Coin Locker Babies (18 page)

Neva, who had already had several whiskeys, called the waiter over, and he came back almost immediately with a clear drink garnished with several slices of lemon.

“This’ll be good for your nerves,” she told him. His tongue was numb after the first sip.

Neva’s cigarette butts piled up in the ashtray, the filters smudged with red. When she reached for the one she was still smoking, Hashi noticed the thin, ruined fingers and remembered that he wanted to ask her what had happened to her hands.

“Mind if I ask you a question?” he said, downing the rest of his drink. “Your hands…” he managed to get out before a fit of coughing shook him, making him feel as if burning sand were being poured down his throat and then shoveled out of his stomach. Neva laughed as she patted his back. At about the time the cough subsided, the alcohol began to take effect; the noise around them receded into the distance, while Neva herself seemed painfully real and close. Hashi ordered another drink and drained it, this time without coughing. Neva applauded, but his head had started to pound before he put down the glass, and he decided not to ask again about her hands.

Now he was staring at the way her smooth, plump ankles arched down into her patent leather shoes as if by suction. He thought it was beautiful. Next he studied her lips and the cigarette silhouetted in the dim bar light. The waiter came over to empty the ashtray, and Hashi noticed that Neva seemed to hide her hands from him. Suddenly, he was overwhelmed by all the sadness in the world, by the thought that there was no such thing as happiness, and as he struggled to keep from weeping, his mood slowly changed, gradually becoming more like rage. This beautiful woman, he thought, this woman who slaved all day for me—the hair, the clothes, the photo session—this woman who had kept a straight face while she haggled over the price of silk shirts, this woman sitting here sipping her whiskey, with her elegant legs, her soft lips, and her shrewd eyes that turned
sweet when she laughed, this wonderful woman was miserable all on account of her wrinkled hands. I just can’t let it happen, he thought… Still, there was nothing he could do to prevent her unhappiness, no way he knew of fixing her hands. If only he could, if only he were some kind of magician and could make them young again. He’d do anything to help her. He’d give her anything he had, the shirts, Kazuyo’s bone, his voice, anything. He was surprised himself how angry it made him, so surprised he sat for a moment, stunned.

Noticing that Hashi was beginning to behave oddly, Neva tried to get him to drink some water, but he dumped it on the floor, grabbed her hand, and burst into tears.

“I’m sorry I can’t do anything for you,” he sobbed, “I’m so sorry.” His whole body shook as he looked around for some way to release his sorrow; but just when there seemed no hope of finding one, his eye fell on the pianist who had been playing, rather badly, the whole time. Still clutching Neva’s hand, he began shouting insults across the room in his direction.

“Look what you’ve done! Your playing is so shitty you’ve made her hands shrivel up! You’ve made everybody miserable. Whoever wrote that tune worked his ass off to make it good, to come up with a few notes that would keep people from getting lonely, remind them of old friends or whatever, and look what you’ve done to it.” As he finished his speech, he saw himself producing Tatsuo’s shotgun from out of nowhere and blowing the pianist’s head to bits. It was about the only thing he could think of doing for Neva.

Then he stood up, suddenly and resolutely.

“OK. Now I’m going to save the beautiful Neva from all you fuckers,” he announced, moving toward the piano. When she tried to stop him, he shook her off and, grabbing a whiskey bottle,
took a swing at the piano player… and missed, slamming the bottle on the keyboard in a grotesque chord of breaking glass, gushing whiskey, and Hashi spewing his gutful of dinner and cocktails. For a moment the bar was deathly silent, then broke into an uproar. In the midst of this commotion, Neva and a waiter ran over to try to calm Hashi down, but before they could reach him, he screamed in a voice that threatened to split the building down the middle:

“DON’T TOUCH ME!”

After that, he crouched on all fours while the other waiters, who had started cleaning up, apologized to disgruntled customers. The pianist, still muttering about the maniac with the bottle, stood next to Neva, who seemed a bit lost. Neva, though, was the first to hear it. Then the piano player seemed to prick up his ears. The waiters stopped sweeping and the customers froze in their tracks. Everything became absolutely still: Hashi was singing.

On his knees, his eyes shut tight, he had started humming like a bird; and soon the hum began to grow into a tune, but one that nobody there had heard before. It was “The St. Vitus’s Blues.”

