Coin Locker Babies (33 page)

When the young foreign performer had removed a number of her clothes, it became clear that while she was quite pretty, her skin had begun to sag across her stomach and down her thighs. Hashi, meanwhile, was trapped on a couch, surrounded by three women in late middle age whose faces had little drifts of fine white powder filling their wrinkles. One was squeezing a slice of lemon over a cracker heaped with caviar. The champagne had turned her earlobes bright red, and she was stealthily rubbing her thigh against Hashi’s leg.

“When I heard you sing tonight, I suddenly wanted to take a knife to this bit of flab,” she said, taking his hand and pressing it against the flesh in question.

“Isn’t he stunning?” said another. “Just like a girl. I don’t think I’d be surprised if he grew breasts on that pretty chest of his.”

“Me either,” rasped the third woman, who had just had an operation on her throat. “He reminds me of a dirty movie I once saw in Hawaii where this Nazi doctor was doing experiments on live prisoners and he decided to attach a pair of tits and an ass to this beautiful young man. He ended up sewing soft skin all over his body, except around his privates. It was all a bit creepy, but he turned out looking
gorgeous
just the same.”

Hashi sipped at a strong drink, wondering why he was more or less content to be sitting there with these aging women pawing at him. D had asked them to be nice to the oldsters for PR purposes and to make sure they got permission to use the
right concert halls, but in Hashi’s case the assignment was no trouble at all.

By now, the skinny boy with the armful of muscle relaxant was just finishing his act and acknowledging the applause; in the course of it he had managed to fill himself with a solid gold dildo as big around as a newborn baby. And on that note the party broke up, a little after three in the morning.

As Hashi was heading back to his room, Toru called after him: “We’ve got a cute little thing coming upstairs later. Why don’t you join us?—once you’ve put Auntie to bed, that is.”

While he was showering, Hashi tried to think of a way to put Neva off if she crawled in with him. He’d just tell her he was tired, he decided, and hope she took three of her big, round sleeping pills. When he emerged from the bathroom, she was at the mirror removing her makeup.

“Hashi, there’s something I’d like to talk about,” she said.

“Could we make it tomorrow? I’m beat,” he told her, turning out the bedside light.

“Sure. Tomorrow,” she said, getting into the other bed.

“Neva, you been sleeping well lately?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Are you still taking those big sleeping pills?”

“No, not any more.”

“Well, good night,” he said, but Neva started talking in the dark.

“When I was a little girl, my grandmother would never let me go swimming. She thought the sea was dangerous and I didn’t swim well enough to go in by myself. She was sure I would drown. I always thought she was silly to worry like that, but lately I’ve begun to understand how she must have felt.”

“Neva, stop yacking and go to sleep.”

“Why did you cut your tongue?” she asked suddenly.

“I’ve told you, I wanted a new voice.”

“Hashi, promise me you’ll start playing it safe from now on. These past few weeks you’ve been crazy—trying to please everyone. You’ve got to figure out what you want and forget about other people.”

“But it’s me that’s calling the shots now. And besides, haven’t the concerts been a smash thanks to the change?”

“It won’t matter if you lose track of what you want and who you are,” said Neva.

“I don’t want to hear about it. Why don’t you take one of those nice fat sleeping pills and check out for a while?”

“But don’t you see? You’re famous now so everybody’s telling you something different, everybody wants something. They want you to sing louder, they want it more soulful, they want it easier to understand, more love songs, more this, less that… But none of that matters; you’ve got to do what you want to do.”

“Check. Understood. Now stop talking crazy and go to sleep,” said Hashi.

“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to nag. I promise I’ll shut up. I just want to tell you what my grandmother said when she finally realized I wasn’t going to listen no matter how many times she told me not to go in the sea. What do you think she said?”

“How should I know?”

“She told me not to go in over my head.”

“OK, OK, now I’m really going to sleep.”

“Hashi?…”

“Unh.”

“You’re going to be a daddy.”

