Fat Man and Little Boy (24 page)

Still there was a craze for kamikaze in the military. Every general felt pressured to create his own. The navy made speed boats loaded with explosives for the purpose, and frogmen who would swim to plant explosives on the undersides of ships. There was also the one-man submarine. It was about the size of a torpedo. You could barely fit one person inside it. He didn't have a lot of air because he didn't need a lot of air. He didn't have a lot of fuel because he didn't need a lot of fuel. The idea was you launched the submarine out of the torpedo tube. Then the pilot would ride it into the side of a ship.

There are a hundred ways to make a man into a bomb.

Masumi got a letter from his brother with a list of readings. There was a technical manual on a machine Masumi didn't recognize. There was a history of Buddhism. Beside the technical manual's name Hideki wrote, “A Son's Resignation.”

Beside the Buddhist history, a word or short phrase crossed out so many times it was illegible. No poems.

It was time for Masumi to crash his plane. They gave him little fuel. He flew with a picture of his mother. His parents had sent it for that purpose. They had also enclosed a picture of a girl Masumi never met—one they said he would have liked. She was holding a paper fan over her mouth, peeking out above it. The paper fan was painted with pink blossoms. They said he could think of her as his reason. He left that picture in the barracks.

He meant to die.

He flew out until half his meager share of fuel was gone. There was nothing on the water to crash into. He returned to the base. They broke his arm and made his eyes swell shut.

Two weeks later, when he had healed enough, they sent Masumi up again. Again, he meant to die. He imagined his death as the one that would turn the tide. He would sink a destroyer or perhaps a carrier. As the water rushed into the hull's breach, so would the Japanese empire rush into American soil, leveling the movie theaters, the malt shops, the liquor stores, the pornography rackets. They would destroy all obscene art and low culture. As a result, two hundred years from now, the people's revolution would be made real. The happy offspring of a Japanese-American union would parade golden and wise. They would spin noisemakers and play rustic arrangements of “Ode to Joy” and other fine humanist works. They would never know who made it possible—which diving plane, which sinking ship.

There were no ships. No targets. Masumi returned home and threw himself on the ground. His chin scraped the pavement, and he bled as they kicked him on his legs and stomach, careful this time to avoid the arms. He bruised and tendered. His skin was marked up a spectrum of yellow, red, blue, purple, black. They said they would send escorts next time in spite of the expense. This was becoming necessary more and more often. He wondered if they would shoot him down if he turned back. Wouldn't it make more sense to kill him once he'd landed the plane, so someone else could use it? The Americans were already taking down enough Japanese planes.

Masumi never flew again. Before he got the chance, there was a raid on his base. American planes strafed their hangars, destroying everything. Many died.

After Hiroshima, after Nagasaki, after the surrender, after the emperor's voice went out over the radio announcing the surrender, Masumi was allowed to go home to his family. He found his father drinking sake, staring at the wall. His mother read poetry in bed.

She said she was glad Masumi was home.

She said she had missed him while he was at school.

She said, “Hideki is dead.”

The army had sent them a box a month before. Inside the box was a bag of money, a notice of Hideki's posthumous promotion, and a written description of his death. There was also another box, smaller, wooden.

“I can't look inside the smaller box,” said his mother.

“How did he die?” asked Masumi.

“Your father has the letter.”

Masumi asked again how Hideki died.

“He was piloting one of those baby submarines,” said his mother. “Apparently it was a test run. They put it in the water. It never came back up. They say it sank very quickly. They say he must have drowned or, if he was lucky, simply run out of air, passing out before the water breached.”

Imagine your brother in a submarine. He cannot move his arms or legs. He sees through a sort of bubble on top of the tube. He is sinking deep into the blue until the blue becomes black. His lungs fill with water or they empty of air. He cannot feel his limbs. He only sees the blue so blue it's black, and then the insides of his eyelids, and then the black. Wonder how and when he knew he was dead, that he had really crossed the threshold, that he was done. Wonder if he ever knew.

