Celestial Inventories

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  “I saw many beautiful women naked, running around with skin hanging from their limbs. Sabishii! Sad! I helped bandage many of the half-clothed women. There was much shame; they would crouch and try to hide themselves, but they were in so much pain; they needed my help. The bomb had left terrible burns they call them keloid on their bodies. One old lady’s face had grown together so that with the puffy red tissue I could not tell if she was facing me, or if her back was turned. There were many young girls from the secondary schools who had been out clearing fire lanes, most naked and terribly scarred and frightened. They reminded me of my young cousin Shino. I felt very sorry for them; I helped them with much affection. It was a terrible time.

  “But sometimes, I would think that the bomb had left them with beautiful—perhaps that isn’t the word—fascinating, yes fascinating, markings. Red, and yellow, and blue green, and black stars and circles. Some so beautiful. The scars were like ornaments. I try to remember them, the women, as beautiful. I forget the disfigurement.

  “The bomb was so large; I feel it has made me somewhat larger, stronger. For the first time, man had made a god, a god not …

  limited, like himself, but something part of everything, the dream that fills … everything. If I try, I can see him as a man. Multicoloured flames in his scalp; a bronze, naked body. He sleeps curled inside us, in our hearts, just waiting to be released through our working hands, fingers, genitals. I was never confused as to what this new weapon truly was. I knew it immediately. It was of man’s interior, the Atomic Bomb.”

  Tom shut off the tape recorder and stared at Fujii’s beaming, almost gleeful face.

  *

  “Everything collapsed,” Fujii said. “My Buddhist neighbours, they thought that they were really in hell. They fell to their knees in prayer. Imagine! They really thought the world was ending … that it had become hell!”

  He paused, and looked at Tom sadly. “I sometimes think it does no good for people to believe in a religion. If these Buddhists had not believed … they would not have been so mortally terrified. They would have seen this as an occurrence of war, not a sudden arrival of hell. Ours was an experimental city, nothing more.

  “I could have done more. I must tell you, I know that now,” Fujii said with tears in his eyes. Tom looked down, suddenly embarrassed. “Most of us, we acted selfishly. We were too frightened, our minds too full of this flash, this fire, to help each other. So we left people alone … left them to die. We shamed ourselves before whatever god there might be. I too, I admit it, feel a great shame. I did a terrible thing.”

  *

  The dark-haired god of the gleaming skin, Pikadon, rested within a silver layer in the clouds covering the islands of Japan. He had just exhaled 1945, and breathing in 1965 left 1985 and beyond a mere exhalation away.

  Hurricane force winds gathered in his hair indistinguishable from whiffs of cloud. Fire settled into the corners of his imagined mouth like small red droplets of spit. He looked into the heads of his followers and imagined himself with silver and black hair flowing out into the horizon line, scarlet wings lifting him up into the sun, his bronze form scintillating with hot vapour.

  The god snatched a bird from the air and blackened it, swallowed it, cast it back through his anus. Concrete is discoloured. Human souls turn to flaming wind. He is enraged, frustrated.

  Below, the Japanese islands appeared in the gaps of morning mist, divine children of the deities Izagagi and Izanami, along with the waterfalls, trees, and mountains. The fire god had been last, and killed his mother Izanami with burning fever.

  A new fire god had come, and his rage could turn the islands back into the original oily ocean mass.

  *

  Takashi Fujii stared past his cousin, out the window to the parking lot. His cousin seemed strangely quiet. But of course she had said very little to him the last ten years, although they had lived in the same house.

  Shino thought about some of her dreams of the night before. Dreams of white faces, keloid flowers on her body, the walking dead, undiscovered atomic bombs constantly overhead or imbedded deep inside her belly.

  Shino remembered the way the red ashes rose out of the flattened rubble and took form as more survivors. Walking dead. No way to tell their fronts from their backs, arms dangling from elbows held out like wings. Ghosts wandering aimlessly. They couldn’t bear to touch themselves. They walked very slowly, like ghosts. She had thought she had recognized an old friend. Oh, my god, she thought, it is Okino!

