“Babies,” says Matthew, in his clumsy French. “A young couple lives here. She got a baby even though they didn’t think she could.” He motions at the rest of them. “Their friends, and the friends’ friends. They want to get babies too. But it takes a little while.”
One of the wives sits in a cane chair, rubbing her small tummy through a baggy maternity dress, while her husband pours her a glass of slightly brown-tinged water from a bottle.
“How does it happen?” asks Claire.
The woman drinks the water, screwing up her eyes as she glugs. She shivers once in her neck and shoulders as the last drop disappears.
Matthew shrugs. “No one’s sure. The water,” pointing to the wife in the maternity dress. “The air. The mud. The food. The ghosts. Could be anything.”
“Ghosts?”
“Dead Jews,” says Matthew. “Come on. I want to do something.”
“Something in particular?”
He shakes his head, waving his hands, offended by her misunderstanding or his own communication. “No, no. Just something.”
“Maybe I could meet your uncle,” says Claire. “I never got to yet.”
Matthew takes tentative steps in what Claire immediately knows to be the opposite direction of where he might find his uncle. “I never met your mother.”
Claire’s mother is busy. She puts on the face that she wears when she says that her mother is busy. “My mother is busy,” she says, and that’s that.
“My uncle is busy.”
“Busy with what?”
Matthew shrugs. He begins to walk again, snapping his fingers as if she is a pet that follows.
“Are you ashamed of me?” says Claire.
“What?” says Matthew. “Why should I be? Come on. Meet my uncle. You won’t like him.”
He takes her to the kitchen cabin. Claire feels the thirsty eyes of husbands and wives on their bodies like so many tongues. They aren’t babies, but can pass given sufficient need. If they stopped someone would offer her a candy. They pass a young couple—newlyweds, perhaps—walking side by side under a similar collective gaze, arm in arm, their other hands cupping the young wife’s swollen belly as if it is a tenuous thing and not the hard bubble, the bulgy sun, at the center of her body, at the center of their lives.
“She could burst any day now,” whispers Claire to Matthew, though loud enough for the couple to hear—she has grasped their promenade and its purpose, the way it thrills them to hear the coming mother spoken of as if she was not there.
When they enter the kitchen, they find a monstrously fat man and a pretty-if-strange woman. Claire deduces that she is American because of her ankles; Americans’ ankles are always red knobs sheathed in watery, bluish skin. Together they work a large collection of pots, some steaming, some rattling on the several stoves, some outright bubbling over. Some finished and waiting. The fat man—Matthew’s uncle, apparently—and the woman—the widow, Claire guesses—work with few words, if not smoothly then at least directly, grunting cooking times at each other and reaching out with sauce-sodden spoons for a wipe clean from the other, using a towel held out backward, neither watching the operation, only trusting it to happen. They drip with sweat. It’s sort of cute.
Matthew waits to be noticed.
“Hello,” says Claire, offering a curtsy. “Are you Matthew’s uncle? He doesn’t seem to want to tell me for himself.”
The fat man and the pretty-if-strange widow turn to her. Their aprons are identically stained, carbon streaks and old butter, crusted flour, tomato, and several grease burns.
“Hello,” says the fat one. “My name is John. I am indeed his uncle. And who is the little lady?”
What lovely French, thinks Claire. “Claire Lambert.” Another curtsy. “Matthew’s friend.”
“You’re quite pretty, aren’t you?” says the widow. “I’m Rosie.”
“I wouldn’t know,” says Claire, covering her mouth and looking at the floor.
“Is she your little girlfriend?” says John.
Matthew twists up his face in anger, but does not answer. Claire only smiles, charming as she can.
“How cute,” says Rosie. “How sweet.” She turns to move something overheating from the range, placing it on one of several counters, where it bubbles, calming.
“Be careful,” says John. “You know how it is here.”
Matthew fumes.
“Are you taking her to your secret cabin? Have you shown it to her yet?” says John, grinning sidelong at Rosie, who suppresses her laughter.
“You don’t know anything about it,” shouts Matthew.