“We got more money because he died the way he did, because they promoted him,” said Masumi's mother. It would have been the same for Masumi. He would have been promoted too. “Your father took the money and bought sake. He hasn't gone to work. Yesterday someone came to check on him. Your father threw a bottle at his head.”

Masumi went and sat with his father. After a long time, his father seemed to notice him. “You're home.”

“I am.”

“Hideki is dead.”

“I know.”

“He was my favorite.”

“I know that too.”

His father fell asleep drinking sake.

The next day Masumi found the small wooden box.

He reached to open it and see what was inside.

His skin touched the soft, almost-smooth grain of the wood.

He had a vision.

He saw their grandfather as if he was alive again. He saw his grandfather's father, and his wife, and her sister. He saw all the dead.

Masumi never opened the box.

Soon he ran away from home.

It's different for women. There is no shame in survival. No one wanted you dead in the first place. You don't have to think of your brother. If you do, a small drink helps, or sometimes a big one. You can be pretty. You can wear a nice robe.

I'm sorry you found me out there under the tree.

The medium puts the gun on the table and pours himself another drink. He says, “You can still kill me if you want to. That was my other plan, if I didn't kill you. Maybe shoot me in the back of the head.”

Fat Man says, “I wouldn't do that, Masumi. I'm guilty of much worse.”

“Pour me another drink while I down this one.” He takes what he's got in a swallow while Fat Man obliges him with another. He wipes his mouth with his sleeve. Hisses like a happy snake. Hisses for the sting. He downs the second glass.

Fat Man pours him another. “Easy there. I only know the one hangover cure.” He indicates the gun.

Little Boy says, “So you're your own husband?”

Fat Man elbows him to be quiet.

“He was me, yes,” says the medium, in his man's voice, “and I was him,” in his woman's.

Little Boy mulls it over. “You never opened the box?”

Masumi shakes his head.

“So you don't know what's inside?”

“No, I don't.”

“Are you ever going to open the box?” says Little Boy.

“No.”

“So you'll never know what's inside it, even though your life revolves around it entirely now,” says Little Boy.

“That's right.”

Little Boy takes the box.

“Wait!” shouts Masumi.

“No!” shouts Fat Man.

They both go for the gun. Fat Man gets it first. He gestures with the business end.

“Put it down,” says Masumi.

“I'm doing you a favor.” Little Boy shakes the box. There is no rattle inside. Perhaps a flutter. “Sounds empty to me.”

Masumi advances on Little Boy, making his hands talons. “You slow, stupid, dull-witted boy.”

Little Boy turns his back on them. He squats, setting the box on the ground, shielding it from their view with his hunched body. He opens the box. The sound of a machine's parts falling into place. The sound of a pendulum at its lowest point. The sound of a box being opened.

Masumi groans—grabs Little Boy by his hair and his ear. As he's dragged away, Little Boy says, “I don't understand.”

Fat Man peers into the box while the medium screws his eyes shut and thrashes the boy.

Inside there is a small piece of white paper, curled inward on itself like a lock of hair.

“Stop, Masumi,” says Fat Man. “It's too late. He's already done it.”

Masumi lets the boy go and approaches the box. He sets it on the table, knocking over several bottles, which pour out on the floor,
dook dook dook.

Masumi takes the curl of paper from the box. “I wish I never saw this.”

Two Japanese characters, stacked in a squat column.

Little Boy gets up and goes around to see it over his shoulder. Fat Man, slipping the gun into his pocket, does the same.

“What does it say?” asks Fat Man.

The medium closes his eyes. He waits until the air inside him feels like it's enough.

“The first character means leave behind. It almost always refers to death. The second character is bone. Together in this way, it means remains.”

“Remains,” echoes Fat Man. “Like a body?”

Masumi nods.

Little Boy is crying. “They look like brothers.”

