Fat Man and Little Boy (9 page)

THE ORIENTAL SPIRIT
MEDIUM SEES THE
BROTHERS

The show begins with a stage, empty but for a table draped with red velvet, gaudy jade pillars that look like stacked, scowling heads, and what seems to be a golden urn filled with bamboo stalks. Someone offstage plays a piano—tittering Orientalisms and angular, discordant cords.
Chi chi chi chi chi-chi, chi chi chong, chi chi chong, chong.
A gong gongs.

From both wings, men in black, red, and white kimonos run across the stage, crossing each other as they scamper. They wear wooden sandals and scowling white masks with thick black savage brushstroke eyebrows.
Chi chi chi, chi chong, chong, gong
, and the stage is empty.

They run across again, this time wielding katana-like clubs, waving them over their heads, screaming sounds that might be Japanese. They crouch as they run.

A careening glissando introduces a proud, tall man with a silken white rising sun on his black, billowing robes, stomping the stage as if he means to crack the wood, which creaks with each impact. He nods officiously at the audience, his actor's bright, blue eyes glancingly visible through the mask's eyeholes and their shadows. He pretends to twirl his painted mustache. His robes give the impression of a master of ceremonies.

He removes a bamboo stalk from the golden urn and holds it out to the audience between thumbs and forefingers, running his hands demonstratively over the length of it, as if to say, “This is all of one piece.”

He shouts something from his gut and tosses the bamboo in the air. One of the samurai sprints across the stage, raises his sword to touch the falling bamboo, and then he is gone. The referee catches the bamboo—one half in each hand. He shows the audience the clean cut, then discards both measures, tossing them back into the golden urn. When he turns away from them the audience can see the red ribbons that tie the mask to his face, and the bald, crumpled skin of his head. Someone strikes the gong.

He takes two more stalks and throws them up. Two samurai run screaming across the stage. They slash at one another—one low, one high—and seem to miss. When neither can be seen, both bamboo stalks split in two, fall to the ground. The referee will not deign to bend and lift them. Someone strikes the gong.

Fat Man looks to Little Boy, and sees he is amazed, or feigning amazement. The child nearly shakes from pleasure. Beside him Francine touches her chin. Albert might be sleeping, his face is turned down.

Now the referee throws into the air stalk after stalk. A continuous parade of samurai runs across the stage, leaping to cut the bamboo, flipping over each other, sliding on their silk-sheathed knees, swords whispering past one another, never touching. They grunt and shout. The unseen piano player pumps his left hand like a bellows, his right hand like pistons. The keys shriek. Gong gongs.

Everyone is here. The policemen, Messieurs Bruce and Rousseau, sit toward the back of the auditorium, hands ready on their truncheons. They watch the stage as if they anticipate a crime, their chins upturned and eyes narrowed. Jacques is here, and so are his regulars, and so are the waiters. So is every woman Fat Man has dreamed about since they came to town—the brunette with her hair done up in a tight bundle, the teenage girl with a handkerchief holding her red curls in place, the blonde with eyelashes like hummingbird wings.

Having only seen Mr. Blanc in passing, and from a great distance, Fat Man can still discern him now. He recognizes Blanc by the pumpkin-like shape of his head, the way his eyes never fully open, owing to the prodigious fat of his cheeks; he recognizes Blanc by the quizzical weight of his brow, nearly one continuous arch, and by the way he sits with his hands at rest on his gut, all his fingertips touching their opposite palms. He recognizes Blanc by the slump of his widower's figure. If they were shaking hands, he is sure Blanc's face would be transformed by proximity, by unseen moles or lines or other features, such that he would not recognize Blanc, or suspect that they had ever known of one another.

In the time it takes for Fat Man's gaze to return to the stage, the samurai are gone and so is their bamboo. He missed the roar of applause that followed their finale. Now, the Oriental spirit medium approaches.

