He fidgets with his shirt. Attempts to wipe away Masumi’s stain.
“I don’t have to ask because I know.”
“Is it my looks?”
“Get down on your knees and check beneath the bed for our daughter before I kill you with my bare goddamn hands.”
Fat Man slides down from the bed like a deluge of mud and mud. He rocks forward onto his hands and knees and lifts the sheet from the bed. Seeing nothing, he waddles forward, while Rosie watches coolly, from some painful remove: the fat man crawling, the fat man’s wife watching the fat man crawling. The trail of crushed carpet he leaves in his wake like parted water now forever parted. He leans forward to peek beneath the bed.
Gasps.
The gun falls from his body like an egg.
As Rosie watches she feels herself leaving her body to watch her body watch the fat man and his gun, and the small white hand that darts out from beneath the bed, and takes the gun, and pulls it underneath.
“Maggie,” shouts Rosie, pulled back inside her body with a painful rubber force. “Put it down!”
She drops to her knees, burning them on the carpet, and crawls to look beneath the bed, where she can barely make out anything, but knows as if by feel and smell and sound as well as sight the shape of a sleeping dog and her daughter, who is looking down the barrel of her husband’s pretty gun, who is thumbing the trigger. Who is thumbing the trigger.
John says, “It’s not loaded.”
Maggie, as if to confirm, pushes the trigger back so that it clicks. The dry, hollow, toy-like snap of the gun’s silver hammer.
Rosie—thinking, Too late Rosie, your daughter should be dead—takes the gun from Maggie and hurls it at her husband’s face. It hits his nose, and maybe breaks it, which makes him bleed. She pulls out her daughter from underneath the bed. She lifts Maggie in her arms, and Maggie’s asking what’s happened to Daddy. Daddy who is still on all fours, who is bleeding down his face and jowls onto someone else’s carpet. Who is looking up with pleading eyes. The sleeping dog under the bed whines.
“If there’s one thing I can’t abide, it’s a weapon,” says Rosie. “You know enough languages you ought to be past that.”
John sits back on his feet. They’ll go numb like that, she thinks.
Rosie says, “Why do you have that?”
“It wasn’t loaded.” He says, “I am a weapon.”
“Did you kill those girls?”
“Not the ones they say. But some others.”
“What were you going to do with the gun?”
“I don’t know yet what I’ll do.”
“I’m going back to France. If you can make it back without getting arrested, we can talk through everything there.”
Fat Man’s tears are diluting his blood, which is creeping down his shirt.
“I’m a bomb.”
Maggie’s hiding her face in Rosie’s neck.
“I don’t know what that means, but I don’t like it.”
“I’m trying to tell you.”
“No,” says Rosie, pointing at the picture over Able’s bed, or Baker’s. “That is a bomb. You’re a father. Not a very good one.”
She heads for the door, begins to close it behind her, and turns to look at him through the crack. He can see Maggie’s arm around her mother’s neck, but not Maggie. Rosie knows this. She is maybe being cruel. She is waiting for her husband to tell her to wait. She is waiting to find out what she’ll do when he begs her. But he doesn’t beg. Only weeps and bleeds, though he’s losing energy for both. His face is settling into its half-dead, half-miserable default.
“I hate to see you unhappy,” she says. So she closes the door.
Fat Man can track her passage through the home, her growing distance, by the sounds of closing doors. As she grows farther away, the sounds grow louder. She may spend the rest of her life slamming doors. She may spend the rest of her life, he thinks, more or less as unhappy as she is now, and maybe always has been. This, this moment now, this feeling, is a fluctuation.
To slither up the bed behind his nurse. To breathe the scent of her neck, of her hair. To wrap his arms around her waist. Or better yet, to slither up the bed and curl and rest against her stomach, to breathe the scent between her breasts, and from her neck and hair. To let his body shiver. Let it tremble. Let the tremble wrack his body. To push the book away. As he now does.
Little Boy asks her if she will hold him like his nurse did. Little Boy asks her does she love him. Little Boy asks her does she know how beautiful she is. Little Boy breathes. Her scent.
Keiko pushes him far enough away, on the bed, so he’s at arm’s length. He actually rolls over once completely, she pushes him so hard. As she pushes him and as he rolls he catches a glimpse of her bare breast beneath her robe. Keiko slaps his face. “You’re not a little boy!” she says. “You’re a creep!”
She slaps him again, exactly where Fat Man slapped him, so that he can feel his face begin to bruise, two overlapping bruises, a hand within a hand. She pushes him off the bed. He falls on the floor. Stares up at the ceiling. Keiko peeks over the bed’s edge, a tendril of her hair hanging down half the distance between them. Her head recedes.
“Go on,” she says. “Fuck off.”
He runs.
There is no water in the swimming pool shaped like a star, apart from a small bucket that holds a mop, propped up in the corner of one of the star’s points. Fat Man lies on his back at the bottom of the star. He stumbled here through the mansion. He did not see the Hanway twins in his passing, unless they were hiding among their wax doubles in the wax double room. He bled on everything he passed.
His eyes are closed or he is looking at an empty sky.
His body is a shell.
Where is Little Boy’s body?
