  Masumi puts his head between his knees to see the dead boy, who grins up at him, gap-toothed.

  “Hello Charlie.”

  “Hello,” says the dead boy, sniggering. “Do you feel well today?”

  “I’m hung over, and I’ve got an itch.”

  “What kinda itch?”

  “The same kind I’ve had for months now,” says Masumi. “The kind you can’t reach. I’m going down to the casino. Don’t wait up for me.”

  “If you see my parents,” says the dead boy, and then he trails off. He wouldn’t know what to do about it if he found them.

  Masumi scratches the back of his head. He has, in fact, two itches. There is the ghost of a submarine that floats just above and just behind him. There is also the pull of the bombs, which manifests itself in his right temple. The submarine is silent. He has never seen it, only feels its judgment as it wavers pale and ominous, watching him. It follows as he buzzes the elevator and hovers behind him as he waits in the hall. The submarine has become a sort of comfort. The bombs are something different. He doesn’t want to think about them.

  There is a dead elevator boy in a hotel uniform. His black fingers pass through the door as he reaches to slide it open. The white, living elevator boy welcomes Masumi inside. “Hello sir,” he says. Masumi nods. The dead elevator boy stands beside the living one, pulling an invisible crank as the living one pulls his. Masumi ignores the dead one. They want to be seen. They are prone to acting out.

  Masumi lights a cigarette. Watches the smoke. Lets it build in his throat until it seeps out his nostrils. There must be a line in a poem somewhere about the way a pack can make you a dragon for a day. The living elevator boy coughs pointedly. The dead one doesn’t mind at all.

  Perhaps the best part of playing the casino is that no one pays Masumi any mind. He can sit at the slots unmolested, pulling the lever when he feels he wants to pull the lever and handling his coins when he doesn’t want to do anything. He sucks on them as well, pressing the cool, greasy metal to the inside of his cheek. He can shoot craps, or he can play roulette. No one asks about dead relatives, or looks to him for guidance. Nobody meets his eyes, even. Perhaps they are afraid. Western wartime propaganda emphasized his culture’s strange admixture of industry and savagery. They may be waiting for him to play a koto or eat from the end of a ritual knife. Or they may, to be more generous, only dislike the way he looks around a room, observing the death in all things: the ghosts among the crowd. He unscrews the cap on his flask, pours his boozy concoction in his half-full Coca-Cola. The remaining flecks of ice unsettle, pushed to the perimeter of the glass, and tilt from side to side. He stirs with his straw, takes a sip. Bittersweet.

  Edith Piaf sings “Embrasse-moi” on all the casino’s radios, which are distributed throughout the betting floor. Just now the song is getting to the really slow parts. Masumi, who never liked this one, loses five minutes trying to invent a trilingual pun that cuttingly describes the way her band handles their instruments—surely there must be a French word for performance that rhymes with a German word for strangling a sickly fowl, but he can’t think of it now. It’s been too long since he read.

  When he gets serious, when he’s lost enough money and had enough peace, Masumi goes to the blackjack table. He waits politely until he can sit, emptying his glass, drinking openly from the flask. Its concealment is an affectation. No one here cares. In fact the employees—the only ones with whom he will intentionally interact—prefer him drunk. He makes more mistakes that way.

  There is a woman who waits for him most nights at the blackjack table, sitting legs crossed, martini in hand, watching the dealer, silently counting cards. She always dresses like a man—brown slacks, white shirt with open cuffs and collar, blue vest, brown fedora—and she keeps her hair tucked up and out of sight. There’s no masking her breasts, however. There is no hiding her hips.

  There she is now. Martini, olive floating like a life raft. A single chestnut thread has fallen from beneath her hat, bisecting her eye. A long, thin shadow follows, hooking the chin and climbing to her lower lip, where it meets its mother thread, split ends, clinging to the lip. Her eyes are green. She said her name was Lauren when he asked.

  She won’t acknowledge him until he sits down beside her. She’ll stay when he leaves. These are the rules. Other men might object to her rigidity and coldness. Masumi prides himself on being unlike other men. When the seat beside her is vacated by a sweaty, red-faced man in a too-tight suit storming off, hat pushed down over the tops of his ears, Masumi takes it. He crosses his legs, remembers who he is tonight, uncrosses them.

  “You’re looking dandy,” says Lauren.

  “I was waiting for someone to notice.” He puts his bet in the box.

  The dealer lays down his cards. Masumi peeks at his own hand. It’s a soft seventeen—ace hearts, six spades.

  “Hit,” says Lauren.

  He knew that.

  “Hit,” he says. The dealer gives him a five. It’s twelve, then. He hits again, seventeen, and again, twenty.

  “Hit,” says Lauren.