In the dark his eyes shot wide open. The sheet stretched dim and gray in front of him. “You’re… pregnant?” he murmured.
He knew he should say something more, but he couldn’t think what and his throat had tightened in a knot. “A baby?” he managed at last. “Me? A father?” He suddenly remembered the way the rock-hard baby had rattled against the side of the box he’d carried before burying it. He knew nothing about how an egg grew for all those months in a woman’s belly, and so in his mind he pictured gestation in some dark, anonymous void, until the moment came and, miraculously, the baby emerged, kicking and screaming, from a woman’s crotch. But until that time, he thought you dangled in space somewhere, suspended from unseen wires. Maybe, if you could find the place and give it a shake, the babies inside would rattle too, just as the one in the box had.

“We’ll talk it all over tomorrow,” said Neva, rolling over to go to sleep. When he thought he’d given her enough time, Hashi slipped out of bed.

Toru’s room was unlocked. Inside it was dark, but Hashi managed to make out the shape of a young woman curled up on the floor in nothing but gold high heels. She was drooling slightly and smelled of alcohol. When he turned on the light, she rubbed her eyes.

“Noooo…” she groaned. Her face looked familiar… front row, hat… he remembered. When she finally realized there was someone else in the room, she struggled to her feet and lurched over to drape herself around Hashi’s neck. She was a lot taller than him, but he scarcely had time to notice before the high heels seemed to melt under her and she collapsed on the floor, taking him with her.

“Yur Hashi,” she slurred, her eyes peering from the narrowest of slits. “You really him?” He nodded, feeling her breasts pressing against him. “Come on,” she said. “Fuck me. I hate that foreplay shit. I like it shoved in me while I’m dry as a bone. Go on, baby,
make it hurt,” she said, spreading her legs. Hashi began to undress, thinking this would be his first time with a woman whose skin didn’t wobble about when she lay down.

Since the wedding, Hashi had slept with three other women on the sly. All three, however, had been about the same age as Neva, and all three had been embarrassed to get undressed in front of him. Each time he had been made to shut his eyes, and each time he had crawled into bed next to a body with layers of slack flesh that seemed to have no relevance to the thighs and flanks and arms they hung from. It all rippled like slurry with too much water in it, and when you pinched it, it didn’t spring back. Yes, all in all, they had been oddly comforting bodies. But this young woman was different. The firm, molded flesh on her thighs and ass refused to quiver no matter how much he shook it, and she lay confidently before him, lights on, legs spread, reveling in herself.

After a few minutes of grappling, Hashi was still limp. Even after she sat up enough to get his cock in her mouth, it made no difference.

“Come on, honey, get hard for Momma,” she crooned as best she could with her mouth full.

“What did I tell you? He can’t make it with the young ones,” said Toru, standing in the doorway with Matsuyama. They were both grinning.

“Whew, thought my tongue would break off,” said the girl, sitting up. “Hashi, love, something tells me you’re
im-po-tent
.”

“You been watching all this time?” said Hashi. They nodded, still grinning, as Hashi rushed them. Dodging the punch, Toru grabbed his arm and threw him on the bed.

“Calm down, Hashi. We’ll show you how it’s done,” he said as Matsuyama turned the woman over on her hands and knees and unzipped his fly. The buckle on his belt clanked in rhythm with
the thrusting of his hips. “You know,” Toru continued, “Shimoda called it just right. He said that once a guy sells his ass, that’s the way it is. What he’s really selling is his shame. So no matter how much a kid like this waves her butt in his face, he’ll never get it up again. That Shimoda’s real smart. For a woman, they say, it’s all the same, but for a man, it means the end of this,” he said, winking at Hashi and walking over to prod the girl’s grinding thigh with the tip of his snakeskin boot. “Hashi, love, you’re an orphan,” he laughed. “You never knew your mother, and now all you want in a woman is some flabby tit to suck on—mmmmmmm.”

Hashi, white-faced, grabbed an ashtray from the nightstand and threw it as hard as he could, but Toru ducked and it shattered against the wall.

