Fat Man and Little Boy

by Mike Meginnis

  Rosie’s face twitches at the left cheek. The twitch becomes a pained smile. “As in penis?”

  “No, dick as in fat.”

  “Does it bring you peace knowing all that language?”

  “I’ve always got a word for anything I feel, and there are lots of people I can talk to.”

  “Do you talk to them?”

  “No. It’s good to know I could, though.”

  “You don’t seem at peace,” says Rosie. “What you did to Matthew. You don’t need to explain. I wouldn’t be impressed. Just don’t do it again. Find peace or get out of my hotel.”

  Masumi says, “There’s something about this place. You know when I heard what you did with the camp I thought it was in quite poor taste. In fact, I still do. But something about that works for me. The crass American willingness to build on a graveyard, to erase history. But the cabins are beautiful. And, if I am honest with myself, it is good to study language once more. That study used to be the center of my life.”

  Rosie listens with a stern, warning expression on her face, lips tucked in, eyes wide and unblinking.

  “Don’t worry,” says Masumi, “I’ll be good. I won’t be any trouble. If I start to be trouble again, then I’ll leave.”

  “See that you do,” says Rosie. She can speak a cliché without the slightest indication she knows it as such. It sounds pure and cold and new. “I don’t need your money.”

  “I don’t think that’s true.”

  They part on these terms. Rosie leaves the Italian book behind, unshelved. He slides it into place for her, running his hand over the spines to even them.

  He finds a French history of flight and sits to read. It begins with the French contributions to the field, focusing on these at the expense of the Germans, Italians, Americans, and Japanese. One of the small pleasures of the languages of others is witnessing their petty nationalisms. He finds himself laughing at a paragraph lauding the craftsmanship, care, and elegance found in French plane designs as a way of downplaying the innovations of foreign engineers. He runs his hand over an illustration of a particu­lar­ly tasteful aircraft, all soft curves and stylish bulges, tracing its wings and fuselage, imagining how each segment might look disembodied, exploded. The beauty of a machine’s destruction is a ratio of its beauty intact.

  The young, new wife sits down beside him. She says, her voice thick with sleep deprivation, “My father designed those, and helped to build them.”

  “Where’s your handsome husband?” says Masumi.

  “He’s ill in the cabin. I’ve been caring for him but I needed a break. You should hear him going on about his stomach.” Her own stomach burbles. The medium notices a pale, waxy quality to her skin. A zit crowns her nose, obviously much-molested, red and furious against her pallor. He watches the girl raise her thumb and rub it over the pus nub, which whitens and then crimsons again as she applies and releases the pressure, the way a thumbnail does when pressed.

  “Are you sure that you aren’t ill as well?”

  “I mustn’t be, the way he whines,” she says, offering a lazy wink. “If I’m sick then he’s dying, so I’ve decided I’m not sick.”

  “Very prudent.”

  She takes a handkerchief from the elastic waistband of her skirt and blows her nose, folds the fabric to cover her crime. She looks longingly at a portrait of an engineer—thick glasses fallen to the tip of his nose, wild lick of hair an island on an otherwise bare, long forehead, gentle eyes. With the ginger half-aggression of a young bride, she touches the page, bringing her soft elbow into soft contact with Masumi’s gut, and in intimate proximity to the butt of his fancy little gun.

  “Do you miss him?” says Masumi.

  “I loved my mother more while he was alive. Now he’s gone and we eat and sleep on his fortune, luxuriating in this quaint little hideaway, waiting for the letter demanding that we come home and stop wasting the money to which my mother feels she is entitled. But the truth is the rent here is very reasonable. We should have chosen, perhaps, a more frivolous hotel.”

  “So you do miss him, and you need to burn a little money.”

  She nods, taking the book from his hands.

  “My wife can help you with that.”

  “You’re married?” says the newlywed. “What does she look like? Is she very beautiful?”