遺
骨

REMAINS

THEY LIVE

A week later Fat Man and Little Boy find the tree like a willow destroyed. The tree is collapsed into a heap of large charcoal segments, recognizable as former limbs, as quarters of the trunk, and knots. The tree will issue ash for days. The fire chars the grass around the roots but does not spread. Masumi is there, dressed as a man, though his long hair is let down, hanging in wild black streams over his face and pushed behind his ears under the white rim of his hat. As they approach, he gestures at what he's done and jumps on the pile, stomping with both feet, kicking up wild flurries of black powder. It looks as if he's crushing grapes for wine. The ground is littered with bottle necks and bottle ends, which refract and flare the light at many points, sharp ugly scatter shine.

“You've blinded me,” he screams, blowing his hair out of his face. “You've taken my second sight.” He indicates his eyes with fingers one and two, then jabs himself in the forehead where the third eye would go. “How am I to see my brother now?”

He says, “You never should have opened my brother's box!”

He says, “I'll kill you!”

But Fat Man has the gun.

He describes for them the joy of burning down their tree. He poured his alcohol on her, threw bottles up against her until they broke and stained the bark, until the air was thick with it, and his eyes, ears, and nostrils stung, so that he was drunk on the air, and he felt its bitter tingle on his skin. The air was drunk on him, he boasts. He soaked a rag in alcohol. He fed the rag to his last lovely brown bottle of bourbon. He lit the rag and threw it at their tree.

“Did she suffer?” Masumi asks the brothers. “I don't know anymore. I can't see. But now she's free, and so are all the rest you trapped in there. They're all free to haunt you.”

Before stumbling back to his cabin, Masumi screams that he'll kill the brothers. He says he'll tell the world who they are. He says he'll reveal them. He says he'll get his gun back from the fat man. He says all the hotel babies will grow up to know Fat Man and Little Boy, and that they will continue to recognize them, and be drawn to them, and look at them with so much love, and someday the brothers will have to admit and explain what they are, what they were, what they always will be.

The next morning, Rosie leaves a note in an envelope wedged under the door of Mr. Wakahisa Masumi and Mrs. Wakahisa Masumi. The letter demands that they leave. It threatens the full force of the law. It advises them a car has been hired to drive them wherever they wish the next morning. It offers the widow's condolences for Masumi's brother, included at Fat Man's insistence. It thanks them for their contributions to the hotel community, especially in languages, where Mr. Wakahisa Masumi's skills are commendable. His drinking, however, gives the widow cause for concern. Mrs. Wakahisa Masumi would be wise to make him see an expert next time he has a spell.

Mr. and Mrs. Wakahisa Masumi take the car. No one sees them go; it is dark when they leave. Their cabin is pristine. There is some concern in the community at their passage, that this might affect the influx of souls into bodies—into babies, that is: and babies into mothers.

Fat Man and Little Boy mourn the tree for several days, loading its wood into a wheelbarrow, rolling it out of the hotel grounds, and dumping it into the river, which carries it away, out of sight. They see a turtle's head bobbing in the river. See water bugs on the surface.

Little Boy says, “Why was he always so mad at us?”

Fat Man says, “You should know.”

For a long time, Fat Man lives in fear of Mr. Bruce and Mr. Rousseau's return. It seems impossible to him that they should really try to track down a hundred thousand dead women, all of them pregnant, all of them pretty. The definitions of both words would have to be stretched beyond all recognition. Still, they don't come after one year, and they don't come after two, and he begins to think they never will. He begins to think he's safe.

It makes him feel ill to be safe.

Rosie asks him, a few months after the once-police have gone, what made them take an interest in the first place. “Are you guilty?”

“Yes. But not of what they say I am.”

“What have you done?”

“My life is built on the destroyed lives of others. It's built on death.”

“That's all of us,” says Rosie.

 

And the sun rises yellow, and the sky is clear. The grass tilts in the breeze, and people forget the war, or they remember everything else. There are no more secret cabins. Fat Man and Little Boy still share one. Rosie has her own, where she spends most nights alone. The excess Jew things are kept in the museum cabin, or they are sent to relatives who write to ask for them, or they are sent with relatives who visit. Some—the really worthless things, the broken cups and frayed shoelaces—are simply thrown away. They no longer bring Fat Man comfort.

