Almost Transparent Blue (2 page)

With the earprick, he placed a bit of heroin just about the size of a match head in the center of the bow-handled, stainless-steel spoon. "Hey, Reiko, you sneeze or something now and I'll stomp you, you understand?" He fixed the needle in place in a one-cc battlefield syringe. Reiko lit a candle. Using the syringe, he carefully dripped water on the heroin.

"Hey, Ryū, you going to fix up another party?" Okinawa asked, rubbing his slightly shaky fingers on his pants to steady them.

"Yeah, well, those black guys asked me to."

"And you're going, Reiko? To the party, right?" Okinawa asked.

She folded up the rest of the heroin in the foil. Looking at me, she answered,

"Yeah, but it's nothing to get uptight about."

"Look, I don't want you to get stoned and screw some black, O.K.?"

He held the spoon over the candle. All of a sudden the solution was boiling.

Froth and steam rose from inside the spoon, the bottom was dirty with black soot. Okinawa slowly moved it away from the flame and blew on it to cool it, just like you do when you're going to feed soup to a baby.

"In the clink, you know," he began as he started tearing up a cotton wad. "In the clink, you know, I was going cold turkey, right? Had these nightmares, you know, I don't remember them too well, but I saw my big brother—I'm the fourth son in my family, he was the oldest—I never got to know him, he died fighting in Oroku, there wasn't even a photo of him, just a bad picture my old man had drawn and stuck in the family altar, but anyway there was my big brother in my dreams—wasn't that weird? Wasn't that really far out?"

"And did he say anything?"

"Naw, well, I don't remember now."

After soaking a bit of torn cotton about the size of a thumbnail in the cooled solution, he sank the tip of the needle into the center of the sodden wad. There was a faint noise, just like a baby sucking milk. The clear liquid filled the slender glass tube a little at a time. When he'd finished, Okinawa licked his lips and pressed the plunger very slightly to force the air out.

Reiko said, "Hey, let me do it, I'll shoot you up, Ryū. I used to do it for everybody back in Okinawa." Her sleeves were rolled up.

"Shit no! Not after what you did. You blew it that time and wasted a hundred dollars' worth. It's not like, you know, you're throwing together rice balls for a picnic or something. Fuck you. Here, tie Ryū's arm with this."

Reiko pouted and glared at Okinawa as she took the leather thong and made a tight tourniquet around my left arm. When I made a fist with my hand, a thick blood vessel stood out in my arm. Okinawa rubbed the spot with alcohol two or three times before plunging the wet needle tip in toward the bulging vein. When I opened my fist, blackish blood ran up into the cylinder. Saying Heyheyhey, Okinawa coolly pushed the plunger, and the heroin and blood entered me all at once.

"Hey, well, that's it, how about it?" Okinawa laughed. He pulled out the needle.

In the instant that my skin quivered and the needle was gone, the smack had already rushed to my fingertips and hit my heart with a dull thud. Before my eyes there seemed to be something like a white mist, and I couldn't make out Okinawa's face very well. I pressed my hand against my chest and stood up. I wanted to take a deep breath, but my breathing rhythm was off and I had trouble doing it. My head was numb as if it had been beaten, and the inside of my mouth was dry enough to burn. Reiko took my right shoulder to hold me up.

When I tried to swallow just a little saliva from my dry gums, I was filled with a nausea that seemed to rush up from my feet. I fell groaning onto the bed.

Reiko seemed worried and shook my shoulder.

"Hey, don't you think you gave him a little too much? He hasn't shot up a lot before, hey look, he's real pale, is he O.K.?"

"I didn't give him that much, he's not gonna die, right? Naw, he's not gonna die, Reiko, but bring that pan, he's sure gonna heave."

I buried my face in the pillow. Although the back of my throat was parched, spittle overflowed steadily from my lips, and when I tried to lap some up with my tongue, violent nausea attacked my lower belly.

Even trying as hard as I could to breathe, I got only a little air, and that felt as if it didn't come in through my nose or mouth but just seeped in through a tiny hole in my chest. My hips were almost too numb to move. From time to time a strangling pain pierced my heart. The swollen veins in my temples twitched.

When I closed my eyes, I felt panicky, as if I were being pulled at terrible speed into a lukewarm whirlpool. Clammy caresses ran all over my body, and I began to melt like cheese on a hamburger. Like water and globs of oil in a test tube, distinct areas of hot and cold were shifting around in my body. In my head and throat and heart and prick, fevers were moving.