“Shut the fuck up!” he shouted, making another charge at him. This time Toru offered no resistance, allowing Hashi, who was much the smaller of the two, to punch him a few times in the chest. He had stopped laughing. Matsuyama, who by now had finished with the girl, pulled Hashi away.

“You’re an orphan faggot whore,” Toru said, his tone suddenly serious. “Today you might be a great singer, but not too long ago you were an orphan faggot whore, and there’s no way you’re ever going to forget it. But that’s exactly the point: you shouldn’t ever forget it—that’s what old guys like us learn from all these years of shit. It doesn’t make a piss of difference whether you can fuck a pig groupie…”

“Pig??!” muttered the girl, her tongue thick in her mouth.

“Yeah, pig!” said Toru, kicking her harder than before. “Hashi, there are plenty of assholes out there who go bad as soon as they get there hands on a little money. But those are the ones who forget where they came from and suddenly start thinking they were born in a limousine. We don’t want that happening to you
now, do we? No matter how good the grub, no matter how plush the hotel, no matter who’s kissing your ass, don’t ever forget: you’re an orphan faggot whore. I guess we wouldn’t bother telling you this except we really dig backing you up. It’s not often you come across this kind of gig—together we’re pretty hot; we all think so. So don’t forget: orphan… faggot… whore. Don’t you go screwing it up.”

Hashi wanted to object, wanted to tell them they were wrong about him and older women. He wasn’t sure exactly what it was, but there was something soothing about those soft bodies, something that reminded him… of that soothing room. He wanted them to know that the reason he was this way had nothing to do with being an orphan, or even with being a whore; it was that sound, the one he and Kiku had heard all those years ago in that rubber-padded room. He sang because he was looking for that sound; his songs were his way of getting close to it. And it was only in a padded room he could hear it, a room made of a woman’s ample, bare body—walls, floor, furniture, all from the full inner thighs, a room gently contracting and expanding, pulsing in and out, endlessly, softly enclosing him—only there, inside, could he hear it.

From the window of his suite, the whole town was visible. Across the way, Hashi could see the remains of the party: ice birds melted into formless lumps, and the skinny young man, quite naked, asleep on a table. Hashi stared out into the night. It had begun to rain, and each light bristled with silver needles, but behind the panes of glass he could hear nothing, feel nothing. In high school, he remembered, he had stared out a window… to watch Kiku pole-vault. Suddenly, he could smell something… something familiar… what? Closing his eyes, he searched his brain until he knew: chalk dust, he thought to himself with a muffled
laugh. After a particularly good jump, Kiku would smile and wave at him. “That’s my brother,” he would tell his classmates, pointing in his direction. Just as the far-off island and the sea now came floating up outside the window, the naked man across the way sat bolt upright and let out a silent scream. Hashi shuddered. His face in the glass was superimposed on the young man’s body. Everything seemed to have become transparent, interchangeable; the body, the lights of the city beyond, the sea and the island in his mind—it was all the same thing, and for a moment he had no idea where he was. His face had slipped down somewhere in between these hazy images, and he was falling. He couldn’t breathe; the impossibly thick, rain-spattered glass had cut him off from any air, had cut off everything. He pounded at it as hard as he could. No good. Suddenly he noticed that the man across the way was waving the enormous, solid gold dildo as he munched a piece of leftover bread. Try this, he seemed to be saying. This should do the trick.

On the day that Kiku, Yamane, Nakakura, and Hayashi joined the Nautical Training Unit and were transferred to a new cell-block, Yamane had had a terrible headache since early in the morning, and was covered with gooseflesh and clammy sweat.

“This damned plastic plate in my skull must be out of whack,” he told them. “If I pass out and go all stiff, don’t talk to me or try to move me. If you touch the plate in one or two places, there’s no telling what’ll happen.”

“You mean it could kill you?” Kiku asked.

“No, not that. Don’t suppose I’d mind that much,” said Yamane forcing a smile. “No, more likely it’d kill you.”