Whatever it was, it made Neva break out in gooseflesh. The sound appeared to be coming through a sheer membrane woven from some incredibly fine animal hair. It didn’t flow through the room; it seemed instead to envelop the bar like a shroud. The tune was nearly inaudible, but it refused to die away, attaching itself to the skin and creeping in through the pores to mingle with the blood. And anything left over collected in the air, becoming thick and palpable. When the air had become as sticky as jam, Neva could feel the song beginning to probe her brain, reviving a memory of something long forgotten. She fought off the memory as long as she could, until a scene suddenly floated into her head: a city at dusk, the sky still glowing orange behind the mountains
in the distance; everything else faded to a deep blue, broken only by the lights of a train speeding across town.

As the train passed, she shook her head and looked around at the bar where she’d been a moment ago. Not a soul was moving. The pianist sat holding his head in his hands, slowly swaying back and forth. Realizing she had to put a stop to this, she made her way over to Hashi and cupped her hand over his mouth. Startled, he bit her and rolled around furiously for a moment. And just before he passed out, he murmured to her: “Useless—got no guts.”

Not wanting to go back to the apartment D had rented for him, Hashi walked off the effects of drink on the damp streets and thought about Neva. She was thirty-eight, he had learned, and had lost both breasts to cancer, making her a woman from the waist down only—but his first woman. He had no idea why he’d gone hard when he saw her naked; he never had before with a woman. It might have been because her chest was flat, or the way her warm, firm tongue had probed the pucker between his legs, or maybe just that he was drunk. He didn’t much mind the rain now, he just wanted to walk. Anyway, it had almost stopped, and the clouds, having split down the middle, were streaming off to the east. When the sky was like this, Hashi knew from experience, it was going to clear up.

He knew about rain because he had prayed for it so often back in junior high school, heavy rain being the only thing that could rescue him from gym class. On days when he was scheduled for gym, he had spent most of his time thinking about rain. And of all the sports to be dreaded, the worst was gymnastics, mostly because he was the only boy in his class who couldn’t do a backflip on the high bar. But what made it particularly hard to take was that Kiku, who was always the best in the class, had to witness his failure. Once, when gym class threatened, Hashi had gone to considerable trouble to perform a Central American Indian rain-making spell he
had read about in a book. The spell involved hanging the bodies of mice under the eaves of the house, so he went to the abandoned mining town and caught a cageful. For Hashi, the hardest part of the spell was drowning the mice, and it occurred to him that if it didn’t rain after all this, he was sure to be punished for such a gruesome crime. He hated himself, but he also couldn’t think of any way to escape P.E. without a little self-hatred. And, on balance, he hated the high bar more than he hated himself.

The twelve tiny corpses were hung beneath the eaves on pieces of thin wire, a job that strained his nerves to the point of collapse. As he worked, he had been thinking up an excuse for when the mice were discovered, and he decided eventually to say that it was some sort of biology experiment. When he was done and stood back to look, Hashi had the feeling that the mice could grant him anything he wished—maybe even the ability to do a backflip. And as he stood watching the mice swinging against a clear blue sky, he had really believed that thick black clouds would be coming over the horizon at any moment.

A minute or two had passed when he heard the cry of birds and saw the shadow of wings wheeling over the yard. A dozen hawks circled briefly before settling on the roof. Hashi tried throwing stones at them for a while, but then gave up and watched quietly as the hawks rose up from the roof in unison, stalled above the house to sight their prey, and then fell from the sky. A single pass was enough: they left only spindly gray tails dangling from the wires like drips of water suspended in the air.

Tokyo in the rain lacked definition. Instead of clear reflections, the puddles gave the passing nightwalker a muddied, warped image. Earlier, Hashi had stood at the window, watching the tiny drops on the pane.

“Rain always makes me feel as though I should be remembering something,” he’d said as Neva came up behind him, fastening her padded bra.

“Hashi, it’s OK for now to remember, but when you get famous, you’ve got to forget all about the past. You have to forget who you are. Once you’ve made it, you can’t think about where you came from; it’ll make you crazy if you do. You wouldn’t be the first.”

