Family - a novel by Tom Lyons pdf

My short term memory, I admit, is not as precise as it once was; seems like I forget a lot these days, but all of the events of the morning I was kidnapped are stamped into my brain as

Family

A novel by Tom Lyons

Part 1

San Francisco, California, Bay Area

October 1945

1

“When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.”

William Shakespeare – Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

Doctor James T Palmer

It is amazing how clear in my mind are the events that transpired on the morning that I was kidnapped

Crystal clear

My short term memory, I admit, is not as precise as it once was; seems like I

forget a lot these days, but all of the events of the morning I was kidnapped are

stamped into my brain as if chiseled

The morning, like all my mornings, was dripping in routine I rise early, often before the sun On with the slippers, you know the kind, tattered and worn, but comfortable Then the slow shuffle outside to collect the morning paper I settle in with hot fresh brewed coffee

I read the obituaries first

Do I have a fascination with death? No With my own death? Hardly How many good years do I have left? I am fifty, life expectancy these days for a healthy male is sixty-five, which is better than it was forty five years ago in 1900, when the average life expectancy for an American male was forty-six years of age

I read the names, the dates when they were born, when they died I look at where they lived; when I see that the deceased lived in Hayward California I

extrapolate info more closely since I, too, grew up here in Hayward; perhaps I knew them while he, or she, was alive? Many have faded black and white pictures above the written obit; I read the description below on each When it states that the person

died ‘suddenly or unexpectedly’, I think that the person may have had a heart attack

or brain stroke When the description states that the person died “after a long

illness”, then I think that the person might have been suffering from a cancer

I remember a great sadness weighed me down, like an anvil hanging on my neck; I felt nausea knot my stomach I would have to write an obituary myself; my brother Ed, Doctor Ed Palmer to be more accurate, had just died in a single engine plane crash in the foothills near Las Vegas Nevada He was forty-eight years of age

Ed was flying his normal weekly run between Lawrence Livermore National Lab and Los Alamos Lab in the New Mexico desert He was an experienced pilot and had logged tens of thousands of miles; from early reports it looked like he was preparing to land near Henderson Nevada to refuel, as his Champion 7 single engine single winged plane had a flying range of 460 miles Probably got tangled in one of those violent hot air thermals that you fly into in the area, which could shake a small plane around like a clothes washer and smash it to the ground like a raggedy Andy doll He had been missing for several days before a search party found the wreck and one charred body

-Don’t need you on this trip brother

He said to me before leaving; frequently I made the trip with him

-Not our normal weekly meeting He added

-Have to sort something out with Julius He said, referring to Doctor J Robert Oppenheimer, who, ninety days after Hiroshima, was already considered to be the father of the Atomic bomb

Little did I know that those would be the last words he would ever speak to

me

Something else happened on the day that I was kidnapped; I remember it clearly because it had never happened before My car did not start right away Babe coughed a little when I turned the key So I gave him a moment to catch his breath and fired him up again

At what point does a car cease to be an inanimate piece of metal and rubber and become an old friend instead? Almost like a member of the family For me it was when Babe hit 180,000 miles He kept chugging along He never broke down

-Just put one foot in front of the other, soldier on

My son JT, the Navy Master at Arms would say

“Babe” was a regal blue 1939 Lincoln Continental town car, with regal blue leather interior and white wall tires, which I named after baseball legend Babe Ruth

He owned the same model, year, and color car The retired baseball great would barnstorm the country teaching baseball to children The newsreels I saw were alarming; once a great hulk of a man with enormous appetites for all fine things in life; booze, food, fancy clothes, and women especially - recent news footage showed

a thinner, gaunt like, skeleton faced man – as if he was ill

Babe has a top speed of eighty miles per hour; I let her warm in the garage for fifteen minutes before I drove off; that is how long it takes the glass vacuum tubes of the state-of-the-art-radio to warm up I listen to the latest news as I drive

Sure he had lost some of his get-up-and-go just as old folks lose strength and flexibility As he aged I fed him correctly, made sure he had regular checkups, and even bought him new glasses, er, I mean, windshield wipers when he needed them

He rewarded me by being dependable and trustworthy; he was there when I needed him; my butt fit into that driver’s seat like a hand slipping into a warm wool mitten

He never had a problem; never let me down Babe’s odometer was now approaching 230,000 miles

