Coin Locker Babies (20 page)

Kiku closed the scuba diving magazine and put it down. He’d found it on Anemone’s bookshelf, and this was his tenth time through that article, so the pages were worn and grubby. He mumbled a line he’d memorized from the pamphlet on DATURA that the drug dealer in The Market had given him: “A large part of the existing stockpile… sunk somewhere in the ocean.” He and Anemone then went to a store that specialized in navigational charts and bought two: the quadrant for the Ogasawara archipelago and a detailed map of Garagi.

In the evening, Kiku went along to watch Anemone work. The downtown studio was basically an empty warehouse—dim, damp, and cool—that had been rigged with a metal framework on the ceiling, from which hung hundreds of lights. The floor and walls were concrete, painted snow-white, and when the lights were focused, a person standing in that vast, colorless space cast absolutely no shadow.

Shortly after they arrived, workers started wheeling in props and decorations. For this particular set, the white room was to become a meadow in Bulgaria; an enormous background photo was brought in, then yards of rolling artificial turf, a fence, a cottage complete with chimney, and a flock of live sheep. Finally, someone led in a long-haired dog, while the finishing touches—
real dandelions—were scattered on the “grass.” When everything was ready, a smiling Anemone, clad in a frilly white frock and checked apron and carrying a basket of yogurt, was supposed to stroll across the phony countryside. After the shooting started, Kiku quickly lost interest and decided to look around at the other sets while he was waiting.

There were lots of things to see: a tropical island, an iceberg, a desert battlefield, an amusement park, the grand hall of a palace, a circus tent, and the surface of Mars. In order to get a view of everything at once, Kiku climbed up to the lighting scaffold and sat down; from there he could watch all the shooting.

“Finished,” said a laughing Anemone some time later as she appeared at his elbow, still in costume. They were beginning to dismantle the sets in the various studios and the lights were dimming. Below, shadowy figures were scurrying about with plants and furniture, weapons, toys, musical instruments, fountains, stone walls, and whatever else came to hand, and in a few minutes the two of them were sitting above what was once more just an empty room, as if white paint had rained from the sky, obliterating every last hint of scenery.

“It’s so white,” murmured Kiku.

“And what’s strange about that?” asked Anemone as she peeled off her golden lashes.

“Over there,” said Kiku, pointing at a darkened studio, “until a few minutes ago they were holding a ball in a beautiful palace. Now it’s just a big white room.”

On the way home from the studio, they made a detour to west Shinjuku and drove about among the skyscrapers. The sparsely lit towers looked like damascene cliffs rising above them, and at the top, red signal lights blinked on and off with sinister regularity.

“Let’s go to Garagi to find the DATURA,” said Kiku.

“Datura?” said Anemone, stopping the car in the valley of towers. The reflection of a red light was blinking where Kiku’s pupil should have been.

“The medicine to make Tokyo snow-white,” he said.

D’s offices occupied an older nine-story building nestled among the skyscrapers in west Shinjuku. After the success of his first rock singer, D had taken over the seventh floor of the building and set up an independent record company. Then, when the second discovery had become something of an international sensation, he bought the building outright. The basement was used for storage and parking space; the first four floors housed business, accounting, promotion, and production offices; and the fifth and six floors were recording studios. The next floor had screening and editing facilities for dubbing in soundtracks produced for commercials and movies, and on the eighth floor were the offices of various music magazines ostensibly independent of D’s little empire. Right at the top were a couple of conference rooms and the president’s suite.

D’s office was famous for the impossibly bad taste of its decor, which took its cue from his obsession with American movies of the forties, particularly those starring Bob Hope. The room was an exact replica of the boss’s office in a Bob Hope film about a mill company executive whose ambition was to be a big game hunter. One wall was covered with enormous photographs of the jungle and savannah, and the floor was strewn with zebra and lion skins. In the corner stood a stuffed gorilla and a stuffed ostrich, and in the center of the room was a jet of water rising from a
heart-shaped pool. It was in this setting, on Monday mornings, that D could be found with his masseuse, a black woman in a gaudy bathing suit, lying prone before a wall of windows that looked out on the thirteen skyscrapers. D was convinced that the drones at work in the offices across the way could see what he was up to, and were jealous as hell. On Monday mornings, as he lay beneath the masseuse’s hands, he was in the habit of saying:

“Take a good look, kiddos. It won’t be long before I
buy
one of your big tall buildings, lock, stock, and barrel.”

