Fat Man and Little Boy (3 page)

LITTLE BOY'S NURSE

Little Boy dreams of the nurse who found him beneath the wavering sapling. He did not know she was a nurse then but would find out about it later. She was dressed in Western clothing: a checkered black and white turtleneck sweater and a long blue skirt, both stained with blood. She had yellow slippers.

She wiped her puffy red nose with the back of her hand and sniffled to win his attention.

He looked up at her, opened his mouth as if to speak. There was nothing to say. She was talking Japanese. She talked to him like he was a baby. Bending forward slightly, pressing her knees together, resting her palms on her thighs. It made him feel safe and he didn't want her to stop. He reached up for her as if his legs were broken.

For a second she looked very tired, and he thought he must not be the first to reach for her this way. He grunted like a baby, he moved his lips as if to suckle. Her face smoothed. Something in her posture hardened. She stooped to lift. He wrapped his arms around her neck and sighed. Her turtleneck collar hung a little loose. There was a black mark on the pale soft skin of her neck like a big thumbprint.

She made her way, bouncing him on her hip and humming a song. They passed through wreckage. She walked around two bodies. He hid his face in her shoulder so he wouldn't have to see. They met a man, not a nurse, who seemed to know her. He wore an undershirt with orange-red blots down its middle. His nose was red and puffy too. He sneezed. He wiped it with the back of his hand.

He made an empty-handed gesture and talked an apology. Yet he had brought her shoes. He let them hang from his hand by their laces. She looked away and then nodded, agreeing. The man came close. He wrapped his arms around Little Boy's chest beneath his armpits. Little Boy dug in with his fingers, he scratched and pinched her skin, but he was not strong enough to keep his grip. The nurse pried his legs from her hips. He left a boy-shaped stain on her clothing. The man whispered something in Little Boy's ear. Little Boy wanted to know how to say, Give her back.

The man shifted his weight from heel to heel and watched the nurse. She knelt to take off her slippers and put on the shoes. They fit her well enough. She kissed the man on his cheek because these shoes were better than the slippers.

They walked together. The nurse's new shoes clomped with each step. She sneezed into her sleeve. She wiped the snot from her cheek. The man kept looking at her. The man, like Little Boy, was very thin. Their bones touched through their skins. They were joined by a middle-aged man leading an old blind woman by her arm. He spoke to her in a constant, calming whisper, maybe describing the scenery or telling where her feet should go. All her clothes had burnt away from her body and her skin had fallen off her back in long, narrow strips. Little Boy looked away from her before he could see too much.

Here was the school. The walls were fallen down. Here was an overturned vegetable cart and here were the vegetables, pulped. Here a dead man.

They were joined by two women carrying a boy on a stretcher. He was sleeping. He was naked, and his face and chest were all burned and looked like wet tree bark.

Little Boy was passed off again to the nurse. She bore him cheerfully as she could.

They came to an improvised clinic, a small concert hall or a playhouse. The main room was large and littered with wooden folding chairs. There were bodies all over the floor on thin mats and blankets, some of them moving, some of them still. An old man lay spooning his adult son and sung to him, quietly, while the young man bled on the floor. Everyone was quiet, except for a woman Little Boy couldn't see, who made an awful sort of braying, until she stopped, until she started up again. A little girl prodded her big sister, who would not respond. A man and his wife lay facing each other. They watched each other's eyes and touched their noses. They were burned all over. They had been rubbed with white cream. Little Boy floated over the scene in his nurse's arms. She bounced him on her hip, which made the world stutter.

A doctor knelt by a policeman and pulled glass from his leg. After each piece was removed, he daubed the wound with a cotton ball. When the cotton ball was used up he pulled another from a bag and held it, overturning a bottle of alcohol in his palm, soaking the ball. The policeman gritted his teeth. He thanked the doctor for each piece that was pulled.

The nurse called someone's name. An older woman came and took Little Boy away from the nurse. The old woman placed Little Boy down on the floor beside the wounded policeman. The doctor was pulling three inches of glass from the policeman's calf; he was pulling the long, thin shard quick as he could without its breaking. Little Boy's nurse and the old woman left. The old woman came back with a pair of tweezers and a small tin pan. She made Little Boy lie down. She took his left foot by the ankle and lifted it until she could see what was inside. Thick, partly-clotted blood fell out of him. She put the tweezers to his skin. They were cold.

The policeman took Little Boy's hand and squeezed as if to say, Now squeeze me back.

The hidden woman brayed.

The old woman put the tweezers in his foot. She pulled something loose and set it in the pan, where it glistened wetly. She reached in—he squeezed the policeman's hand—and pulled something else free. It made a scraping sound as it left him, as if it didn't want to go. The policeman screamed.

They made Little Boy wait for clothes until they could find something Western. When they did it was a little gangster costume; a blue suit, cheaper than it looked, with matching fedora. They watched him dress. They asked him questions that he couldn't answer, so he didn't. He sulked until they left him alone. He laid around on the floor.

He thought about how it was to explode.

