Almost Transparent Blue (7 page)

The wet scenery outside seemed gentle. Its blurred contours collected raindrops, and voices and the sound of cars had their corners smoothed off by the steadily falling silver needles of rain. The dark outside seemed to suck me up. It was dark and wet like a woman lying down, her strength spent.

When I tossed away my lighted cigarette, it made a little noise and went out before it reached the ground.

"Do you remember that time some feathers were sticking out of the pillow, and after we did it you pulled one out and said, Wow, feathers are so soft, and stroked me behind the ear and on on the chest with it and then threw it on the floor—you remember?"

Lilly had brought along the mescaline. She'd hugged me and asked, What've you been doing, all by yourself? And when I told her I've been watching the rain on the veranda, she talked about the feather.

She lightly nipped my ear, took the blue capsules wrapped in foil from her bag, and put them on the table.

Thunder rumbled and rain was coming in; she told me to close the veranda door.

"Yeah, well, I 've just been looking outside. Didn't you look at the rain when you were a kid? Not playing outside, you know, I just used to look out the window at the rain, Lilly, it's really fine."

"Ryū, you're a weird guy, I'm really sorry for you, even if you close your eyes, don't you try and see what comes floating by? I don't really know how to say it, but if you're really honestly having fun, you're not supposed to think and look for things right in the middle of it, am I right?

"You're always trying so hard to see something, just like you're taking notes, like some scholar doing research, right? Or just like a little kid. You really are a little kid, when you're a kid you try to see everything, don't you? Babies look right into the eyes of people they don't know and cry or laugh, but now you just try and look right into people's eyes, you'll go nuts before you know it. Just try it, try looking right into the eyes of people walking past, you'll start feeling funny pretty soon, Ryū, you shouldn't look at things like a baby."

Lilly's hair was damp. We took one mescaline capsule each, washed down with cold milk.

"I haven't really thought of it like that, you know, I do have a lot of fun—but it's fun looking outside."

I wiped her body with a towel and hung her wet jacket on a hanger. When I asked, Want me to put on a record? Lilly shook her head and said, Let's have it quiet.

Lilly, I guess you've gone for drives, you know, when you take several hours to go to the sea or to a volcano or something, setting out in the morning when your eyes are still sore, and drinking tea from a thermos at some pretty place along the way, and at noon eating rice balls in a meadow—you know, just an ordinary kind of drive.

And while you're in the car, you think of lots of things, right? When I left home this morning, I couldn't find my camera filter, where's it got to? Or, what was the name of that actress I saw on TV yesterday? Or, my shoelace is ready to break, or I'm really scared of having an accident, or I wonder if I'm not going to grow any taller—you think of a lot of things, right? And then those thoughts and the scenes you see moving by the car pile up on top of each other.

The houses and fields, they slowly come closer and then drop far away behind you, don't they? And that scenery and the stuff inside your head mix together.

People waiting at bus stops and a drunk in formal dress staggering along, and an old woman with a cart piled full of oranges, and fields of flowers and harbors and power plants—you see them and then soon you can't see them anymore, so they mix in your head with what you were thinking about before, do you know what I mean? That lost camera filter and the fields of flowers and the power plant all come together. And then I slowly mix them around, just the way I like, the things I see and the things I'm thinking, taking a long time and pulling out dreams and books I've read and memories, to make— how can I say it?—a photo, a scene like a souvenir photo.

And bit by bit I add to this photo the new scenery I keep seeing, and finally in the photo I have people talking and singing and moving around, right? You know, I have them moving around. And then every time, you know, every time, it gets like this huge sort of palace, there's this thing like a palace in my head, with lots of people getting together and doing lots of things.

Then it's really fun to finish this palace and look inside, just like looking down at earth from above the clouds, because there's everything there, everything in the world. All kinds of people talking different languages, and the pillars in the palace are made in lots of different styles, and food from everywhere in the world is all laid out.

