“A man cannot explode,” says Old Man #1.
#2 is holding the newspaper on his lap. He points to a line and says, “It says it’s so right here.”
“Impossible.”
“I’m the one who can read here,” says #2. “We can go ask the doctor if you like.” He motions to the doctor who is leaving the square, having already left the newspaper refolded and new-ish on the bench so they did not have to directly accept his charity.
“Well read it again,” #1 says. “I don’t believe it.”
#2 smoothes the thick gray paper in his lap and squares the edges. “In the city of Chicago, United States, a man has exploded…”
“Bullshit!”
“It says so right here.”
The Lisbon sky is a pale bleached blue over the Tagus. The river is wide and frightening, an unbridged, shimmering green skin that blacks riptides and Atlantic-going currents. The far bank is traced by a thin, toothy line of buildings, Almada, as foreign and inaccessible to the old men as the Orient. A single rocking warship is tied to the docks below them, guns oiled and cleaned daily. They wear wool suitcoats and their ties are loosened and because they are accustomed to the lay of this land it does not bestill them.
“He must have passed out drunk with a cigarette,” #1 says.
#2 reads the news article aloud:
A Chicago police officer discovered the remains of the deceased in his home on the 3700 block of North Avenue. Neighbors reported hearing a loud booming sound and called the police department, which dispatched officers to the Humboldt Park greystone. The officers described the scene as ‘grisly’ and noted that the only identifiable body parts were both hands and one foot. A forensic investigation is ongoing but the police believe the man spontaneously combusted.
“Ha!” says #1. “They believe he exploded. They don’t have proof. Americans are naive. They believe anything.”
#2 scans the article a second longer then looks up. “It’s true,” he says. “But what if?”
“Bah. People don’t explode.”
#1 breaks off a square of chocolate from the bar in his pocket. If a man could explode, why had he not in sixty-six years heard of this until now? Unless this was a miracle. But what kind of miracle would an exploding man be? He supposed a man could explode and his soul could ascend to heaven like a flare.
“I wonder,” he says, “will they bury the hands and the foot?”
#2 sets the newspaper on the bench between them. He has heard stories of men spontaneously combusting, told within earshot by the older men in the square when he was younger and working. A sailor from Porto returned from sea, resting in bed, reduced to a pile of foul ashes in the morning. A man upon a horse shattered from the inside out, vacating his riderless nag to gallop spooked across the orchard. A penniless widow’s thunderous leaving. But they were all thin stories passed down by unsophisticates, generations of mythologizing gape-mouths who would burn a woman at the stake if a mob demanded.
“This has come through the foreign news bureau,” he says, “not some cheap penny rag. The paper cannot simply print hoaxes. They’re not allowed.”
“But they can be wrong. It’s happened before.”
“Yes, but there’s a process: editing, fact-checking, more editing. There’s a code of ethics, of integrity.”
“You can’t be serious,” #1 laughs. “What about the story on police corruption here in our own city? Was that not reported incorrectly? The newspaper incriminated the wrong man!”
“True, true. But who reported the errors in that story? The ombudsman. And then the paper itself. They corrected the mistake. If this man did not explode, we’ll hear of it. It’s the newspaper’s duty.”
“You’re too eager to believe,” says #1. “You’re like an American.”
Across the square, city workers are lining up at the kiosk. Above them, gulls are sweeping the sky, their waste unspooling in white threads behind them, boomeranging elastically through the firmament before slamming into the warship below.
#
In Chicago, a slow-burning hysteria is developing on the 3700 block of North Avenue. The police department has neither confirmed the spontaneous combustion nor offered an alternative cause of death. The silence infects the neighborhood like airborne plague. An automobile backfires and a snag of women scream. The reverend sneezes and the altar boys duck. Collectively, they are a gasping, hollering, weeping tremor. A man on the corner with a megaphone barely contains his glee. Feral cats thrash the night.
Why would they not grow hysterical? There are landmines among them. Heretofore man had hidden such devices along roadsides and in tunnels behind enemy lines. They were fixed, stationary, and they were intended to kill combatants in war. But if a man, a pedestrian, can explode, who is not at war?
And a line forms outside the police department on Kimball Avenue. At first a line, then a large gathering, soon a mob, and the streetcars are unable to pass. There is garbage in the streets, crumpled placards and newspapers that batter at the edges of the amassed and cling to their calves and gather underfoot. There is a light breeze, for it is summer, and it’s a closed-eye sigh reach-for-it thread of silk that winds its way through them and the hair on their skin, although in their delirium they do not notice. There are birds and the birds lilt on the breeze and alight and shred the newspapers with their hard beaks. There are police officers and soon they ride horses and circle the throng.
They want answers. Did the man explode? Can a man explode? Why have you said nothing? Why is the press silent too? The man with the megaphone climbs a fence and calls to the police station. “In five minutes, I will enter the police station and explode. If any man attempts to stop me, I will explode as soon as I am touched.”