They brought a little boy to the empty space beside him. The boy was pulling out the hairs from his own head one at a time. He set them in a pile on the floor. He was burnt all over but did not seem to notice. Little Boy wanted to trace the weird patterns with his fingers. He wanted to reach under the other boy's skin and see what he could find.

He wanted his nurse.

She was busy among the bodies, checking temperatures with the back of her hand, finding pulses with her fingertips. She wouldn't look at Little Boy. When the father holding his bleeding adult son cried out, it was
his
nurse that came running. She watched his chest and touched his temple. He was dead. One of the other nurses found the energy to say something gentle, to touch the old man's head. They left. The father held his dead son as before and was quiet.

Little Boy went looking for his nurse. He searched outside, where young people shared the cigarettes they'd found and watched the sun set over those parts of the city still standing. She was not there. He searched the improvised operation rooms where surgeons sutured, disinfected, stanched gut wounds, and pruned dead skin. They shooed away Little Boy. She was not there.

Next, the empty stage, on which the policeman slept. Little Boy slipped behind the curtain. It was dark there. Hanging on the walls, grotesque masks, whether pale or demon-faced, all glaring and grinning and twisted, distressed. Shadow puppets dangled from hooks, limp and cheap-looking. Costumes were heaped and hung on trunks and racks. More suits in other sizes, and dresses, Western and Japanese. There was a long paper dragon with many, many bright streamers coiled in the dark corner.

At the dragon's tail end, behind a rack of clothes, Little Boy heard his nurse's coarse, husky whisper drift on the air. The young man, her friend from the search party, stood behind her. Little Boy could make out their shapes because of the light that spilled from the window, but it was a small window, it was faint light. The young man breathed in her neck.

No doubt, thought Little Boy, watching them through a gap between the silken costumes hanging from the rack, the vivid colors flattened by the window's graying light, No doubt he takes great pleasure in her smells of scorched caramels and dried vanilla. The nurse's friend was speaking into her ear or he was licking it. She swayed in his arms like a dead tree in the wind.

She said something.

Her friend said something back.

She was shaking her head.

He was nodding and kissing her neck.

She was lifting her checkered turtleneck sweater.

He was running his hands over her abdomen.

From waist to neck her skin was marked.

Smudged, like ink fingerprints.

Like charcoal squares, in checkers.

Burnt in the pattern of her sweater.

The nurse's friend kneaded her breasts as she fumbled to hitch up her skirt in the back—as they twisted their heads to unnatural, perhaps painful angles, like graceless swans, so that their eyes could touch, so that their lips could meet.

The masks on the walls made faces at the couple. They floated like ghosts. They seemed to react to the scene. Some with horror, some with great sadness, and some with a fiendish delight. Little Boy's nurse whispered something, leaning into the man. He hushed her.

Little Boy felt himself between his legs. There was nothing, no response. They backed away from him, into deeper shadow, so that he could not see what he heard, or know.

He felt very alone.

The sun was set. Only a thin red line on the horizon. Only the sound of their love, the soft squelch, like sucking a pool of thick spit through his teeth and pushing it out into the reservoir of bottom lip, again, and again. He chewed his cheeks to pulp. It was quiet there.

When they were done he ran away. Some days later, on news of the second bomb, he began to search for what would be a brother.

WHAT THE SHADOW LOST

When they wake the next day wind whistles through the holes in their overnight shelter; the edges of their piled blankets flutter; there is a one dollar bill blown up against the wall as if it is a picture hung there. The wind lets up and the bill floats down to the floor. The wind picks up again and the bill climbs back up where it was. This is the greenest thing they've seen in days.

Little Boy says, “Grab it!”

Fat Man lunges for the bill. Snags it. “Don't know what good this is going to do us,” he says, spreading the dollar smooth in his upturned palm. It does feel good though, the slightly fuzzy grain of the paper.

“The Americans are coming,” Little Boy says. “They'll be all over this place soon. People are going to want their money. I want their money.”

“So do I,” Fat Man says, handing over the bill. “How do we get it?”

Little Boy says they find where this one came from. He tucks it in his breast pocket.

“Can we leave before the soldiers get here?” says Fat Man.

“Probably not,” says Little Boy. “We need time to plan. We'll hide.”

They drape Fat Man in another robe, which he can't close. They wrap his waist in someone's pants. They put a blanket over his back like a cape, tie the corners around his neck. This will keep him warm. He knows it also makes him look a little crazy. He asks his brother if he has to wear it.

Little Boy says, “I don't want you catching cold.”

Outside they find a small cloud of dollar bills drifting over the waste. Little Boy scurries, catching what he can and shoving them in his pockets. Fat Man teeters clumsily in pursuit, snags one here and there, keeps them balled up in his fists for lack of pockets. Anyway, he's too hungry for this. He asks Little Boy if this money will buy them food. Little Boy's too busy to answer. Fat Man trips on a bit of concrete from a building no longer there. Lands flat on his front.

Little Boy shouts, “Where are these coming from?”