D’s company had run off thirty thousand copies of Hashi’s debut single, ninety percent of which had already sold, making Hashi something of a hit. Anything over ten thousand would have been a good showing, D had thought, but he hadn’t taken into account the full impact of the story of Hashi’s origins. News that the young singer had been found in a coin locker resulted in no fewer than eleven magazine features and seven television appearances. To make sure the interviews went according to plan, D hired three scriptwriters to work up answers to possible questions, and then chose the best of their suggestions for Hashi to memorize.

Hashi’s performance during the interviews was superb. He didn’t really mind all the questions; to him they were just a sign that he was finally attracting attention. Following D’s instructions, he carefully cultivated the image of “a young man who was unusual but not unlikable,” taking a certain pleasure in giving unexpected answers. As he found that he was able, just by talking, to make someone angry or sad, or cause surprise or admiration, something developed inside Hashi that had never been there before: confidence. Television became his mirror, and the reflection he saw there was not the sniveling person he had always been but someone else.

Quickly, Hashi grew to like the new self D had invented for him, and he set about trying to turn the real Hashi into the image he saw reflected in the cathode tubes and newsprint. It was neither difficult nor painful, a matter of a slight readjustment of outlook. He had, he reasoned, always been different from other people, always willing to play the weakling, but now he saw this willingness in a new light. If in the past he had been terrified of grown men to the point of tears, that was simply—on the new scale of values—something he had done because it made men happy to see him cry. And though he’d often pretended to be sick to escape gym class and had hated himself for it, self-hatred, he now realized, was his own, idiosyncratic way of changing his character.

Hashi himself was surprised how easily he was able to manipulate the self inside his head, even down to his memories,
to make it resemble the confident person he projected on TV. As he thought back, he decided that Kiku, sailing high above the heads of their classmates on his pole, had never been the hero he appeared, but was actually just a musclebound jock; and the girls at school who had laughed at Hashi as he sat and watched, pale and fragile in his school uniform, were stupid, spoiled things who’d never experienced real feelings. And how would that dumb robot Kuwayama react if he had to face an interviewer’s microphone? He’d faint dead away, that’s how. One by one Hashi reworked each memory, and as he did so, he began to realize that the dividing line between his two selves could be traced to a specific incident. Before the incident he had been a victim, unaware of his real role, his mission, all his powers lying dormant. He had been measured by meaningless, arbitrary standards and judged a weakling; simply because he couldn’t swing on the high bar, he had been found wanting, had learned to despise himself. But since that day, everything had changed; he had discovered his own desires, had realized what it was he wanted—he had begun his search for sound.

And slowly, as he reshaped his memories, he began to recall the incident itself: it had happened after the hypnotist had conjured up the paralyzing terror in him that day on top of the department store by taking him back to the smells and sensations of the coin locker, the feel of the talcum powder, the smell of the stuff all over his body, the puke in his throat oozing from his mouth to mingle with it. She of the botched eye-job and the dyed red hair, she had brought it all back with a vengeance, and he had fled away from the stage, out of the building and down along the river until he found refuge in a toilet in the park. He remembered the dampness, the view of the harbor through the window where everything—sea, sky, buildings, boats—seemed to dissolve in a
gray evening haze. As the lights began to come on, the scene had dimmed and an enormous shadow tanker being pulled out to sea merged with the darkness in the distance.

While he stood looking out the window, Hashi had suddenly sensed that someone else was in the place: a large man in a straw hat, a bum apparently, was squatting in one corner. Almost as soon as Hashi noticed him, the man began to moan and shake the swollen penis in his hand. Hashi remembered thinking at the time that he was very big, but that his body still seemed light, almost buoyant somehow, as if his veins were full of air rather than blood. If he’d had a pin, he might have slipped it deep into the man’s neck and watched him shrivel up like a balloon and go shooting out the window into the night. This was the man of smoke who appeared from the lamp to aid the hero in his hour of need and then, obligingly, withdrew into the lamp when the wish had been granted. As Hashi had stood there in the half-light that evening, the laughing man of smoke had come to him and pulled down his pants, muttering, “Please, pleeease, pleeeeease. Don’t be afraid.”

