Fat_Interior

The show begins with a stage, empty but for a table draped with red velvet, gaudy jade pillars that look like stacked, scowling heads, and what seems to be a golden urn filled with bamboo stalks. Someone offstage plays a piano—tittering Orientalisms and angular, discordant cords. Chi chi chi chi chi-chi, chi chi chong, chi chi chong, chong. A gong gongs.

From both wings, men in black, red, and white kimonos run across the stage, crossing each other as they scamper. They wear wooden sandals and scowling white masks with thick black savage brushstroke eyebrows. Chi chi chi, chi chong, chong, gong, and the stage is empty.

They run across again, this time wielding katana-like clubs, waving them over their heads, screaming sounds that might be Japanese. They crouch as they run.

A careening glissando introduces a proud, tall man with a silken white rising sun on his black, billowing robes, stomping the stage as if he means to crack the wood, which creaks with each impact. He nods officiously at the audience, his actor’s bright, blue eyes glancingly visible through the mask’s eyeholes and their shadows. He pretends to twirl his painted mustache. His robes give the impression of a master of ceremonies.

He removes a bamboo stalk from the golden urn and holds it out to the audience between thumbs and forefingers, running his hands demonstratively over the length of it, as if to say, “This is all of one piece.”

He shouts something from his gut and tosses the bamboo in the air. One of the samurai sprints across the stage, raises his sword to touch the falling bamboo, and then he is gone. The referee catches the bamboo—one half in each hand. He shows the audience the clean cut, then discards both measures, tossing them back into the golden urn. When he turns away from them the audience can see the red ribbons that tie the mask to his face, and the bald, crumpled skin of his head. Someone strikes the gong.

He takes two more stalks and throws them up. Two samurai run screaming across the stage. They slash at one another—one low, one high—and seem to miss. When neither can be seen, both bamboo stalks split in two, fall to the ground. The referee will not deign to bend and lift them. Someone strikes the gong.

Fat Man looks to Little Boy, and sees he is amazed, or feigning amazement. The child nearly shakes from pleasure. Beside him Francine touches her chin. Albert might be sleeping, his face is turned down.

Now the referee throws into the air stalk after stalk. A continuous parade of samurai runs across the stage, leaping to cut the bamboo, flipping over each other, sliding on their silk-sheathed knees, swords whispering past one another, never touching. They grunt and shout. The unseen piano player pumps his left hand like a bellows, his right hand like pistons. The keys shriek. Gong gongs.

Everyone is here. The policemen, Messieurs Bruce and Rousseau, sit toward the back of the auditorium, hands ready on their truncheons. They watch the stage as if they anticipate a crime, their chins upturned and eyes narrowed. Jacques is here, and so are his regulars, and so are the waiters. So is every woman Fat Man has dreamed about since they came to town—the brunette with her hair done up in a tight bundle, the teenage girl with a handkerchief holding her red curls in place, the blonde with eyelashes like hummingbird wings.

Having only seen Mr. Blanc in passing, and from a great distance, Fat Man can still discern him now. He recognizes Blanc by the pumpkin-like shape of his head, the way his eyes never fully open, owing to the prodigious fat of his cheeks; he recognizes Blanc by the quizzical weight of his brow, nearly one continuous arch, and by the way he sits with his hands at rest on his gut, all his fingertips touching their opposite palms. He recognizes Blanc by the slump of his widower’s figure. If they were shaking hands, he is sure Blanc’s face would be transformed by proximity, by unseen moles or lines or other features, such that he would not recognize Blanc, or suspect that they had ever known of one another.

In the time it takes for Fat Man’s gaze to return to the stage, the samurai are gone and so is their bamboo. He missed the roar of applause that followed their finale. Now, the Oriental spirit medium approaches.

She is a tall, slender figure in robes shot through with brilliant color like thick veins of quartz. The robes trail her like the train of a wedding gown, though they are black and bright purple and jelly red and silver and gold and forest green and tiger orange and sun yellow. Her robes are open at the shoulders, revealing the kind slope of her collarbone, the fairness of her skin. There are no sleeves apart from knots tied just beneath those exposed shoulders. She wears a large silver necklace hung with obsidian and pearls. Her black hair is piled atop her head in a tight, thick knot. One long strand falls down her back, mingling with jade beads and bits of precious metal that dangle from a comb.