Hashi wandered without paying much attention where he was going, and before he quite realized it he was at the entrance to the tunnel that led to Toxitown. It was nearly dawn and The Market was at last quieting down. The makeshift bars had closed, and the prostitutes who hadn’t gone home with a customer sat on the curb among litter and broken glass and cigarette butts. A foreign woman was changing into running shoes, and two others were doing deep knee bends; after standing around all night on the street, you would stiffen up if you didn’t stretch before going home. It was no fun, Hashi knew, waking up from a nightmare in the middle of the day with leg cramps. Then, all the curtains and shutters in the world couldn’t keep out the daylight, and there was no getting back to sleep.

As Hashi watched, one of the women staggered and fell—apparently a broken heel—ripping her skirt and unceremoniously exposing her crotch. She was not wearing underwear.

“Pardon me, honey,” said a ghostly male prostitute standing nearby, “but looks to me like somebody’s been using your pussy as an ashtray.” The woman ignored the remark and, without making any effort to cover herself, worked intently on her broken heel. After a few minutes, however, she gave up and, throwing the shoe as hard as she could, started limping away. The single heel made a rhythmic clicking on the pavement until she finally realized
one shoe was useless as she reached the end of the tunnel. She came to a stop, then kicked the remaining shoe high in the air. Walking out of the tunnel barefoot, she stretched out her arms, palms up, and tilted back her head. The rain had stopped. As she disappeared into the light, she passed a boy racing in on a bike loaded with cartons of yogurt to sell to the hookers after their long night of work, a night in The Market that came to an end as a dozen hands slowly wiped the sticky white liquid from around weary mouths.

Almost immediately, Hashi was stopped by a man he knew, a former colleague who was still turning tricks. The man was a deaf-mute, but he expressed his admiration for Hashi’s silk shirt with his hands.

Toxitown had a familiar, comforting smell. The puddles made crazy reflections as they always had, and the streets and houses were the same as ever. It had only been two months since he’d left, so there was really no reason to expect anything to have changed. Still, Hashi almost wished that this world within barbed wire had somehow vanished in the interim. And not just this place; he would be better off without any of the old scenery—the island down south, Kuwayama’s crummy house, the slope where the cannas bloomed in summer, Milk’s doghouse, the beach, the orphanage, the rows of cherry trees, the sandbox, the chapel, everything. But why? It was simple: because he, Hashi, had become a singer.

In point of fact, when he thought about it, he hadn’t exactly “become” a singer; actually, he’d been born wanting to be a singer, and now that he was close, it was just a matter of convincing himself that up till now he had never really existed. All that time before, he’d just been some guy with a forced smile in a badly focused snapshot; or maybe if you looked all the way back, long
before he started singing, you’d find a little naked baby, frightened and bawling its head off—a baby in a box, sprinkled with powder and left for dead. That’s what he’d been all along, and it wasn’t until he became a singer that he had been able to get out of the box, out of that coin locker. But now that he was out, he despised his old suffocating self and wanted to erase all traces of him, everywhere he’d been, everything he’d done.

As he walked along, he remembered how Neva’s tongue had felt as it ran down his back, how it probed at his ass, fluttered over his cock and on down to his toes. He could still feel it, rough and pliant yet firm, as if it concealed a nice streak of gristle. It was long and wet, tapering perfectly at the tip. She had swallowed his cum, he remembered; from experience he knew how it must have tasted, how it caught in the throat and refused to be washed away even when you gargled. It stuck to the gums, flavoring your next cup of tea, like a remembrance of fellatios past. Neva said it was the first time she’d ever sucked a cock.

“Hashi,” she had told him when she’d finished, “I’ll give you a piece of important advice. When you’re with a woman, you’ve got to square your shoulders and stick your chest out, not hunch up like you were doing.” Neva had never even hinted that it might be his first time; she had treated him like a man, and it made Hashi feel different. I’m not a faggot any more, he told himself.

Just then, Hashi stopped short, recognizing the man coming toward him along the street. It was his old neighbor, the Quaker.

“It
is
you!” the old man said. “I saw you from the window, and I thought I knew that face. So. You back to stay?”

“No, just came for a look around the old neighborhood,” said Hashi.

“It’s pretty quiet around here now that you all left. Gets a little scary sometimes and I don’t sleep so good.”

“That so?… Well, I’ve got to be going,” he added.

“Why don’t you stick around a while and have some noodles? I bought them fresh and there’s plenty left.”

“Thanks anyway, but I’ve really got to get home.”

