Little Boy (40 page)

I like to lay down a lot more than I used to.
I feel more comfortable lying on my bed, for example, where my
body’s movement equals my mind’s. With all of these memories
sweeping in and out of my head each minute, you’d think I’d be
jittery, like a person who’s had too much coffee. But I’m not.

As in a trance, I commence movement
physically feeling as if I’ve already reached my destination before
I’ve departed, as if gravity has pushed me down before I begin to
jump. They were frightening at first, these feelings; but now I’m
used to them.

Early in my relationship with Maria I began
to get the impression that I was losing knowledge. That feeling has
been facilitated by our breakup. In fact, I feel as if now I know
nothing other than my own emotions. So many people go to school or
work in order to gain a special skill or expertise in some field.
Some become architects, some doctors, some electricians. But I have
no special skill. A new born baby just one year ago, this
affliction has swiftly grown me into a frail old man. And a frail
old man whose life has meant nothing, whose labor has been
fruitless, whose talents are few—that’s a very sad person
indeed.

Only recently did I discover the nature of my
problem of losing knowledge. It’s not that information has been
swept out of my brain, leaving a vacuum in its place. Far from it.
I now understand that knowledge has been eliminated only to have
thoughts of one person take its place. I’m permeated by memories of
Maria. I know nothing of the world around me beyond that of which I
discovered with Maria. She is in the forefront of my mind whenever
I attempt any task at all, no matter how trivial or minuscule it
may be.

I have shaved with Maria, showered with her,
eaten dinner with her, studied with her, watched TV with her, slept
with her, cried with her, walked with her, sung with her, and
scratched my head with her. And not just once or twice each time.
Each one, all of the time.

Who am I?
I don’t know.

Each morning, when I wake up, I must
literally tear myself from the bed to begin the day. It’s
troublesome having to face others when I have no face to show. I
don’t know what I look like, only what I feel like. I am my
emotions. I’m not myself, whatever that is, unless I’ve thought of
Maria, and what I did to her, and what I should have done instead,
and felt her presence rattle my soul. And then I enter my trance,
my mean. I’m not gratified until I’ve reached that mean. And only
then have I sedated myself to the point that keeps me from drifting
from bliss to sadness and back again, the two states that would
affirm my humanity. Only then can I rise from bed and light my
first cigarette of the morning. Or afternoon.

Focusing on whatever it is I am is a task in
and of itself. I’ve attempted time and again to classify myself as
something, some type of being, or another. Mirrors mock me, for
they only reflect a shadow of emptiness. Although what I am is an
enigma, I need only glance at my World War II poster each morning
to realize what I could have been. That is enough for me.

I am not what I could have been. That is my
existence.
I am not
.

Only recently did I learn exactly what that
World War II V-J Day poster portrayed. A short while ago I was
reading a book that my dad had given me when I was younger:
Great Events of the Twentieth Century
. He said it had vivid
accounts of all the major wars of the century, and he was
right.

I was especially interested in the World War
II chapter of the book, which had photographs of about a dozen
military aircraft flown by the Allies during the war. There was the
B-17F Flying Fortress, a seventy-foot long plane with a
six-thousand pound bomb load. There was the B-29 Superfortress,
which could fly at a top speed of four-hundred miles per hour; it
was such an effective plane that over four-thousand were built.
There was the Chance-Vought F4U-1D Corsair. A naval attack plane,
and one of World War II’s most effective dive-bombers, it was
called Whistling Death because of the whistling sound it created as
it swooped through the sky. There was the British Spitfire, a Royal
Air Force combat plane, which was responsible for thwarting the
German air attack during the Battle of Britain in 1940.

And then there was Enola Gay.

Enola Gay was a Boeing B-29 Superfortress.
It’s WEFT: gigantic 141-foot permanent wings; four propellered,
2,200-horsepower engines; a cigar-shaped fuselage which was tapered
at the rear; a thick, high-mounted, immobile tail. With Curtiss
Electric four-blade sixteen-foot, seven inch propellers, it could
fly up to 360 miles per hour at 25,000 feet.