It's so much bigger and more detailed than something like a movie set. There're all kinds of people, really all kinds of people. Blind men and beggars and cripples and clowns and dwarfs, generals with gold braid and soldiers smeared with blood, cannibals and blacks in drag and prima donnas and matadors and body-builders, and nomads praying in the desert—they're all there and doing something. And I watch them.

The palace is always by the sea and it's just beautiful, my palace is.

It's like I have my own amusement park and I can go to never-never land whenever I like, I can push a button and watch the models move.

And while I'm enjoying myself like that, the car reaches where it's going to, and while I carry out the luggage and put up the tent and change into my swim trunks and other people talk to me, you know, I'm really having a hard time trying to protect the palace I've made. When other people say Hey, the water's nice here, not polluted, or something like that, it just knocks down my palace—

you understand, too, don't you, Lilly?

One time, when I went to a volcano, when I went to a famous live volcano in Kyushu, when I went to the top and saw the dust and ashes spouting out all at once I wanted to blow up my palace. No, when I smelled the sulphur of that volcano, it lit the fuse already attached to the dynamite. A war, you know, Lilly, will finish off the palace. The doctors run around and the soldiers point out roads but its already too late, feet are blown off, since the war's already started it's not as if I had anything to do with it, not as if I started it, and before you know it everything's in ruins.

Because it's a palace I make myself and it doesn't really matter what happens to it, it's always like that, you know, whenever I go on a drive, and looking outside on rainy days helps, too.

Listen, a while back, when I went up to Kawaguchi lake with Jackson and the others, I dropped Acid, and when I tried to make that palace, it didn't turn out to be just a palace but a city, you know, a city.

A city with I don't know how many roads and parks and schools and churches and plazas and broadcasting towers and factories and harbors and stations and markets and zoos and government offices and slaughterhouses. And I even decided on the expression and blood type of every person living in that city.

I keep thinking, won't somebody make a movie like what's inside my head, I'm always thinking that.

A woman falls in love with a married man, he goes off to war and kills a child in a foreign country, that child's mother saves him in a storm without knowing what he's done, a girl is born, she grows up and becomes a whore for a gang, the gang's really cool but a district attorney is shot, and his father was in the Gestapo during the war, and finally the girl, she's walking down a road lined with trees while a Brahms piece plays in the back-gound—I mean, not that kind of movie.

It would be like when, you know, you cut up a big cow and eat a steak just about this big. No, that's hard to understand, but listen, even with a little steak you've still eaten the whole cow, you know. So I'd like to see a movie that cut out a little bit of the palace or the city in my head, like cutting up a cow, I think it really could be done.

I think it would be a movie like an enormous mirror, a huge mirror, reflecting everyone who saw it, I'd really like to see that movie, if there were a movie like that I'd see it for sure.

Lilly said, "And let me tell you what the first scene of that movie would be—a helicopter, you know, would come carrying a statue of Jesus Christ, how about it? O.K.?

"The mesc has gotten to you, too. Hey, Ryū, let's go for a drive, let's go to a volcano, and you'll make up a city again and tell me about it, I'm sure it's raining, in that city. I want to see that city, too, with the. thunder rumbling, you know, I'm going!"

I said over and over that it would be dangerous to drive but Lilly wouldn't listen.

Seizing the key, she ran out into the whiplike rain.

Neon signs that pierced the eyes and headlights from oncoming cars that split the body in two, trucks that passed with a sound just like the cries of enormous waterfowl, big trees that suddenly stood in our way and abandoned ruined houses beside the road, factories with mysterious machines lined up and flames spouting from smokestacks, the winding road like molten steel flowing from a blast furnace.

The surging dark river crying like a living thing, tall grass beside the road dancing in the wind, a barbed-wire enclosed electric transformer station panting steam, and Lilly laughing, laughing crazily, and me, seeing it all.

Everything glowed with a light of its own.

The rain magnified, amplified everything. The light made shadows stretch blue-white on the white walls of sleeping houses and startled us as if some monster had bared its teeth for an instant.