  Shino had left her sister alone in the house. After a few hours, her sister had died. It made her feel very guilty: she had not stayed with her long. Shino’s sister’s wounds had oozed much pus and dark blood. She smelled so bad Shino couldn’t stand to be near her.

  She sometimes dreamed her sister would return some day from the realm of the dead to accuse her. She had failed her. She no longer found solace in the old religions; they had died when all those thousands of believers had died. They were religions for the dead. For memories. For ghosts.

  It was a shame; he had never married. Neither had Shino; their family line would soon die out. Family was very important to Fujii; he didn’t want the name to die. The family maintained one’s immortality; this was man’s central purpose in life.

  Fujii thought much of religion these hours. Never particularly devout, but he was a strong patriot and nationalist. He believed in science, technology, little else. Shortly after the war he had become interested in various machine age cults, religions based on the glories of technology. But that had been long ago; Japan needed a new religion, an object to unite behind.

  He glanced over at Shino. “I truly did not know what it was. Remember, I used to believe it had been a Molotoffano banakago, a Molotov Flower Basket? I did not know it could do these things.”

  “He is a god. He burns up the sky,” she replied quietly.

  Shino thought of how the day was much like an earlier September, when green had crept over the rubble and along what had been barren riverbanks. Spanish bayonets, clotbur, and sesame had covered the ruins. It had been beautiful, and even the tiny hemorrhages the size of rice grains on her face and hands did not bother her. Insects had filled the air, rising in clouds over the city.

  Fujii thought of the bodies and their final cremations. The people had not been able to dispose of the bodies properly earlier, and many corpses were already rotting. They burned with a smell like frying sardines; blue phosphorescent flames rose into the air. As a child he had been told they were the spirits of the departing dead, fireballs, and he imagined he saw some of his neighbours’ and friends’ faces in the smoke.

  *

  Tom drove through the city streets lost in thought, the cyclic changes from skyscrapers and other technological monuments to slums and ancient architecture having a mesmerizing effect on him, almost convincing him that he was time travelling, surveying the lives of his ancestors and his progeny. A strange smell seemed to permeate the air, the smoke giving him a sense of great buoyancy. He decided to return to the church and talk to the old man about what he had seen, what the others had seen. He had a hundred questions.

  First Street, Hell. That was what the survivors had called the city.

  In the dream he had returned to Japan, land of his ancestors, to find god. No religion had ever answered his doubts before, none were identifiable within the context of the sometimes terrible and sometimes beautiful landscapes he saw inside himself. Every time, however the dream might begin, it always ended with the firestorm. With hell.

  Violent inrushing winds … the air in his lungs seeming to combust spontaneously; he roared through the city like a part of the firestorm himself, aware of the moans of the burning, the asphyxiated in their shelters, but so caught up in his own fiery power he could not stop, for he was part of the flaming god himself, and the daily drama of frustration and loss undergone by people so similar to what he used to be … they were far removed from him …

  … the glorious flames
spreading, Tom leapt into the air with them, spreading the destruction back to America like a contagion …

  … and the vengeance was a terrible one. Tom stood in his glorious cloak of flame, a few miles from each epicentre, one bombing after another, as eyelids ran, sealing the beautiful vision of himself forever within the eyes of all witnesses. Clothes melted into skin, bodies flew as if the law of gravity had been momentarily rescinded. The air filled with flames, brighter than any sun, brighter than anything an ancient god might concoct.

  … as refugees wandered the streets in broken bodies wailing that God had forsaken them, but Tom was there, Tom in his God’s form, welcoming all into his congregation.

  … as stomach walls were ruptured, as eyeballs turned liquid and ran on cheeks like egg white …

  … as metal ran into glass ran into cloth ran into flesh and bone and brain and the end of all desire and the end of all thought …

  Tom smiled and took it all inside himself. The world had become truly one, flowing and intermingling, one within fire, one within God.