With an eleven-man crew, Enola Gay departed
Tinian Island in the Marianas on August 6, 1945 at 2:45 a.m. and
arrived back twelve hours and thirteen minutes later. During those
thirteen hours, it released an atomic bomb over Hiroshima, Japan,
at 8:15 a. m. local time.

Atomic bombs are amazing. They depend upon
the release of energy in a nuclear reaction known as fission, or
the splitting of atomic nuclei. With a release of energy a million
times greater than an equal weight of chemical high-explosives,
they’re invention is the most impressive and disturbing application
of science in human history. As the atom splits, it creates
neutrons. Neutrons striking the heavy element uranium cause it to
fission, producing fragments which have less mass than the original
atom. Allowed to progress unchecked, a chain reaction releases
energy rapidly and with explosive force.

And it did.

It’s official number was 44-86292. But the
book said that the pilot, Lieutenant Colonel Paul Tibbets, named
the plane Enola Gay after his mother. The atomic bomb it released
had an explosive capacity equivalent to twenty-thousand tons of
TNT. The bomb’s code-name was “Little Boy.”

Its direct hit on Hiroshima killed
seventy-eight thousand innocent citizens almost immediately.
Another seventy-thousand were injured, and about ten-thousand were
never discovered. But it wasn’t just the number of people who died,
but the way they died. Thousands of people were instantly
carbonized in a blast thousands of times hotter than the sun;
further from the epicenter, birds ignited in mid-flight, eyeballs
popped, and internal organs were sucked from bodies of victims.

The same scenario took place, and tens of
thousands more were killed and wounded, by the second atomic bomb
dropped on Nagasaki, three days later. Unlike Little Boy, the
second plane didn’t hit its target directly. But it still caused
thousands of deaths. Combined, they facilitated the end of World
War II.

The book went on to state that the war
might
not have carried on too much longer even had President
Truman not ordered the atomic bombing of those two Japanese cities.
However, in the interim, hundreds of thousands of American soldiers
might
have died in an inevitable land invasion on Japan. A
few years after the war, President Eisenhower said the bomb was
unnecessary, that Japan was about to surrender anyway. Imagine if
that were true: The U. S. killed hundreds of thousands of innocent
souls for naught; just as punishment, I suppose, for the stuff that
the Japanese government did during the war.

History, unfortunately, has a cruel way of
only telling what did happen, and not what might have happened. Did
Little Boy and its counterpart three days later kill hundreds of
thousands to save hundreds of thousands? We will never know.

The mass destruction caused by Little Boy
fascinated me, as did the entire story behind it. Among the many
vivid details of these explosive events, most striking was what
Captain Robert Lewis, the co-pilot, wrote in his journal that
morning: “As the bomb exploded, we saw the entire city disappear. I
wrote in my log, ‘My God, what have we done?’”

My God, what have we done?

My mind now flips between the corresponding
events of that mission—the dropping of the bomb Little Boy in an
effort to win a war, and Robert Lewis’s departing words: “My God,
what have we done?” I couldn’t help but feel connected to him, this
pilot that was not much older than me way back then. I repeated
those words—“My God, what have we done?”—silently and intently to
myself alone in my room late one night.
My God, what have we
done…My God, what have we done?

I began thinking:
My God, what have I
done?

I wanted to go back in time, to the morning
of August 6, 1945. If I could, I would’ve ripped the pencil from
Robert Lewis’s hand and prevented him from asking that question. He
had no right to do so. He was just following orders. He was only
doing his job.

That’s my question!
I thought.
I AM
LITTLE BOY!

