Coin Locker Babies (5 page)

“DATURA?”

“DATURA.”

“DATURA,” repeated Kiku.

“Don’t forget it now. I promise you it’ll come in handy someday.”

Nearly all the dogs were napping in the shade of the apartment complex as Kiku approached. He had come in search of a puppy, one with long white hair to give to Hashi, who had always wanted a dog.

The pack noticed Kiku coming and began to snarl: seven in the entrance to one building, four lying in the grass in front, three on the second-story balcony, and two more that came running out
of building D when they heard the others. They were all fairly small but, with fangs bared and hackles up, frightening enough. Worse, more and more kept coming. When a particularly
tough-looking
black dog came down the stairs of building C, the others scrambled to get out of its way. It was carrying something in its mouth that at first seemed to be a black rag, but Kiku soon realized it was a crow with the head bitten off. He decided he should keep an eye on this one. For a while the black dog eyed Kiku back, then seemed to lose interest and walked off around the corner of the building.

Kiku had noticed a puppy, a white one chewing on an old inner tube. Between him and the puppy, however, was a beautiful dog with a long white coat and floppy ears that appeared to be the mother; not a bad thing in itself since it meant the puppy too would probably be beautiful when it grew up, but it did present an obstacle. He studied the situation for a moment as he took out of his pockets the French bread and a bludgeon he’d made by wrapping a leather strap around a heavy piece of steel pipe. The puppy, having tired of the tube, tried to nose its way under its mother’s side, but when she pushed it off, it settled down for a nap with its face buried in her soft coat. Just as the puppy was beginning to doze, its tail wagging contentedly, Kiku tossed a piece of bread just out of reach of the mother. She hesitated, but before she could make up her mind, a small spotted dog darted out, without taking its eyes off Kiku, and pounced on the bread. As it raced off, the prize in its teeth, the mother gave a bark and set out in pursuit, as if to claim what was rightfully hers. At that instant, Kiku rushed forward and scooped up the puppy, which was about to follow its mother. He shoved the little dog under his shirt, tossed the remaining bread in the direction of some other dogs sitting in the entrance, and ran.

The struggling puppy scratched softly at Kiku’s chest as he glanced back over his shoulder. The rest of the pack, scrambling for the bread, didn’t seem to be following. Nevertheless, he ran as fast as he could, leaping through the bushes and wondering whether snakes could bite someone running at full speed. When he finally slowed to look back again, the apartment blocks were no bigger than boxes and the dogs were nowhere to be seen, but he still kept running. The puppy was whimpering under his shirt.

Suddenly, something struck his neck from behind. Everything went black and he fell, barely managing to catch himself on one elbow to keep from crushing the puppy. He heard a snarl just behind his ear and pain shot down his back, but for a moment Kiku had no idea what had happened. It wasn’t until the dog shook the fangs it had buried in his shoulder and neck that Kiku realized that he’d been bitten. With his face pinned against the ground, all he could see was a trickle of blood forming a pool beside his head. The sun seemed to melt into his wounds, setting them on fire.

After a moment, Kiku tried to get to his feet, but the dog forced its teeth deeper into his skin and he collapsed under the weight. He began to feel cold. The wounds were burning but he was covered with gooseflesh and starting to shiver. He was also having trouble breathing, and his stomach began to churn. Just as he was about to vomit, though, he and the dog were suddenly showered with cold water and he heard the thud of metal hitting soft flesh. He looked up, and there was Gazelle. Next to Kiku, the mother dog cowered on crushed forelegs, a pale red liquid trickling from her jaw. At the sight of Gazelle grinning merrily and raising the pole to strike again, Kiku closed his eyes and yelled:

“No! Don’t kill the mother!”

Hashi named the puppy Milk. As for Kiku, the mother’s teeth had torn gaping holes in his neck, which took a long time to heal. The hardest part was that the sores had to be kept dry so they wouldn’t get infected; Kiku was a cloud of gauze for weeks. Eventually, though, new skin grew to fill in the gouges, and as Kiku healed, Hashi too seemed to return to the world of the living. He had apparently memorized almost every sound the television had to offer without finding the one he’d been looking for.

