Fat Man and Little Boy (2 page)

HOW LITTLE BOY
WAS BORN

Little Boy woke alone, lying naked on his side, curled inward. It was quiet. The ground was hot. He was afraid. Pink and pale.

Soft.

He pushed himself up on his feet. Faltered. Tipped forward and back. There were no people there. He called out for help. The wind was gentle but he lost his voice in it. His throat felt dry. Inside his body, a strand of whisper that couldn't get out.

There were crooked trees in the distance, black and pulled apart. There were ruined buildings far away. Everything close was rubble and dust. There were bits of wood and glass, and concrete powder on the air.

There was no one to see him standing there. No mommy. No daddy. He held himself and shivered.

He stood on a bald white depression.

Dozens of small fires burned in the wreckage. He walked forward. He needed away.

There was a cart wheel, there was a yoke.

There was a leveled home. There was the floor of the home.

Thin black smoke rose like a solid climbing thing, gnarled as the trees.

As he walked past the ruined home, bits of glass and wood and rubble pierced his feet. He left red footprints in the ash. It hurt badly. He didn't know what to do. He was breathing ash. He was caked with ash. His lungs burned. There was no good air to breathe. A body burned black was on the ground. Its skin had all peeled off and lay in rags around it. Its sex was burnt away, leaving only a lump or a crease between the legs. The fingers were the same. They were nubs. Its teeth had all been shaken from its head. They were scattered in the dirt like seeds. He shivered. He held himself.

Stone walls spilled broken on the ground.

There was a woman in the dirt, shielded by the wall that crushed her head. He could see her through the cracks in the wall where it was broken, where it fell. Her blood ran downhill, the hill on which he stood. She gave more and more. He stumbled on through more bodies. He walked over a stone bridge, across a stream that was white from the dust. There was a baby smeared across the ground.

There were papers from a painter's home, torn and weighted down by rocks, lumber, and dirt.

He came to a sapling. Stripped and blackened like the rest, with several broken branches hanging from its bough. It stood at a sad, sloping angle, pointing at the sun. It looked like a hair. A loose branch fell to land among the roots.

Behind the tree a standing wall. Ten feet high, not one foot more.

Only a section, the rest fallen and scattered.

Its edges rough, uneven like an old saw.

The window blown out, the glass all gone, the drapes thrown forty feet away.

It was a square window, four feet up, two feet wide, two feet tall.

There was a thin tree shadow on the wall. A black silhouette. This was the sapling as it was before. There were seven long branches, seven delicate arms, seven reaching tendrils. They searched the wall. One shadow branch reached into the window. The leaves were small faint smudges of gray, the wall was flecked with them. He sat down beneath the tree to rest his legs and aching feet. He coughed dust and blood into his hands. He watched the shadow on the wall. The tree behind him moved, swayed slowly in the breeze, searching the sky like a finger. Its shadow was still.

 

“Now do you believe I am your brother?” asks Little Boy. They are resting up against a squat gray pedestal where a statue once stood. They are careful not to touch.

Fat Man says, “How long have you been born?”

“Only a few days before you.”

“So you're supposed to be my big brother?”

“I'll try to take care of you.”

Fat Man says he doesn't think he can be taken care of by someone who can't even find him any food. He says that maybe he should leave his older brother, that they should part ways. He stands and makes to leave.

“Wait,” yells Little Boy, who struggles to his feet and looks up at him with wide, pleading eyes. Little Boy steps close to Fat Man and wraps his arms around his leg. He squeezes him through the silken robe, presses his forehead to Fat Man's rubbery hip. His little hands are warm, though also bony.

Fat Man feels how very small his new big brother is. He puts one hand on Little Boy's back and his other on the crown of his head, which soothes the boy and relaxes his body. “Okay,” says Fat Man.

Little Boy's eyes close. “Thank you.”

Fat Man asks his new big brother what they're going to do.

“We're going to take care of each other,” says Little Boy. “We're going to find you something to eat. Then we're going to find a way out of here.”

Fat Man says, “I don't like it here at all.”

Nobody does.

THE SOLDIER'S BODY

It is not long before they find the shorter soldier's body face-down in the shattered fragments of a limestone statue. The dashed pieces suggest that the statue was a furry creature, perhaps with a mane and clawed feet. The shorter soldier's gun is gone. His left arm is folded under him. The right arm points outward, three o'clock. The purple blotches have expanded through his skin; they have multiplied. Fat Man squats for a closer look. Little Boy turns his back on the body.

The taller soldier is nowhere in sight.

