Fat Man and Little Boy (17 page)

So she shouts, “Go Matthew!” and Peter, in a too-rare moment of kindness, pushes the bike, helping Matthew climb the hill, running alongside across the plateau, and barking a reminder for the both of them to jump. Matthew stands on the pedals. He breathes on her neck. She pushes off the handlebars.

A long, sharp breath at the apex.

They land entangled—Matthew with one leg beneath the bike, Claire with her arm trapped under Matthew's torso, everyone crying. Peter comes down from the hill the long way. He tries to help them up. They hurt too much. Claire wrenches out her arm from beneath Matthew and rolls onto her side. Her mouth is bleeding. Her nose is bleeding. Her body hurts all over. Matthew is bleeding from his nose as well, and his leg has been scraped badly. The bike's right handlebar is bent to a weird angle. Peter is saying he's sorry. He's saying she shouldn't have done it.

She says, “It's okay.”

Matthew curses in English.

She says, “I've got to pee. I'm going to go behind Half Hill. Peter, please don't let Matthew look.”

Matthew rolls onto his back and lets his mouth hang open as if he's waiting for the sky to pour itself down his throat. He kicks once at the clouds. He says, “That was stupid.”

Claire makes her way out of sight. She tastes her own copper, feels it running weirdly cold from her nose and down her cheeks, her neck. She draws up her skirts around her waist and pushes down her underwear. The grass tickles. She relieves herself. It soothes her stomach.

Wait. There is a cloud in her underwear. Rust among the white. She puts her head between her knees to look a little closer. A smell she can't identify.

The boys are crying on the other side of the hill. Soon they will begin to fight again. Either ruckus will cover for her crying. Her guts are awful knots. Her stupid little womb is bleeding.

WHO THEY ARE

Fat Man and Little Boy sit together in the library cabin, their chairs catty-corner, their knees almost touching. It's the closest they've been in more than a month. Fat Man feels a charge passing between them. He does his best to ignore it. Little Boy kicks his feet as he pretends to read his grammar, lazily dragging a pencil across each line as if he is very slowly slitting someone's throat. He whispers to himself. His nose has been bent to a new angle, his bottom lip scabbed, his shin wrapped in gauze, blood-soaked and browned, sticky-bound to the long scab the shape of Africa. He ought to change the bandages. His brother has resolved not to tell him this, not to mother Little Boy anymore if he can avoid it. They get along better this way.

Presently Fat Man is consulting a book on the etymology of names. He says, “Why oh why did I name myself John?”

“What's wrong with John?” says Little Boy, closing the grammar without marking his place.

“It means ‘Yahweh is gracious.'” says Fat Man, indicating his entry in the book. “Yahweh as in God.”

“I don't see what's wrong with that. What does mine mean?”

“Let me see.” Fat Man flips to the M's. “It means ‘Gift of Yahweh.' Ugh. Yours is even worse.”

“They're like the same thing.”

“Yours states specifically that you were given to the world by God, but does not specify a reason or an end. It's the worst thing you could be called. It might equally describe the beginning of the future or the beginning of the end. In my case, I needn't necessarily be a gift from God and there's no ambiguity about who God is or what he's like. He's gracious. Kind.”

“But isn't calling him gracious just another way of saying he likes to give gifts?” says Little Boy. He picks at his bandage, peeling it partly from his shin. He winces as the scab tears. A fresh trickle down his ankle and into his shoe stains his sock already fouled with sweat and mud. He dabs at the flow with his fingers.

“Jack, a diminutive of Jonathan, is a slang word for man.”

“So what? Put the book down,” says Little Boy, wiping his fingers clean on his short pants. “You're being weird.”

“I'm not,” says Fat Man. “I'm enriching myself. Learning about this world of ours.”

“By looking up your own name?”

Fat Man hushes him. Though they are alone in the library apart from the newlyweds, who have proven resistant to learning any part of the English language that can't be swung as at least a little bawdy, caution's still in order.

“What are you really looking for?”

“Rosie.”

Little Boy asks him if he's checked under “Rose.” He hasn't. Rather than acknowledge his error, Fat Man turns to the proper page and reads aloud. Apparently the name originally comes from a German one meaning something like “famous kind.” Kind as in “type” or “sort.” Its similarity to the English word for the flower was a coincidence.

“So,” says Little Boy, “Rose means a rose.”

“What do you suppose Masumi means?”

“Japanese,” Little Boy grunts. It is not clear if he means to indicate the language as a language, as the origin of the name, or for that matter the origin of the person.

