The Remembering Read Free

bomb?”
    Koki stammered and muttered something to himself, but never answered. Instead, he began rocking from side to side in a rhythmic motion and turned his head toward the wall. He moved back and forth in perfect time, and seemed to be staring at something, or into something, or possibly nothing. I thought I heard him humming deep inside—a last chant or lost prayer.
    Before I could ask him anything else, a voice behind me said, “I am afraid Koki is not aware of current events, Zezen.” It was the Fleur-du-Mal and I had not heard him approach. Walking into view, he was wearing an elegant silk kimono, cut to his specifications. His hair had been pulled back and tied with his familiar green ribbon and he was once again wearing his ruby earrings. He sat down casually in a chair opposite mine. He let a slow grin spread across his face, then continued. “Let us say, Koki does not get out much.”
    I ignored the comment and looked back at Koki. He was deep inside his trance. “Where is he staring?” I asked.
    “Most certainly at Goya,” the Fleur-du-Mal answered. “Koki has been fascinated with Goya for years.”
    I followed Koki’s gaze toward the stone wall. Five paintings hung in a row—three by Pablo Picasso from his classical style of the twenties, and two by an artist unfamiliar to me. I walked over to get a closer view of the paintings. The artist’s name was Candido Portinari and his style had the influence of Picasso, but definitely not Francisco de Goya. Nor were there any Goya paintings, drawings, or prints anywhere on the wall. There were only the five paintings and one unusual object attached to the wall with iron clamps—a human skull. I glanced at Koki. His hands shook and he rocked back and forth and his eyes never left the skull. I turned to the Fleur-du-Mal. “I see no Goya painting.”
    “Not ‘painting,’ Zezen. Goya. Koki is staring at the skull of Francisco de Goya.” The Fleur-du-Mal paused, grinning, then added matter-of-factly, “In 1899, during an exhumation in Bordeaux, it seems to have gone missing. At the time, and at the very least, I thought Goya’s head might serve as an interesting conversation piece.” He paused again and looked at Koki. “Alas, it has not.”
    Before I could make a response, or even form one, the Fleur-du-Mal spoke firmly to Koki in Japanese, repeating the same phrase three times, which included one word in English—“chess.” Seconds later, Koki came out of his trance and calmly walked out of the room without a word. The Fleur-du-Mal’s voice and words had been a key that unlocked something in Koki’s mind, almost as simple as coming out of a deep hypnotic state with three claps of a magician’s hands, and very similar to the way all Giza respond to the Stones.
    Once Koki was out of sight, the Fleur-du-Mal said, “He is an idiot … an idiot savant … but an idiot nonetheless.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I will explain later. I believe it was the atomic bomb you most wanted explained to you, was it not, Zezen?”
    “Well … yes.” I hesitated, thinking again of Sailor and Sak—all of them. “What is it?”
    The Fleur-du-Mal laughed to himself. “Ironically, or perhaps not, it was Koki’s brother, Tsuneo, who explained the fundamentals of a nuclear explosion to me, in the fall of 1940, shortly after he returned from his studies in Germany.” He waited for a response, but I said nothing. “All right then, mon petit  … let us begin with the atom itself.”
    To my surprise, the Fleur-du-Mal was an excellent teacher. As he elaborated the fundamentals behind the physics of what we’d witnessed over Nagasaki, all of it theory until now, he made certain I clearly understood each principle before he continued. He mentioned Albert Einstein several times and I was reminded of New Year’s Eve, 1918, high on a ridge at Caitlin’s Ruby—the last time I saw old Tillman Fadle and the first time I heard Einstein’s name. Looking up at