Almost Transparent Blue (9 page)

"I wonder if they'll be O.K.," I said, but Reiko didn't seem to hear me because of the tremendous volume of the guitar solo. All kinds of amps and speakers were lined up on the stage, just like a display of toy blocks. A girl in a green lamé jump suit was singing "Me and Bobby Magee," though you couldn't make out the words. She jerked her body up every time the big glittering cymbals clashed.

The people in the front rows were clapping their hands and dancing, their mouths open. The noise whirled around the tiers of seats and rose to the sky.

Every time the guitarist swung down his right hand, my ears tingled. The individual sounds massed together, split the earth. I walked around the part of the fan-shaped amphitheater farthest from the stage, along the last row of seats, thinking it was just like summer, when all the cicadas are buzzing together in a forest during the morning. Someone shook a nylon glue-sniffing bag, clouded with white vapor, someone put an arm around the shoulders of a girl laughing with her mouth wide open, someone wore a T-shirt with a picture of Jimi Hendrix on it, all kinds of shoes pounded on the earth. Leather zori, sandals with leather thongs wound around the ankles, silver vinyl boots with spurs, bare feet, enameled high heels, basket shoes—and all shades of lipstick, nail polish, eye shadow, hair, and rouge shook in time to the music in one great commotion. Beer foamed, overflowed, cola bottles broke, cigarette smoke rose steadily, sweat flowed down the face of a foreign girl with a diamond set in her forehead, a bearded guy shook a rolled-up green scarf, standing up on a chair and jerking his shoulders. A girl with a feather in her hat spat out saliva, a girl with green-rimmed sunglasses, lips stretched wide, bit the insides of her cheeks. She clasped her hands behind her and jerked her hips. Her long dirty skirt rippled like waves. The movement of the air seemed focused in her as she swayed back and forth.

"Hey, Ryū, isn't it Ryū?"

The guy who spoke to me had spread some black felt on the ground beside the water fountain at a corner by the path, and lined upon it metal handicrafts, pins and necklaces dangling animal fangs and bones, Indian incense, and pamphlets about yoga and drugs.

"What's up? You've gone into business?"

This guy, he was nicknamed Male, grinned at me as I came over, spread and circled those hands that had always put on Pink Floyd records when we were staying over at some coffee shop, a long time ago.

"Naw, I'm just helping out a friend," he said, shaking his head. He was thin, his toes were black with dirt, one of his front teeth was broken.

'It's a real bummer, this kind of crummy music is all over these days, and before this there were those fag singers, Julie or somebody, I threw a rock at them.

You're over by the Yokota Base, right? How is it, any fun?"

"Yeah, well, because there're black guys, when there're blacks around it's cool, because they're really something else, blowing grass and pouring down vodka and then while they're stoned playing the best kind of sax, you know, really something else."

Just in front of the stage Moko was dancing, almost naked. Two cameramen clicked their shutters at her. A guy who'd thrown some burning paper among the seats was surrounded and taken out by several guards. A little guy holding a glue-sniffing bag staggered up onto the stage and hugged the girl singer from behind. Three of the people in charge tried to pull him off her. He clutched the waist of her lamé jump suit and made a grab for the mike. Angry, the bass guitarist pounded his back with a mike stand. The little guy leaned backward, clutching the small of his back, seemed about to fall, then he was pushed off into the front seats by the bass guitarist. The people dancing there yelled and jumped aside. The little guy had fallen headfirst, still holding the glue bag; he was dragged out by both arms by guards.

"Ryū, do you remember Meg? You know, the girl who came to us in Kyoto and wanted to play organ in our band? With the big eyes, right, the one who told that whopper about her taking off from the arts college," Male said, pulling a cigarette from my shirt pocket and lighting it. Smoke seeped out from the gap in his teeth.

"Sure I remember."

"She came to Tokyo, to my place, I wanted to get in touch with you too but didn't know your address. Because she was saying she wanted to see you, too, you know, it must have been around the time right after you moved."

"Is that so? I really wanted to see her, too."

"We lived together for a while. She was a good kid, Ryū, a really good kid.

Yeah, she was sweet, she felt sorry for this rabbit that hadn't been sold and swapped her watch for it. She was a rich kid, the watch was an Omega, for this lousy rabbit, really too much, but she was that kind of girl."

"She's still around?"