Fat Man says, “He had a limp. He tried to hide it.”

“Why hide a limp from you?” says Little Boy.

Fat Man says he doesn't know. He says he thinks the soldiers were afraid. He says, “They found me wandering and locked me up. They can't have known what I did. I think I was supposed to be a hostage, or a war criminal. They never answered my questions.”

“They didn't speak English.”

“They didn't even try,” says Fat Man. He rocks on his heels, balancing with his hands on the ground. Chill air lifts the loose threads of his robe. “I kept asking and they didn't even try.”

“What were you asking?”

Maggots come to the surface of the body. A spider crawls from its ear.

“I wanted to know where I was. Then I wanted to know why they were keeping me. Then I wanted to know how things had changed outside. I wanted to know if the fire was done, how many people died, how many survived. I wanted to know if they were ill. Why the short one was limping. I wanted to know their names. I wanted to know what they thought of me. What they were going to do with me. What they called me. Was I alone. Was there anyone who wanted to see me. I wanted to know if I could do something.”

“Like what?” says Little Boy.

The maggots eat of the short soldier's neck, they sprout in his hands. They squirm barely perceived beneath the soldier's heavy jacket. Between the fingers, worms writhe. The spider crawls over the body.

“Like help,” says Fat Man. “Like could I do some work for them, could I fix things, make them better. Could I do something to make them like me more.”

The soldier's body begins to sag beneath its uniform. The skin is riddled with holes. The hungry things favor the purple blotches, eating them first.

Little Boy says they should leave the body. He says today is a bad day to be an American standing over a dead Japanese.

Fat Man says, “Soon there won't be a body.”

Little Boy asks Fat Man what he means. Fat Man points and asks if it is normal for a body to decay so quickly. Another spider crawls from the ear, which so far the maggots and the worms have left intact. They have focused on the cheeks, what is visible of the shoulder, and everything beneath the soldier's clothes—perhaps cartilage is difficult. More worms rise to the surface of the dirt. The uniform itself, now damp from inside with blood, begins to grow a cotton mold.

“Yes,” says Little Boy, “this is normal.”

“Are you sure?”

“We should go.”

Instead Little Boy folds his legs beneath him. He scoots up close to watch. Fat Man feels a warmth rising from the body and the things that grow inside it. His legs begin to ache from squatting. His hands as well, from the weight he leans on them.

“The taller soldier might come back.”

Little Boy says, “Then we should go.”

They do not go. The body becomes bones. The maggots become flies. These land on the two brothers, skitter and buzz their wings, but do not fly, keeping to the skin.

Fat Man says, “They itch!”

“Swat them.”

“Won't they fly away and land somewhere else?”

“They won't.” Little Boy squashes several on his left hand with his right. They do not try to move away. They become black smears.

Fat Man falls back on his ass, sore feet briefly rising up into the air and then settling back in. He holds out his left palm. There are two flies walking a slow circuit from thumb tip to pinky finger. His right hand casts a shadow over the flies. They perhaps twitch or tremble, but otherwise stay where they are—become still, in fact, where before they were crawling. Like closing an alligator's jaws, he lowers his hand. What is left of the flies, he scrapes off on the ground, and proceeds to remove the others from his face and neck and calves, one by one, pinching them dead, flicking away their corpses.

“Good job,” says Little Boy, encouraging his little brother as he kills his own flies too. “That's the way.”

The bones stripped clean. The uniform a mold-fuzzed tatter. The worms creep toward the brother bombs, who stand up, step back. Little Boy puts his hand on Fat Man's stomach, pushes him back farther, to keep him safe.

Fat Man asks, “What are we?”

Little Boy says they are brothers. “Only brothers. Always brothers.”

Now there are more flies.

A cloud of them looms over the brothers—the only brothers, the always brothers.

Little Boy says, “We should run.”

Fat Man has already started. He can barely find the strength, but what's left is enough. The cloud of flies follows them, sending dizzy scouts, which the brothers swat, or fail to swat—they flail, the flies dive and buzz around their ears and eyes. As if to say, “Look at me!” As if to say, “Listen!” They need to be heard.

“Does this often happen also?” pants Fat Man.

Little Boy says, “Sometimes this happens.” He is running with less speed than he could so as not to leave behind Fat Man, who is doing his best. He's panting and clutching at his chest.

Now Little Boy jogs backward, the better to see the swarm, which lilts as one fly lilts, now several feet lower, now several higher, now right, now left, some stragglers and some who go ahead, and here and there colliding—a tipsy weave. A seethe. Always angled so their eyes are on the brothers—compound eyes, like black jewels. Specks on specks.