She walks to the velvet-draped table. She sets down a small, featureless wooden box—about eight inches long on each side. There is, on closer inspection, a wooden slat on the top of the box with which it could be pulled open. From the ease with which she carries it and the softness of its landing on the table, Fat Man thinks it must be very light—perhaps empty.

The medium bristles with peacock feathers. Or rather, they seem to be feathers but Fat Man sees that they are long, silver needles done up with plumes like peacock tails. There are needles in her arms and shoulders, which must puncture her perhaps an inch deep. They stand wholly erect. As she breathes, the needle-feathers flex and sway. There is one between her eyes and like a quail’s headfeather it droops forward.

The medium folds her hands. She breathes through her nose and mouth together. Deep, deep.

The invisible piano player fingers a mystic mood.

The medium unfolds her arms and gestures violently offstage. She shouts—her voice resounding, deep as the afterlife, deep as a fortune-teller’s should be—“I told you not to play that shit once I came out! I won’t have it!”

Several men exchange words offstage. The piano player stops, though not without striking the keys one more time.

“Unlike everything you have just seen,” says the medium, in perfect French, “unlike everything else on this stage, and unlike what they tell you in church services or funerals—unlike all of these things, I am real. What I do is real.” She strokes the wooden box. Her nails are long, elegant, and speckled all the colors of her robes.

“Tonight I will speak to you of the dead, and the dead will speak to you through me. If you don’t like what you hear, this is not my fault, and I don’t wish to hear of it. If you do like what you hear, I am happy for you, but you cannot expect me to speak to you of them again—or to speak to you otherwise, for that matter. Is this understood?”

Fat Man nods. He feels and hears most of the audience do the same. His eyes are fixed on her. There is a prickling all over his skin, and inside it, an itch, like he too is hedgehogged with peacock needles.

The medium says, “Now I’m going to begin. I’m sorry I won’t be able to help all of you. Time and my own limitations allowing, I’ll do what I can.”

She places one hand on the box and with the other points out at the audience, as if extending an antenna for the dead. All her feathers shiver. She says, “I’ve got something. You, there. The one who brought a dog.”

An old woman in the back says, “Me?”

The medium nods and says, “Why do you bring that dog everywhere?”

“He reminds me of my husband,” says the old woman. “Are dogs not allowed? No one told me.”

“Do you believe the dog is your husband, madame?”

“The thought has occurred to me. He’s always so attentive, as if he means to make up for some slight he has done me in the past. A past life, maybe. They share the same sad little eyes.”

“The dog is not your husband. He tells me that he is your former grocer.”

The old woman gasps. “Who?”

“He says you never learned his name, but describes himself for me now. He says he was a middle-aged man, and that when he was not at work he wore a white felt hat around town. His hair was red, and his mustache streaked with blond, and his shirts were always stained with the pulp of squashed fruits. He wants you to know he didn’t choose to be your dog, but he did love you in life, and now he’s happy to be yours.”

There rises over the audience a heavy, steady panting—the dog. He yaps once.

“Well that doesn’t make any sense,” says the old woman. “Why should some infatuated grocer be my dog? Why should he look so much like my husband?”

The medium ignores her. “I have a message for Rosie Cummings, from your father. He says you should go back to America. Forget about your fool hotel. He says it’s too soon for you to give up on children.”

A tall American woman in a blue frock and curly red hair stands up several rows in front of Fat Man and company.

“Can you tell him I’m barren?” she says, in a flat, Midwestern accent that comes through her nose as much as her mouth.

“He says that’s your imagination. He says the women in your family have always taken to childbirth very naturally.”

“Forget him. Can you hear my husband? Does he have anything to say for himself?”

“No, ma’am. I can’t hear him,” says the medium.

“It figures,” says the American, and she sits down.

“Now I—”

“Wait,” interrupts Rosie, standing up again. “I’m sorry, but concerning America and my hotel and what my father said, is it your experience that the dead are, on the whole, more wise than the living?”

“Not at all,” says the medium.