The police officers exchange looks and worry their batons. The man with the megaphone climbs down from the fence and the hatted crowd parts, their open hands raised to their shoulders to demonstrate their acquiescence. The man follows an unzippering path to the concrete station steps where he pauses halfway up and turns to face the mob. He is tall and sallow and he wears a heavy, double-breasted wool overcoat and a Van Dyke beard. He holds the megaphone under his arm and raises a hand. They recognize him. He stands on corners with the bullhorn and hand-stenciled canvas signs shouting to them about unemployment, foreign dictators, and, since his assassination, Huey Long. Although, in an age of conspiracy, he is not a conspiracist. He does not exaggerate, is not apocalyptic, does not forewarn. He bellows facts. “The unemployment rate sits at 20.2 percent!” and “When he was killed, Huey Long’s Share Our Wealth Society had more than seven million members!” He does not work, although it’s rumored that he came to Chicago from Boston where he studied at Harvard. He has just this one coat.
The crowd quiets and the sound of chuffing and clopping horse hooves carries up to the second and third floor windows where the neighbors lean out. The man’s shadow is long and it spills down the steps like a carpet laid at his feet. What does he know of exploding men? What fact has he that they do not? They have taken torches to chicken livers and tossed beef hearts into alley fires, but the organs only spat and charred and grew hard in the flames and did not explode. Perhaps man is more combustible than beast or fowl, although they dare not break into the morgue to find out.
The man turns to the door and thumps the glass with the fat of his fist. “Send out the precinct captain!” he bellows. A scream goes up when his hand hits the door. The officers on horses have been joined by their peripatetic colleagues, who mill about without apparent strategy. Noise steams off the crowd again, hot and low, pulsating and detuned. It is not yet too dark to see inside the police station from the street and they can all tell that nothing inside is moving, which is the same state the building has been in for at least a week now. There’s been some scant evidence of life, but everything is still and there is an aura around the building like a house under mourning. The man on the steps turns to the police officers. “Goddamn it! Who’s in charge here?”
Some in the crowd are now pushing toward the steps. Some are edging backward, tiptoeing past the officers. They argue and kick at the birds.
“This lady has fainted,” a man yells from the mob.
A reporter from the foreign bureau sways at the edge of the crowd, Schlitz-drunk. He removes a pen and reporter’s pad from his pocket and calls across the crowd to the man on the steps, “Yes, goddamn it, who is in charge here?”
#
“Perhaps we should ask the doctor,” #1 says. “It’s been two weeks now.”
“What would the doctor know that we don’t?” asks #2. “Doctors don’t have special access. Hell, we’re reading his newspaper.”
“But he’s a doctor.”
#2 does not respond. It’s late for them to still be in the square. Typically they arrive after noon, when the sun is high and the benches are warm, at the caesura of the day, and they stay in that decelerated air until the pale shape of the moon pulses into the deblueing sky and waiters begin setting the dinner tables in the streets. They leave the paper near the kiosk and climb back up into the Bairro Alta to eat apart and begin their nighttime routines. Tonight they’ve stayed well past sunset. The square is filling with young men in white suits who shout and sing and drink cups of Vinho Verde and smoke cigars.
“A doctor may be privy to miracles. They work in close proximity to God.”
“So now,” #2 says, “you’ve changed your mind? It may have happened as the newspaper reported then?”
“No no no. Not that.”
“But perhaps a miracle?”
“Maybe,” says #1. “Maybe.” He readjusts the newspaper on the bench. “And you. You believe in exploding men but you don’t believe in miracles?”
“I believe in the truth,” says #2.
“The truth! Ha! You’re confused.”
“Well then I believe what I can see with my own eyes. Unlike—”
“Unlike an illiterate like me? Unlike—”
“No. Unlike our fathers and the blind pilgrims they wandered with. Remember how they crammed into churches to prostrate themselves? They were blind! They used to sit here too, fidgeting in fear that a thunderclap would take them for the sin of basking in too pleasant a breeze. God, it was all rumors and whispers. This square was a goddamn field of crickets.”
“And this enlightened newspaper, is it so much better?”
“I believe it more than I believe these fart gatherers,” he says, waving his hand at the square. They’ve been joined on the bench by a group of the revelers, no doubt members of some civic club on an outing. “I believe in the institution at least.”
“Bah. It's no more reliable than your father. At least you could ask your father to defend his opinions. Try asking this newspaper for an explanation.”
#1 holds up the gray sheet.
“Go ahead, ask it. See what it says. Did a man actually explode or did you, oh holy newspaper, just print a back-alley American rumor to scare the rabble?”
#2 leans around #1 and calls to one of the men in white. “Excuse me, young man, answer me a question will you please?”
“Oh boy,” says #1.
“I’m serious,” says #2.
The young man in white turns to the old men. Sitting, they are the same height.
“Do you believe in miracles?” #2 asks him.