Without answering, Male pulled up his trouser leg to bare the left calf. Pink burn scars puckered the skin all the way up.

"What's that, you got burned? What happened? That's really bad."

"Yeah, it's bad all right, we were stoned and dancing around, you know, in my room. Her skirt caught fire from my gas stove, you know, a long skirt. It really burned fast, just roared up in a second and you couldn't even see her face."

He brushed back his trailing hair with one finger and stubbed out the cigarette on the bottom of his sandal.

"She was burned black, a charred body is one thing you don't ever want to see, you know, it's really bad. Her dad came over right away, and how old do you think she was really? She was fifteen, just fifteen, I was really freaked to hear she'd been fifteen."

He pulled gum from his pocket and put some in his broken-toothed mouth. I didn't want any and waved it aside.

"If I'd known how old she was at the beginning, I would've sent her back to Kyoto. She said she was twenty-one, she acted like it, so I believed her, really I did."

Then Male said he might be going back to the country, so I should come visit him.

"I'm always remembering how her face looked then, I didn't do her dad any favor either, and I'm never going to take anything like Hyminal again."

"Was your piano O.K.?"

"In the fire? The only thing that burned was her, you know, the piano wasn't even scorched."

"But you're not playing it?"

"Naw, I'm playing it all right, I'm still playing, but what about you, Ryū?"

"I've gotten rusty."

Male stood up and went to buy two cokes. He offered me some leftover popcorn. A warm breeze blew, now and then.

The bubbles pricked my throat, numb from the Nibrole. On the black felt, a little mirror with a decorated edge reflected my yellowed eyes.

"You know how I used to play The Doors' 'Crystal Ship'?

"Now when I hear that I could cry, when I hear that piano it's just like I'm playing it myself, I just can't stand it. Maybe pretty soon I won't be able to stand hearing anything, they're all so damn nostalgic. I'm just fed up, what about you, Ryū?

Because pretty soon we'll both be twenty, right? I don't want to end up like Meg, I don't ever want to see anybody like that again."

"You'll go back to playing Schumann?"

"I don't mean that, you know, but I sure want to get out of this lousy life-style—I just don't know what to do. "

Grade-school kids in black uniforms were passing by in three lines on the path below. A woman with a guide flag who looked like a teacher was telling them something in a loud voice. One little girl stopped and stared at me and Male leaning against the wire fence, both long haired and tired looking. She wore a red hat and she gazed at us while her friends jostled past her. Her head was tapped by the teacher and so she started off again in a fluster. She ran to catch up with the line, her white rucksack shaking. Before she was out of sight, she turned back just once to look at us again.

"A school trip," I muttered.

Male spat out the gum and laughed, "Do school kids go on trips?"

"Hey, Male, what happened to the rabbit?"

'The rabbit? I kept it awhile but it gave me bad vibes, and there's no one else who'd take it."

"Maybe I would."

"Huh? Too late, I ate it."

"Ate it?"

"Yeah, I asked the neighborhood butcher to fix it for me, but it was a baby rabbit and didn't have much meat on it. I poured on ketchup, you know, but it was kind of tough."

"You ate it, huh?"

The noise from the huge speakers seemed to have nothing to do with the people moving on the stage.

It seemed that noise had been going on from the beginning of time, and monkeys wearing makeup were dancing to it.

Dripping sweat, Moko came up, glanced at Male, hugged me.

"Yoshiyama's calling for you, over there. Kazuo got beat up by the guards and he's hurt."

Male sat down again in front of the black felt. "Hey, Male, tell me when you're going back to the country."

I tossed him a pack of Kools.

"Yeah, take care of yourself." He tossed me a pin made of translucent shell.

"There you are, Ryū, that's a crystal ship."

"Hey, Moko, is it really fun, getting all in a sweat dancing to this kind of band?"

"What are you talking about? Don't you just lose out if you don't have a good time?"

Sucking noisily on a joint sopping wet with saliva, Yoshiyama beckoned to us.

"That idiot Kazuo tried to climb the fence right while a guard was watching him.

When he tried to get away, he got it on the leg. Too bad. Shit, that guard was a real bastard. Had a bat."

"Somebody took him to the hospital?"

"Yeah, Kei and Reiko, Reiko said she'd go back to her place for a little, and Kei was supposed to take Kazuo back to his apartment. But it really gets to me, really makes me mad."