Still lying on his face, Fat Man points in what seems to be the general direction. Little Boy demands that he get up. Fat Man struggles to his feet. The green trail laced across sharp bits of glass, cement crevices, and other broken things leads them into a place between two buildings, the one on their right collapsed almost completely, and leaning on the one to their left, which in turn leans on itself. Together they form a sort of arch, which, as the brothers follow deeper, collapses further, becoming deeper darkness, a wind tunnel. Here and there a stray dollar brushes Fat Man's ear, Little Boy's cheek. One strikes Fat Man where his heart would be if he wore it on a chain. Another bill strikes his eye. They catch as catch can. The wind whistles. The slope falls. They crouch to walk. There is a bright place ahead of them where the slope of the right wall ends—light in threads, motes of dust suspended on the threads, paint chips also, gray crumbs.

There comes a point Fat Man can't advance. Little Boy crawls through the small end of the tunnel and out into the light. Fat Man kneels to follow but he can't get through past his shoulders. The light blinds. All flares and clarifies. He sees the shadow on the wall.

From Fat Man's perspective the shadow seems to reach for him, though in fact it is after the money. Little Boy caresses the wall on which it was projected—the profile of a stumbled man, fallen nearly to his knees, reaching for something fallen to the ground. The open cash case. The case's hinges were dashed against the wall by the force of the blast, or by the case's fall from the gone man's hand. They came loose, the locks on the other side—gold, once—melted, and on the melted locks the case hinged, as in all the violence it opened on the wrong end, revealing its payload. The hinges came apart like teeth, the gold locks bent into a new shape.

“What luck,” says Little Boy. “We can buy you a damn suit.”

“And some food. We can get meat.”

“We can leave. We can get out.”

“How much?” says Fat Man.

“Let me worry about money,” says Little Boy. “That's a big brother job.”

 

The case will close if Fat Man puts his weight on it. The gold locks are still a little soft, so the brothers slide the rod back in one of the hinges and this serves as a lock. The other hinge's teeth are too crushed. The case is otherwise, it seems, invulnerable—the corners and edges protected by an iron exoskeleton, identical in color to the woven wires embroidering the leathery material that is its skin. The corners are especially tough, their shell thick and sharp, like a steel-toed boot.

Little Boy tells Fat Man to carry it. He passes it through the small end of the tunnel to Fat Man, who carries it out to meet Little Boy, who goes around the tunnel, around the collapsed building. The weight is less in Fat Man's hands than he thought it would be. The money shifts inside.

“Now we can have anything we want,” says Fat Man to Little Boy.

“We can have a few things we want,” says Little Boy. “If we can convince anybody to trade us.”

This means finding people, which means leaving the city. At the far edges there is woodland, there are fields and farmers. They go toward the sun. Fat Man tears cloth from the pants they wrapped around his waist, wraps the strips around his feet for shoes. This offers some relief from the pain of travel. Little Boy holds Fat Man's free hand. Fat Man asks his brother if he wants to take a turn carrying the cash. Little Boy says no, he would not like that; he says it is too heavy.

As they go, they pass the car Fat Man saw. The lovers still twist their heads to see each other, angling for a kiss.

They pass the tree Fat Man touched. It is split, charcoal all over, but not destroyed. The pulsing warmth of the orange barrier reef inside has become the inert gray-black of pencil lead. The branches are fallen and cooked down to nothing. Fat Man thinks of his hands.

He asks his brother, “Do you think they are a symbol?”

“What's a symbol?”

“My hands. Do they suggest guilt?”

“Do you feel guilty?”

“I do.”

Little Boy asks him what for. He says hands are not a symbol. He says there is nothing to feel bad about. They are not thieves. The money was just lying there. No one had a claim to it. The shadow was dead.

Fat Man says, “That's why I feel guilty.”

Little Boy says, “Nothing you could have done.”

Fat Man feels the tree is pulling him in again. He feels he wants to touch it. He lets go of Little Boy's hand. He goes to the cold tree and presses his palms to it.

Little Boy asks him what he is doing.

The cool of the tree as it stands does not cancel the heat that lived inside it before. It does however smudge his body dark in several places where skin touches smooth memory of bark. This smudge will come away—Little Boy comes to him and rubs it off with spit.

They go on together. They find a Western-style door thrown on its side, wooden, with heavy finish, dark grain, knob melted so it looks like a wilting brass flower. There was black lettering before that is now burnt away, leaving a streak of scorch.

“This is where the soldiers found me,” says Fat Man. “I was crying.”

“What for?” asks Little Boy.

“Am I a good brother?” says Fat Man.

“So far you're fine,” says Little Boy. “Just do as I say.”

They pass another man's shadow projected on a wall. He is reaching toward what killed him. The cinders that were the body remain face-down on the road.

“He looks like he wants our money,” says Fat Man, fearful, squeezing Little Boy's hand.

Little Boy squeezes back. He does not deny the shadow wants. Stooped body, thin wrists. It would take what it could get.

By night they come to the outermost edge of the city, where the wilds begin to encroach and the crickets insist.