Little Boy trips on something unseen, some piece of rubble, and tumbles. Fat Man stops to yank him up. The buzz of the flies is momentarily damped by a whistling gust of wind. Everything is quiet. The ground is covered in a fine gray powder, some smashed statue or wall. The powder, kicked up by the gust, enters their nostrils, burns in their throats.

Fat Man tries to catch his breath. Little Boy watches, helpless, as the swarm descends on his brother. They crowd his eyes and ears, his mouth—some seem to fly, quite intentionally, inside him—and crawl on his hands, his neck, under his collar, beneath his robe. He flaps his arms like useless wings.

“Brother!” calls Little Boy.

He picks up a road sign—something yellow, he doesn't know what it means—and uses it to crush the flies on Fat Man, flogging his brother. Fat Man might tell him to stop if he could speak through the flies. Now the flies remember Little Boy and crawl over him also. He can barely see his brother's shadow through the swarm. Reaches in, finds his brother's wrist, and yanks. “Run!” he screams, tasting a fly. Fat Man struggles out again.

The flies have gotten old. They're going gray. As the brothers flee, the swarm begins to fall. Landing in small puddles, in cups and bowls (some broken, some intact among the ruins of what were once homes), on cars with melted tires, on roads. Each fall punctuated by a sound, a small brittle dry snap, like the crackle of a fire: for every fly, the sound of one spark. Some pelt their backs and bounce away. Some land beneath their feet just as they're stepping.

They slow again as the flies die all around them.

They breathe.

Fat Man chews what they left in his cheeks without seeming to know that he chews. Little Boy ignores the crunching sound.

There were families here once. The brothers can tell from the books that lie here and there in the streets, like bodies.

They can tell from the bodies.

HOW FAT MAN
WAS BORN

They don't find anything. They can't. They try to sleep but Fat Man's rumbling keeps them up. They search the wastes. Fat Man takes a tube of flavorless toothpaste off the ground, rubs off ash with his fingers. The packaging is plain and white. The tube is half-empty, squeezed flat from bottom to middle. It curls in on itself like a rolled-up tongue. This is all that remains of somebody's home. Fat Man looks to Little Boy. He says, “Do you think it's safe?”

Little Boy says he's not sure. He says, “I don't think it's food.”

Fat Man says he knows it isn't food. “What I'm asking,” he says, “is whether I can eat it.”

Little Boy says toothpaste can't be poison if you're supposed to put it in your mouth. It might, however, be very bad for you, and it can't taste good at all. Fat Man twists off the cap and drops it. He squeezes out the white paste along the length of his thumb. He sniffs the paste—smells nothing, nothing different from the taste of teeth and spit. He tips back his head and squeezes out the whole tube into his mouth. It fills his cheeks and throat, he nearly retches, but does not retch; he chokes it down. He drops the tube when it's all gone. He wipes his mouth.

“That's disgusting,” says Little Boy.

“It's. Been. Days,” Fat Man says, glaring down at Little Boy. “Wait. I see a cricket.”

He runs away, kicking up ash and pebbles, heedless of his feet and the flapping of his robe. There is indeed a cricket poised perfectly still on the end of a curling iron pipe embedded in the dirt. He sinks to his knees and crawls toward the insect. He gets up close. It is still quite still. He opens his hands and prepares to clap, to clamp the little fiddler, which does not twitch, does not leap, sing, flutter. He squeals in triumph as he closes his fingers around this morsel and corks the cage with his thumbs.

The cricket does not struggle. Fat Man does not feel the expected frantic searching of his hands for exits. In fact he feels nothing. He opens his hands. The cricket stands unmoved at the curling pipe's end. He pinches the dead thing and drops it down his gullet.

Little Boy asks if there is anything Fat Man doesn't plan on eating tonight.

“You're lucky I don't eat you. I'm still hungry. I need meat.”

“There isn't any meat,” says Little Boy. Fat Man says of course there's meat. Little Boy says, “If you find it, that'll be the first I've seen. It's been rice and vegetables for me from the beginning.”

Fat Man says, “I see a home.”

The home he indicates is largely intact. It was sheltered by a stone structure, much of which stands, though the function of the building is unclear. It may have been a bank. The roof has been swept away. The home's walls are torn, but they stand. Fat Man and Little Boy pick their way through the surrounding wreckage.

