He finds that he can light his candles merely by touching their wicks with a finger. Once lit, this flame burns bright and tall, blue and angry. Wherever he goes in the room, the flame follows, leaning toward him as if pointing him out in a lineup. These flames cannot be snuffed but must exhaust themselves in their own time.
He gives up checking the lock and tells himself he has forgotten checking, so there is one less thing to worry about.
He plays with his body until it becomes strange.
On the seventh day he dreams of eating one of the burnt bodies outside the bunker. Beneath the charred black crust of their skin he imagines a pink, soft meat like salmon steaks. On the eighth day the soldiers do not come. On the ninth day they do not come. He shits again, mostly water. It makes him feel even more empty. He is hungry all the time. He is always looking at the door, waiting for the door to open. For instance he will count down from a high number, thinking that surely they must come for him before he can count down from a thousand, from ten thousand, from a hundred thousand.
He tries closing his eyes as long as he can bear it. Tries sleeping but can’t sleep. Tries singing but he doesn’t know a song. Tries thinking about women. Tries counting again. Assures himself they’re on their way. Finds it easier to sleep as the hunger progresses, as he has less and less energy with which to want and think and need.
He remembers how it was to explode.
It was everything coming out everywhere. Shit and puke and blood and scream.
It was being the world.
It was having no body.
It was screaming till his scream was all he could hear and finding there was air still in his lungs: that he could scream forever.
It was sitting perfectly still at the center of a concrete cube.
It was his candle’s first flare.
It was standing in place and spreading his arms and spinning and spinning and spinning until he didn’t know if he was falling or flying.
It was none of these things.
This is how it was to explode:
It was like being born.
On the tenth day there is a sound outside the door. When the sound comes he is pretending to be a tree with burning wood like a barrier reef inside it. He is pretending to burst at the seams by pulling his robe open, like a flasher, and pushing out his gut. The knob twists in clumsy hands. The Japanese soldiers never fumbled with the door. This is someone else.
Fat Man scoots back against the wall and ties his robe closed. The movement of the candle’s flame makes the walls seem to bloat and collapse. The door opens a sliver. There are no machine gun nostrils in the light that climbs the wall. The door opens wide. The light spreads like wings. There is a slight, distended shadow at its center. It is a little boy. He could be as young as eight or as old as thirteen. He is gawky and thin, and his bones all protrude from his limbs like knobs on a young tree. His hair is so fair it looks white; it sticks out like soft straw from under the brim of his blue felt fedora. He wears a matching suit. He runs his fingers over the wide black suspenders beneath his blue jacket. Fat Man cannot read his expression—though the edges of the boy’s body are lit and bright, the center is dark, nearly black. He can only see the outer corners of the boy’s eyes, which are white. Between those corners, shadow.
There is recognition. There is shame at the smell of the shelter, the filth of his body.
Little Boy says, “So, you are my brother.”
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.