“He makes me nervous. Does he make you nervous? I don't feel right around him. It prickles all over, the way he looks at you. At me, I mean. I itch the whole time we talk. Yesterday he sat beside me at lunch. We didn't talk but I could feel him watching.”

“Everything makes you nervous.” Little Boy rubs his nose at the tip, rotating the bulb at the end, attempting to reset it. The angle is all wrong.

“We can't all go flying off cliffs every time we get to feeling cagey,” says Fat Man. “But listen. You can help me relax, if you're so concerned. In a couple days it'll come time for you to go clean his room. He may ask you not to do it. Be persistent. Get in there if you can. See everything you can see. When you're done, come directly to me and tell me what you've found.”

“I may clean his room,” says Little Boy, “but I won't spy.”

Fat Man does not cuff his brother. Little Boy doesn't wince. They share a moment of silence that acknowledges what it could have been.

“Do you still feel the calm?” says Fat Man.

“I feel the calm she gave us.”

“Do you feel it here?” Fat Man touches himself between his breasts.

“I feel it there,” says Little Boy, touching himself the same. “I feel it here, too.” He touches his gut.

“I don't feel it there.” Fat Man looks down at himself. “One step at a time.”

“I'm glad you don't hit me anymore,” says Little Boy.

“I'm glad you stay out of my reach.”

Little Boy leaves to clean the newlyweds' cabin.

Fat Man sits beneath the tree that's like a willow. He leans against the trunk. This seems to relax the branches—they wave about in the wind, only periodically reaching for him, stroking his face, his proffered hands. She makes him calm. She helps him breathe. He shuts his eyes. A coldness in his brain complements the thrumming warmth in his chest. The thrumming's like a candle burning in a drum. He massages the fat that hangs from his arms, slowly, one arm at a time, as if to worry it away. The cabins cast long, angular shadows on the ground, narrow as the light afforded by an open door. They twist and blur as the sun rolls back behind the hills. The tree like a willow has kept its shadow still, as it sometimes keeps its branches, focused on Fat Man, like a negative spotlight, changing with his breathing but otherwise still, stoking the cool in his brain, a cool rag loaded with ice, pressed to a reopened wound. He focuses on the top of his hat, a felt black wide-brimmed one that once belonged to a Jew, and which sits on the grass between his knees, stuck with grass seeds and dandelion puffs. The tree shades his hat blacker, so from above it's like an empty plate—a black, empty plate.

He lights a cigarette and holds it in his hand, knowing that his mouth can wait. He closes his eyes and thinks how nice some rain would be. He opens his eyes. Masumi is sitting beside him at a ninety-degree angle, facing outward. Their hands nearly touch.

“Hello Matthew,” says Masumi.

“John,” says Fat Man. “Matthew is my nephew.”

“My apologies.” He plucks a blade of grass and twists it. “You're smoking.”

Fat Man considers his cigarette. “I was thinking about it.”

“What were you thinking about it?”

“I was thinking how I like the way they look more than I like the way they taste.” He puts it in his mouth.

“What are you thinking now?” Masumi pulls open his jacket, draws a flask out of its pocket. He cranes his neck to meet Fat Man's eye.

“I'm thinking I was right.”

“You want a drink?” He uncaps the flask with a cheerful twist and pop.

“What's it taste like?”

“You tell me.” He passes the flask.

Fat Man swigs. The air smells like sweet milk on the verge of curdle.

“Cigarettes. Everything tastes like cigarettes.”

“This is a strange tree,” says Masumi. “I've never seen one like it.”

“Why don't you take off your hat? You can look at it the way I'm looking at mine.”

“What do you expect me to see in my hat?” Masumi takes a pull from the plum brandy.

“The tree looks like a willow to me.”

“It has a strange aura. Do you believe in auras?”

Fat Man sucks hard on his cigarette. “You want a smoke?”

Glug glug, says the flask. “No.”

“I should go inside,” says Fat Man. “It's getting cold.”

“With all that blubber?” snorts Masumi. “You'll be fine. Tell me about the tree.”

“It was here when we came.”

“They let a pretty tree like this grow in a concentration camp?”

“We like to think of it as a hotel.” Fat Man puts on his hat and curls up against the tree as if he means to go to sleep there, cigarette hanging from his lip, a small circle of spark bobbing in the dusk like a leaf on the water.

“It was a camp first.”

“Have you been to our museum?”

“I have,” says Masumi. “It was strange how little it was haunted.”

“I feel very haunted there.”

“Why did you take a dead Jew's hat?”