We must be running under the ground here, in a huge tunnel, here for sure, we can't see the stars and the sewer water's pouring down. And it's so cold, there must have been a rift in the ground, there're only creatures we don't know here.

Aimless weaving and repeated sudden stops—neither of us had any idea where we were going.

Lilly stopped the car in front of the noisy towering transformer station, which floated in the light.

The whirlpools of thick coils were surrounded by a wire fence. We gazed at an iron tower like a sheer cliff.

This must be a courthouse, Lilly said and started to laugh, and looked around the wide, glowing fields surrounding the transformer station. The tomato fields rippling in the wind.

It's just like the sea, she said.

The tomatos were wet and wonderfully red in the darkness. They flashed on and off like the little light bulbs on fir trees or around windows at Christmas time.

The numberless trembling red fruits, trailing sparks, were just like fish with luminous teeth swimming in the dark sea.

"What're those?"

"I guess they're tomatos, they sure don't look like tomatos."

"It's just like the sea, a sea in a country we've never been to. Something's floating, in that sea."

"There must be mines laid here, you can't go in, it's protected. You touch one of those, you'll blow up and die, they're protecting the sea."

There was a long, low building beyond the fields. I thought it must be a school or factory.

The lightning flashed and filled the car with white sparks. Lilly screamed.

Her bared legs showed goose bumps, she shook the steering wheel, her teeth chattered.

It's just lightning, calm down, Lilly.

She yelled, What are you talking about, and all at once opened the door. A monster's roar filled the car.

"I'm going into the sea, I can't breathe in here, let go of me, let me go!"

Drenched in a second, Lilly slammed the door behind her. Her hair fluttering, she passed in front of the windshield. Pink smoke rose to the sky from the hood, and steam rose from the road lit by the headlights. Beyond the glass, Lilly shouted something, baring her teeth. Maybe that really was the sea over there.

Lilly was a shimmering deep-sea fish.

She beckoned to me. Her gesture and expression were just the the same as a little girl I'd seen once in a dream, chasing a white ball.

The sound of the windshield wipers squeaking against the glass made me think of the giant clams that can seize and dissolve people.

In that closed metal room, the white seats were as soft and slippery as the flesh of a giant clam.

The walls shook and exuded a strong acid, surrounding and dissolving me.

Come quick! You'll melt in there!

Lilly went into the field. Her spread arms were fins, she rippled her body, the raindrops on her were shining scales.

I opened the door.

The wind roared as if the whole earth were shaking.

The tomatos, with no glass between me and them, weren't red. They were nearly that special orange of the clouds at sunset. A whitish orange flashing through glass vacuum bottles that burns on the retina even when your eyes are closed.

I ran after Lilly. On the tomato leaves brushing my arms grew a light down.

Lilly tore apart a tomato, Hey, Ryū, look, it's just like a light bulb, all lit up. I ran to her, grabbed the tomato, and threw it into the sky.

Get down, Lilly! That's a grenade—get down! Lilly laughed loudly and we fell to the ground together.

It's like we're down in the sea, it's so quiet I'm almost scared. Ryū, I can hear your breathing, and mine, too.

The tomatos looking up from this place were breathing quietly, too. Their breath mixed with ours and moved like mist among the stalks. In the puddly black earth were broken grass stalks, they pricked our skin, and thousands of tiny resting insects. Their breath reached here from deep in the earth.

Look, that must be a school, I can see a pool, Lilly said.

The ash-gray building drew in sound and moisture and pulled us toward it. That school building floating in the darkness was like the golden exit at the end of a long cave. Dragging our bodies, heavy with mud, and trampling on overripe fallen tomatos, we crossed the field.

When we got out of the wind and rain under the eaves of the school building, we felt as if we were in the shadow of a dirigible floating in the sky. It was too quiet, and the cold attacked us.

At the edge of the wide grounds was a pool, and around it flowers were planted.

Like the eruptions on a rotting corpse, like a serum with multiplying cancer cells, the flowers were blooming. Against the background of a wall that rippled like white cloth, they scattered on the ground or suddenly danced up in the wind.