When they got to their new quarters, they were expected to pay their respects to the senior people there, but Yamane, in too much pain to talk, could only crouch by the door shaking. Kiku, who by now had a single silver stripe on his prison uniform, tried to cover for him, explaining that he had a bad cold, but the older inmates took offense all the same.

“The bastard’s got no manners,” somebody said.

To take their minds off Yamane, Nakakura hit on the idea of offering to give some of them a massage, but as soon as he started rubbing one man’s shoulders, somebody else gave a loud sniff.

“Buddy, you need a bath,” he said.

“Yes sir, I know, sir. Whenever I get sweaty…,” Nakakura started to explain, but his voice trailed off.

“Smells like a bitch in heat,” said one of the other prisoners. “Kinda makes you horny.”

Nakakura grimaced. Afterward he explained to Kiku that the comment had made him think of his mother: “In summer you could smell her from the next room. Most of the time it was OK, but you could always tell when she’d been with a man from the way she smelled.” As he went on prodding at the older fellow’s back, however, he merely smiled at Kiku and Hayashi and pretended for a second to be wringing his neck. It was just a gesture, the lightest of jokes, but another guy standing behind him noticed and blew up.

“You fuckers got no respect. Rookies are supposed to be on their best behavior, but you assholes go monkeying around like I don’t know what,” he shouted, giving Nakakura’s back a light kick with his boot.

“Could you please shut up?” murmured Yamane, still crouching in the corner. “
Please
.” Kiku could tell that he was trying to focus on his son’s heartbeat. The immediate problem, though, was to find a way of cooling things down; but the more he apologized, the more indignant they became, until finally one of them gave a howl and slapped Nakakura across the face, accidentally hitting Yamane in the process.

“Stop it!” Yamane hissed; then, without any warning, he jumped to his feet, let out an odd soft of squawk, and drove his fist clean through the nearest wall, a solid plaster affair about five centimeters thick. “Just be quiet!” he wailed.

The rest of the room watched, slack-jawed. The men who a minute ago had been making all the fuss now sat silent and
slightly pale as Yamane resumed his crouch, clutching his skull to ward off the pain.

“So how long would I have to train to get as strong as you?” Nakakura asked Yamane as he plotted a position on a set of mock nautical charts.

“Whaddya mean ‘strong as me’?” said Yamane, struggling with his own chart. The classroom part of the course, charts, compasses, and the rest, was his weak point. His massive torso and powerful arms seemed useless pushing a little ruler around a desk.

“You know what I mean: strong enough to punch my fist through a wall. How ’bout it? Five years? Something like that?”

“No way! Anybody can do that shit. You don’t have to practice to stick your hand through a wall.”

“Come on, don’t get humble, man,” laughed Nakakura.

“Nothing humble about it. I’m serious; all you’d need’s a hammer in your hand.”

“A hammer, huh? I’m not so sure I could do it even with a hammer. What do you think, Kiku?” Kiku was sitting at the next desk, calculating compass bearings. “I don’t see how a hammer’d make much difference.”

“I don’t see what the connection is between the hammer and training,” Kiku said. “How about it Yamane?” Yamane was busy trying to determine the point of intersection between the sightline from an imaginary lighthouse to an imaginary mountaintop and a line of imaginary buoys in an imaginary harbor. He looked up just long enough to tell them to wait while he checked the latitude and longitude against the figures Kiku had come up with earlier. They must have matched since he snapped his fingers happily as he turned to answer.

“The point of karate practice isn’t to toughen up your fists,” he said at last.

“Then what is it?” asked Nakakura.

“It’s all about speed. If you don’t think you could smash through the wall with a steel hammer, how would it help to have hands as hard as steel?…” Just then the bell rang and the instructor told them to turn in their answer sheets, so Yamane interrupted his explanation again to start furiously copying Kiku’s paper.

“Crime doesn’t pay, Yamane,” chirped the wizened instructor, catching sight of him. A ripple of laughter went through the class as he sheepishly handed in his work.

After lunch, Yamane took a single sheet of newspaper and held it out in front of Nakakura.

“See if you can punch a clean hole in this,” he said.

