Thin Man

On the way home from her morning shift at Value King, Kyoko bought me a copy of the Topine Transcontinental Tribune, our local tabloid newspaper.

I’d been reading the Tribune ever since I was a kid, and the fact that it was all nonsense was exactly what made it fun to read. Thumbing through this week’s edition just before dinner, I remembered those long Saturday mornings of my late childhood, when me and my dad would stop off at Value King on the way home from my piano lessons with Mrs. Wilson. There my dad would buy me two big pieces of meat lover’s pizza from the cafe and read me the silliest stories in the Tribune. These days I always ended up reading the Tribune by myself, since Kyoko despised the phony horoscopes, UFO hoaxes, and general charlatanism the Tribune reveled in, but it never failed to give me something funny to think about while stocking the vitamin aisles at work.

This week’s horoscope for Libras born under the waxing bloodmoon said that Hitler’s ghost would visit me tomorrow at midnight to apologize for his sins. But it was the ghost of Robert Oppenheimer instead of Hitler who appeared in the bedroom that night. Oppenheimer looked frail and thin in a black pinstripe suit and gray fedora, and his glassy eyes glinted with the orange fire of the first test blast of the bomb. After a few minutes of silence, he sat down at the desk beside the bed and fanned himself with his fedora. He stared at Kyoko for a long time. She was peacefully asleep on her side, her long hair splayed across her neck and bare shoulders.

“So,” Oppenheimer said.

“So,” I said, in a hushed whisper, not wanting to wake Kyoko.

“Is this your wife?” he said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“She’s quite beautiful,” he said. “What’s her name?”

“Thanks,” I said. “It’s Kyoko.”

“I see,” Oppenheimer said, nodding.

“Yeah,” I said. “Is there something you want me to tell her when she wakes up in the morning?”

Oppenheimer glanced out the black square of the bedroom window, where an orange sodium lamp vomited a cone of greasy light onto the neighbor’s driveway.

“Tell her . . .” he said, pausing for a moment, thinking. “Tell her Thin Man failed because the spontaneous fission rate of plutonium-240 was too high to use in a gun-type bomb design.”

“There’s no way I’m going to remember all that,” I said.

“That’s fine, then,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.”

The next night Oppenheimer appeared beside our bed about an hour before we went to sleep. Kyoko glared at him coldly as she went about her bedtime routine, but she refused to say a word to him. Or me.

Just before I turned off the lights to go to sleep, Kyoko climbed on top of me and slipped off my boxers. I grasped her hand and pointed at Oppenheimer.

“No, let him watch,” she said. “He needs to see this.”

For the next twenty minutes, Oppenheimer sat at the desk beside the bed and fanned himself with his fedora while we fucked. At the moment of her climax, Kyoko cried out in pleasure and yelled something in Japanese. She looked up at the ceiling and spoke the name of her great-grandfather who’d been killed by Fat Man in Nagasaki. Then she rolled onto her back and reached between her legs and pulled a glowing, red and black spike out of her vagina. The spike was as long as her forearm. Like a shard of cooling volcanic rock, it smoldered with heat and light. A thick string of vaginal secretion mixed with semen dripped from its needle-like tip.

Clutching the spike in her right hand, Kyoko strode naked across the room and stabbed Oppenheimer in the heart. His fedora slipped from his fingers and glided to the floor. His face twisted in pain. He didn’t make a sound. Kyoko stared at him. He stared back at her. The gray plume of a miniature mushroom cloud devoured his body from the feet up.

I understand, Oppenheimer mouthed to Kyoko, as he dissolved into irradiated ash. I understand.