“No, no,” #1 interrupts. “What my friend means to ask is ‘Do you believe a man can explode?’”
#2 snatches the newspaper from #1’s lap. “Damn it! Now you’ve ruined it. There was a line of questioning.”
“Maybe,” suggests #1, “But maybe we should write a letter to the editor, like I originally proposed. All questions answered.”
“You talk too much,” says #2. He refolds the newspaper.
Beyond the church, a bell rings and the civic club members put out their cigars and pack their Vinho in baskets and begin to leave the square. They meander chaotically to the northeast corner and soon they are bunched, parading up the cobbled street, the tiled buildings lined up four stories against them, sifting them generally northward through the warren of the city.
The old men are alone again in the square. The moon above the Tagus is the murmuring gill of a fish in a bucket.
#
The foreign news correspondent has forgotten his assignment. In the jostle, he loses his pen and spills a portion of his flask. Without an implement, he becomes distracted by the nickering horses and the shouting around him and the latent anarchy and soon he is leaving the scene, shuffling back to the streetcar for home or an inviting wall to lean against, whichever beckons first.
As the journalist takes his leave, the man on the steps is warning the crowd to stay back. He seems, to some, to be puffing his chest, testing the tensile strength of the skin around his ribcage, and they shirk without further prodding. Just as he raises his megaphone to speak again a police dispatcher appears in the door behind him, his small silhouette shrinking and unofficial. The officer turns the deadbolt and opens the door only a few degrees, just enough to slide a folded piece of paper to the man. He does not speak and as soon as he passes the note he pulls closed the door and sets the lock.
The mob is docile again. The man reads from the note:
“The Chicago Police Department wishes to blah blah blah this ongoing investigation blah blah blah with regard to the blah blah blah okay no no no yes here okay the deceased has been found to have died of natural causes and the case is closed. There will be no further investigation. Please disper…”
The man turns back to the door and raises his megaphone. “Natural causes? What in the name of Christ is natural causes?”
The courier behind the glass shrugs and retreats. The emergent sound that comes off the throng is like a tidal bore and at once they are shouting and pressing upon one another, the tinder of their imaginations reignited, clamoring like pilgrims for the truth, and for escape, because now the police have organized and are in lockstep, pinching the crowd against their headquarters where they leave only a small opening to shuffle the insurgents out and away from the mob. Behind them a new crowd is forming, curious and voyeuristic, probably infiltrated by Pinkertons, stretching northward up Kimball.
He shouts again. He pounds against the glass.
The explosion, when it finally comes, originates from somewhere in the back of the crowd. The skin fails first, the stretched canvas of the body distending, then at once shredding, tattering, tearing open, the liver and pancreas detonating, the skull fissuring and vertebrae reducing to motes, eyeballs collapsing inward, hollow intestines dirging like a pipe organ before disintegrating, hair singeing, the dead weight of the tongue reversing, teeth erupting like popcorn, and last the heart caterwauling out of the body—what was once the body—shrieking with the assemblage in a final tangle of veins that tornado and empty themselves into the blue. One moment the pall of bone dust, the soot of viscera, the ash of flesh, is suspended in orbit and the next it sublimes, steaming into the crowd, leaving nothing, not foot nor hand nor crater, only an empty, undemarcated space in the wilderness of the mob.
It happens far too fast for anyone to really know the source. There was a man from Rockford in the vicinity and tomorrow he will not return home. The barber’s son, unaccounted for also, was believed to be on Kimball this afternoon. A circle forms around the scene but soon the circle stretches and elongates and no one can be certain whether the center now was the center ten seconds ago. “I’ve found a tooth,” a woman shouts, holding aloft an incisor, and the crowd shifts greedily.
On the station stairs, the man with the megaphone begins to prophesy: “I warned you! You were warned! The people will rule! The mob will hold the day!” But now the people have turned away from him. He is not miraculous. He is not a landmine. He is a man standing in the last reaches of the sun, looking at the backs of old women.
“A man has exploded,” he shouts through the megaphone, but there are sirens and the horses are wading into the throng and there are bells and wailing and the wooden cone in his hand cannot amplify his voice above this. If he too waded into the crowd perhaps he could see it, could feel the phantom among them. Disarmed, he stands above the crowd and works his tongue in his mouth.
The newspaper will report a riot. The editors will speculate that the workers are preparing to strike and that there are enemies of the Republic among us, only now coming into view. And the illiterate, hysterical, witch-doctor apostles, the mob? They will strain to the fallow of their minds to remember together a sounding whose only remaining traces have already dissipated completely.
It is bright again this morning in Lisbon. The old men are in the square awaiting the doctor, who at this moment is shaving, dragging with concentrated precision a honed blade across the skin of his face. Revived, he will go again to the old men to yoke them once more to the lunatic stirrings of the world without.
John Honkala lives in Chicago, IL.
Photo by Sam T (samm4mrox) on Foter.com