  It’s a stupid play, but she’s usually right. He goes for it. The dealer tosses out the card eagerly. Diamond seven. Dealer takes Masumi’s money.

  “Look at it this way,” Lauren says. “You just ate a lot of shit. Less shit to eat in the next hand.”

  The guy on Masumi’s left wins. He tips back his drink and finishes it off all at once in celebration, apparently determined to never win again tonight. He looks like the kind of wealthy that comes here to purge a little. Masumi nods to acknowledge his neighbor’s good fortune.

  “I can’t take it anymore, Lauren,” says Masumi.

  The dealer lays down two nines.

  “Split them,” says Lauren.

  Masumi separates the cards, still face-down, and sets out another bet.

  The dealer’s top card is a ten. Masumi hits both his hands. Five and eight. He hits them again. Four an
d three. That’s twenty, twenty-one. He feels good but he’d like to see the hole card.

  “The brothers,” hisses Masumi, beneath his breath. “I need to see them again. Just thinking about them makes my hands shake.”

  “You seem calm enough,” says Lauren.

  “I’m drunk.” He unscrews the flask’s lid, takes a swallow.

  In a fit of triumphant laughter, the rich idiot next door elbows him in the side without seeming to notice he’s done it. The dealer flips his hole card: nine of hearts. Masumi prides himself on his graciousness in victory—he collects his winnings with one hand, saluting the dealer in a short, jerky motion with his other.

  Lauren smirks. “Where are these brothers?”

  “Just a bit south, on the Spanish border, more or less. Not sure what they’re doing there, but probably not hurting anybody.”

  “Hit,” says Lauren. “If they’re harmless, why do you get so worked up?”

  The dealer adds a two to his seventeen. Lauren tells Masumi to hold, so he does. Dealer loses again, to him and half the table. Half the table cheers. Masumi maintains his reserve.

  “If I go there,” whispers Masumi, “if I see them again, I’ll kill either them or myself. I won’t know which until it happens.”

  “Collect your winnings,” says Lauren.

  Masumi chuckles and takes his money. He’s ahead for the night. All it takes is to win a little more than he loses—if he can do that, he can afford another night in the hotel, another bottle of liquor, another rack of lamb, another chocolate ice cream with sliced, caramelized bananas and sprigs of mint on top. The casino’s patience, its ability to come out just a little bit ahead each day, its constant impersonal hunger balanced by the way it contents itself with emptying the patron’s wallet only a few hundred francs at a time, is an inspiration to Masumi. To attach oneself to the world and suck calmly and with care until the blood wells up beneath its skin and makes a bruise, and then to pierce the flesh, to let the blood thread through one’s spit and down the throat. To nourish oneself on the trickle, this must be the goal of any person. Masumi may never be wealthy, but if he plays by the odds he can live well, and this can be a kind of happiness to replace the kind he used to feel. So far, tonight, he’s ahead, which is just another way of saying he’s winning.

  “Hit,” says Lauren.

  He does, and goes bust. That’s a good thing. Losing keeps him humble, keeps him mindful of the odds.

  “You should go there. You should see them.”

  They don’t talk about it anymore. Lauren thinks she’s won. After several more hours, in which following her instructions most of the time leads to winning a small majority of hands, and in which Masumi empties his flask, lending a tearful, stinging bleariness to his eyes and a soft blur to all the world’s edges, he decides she’s right. Meanwhile, a beautiful Parisian with a bevy of bright scarves assumes Lauren’s chair. Lauren effortlessly slides out of the way, orbiting the table so that she still faces the dealer, so that she can still see the cards. She’s sitting on thin air now, like the dead girl upstairs. Most people feel an instinctive aversion to her seat. It can stay empty for hours in a packed house. The average Parisian is apparently, perhaps predictably, unimpressed by premonitions and haunts, or wholly numbed to them from ass to elbows.

  Masumi approaches Lauren from behind. “I won’t be seeing you again,” he says, leaning forward to wrap his arms around her. Where they touch they do not touch—he passes through; it feels like nothing. Not even an active absence, but a passive one. He kisses where her ear would be if she had one, if she had anything. “I’m going to go down there. Maybe kill someone.”

  No one seems to mind his hugging the air. It doesn’t matter. He’ll never see any of them again.

  “Have a good life,” says Lauren, keeping her eyes on the cards.

  In this last moment, the worst possible time, Masumi surrenders to the obvious. “I never asked you how you died.”

  She peels back the open cuffs of her sleeves, revealing trails of dried blood leading from inner elbows to wrists, delicate bones, firm muscles. He’d never noticed how strong she was.

  He leaves her there.

  When he gets upstairs, Charlie has gone missing. Masumi never finds him again. The dead girl, thank goodness, is still fussing in the mirror. She doesn’t miss the dead boy because the dead can’t see the dead. The dead can’t see the dead, he thinks, because it would be too much comfort.