-Atta boy Babe

I said when he started on the second try

-Atta boy I remember that clearly

2

I teach physics at Cal Berkeley; I live twenty minutes south of Cal in Hayward,

a sleepy little town, mainly a food-canning center, of 8,000 people My wife Kat and I

do not have a fancy house, just an average size two bedroom, painted white; paint peeling off of the wood siding The bath is indoors though, which is nice, plus we were just hooked up to the new city sewer system, so we were able to get rid of our old septic, which tended to clog during the wet, rainy, winter season here in the Bay Area It’s one of the few homes in the area with a basement; our coal heater is down there; we just had a new coal shute installed so I no longer have to shovel and haul coal down stairs Last week we purchased and installed a newer, larger, and more efficient icebox in the kitchen; one who’s melted ice pan did not need emptying so often

I saw Navy warships as I left my house that morning; the battleship USS California which was sunk by Japanese torpedoes at Pearl Harbor and the battleship USS Alabama with its 16 inch guns capable of firing a 2,000 pound bomb over 17 miles through the air - lay anchored in the bay The California was salvaged and reconstructed here at the Alameda Naval Shipyard I remember hearing bugles sounding attention as flags, whipped by wind, were hoisted Other Navy warships lay anchored in the bay, destroyers mostly; the fleet was coming home

Though early in the morning the streets in Hayward bustled with car traffic, buses filled with busy worker bees rumbled by Sailors dressed in white bellbottoms and pillbox sailor’s hats walked by in pairs They looked proud I stopped Babe and let a horse driven fruit truck pass

-Fresh strawberries, strawberries!

The large round mustached fruit man yelled in a deep clear voice that

carried for blocks I watched as one sailor, holding hands with a pretty young

woman, her red hair in a pony, stopped and bought a box of berries She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him eagerly as he fed her the fruit

People were happy

The war was over Our boys were coming home The slaughter of millions of people was coming to an end It was several months after V-J day, victory in Japan, three months after we dropped the atomic bomb, “Little Boy”, on Hiroshima which instantly vaporized seventy-five thousand Japanese men, women, and children and,

if reports were accurate, burns and radiation sickness killed another thousand Japanese people over the next thirty days But US military experts

seventy-five-predicted that our military could lose five-hundred-thousand-men during an

invasion on the Japanese mainland, so the powers that be decided that dropping the

A bomb would be the way to go A week after Hiroshima, we vaporized another ninety thousand Japanese men, women, and children at Nagasaki with an even more powerful Hydrogen bomb

Then the war was over

I watched as a milkman, dressed in a starched white uniform, loped up a brick stoop; he procured two glass bottle empties, then deposited two full bottles of milk by the front door; I heard him whistle as he stepped towards the next house Like I said, people were happy

Babe’s radio was fully warmed; I listened to the reports on the ’45 World Series Detroit had beaten the Chicago Cubs in seven games and the announcer was talking about something called ‘The Curse of the Billy Goat.’ Apparently a Cub fan was asked to leave game seven at Wrigley Field because the odor of the pet goat that

he had brought to the game was offensive to other fans Before the incident the Cubs had been winning the game, but Detroit rallied late to win the game and the series The announcer then stated that the Cubs would never win a World Series because of the incident The curse had been placed on the Chicago Cubs Well, at least baseball’s best players would be back in uniform next year; most were still in the service this year

I had a meeting scheduled at Lawrence Livermore National Lab that morning

so instead of heading North to Berkeley; I drove east towards Livermore Once over the hill all I saw was vacant land, the golden hills of California, wheat colored dried-out flash-fire-ready land as far as the eye could see The lab was built in the middle

of nowhere, away from crowded towns and people, so as not to contaminate with the testing

My thoughts turned towards my one and only child, my son JT Palmer, short for James Thomas JT was twenty-seven years old now and had served as a Master at Arms aboard a naval ship in the Pacific What ship did he serve on? Who knew? Where in the Pacific did he serve? Did he see combat action? I don’t know the

answer to those questions either The Navy does not release that information

Sensitive information might fall into enemy hands which could jeopardize the safety

of all aboard All I knew was that JT had spent the last three months at a VA hospital

in Hawaii, which means that he had been injured, probably during combat in the Pacific theatre