“Okay, thank you,” says Rosie, and she sits down again. Her chair makes a sound like a hinge.

The medium stands and paces the front of the stage, eyeing the audience. When her gaze passes over Fat Man the prickles in his skin intensify, and when she has moved on he sees that he is holding hands with Little Boy, who looks up at him in amazement, and some kind of guarded tenderness, which suggests to Fat Man that he’s the one who reached for his brother.

“Barbara?” says the medium. She holds out open hands. The quills hang from her upturned arms as worms will hang from silk. “Barbara Trudeau, can you stand for me now?”

A stout woman with a kind face stands before the audience as she looks at the medium with something like love or acceptance.

“Your daughter wishes to speak to you.”

“My daughters are with me,” says Barbara. “Perhaps you mean someone else.”

“Your other daughter,” squeaks the medium. “The one you had before your marriage. The one you strangled.”

Barbara squawks. It was meant to be laughter, but no one laughs like that. She looks around herself again, begging support against the madwoman on stage.

Now the medium watches her own hands rear up and wrap themselves around her neck. They squeeze and twist like opening a bottle. The dead girl’s voice is not impeded by this grasping. It sounds as if it’s coming from a bottle. She says, “I just wanted you to know that, in spite of your faith and your prayers, not all small girls are blessed,” she drawls this last word—she drags it through the muck, “enough to live the hereafter in Heaven. It’s different than what you think. I watch you comb the others’ hair. Your new little girls, who are quiet and sweet.”

Barbara Trudeau watches the medium throttle herself and makes her face hard like a cliff. Her bosoms climb her body and fall. Her girls look up to her on either side, the younger tugging at her skirt, their hair festooned with paste costume jewels. The medium falls to her knees and thrashes in her robes as her face like the moon turns red and throbbing, as she squeezes and wrings her own neck.

“Do you ever think how it would be to do it again?” says the voice from a bottle. “When you comb, or pluck the lice from their scalps, or when there was no food, do you, did you wonder what your husband would think? Every day I try to haunt you, but I can never work out how. Now,” she says, and releases the medium’s throat. She plucks a quill from her own borrowed body. A bead of blood forms on the arm it came from, and likewise on the needle’s tip. The audience gasps as she wields it, stumbling forward on her knees and jabbing at the air.

The medium drops the quill on the stage and stands, and smooths her robes.

Barbara stands, hands made fists, squinting, grimacing, a bulwark against some coming wave. The younger girl tugs again at her skirt. Fat Man wonders, will she mount the stage?

“Sit down, madame,” says the medium, and she sits down as well.

“It isn’t true,” says Barbara, such that everyone can hear. After the whispers have stopped, and only after this, she sits down. She hugs her girls in both arms.

The medium says, coolly, “Audience members compromised by my communions with the spirits should take comfort in the knowledge that modern courts do not admit as evidence the testimony of mediums, soothsayers, or shamans of any kind.”

The medium holds her hand over the box as if to warm them. There is dead air in the auditorium. Little Boy digs his nails into his brother’s fat black-burnt palm. “What?” whispers Fat Man. Little Boy only squeezes. Fat Man shakes his head, but he feels it rising in him too—like black moss climbing his spine, like his brain becoming broth, like exploding.

The medium’s eyes open wide and her nostrils flare and the things all tangled in her hair jangle; the quills in her skin all stand on end, including, especially, the quill feather quail thing pricked between her eyes, which seems even to twist in some brief violent updraft. She looks directly into Fat Man, and then Little Boy, and then, most alarming, their joined hands.

She doesn’t say anything.

Waits.

She touches the box, and fingers the slot by which it might be opened, but does not open her box.

A man calls to the stage, “Can you hear my son?”

“Your son says to let him rest,” hisses the medium, waving him away with a flick of her arm like a lizard’s tongue. She points to another man in the audience. “Your father looks on you as a disappointment. He says your brother is the better man.” She looks to another. “Your sister is the one who makes the tree move when there is no wind.” Another: “It’s your dead mother rocks the cradle when you think it is the dog.”

She stands again and pushes back her chair so hard it falls, bouncing off the left jade pillar and clattering on the stage. She approaches the fore. Hands in fists. Quiver-chinned.