Where is his daughter’s body going now?
Where will it be tomorrow?
The Hanway twins are asking him to get out of their pool, please, or their backyard’s greenery is rustling in the wind.
Where is Little Boy’s body?
His body is a shell.
It was like rubbing your hands together to make them warm.
It was like breathing in and in.
It was like drowning in an empty pool.
It was peaceful.
It was deafening.
It was blinding.
It was being a moon.
It was coming back from the dead.
It was forgetting.
It was perfect, awful memory.
It was like having no brother, and being nobody.
His eyes are closed or he is looking at an empty sky.
It was like being born.
Fat Man is born.
and his body splits beneath his arms, new hands emerging, climbing on new arms beneath the old ones, while new legs thrash out from his hips, and new arms beneath the new arms, and new legs beneath the new legs, climbing
his body jerks with each new growth, pulled this way and that by the force of his force, and his jaw cracks from his screaming, and from his open jaws an arm, and with every inch of that arm’s passage it widens, so that the jaws are more and more divided, ripped asunder,
and the arm burns,
and the fire
burns
as his body aching swells, as the fat grows up around his head, rolls up over his chin and his ears, rolls up over his nose, rolls up over his eyes, blacking
all he sees,
and closes, his fat, over his head, sealing at the crown, puckered around the arm that split his jaws,
as there grow new arms between the new arms and new legs, he is a wad, he is and he is and he is arms and legs and arms and legs projecting from a swarming trunk of flesh,
like say a tree,
fingers growing from palms, fingers growin
g from knuckles, fingers growing from fingertips, fingers growing from elbows, fingers growing from knees, fingers growing from armpits, fingers growing from groin, from ass, from between toes, growing out, extending hands, hands becoming arms, growing fingers, growing hands, growing arms, thrusting out,
reaching up
in a stream
twisting
together
and from this twisting
spreading,
new arms growing from new arms, hands reaching out, trembling, and new hands reaching out, trembling,
grasping at the air,
and new hands, and new feet lashing, bare feet, how they prickle and they tingle in the wind
until his body is a flower, a disc of arms up on a stem, of arms, the disc reaching all directions, tearing the air, like a skyscraper, like a capsizing ship, like a spotlight
feet for roots, in the star pool, circled feet, toes out-facing
two largest arms at the top, outspread, like antlers, as if to welcome or to warn, and from these two arms many more hanging, and from these many hang many more, and from all these wrists hands, and from all these hands so many fingers, and all these fingers needing
this is what it’s like to explode
The flesh flower sways. It must be one thousand feet tall. It is also like a mushroom cloud. Its stem built from braided arms. The mushroom cap at the top the bloom of the arms—their uncoiling. At the base of the flower, the bloat of Fat Man’s greatly expanded torso, dotted with nipples, toenails, and massive, spongy moles, from which sprout huge feet like stone sculptures. These stabilize the structure, though not very well—it leans as if it might fall. It groans as it sways.
Ash falls from it like dander.
Little Boy begins to cry.
Little Boy witnessed the explosion, was searching for his brother when it happened. He now stands at the pool’s edge, between Test Able and Test Baker, who also maybe weep behind their hands.
“He was right,” says Test Able.
“He shouldn’t explode,” says Test Baker.
They stumble backward, parting their fingers slowly, and as they better see they leave more quickly—shouting, “Don’t you explode either!”
They are back in their house and they’ve locked the back door. They turn off all the lights, running through the rooms, random windows blinking out, until their house is a silent giant towering over Little Boy just as does his brother, but empty, a jumble of dark stone and dark glass, whereas his brother is full. His brother. Somewhere in that. There must be something left of him.
They have to leave. They will be found. There was a moment where Little Boy didn’t know what he would do. This now is the moment he knows what he’ll do.
Little Boy goes down into the pool by way of the staircase, following his brother’s blood. He is among the roots of his brother, or a root-like tangle, and it writhes against his ankles, pulsing. They are only skin. Though blackened as if charred, the char flexes; there is flesh beneath it. He mounts one of his brother’s giant feet. Its char skin is fever hot; burns him through his shoes. The blood flows underneath. He crawls up to the ankle, which is stood on by another massive foot. He hoists himself up on his brother’s toe.
Little Boy looks up. There is an opening in the stem of giant braided arms a dozen yards beneath the swell. He’ll have to get up there. He comes to the trunk. These arms wide as redwoods are grown with many grasping hands, each one black-palmed, not merely char but really truly black. Each one his brother’s. He takes his brother’s hands. The hands take hold of Little Boy’s feet to support him. They take hold of his calves, his shoulders, beneath his arms. They touch his cheeks. They help him climb.
The wind batters him. A tiny figure up so high. Sweaty hands pulling him by his hair, pushing up from under his feet. Full arms of normal size, but oddly shaped, as if taffy, as if boneless, extend from the trunk, lifting the hands, helping him.
When the wind blows hard, and it whistles like a coming train, and the trunk leans, and he hangs from the side, sick with fear of falling, the hands hold him so tight. The arms wrap around him. They keep him there, tucked against the trunk’s unbearable heat, until the wind softens and the explosion rights itself.