When he first entered the VA hospital the Navy sent me a short, one page letter Nothing more Then I received a letter from JT, telling me that he was okay It took one week for each letter to travel across the ocean and arrive stateside; it took ninety days for JT to be healthy enough to be released He was due to arrive at Mares Island Naval Facility within the next several days Nothing in this life is more

important to me than my son; I had planned to be there when he arrived home But before he arrived I was kidnapped

3

-We met fifteen years ago Roxy said, emotion getting the best of her As I drove east towards Livermore, bright early morning sun making me squint to see the road ahead, I recalled the conversation that my wife Kat and I had with Ed’s widow

-Did you know that? Roxy asked

-We knew each other for three years before he proposed

Roxanna, Roxy for short, had sat down abruptly when she heard the news, as

if sucker punched It seemed like all the air had left her body Born in Kiev Russia Roxy had the classic Northern Slav appearance; lily white porcelain skin; it looked like she would instantly burn and peel if she spent ten minutes outside in the

California sun Slim, but short and stocky with frizzy blonde hair and a flat face and nose; blue eyes that bored through you

-She has good birthing hips

My brother Ed had once said of her, though after ten years of marriage they had no children She was in her early forties, which would have made her a young teenager when the last Russian Czar, Nicolas II, and his wife, son, and four

daughters, were assassinated in 1917 When she spoke there was no trace of an accent

-I was a dancer, a ballet dancer, when we met in Moscow She started

-Your brother was studying at Cambridge, but he would travel to my country

to lecture Then she added: -Why weren’t you with him on this trip?

She was chain-smoking unfiltered Lucky Strike cigarettes

-He said that he had a meeting with Oppenheimer

-I thought that the two of you worked together

For the most part this was true My brother Ed and I were not the first pair of brothers to become physicists who worked together Ernest Lawrence, whom the Lab in Livermore was named after, and his physicist brother John, were one such

example A vision flashed through my mind, a vision of my brother Ed piloting his plane; he loved to fly

-Light the fires! He would say

-And strap in tight, Jimmy boy

He’d call me ‘Jimmy boy’ though I was fifteen months older than him

-Check the cone

Then he’d take off, plane heading west into the wind; at a height of one hundred feet he’d bank hard southeast, then yell with glee Over the South

Livermore hills we flew, over Site 300, until we were over the Central Valley He’d navigate by keeping the ever-present California sun to the left of the plane I

remember smelling engine fuel Eventually, we’d drop down over the Southern Sierra and swoop down into Henderson to refuel Navigating the bumpy hot air thermals here was the most dangerous part of the flight; another vision flashed to

me, one of his plane hitting a violent thermal which could instantly hurl the plane, like a small toy, several hundred feet downward in a couple of seconds Perhaps his motor stalled? Or worse yet, he could have lost a wing strut? This was not out of the question as those struts were held in place by a few bolts only

-I was not invited to this meeting I said

-His plane was found? Cigarette smoke spiraling upward

-Yes His plane

What do you say to someone when his or her spouse had just died in a plane crash? For that matter what do you say, or feel, when your brother dies?

There is nothing to say We sat and cried

-I made some matsah ball soup Kat said

My beautiful Kat My wife of ten years Tall, slim and blonde, she was striking

at forty-seven years of age That smile of hers, that feminine tilt of her head while she contemplated what was being said, it still had a devastating effect on me Kat was not my son JT’s natural mother His natural mother, Edna Jean, had died twenty years ago when JT was seven She had picked up the family cat, in an attempt to put

it outside; claws flashed Three days later her hand became infected, a day later it turned into staff, and two days after that Edna Jean was dead She was thirty years

old Penicillin, or any kind of antibiotic, had not yet been invented Though it happened twenty years ago I still teared when I thought about my first wife

-Have some soup Kat said to Roxy, as she spooned out dumplings made of matzah meal, eggs, water, and oil that had simmered in home made chicken broth