Ivy finds the cabins and begins to climb. Fat Man offers to scrape it away. Rosie says the land is making them welcome. She says to let it be.

And the guests summer in Gurs with their children, and the children grow. They love the fat man and his nephew, but also other things: their mothers, their fathers, dessert, games, and some of them the library. Rosie buys picture books.

They are not like the piggies or knots of piggy-flesh. They are strong, they are quick, they are some of them beautiful, they are some of them plain, they are some of them quite ugly, but all of them complete.

And cicadas hide in the trees, and gnats swarm wherever there is damp. Fireflies in the summer. The children jar them as their parents did before. The jars glow. Some forget the air holes. Their fireflies die. Others remember; theirs live a little longer. They rinse the bodies and the grass out of the jars into the river. When it rains Gurs smells of chocolate. When it's dry the hotel smells of grass. There are wild strains of it among the rest. Blue-tinted blades, and red. Fat Man wonders sometimes how they came to be here. The ivy climbs the walls very slowly. Sometimes it seems you can hear it.

 

Fat Man ages, or seems to. He fattens, slowly. Lines crease his face. They might be only fat folds. His body slumps around him, he is surrounded by it. His arms hang heavy, his wrists' fat threatening to consume his hands, which remain their same size, his fingers at some theoretical horizon of their swelling. His palms remain black. His thighs rub together when he walks. He powders them to limit chafe.

When he and the widow make love she mounts him. He lays back and pulls his stomach out of her way like a curtain.

She had to tell him seven times—in her straining, whispering way—that he was “so big” before he understood it was a compliment.

Sometimes she faces away when she mounts him, nightgown gathered up around her waist like a sash. He doesn't know if she closes her eyes. If not, then what does she look at? If so, then what does she look at?

Little Boy does not grow. He does not grow older. They have a fifteenth birthday party for him; he blows out the candles. He blushes. He says, “You didn't have to.” They have a sixteenth birthday party for him. He blows out the candles. He blushes. He says, “Haha. I guess I'm a runt.” None of his friends from school attend because he doesn't have them anymore. He runs and plays with the children of guests afterward—children three, children four. He seems happy this way.

Rosie says they need to take him to a doctor.

“He's just a late bloomer,” says Fat Man.

“He looks like he's nine. When did he last grow even an inch? He's been exactly the same since the day I met you.”

“So he's a little stunted. There's nothing wrong with that.”

“Maybe he's a dwarf.”

“Dwarfs don't look like he does. They're squat, and their arms don't work right. I promise he's fine. If he doesn't grow soon I promise I'll take him to a doctor.”

There is a whole week where Fat Man forgets he was ever a bomb. It comes back to him in the night. He is looking at the other side of the door's frame while he smokes a midnight cigarette in the cabin's open doorway, his back propped up against the side with the hinges. It occurs to him he hasn't been thinking of himself as a bomb. It occurs to him he was one.

It occurs to him you can never be consciously innocent. You only really know what you've done wrong. This is partly because there is so much you haven't done there is a boundary on how much and how often you can think of it. He is innocent of rape. He is innocent of gossip. He is innocent of kidnapping. He is innocent of child molestation.

To recite one's innocence, he thinks, degrades it. A list of what he hasn't done becomes a list of things he could do. The rest, the things he hasn't considered or even imagined, are an abstraction. This is innocence. This is the look in Little Boy's eyes, as he does not grow, but grows apart from Fat Man—the milky white, the perfect fog of innocence. Little Boy doesn't know what he could do. He doesn't see how he could hurt all the people around him.

There is a day a year later when Fat Man forgets—for that day, he is only John.

Another month, there are two weeks.

One day, there is an hour.

It always ends the same way. The chill, the ache, the lurch of remembering, of coming up short, of realizing he hasn't been thinking of himself as himself. He wonders, after the fact: While I didn't know, was I happy? Was I any happier at all?

