Fat Man and Little Boy (32 page)

“John, the news is not so grim. This is why it takes training to read the cards. The death card, for instance, means change. The tower card represents the end of a false belief or institution. Your relationship will be tested. Something you believe about yourself or your loved one will be revealed as false.”

“Why are we talking about my marriage?” asks Fat Man. “My marriage is fine. What we're supposed to be talking about, what you used to
always
want to talk about, is the fact I'm a bomb.”

Madame Masumi places her index finger on the justice card. The long nail is painted eggshell white. “This card tells us that your life and priorities are out of balance. You need to see your loved one for who she is, anew, as if for the first time, and approach her with a fair mind and a cool heart.”

“Look,” says Fat Man. “I've got your gun.” He pulls it out from underneath his shirt and jacket. Its weight is like a small rock in his hand. He nudges it toward Masumi, across the tabletop. “Go on. Threaten me like the old days.”

“Calm down,” says Able.

“Be cool,” says Baker.

They both say, “Breathe.”

“The hanged man,” says Masumi, “is amplifying the justice card. It means you need to meditate, to look at life from a new perspective, a state of calm and contemplation. Only then can you know the right approach to your romantic conundrum.”

“I'm giving you permission to shoot me before the cops come,” says Fat Man. “You can tell them I gave you permission.”

He reaches for Masumi, who flinches. Fat Man lifts her face by the chin; he looks her in the eyes. She's wearing eyelash extensions. Her eyebrows are plucked to arch wisps. Her makeup applied so thickly as to smooth her face away to nothing. She has no lines, no pores. He studies her eyes.

“Go on. For your brother,” says Fat Man. “Don't let me explode.”

Masumi pushes the gun back across the table.

“This is yours, not mine,” she says. “I am a new person. So are you.”

She lowers her face and kisses his hand, leaving a red blossom on his knuckle.

She snuffs the candles with her fingers and shuffles all her cards together.

The brothers pay her fee.

She leaves.

The gun is in Fat Man's hands.

“We forgive you,” says Able.

“We forgive you,” says Baker.

“She forgives you,” says Able.

“Forgive yourself,” says Baker.

“We'll go to our island tomorrow,” says Able.

“You can explode,” says Baker.

“Imagine that weight coming up off your chest.”

Fat Man tucks the gun in his waistband. His shirttails are out now, the shirt itself rumpled, the suit's pits stained through. His soda is empty.

He says, “There's nothing else to me but weight. No joy or beauty. No real feeling. Only weight.”

He says, “I'm taking my family. We're leaving. Thank you for dinner.”

Rosie's been searching for Maggie twenty minutes now. There have been no clues. No snorts, no giggles, no breathing, no scurries of small feet. The mounting terror is now only terror. All the hallways look the same. Either she's walking in circles or there are several copies of the same painting hung on several different walls. She calls for Maggie. “It's not a game. I'm not playing!”

Instead John finds Rosie. He looks an awful mess, like some stumbling drunk. She asks him what's happened.

“We're leaving.”

“Did they upset you?”

He won't answer.

“Were they strange? I think they're very strange. I think their home is strange.”

“Where's Maggie?”

“She's hiding. We were playing. But now I can't find her.”

Rosie sees Masumi's lipstick on his hand. He sees her see the lipstick. He wipes it on his shirt. This only leaves a vivid mark like a trail of blood down the left side of his gut.

“Please help me,” she says.

They look for Maggie. They open every door. Sometimes finding a room, sometimes a closet, sometimes a bathroom. Always one where there should be another. Where common sense demands an office there is a coat closet hung thickly with coats, but no little girl between them. Some of the coats belong to women. Some belong to very small people, or children.

“Where's Maggie?” says Rosie. “Where's Maggie?”

They come back to the master bedroom. There is a large window overlooking the backyard, which has a swimming pool in the shape of a star. Rosie looks out the window to see if Maggie's crouching somewhere out there, among the flowers and the palm trees and everything else overgrown. She hears the nearest bed sigh behind her as John sits down on it.