That’s all I thought about then, that’s all I
think about now—
I am the real Enola Gay. I am Little Boy. I
could’ve been a man. I could’ve learned from my mistakes as they
sprang up—I made them each and every goddamn day—and each one
could’ve become a valuable lesson rather than a fire that shortened
an ever-shrinking fuse. I could’ve extinguished the fire before it
scorched my face and Maria’s, before it scalded our love into a
state of disrepair. Mine was a war against myself that I’d never
won. It still is.

Few thoughts dominate my condition as do
those of that World War II military plane and its connection to my
existence. The story of Little Boy and the Enola Gay has sparked an
unconscious obsession to study and contemplate and predict what a
loving and remarkable relationship Maria and I were destined to
have were it not for my inhuman treatment of her.

These are the thoughts which shall hold me
locked in place for the rest of my life. I will no longer think
about her past—only what I am, and what we could have been.

Chapter 20

My Last Cigarette

As you know, I never did get into the Air
Force Academy.

To this day, I don’t know whether or not
Maria’s father canceled his letter of recommendation for me.
Perhaps, upon seeing the tears on his daughter’s face, Mr. Della
Verita called up Colorado Springs and told them what scum I was.
Perhaps not. I’ll never know.

The summer after senior year, instead of
packing for the Academy, I got back my old deli job at Key Food and
enrolled in Hunter College in Manhattan. But I never did find
myself. And I didn’t bother to reapply to the Academy, either.
Instead, traveling on the subway each and every goddamn day into
the city, disgusted by the yuppie scum and winos surrounding me, I
imagined myself shooting through the skies in a B-1 Bomber.
Cornering the subway tunnels, screeching to a halt at each stop,
more often than not my eyes swelled with tears with the thought
that my flying career was over—and yet it had never begun. I took
the same train that Maria and I took when we went to Central Park,
the R train. Often, I search for her on the train, but I never find
her.

I didn’t make many friends in college. I
strolled around the hallways with my head down, never bothering to
talk to anybody, continuously replaying the events of that single
year Maria and I had spent together.

One person I did meet was Megan. Like I said
before, most of the time we didn’t hang out together, but we
studied with each other on occasion.

Megan impressed me. Not so much her looks but
her personality. She was a sweet kid, kind of nerdy. When I passed
by her, with my face anchored to the pavement, she’d tap me on the
shoulder and greet me with a cute, angelic smile on her face. She
didn’t seem to mind that other people thought she was weird for
speaking to me. I know that they thought that, too. Megan used to
say, jokingly, that I was the Invisible Man, but she had a special
ability to see me. I always insisted that she was delusional, and
she responded by smiling.

For one reason or another, Megan was very
friendly toward me. In the library, when I went off to make a
photocopy or check-out a book, Megan would leave cute little notes
in my bag that said “hi

” or “how are
you?

” It was weird behavior, if you ask
me. But I suppose it was nice to be noticed.

We had our ups and downs, Megan and I, like
I’ve already described. After the Deck the Halls Ball we didn’t
speak for months. Still, I always felt that eventually she would
call me. Even though I was wasted and out of control, I was sure
she thought being defended in front of The Plaza was romantic. By
the time summer rolled around—the summer right after my freshman
year and her sophomore year—we’d become reacquainted. She called me
a few times in Queens, begging me to go see a movie or get some
pizza. I always said no. I usually said no and ended the
conversation quickly, because I always preferred to stay in my room
and watch the game. I’d sit in there and smoke cigarettes one after
the other like a fiend. Alone, lying on my bed, in my smoky room,
I’d think all about Maria. Either that or I’d watch TV or listen to
the radio, trying to get her out of my mind. Trying like hell to
think of her, trying like hell not to think of her—that was my
life, day-in, day-out. A spectator would’ve thought I was a lonely
guy, but I wasn’t. I actually enjoyed hibernating in there, with
nothing but cigarettes as my friends, and my TV as my confidant.
You guys were worried about me. And I want to take a moment to say
thank you for coming to my room, and asking me if you could help in
any way. You didn’t know what had happened, at least not all of it,
but you responded with kindness and patience.