“Monsieur Blanc.”

The grotesque is erected.

“Your wife married you for your money. Knowing that, she wonders if you might not waste it all on destroying better men.”

He is a gargoyle trembling.

“That’s quite enough,” speaks Mr. Bruce.

“Leave a mourning husband be, you shrew,” says Mr. Rousseau.

“Albert,” says the Medium, her voice a bottled girl again, “I thought you would pay me more attention were I pregnant, and I convinced myself I was, but I wasn’t. Now that I’m gone, you should treat your wife better. And get your fucking feet off of the table.”

Handsome Albert grunts. Francine taps the ground with her heels.

The medium coughs into her hands. So much wet comes out of her mouth, hanging in strings and ribbons from her hands. She is shaking her hands, and some hits the audience, and some now are standing to leave, tripping over others’ feet, excusing themselves, all harrumph-harrumphing.

Fat Man feels a fart like the sun inside him. He tries to hold himself shut.

The medium wipes the rest of the wet on her robes, leaving vertical streaks. She sniffs back more. “Mr. Bruce,” she says, and both the thin one and the short one stand to show themselves. “Your father asks you to remember your prayers.”

The medium settles on Fat Man and Little Boy as if at the end of a long journey. Goosebumps form thick as shingles on them. She kneels at the fore, offering a hand to the audience.

“Fat Man. Little Boy. Come here. Let me see you.”

Fat Man looks to Little Boy.

“Don’t be shy,” says the medium.

Little Boy takes to his feet. He pulls up Fat Man by hand and elbow.

Francine bites her lip. “Don’t go up there,” she whispers, in English, so both the boys can understand. “She’ll tell awful lies about you.”

“It’s just a show,” says Fat Man.

“She’ll say it either way,” says Little Boy.

They walk the aisle. Fat Man hoists Little Boy onto the stage and pulls himself up after, huffing and puffing. He wipes his head dry with his sleeve. No one can see the manic way he clenches his fat sphincter to keep the gas giant inside.

“My name is Matthew,” says Fat Man, in French.

“I’m John,” says Little Boy, in English.

“Are you sure it’s not the other way around?” asks the medium, who weaves between French and English now and for the rest of her time on the stage, assuming each accent with only the slightest slurring transition, then returning, so that everyone who cares to follow can do so. Little Boy and Fat Man look to each other and wonder if the medium is right—they wonder if they’ve switched.

“I mean he’s John,” says Fat Man.

“And he’s Matthew.”

“Oh well then that’s different,” says the medium. She prods the Fat Man’s gut. “Women, guard your wombs. This man and this boy are haunted, haunted by tens of thousands. They killed them all, ladies.” She stomps the stage. “Now those people and children follow them wherever they go, jostling for a chance to be born again near them, whether as infants or livestock or rot. Do you want a ghost in your belly?” She sculpts a gut like a dome in the air before her own gut to demonstrate the concept. “If not, then leave—their collected haunts worm their way up inside you even now, and will soon demand nutrition from your unknowing bodies, which will give and give, indiscriminate. You and your daughters. Lucky Rosie, lucky barren Rosie. I see them coax your flesh but they cannot. They all speak to me at once. A gibbering chorus. What do you have to say for yourselves?”

“It’s not true,” says Fat Man. He shifts on his feet, fighting back the gut-buster. “I don’t know what you mean.”

Little Boy stares out at the crowd, arms hanging from his sides like streamers.

“I told you she was a liar,” shrills Barbara Trudeau, the daughter-killer.

The medium spits, “These readings are for entertainment purposes only!”

“Who the hell are you?” says Fat Man.

“Did they kill Marie Blanc?” shouts Mr. Bruce.

“Was the fat one in cahoots with her lover?” shouts Mr. Rousseau.

Mr. Bruce yells, “What about Laurel?”

The medium circles the brother bombs, sizing them up. Little Boy trembles, and scratches himself, and—unaware of what his hands do—pulls at the foreskin of his penis through his trousers with one restless hand, squirming, as young boys sometimes do.