“A newspaper? You kidding?” But a dozen lunges later he was beginning to sweat while the newspaper just seemed to flutter aside, still intact. Finally Yamane had Kiku hold the paper. The squawk rose again from somewhere in his throat and a moment later his fist had opened a neat little hole almost without rustling the paper.

“If you think about punching a hole, you’ll never do it,” he said. “Suppose you’re trying to split a board; most people are going to start out thinking, ‘OK, now I’m going to split this board.’ But most people’d be wrong. You’ve got to think something like this: you following me?—‘I will now concentrate all my strength and all my willpower in this fist and then my fist will
be
on the other side of the board. My fist will slip through the board like the wind and just
be
on the other side.’ That’s what you’ve got to tell yourself. See what I mean?”

“It’s all concentration,” said Kiku. Yamane nodded.

“A good way to start is to try to remember the most dangerous moment you can think of, a time when a little slip would have meant the difference between life and death, and use the energy you felt then in your punch. Give it a try.”

“OK, here goes,” said Kiku, handing him a new sheet of paper. He closed his eyes and tried to breathe slowly and evenly. Suddenly, his eyes flicked open and his fist flew out, puncturing the newspaper. The hole was perhaps less perfect than Yamane’s but it was a hole nonetheless.

“You were thinking about pole-vaulting, weren’t you?” said Yamane. Kiku nodded, smiling broadly.

Next was Hayashi, whose style was slightly different; pumping himself up with little barks of encouragement, he swayed back and forth until he stopped, quite still, and struck. His hole was more of a tear, but he still managed to get through.

“What was that you were doing?” asked Kiku. “Water-skiing?”

Hayashi shook his head bashfully. “Actually, I was imagining I was shooting a goal in water polo. I used to play a lot, even though there wasn’t any money in it.”

Nakakura had watched the other two in silence, but at last he spoke up. “What’s a guy supposed to think about if he’s not exactly the athletic type?” he said, looking a bit put out. “I was a cook before they stuck me in here.”

“But you worked on a salvage boat, didn’t you? And you’re a professional diver,” said Hayashi.

“You don’t have to concentrate so much to scuba dive. It’s more a matter of just sticking it out.”

“Still, it doesn’t have to be a sport you think about,” Yamane told him. “The important thing is that you have the feeling of getting all your strength and all your willpower in the fist.”

“Hey! Wait! I’ve got it!” said Nakakura. For a moment he
looked up, and then, nodding as if he’d remembered something, he licked his lips and addressed his newsprint opponent. His eyes grew wide and his breathing rough. “Die!” he screamed as his fist shot out. The hole was clean; the others clapped.

“Nice work. What were you thinking about?” said Kiku.

“Nothing,” Nakakura muttered, his head bobbing shyly.

Later, on the way back to navigation class, he tapped Kiku on the shoulder. “You know back there, I was thinking about my mother’s face. I saw her plain as day on the other side of the newspaper. Once I thought about slamming her in the puss, it was easy to concentrate.”

“
Btt, btt
.” Nakakura was leaning against the wall of the cell making a clicking sound with his lips. His neck was bent all the way to one side. “
Btt, btt
.”

“What the hell’s that?” asked Yamane.

“You can’t tell? Kiku, bet you know.” Kiku shook his head. “It’s the sound a cigarette lighter makes, but not some cheap piece of shit. It’s supposed to be the click of a Dunhill just like the one I got from a buddy of mine who went to Macau. You ever used a Dunhill? Fuckin’ heavy. You flick it, but the flame doesn’t come up right away. There’s like this little delay, till your thumb runs all the way around the wheel, and then ‘
btt
!’ Prettiest damn sound in the world. But there’s no way to explain it if you’ve never heard it, it’s one of a kind. It sounds just like… like
fire
, dammit. Cigarette even tastes better when you light it with one of those. I was just trying to remember the sound, but I can’t quite get it. It’s not ‘
btt
’ exactly; it’s more like ‘
shbtt, shbtt
.’”