Yoshiyama passed the joint to the girl with heavy makeup next to him. She had high cheekbones and a lot of green stuff smeared heavily around her eyes.

"Hey, what's this?" she asked. The guy holding her hand said into her ear, "You dumb chick, that's marijuana." "Gee, thanks," she said, flashing her eyes. She and her guy sucked on the joint noisily.

Moko swallowed two more Nibrole pills at the water fountain. She was sticky with sweat and her hot pants cut into her stomach and her sides heaved. A cameraman wearing an armband snapped her as she came over to hug me. I pried her arm from around my neck and pulled away.

"Hey, Moko, you can go and dance some more if you want to."

"Huh? Even after I gave you a whiff of my Dior? I hate you, Ryū, you bring me down."

She stuck out her tongue and staggered back to join the dancers. As she leaped her breasts shook, one of them had a freckle on it.

Yoshiyama came running and shouted in my ear, "We've caught the bastard who got Kazuo."

In the dim public toilet was a guard with a shaved head. A half-naked, mixed-blood hippie had the man's arms pinioned, while another guy gagged him tightly with a leather thong. The walls were filthy with graffiti and spider webs and the smell of piss stabbed my nose. Flies buzzed around the broken windows.

As the guard twisted and beat his feet against the floor, Yoshiyama drove an elbow into his belly.

"Hey, you stand watch for us," he said to me.

Once more Yoshiyama buried his elbow almost halfway into the pit of the man's stomach, so that he spewed. From the corner of his mouth, held in a straight line by the leather thong, the yellow stuff dribbled over the back of his neck, soiling his Mickey Mouse T-shirt. His eyes tightly shut, he fought against the pain. The vomit came out again and again, catching on his thick belt, dripping in to soil the inside of his trousers. The well-muscled hippie said to Yoshiyama,

"Let me have him for a minute," got in front of the groaning guard, and whipped an open hand across his drooping face. The blow jerked the guard's face to one side, almost hard enough to tear it off. Fresh blood splattered out, I thought a tooth must have been broken. The man fainted and slithered out flat on the floor. The hippie was terribly drunk or stoned on something; his red eyes flashing, he shook off Yoshiyama when he tried to hold him back and then he broke the guard's left arm. A dry sound like a stick snapping. The man groaned and raised his face. His eyes opened wide when he saw his limply dangling arm, and he rolled on the slimy concrete. He turned over once, twice, slowly.

The hippie wiped his own hands on a handkerchief, then stuffed the bloody cloth into the mouth of the groaning man. Between the guitar chords that blasted my ears, I could hear the man's panting even from where I stood. When Yoshiyama and the others went out he stopped rolling and tried to crawl forward, his right hand groping on the floor.

"Hey, Ryū, we're leaving."

The blood smeared and dripping over the lower half of his face was a black mask. The veins in his forehead bulging, he tried to pull himself along by his elbows. Perhaps seized by some fresh pain, he mumbled, lay on his side, his feet trembled. His vomit-covered belly heaved up and down.

The inside of the train glittered. Full of the train's roar and the smell of liquor, my chest felt queasy. Yoshiyama wandered around, stoned on Nibrole and red-eyed, and Moko was sitting on the floor by the door. In the station we'd each crunched two more Nibrole pills. Hanging onto the pole, I stood next to Moko.

Yoshiyama held his chest and puked, then watched vacantly as other passengers hurried to move away. The sour smell floated to us. Yoshiyama wiped his mouth with a newspaper taken from the overhead rack. With the vibrations of the train, only the liquid spread out from the layer of vomit on the floor. No more passengers got on our car at the stops. Bastards, Yoshiyama muttered, and slammed his hand against the window. My head felt heavy and when I relaxed my grip on the pole I almost fell. Moko raised her head and held my hand, but my senses were so dulled I didn't feel as if it were another person's hand touching me.

"Hey, Ryū, I'm tired enough to die."

Moko kept saying we should go home by taxi. At one side of the car Yoshiyama stood in front of a woman bent over reading a book. Noticing the spittle trailing from his lips, she tried to get away. Yoshiyama yelled, seized her arm, spun her around and hugged her. Her thin blouse tore. Her shriek rang out higher than the screech of the wheels. Passengers escaped to the adjoining cars. The woman dropped her book, and the contents of her handbag scattered on the floor. Moko made a face of disgust in that direction and mumbled, her eyes sleepy, I'm hungry.