She is a tall, slender figure in robes shot through with brilliant color like thick veins of quartz. The robes trail her like the train of a wedding gown, though they are black and bright purple and jelly red and silver and gold and forest green and tiger orange and sun yellow. Her robes are open at the shoulders, revealing the kind slope of her collarbone, the fairness of her skin. There are no sleeves apart from knots tied just beneath those exposed shoulders. She wears a large silver necklace hung with obsidian and pearls. Her black hair is piled atop her head in a tight, thick knot. One long strand falls down her back, mingling with jade beads and bits of precious metal that dangle from a comb.

She walks to the velvet-draped table. She sets down a small, featureless wooden box—about eight inches long on each side. There is, on closer inspection, a wooden slat on the top of the box with which it could be pulled open. From the ease with which she carries it and the softness of its landing on the table, Fat Man thinks it must be very light—perhaps empty.

The medium bristles with peacock feathers. Or rather, they seem to be feathers but Fat Man sees that they are long, silver needles done up with plumes like peacock tails. There are needles in her arms and shoulders, which must puncture her perhaps an inch deep. They stand wholly erect. As she breathes, the needle-feathers flex and sway. There is one between her eyes and like a quail's headfeather it droops forward.

The medium folds her hands. She breathes through her nose and mouth together. Deep, deep.

The invisible piano player fingers a mystic mood.

The medium unfolds her arms and gestures violently offstage. She shouts—her voice resounding, deep as the afterlife, deep as a fortune-teller's should be—“I told you not to play that shit once I came out! I won't have it!”

Several men exchange words offstage. The piano player stops, though not without striking the keys one more time.

“Unlike everything you have just seen,” says the medium, in perfect French, “unlike everything else on this stage, and unlike what they tell you in church services or funerals—unlike all of these things, I am real. What I
do
is real.” She strokes the wooden box. Her nails are long, elegant, and speckled all the colors of her robes.

“Tonight I will speak to you of the dead, and the dead will speak to you through me. If you don't like what you hear, this is not my fault, and I don't wish to hear of it. If you do like what you hear, I am happy for you, but you cannot expect me to speak to you of them again—or to speak to you otherwise, for that matter. Is this understood?”

Fat Man nods. He feels and hears most of the audience do the same. His eyes are fixed on her. There is a prickling all over his skin, and inside it, an itch, like he too is hedgehogged with peacock needles.

The medium says, “Now I'm going to begin. I'm sorry I won't be able to help all of you. Time and my own limitations allowing, I'll do what I can.”

She places one hand on the box and with the other points out at the audience, as if extending an antenna for the dead. All her feathers shiver. She says, “I've got something. You, there. The one who brought a dog.”

An old woman in the back says, “Me?”

The medium nods and says, “Why do you bring that dog every­where?”

“He reminds me of my husband,” says the old woman. “Are dogs not allowed? No one told me.”

“Do you believe the dog
is
your husband, madame?”

“The thought has occurred to me. He's always so attentive, as if he means to make up for some slight he has done me in the past. A past life, maybe. They share the same sad little eyes.”

“The dog is not your husband. He tells me that he is your former grocer.”

The old woman gasps. “Who?”

“He says you never learned his name, but describes himself for me now. He says he was a middle-aged man, and that when he was not at work he wore a white felt hat around town. His hair was red, and his mustache streaked with blond, and his shirts were always stained with the pulp of squashed fruits. He wants you to know he didn't choose to be your dog, but he did love you in life, and now he's happy to be yours.”

There rises over the audience a heavy, steady panting—the dog. He yaps once.

“Well that doesn't make any sense,” says the old woman. “Why should some infatuated grocer be my dog? Why should he look so much like my husband?”

The medium ignores her. “I have a message for Rosie Cummings, from your father. He says you should go back to America. Forget about your fool hotel. He says it's too soon for you to give up on children.”

A tall American woman in a blue frock and curly red hair stands up several rows in front of Fat Man and company.

“Can you tell him I'm barren?” she says, in a flat, Midwestern accent that comes through her nose as much as her mouth.

“He says that's your imagination. He says the women in your family have always taken to childbirth very naturally.”

“Forget him. Can you hear my husband? Does he have anything to say for himself?”

“No, ma'am. I can't hear him,” says the medium.

“It figures,” says the American, and she sits down.

“Now I—”

“Wait,” interrupts Rosie, standing up again. “I'm sorry, but concerning America and my hotel and what my father said, is it your experience that the dead are, on the whole, more wise than the living?”