  “She’s a Japanese woman,” says Masumi, as if that is an answer. “She looks a bit like me, I’m told.”

  “How come I’ve never seen her here before?”

  “She doesn’t like to come out in the daytime. It would darken her skin, which is very fair, and concerning which she is also very vain. Also, she is uncomfortable in groups. She would be comfortable with you though. I can tell.”

  The newlyweds don’t come to dinner. Matthew is sent to their cabin with a large platter of easily-digested foods: breads, jellies, fruit, steamed vegetables.

  John raves, not for the first time, about the film they saw the week before. His enthusiasm fades to background noise, but certain themes and phrases assert themselves repeatedly—repetitions, no less, from other meals and conversations, wherein the fat man also touched his neighbors freely on their arms and wrists to emphasize his points and better capture their attention. “They’re really brilliant kids,” he says. “Handsome, of course, but both so talented and—and this is the really special part—both exactly equal in their talents. You understand? Neither one has anything over the other, or if he does, I couldn’t spot it.”

  “Yes,” says Rosie. “They were pretty good.”

  “Their genius lies in being identical, or alternately, in appearing to be identical,” says John. “Now, it’s possible this is only an illusion. Perhaps they’ve divided the emotional spectrum between them. Able, for example, might be responsible for sadness, disappointment, misery, loneliness, and the sort of joy that makes one weep. Baker would then be charged with savagery, anger, joy, laughter, humor, exuberance, and orgasm.”

  “You don’t film orgasm,” says Rosie. “People don’t want to see that.”

  Masumi toys with his salmon. Lemon butter sauce drizzled over the pink meat, seasoned with crumbled herbs, fork tender. He sips the wine he brought to the table, the wine he is sharing; the widow takes a sip as well, as does Mrs. Dryden. Matthew comes back from the newlyweds’ cabin empty-handed, rubbing his stomach, ready to chow. He sits down across the table from the fat man, serves himself fish from the pile at the table’s center, dripping citrus-laced dairy fat on the tablecloth in a trail of yellowed dots. There is still a little steam rising from his meal. Rosie covers the fish again and piles vegetables onto his plate as if she were his mother, neither making eye contact.

  John drones on. “It might be that they’ve taken a more disorganized approach, with Baker doing all the scenes requiring tears, anger, giddiness, and jealousy, while Able claims hunger, fear, intimacy, and sadism, to name some possibilities. Or it might be that Able is responsible for the full range of emotion apart from those that require expelling fluids: weeping, spitting, ejaculation, bleeding, drooling, urination, and so on.”

  “People don’t want to see those things,” says Rosie, “or hear about them.”

  “They’re artists ahead of their time. Someday people will film all of those things and more.”

  “Why should they want to do that, John?” says Masumi.

  “People are curious about their bodies.” He looks down at his plate: empty, eaten, in spite of all his rambling. “They want to know what it’s like for other people.”

  “About the same, I imagine,” says Rosie. She dabs at her cheek with a napkin.

  “Imagine two men,” says John, pushing through to his central point, “brothers, dividing the human experience between them, to make it manageable. Each masters his share of human feeling and leaves the rest to his twin. Together, their efforts make one man, perfect and round a
s an unbroken circle.”

  The young bride knocks at Masumi’s door. He knows it is her because of how she knocks—her knuckles striking twice, firmly, and then nothing. The shifting of skirts outside as she sways, considering, imagining. These are the ways that she would do these things.

  The medium welcomes her in.

  “You are beautiful,” says the bride, perhaps a little too surprised, touching the kimono, pinching the silk. “I love your robe.”

  “Thank you,” says Masumi.

  He’s let his hair down. He wears a touch of makeup. He’s left the peacock feather needles in their bundle, apart from the one that extends from his third eye. The rest seemed a bit much for close quarters.

  “Where’s your husband?” asks the bride.