-It’s good for you

I could see that Roxy was upset; she was taking the news hard

4

Next thing that I remember about that morning was what I saw while

approaching the City of Livermore Farms, ranches, horses and cows penned by barbed wire fences ‘No Trespassing’ signs with the wording ‘Violators will be shot!!’ Some property lines were marked by meandering two foot tall rock walls, made from small rock and built immigrant Chinese back in the late 1800’s A few tattered American flags dangled in the morning sun Downtown Livermore was a collection

of small buildings; a livery store, the post office, where people milled about looking for letters from the boys still not home from the war, plus a local bar, where a young woman dressed in a tight white skirt, her faced painted with lipstick stood outside One paved road ran down the center of the town, the side streets were dirt, not yet paved The entire city smelled like a mixture of dust, horses and dung

It was a wild-west town, except for the Atomic bomb producing nuclear facility located two miles away

I drove east along a narrow dirt road, then the unfathomable happened Babe started to overheat; he hissed like a teakettle A mile out of town I heard a loud metal clank under the hood, then a grinding sound like metal slicing metal, a freight train slamming on the brakes With steam flying from under the hood, dust thrown into the air from all four wheels, Babe ground to a halt

-Ah

I slammed the steering wheel in exasperation

-Come on Babe Not now

With a PhD in Physics I would easily recite the formulas on how to separate uranium isotopes by bombarding them with high-energy electrons, but as I opened Babe’s hood and looked inside I had to scratch my head and extrapolate for a

second Babe had struck out; he had overheated and threw an engine rod

Ok No problem, I thought I was a mile from the lab, so I loosened my tie, untied the top button of my white dress shirt and removed my tweed sports jacket and flung it over my shoulder The October morning California sun was beginning to heat; I could see waves coming off the road; beads of sweat dotted my forehead

Then, from the east, I saw dust flying

A car was approaching

5

Katherine Palmer blamed the London Blitz for the way things were in her life nowadays but in her heart the voice inside her said that she had nobody to blame but herself

Kat rose at ten AM and tasted the now cold cup of coffee on the nightstand

He’s always taking care of me, she thought

She walked into the bathroom, looked at her naked body in the mirror and began to examine her breasts Kat chuckled at the memory of being eleven years old, hoping that her breasts would come in soon Worrying that they wouldn’t By the

age of fourteen she would yell – “Stop growing already!” That’s when the boys

started showing up

She started examining her own breasts when her sister Dee had found a couple of ‘grape sized rock hard lumps’ in her left breast six years ago Diedre was two years younger than Kat

Kat and Dee started taking care of each other when they were teenagers Mom tabled two waitress jobs to make ends meet Pap sold encyclopedia’s from door to door in San Jose California Each morning he’d dress in his lumpy brown suit and white starched shirt and yellow tie: he’d put on his brown fedora hat and pick

up the case that must have weighed fifty pounds

-Make an investment in your child’s future He’d told Kat he’d liked to say as

he knocked on doors He knew he’d made a sale once he had showed a boy child a picture of a dinosaur The parents would notice the boy’s eyes go wide Girl children

he would show pictures of houses, ones with yards that showed children playing on green lawn But once Pap got home from work it was straight to the vodka Every night Sometimes Kat would see purple bruises on Mom’s face that she’d try to cover with rouge Mom never said much; quietly she went about the business of taking care of her family; cooking, cleaning, scrubbing dirty wash and hanging it on the clotheslines outside to dry in the breeze But she locked her bedroom door Dee was

fourteen when her breasts started to grow, then their father, too, began to look at both of them the way men look at women

-Stay away from her, you monster!

Kat yelled at him one night, so full of rage she almost spit, when she caught Pap looking at Dee that way one evening The girls, who shared a bedroom until Kat left home at age seventeen, locked their bedroom door and made sure that they stayed safe

-My doctor says that it is a good thing for women to do

Dee had said during one of the infrequent times they were able to talk on the telly Phone reception was poor

-Examine your own breasts She had said

-Otherwise by the time they find a growth it may be too late

Dee had lived in London with her British foreign correspondent husband of thirteen years; he wrote articles on the tensions between England and Germany that existed in the late 1930’s Since phone lines had to travel across the country, then under the ocean to Great Britain, it took thirty seconds for Dee to respond after Kat said something to her Plus the reception was poor

Doctors cut both of Dee’s breasts clean off and they took a significant amount

of flesh from her armpits as well in an attempt to remove her lymph nodes It took six months before she regained reasonable use of her arms The doctors injected her with this brand new form of cancer treatment called chemotherapy, a thick

brownish yellow gooey liquid made from a derivative of the poison mustard gas that killed tens of thousands of young men in the trenches in Europe during World War I First, Dee’s facial coloring turned pale, then her hair fell out in clumps She lost weight, over twenty pounds; she vomited everything she ate; she kept puking until the bile in her stomach had come up as well