I tried to call Reiko, my throat cramped, no words came out.

I'd been thinking I wanted a cigarette, that's why I wanted to call Reiko, but when I opened my mouth my vocal cords just quivered and gave off a strange whistling sound. I could hear the clock ticking over near Okinawa and Reiko.

The regular sound rang in my ear with a strange gentleness. I could scarcely see. At the right side of my range of vision, which was like a diffused reflection on water, there was a dazzling flicker that hurt me. As I thought that must be the candle, Reiko peered into my face and lifted my wrist to check my pulse, then said to Okinawa, He's not dead.

I moved my mouth desperately. Raising an arm as heavy as iron I touched Reiko's shoulder and whispered, "Give me a smoke." Reiko put a lighted cigarette between my lips, wet with spittle. She turned toward Okinawa and said, "Hey, look here at Ryū's eyes, he looks scared as a little kid, right? He's shaking, you know, it's really pathetic, hey, he's even crying."

The smoke clawing at my lungs was like a living thing. Okinawa took my chin in his hand to raise my face and check the pupils of my eyes and said to Reiko,

"Hey, that was a close call, a real bummer, like, if he'd been maybe twenty pounds lighter that would've been the end of him." The warped outlines of his face looked like the sun seen through the beach umbrella you sprawl under in summer. I felt as if I'd become a plant. Folding its grayish leaves at dusk, never putting out flowers, just having its downy spores blown away by the wind, a quiet plant like a fern. The light was put out. I could hear the sounds of Okinawa and Reiko undressing. The sound of the record rose—"Soft Parade" by The Doors—and between the notes I could hear rubbing on the rug and stifled moans from Reiko.

An image of a woman plunging from a tall building floated into my mind. She was staring at the receding sky, her face was distorted with terror. She made swimming motions, struggling to rise again. Her hair had come undone and waved above her head like seaweed. The trees along the streets, the cars, the people growing larger, her nose and lips twisted by the wind pressure— the scene in my mind was just like the bad dreams that drench you with sweat in midsummer. It was a slow motion film in black and white—the movement of the woman, falling from the building.

They got up, wiped the sweat from each other, and lit the candle again. I turned away from the brightness. They were talking in voices too low for me to make out. From time to time I was seized with cramp and nausea. The nausea came in waves. Biting my lip, gripping the sheet, I rode it out, and when the nausea stopped at my head and rolled back again, I noticed a pleasure just like sexual release.

"Okinawa, you, you dirty rat!"

Reiko's high voice rang out. With it came the sound of breaking glass. One of them fell on the bed and the mattress sank down, tilting my body a little. The other one, it seemed to be Okinawa, spat out the word Shit!, yanked open the door and left. The candle was snuffed out in the wind and I could hear the sound of someone pounding down the iron staircase. In the pitch dark room I heard the soft sound of Reiko's breathing, and then I started to faint as I fought down the nausea. An odor just like the rotten pineapple, I could smell the same sweetish odor from the juices of this mixed-blood girl Reiko. I recalled the face of a certain woman. Long ago, I'd seen her in a movie or a dream, thin, long fingers and toes, slowly letting her slip fall from her shoulders, taking a shower behind a transparent wall, then, water dripping from her pointed chin, she gazed into her own green eyes in a mirror, a foreign woman.

The man walking ahead of us looked back and stopped, then tossed away a cigarette in the running water of the ditch. Firmly clutching a new duralumin crutch in his left hand, he moved on. Sweat ran down the back of his neck, and from the way he moved, I thought he must have hurt his leg just recently. His right arm seemed heavy and stiff, and there was a long groove in the earth where his foot had dragged.

The sun was straight overhead. Walking along, Reiko slipped off the jacket draped over her shoulders. Sweat blotched the tight blouse sticking to her body.

She seemed tired, as if she hadn't slept the night before. In front of a restaurant I said, "Let's have something to eat." She just shook her head without answering.

"I don't understand that guy Okinawa—I mean, the trains had already stopped running for the night by the time he left."

"It's O.K., Ryū, I've had enough," Reiko said softly. She pulled a leaf from a poplar tree planted beside the road.

"Hey, what do they call this thing like a line here, this here, do you know?"

The torn leaf was dusty.

"Isn't that a vein?"

