Читать книгу Fat Man and Little Boy - Mike Meginnis - Страница 6

HOW BROTHERS

TRAVEL TOGETHER

Little Boy is urging his brother out of his hole. Fat Man says he is not afraid, yet he trembles at the threshold.

“Then why are you shaking?” says Little Boy.

“I’m cold,” says Fat Man. “This robe is all I have.”

“I’ll keep you safe if you come out,” says Little Boy.

“I’m weak with hunger,” says Fat Man.

“I’ll feed you once you’re out of there.”

That does it. Fat Man takes a step out of the doorway. The sun hits him full-on; squinting his bleary eyes against its light, he sways on his feet. He holds on to the doorframe, waiting for his dizzy spell to pass.

“Come on,” says Little Boy. “Aren’t you hungry?”

“Ravenous,” growls the fat man. “Do you have the food or not?”

“Not on me, but we’ll have it soon enough.”

Sweating and starving, Fat Man heaves himself out of the doorway. His knees shake and strain as he forces his feet up the stairs in heavy, leaden steps. He still hunches from habit, as if the bunker’s low ceiling has followed him out. Little Boy leads him up, walking backward, coaxing, “Come on big fella. Come on.”

They sit together at the top of the stairs, not quite touching. Little Boy looks at their feet—his leather shoes, the fat man’s bare, dirty feet.

Fat Man is like a shaved bear wrapped in someone’s expensive drapes. His lips are full, his toes and digits wide, his skin smooth and soft as cream. His neck quivers like a rodent’s breast when he speaks. His fingernails are all bitten down, the toenails peeled. A week’s growth mosses his head.

Fat Man says, “I don’t believe you are my brother.” But he can feel it, the same atomic pull. Their elbows touch.

Little Boy says,“But I’m so happy to meet you.”

“Are you?” says Fat Man.

Little Boy revises his expression several times until he finds the one that feels right for this occasion. Eyebrows raised, mouth-corners rising, eyes wide with pleasure, cheeks shading pink by degree and degree. He says. “Can’t you see how happy I am?”

“If that’s what it looks like, I guess you must be.” Fat Man mirrors Little Boy’s expression to see how it feels. He tries variations. He touches his face. “Happiness,” he says.

Little Boy insists he is happy, that this is what happiness looks like. He wiggles his feet—his shoes squeak on the cement step.

Fat Man says, “Then I guess I’m happy too, if this is how that feels.”

Little Boy and Fat Man sit and wonder if they are really happy, if they look happy, if someone else would be able to tell them.

They keep their eyes low, glancing at each other’s downcast profiles as briefly as they can, so as not to see the wastes of Na­ga­­saki. There is nothing to see.

“If you are really my brother,” says Fat Man, “then you will know how it was to explode.”

The little boy frowns. He pats his left thigh, his right, stalling. “How do you mean?”

“Are you my brother, or aren’t you?”

Little Boy sighs. “It was like being born.”

Fat Man asks Little Boy did he like being born.

Little Boy says, “What’s to like?”

“Let’s find food.”

“So am I your brother?”

“I can’t think on an empty stomach.”

Standing, they face the city’s ruin. Fat Man asks Little Boy does he think there is food in the wastes. Little Boy says there must be. He says, “There are still people living in there.”

“What are they doing alive?”

“Mostly they seem to be sleeping.” Little Boy tells what he’s seen so far: Bodies that from a distance seemed done with life, but, more closely observed, revealed themselves as dreaming, bleeding, faintly breathing, on a bed of any given thing, or dirt. Some also clutched knives, or bowls with jagged broken edges, or horseshoes, or broomsticks, or other improvised weapons. They warned him off. Some reached for him with shaking, open hands. When he offered his hand in return this was not what they wanted; they must have wanted food; his warmth stuck slightly to their cold skin as they tugged free.

One woman did not let him go. She pulled Little Boy close, so that he lay down beside her, huddled up into her core. Her legs were pinned beneath a heavy bookshelf. Her blood had soaked into the books. It tarred and clotted their pages, scabbed them over. She wrapped her working arm around him. Some time later that day, he couldn’t say when, she died. He stayed a little while after he knew. Then he left her, taking nothing with him from her home, though there were canned goods piled in another room. He would regret this later, and regrets it now. He could have fed his brother. He does not know the way back.

Fat Man asks him how he came to open the door.

“It was unlocked,” says Little Boy.

Fat Man tries on another expression—it seems to be surprise. He feels his face to know what he’s made. By hand he adjusts certain features. Now he seems surprised and saddened. Now he shifts them again, this time without his hands. He looks afraid. “We should go,” he says. “They could still come back.”

Little Boy says, “How do you think two brothers travel?”

“In this country?”

“Anywhere. Do they hold hands?”

“They might hold hands.”

“Do they go side by side, or does one lead the other?”

“Side by side, I would imagine,” says Fat Man.

“Do they speak or are they quiet?”

“I should think it depends on their mood.”

“May I walk by your side?” says Little Boy. “May I hold your hand? May we speak to each other?”

“I will not hold your hand yet,” says Fat Man. “I am not sure you are my brother.”

They walk side by side into the waste.

The sun is falling. The clouds are frayed like Fat Man’s sleeves. A black bird settles on a lamppost knocked askew. Ash lifts on a breeze, lilts this way and that, returns to the earth. Every building’s shadow is injured. They have holes in them, or walls are missing. Fat Man finds an empty can of food. Only a sweet brown smell remains. Little Boy finds three dry grains of rice.

They find two bodies knocked dead by impacts to their heads. Their faces are crushed beyond recognition. Their bodies slim and sexless. They lay side by side. One body’s arm flung carelessly across the other body. One body’s wearing sandals while the other’s feet are bare, and curled inward, as if the toes are reaching for their matching heels. If these bodies are brothers then this is how brothers die together.

Little Boy crouches to study them more closely. From inside them maggots come up and out for air—white studs in their skin become stunted worms. First six, then a dozen, then many seething. They eat through the bodies’ faces, they fall from their ears. Little Boy startles, cries out, jumps back. The maggots calm. Some lie still on the bodies like white cashews. Others die and shrivel. Others burrow back into the flesh.

There are no flies here.

The brothers leave those bodies. They leave that place. Little Boy imagines worms inside him. How it would be to see them bursting through his skin.

Fat Man asks him when they’ll find food. Little Boy says he doesn’t know. He says Fat Man needs to be calm. Fat Man says it’s been days since he’s eaten. He says, “If you were my brother you would feed me.”

The sun goes down. Things turn blue, gray, black. The brothers find a shadow on a wall. An image of a painter on a folding ladder. He has a bucket of paint in one hand, and in his other hand a brush. He reaches for the wall to apply the paint. The folding ladder is angled sideways so that Little Boy can see the gaps between the ladder’s steps like spokes in a wheel. The painter’s posture is stiff. The painter’s body is gone. The ladder is broken in half, there, on the ground.

Little Boy touches the shadow. Cold, like the rest of the wall. He can feel Fat Man’s eyes on him. There is a surge of heat through his body. He tries to rub it away but it won’t go away. He thinks how it would be to reach out with that brush but never touch the wall. He tries to rub it away but it won’t go away. Fat Man says he should leave it alone.

“We need to leave this place,” says Little Boy.

He means Japan.

They walk together side by side in the way that brothers might do.

Fat Man asks Little Boy how he was born. Little Boy says he will tell it.