Sixty days after the chemotherapy treatment ended Dee seemed to be doing better; the weekly letters that she sent from London expressed her increased

optimism about her health

But the London blitz, or the battle for London, which started in September of

1940 changed all that German Luftwaffe Heinkel HE III bombers dropped

thousands of one hundred and ten pound incendiary bombs on London for seven consecutive nights The bombs specifically manufactured to spread fire as quick as they could, by using napalm and white phosphorus, were designed to firebomb London into submission

fifty-In one of the last letters that Kat received Dee explained that she had

volunteered for the Red Cross They had fitted her with a uniform, gave her a metal helmet and a whistle; she was in charge of a horse driven cart, where the wounded were stretchered to underground bomb shelters while waiting for transport to hospitals once the bombing stopped late in the evening Dee sounded upbeat; she seemed healthy and did not say anything about her cancer

On the fifty-sixth straight evening of bombing, according to the letter her husband Wilfred wrote, which arrived in Hayward forty-five days later, Dee had been killed when a Nazi bomb had scored a direct hit on where Dee and sixty-eight other souls lay hiding in an underground bunker That was over four years ago in

1941

Kat started drinking Vodka

Vodka didn’t leave a smell on your breath, so Kat could hide her drinking from her husband Jim; she’d use eye drops to reduce redness She didn’t think that Jim knew how much she drank She’d hide the alcohol at Jim’s father’s house two doors down the street and she managed to drink about a half-quart a day while she was there taking care of him He had memory issues; some mornings he forgot how

to dress She’d clean house, cook and feed him; his stomach made loud noises while

he swallowed his food Lately she had to bathe and dress him in clean clothes too as

he sometimes soiled himself and didn’t know that he did so

But by the end of the day, when she arrived home to cook dinner, she had consumed enough vodka to anesthetize herself enough not to feel the emotional pain of missing her dead sister

When Kat was seventeen she met her first boyfriend, Billy McQuade Tall and handsome with red hair, he was a high school senior like Kat; he played point guard

on the basketball team Billy’s father was a successful insurance salesman; to Kat it seemed that Billy always carried a wad of money She liked him well enough; he took her to dances; Kat loved to dance He was energetic and a good dancer, light on his feet They’d dance the Black Bottom, the Catwalk, the Fox Trot; they’d dance all night Kat felt free; she didn’t have to wear a corset while dancing; one night she dared to show off her calves with a below the knee length pink pleated skirt That was the night she let Billy get to second base

The following week while they sat on a blanket on a secluded beach near Santa Cruz, Billy reached over and kissed Kat He opened his mouth Then he took Kat’s hand and placed it on his crotch She didn’t want to disappoint Billy, but

something just didn’t feel right She asked him to stop He didn’t She started to cry Billy still did not stop Kat knew that something had gone terribly wrong Quietly she sobbed This was not – when she envisioned this moment as a young girl – how she wanted to lose her virginity

Six weeks later Billy sat down with Pap, at Kat’s house in San Jose Saying that

‘he wanted to do the right thing.’

-This is man’s talk

Pap said to Kat motioning to her to leave

-It doesn’t concern you As she left Kat thought she heard Pap: -How you gonna make this right for me?

To Kat it seemed like he was asking Billy for money; Kat felt stunned

That night after Pap had more than his normal amount of vodka, he stood outside Kat and Dee’s locked bedroom door; he kept calling her a whore

Two weeks later Billy and Kat married; seven months later Kat’s daughter May was born; one month after Maisy’s birth Billy McQuade ran off with another girl Neither Kat, nor Maisy, ever saw him again

There was no money for a place for Kat and Maisy to live; they stayed at home with Kat’s parents and Dee Kat had always wanted to go to college; Dee

helped watch Maisy while Kat took secretarial classes at night

-Women don’t need no education

Pap would say, when he saw Kat studying

-How’s that gonna help a woman clean and cook and take care of the house? Kat couldn’t help but think: here is a man who sells encyclopedia’s for a living, impressing on his clients how important it is for children to get an education