"Yeah, that's it, a vein—me, I was taking biology in junior high, and I made a specimen book of these. I forget what it's called but I put on some kind of chemical, you know, and it just left these all white and dissolved the leaves, just left the veins real pretty."

The man with the crutch sat down on the bench at the bus stop and looked at the schedule board. "Fussa General Hospital," the bus stop sign read. The big hospital building was on the left, and in its fan-shaped central garden, over ten patients in bathrobes were doing exercises, led by a nurse. They all had thick bandages on their ankles, and they twisted their hips and heads in time with the tweets of a whistle. People coming up to the hospital watched the patients.

"Hey, I'm coming over to your bar today, I want to tell Moko and Kei about the party. They'll be coming in today?"

"Sure they'll come, they come every day, so they'll come in today, too. . . . Me, I'd really like to show it to you."

"What?"

"That specimen book with all the leaves in it. A lot of people back in Okinawa collect insects, because they've got prettier butterflies than here, but me, I made a book of leaf veins, you know, and the teacher said it was real good, and because I got a prize and went all the way to Kagoshima, I still keep it in my desk drawer. I'm taking real good care of it, I really want to show it to you."

We reached the station, Reiko threw away the poplar leaf beside the road. The roof over the platform flashed silver, and 1 put on my sunglasses. "It's already summer, really hot."

"Huh? What?"

"Yeah, I said it's already summer."

"Summer's hotter." Reiko just stared at the rails.

Drinking wine at the counter, I could hear the sound of someone crunching a Nibrole pill in one corner of the bar.

After closing up early, Reiko had spilled about two hundred Nibrole pills out onto the table. Kazuo said he'd lifted them from a drugstore in Tachikawa. Then she said to everyone, Tonight's the party before the party!

She got up on the counter, pulled off her stockings while dancing in time with the record music, came over to hug me and stuck her tongue, smelling of the pills, into my mouth. Finally she heaved up blackish blood and vomit and stretched out on the sofa without moving. Yoshiyama, brushing back his long hair with his hand, shaking droplets of water out of his beard, was talking with Moko. She looked over at me, sticking her tongue out and winking. Yoshiyama turned and asked me with a laugh, Hey, Ryū, it's been awhile, you got anything for me? Any hash or something? I put both elbows on the counter and let my feet, in rubber sandals, dangle from the chair. My tongue smarted from smoking too much. The sour wine stuck in my throat. Hey, don't you have any sweeter wine?

Kei was telling Kazuo how she'd gone to Akita to work as a nude model, but he looked drowsy from the Nibrole. Drinking whiskey straight from the bottle, tossing peanuts one at a time into her mouth, she said, So there Ah was, tied up on stage, it was jes' awful, hey, Kazuo, tied up with some prickly rope—don'

ya think that was awful? Kazuo wasn't paying any attention to her. He was peering at me through the finder of his Nikomat, which he called "more precious than life itself." Hey, ya gotta listen when people are talking. With a poke in the back, Kei tumbled Kazuo onto the floor. Hey, wow, don't mess around, he said, that's a bummer, what if you'd broke it? Kei snickered, stripped off her blouse, started cheek-dancing and tongue-kissing with whoever she bumped into.

Maybe because of yesterday's heroin, I felt dragged out and didn't want any of the Nibrole. Moko came over. Hey, Ryū, won't you go in the can with me?

Yoshiyama felt me up and I'm all shaky. She was wearing a red velvet dress and matching hat, and the powder smeared thickly around her eyes was red.

Ryū, you remember when you made me in the can at that disco? Her eyes were bleary and unfocused. The tip of her tongue flicked from her lips and her voice was too sweet. Hey, you remember? You told me a big lie, said the cops had come and we had to hide, right? And got me all scrunched up in that little can—

you've forgot?

Oh wow, that's the first time I've heard that one, Ryū, is that the way it was?

You're a real stud, right? Even though you've got a face like a pot, you've done stuff like that, huh? Yeah, that's the first time I've heard. Yoshiyama's voice was loud. He let the needle fall on a record. What are you talking about, Moko, stop running off at the mouth, O.K.? It's just something she made up, Yoshiyama, I answered. With a blast of sound, Mick Jagger began to sing. It was a really old song, "Time Is on My Side." Moko threw one leg over my knees and said drunkenly, I hate lying, Ryū, don't lie, that time I came four times, four times, you know. I'm not going to forget or anything.