  And all doubt, all loneliness was answered.

  *

  Fujii could almost smell the burning bodies of his friends and neighbours, the sweet perfume of their liberated souls, free of the body’s gross control. He knew a man who talked of a new religion, a religion based on the bomb. Perhaps when he left the hospital… .

  At last, Shino was seeing her lover again, the beautiful bronze face in the clouds, the endless streamers of silver and black hair reaching out toward the ends of the world. The god’s beckoning wing… .

  The smoke rose above the city of Hiroshima and spread to the surrounding islands, and out to cover the world. Tom watched the smoke mix into the clouds. The god Pikadon gathered the rising spirits within his scarlet wings. And his wings covered the world.

  THE

  MOUSE’S

  BEDTIME

  STORY

  The boy always had trouble falling asleep. His mother, who could not bear to see her son asleep, would stand outside his bedroom for hours, making noises, then disappearing into another room when the weeping boy ran out to investigate. Not that she liked hearing her dear son cry—it was just something that had become part of the ritual.

  Sometimes she would throw a small rubber ball inside the room, listen as it banged against walls and toys displayed delicately on shelves, wait for a whimper or groggy objection. Sometimes she would slip a bright red mask over her face, step just inside his room, then listen for his terrified breathing as he tried not to cry out. Sometimes she would crawl inside his room with a dark coat over her back, then rise beast-like and howling above the edge of the covers.

  Sometimes she would simply stand to one side of the door, and in her hoarse whisper say, “Your parents are dead because you would not move. No more Mommy’s sweet kisses. No more Daddy’s funny tales. Now I have my knife and my claw and I’m coming into that room for you.”

  By morning his room would look as if a small animal had been trapped inside, covers torn to threads from his sleepless struggle.

  Eventually she suggested to her son that milk and a bedtime story created the only path to sleep. And although the boy could no longer stand the sound of another person’s voice after dark, he desperately agreed.

  “Once there was a boy mouse as fierce and sleepless as you, my son, and though his elders insisted that mice never sleep—that their lives were in their nights wandering floors and the spaces between walls—sleep was all this little boy mouse ever thought of or desired.

  “Finally one night one of these elder mice, tired of the little mouse’s pleadings, told him to go see the oldest of them all, the ancient white who lay beneath the grandfather clock in the coldest room of the house. This was a room even the hugemans rarely visited, keeping it locked and alone. If any a mouse knew of a way to sleep, or recalled a single mouse who’d ever slumbered, the ancient white was he.

  “So the boy mouse took to the walls and cavities and dry-rotted studs, made his way slowly but eagerly to the cold room and the large dry chamber beneath the base of the grandfather clock. And just as he had been told, there lay the ancient white, eyes closed and mouth open, too stingy to share a breath with the world.

  “‘Hey there,’ the mouse said impetuously, ‘Might you be asleep? Certainly there is slumber in the look of you! Tell me the secret, ancient white, for I will surely die if I never dream!’

  “But the ancient white said nothing, and the boy mouse studied the dryness of him, the stiffness, and the way the spider webs travelled from ear to tail and back. If this was the only way a mouse might dream … In anger he turned, anxious to leave this cold place.

  “‘Only a mother can teach her brood the secrets of sleep, my child,’ a dry voice scuttled up behind him.

  “The boy mouse turned with excitement, but the ancient white looked no different from before. Its eyes were still closed, and not a strand of webbing had been misplaced.

  “The boy mouse crept closer until he was nose to dusty nose with the ancient white. ‘I never knew my mother,’ he said, ‘and no one would tell me her name or anything about her,’ and waited.

  “He didn’t have to wait long, however, for after a moment the very dryness of the air around him began to speak. ‘They are all ashamed, or frightened, boy mouse. For in this house there is a cat, and a cat is the mother of this boy mouse.’

  “‘But I don’t understand,’ the mouse began.