Everyone stares at everyone else for what seems like, but can’t be, a long time. Matthew leaves, slamming the kitchen cabin’s door behind him. Rosie guffaws, a throaty bark strange from her small-if-sturdy frame.
Claire hesitates to follow Matthew, looking to his uncle and the woman for help. She’s blushing, too, and yes, a little furious, at what they knew, and how they said it now, in front of her, and all that it implies, as if they know—as if they know anything.
“Go on,” says Rosie. “Follow him out. Give chase!”
He runs away from her for a long time. He hides at the corners of cabins, behind outhouses, leading her from the hotel’s center and into its periphery, where there are fewer guests, some darting wild animals—small mice, black birds, crickets, chipmunks—unchecked weeds, unstable bushes with many yellow blossoms, clover, dandelions, a fuzzy purple plant with a poison-looking sheen, and already withering too-tall blades of grass budding with seeds at their brown, pointed crowns.
Matthew darts through a gap: a dark, small shape against the low sun. He runs behind another cabin. When she chases him around the corner, he’s gone. She imagines him running with a full, jangling key ring, unlocking the doors of these outlying cabins, secreting himself in their shadows until she passes by a window, going the wrong way, and he runs out in the other direction, circling at some distance, so as to flit through her vision and be gone.
Just as her lungs are starting to really burn and she’s lost herself completely in the identical rows of identical cabins, she hears Matthew yelp a short distance away. Rounding a final corner, she finds him, face-down, sprawled in the grass, and immediately decides he’s only pretending. As she approaches, giving her heart a chance to settle and fortify, she prepares for his inevitable launch headlong down the alley, past the middle-aged couple playing cards on a table they brought for that purpose, and perhaps into the hotel’s center to start it all again. He’ll do it when she’s four steps away. She walks softly. He’ll do it when she’s two steps away. He does not. She kneels and rolls him over; an easy thing, he is so light. His eyes come open. His chest rises and falls as hers rises and falls. They look at each other.
“I fell.”
“Mhm,” says Claire.
“You’re breathless,” says Matthew.
“You know the word breathless.”
“Let’s find a new cabin.”
Perhaps emboldened by the chase, perhaps knowing how it would sting her lungs to find the air to object, he leads her by the hand. His hands are smaller than hers. She is taller than he. Once inside the cabin, Matthew pushes the table against the wall and stacks the chairs on its top as in the previous secret cabin, which still has their bikes. Claire pushes the sofa against the opposite wall, moving one end and then the other in several seesaw motions.
When they’re done they sit in the center of the room, legs folded, and wait for their air to come back, really breathing for the first time in what might be an hour. Claire coughs harshly. Matthew closes his eyes and raises his arms almost parallel to his shoulders, feeling the air.
Feeling the quiet.
A long while later they can speak again.
“See how good it feels?” he asks her.
Claire’s been torment
ed by every second of silence. She hated it. Couldn’t he tell? Some of us may not have a lot to say but some of us have ideas. He kisses her. She laughs. He takes it all wrong. She shakes her head no and kisses him. It’s fine. They touch each other. She rubs him through his shirt. He touches what there is of her breasts. He’s terrifically hungry in his kissing, in his feeling. After every kiss she has the urge to ask him is this what he’s wanted—is this why he’s pushed her? His breath tastes like fried egg white. He’s got gas inside him, waiting to push out, she can tell. Little belches between kisses, facing away. She doesn’t mind so much. It can be that way for her too, though today she’s almost calm, perhaps because she knows he’ll do everything she wants and nothing she doesn’t. He runs his hands over her sides. She feels her ribs resist his fingers. She reaches between his legs. Squeezes, her fingers beneath, cupping, her thumb above, pressing.
Soft.
He’s soft. Like a slug.
“Don’t.”
She curls her fingers more tightly.
“Don’t,” he shouts, and pushes her away. Too hard. She raises her hand to slap him. He cowers. She reaches out for him again. He scoots away, beginning to cry. “I can’t. I never, ever can. Don’t,” he heaves. “I can’t.”
When she tries to ask him what he means he tells her to shut up.
She leaves him there. Walks home, in the dark, her bike trapped behind the door of one in a hundred anonymous, identical cabins. All the wives and husbands are indoors—she can feel them on the sticky air, working to conceive.