He can't remember. The guilt is beyond him when he forgets who he is. When he remembers, it's the forgetting that escapes him.

The chocolate factory smells the same in both states. He knows that much for sure.

Fat Man finds Rosie in the library, in tears. She is searching a German dictionary. Fat Man rubs her back. He gently touches his knuckles to her cheek. He asks her what's wrong.

“Nothing.”

“Then why are you crying?”

“I can't find the words.” She breathes shallow.

He puts his hand on her stomach, trying to slow her. He says, “What words do you need?”

“The words I need to tell you what's happened. I talk each day about the importance of knowing several languages and when it counts I only have the one.”

“What do you need to tell me?”

“You're going to be a father,” says Rosie, closing the dictionary. “Ein papa.”

Fat Man leaves the library. He walks faster than he knew he could, his thighs swishing with each step. After a moment's hesitation, Rosie follows him out. She catches up quickly.

“You said you were barren,” says Fat Man.

“These things happen. You should comfort me. I'm the mama.”

“You should comfort me,” shouts Fat Man. “You've had how long to adjust? Days? You just told me. I've never seen myself as a father.”

“You're practically a father to Matthew.”

“He's always been more of a brother to me.”

“What a strange thing to say.”

“Rosie, are you sure?”

“The doctor is quite sure.”

They hold each other.

Rosie says, “I don't believe in abortion.”

“Of course not,” says Fat Man. “Of course not.”

They marry. Fat Man asks her often before, during, and after the ceremony if she's sure she wants to be with a lout like him. “It's the risk I took,” she says one time, “sleeping with you like a child.” Another time she says, “I can put up with you if you can put up with me.” Another time she says, “Just don't go off to any wars.” Another time she says, “You're not so bad.” And another time, “You make me laugh.” And another time, “You're beautiful.” And another time, “Okay, you're ugly, but in a way I find beautiful.” And another time, “Not if you keep asking me.” And another time, “For God's sake yes, you dumb son of a bitch, I love you more than anything. This is really, honestly, truly, and actually, exactly what I want.”

He moves out of the cabin he shares with Little Boy. Little Boy sleeps alone. He lives alone, though they often take their meals together, along with the rest of the hotel community. Little Boy keeps his cabin clean. He is so well-behaved now it makes his brother nervous. He is supposed to be seventeen. He looks the same as ever. Younger, even. More innocent. More rosy in the cheeks. Actually and truly happier, perhaps, though he never speaks unless he has to.

At night, Fat Man dreams of his child to come. Nightmares, all of them. In one his son is born with a black iron shell. The son can't move, but stands a statue in the shape of a boy, arms raised to flex biceps. In another, Rosie births a bomb like Fat Man, a little one, along with several gallons of a black sludge like crude oil. The bomb rolls over several times, each time with a heavy clank. It does not explode, but lies smoking, quiet and still, an evil egg. In another dream, Rosie births rot. It comes out of her in colored smoke, or a gas lit from inside, red and yellow, green and blue, and the warmth between her legs collapses, becoming a space, and it spreads to her inner thighs, her pubis, her stomach, and she slowly collapses, the flesh rippling, dimpling, and staining with the rot colors, becoming a void.

He asks Little Boy what it would be to be a half-boy, half-bomb.

Little Boy says, “What?”

Marshal Philippe Pétain dies on an island somewhere. He was so old. They say that by the end his memory had left him so he didn't even know what Vichy was. He might have thought that he was on vacation. He might have thought he'd always lived on that island.

Rosie comes home with a bust. She walks into their cabin with it balanced on her big baby gut, between her breasts. For a moment Fat Man thinks he's gained what Little Boy took from Masumi—he thinks he sees a ghost, a victim of the guillotine. The white of the bust's skin seems to glow in the night. The blank eyes accept his stare.

Rosie says, “I thought we should have one. Everybody else does.”

“We'll have to paint his face,” says Fat Man.