On Sundays and holidays there were no vocational classes. If the weather was good, they played softball or soccer in the recreation area, but today it was raining. Some inmates still had
club activities: art classes, guitar lessons, choir practice, and so on. Most of the others were in their cells reading. But Kiku and the rest of the Nautical Training Unit had time on their hands. The only one who had anything to do was Yamane, who had borrowed a book from the library:
The Secret of the Dragon King
. But he gave up trying to read it after a few minutes when Nakakura started babbling.

They had already killed part of the day with a round-robin arm wrestling tournament which Hayashi, surprisingly, won. Kiku, who had never lost a match himself, had thought he would make a good showing, but after barely managing to beat Nakakura, he was wiped out by both Hayashi and Yamane who were in a different class altogether. After the preliminary rounds, these two faced off in the finals, and even just watching, Kiku could tell there was an incredible amount of strength involved; at times he wondered if one of their arms wasn’t going to snap clean in two. Hayashi’s arm was only about half as big around as Yamane’s, but the muscles were supple and all the power seemed to be focused in the wrist. Their two arms were nearly motionless, apparently an equal match in strength, but the struggle could be seen below where the pillows that cushioned their elbows had been torn open and were spilling their stuffing around the room. In the end, the match came down to Hayashi’s ability to withstand a series of aggressive moves by Yamane, who finally ran out of steam and gave in to superior stamina. When it was over, Yamane lay on his back for a while rubbing his arm.

“First time I ever lost,” he marveled.

Hayashi’s face was flushed. “When I was in high school, I could swim five thousand meters with just my arms and then ten thousand with just my legs. Swimmers get to be real flexible; not strong, just flexible.”

“Wrong,” laughed Yamane, getting to his feet. “That’s
strong
.”

Next, at Yamane’s suggestion, they tried something called “seat wrestling”: you sat on the ground and locked legs and then tried to flip your opponent over. Predictably, Yamane was by far the best at this, and the others quickly got tired of it. It was somewhere in the middle of this last contest that Nakakura had started in with “
btt, btt
.”

“‘
Shbtt, shbtt
.’ No, that’s not quite it either. Shit! How did it go? Something like ‘
bhao, bhao
.’ Maybe ‘
jbha, jbha
.’ ‘
Shba, shba
.’ ‘
Subo, subo
.’ ‘
Bot, hot
.’ I can hear it, but I just can’t figure out exactly what it was.”

“Chugga, chugga, choo, choo!” Hayashi began to chant, and they all broke up. When the laughter had died down, it was very quiet.

“Shit, what wouldn’t I give for a smoke,” moaned Nakakura. His face was twisted into an attempted smile, but it wasn’t quite working. In the end he actually seemed to have started crying.

Yamane went to open a window. The smell of damp spring leaves came drifting into the room along with the sound of the prison choir rehearsing. He was just about to say something to Nakakura when the little shutter of the peephole opened and a guard’s face appeared. Nakakura stopped crying instantly.

“You’re getting a little treat at four o’clock, so line up out in the hall,” said the guard, closing the shutter when he was done.

“Something special on?” Hayashi asked.

“Some people from town coming to put on a play for you guys,” the guard said over his shoulder as he moved on down the corridor.

Not long afterward, all the inmates and nearly all the staff were assembled in the auditorium. There weren’t enough chairs, so some of the prisoners were sitting on the wooden floor. The assembly started with an address by the warden.

“Today we’re been honored with a visit from the drama club at Hakodate Commercial College. These nice people come here at about this time every year to help brighten up these rainy days when you can’t get out for sports and whatnot. This is their third visit, and I know that some of you out there who have seen their productions in the past have been looking forward to this day. So sit back, see a bit of the outside world for a change and, above all, enjoy the show.”

The curtain was raised to reveal a title card to one side of the stage with the words “Blue Nymph of the Alps: A Musical” written on it. A bent old man entered from stage left. The backcloth showed a hut, some trees, and snow-capped mountains, and birds could be heard chirping; then the music swelled and the old man’s hoarse voice suddenly burst into song.