It may be these sickly men could not arrest him if they wanted. These do not carry guns. They have only truncheons. They are perhaps too weak to wield the truncheons. He could maybe crush them, or they may think that he could crush them, that there is no arresting him without the aid of others. He has seen so few other policemen in this city on the coast. They are watching him. He is looking back at them. He is looking at the evidence case. Perhaps they mean it as a gift. He could close the case, slide its hinges into place, and go—a memento. The sound of a knife in a suitcase, the sound of scabbed money. Some dirt. Luggage, only luggage. Only what he carries.
The tall one closes the evidence case. The hinges click into place.
Or it may be there’s no point. Even assuming the possibility of arrest, of conviction. There were these bombs. Not here, but nearby. There were these bodies. The bodies are gone. There is no good count of these bodies. There were other bodies? What’s a hog farmer’s body? What’s a stillborn baby? What are two crying women? Compared to two cities and all the bodies therein, now gone?
They cannot know he was the thing exploded. Or can they know? They cannot know.
Still there are his hands.
“Are you sorry?” asks the tall one. But Fat Man does not understand.
“I need to go,” says Fat Man. “The boat is going.” He realizes he can say “without me.” “Without me,” he says. “The boat.”
It occurs to him he can leave. The small Japanese home may be the home of the policemen. They do not seem at home here. But there are signs that someone lives here. Used dishes, an open book, a telephone in the corner, on the floor. A painting of mountains hanging on the wall. A sock, discarded. These things all could be theirs. This home is not a prison.
He stands. He leaves the small home. The policemen only watch. As he passes through the doorway, one of them—the tall or the short, he does not turn to see—reaches for his hand, and holds it. The policeman’s skin is cold. His grip is tight. Not painful, but tight. Not a threat, but tight. Not angry, but tight. What the hand seems to say is, Wait. What the hand seems to say is, We can talk.
Fat Man pulls his hand loose. He goes.
Outside the home is Little Boy, who followed them here. He’s been sitting on the ground, back propped against the home, waiting just beside the door. He might have heard it all or nothing. He says, “We need to get to the boat.”
“They have the cash case, and other things.”
“So we should go then,” says Little Boy, taking Fat Man’s hand. “Do you know Japanese now?”
“No,” says Fat Man. What he means is that he only knows a little. What he means is that it was no use. What he means is he rejects the language. He rejects this country. He rejects the evidence case and everything within, not because it’s wrong but because it’s not enough.
They go to the dock. They wait in line to board their boat. They hold hands so as not to lose each other.
When they board the boat the Japanese policemen are there to watch them from the shore. Not to stop them or to wave. No goodbyes. Their faces are illegible from the deck. Their bones show through, but not their eyes. Their uniforms are clean and pressed. As the boat departs, the tall one collapses. The short one catches him in both arms, and for a long time they seem to kneel together. When it seems they will not, cannot stand, then they do stand, together, the short one hoisting the tall one up to his feet. When each is righted, they lace their fingers.
They too hold hands.
HOTEL GURS
WHAT FRANCINE KNOWS
Francine lies awake in bed, pretending to know where her husband is now. She pretends to know he is with another woman. She pretends to know they’re sitting together outside an abandoned café, her husband and the other woman—a blonde—and that he brought them cheeses and melon chunks to share in the dark, seated on chairs he took off a tabletop and set down for them. He makes two flirtatious jokes before forgetting to charm the other woman, before resuming the comfort of his usual half-sullen silence, the silence that makes him pout so pretty. The one that makes his eyes seem to float in his skull like paper lanterns on the water. He pours wine for himself and neglects to offer her any. She has to pour it if she wants it. He’s smoking between chews. It would be rude if it were anybody else.
She pretends her husband will not be home tonight. If she weren’t sure of this, she would have to watch the door, or, more discreetly, the wall opposite the door, for changes of light. She would wait for a wedge of yellow to open, and his shadow. Now she doesn’t have to wait, because she is certain. Instead she clenches closed her eyes.
Her hard heart wavers. She is no longer certain. So she changes the story. Now he is sharing a hotel room with this other woman, who is a brunette, who is also married, whose husband is away on business—scrabbling for a piece of the new action, the foreign investors, large Americans. They are making raucous love to each other. He presses her face and breasts to the cool thick window, through the curtains, but he tells her to imagine he’s drawn the curtains. And it’s light out. And everyone can see her. They can see the way she moans, the way her nipples press flat against the glass, like veal medallions.
When she comes he comes too. He doesn’t pull out, doesn’t spray the brunette’s back, doesn’t watch it trickle down her thighs, but pushes deeper in her; damn the consequences; damn him, he’s coming. He grits his teeth the way he does. They squeak, he’s sucked them dry. Francine’s sure of it, lying in bed.
She’s sure of it. She reaches down between her legs, then stops, thinks better.
“It shouldn’t bother me if he doesn’t want to do it inside me,” she says to herself, fortified by her confidence that even now her husband’s clever sperm are striving for this other married woman’s eggs.
Francine is thirsty. She climbs out of bed and puts her feet in their blue slippers. She goes to the kitchen for a glass of water. There’s a faint chill on the air like an unwelcome secret. She tips back the glass, finishes the water in one gulp, and licks the dewy moisture from her lips. Her husband never believed in marriage, as he acknowledged on the night of his proposal. He asked her anyway, during all the excitement, when people did these things. But clearly children are out of the question.
She pours herself another glass of water and walks back to bed. Should he come home early, Francine doesn’t want to seem to have been waiting up. She isn’t waiting for anybody. She only woke up thirsty.
Francine reflects that her husband would not leave her alone all night simply for sex. “He’s more discreet than that,” she whispers to her glass. She revises her confidence again. Her husband is still in a hotel, but now it’s more expensive, and yet no one’s having fun. He sits up in the bed, back to the headboard, married brunette head in his lap. He’s just paid for her abortion, so he strokes her hair and twists the ends between his fingers. The brunette rubs her stomach very slowly and wonders how it would be to feel a kicking thing inside her. He whispers drowsily how everything will be all right, like drooling honey in her ear. He’s drooling honey, that’s his fault, but the brunette doesn’t turn her head to block the flow. They’ll spend the night together. He’ll leave early in the morning while she pretends to sleep, buy them a sweet breakfast and chocolates, and carry the food back to the hotel in a small brown basket. This might be the end of their affair, or not.
Francine won’t know about that until circumstances call again for certitude, for deciding for herself what she can’t know and won’t ask.
Francine has finished her water. She rolls a cigarette. She puts it between her lips and chews the paper without chewing hard enough to break it. That feels like breaking skin. When