  “‘The cat is your mother, it was she who gave you life. And it is only your mother who may lead you to sleep.’ Feathers of dust twirled in the dry, cold air.

  “The mouse thought on this for a time, trying to sketch out its sense, but certainly there was no sense to be drawn. But he had doubted the ancient white, and yet the ancient white had spoken to him with a mouth frozen in age. He could not bring himself to doubt the ancient white again.

  “And so it happened that the boy mouse went in search of his true mother the cat. The smell of her, of course, was everywhere. It always had been so. After a few hours of sniffing every particle of ash and moonbeam the mouse began to falter. A sudden collapse of the left front foot and he was rolling down an incline to the carpeted steps beyond.

  “‘Murem murum my son,’ his mother sang sleepily from someplace far below.

  “The mouse stopped rolling at the top of the stairs.

  “‘Murem murumm please come my tummy hurts iyum a rub rub rubbing from my lovely son murumm.’

  “The boy mouse leapt the stairs two at a time, skated across sweet shiny floors until he came to the place where the hugemans gathered to watch their thoughts ride up the chimney in flames. And in the darkness at the far end of this room he spied the large eyes of his mother filling up with her love for him.

  “‘Murumm murumm,’ she sang as she stepped quickly out of the dark to gaze down at him. The boy mouse could not move, so overcome he was with joy and terror.

  “‘Sleep, Mother. I need you to tell me of sleep!’ the boy mouse cried.

  “‘Iyum,’ she replied, with the most playful smile you can imagine, her front paw poised to stroke and play with her long lost child. ‘Iyum,’ again, as her mouth yawned wider with boredom or fatigue, and with that mouth proceeded to tell her son everything she knew of mice, everything she knew of sleep.”

  The boy was finally asleep. His mother held him close to her breast. He had shuddered violently once or twice during her telling of the tale, but now he slept so silently he hardly appeared to breathe. It was so unfair, she thought, how much young children sleep, sleeping their poor mothers’ lives away, who only want a kiss, an occasional hug. Not all this sleeping, this sleeping so still, the air she breathed suddenly colder, and the dark as dry and old as death.

  LAST

  DRAGON

  Alec thrashed in bed. His muscles cramped. His right arm flapped and struck his chest. He had been dreaming that his wife’s tongue was scraping at his eyes, his sons fingers clawing his shoulders. So rea
l that his night’s sweat was irritating the wounds.

  His left fist tightened reflexively and made a painful knot under his lower back.

  His body felt huge and unmanageable. It rocked and shook out of control.

  His eyes sprang open and tried to focus. He coughed into his sheets and, terrified of choking, managed to turn his mouth to the side.

  On Sunday mornings, he used to hide in bed until noon. His mother warned him about what happened to lazy boys who didn’t go to church.

  His father used to toss him into the air, too high. He’d kept his arms rigid and immobile at his sides in fright. This one thing had frightened him, this one thing. He’d never flown before, and it had scared him. No logical power could hold him up. It was magic.

  “Daddy! Stop!”

  “Fly, Alec! Fly! I won’t drop you!”

  Then one day his father did drop him. Alec had fallen slowly, trying to push his arms out to break the fall. But he had been immobile.

  For just a few moments, he had been paralyzed.

  Alec was fully awake now. The room was dark; heavy curtains covered most of the walls. “Light,” he whispered. Nothing. Someday, as the sclerosis increasingly affected his throat, the house’s computer would have to be reprogrammed to allow for a wider range in interpreting vocal commands. But this morning he knew it was just fatigue,

  Just a lack of focus. He concentrated, and after a time again said, “Light.” Curtains pulled back; ceiling panels began to glow dimly. “Light light light,” he said, and the brightness increased almost to daytime intensity. He could feel Earth’s sun beyond the sheer yellow gauze that covered the windows, and soothing familiarity chased away the night’s last alien dreams.

  Earth’s sun. He had to remind himself. He saw so little of the Outside world that he could have just as easily been on Bennett, sleeping in the corporate headquarters there.