Hashi wasn’t afraid. For him, this slobbering, barefoot character was a genie whom the smoke had changed into a faithful dog, and before Hashi could move, the dog crouching there before him had taken his penis in its mouth, which felt less like a mouth than a cluster of soft sea anemones. Hashi closed his eyes and allowed himself to be sucked. His body became warm, and each time he breathed he felt a little sick, but the faithful dog continued to sniffle and whine before him, lapping with its long, whitish tongue. Suddenly a feeling not unlike the urge to pee swept through his body and gathered behind his eyes. From his eyes it invaded his brain, eating away at a wall of cartilage that had been concealing a part of him that now quivered to life; and with that quiver,
Hashi realized that his whole body was trembling. The secret thing that had awakened whispered to him to be still as the moist tentacles of the anemones released him one by one, and he felt all the strength drain from his body. It was then that the memory of a great red lump, shriveling and swelling in turn, had come to him, and he had pulled free from the mouth with a yell.

“OK!” he had ordered. “You can go now; back into smoke!” As Hashi moved away, the big man had followed, still on his knees, drooling and clutching at Hashi’s cock. But the memory was already huge, raw and red and stirring behind Hashi’s eyes. “That’s it,” he told the kneeling man, “you’ve done what you were meant to do, now get back in the lamp!” The man’s pale tongue arched out of his mouth almost to his chin as his straw hat tumbled to the ground. The head underneath was pointed, and it occurred to Hashi that somewhere at the top of that head there must be a switch of some sort, some way to turn the man off. Grabbing a piece of brick that lay nearby, Hashi swung at the switch with all his might. The brick sank into the man’s skull and a puff of bright red smoke came from his head as he staggered to his feet and disappeared through the door into the darkness. Hashi quickly threw the bloodstained brick into one of the toilets, but it was already mixed up with the memory that had come to him. He could
hear
it now, this memory, somewhere beyond the wail of the balloon man which still rang in his ears.

And that was how I first came to remember, Hashi realized; a sound that swirled around, became music of a kind, and wrapped me all up. That night, just before he fell asleep, he had seen tropical fish swimming over a coral reef, giraffes loping across the savannah at dusk, a glider soaring above an iceberg—and faces, Kiku, the nuns, the psychologist, and the room with padded walls in the big gray building—but most of all that sound, the one that
had wormed its way into his veins and coursed through his whole body. For some reason, perhaps thanks to that degenerate, he had rediscovered the sound that night in the public toilet by the river, and it had changed him. That night the embryo he carried inside him had burst through—for which he had to thank… a pervert? No way! No, the other thing he had discovered was the courage to split the man’s pointy head open with a brick, and that from time to time it would be necessary to add a lump or two to people’s skulls, even his most loyal followers. Why? Because he found it necessary!

“Sales to date: 29,111 records. Not bad for a newcomer. But you know, kid, I couldn’t buy the window glass in one of those towers with that kind of money.” D’s body glistened as the black masseuse rubbed it with ram oil. Hashi had been called into the boss’s office to discuss the preliminary arrangements for his second album. For the occasion, the woman rubbing D was dressed in a bikini and high-heeled boots.

“Now the way I figure it,” he went on, “there are about three hundred thousand people out there who’ve heard of a singer named Hashi at this point. But there must be over a million who’ve heard something about some kid left in a coin locker who’s causing a stir. That’s why this second album is so important, and why we’ve got to get it done pronto. I’ve got the lyrics here; have a look.” D didn’t mention that he was sure that after Hashi was reunited with his mother on national TV, there would be several million more who knew who he was. As D saw it, Hashi’s music was like a narcotic: at first, there was a reaction against it, but once people were let in on the secret—the truth of Hashi’s origins—they would begin to accept it. Born in a coin locker! That’s what set him apart from every other bland singer with a
passable voice. If he could only get them to listen to Hashi a third time, they’d be hooked.