Fat Man rolls onto his other side, facing away from Masumi. He does not like this man with his white suits, his sweet liquors, his soft, buzzy voice like something left too long in a can. The tree cannot reach him down here, so low to the ground, nearly wrapped in her roots, which is fine by him, he does not want to be comforted right now, he wants to hate. The coolness in his mind becomes numbness.

“I asked you why you stole a dead Jew's hat.”

The roots are rough against his face. “I didn't steal it.”

Masumi keeps his tone breezy, even friendly, the excitement in his body manifesting as a series of rapid climbs and falls in key. “How do you even know it was a Jew's?” says Masumi.

“When did I say it was a Jew's hat?”

“There were French in this camp. They wore hats too. And shoelaces, and they used combs and razors, and they brushed their teeth, and they ate from bowls, with spoons, and they drank water from cups, sometimes cups with darling chips or dents in their rims, and they had broken toys and they made art, even, and they wore fancy dress as well—if not here, then at home.” Masumi crawls around the roots, around the fat man, and kneels in front of him, taking a quick gulp of his brandy. Though crouched he looms, nose pulled back into a purple snout, chin knitted up tight like a waffle. “The point is you might be wearing a Jew-killer's hat, not a Jew's, and then how would you feel? Or possibly you are wearing a hat stolen from a Jew by a killer, or possibly it was passed from one dead Jew to another in a series, as they died. You think you know who it belonged to but now it belongs only to you. The dead don't own anything.”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” says Fat Man. He rolls onto his other side, then totters back, back up on his ass to sit against the tree. “Why did you come here?”

“I came here to relax and practice languages. What else could I do here?”

“Do you know what your name means?”

“Submarine,” says Masumi. “Submarine in deep water.”

“I don't believe you.”

“Suit yourself,” says Masumi. He begins to walk distorted circles around the tree, placing his feet heels-first. “What do you think it's like to die?”

Fat Man twists out his cigarette in the grass and eats the butt. “I imagine it depends on how you go.”

“Give me a for-instance.”

“You're talking to a hotel employee, Mr. Wakahisa. I can tell you how to get a stain out of sheets. I can tell you how to make a room smell like new. I can tell you how to fry up bacon just the way you like it.”

Masumi leans against the tree with one outstretched hand, crossing his legs at their ankles. He has very nice shoes that skin small feet; they smell of polish. The laces are neat, tight bows. “As a hotel employee, you are living on my money. So I'm not asking, I'm demanding. Tell me what you think it's like to die.”

The tree like a willow trembles sympathetically.

“I imagine that for some it's like a long walk into a deep cave. For others, perhaps, like falling down a long ladder, the hands whipping the rungs as they pass, until they're all red and swollen, until they become the world, until they become the sun, until the burning hands wink out.”

Masumi encourages the fat man to continue, rolling his hands one over the other as if a reel of a film.

“For some it must be like drowning in a shallow pool. For some like cooking on a spit. For some like a burst of white paint across the vision. For some, like an explosion, beginning in the bowels, tearing loose the limbs, blowing the head sky-high.”

Masumi says, “I think for some it's like sinking to the bottom of the ocean in a tin can with just one window and no way out. As you go deeper the window turns dark, the deepest blue, your arms and legs go numb. You run out of air. You feel it in your feet first, your hands, and then your chest. Then you don't feel anything, or see anything, but it's not like you're smothering to death, it's just that the water's so deep, so dark, the deepest blue.” Masumi smiles. “How do you think it's going to be for you?”

Fat Man isn't sure he'll ever die. “I think I'll be fine.”

“I have a gun,” says Masumi. He pats his side, where there may or may not be a certain bulge beneath his white coat. “I brought it here with me in case I needed to kill anybody.”

“That's not allowed in this hotel,” says Fat Man. His heart seems to repeat itself too perfectly, too crisply, several times—droplets falling from a sink faucet.

“Is that the widow's policy, or yours?”

“This hotel is about peace. It only follows there can be no guns.”

“I know who you are.”

“You can't even keep my name straight.”

Masumi draws his fingers across the white brim of his hat, left to right, and opens his jacket to reveal holstered gun. “I know who you are.”

“Who am I?”

Masumi says, “Who are you,” and leaves Fat Man alone with the question.

The tree like a willow's shadow has faded into the general darkness of night—it is all dark, it is all shadow. The tree's weepy branches touch Fat Man as he stands. He runs a hand over one of them, accidentally pulling loose a leaf. It falls into the shadow. There is a lit window in the distance—Rosie's. It is a thick square of glass, yellowed. The tree seems illuminated because it is most of what he can see. The grass fades to black as it recedes from him. The cabins are still, empty, square blots of night. He is standing on an island built from what light his eyes can wring from the earth.