“Get back up. Help me find our daughter.”

“Rosie? When I ask if you're happy?”

“Our daughter,” she reminds him, still searching the yard.

“Why don't you ever ask me if I'm happy?”

She turns to look at him. As he slumps on the bed's end, which sags deeply beneath him, he seems to project the mushroom cloud on the wall from his back as if he were its source.

“Everyone knows you're unhappy, John.”

He fidgets with his shirt. Attempts to wipe away Masumi's stain.

“I don't have to ask because I know.”

“Is it my looks?”

“Get down on your knees and check beneath the bed for our daughter before I kill you with my bare goddamn hands.”

Fat Man slides down from the bed like a deluge of mud and mud. He rocks forward onto his hands and knees and lifts the sheet from the bed. Seeing nothing, he waddles forward, while Rosie watches coolly, from some painful remove: the fat man crawling, the fat man's wife watching the fat man crawling. The trail of crushed carpet he leaves in his wake like parted water now forever parted. He leans forward to peek beneath the bed.

Gasps.

The gun falls from his body like an egg.

As Rosie watches she feels herself leaving her body to watch her body watch the fat man and his gun, and the small white hand that darts out from beneath the bed, and takes the gun, and pulls it underneath.

“Maggie,” shouts Rosie, pulled back inside her body with a painful rubber force. “Put it down!”

She drops to her knees, burning them on the carpet, and crawls to look beneath the bed, where she can barely make out anything, but knows as if by feel and smell and sound as well as sight the shape of a sleeping dog and her daughter, who is looking down the barrel of her husband's pretty gun, who is thumbing the trigger. Who is thumbing the trigger.

John says, “It's not loaded.”

Maggie, as if to confirm, pushes the trigger back so that it clicks. The dry, hollow, toy-like snap of the gun's silver hammer.

Rosie—thinking, Too late Rosie, your daughter should be dead—takes the gun from Maggie and hurls it at her husband's face. It hits his nose, and maybe breaks it, which makes him bleed. She pulls out her daughter from underneath the bed. She lifts Maggie in her arms, and Maggie's asking what's happened to Daddy. Daddy who is still on all fours, who is bleeding down his face and jowls onto someone else's carpet. Who is looking up with pleading eyes. The sleeping dog under the bed whines.

“If there's one thing I can't abide, it's a weapon,” says Rosie. “You know enough languages you ought to be past that.”

John sits back on his feet. They'll go numb like that, she thinks.

Rosie says, “Why do you have that?”

“It wasn't loaded.” He says, “I am a weapon.”

“Did you kill those girls?”

“Not the ones they say. But some others.”

“What were you going to do with the gun?”

“I don't know yet what I'll do.”

“I'm going back to France. If you can make it back without getting arrested, we can talk through everything there.”

Fat Man's tears are diluting his blood, which is creeping down his shirt.

“I'm a bomb.”

Maggie's hiding her face in Rosie's neck.

“I don't know what that means, but I don't like it.”

“I'm trying to tell you.”

“No,” says Rosie, pointing at the picture over Able's bed, or Baker's. “That is a bomb. You're a father. Not a very good one.”

She heads for the door, begins to close it behind her, and turns to look at him through the crack. He can see Maggie's arm around her mother's neck, but not Maggie. Rosie knows this. She is maybe being cruel. She is waiting for her husband to tell her to wait. She is waiting to find out what she'll do when he begs her. But he doesn't beg. Only weeps and bleeds, though he's losing energy for both. His face is settling into its half-dead, half-miserable default.

“I hate to see you unhappy,” she says. So she closes the door.

Fat Man can track her passage through the home, her growing distance, by the sounds of closing doors. As she grows farther away, the sounds grow louder. She may spend the rest of her life slamming doors. She may spend the rest of her life, he thinks, more or less as unhappy as she is now, and maybe always has been. This, this moment now, this feeling, is a fluctuation.