Inside there is a man on his back studded with all manner of shrapnel. Not only shards of glass, but blades of grass, which were blasted through the walls and his flank. They hang long and brown from his body. A bamboo pen protrudes from his gut. Slivers of wood bristle in his back and chest. His legs look fine but they don't work. He looks like a father. If he is a father, his wife and children are dead, or he is abandoned. His mouth is white and scabbed from days of thirst. There is an empty flask by his side that let him live this long.

The man croaks. Fat Man is afraid.

“I don't understand you,” says Little Boy.

“Maybe he's thirsty,” says Fat Man. He paces the home, searching for water. There is an overturned pail in what might have been the kitchen. If there was ever water there, it is vaporized now. Fat Man goes back to the shrapnel man. Little Boy is trying to pull the grass from his arm. Instead, the blades break, and what threaded his flesh stays. The man watches Little Boy's hands working without alarm. Fat Man says there is no water.

The man on the floor says, “I don't know what happened.”

They don't understand.

Little Boy asks him if there are any canned goods. Fat Man makes a motion like operating a can opener, pretends to lift the lid, mimes delight at the treats inside. Little Boy tells him not to be stupid.

The man says, “If you want, you can have my other clothing.”

Fat Man ransacks the kitchen or a room like a kitchen. There is a wooden container like a tall bucket with a thick lid. This, like the pail, has been overturned by the blast, and the lid is knocked loose. There is not enough rice to spill from the mouth. Fat Man has to reach in with his whole arm to pull a dry white moon of clotted rice from the bottom, where it huddles up against the inner wall. He eats the rice in seven bites. Little Boy comes in time to see the sixth. “No fair,” he shouts. “We're supposed to share.”

Fat Man finishes the rice and licks his fingers. “You didn't want the toothpaste,” he says, defiant, “or the cricket. How was I to know you'd want the rice?”

“Well,” says Little Boy, reminding himself that he's supposed to be the big brother, “I guess you'll let me have what's in that bowl then.” There are two ceramic bowls on the low, wide table, with lids of the same material. One of them is shattered. Little Boy opens the one that remains intact and finds the cold dregs of a dish left unfinished, a salty fish broth with transparent peels of skin at the bottom. Fat Man seizes the bowl. As Little Boy calls his brother selfish, Fat Man takes the bowl to their host. He cradles the dying man's head and presses the rim to his painful-dry lips. He thanks the fat man; Fat Man can tell. One of his eyes is more open than the other. He has long eyelashes. They move the way the cricket did not move. He drinks the broth.

From the dying man's perspective: the looming face of Fat Man, half-sorrowful, half-blank, as if he has forgotten to finish his face; coming over the behemoth's shoulder, Little Boy, outraged but also very tired, with eyes half-lidded—eyes that want sleep.

The dying man says, “You can take anything you find.”

He dies a moment later, or ceases moving, pretending to die to make everything simple, to let the brothers do what they will. Fat Man feels the life leave his body or pretend to leave his body. They do not know they are permitted to search the home, but they search anyway. Fat Man finds a can of beans and works on it with a sharp rock for a while, first sucking the juices through the puncture and then levering it wider with what looks to be a metal drinking straw. Little Boy doesn't ask for what he likely wouldn't get. Instead he rifles through the household's clothes, finding nothing that might fit his tremendous little brother.

“You're going to be cold,” says Little Boy. “You could wrap some of their pants around your waist.”

Fat Man says they should leave. Little Boy says they should spend the night. There are mats to sleep on in the other room. Fat Man says they can't sleep here or anywhere nearby.

“Why not?” says Little Boy.

“The tall soldier,” says Fat Man. “He might not be dead. He might blame me for his friend.”

“He won't find us,” says Little Boy. “You can hide under a blanket.”

“Are you sure that'll work?”

Little Boy says no soldier has ever found him while he was sleeping.

Fat Man yawns and stretches. “First thing tomorrow we have to get far away, though. We have to find more food. We have to get meat.”

Little Boy says they can do these things. He leads his brother to the mats and lays him down, covers him with a blanket, making a soft hillock, from which protrudes a pair of dirty feet. As he tucks in Fat Man, Little Boy sees what's wrong with his brother's palms.

“They're black,” says Little Boy. He lays other blankets on his brother's body—it takes three more to cover him.

“I know they are,” says Fat Man, the mound beneath the blankets.

“Not like mine,” says Little Boy. “Mine are white.”

“I know they are.”

Little Boy crawls underneath the blankets with his brother. He says this is what big brothers do when their little brothers are cold or afraid, or when they need comfort. He snuggles up against his brother, nestles his head into the doughy vastness of his brother's side and breast.

Little Boy asks Fat Man how he was born.