Little Boy climbs.
There are hands of all sizes. They grow larger as he nears the top, the bloom, the cap, the unwinding—hands like sofas, hands like Mt. Rushmore. Small ones as well, like baby fists, like strawberries.
He walks along a finger like a bridge. The tip shaking beneath him, mere feet away from the fingers beneath. He has to leap.
He leaps. The world swirls.
The fingers curl upward to catch him. They squeeze him crushingly tight, and for a moment he is smothered, rolled up in their grip. There is a long instant he thinks they will crush him. Where he thinks that if he’s crushed then he deserves it. They don’t crush him. They unfurl. He finds himself at their edge; he could roll over one more time and fall to his death.
Instead he crawls along the fingers, down, into the breach.
Where it is black and red. Where the underside of skin is raw. Muscles like curtains. Growths of bone. Here the hands are skeleton claws, cruel bones, their palms as black as ever. The heat is incredible. Little Boy takes off his clothing. He leaves it at the threshold.
He descends into his brother.
Into hot breath. Total darkness.
The bone hands helping him down.
He crawls blind through a narrow, pressing tunnel.
Body caverns.
“Brother!” he calls. Echoes and echoes.
“Brother!”
There is a pulsing sound somewhere beneath.
There is a faint light.
Here the walls trickle blood.
It paints Little Boy red. Paints him sticky. Paints him hot. He pushes his way through a curtain of nerves. They light up where he touches. They sting. Shadows of hands like shadows of a jungle canopy crawl across his body. They warp and waver with his curves and divots. There is a chamber with a thousand lungs hanging from the ceiling, pumping air. Turning blue blood into red. Or some are iron lungs—black, largely inert, humming darkly. The light grows.
He sees, just beneath the flesh, hints of wire: ridges, protrusions, blinking lights, blue.
Now, past a loose internal sphincter, there is a chamber full of flesh sculptures, which resemble a painter on a ladder, but the painter’s missing half his body, the half that held the can of paint, and which resemble a man lying on the ground, and the man’s skewered with nerves and bone and other, and which resemble bodies flying backward from a force, arms and legs trailing, these suspended by wires, arms and legs dissolving, cold black spheres hanging also amid the bodies, only black spheres, only hanging, and there are bodies resembling a herd of pigs of increasing deformity, and resembling a family at a low dinner table, but the family’s all bone, and resembling some hundred pairs of men holding hands, or fused there, which men are grown more thickly from the walls and floor and ceiling as the chamber becomes a passage, and Little Boy must crawl through them, between their legs or arms, and he is slicked with the gore that they seep at their surfaces, and there are more and more of these so that he has to climb through them, and they press on his body.
Until he is in a tight tunnel lined with large, sharp filaments of hair as wide around as his fingers. These make him bleed. His blood mingles with his brother’s blood. The light grows more intense though it is narrowed to a distant, blinding point, circumference of a peephole, intensity of the sun. He feels its pinprick heat on his forehead.
“Fat Man!” he shouts. “It’s Little Boy!”
“It’s your big brother!”
His voice echoes as a voice might in a drum.
He shouts, “I’m coming for you!”
“We have to go!”
The sharp hai
rs retract into the flesh tunnel almost completely, so they are little studs, and do not pierce him too badly.
He comes to the tight pucker at the tunnel’s end. Reaches through, both arms pushing to spread it open. To leverage against the flesh wall on the other side. To push his head through, and his shoulders.
He slides gore-slick through the hole, down the wall’s gentle slope, onto the warm floor and into the light, which is cast by some soft blue harsh-glowing crystal, like a heart become quartz. The walls of the cavern—massive, more an amphitheater—are thickly bejeweled with some million open hands, blue in the blue crystal’s light, with black palms made bruise-blue by selfsame light. They are here and there shelled with metal—black metal, silver metal—and it hangs from the ceiling, rotating slowly, reflecting the blue crystal’s light. Pieces of bomb shell. There, in the far wall, a large hole in the shape of a mouth. Through the hole, Fat Man’s face, speckled blue and red and yellow as if with some child’s paints.
On closer examination, the hole is not a hole but a cell. The cell is set low in the wall, its floor several feet beneath the floor. Little Boy kneels to better see inside. Though lined with small white teeth, the cell’s opening is barred by long arms, which extend from above and below, where lips should be, and clasp each other’s hands. Fat Man is pushing his face through the bars. He puts his arm out through another gap. He reaches for his brother. Little Boy reaches for his brother’s hand. There is no room for the fat man between the bars. Little Boy is looking for a weapon—a way to break the arms. He takes his brother’s hand. The skin is soft like putty.
“I’m here,” says Little Boy.
The skin hangs loosely from his brother’s arm like lichen. Little Boy perceives, beneath the skin, his brother’s bones. His knuckles, wrist, and elbow. Inside the cell, Fat Man is huddled. Though the skin remains, the fat is gone. His stomach skin hangs around his hips like a skirt. The skin of his legs pools at his feet. The fat is gone. The hollows of his face are deep and darkest blue. The hollow lines between his ribs. The dimples in his knees. Only the excess skin suggests what he has been.
Fat Man and Little Boy Page 34