“Who am I?” says the medium. “Who are you? Do maggots form in the flesh of your victims with terrible speed? Do infants pour from every womb you see, unfinished, rushing to be near you? Does the food on your fork sprout mold before it reaches your lips? Do spiders crawl from inside dead bodies? Do you dream at night of mosquitoes devouring your flesh? Do you LIVE in SHAME and FEAR of EVERYTHING AROUND YOU?” She rears up, claws hoisted over her head. “Do you wake up sometimes soaked in your own mess and piss, flailing for something to break your fall, screeching like a goddamn harpy?”

Little Boy sobs—a snot bubble growing from his nose. “Yes,” he cries, “yes I do.”

“Shut up,” says Fat Man, not to Little Boy, but to the audience, which is silent. He holds his arms out like wings, displaying his bloated body. He feels his entrails roil inside him like hot tar.

“I want to die every day and I’m not even sure why,” says Little Boy.

“Does the guilt bring you pleasure,” hisses the medium, who fairly gyrates on the stage. “Does it, to know what you’ve done to them, the lives you destroyed, you took for your own, and their fascination, and the way they suck and clutch your fingers?”

“I don’t know.”

“You are fat with them,” she says, jabbing Fat Man’s belly.

“I’m fat with food,” says Fat Man. He squeezes his carriage in his arms. The blood is rushing. His heart burns. He is sure to explode. “I eat too much.”

“You hardly eat at all, most days,” says the medium. “I know you eat what you can get, I know, but your fat comes from the children. They’re lining your insides, like good soldiers throwing themselves on a grenade, wave after wave.”

Fat Man looks down at his body. “They can’t be.”

Little Boy falls down on his ass for no obvious reason. The audience is mystified, but cannot speak, cannot look away. He wails like a newborn. “Leave us alone,” he pleads. “Leave us alone. I am Matthew. I sweep the floors clean, and kill no one. Please ma’am, my brother is the killer.”

“Not me,” bawls Fat Man, rocking on his heels, stumbling back against the table. “It isn’t so. Not me.”

“Come clean,” calls Mr. Bruce.

The table rattles beneath his fat, shaking hands.

“I’m going to explode. I’m going to explode.” Fat Man’s sphincter flutters, pulses. There is such a force inside him.

The medium pulls the feather needle from between her eyes. She holds the point up, gesturing at the ceiling, which is painted thickly with cherubim and other naked things. She wrenches the needle, once, twice, showing the audience. They murmur or remember to breathe.

She marches on Fat Man. He lurches around the table, collides with one jade pillar, upending it. The ugly stacked pillar faces put their ears to the ground, and sway forward and back, listening to the thrum of spirit medium and Fat Man, Little Boy’s shoes scraping the boards of the stage.

Fat Man pants, and feels the cold, itching rivulets of saltwater running down his peaks and valleys. He holds out his black burnt palms. “I’ll explode! You don’t want to see! You don’t want to be here! I’m sorry!”

He chokes down vomit.

The medium plunges the needle in between his eyes. It scrapes the bone. He raises up his hands as if to lift the ceiling.

The gas he’s been holding explodes from his body, hot and sulfur, wet, like a failing machine, like a rhinoceros goring a hog. He screams. Deflates. His arms fall to his sides. He falls too, and lands on his ass. A simple, sad expression spreads like grape jelly over his face.

A bead of blood rolls down his nose.

He can hear Little Boy’s piss trickling down his pant leg and onto the wooden stage.

“Are you ashamed of what you have done?” demands the Oriental spirit medium. Much of the audience is leaving. The short policeman and the thin one walk against the outflow, truncheons at hand.

“Yes I am ashamed,” says Fat Man, hoarsely. “I am ashamed. Yes I am ashamed, yes I am ashamed.”

“See what I see,” says the medium. “Know what I know.”

She’s retrieved her box from the table. They are swimming in the eggy fumes of Fat Man’s explosion—the air is hot, and seems to warp and bend around them.

“Touch the wooden box with me,” she says. “Hold it as I hold it.”

She proffers the box, kneeling beside him.

“Are you Japanese?” says Fat Man.

“I am.”

“You survived,” he says.

“I did.”

Fat Man reaches for the box.

It’s cold. The grain is smooth.