“Not at all,” says the medium.

“Okay, thank you,” says Rosie, and she sits down again. Her chair makes a sound like a hinge.

The medium stands and paces the front of the stage, eyeing the audience. When her gaze passes over Fat Man the prickles in his skin intensify, and when she has moved on he sees that he is holding hands with Little Boy, who looks up at him in amazement, and some kind of guarded tenderness, which suggests to Fat Man that he's the one who reached for his brother.

“Barbara?” says the medium. She holds out open hands. The quills hang from her upturned arms as worms will hang from silk. “Barbara Trudeau, can you stand for me now?”

A stout woman with a kind face stands before the audience as she looks at the medium with something like love or acceptance.

“Your daughter wishes to speak to you.”

“My daughters are with me,” says Barbara. “Perhaps you mean someone else.”

“Your other daughter,” squeaks the medium. “The one you had before your marriage. The one you strangled.”

Barbara squawks. It was meant to be laughter, but no one laughs like that. She looks around herself again, begging support against the madwoman on stage.

Now the medium watches her own hands rear up and wrap themselves around her neck. They squeeze and twist like opening a bottle. The dead girl's voice is not impeded by this grasping. It sounds as if it's coming from a bottle. She says, “I just wanted you to know that, in spite of your faith and your prayers, not all small girls are blessed,” she drawls this last word—she drags it through the muck, “enough to live the hereafter in Heaven. It's different than what you think. I watch you comb the others' hair. Your new little girls, who are quiet and sweet.”

Barbara Trudeau watches the medium throttle herself and makes her face hard like a cliff. Her bosoms climb her body and fall. Her girls look up to her on either side, the younger tugging at her skirt, their hair festooned with paste costume jewels. The medium falls to her knees and thrashes in her robes as her face like the moon turns red and throbbing, as she squeezes and wrings her own neck.

“Do you ever think how it would be to do it again?” says the voice from a bottle. “When you comb, or pluck the lice from their scalps, or when there was no food, do you, did you wonder what your husband would think? Every day I try to haunt you, but I can never work out how. Now,” she says, and releases the medium's throat. She plucks a quill from her own borrowed body. A bead of blood forms on the arm it came from, and likewise on the needle's tip. The audience gasps as she wields it, stumbling forward on her knees and jabbing at the air.

The medium drops the quill on the stage and stands, and smooths her robes.

Barbara stands, hands made fists, squinting, grimacing, a bulwark against some coming wave. The younger girl tugs again at her skirt. Fat Man wonders, will she mount the stage?

“Sit down, madame,” says the medium, and she sits down as well.

“It isn't true,” says Barbara, such that everyone can hear. After the whispers have stopped, and only after this, she sits down. She hugs her girls in both arms.

The medium says, coolly, “Audience members compromised by my communions with the spirits should take comfort in the knowledge that modern courts do not admit as evidence the testimony of mediums, soothsayers, or shamans of any kind.”

The medium holds her hand over the box as if to warm them. There is dead air in the auditorium. Little Boy digs his nails into his brother's fat black-burnt palm. “What?” whispers Fat Man. Little Boy only squeezes. Fat Man shakes his head, but he feels it rising in him too—like black moss climbing his spine, like his brain becoming broth, like exploding.

The medium's eyes open wide and her nostrils flare and the things all tangled in her hair jangle; the quills in her skin all stand on end, including, especially, the quill feather quail thing pricked between her eyes, which seems even to twist in some brief violent updraft. She looks directly into Fat Man, and then Little Boy, and then, most alarming, their joined hands.

She doesn't say anything.

Waits.

She touches the box, and fingers the slot by which it might be opened, but does not open her box.

A man calls to the stage, “Can you hear my son?”

“Your son says to let him rest,” hisses the medium, waving him away with a flick of her arm like a lizard's tongue. She points to another man in the audience. “Your father looks on you as a disappointment. He says your brother is the better man.” She looks to another. “Your sister is the one who makes the tree move when there is no wind.” Another: “It's your dead mother rocks the cradle when you think it is the dog.”