Mike Meginnis - Fat Man and Little Boy

“White tub. She took a bottle of aspirin before she did it. We figured she didn’t understand how painkillers work. Now we know it was you trying to poison her.” Mr. Bruce turns a sharpened pencil over and over in his hand. “She was your first.”

“I can’t help but notice you’re both wearing ordinary clothes,” says Fat Man. “You don’t look like police anymore. I don’t think I have to listen to this.”

“Very sharp,” says Mr. Bruce, exchanging a smile with his partner. “We work for Mr. Blanc now. He pays us a modest salary so that we can focus our energies on solving his case, and his case alone. But you shouldn’t leave your seat until you’ve heard us out.”

He produces a typewritten list, some names crossed out, others underlined. But he reads them all, and he reads them all the same way. A flat delivery, pro forma, as if their meaning, such as it is, is already known, and in the rehearsal there is nothing new accomplished, but a recitation for its own sake, a list that exists to list and be listed, an index to itself. “Corinne Roux, Nantes. Caroline Fortescue, Nantes. Bernadette Boucher, Toulouse.” Those should be Japanese names. “Christiane Bourque, Lyon. Alice Bessette, Bordeaux.” A woman crouched melting all around her baby, back turned to the low sun of his explosion, the flash-bang, pika don. Their collective shadow stained onto the wall, a heavy smudge, the baby subsumed somewhere in the melting mother, perhaps identifiable in the bodies themselves—you would cut through the meat char, to the bones, to learn what was where—but the shadow lost in the shadow projected on the wall. “Dianne Chevalier, Paris. Florence David, Paris. Lorraine Girard, Paris.” Meat rolling back from fine, delicate bones, in layers and peels, revealing the joint of a knee, revealing the cold, hollowed whiteness of a hip bone, rolling back, unveiling organs, which flow away as bright many-colored steam, revealing a spine, rolling back from the breasts, sponges sizzling, veins like fuses, revealing ribs, white smiles. A face becoming a skull, becoming a toothless, hollowed thing, the eyes boiling and then gone, all gone, revealing the brain, which hardens, raisin-esque, though the nose slowly collapses, though the ears drip away. “Alice Bernard, Paris. Lucie Michel, Marseille. Martha Grosvenor, Marseille.” A city stripped the same. Trees aflame, revealing foliage, revealing grasses, revealing dirt, becoming mud, flowing away, pushed back all wiggle-pudding by the force of Fat Man’s low sun, and layer, and layer, until the dinosaurs surface; their bones, the pterodactyl midflight midst the mud, the brontosaurus mourning its lost tail, the tyrannosaurus rex reaching up with stubby arms as if to finally crown itself king of the lizards; all floating out of gravity’s grasp, into space, among the stars, revealing the core, the burning center, orange-yellow swirl, and underneath that red, a red light, pure as pure as pure as pure, throb —and him, Fat Man, exploding still, a white sphere opposite the red throb, singing, a single note, no sound now, nothing heard or felt in space, in vacuum, but still, the song, a single note, and all else gone but for the other’s throb.

“All of them pregnant, or with a child recently born,” says Mr. Bruce. “That’s how we know you did them. It’s a pattern.”

“The pattern fits,” says Mr. Rousseau, jabbing Fat Man’s chest with his forefinger.

“Black palms,” says Mr. Bruce. “Stained by sin. They used to think the body would show guilt. Then they decided against it. We’ll show them they were right before.”

Fat Man belches nervously, biting it back so the stench and the sound die in his mouth, becoming a burn in his throat. He wipes tears from his eyes.

“It’s like fingerprint ink,” says Mr. Rousseau.

Fat Man weeps openly. He blubbers, “You don’t get it.” Spit running down his chin.

“There, there,” says Mr. Rousseau. He rubs the fat man’s back in circles. “So we caught you. You had to know it would happen. Crack cops like us.”

“All those dead girls,” says Mr. Bruce. “You wanted to be caught.”

Spit bubbles pop as Fat Man speaks, “No, no, no, no, no. It’s not enough.”

Mr. Bruce says, “Evidence? We’re still building our case. Unless you are willing to turn yourself in. If you feel guilty, as you should. We brought the cuffs. You could try them on. See how you like their fit.”

“No,” says Fat Man, running at the nose, rubbing his palms in slow, vertical swipes across the tabletop, and then again, and again. “No, no, no. No, oh no. They’re not enough.”

“You mean you’ll kill more?” says Mr. Rousseau. “We won’t let you.”

“I mean you need more names. Hundreds of times more names. Thousands of times more. There are scores of hundreds of women you haven’t named, dead women, dead children.”

“Is this a confession?” says Mr. Rousseau to Mr. Bruce, taking the pencil from his partner’s hand—apparently, to write it down.

“Exaggeration does you no good,” says Mr. Bruce. “If you want to be arrested, there can be no falsehoods in your acceptance of guilt. The scales of justice require you only take credit for what wrongs you have done with your own black hands—there can be no falsehood. Otherwise the scales will be lies, and the exercise moot. So if you tell me you killed hundreds of thousands, you’d better hope that you can name them all, if you want to be damned properly, and in proportion to your crimes.”

“Let me write this down,” says Mr. Rousseau, who takes the list of names from Mr. Bruce and lays it face-down on the table so he can use the blank side.

“What were their names?” says Mr. Bruce.

“I don’t know their names,” says Fat Man. He wipes his eyes with his shirt, clears what he can from his mouth with his palms, wiping them to make a glistening shellac across the table.

“They were strangers?” says Mr. Bruce.

“Perfect strangers. I didn’t know a one. I didn’t see them, even.”

“You’re not being serious. Give back my pencil, Mr. Rousseau. He’s trying to foul up our investigation. He wants to make it sprawl. He’ll have us busy for years, hunting go-nowhere leads. If he really wanted to be punished, he would give us their names.”

“Or at least descriptions, if he doesn’t remember the names,” says Mr. Rousseau.

“Precisely.”

Fat Man closes his eyes and presses his temples. He thinks what’ll happen to Little Boy if he goes to prison. He thinks also of the guilt his brother shares. He thinks how Little Boy would never come clean on his own. Fat Man will have to take the fall for both of them. He can be the guilty one. Little Boy can be the innocent. In this way they can live as they should, imprisoned and free. They can do both. Little matter if one should be responsible for one half and one for the other. It’s easier that way—to share the guilt, share the prison, is impossible. Better that the heavy one should have to take the heavy load.

Innocence is the hardest thing. He wouldn’t know where to start.

“I won’t give myself up,” says Fat Man. “That’s not how it works. You’re still something like police. Connect me to these women in a court of law, you can put me away. Find the others, you can put me away for them too. Keep me locked up for the rest of time. But I won’t do your job. You find the evidence. You get the testimony.”

“We’ll talk to Matthew now, if you’ll kindly call him to us,” says Mr. Bruce. He takes a bar of chocolate from his pocket, peels the wrapping off one end, lays it down on the table.

“My nephew doesn’t talk.”

“You mean you’ve trained him to be afraid of police.”

“I mean it’s a miracle if anyone gets a full sentence out of him. You can try, though.”