“You know, I never really thought what we heard back at that hospital could have come from the TV. TV sounds are all the same; there’s no difference between the sound of the wind in Northern Ireland and the wind on a Polynesian island. You can’t tell anything unless the air vibrations are produced directly. On TV, the original vibrations in the air pass through a microphone to tape, then from the tape they’re converted to electrical waves; somewhere in there the real sound dies and all you’ve got left is electricity. The sound they played for us was probably reproduced somehow, but it was more than just taped; there was something special about it. As far as I can tell, it must’ve been a mixture of natural sound, something fixed up electronically, and some kind of electronic instrument. There’s nothing like that on TV. All you get on TV is pigs squealing.”

Having done nothing for three months but listen to sounds, Hashi’s hearing had become extremely acute. He had heard all kinds of things: the wind blowing in the garden, leaves rustling, metals, glass, animals, musical instruments, and human beings—everything had its own distinctive sound, and Hashi could distinguish them all from the tiniest sample. As a condition for going back to school, he demanded a tape recorder, and with Kiku as guinea pig, he began to experiment with mixing sounds together. He had learned two important things about the soothing
sound he was searching for: one, that it had to be indirect, refracted or muffled in some way; and two, that the sound had to give the impression that it would continue forever. His test subject, Kiku, found two most comforting: the sound of someone practicing the piano heard faintly from an unknown direction, and the sound of gentle rain outside a window, punctuated by drops falling on the casement.

Nothing changed when Hashi went back to school; he was constantly rooting out new noises, new types of music. He also began to study the fundamentals of musical scales, rhythm, and harmony. Then one day, by chance, he stumbled on a tune that was somehow similar to the sound they had heard at the hospital. He knew the tune from recordings, but it hadn’t clicked until he happened to pick up an old music box in the deserted town. A spring was broken in the music box, so the mechanism had to be pushed around by hand, but as Hashi turned the rough surface against the vibrating bars, it came to him: this was nearly it. Even Milk stopped barking and sat wagging his tail happily. The tune was tantalizing but still not quite right; it only made him more determined to find the real sound, even if it took his whole life, but at least now, thanks to the music box, he had a name to call it: Träumerei.

In the summer of the year they turned fifteen, Kiku and Hashi took Milk to the beach almost every day. Milk loved anything that had to do with water. From the time he was a puppy, he would plant his paws in his water dish, more interested in a splash than a drink, and when chasing a ball, he always found a way to guide it into a ditch or puddle. And once he was in the water, no amount of coaxing could get him out. He preferred the rocky part of the coast to the sandy beaches, so they made him dog shoes from
scraps of leather to protect his soft paws, and at the mere sight of them he would begin to bark for joy at the promise of water. It wasn’t long before Milk was a better swimmer than Hashi, and the silky white hair he had inherited from his mother was almost always damp. At the end of a day of swimming, as the sun was going down, the boys would groom Milk on the beach, leaving the comb caked with salt crystals when they were done.

In one thing, Kiku and Hashi actually envied Milk a little: though he’d lost his mother early in life just as they had, Milk later got a chance to meet her. One evening, on the way home from the beach, they came across several dogs rooting in some garbage. Though she was completely changed from their last meeting, Kiku immediately recognized one of them as the white dog from the mining town. A patch of fur was missing where Gazelle had hit her, her eyes were cloudy, and she drooled a bit, but it was unmistakably the same dog. Her right front leg was bent and dragged along the ground. Milk, having no idea that this was his mother, growled quietly for a while, then seemed to lose interest and passed on with the boys. The mother never even glanced up. When they had gone quite a distance, Milk stopped at the crest of a hill, shook himself, and gave a long, mournful howl.