Hypocrite, she thought

Kat did the best she could with Maisy, but she wondered how the child would fare without having a father to help raise her

With Dee’s help watching Maisy Kat got by, but when Maisy was nine Dee met her journalist husband and moved to London

Maisy was thirteen when Kat met Doctor James T Palmer For the previous several years, she had rented a small flat in Oakland for herself and Maisy; she now worked for the University at Cal in Berkeley, as a secretary in the Physics

department Dr Palmer was in his early thirties, a couple of years older than Kat, or

so she guessed, and he taught Physics there Her first impression of him was that he didn’t look like the normal professor type He was tall and athletic looking with thinning brown hair; he had intelligent green eyes; he was not some bespectacled distracted man with unruly hair, his head whirling in algebra equations and physics issues and buried in a textbook He seemed nice; he had a great smile

The first time they met outside of the Cal campus they met for martinis; he brought her a single red rose, her favorite flower The following weekend, from Kat’s point of view, something very strange and wonderful happened; their date that Saturday lasted over twelve hours They met in downtown Berkeley for coffee in the morning; then they walked up and down University Avenue exploring bookshops Then they saw the popular movie, ‘It Happened One Night’ at the California theatre The movie had just won the best picture Academy Award, the dashing Clarke Gable and the beautiful Claudette Colbert starred in it Before the movie they watched a

comedy short, featuring a fat man and a tall thin man, named Laurel and Hardy; they dressed in frumpy black suits and bowler hats; Kat laughed until her sides ached They had dinner at Looney’s, sitting outside on a warm autumn evening, and then he walked her to the bus stop and waited until she boarded the bus back to her

apartment After two more twelve hour dates Kat couldn’t believe how comfortable she felt spending time together with this man

Not once during the first six months that they dated did Jim try and have sex with her At first this confused Kat; isn’t that what men did? Try to get you into bed? Not Jim Kat loved him for that; she realized that Jim wouldn’t hurt her – he was looking out for her She didn’t think that Jim was a fag, or a pansy, which was a popular name for gay men these days Her female softness shined through with this understanding about her new boyfriend

-Let’s wait He would say in that deep voice of his

-There’s no need to rush Let’s make sure we have something between us first

But he would hold her hand when they were together, they were in each other’s physical space the way lovers are; at the end of their twelve hour dates, just

as Kat arrived home (he now accompanied her on her bus trip to her flat and made sure she arrived home) he would tenderly kiss her on the lips Kat felt safe

After they had been dating nine months, after another of their wonderful dates; one night as they stood on her front stoop, Jim bent down to kiss her

Kat finished her self exam of her breasts; she found no lumps; she felt

relieved; while she dressed the bells on the telly hanging in the hallway began to ring

-Dad didn’t show for his meeting this morning

It was Maisy Now twenty-eight, married with three children of her own, Jim had helped her get a job at the lab several years ago

-Did he show at the lab at all?

Kat asked, meaning the campus of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, sprawled across fifty acres of rural farmland She recalled Jim telling her about the meeting He had said that he had to meet with his ‘family’ The family of five - The five physicists; Doctors James T Palmer, his brother Doctor Edward Palmer, Doctor Charlie Watson, the world renowned Doctor Oppenhemier himself, and the famous Italian physicist, Doctor Mario Azzerghetti Except now, with the death of Edward Palmer, it would be more aptly titled ‘the family of four.” They should have called themselves ‘The Manhattan Five’; as they were the physicists here in California that worked on the Manhattan Project

-No one has seen him today

-Well, he’s probably in Berkeley,

Kat heard herself answer, worried, her antennae on alert In the years she had known Jim he had never missed an appointment; it wasn’t in his nature to miss one; not only did he never miss an appointment, he was never late for one either

-I’ll call his office at Cal and see where he is

For some reason she found herself thinking about what happened fifteen years ago when Maisy had her first period Kat had prepared Maisy by explaining the ‘female change’, as well as purchasing newly invented disposable pads Plus, Kat had Lysol disinfectant, which was used as a feminine hygiene product But when her new boyfriend Jim had asked her why Maisy remained in her room when he came

by one day, Kat had told him what had happened Kat remembered how quiet and withdrawn he had become; how a look of worry had crossed his face God only knew why she had thought of that now

-Thanks, Mom Maisy said

-Call me after you talk to him