The old man was dressed in faded flannel pajamas and a pair of women’s sandals. He had a slightly sour smell. As he stood hesitating, Hashi had a sense of foreboding; he knew he shouldn’t hang around any longer, but when he turned to retreat down the alley, the old man grabbed his sleeve.

“Look, if you can’t stay to eat, there’s something I want you to do for me,” he said.

“I’m sorry, but I’ve got to go. I’ll come back sometime to visit,” Hashi told him, noticing for the first time that he was clutching a cardboard box.

“There’s nobody else I can ask,” he said. “I want you to bury this for me.”

“What is it?”

“You remember the streetwalker lived next door to you? The one with the big belly? Well, she left this behind when she cleared out.”

“Why don’t you just keep it? Nobody would care.”

“You don’t understand. This isn’t something I can keep; it’s a body.”

His premonition had been right. The old man put the box down on the pavement and turned to run, but Hashi managed to catch hold of his pajama top.

“Wait a second. Why do I have to do this?” he demanded. The skin at the back of the Quaker’s neck was so cold and clammy, Hashi released his grip with a shudder. Sinking to his knees, the old man began to cry and shake. Then he reached down and clawed at the damp soil with his fingernails as a stream of incomprehensible insults came from his mouth. The tears welling
from his bloodshot eyes collected in the deep, scaly wrinkles that covered his face.

“Monster!” he shouted. “God’s judgment is upon you! The Lord will not suffer your kind to desecrate a body. In the Revelation of St. John it says that the earth will crack and the whole world will be rent asunder and then even those who call the Lord’s name will find it is too late!”

Lights had come on in windows up and down the alley, and somewhere a voice shouted for the old fool to shut up. Hashi retreated into the shadow of an empty oil drum as a man and woman, naked from the waist up, appeared at one window. The Quaker, still crouching on the ground, continued his cryptic tirade in a shrill, whining voice. Looking up at the sky, he began to pray. “Lord, send down Thy judgment upon us miserable sinners,” he begged. A teacup sailed out of a nearby window and shattered at the old man’s feet, and then, from somewhere behind them, a whiskey bottle, better aimed, smacked into the back of his head, breaking into a thousand pieces.

“Fucking asshole! There’s your judgment for you!” a voice shouted. The old man slumped to the ground and lay still as the lights and faces disappeared from the windows. The neighborhood fell silent.

Hashi slowly approached him. The Quaker groaned quietly as Hashi helped him up and walked him back to his room, a narrow space stacked to the ceiling with emergency rations, fuel, medicine, and bottled water. Putting him to bed, Hashi dressed his wound with some mentholatum and then wrapped it in strips of torn towel. When he was done, he went back to the alley to retrieve the box, which looked ordinary enough except that it was taped tightly shut and tied around and around with string. Giving it a shake, Hashi could feel the baby’s stiff body shift inside.

He carried the box to a junkyard where he thought he might find a shovel. There wasn’t one around, so he picked up a flat piece of fender and began scraping a hole in a clear space among the abandoned cars. He dug mindlessly, quickly breaking into a sweat that plastered the silk shirt he was wearing to his skin. Scratching away for as long as he could with the blunt metal, he then took to clawing at the earth with his fingernails. If I don’t go deep enough, dogs will come dig it up, he thought, or hawks will swoop down and tear the hard little body to shreds… He worked on, his arms growing numb and his hips aching. Hashi had never had much stamina when it came to physical labor; he always tired more quickly than anyone he knew. In addition to a stomach and lungs and intestines like everybody else, he decided he must have a special organ in him, a fatigue gland of some sort. But his mind was now on other things; he was digging furiously, scraping with his fingers or whatever bit of wood or metal came to hand. As he dug, he mumbled to himself.

“Nope, I’m never doing any more rain spells. No more hanging mice for me, no way, because if it rains now, the box gets wet and the baby rots…”

When he cut his hand on a piece of broken glass, he finally realized it was daylight. The glass sparkled in the rays of light filtering through gaps in the row of skyscrapers. He felt as though his body had been stretched into a length of fine, shining wire reaching through the spiky fence to the trees and buildings beyond, and from there on to the horizon. But you, my little friend, he thought to himself as he gathered up the box, you will never shine. You, he told the box, are worm food. Putting it in the hole, he began replacing the earth.

“And I,” he said, “—I funked it, I got away.”