Anemone woke past noon but stayed in bed another two hours. An unlit cigarette dangling between her lips, she wondered why she hadn’t had any nightmares. Could be the extra oxygen from the new plants, or the heat, or maybe even the new feather mattress. Which? She fished out some bottles from the refrigerator by the bed: vegetable juice, mango juice, a lactic acid drink, and seltzer. Grabbing the thermometer and an electronic blood pressure meter from the dresser, she checked herself over. Temperature normal, blood pressure a shade low; so she did ten minutes of yoga in bed and drank some mango and vegetable juice. She put the rest of the bottles back in the refrigerator and lit the cigarette. Swirling the smoke in her mouth, which was still a bit numb from the acid-sweet combination, she made a mental note that the world’s worst flavor combination was mango and menthol. Her friend at the Turkish restaurant had been right, she thought, remembering an ad she’d seen in a magazine featuring a fat lady pushing a laxative: “A moving experience.” The friend had told her that all fat women were habitual liars: their center of gravity is lower or something, putting pressure on the front lobe of the brain. Flabby stomach muscles and stiff shoulders make for shaky scruples.

Glancing at the calendar mobile suspended from the ceiling, she realized that she had no work lined up for the whole week.
Plenty of time for tennis, she thought, but then she remembered that the gut in both of her rackets had broken three months earlier and the guy at the tennis shop kept putting her off, saying that he had to order real gut from New Zealand. The idiot had probably ordered live sheep for all the time it was taking. She tried to imagine what else she could do to kill a whole week, but the effort made her tired and she gave up.

Anemone had been born seventeen years earlier, the product of the union of the manager of a company that produced a popular nasal decongestant spray and a child singer, now forty years old, who had her vocal chords fixed so her voice had never changed. Anemone was their only child, and unlike most children, whose first word is usually “mama,” meaning something between “mother” and “food,” Anemone’s first word was “cute.” This was because, all day every day when she was still a baby, everyone around her was constantly saying, “How cute!”

Anemone’s mother had the surgery on her vocal chords when she was nine, but by the time she was eighteen her records had stopped selling anyway, so she decided to have more surgery, this time on her face. The narrow eyes that had been charming as a child were almost grotesque on a teenager, so they were rounded out, and a new face was born, one that looked as if it could go on singing children’s songs well into its thirties. Not long afterward, that face managed to cast a spell over Anemone’s father, and they were married.

Anemone’s mother was content enough being a pretty wife until the time came to give birth. As the day approached, she got more and more anxious: what if the baby turned out ugly? Then her own surgical enhancements would be found out—and perhaps not only the work on her face but the little matter of a reconstructed hymen and the vocal chords as well. Her husband
would divorce her, and she would have to go back to singing numbers like “A Shoal of Minnows” and “Rainy Night Moon” to drunken men in some cabaret. It was understandable, then, that when baby Anemone turned out so cute, her mother tended to solicit compliments, even from the servants, a little more often than the average doting parent. But as Anemone grew up, there was really no need for coercion; the reconstructed and remodeled child singer had given birth to a beauty. Searching for some explanation for her good fortune, Anemone’s mother decided that perhaps during one of her own operations, the doctor had accidentally left some tweezers and a scalpel inside and they had somehow slipped down into her womb and performed gradual, natural, and completely successful plastic surgery on the fetus.

While still in junior high school, Anemone appeared in a commercial for a new product her father’s company was introducing. She was spotted by an agency, and had worked as a model ever since. A year ago, she had dropped out of high school. She wasn’t quite tall enough for fashion modeling, so she concentrated on TV commercials and printed ads, signing regular contracts with several companies. Once, she had been asked to do a movie, but they cast her opposite an actor with pyorrhea and she walked off the set during the first day of shooting.

The year she dropped out of school, she had also left home and moved into this condominium. There were two major reasons for the move. One was that her mother and father had each taken a younger lover with the full knowledge of the other, and yet remained on the best of terms. What made this all the more disgusting was that she was convinced her parents really did like one another and weren’t just putting on an act for her benefit. Once they all had dinner together, the five of them: mother,
father, young lovers, and Anemone. Afterward, while they were playing cards, Anemone had suddenly burst into tears.