Days later, when Peter’s flu has left him and his strength is back, he comes to see her at night, while her mother is out on one of her dates. He comes to her and they kiss. He is becoming a man. His back has grown broad, his arms muscled, and, when she touches it, when she grasps it in her hand, his prick is hard. They breathe into each other’s mouths. His breath is like a heavy bread. They are both waiting until the day, the inevitable moment, where she will flick her tongue across the cleft of his upper lip.
He asks her what she is thinking. He kisses her earlobe, bumping foreheads painfully. They both ignore the impact. That happens sometimes, like the gas-bloat of a stressed stomach. She doesn’t answer. She is thinking how Matthew doesn’t like all the things they like. This, for instance. Matthew doesn’t like this.
HOW MANY
Fat Man sees their car first. Short Mr. Bruce and thin Mr. Rousseau, the police from up north, investigators of the Blanc death, or, as they see it, murder by abortion. The car is a nice one, white, with shining wheels and a quiet little engine. It wears its roof like a hat. It isn’t obviously a police car or not a police car. The other guests, the husbands and wives—some now mothers, bumping babies on their knees or feeding them with newly-swollen breasts—wave at Mr. Bruce and Mr. Rousseau as they approach, assuming them to be new guests, potential friends. Mr. Bruce smiles in the passenger seat. Mr. Rousseau scowls as he drives—the car does not come to him naturally.
Fat Man ducks into the kitchen. “They’ve come,” he says to no one. The cabin is empty. There are many dirty pots and pans he has been meaning to wash. There is a boy who comes down to wash them in the evening, when he’s freed from chores at home. He doesn’t come long enough to do it all though, and he’s all Rosie is willing to hire. She brought on a full-time maid, as Little Boy has failed to keep pace with the growing needs of the guests, but she didn’t like doing it, and often mentions the new expense to Little Boy, though the hotel is thriving now thanks to the medium’s cult.
Fat Man scrubs the pots and pans. He begins with a heavy black one. Its bottom has a scorched rind, a mottle of orange and carbon. He spoons it into the garbage can, scooping divots in the sauce. He turns the pan sideways and digs deeper, pushing more into the can. A mold is growing on the rind. He scrapes away the mold as well, cursing, wiping sweat from his eyes.
Meanwhile the other pots and pans grow differently colored molds, plants, and flowers. A little tree buds in a cup lined with cream; a lily in a pan littered with stale scraps of cornbread; a fat mushroom cap atop a thin, twisting stem in a bowl full of decomposing fruit. The growth ripples outward from Fat Man through the cabin, those things closest growing most quickly.
This, he thinks, is surely evidence against him. It explains everything. It reveals him. He empties all he can into the garbage, shaking scum, flower, weed, little tree, seed, fungus—all of which grow as he shakes them loose, and as he adds to the waste it becomes one solid mass, ingrown, a bin full of tumor, teeming, brimming. When they open the door he pushes the mass down with his hands. It writhes.
Mr. Bruce and Mr. Rousseau stand in the doorway.
“Chores?” says Mr. Bruce.
“I’m a cook,” says Fat Man. “It happens. People make messes.”
“People clean them up,” says Mr. Bruce. He takes Fat Man’s elbow. Mr. Rousseau takes the other.
“We’d like to rent a room a couple days,” says Mr. Rousseau. “Use it as a home base.”
“The widow handles all of that,” says Fat Man.
“Why don’t you go ahead and unlock one of them for us to start with, and we’ll settle up with her later,” says Mr. Rousseau, twisting the end of his mustache.
They lead the fat man out the door.
“We’ve got this thing sewn up,” says Mr. Rousseau. They sit across the table in the cabin for which they promise they’ll pay later. “Soon we’ll lock you away for good.”
Fat Man palms his face. “You still think I killed the Blanc woman?”
Mr. Bruce taps a fingernail repeatedly against his shirt’s highest button. “Not just Mrs. Blanc. We think there are others. You’ve killed more girls than I’ve had. Does it make you feel like a big man to know you’ve killed more girls than I’ve had?”