  The medium explains Masumi’s gone out walking. This way they have their privacy. They discuss payment. The young bride passes the medium a fair chunk of her dead father’s money—the high price of a personal consultation. They sit together at the medium’s table, her simple wooden box between them, but closer to the medium’s chair so it is clear the bride should not touch.

  “I’m told you’d like to speak with your father.”

  “You can do that?”

  “I can be a vessel. If you want me to.”

  “I would like that,” says the girl, putting her fingers on his fingers.

  “You might.” He looks down at her hand touching his. “Please don’t touch me.”

  The girl withdraws her hand. The medium gathers his brother’s box to his breast, feeling the smooth, cool grain. He leans close enough to breathe its dusty, wooden scent. Like loaded dice rolling into place, his mind finds focus. It seeks a voice, a dead man’s. The dead man is coming to him. They will meet in the middle. He will blank his mind and let it take a new shape, a new fire, burning through the fibers, and this will change the features of his face, drawing tight weak, neglected muscles, and slacking others favored by the medium, making the face feel as a pudding, shot through with stubborn strands or grains, entangled in a numbed mesh, a speaking slab joined to the skull.

  The ghost enters the medium.

  The ghost favors the eyebrows, the forehead, the muscle ridges of the cheeks. He lunges the head forward, close as he can to his daughter. “Adèle?”

  “Daddy?”

  “What have you done with my money?”

  “It’s still there, Daddy. We’ve only spent a little.”

  “It has to last you your whole life.”

  “I can work,” says the young bride. “Gilbert will go into business.”

  “You married Gilbert?”

  “He’s a good boy. He takes care of me.”

  “I worry about you.” The medium’s face falls. His eyes water.

  “Do you feel this?” She touches the medium’s hand.

  “No. I don’t.”

  Masumi does.

  “Do they still use my planes?” says the medium’s face.

  “Yes. Of course they do.”

  They talk about family things. She tells him of the aunt who died. The medium’s mouth grows tired and dry. He needs a taste. How to tell the ghost? There is nothing to do for it but wait.

  Later, when the ghost leaves Masumi, he feels his body tremor. The strange, other shape fades from his brain, his face. He is himself.

  “Thank you,” says the young bride. “It was strange. That was really him, wasn’t it?”

  “Next time I could be your grandmother.” He pops the cork on a wine bottle and drinks from it, pulling the feather needle from his forehead. A drop of blood lands on the table, wet and heavy and still.

  “I might be afraid to come again,” she says.

  “There’s one other thing,” says the medium. “You’re pregnant.”

  “How can you know that? You see the dead.”

  “Sometimes the living are dead come back.”

  HIDE AND SEEK

  Summer.

  Claire rides her new bicycle behind Matthew’s old one. He pumps his legs fast, pushing ahead, making her race. Her calves burn, thighs groan, lungs threaten collapse. Does he think girls only like the boys who race them? Boys who can kick up great spurts of mud with their wheels? The feeling of knowing they have a long way to go before they can ride the way you do? The stupid, careless teeter of your careening vehicle’s rear end?

  She does like it.

  He’s led her to his home, and now they weave between the cabins, around a tree like a willow, past bemused wives and relaxing husbands, some with lemonades in hand, some eating pastries, bananas, or wedges of orange. They are careful to avoid spraying dirt on the guests, but not too careful. The women love to see children at play. The men love to see their women love to see children at play.

  A gust of wind, and Claire clutches her hat, pushing it down with the butt of her fist. The brim obscures the world. When she pushes it back into place, Matthew has swerved out of sight. She slows, braking almost too hard, and searches. He’s on her left, at the entrance to a cabin like any other, jumping down from his bicycle’s seat in an almost-graceful dismount designed to obscure the difference between the length of his legs and the height of his wheels. The dirt smears his bare ankles—his cuffs pulled up, it seems, for just such an occasion.

  He motions her to follow. Her bike stalled, all momentum lost, she climbs off and walks it to the cabin. Matthew takes a brass key from his pocket and opens the door. To her surprise, he wheels the bike in with him, mud and all, tracking smears onto the floor.