“Now there’s nothing to cry about, honey,” her father had said. “You mustn’t go crying and feeling sorry for yourself. Anemone, your mother and I are doing what we truly want to be doing, but you know we’ll always love each other. You’re still young, but some day you’ll understand: it’s not that we’re unhappy with each other, not at all; it’s just that it’s not all that easy being a grown-up, all alone in the world. It took your mom and me a long time, years even, to work through this, but we’ve come to realize that we really do love each other. And once we were sure of that, we decided it would be best to get the whole thing out in the open. But the main thing to remember is that Mom and Dad are grown-ups; you’re going to grow up one day yourself, and when you do you’ll see what I mean. This is better than sneaking around, much better… And if you still insist on crying, tell yourself this, young lady—life’s not easy, and it won’t do any good to act like a spoiled child!”

The other reason concerned the pet that Anemone had kept for the past six years: a crocodile. Six years earlier her parents had bought it at a department store with the guarantee that it would grow to be no more than a meter long. “Eats raw meat or fish; change water weekly; just add a rubber tree and you’re in the Amazon!” the ad read. Anemone had been tempted by the piranhas, but when she found out how long a crocodile could live, her mind was made up. The creature was installed in a
meter-square
tank, and all was well in the Amazon until one night six months later when Anemone woke to the sound of shattering glass. No one had noticed that the crocodile had long since outgrown the tank. Anemone’s parents phoned the
department-store
pet shop.

“The variety we sell was developed in Sri Lanka by selective breeding of the Congo Pygmy Crocodile, which comes from equatorial Africa. It’s impossible that one could be more than fifty centimeters long, maximum. There is a chance, of course, that some other variety got mixed in with the shipment from Singapore—the famous crocodile garden at the zoo in Singapore.”

Anemone’s pet got bigger every day. In a year’s time, it measured a full two meters. A write-up in a newspaper prompted a visit from scientists at a reptile research center who came to the conclusion that the animal was an Indian gavial. The crocodilian order, they said, included at least three families: crocodiles, alligators, and gavials. The latter have long, slender muzzles that flatten into an octagonal shape at the end. The long snout and the odd, bulging eyes give the gavial a slightly comical appearance, explaining perhaps why gavial babies once enjoyed tremendous, if short-lived, popularity as pets in a certain city in the U.S. Children, it seems, loved the baby gavials, but the parents were less charmed, and the fad came to an end when hundreds were flushed down toilets all over town. When they disappeared down the drain, they were no bigger than a man’s finger, but some managed to survive and prosper in the pipes, and eventually they attacked and killed a sewer worker. Faced with dozens of huge monsters in its bowels, the city government had called in the army; gasoline was fed into the pipes, and the animals were burned alive. End of story.

But Anemone’s pet was already too big to fit down the toilet, and, besides, she had finally decided to give it a name—up to this point it had been simply “crocodile.” She called it Gulliver. And it gave her a thrill to think how far Gulliver had come from that tropical river, and even more of one to think that she was now his owner. What, she wondered, were the odds of Gulliver living
in a bathtub in the Meguro ward of Tokyo? Millions to one, at least…

By this time the damage done by Gulliver’s food bill—ten kilos of meat a day—was severe, not to mention the damage to the nerves of Anemone’s mother, who was no longer able to use the shower. Her father explained matters to Anemone as best he could and began to make inquiries at the zoo; but Anemone refused to even consider parting with Gulliver.

No one could touch Gulliver except Anemone, and she herself made it a rule to always enter his room crawling on her belly. Since crocodiles were always creeping along low to the ground, she reasoned, they must feel as though they’re being looked down on—and nobody would like that much. If she got down to their level, they might think of her as a friend. Gulliver, she found, was very fond of music, and would sit peacefully listening to anything she played for him as she cleaned his teeth with a screwdriver. His favorite, though, was David Bowie’s “Uranus.”