“I already told you that I never even met Mrs. Blanc. I couldn’t pick her out of a crowd.”
“You said a lot of things,” says Mr. Rousseau.
“You seemed ambivalent,” says Mr. Bruce.
“I didn’t do anything to those women.”
“What about Adrienne Defoe?” asks Mr. Rousseau. “Paris, three years ago. Cut open with a long, serrated blade, perhaps a bread knife. Do you like bread?”
“Denise Desmarais? Paris, died two years back in a back-alley abortion. Bled out on the cobblestones.”
“Danielle Morel,” suggests Mr. Rousseau. “Strasbourg. Five years ago. At the time we thought she was a suicide. Slit wrists, found long dead in the bathtub. Blue skin, red water.”
“White tub. She took a bottle of aspirin before she did it. We figured she didn’t understand how painkillers work. Now we know it was you trying to poison her.” Mr. Bruce turns a sharpened pencil over and over in his hand. “She was your first.”
“I can’t help but notice you’re both wearing ordinary clothes,” says Fat Man. “You don’t look like police anymore. I don’t think I have to listen to this.”
“Very sharp,” says Mr. Bruce, exchanging a smile with his partner. “We work for Mr. Blanc now. He pays us a modest salary so that we can focus our energies on solving his case, and his case alone. But you shouldn’t leave your seat until you’ve heard us out.”
He produces a typewritten list, some names crossed out, others underlined. But he reads them all, and he reads them all the same way. A flat delivery, pro forma, as if their meaning, such as it is, is already known, and in the rehearsal there is nothing new accomplished, but a recitation for its own sake, a list that exists to list and be listed, an index to itself. “Corinne Roux, Nantes. Caroline Fortescue, Nantes. Bernadette Boucher, Toulouse.” Those should be Japanese names. “Christiane Bourque, Lyon. Alice Bessette, Bordeaux.” A woman crouched melting all around her baby, back turned to the low sun of his explosion, the flash-bang, pika don. Their collective shadow stained onto the wall, a heavy smudge, the baby subsumed somewhere in the melting mother, perhaps ident
ifiable in the bodies themselves—you would cut through the meat char, to the bones, to learn what was where—but the shadow lost in the shadow projected on the wall. “Dianne Chevalier, Paris. Florence David, Paris. Lorraine Girard, Paris.” Meat rolling back from fine, delicate bones, in layers and peels, revealing the joint of a knee, revealing the cold, hollowed whiteness of a hip bone, rolling back, unveiling organs, which flow away as bright many-colored steam, revealing a spine, rolling back from the breasts, sponges sizzling, veins like fuses, revealing ribs, white smiles. A face becoming a skull, becoming a toothless, hollowed thing, the eyes boiling and then gone, all gone, revealing the brain, which hardens, raisin-esque, though the nose slowly collapses, though the ears drip away. “Alice Bernard, Paris. Lucie Michel, Marseille. Martha Grosvenor, Marseille.” A city stripped the same. Trees aflame, revealing foliage, revealing grasses, revealing dirt, becoming mud, flowing away, pushed back all wiggle-pudding by the force of Fat Man’s low sun, and layer, and layer, until the dinosaurs surface; their bones, the pterodactyl midflight midst the mud, the brontosaurus mourning its lost tail, the tyrannosaurus rex reaching up with stubby arms as if to finally crown itself king of the lizards; all floating out of gravity’s grasp, into space, among the stars, revealing the core, the burning center, orange-yellow swirl, and underneath that red, a red light, pure as pure as pure as pure, throb—and him, Fat Man, exploding still, a white sphere opposite the red throb, singing, a single note, no sound now, nothing heard or felt in space, in vacuum, but still, the song, a single note, and all else gone but for the other’s throb.
“All of them pregnant, or with a child recently born,” says Mr. Bruce. “That’s how we know you did them. It’s a pattern.”
“The pattern fits,” says Mr. Rousseau, jabbing Fat Man’s chest with his forefinger.
“Black palms,” says Mr. Bruce. “Stained by sin. They used to think the body would show guilt. Then they decided against it. We’ll show them they were right before.”
Fat Man and Little Boy Page 23