To slither up the bed behind his nurse. To breathe the scent of her neck, of her hair. To wrap his arms around her waist. Or better yet, to slither up the bed and curl and rest against her stomach, to breathe the scent between her breasts, and from her neck and hair. To let his body shiver. Let it tremble. Let the tremble wrack his body. To push the book away. As he now does.

Little Boy asks her if she will hold him like his nurse did. Little Boy asks her does she love him. Little Boy asks her does she know how beautiful she is. Little Boy breathes. Her scent.

Keiko pushes him far enough away, on the bed, so he's at arm's length. He actually rolls over once completely, she pushes him so hard. As she pushes him and as he rolls he catches a glimpse of her bare breast beneath her robe. Keiko slaps his face. “You're not a little boy!” she says. “You're a creep!”

She slaps him again, exactly where Fat Man slapped him, so that he can feel his face begin to bruise, two overlapping bruises, a hand within a hand. She pushes him off the bed. He falls on the floor. Stares up at the ceiling. Keiko peeks over the bed's edge, a tendril of her hair hanging down half the distance between them. Her head recedes.

“Go on,” she says. “Fuck off.”

He runs.

There is no water in the swimming pool shaped like a star, apart from a small bucket that holds a mop, propped up in the corner of one of the star's points. Fat Man lies on his back at the bottom of the star. He stumbled here through the mansion. He did not see the Hanway twins in his passing, unless they were hiding among their wax doubles in the wax double room. He bled on everything he passed.

His eyes are closed or he is looking at an empty sky.

His body is a shell.

Where is Little Boy's body?

Where is his daughter's body going now?

Where will it be tomorrow?

The Hanway twins are asking him to get out of their pool, please, or their backyard's greenery is rustling in the wind.

Where is Little Boy's body?

His body is a shell.

It was like rubbing your hands together to make them warm.

It was like breathing in and in.

It was like drowning in an empty pool.

It was peaceful.

It was deafening.

It was blinding.

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.

His eyes are closed or he is looking at an empty sky.

It was like being born.

Fat Man is born.

 

and his body splits beneath his arms, new hands emerging, climbing on new arms beneath the old ones, while new legs thrash out from his hips, and new arms beneath the new arms, and new legs beneath the new legs, climbing

his body jerks with each new growth, pulled this way and that by the force of his force, and his jaw cracks from his screaming, and from his open jaws an arm, and with every inch of that arm's passage it widens, so that the jaws are more and more divided, ripped asunder,

and the arm burns,

and the fire

burns

as his body aching swells, as the fat grows up around his head, rolls up over his chin and his ears, rolls up over his nose, rolls up over his eyes, blacking

all he sees,

and closes, his fat, over his head, sealing at the crown, puckered around the arm that split his jaws,

as there grow new arms between the new arms and new legs, he is a wad, he is and he is and he is arms and legs and arms and legs projecting from a swarming trunk of flesh,

like say a tree,

fingers growing from palms, fingers growing from knuckles, fingers growing from fingertips, fingers growing from elbows, fingers growing from knees, fingers growing from armpits, fingers growing from groin, from ass, from between toes, growing out, extending hands, hands becoming arms, growing fingers, growing hands, growing arms, thrusting out,

reaching up

in a stream

twisting

together

and from this twisting

spreading,

new arms growing from new arms, hands reaching out, trembling, and new hands reaching out, trembling,

grasping at the air,

and new hands, and new feet lashing, bare feet, how they prickle and they tingle in the wind

until his body is a flower, a disc of arms up on a stem, of arms, the disc reaching all directions, tearing the air, like a skyscraper, like a capsizing ship, like a spotlight

feet for roots, in the star pool, circled feet, toes out-facing

two largest arms at the top, outspread, like antlers, as if to welcome or to warn, and from these two arms many more hanging, and from these many hang many more, and from all these wrists hands, and from all these hands so many fingers, and all these fingers needing