On the day her father had arranged for the men from the zoo to take Gulliver away, Anemone threatened suicide, but that was nothing compared to Gulliver’s show. The zookeepers had none of the luxury of space afforded by a jungle river, and in the cramped bathroom the situation got a little out of hand. When the first man tried to sedate him, Gulliver broke his leg with a swish of his tail; then he chewed two fingers off the hand of another man who tried to wire his jaw shut. In the confusion, Gulliver managed to slip out the door of the bathroom, which had been widened for his removal, taking refuge in the living room. When Anemone arrived on the scene, her mother was dancing around the room trying to keep clear of him.

“Get down and crawl!” Anemone urged, as Gulliver, broken furniture and torn carpet in his wake, was closing in. The scars
from her plastic surgery twitched and pulled as Anemone’s mother dropped to the ground screaming.

“Mama, try singing! He’d never eat you while you’re singing.” So her mother, half fainting, sang “Blue-eyed Doll” with all the strength in her surgically enhanced vocal chords while Gulliver listened, one leg planted squarely in the middle of her back.

At the time of their move to the condo, Anemone was seventeen years old, Gulliver three meters long. Anemone did some renovating in Gulliver’s new home, breaking down the walls between the rooms and adding a humidifier, with the heat turned up high all the time to simulate the crocodile’s birthplace, the delta of the Irrawaddy River in Burma. Future plans included a couple of dozen ultraviolet lights to be hung from the ceiling. Gulliver’s room she dubbed Uranus—“King of the Heavens”—a distant world where one year equals eighty-four, and where the atmosphere is so heavy that only low-lying lichens and ferns could survive, with only creeping animals like the crocodile to walk among them. The Uranean wind sighed a long, low song as Anemone envisioned the tropical garden she would make in the apartment: a realm of brilliant colors, with the crocodile as lord and master and she herself as jungle goddess; the air choked with the fragrance of flowers and ripe fruit, and here and there coral reefs and pools of seaweed teeming with sea turtles, palm trees, and lite beer.

“Rain again,” said the driver, catching Anemone’s eye in the
rear-view
mirror and striking up a conversation. He seemed to be the chatty sort. Anemone stared out the window at the traffic, which was getting heavy.

“Rain,” he repeated. “The weatherman said yesterday the rainy season’s over, but it’s still so humid you can’t keep the
windows from fogging up. My grandmother always told me there were only two things in life you could trust: the weather forecast on NHK and Sanseido’s English-Japanese Dictionary. That and the signs on the cages at Ueno Zoo… And maybe the umpires in high school baseball. Grandma graduated from college in the twenties when almost nobody where we came from even went to school… Shit! Look at that asshole trying to cut in… She was a smart old girl… Damn glass keeps fogging up… Uh, miss, pardon me for being nosy, but what college do you go to? I’ll bet it’s a music college…”

Anemone ignored him, and the man went on chuckling to himself and cursing other drivers. She had flagged down the cab in front of the wholesale butcher’s, where her heavy bundle of frozen meat had been carried to the car. It was just bad luck, she discovered after she was settled inside, that the driver was a bit too friendly.

“Know how I can tell music students? They’re a dead giveaway: powerful shoulders means a pianist; a thick neck means a singer; violinists have got calluses on the chin; and cellists are bowlegged. Pretty good, huh? Guess you could say I’m not your run-of
-the-mill
cabbie. I’ve always had this gift for noticing things, and my friends all tell me it’s a shame to waste it in a job like this. They say I should’ve been a writer or a ship’s captain or something. Ship’s captain… now there’s a job. You have to be able to size up your crew pretty good or you can end up in trouble… Yep, you’d have to be real sharp for that… Real sharp… Miss?… Miss? You asleep?” People get chattier all the time, Anemone was thinking. They come up and start talking to you on the train, waiting in line somewhere, at the movies, in a coffee shop or at the supermarket, and if you so much as say “boo” back, you’re doomed; they go on talking forever. More assholes out there all
the time: they smile nice, offer to carry your bag or buy you a cup of coffee, and suddenly you’re their best friend. Seems dangerous, all these pathological talkers. Anemone had read of a case where a man had tried to walk away from a talkative stranger and got a knife in the back.