 

Fat Man woke inflamed, and though his body caught he did not burn. The fire coated him like a gelatin. He was naked and alone. He was on his side, inward-curled. Soft. He felt himself, and felt his skin was hot, and felt the sweat seep. The sweat evaporated, it became steam. What a smell. He was a torch. He was a fat candle. With some effort, he stood. He was ankle-deep in the orange-white-black fuel of the fire—the city, the ruins. The heat an awful pressure. He could feel his eyes boiling in their sockets, his tongue becoming thick and dry like something dead. He began to walk. The coal that was a city crumbled beneath him, fell to ash and ember, sizzled his skin. He wandered through the fire, grasping with his steaming hands. What he wanted was a way out. What he wanted was a meal. He was already hungry.

There was a deafening wind converging on the center: on him. It made the blazes bow before the fat man: he saw the extent of the fire, squat buildings like toys, a library or cathedral with a dome's blasted skeleton, burnt trees and some still burning, an Oriental arch of stone, upright, rigid. A corpse's clutching, upward-reaching hand.

The roaring wind cooled and burnt his body, its crevices and extremities. His hair stood up from his head and danced and burned away. The wind became a vortex, then seemed to rise, and then was gone. The flames sprung up as tall as rearing bears. He tripped over his feet and rolled in the charcoal, screaming, though his throat was swollen shut. A sound like a kettle came out. He rolled down a hill. He hit his side on a black, burning tree stump. It collapsed, exposing bright orange coal, which hissed up against his back. Orange sparks like fireflies.

His insides pulsed and pressed against themselves. His lungs inflated like two blue balloons. His heart was like a dying dog curled up inside his chest. He struggled to his feet. There was a car, its wheels melted, lights blown out, roof destroyed, windshield broken, hood gone, mirrors gone, engine pieces melted. Seated inside, two bodies, cooked, perhaps a young couple, their heads forced to impossible angles, facing each other. Twisted this way, they seemed to look at one another. They seemed to watch. Their jaws broken, hanging loose inside their mouths like decorations.

He was coming to the edge of the fire, which crept over trails of shredded paper, wooden beams, and fallen trees like a tightrope walker. There was a man at the edge of the fire standing in what was left of his home, calling out. He was inaudible, his mouth was open. The walls were collapsed to knee-level heaps; there was a metal bowl fused to his chin. Other kitchen items littered the ground around him, and there was a table overturned. He wrung his hands in front of him, pleading. His skin fell off his body in sheets. It hung from his fingertips and swung like streamers as he moved his hands. There were other bodies in the waste, twisted by a cruel hand, riddled with grass and wood pieces. There was a dead cat at the foot of a lamp. There were two bicycles lying on their sides, dismantled, their tires pooled and steaming round the spokes. There were lead soldiers. There were ceramic dishes shattered. There was a spoon. There was half a public bench. There were someone's keys. Having eaten the walls of his home and traveled the wooden table, the fire found the man whose skin bloomed from his body. It licked his feet and ate his ankles. He sunk to his knees. He watched himself sinking, looked down on the fire and saw where he would lay his head. Hands and arms in the flame, and the rest of him following inexorably as if tugged by his collar to bed.

Fat Man walked a long time after that. Slowly, the fire burning on him died and he began to feel his body.

He came to a tree. It was a tall, black tree. He put his hands on it. There was a pulsing heat inside. The hands sung pain. He pulled them back blackened, still singing. The three remaining branches—strong, solid limbs, which seemed to pour from the trunk—were aflame. They offered fire in outstretched hands. The trunk was split. Was burst open. Inside the cleavage, orange, scaly charcoal pulsed with life. A glow cancer, a barrier reef—it looked almost soft, as if it wanted him inside.

It spit sparks.

It groaned and sighed.

The heat of the tree pulled him in even as he tried to think of other things. He needed to climb inside.

He felt his face glowing orange in the tree's light. His body calmed as he breathed as he breathed as he breathed. He ran his blackened hands over the bark, which pulsed white where it was thin—which flaked off, revealing the orange, the heat, inside.

 

“And before all that?” says Little Boy.

“I exploded,” says Fat Man.

Little Boy asks him how it was to explode.

“Like staring up into the night sky, not at the stars, but at the space between them.”

“It was,” says Little Boy, “like rubbing your hands together to make them warm.”

“It was like breathing in and in and in.”

“It was like drowning.”

“It was like my hunger.”

“It was peaceful.”

“It was deafening.”

“It was blinding.”

“It was being light.”

“It was pushing on a home as if to move it.”

“It was being a mountain.”

“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.”