  She hesitates at the threshold. He comes back to the door and motions her in. “Come on,” he says, in English, ducking back inside. She follows him. She dirties the floor with her bike as well and leans it against the wall beside his.

  What a strange place. All the furniture has been pushed up against the walls, creating as much empty floor as possible. The chairs are upside-down on the table the way the staff puts them in restaurants come closing time. The empty floor is, apart from layered, aging bike tracks, scrupulously clean—but less clean than blank, really, because “clean” implies a sort of arrangement, and here there is nothing arranged, there is nothing to be arranged.

  There is one pillow on the bed, center-mattress. There is one blanket. There is a sack of coal against the wall beside the furnace, only a little used. The furnace is neat, and the floor around it not smudged at all with black, as with other furnaces. There are no hangings on the walls, and the windows are covered with cloth shades, sky blue, to let in a little light. It is very dim.

  Matthew sits cross-legged in the middle of the cabin, hands at rest on his knees, breathing deeply. He opens one eye to check on Claire, closes it when he sees she’s fine, she’s calm too, she’s still there.

  “It’s so quiet here,” says Claire. “Peter would hate it.”

  She traces the sky-blue fabric’s edges, picks off a fuzzball. She holds it in her fist, loathe to drop it on the pristine floor. “They let you have your own place?”

  “No,” he answers, in his slow, cotton-mouthed French, “but we don’t have enough guests to fill up. There are a few secret cabins like this one.”

  “You speak well when you want to,” says Claire. “You should do it more often.”

  “I don’t like to,” says Matthew, in English.

  “Why not?” says Claire. She sits down with him, facing, their knees touching through her skirt, his pants. “Is it hard for you? I could help. I’m good at talking.”

  “This is a quiet place,” says Matthew. “I like to be quiet.”

  “It’s not a quiet place outside.” Claire leans back, her hand flat on the floor.

  “I am a quiet place.”

  Claire shrugs it off. If he’s got to be quiet then she can love the quiet. She can be a quiet place too. She closes her eyes and imagines a meadow, seeds and spores afloat above the whorl
s of tall grass, the grass in shades of green, gray, brown, yellow, green. Framed by lovely trees, thin enough that you can see the way their shadows drape each other and make a network on the ground—branches interlocking branches like one thousand elbows, wavering as waver the strands of light that lick the bottom of a water dish laid out in the sun.

  “Peter would hate this,” she says. “This quiet. He couldn’t stand it. He would have to challenge you, or sing a song, or draw on the walls, mess up the place. My mother says he won’t be satisfied until he makes everything look the way he looks, which, according to my mother, is the way that he feels.”

  Matthew takes in a long breath. He lets it out on its own schedule. It makes her budding bosoms itch to see the flatness of his boy-bosom. She can spend what seems like an hour pinching and kneading her nipples if there’s no one in the house. In the quiet her body is loud.

  Matthew says, “What?”

  “I was just saying how Peter doesn’t like some things that we like. You don’t like some of the things me and Peter like, too, but I was thinking how what he doesn’t like, that you and I do like, is quiet, and being quiet together.”

  Matthew unfolds his legs and stands up. “This is no good.” English again. “You’re not quiet.”

  “I’m sorry,” says Claire. “I’ll do better.”

  “We’ll go out and play,” says Matthew, in French. “We’ll play until you’re tired and out of breath. Then we’ll come back and try it again.”

  “I’m sorry. You know how I get.” She doesn’t know what this means, but Matthew nods, so apparently he does know how she gets; apparently, she gets some way.

  He leads her back into the day. The sun is falling in increments, but the hotel people are still about, some of them playing horseshoes, lawn darts, and badminton, while others sleep or lounge. Gay colors, light dresses, low necklines, suit pants without jackets, slacks, comfortable shoes, slippers worn out-of-doors.

  “Why are there so many now?” says Claire.