  ROSIE DOES THE MATH

  John, dressed for work in a large gray shirt and leather suspenders, follows Matthew out of their cabin. Matthew’s dressed for school: short pants, blue-collared shirt, brand new beret. There are more than three feet between them at all times—the length, roughly speaking, of the fat man’s arms. This is an ominous radius.

  Matthew mounts the bike. He puts one hand against the cabin wall and leans that way, raising his kickstand from the mud. He heels it back. Now he’s upright, ignoring his dependence on the wall. John may offer Matthew help. From this distance it’s impossible to hear. John grips the bike by its seat and sets it right. Matthew tries to pedal away. John holds him still and slips some cash into his pocket. He pushes Matthew along. The bike teeters, finds its balance. Matthew rings his bell three times.

  Rosie likes to see them get along. The sun is rising. The air is cold with a bit of wind. She’s still asleep. Rosie needs her coffee.

  John waves at her and totters her way. He’s getting larger. Knock him on his side and you could roll him like a barrel. Someone could get squished.

  He says, “Have you been to the museum yet today?”

  “Not yet,” says Rosie, rubbing her eyes beneath her glasses. The grease of her fingers is of course smeared on the lenses when they fall back into place. “I was going to have breakfast.”

  “Can I cook for you?” He thumbs his suspenders. “I swear I’ll do better than last time.”

  Rosie is wiping her glasses clean on her blouse. “You better. I still can’t get the taste of it out of my mouth.”

  “I told you what to do about that.”

  “And if I get sloshed, who’s going to keep you and your little hellion from burning the place down?”

  John looks genuinely hurt. “We would never do a thing like that.”

  She touches his arm, sliding her glasses back into place. “Just joshin’. I know you wouldn’t. Although, you know, he might.”

  John makes her puffy pancakes. He puts fat cubes of butter on each stack and sprinkles a generous helping of powdered sugar over each plate, then the syrup. She makes her own coffee while he works the kitchen cabin’s griddle. Her griddle, her pancakes, her butter, her sugar, her syrup. The fat man is liberal with her things. As the pancakes cool, he fries bacon. Grease flecks his shirt. The part of her that wants to sleep in peace tonight is at odds with the part of her that wants to calculate the meal’s cost. An offer to cook is an offer to use her things, is an offer to further deplete her savings. He surely means to be kind. If he added up the money he might save by eating with her, if this is a shrewd money-saving strategy, then he is at least taking care in the cooking. He knows she has a weakness for butter, and that she likes her bacon soft and yellow.

  If you don’t have to pay electric, gas, or water, and if you bought the land outright, you can run a hotel on a war widow’s government checks, assuming nobody comes there to stay. With several guests—and Rosie has only the newlyweds, Mr. Parcel, and Mrs. Dryden—one is required by decency and business sense to purchase more provisions than those guests will use: they expect options. No one wants to look at his neighbor and see an identical spread on the plate. They’ve got to feel special. So there’s excess. Given time the unused eggs go rancid. You’ve got to throw those out. Sometimes Rosie gets antsy; she has a lot of egg dinners. The bread molds but you can trim it away if you catch it early, sometimes even if you don’t. Then the rest is y
ours.

  Rosie does resent living on her own scraps. The fact this bacon would go to rot if they didn’t eat it, the fact the butter might otherwise sour, complicates her calculations. It might be saving them money in the long run. The long run is a lot to think about.

  They don’t say much while they eat. John drinks her orange juice. She knocks back two mugs of coffee before she’s halfway through the pancakes. His silverware—her silverware, in his hands—is loud on her plates.

  “We’ve got a new guest on the way,” says Rosie. “He speaks Japanese.”

  “That puts us at five languages. My French and yours, our collective English, your burgeoning Spanish, Mrs. Dryden’s Chinese, and now the newcomer.”

  “My Spanish does not burgeon. It putters at best,” says Rosie, lowering her eyes. “It’s too many guests. The budget will be very thin. If we can attract a few more, perhaps find another retired lodger—”

  “Bless Mrs. Dryden,” says John.

  “—Then we might start to turn this ship around. There might even be a margin.”

  “A profit margin?”

  “The same.”

  Budgetary concerns aside, it’s nice to sit with him this way. She pours her third and final coffee. John has calmed in recent days. It shows especially in his eating. He used to be frantic, furtive—weird, frankly. He would hold things at a certain distance, on fork-end, until he was ready, and then he would take them in one bite. Chew, gulp, swallow. The next morsel, meanwhile, held again at that ominous distance. Now he’s holding his rasher of bacon in his bare fingers as he speaks, waving it like a conductor’s wand.