Vampires in the Lemon Grove (8 page)

More black thread spasms down my arms.

“Kitsune, please. You’ll make the Agent angry! You shouldn’t waste your silk that way—pretty soon they’ll stop bringing you the leaves! Don’t forget the trade, it’s silk for leaves, Kitsune. What happens when he stops feeding us?”

But in the end I convince all of the workers to join me. Instinct obviates the need for a lesson—swiftly the others discover that they, too, can change their thread from within, drawing strength from the colors and seasons of their memories. Before we can begin to weave our cocoons, however, we first agree to work night and day to reel the ordinary silk, doubling our production, stockpiling the surplus skeins. Then we seize control of the machinery of Nowhere Mill. We spend the next six days dismantling and reassembling the Machine, using its gears and reels to speed the production of our own shimmering cocoons. Each dusk, we continue to deliver the regular number of skeins to the zookeeper, to avoid arousing the Agent’s suspicions. When we are ready for the next stage of our revolution, only then will we invite him to tour our factory floor.

Silkworm moths develop long ivory wings, says Chiyo, bronzed with ancient designs. Do they have antennae, mouths? I ask her. Can they see? Who knows what the world will look like to us if our strike succeeds? I believe we will emerge from it entirely new creatures. In truth there is no model for what will happen to us next. We’ll have to wait and learn what we’ve become when we get out.

The old blind woman really is blind, we decide. She squints directly at the wrecked and rerouted Machine and waits with her
arms extended for one of us to deposit the skeins. Instead, Hoshi pushes a letter through the grate.

“We don’t have any silk today.”

“Bring this to the Agent.”

“Go. Tell. Him.”

As usual, the old woman says nothing. The mulberry sacks sit on the wagon. After a moment she claps to show us that her hands are empty, kicks the wagon away. Signals: no silk, no food. Her face is slack. On our side of the grate, I hear girls smacking their jaws, swallowing saliva. Fresh forest smells rise off the sacks. But we won’t beg, will we? We won’t turn back. Dai lived without food for five days. Our faces press against the grate. Several of our longest whiskers tickle the zookeeper’s withered cheeks; at last, a dark cloud passes over her face. She barks with surprise, swats the air. Her wrinkles tighten into a grimace of fear. She backs away from our voices, her fist closed around our invitation to the Agent.

“NO SILK,” repeats Tsaiko slowly.

The Agent comes the very next night.

“Hello?”

He raps at our grated door with a stick, but he remains in the threshold. For a moment I am sure that he won’t come in.

“They’re gone, they’re gone,” I wail, rocking.

“What!”

The grate slides open and he steps onto the factory floor, into our shadows.

“Yes, they’ve all escaped, every one of them, all your
kaiko-joko—
”

Now my sisters drop down on their threads. They fall from the ceiling on whistling lines of silk, swinging into the light, and
I feel as though I am dreaming—it is a dreamlike repetition of our initiation, when the Agent dropped the infecting
kaiko
into the orange tea. Watching his eyes widen and his mouth stretch into a scream, I too am shocked. We have no mirrors here in Nowhere Mill, and I’ve spent the past few months convinced that we were still identifiable as girls, women—no beauty queens, certainly, shaggy and white and misshapen, but at least half human; it’s only now, watching the Agent’s reaction, that I realize what we’ve become in his absence. I see us as he must: white faces, with sunken noses that look partially erased. Eyes insect-huge. Spines and elbows incubating lace for wings. My muscles tense, and then I am airborne, launching myself onto the Agent’s back—for a second I get a thrilling sense of what true flight will feel like, once we complete our transformation. I alight on his shoulders and hook my legs around him. The Agent grunts beneath my weight, staggers forward.

“These wings of ours are invisible to you,” I say directly into the Agent’s ear. I clasp my hands around his neck, lean into the whisper. “And in fact you will never see them, since they exist only in our future, where you are dead and we are living, flying.”

I then turn the Agent’s head so that he can admire our silk. For the past week every worker has used the altered Machine to spin her own cocoon—they hang from the far wall, coral and emerald and blue, ordered by hue, like a rainbow. While the rest of Japan changes outside the walls of Nowhere Mill, we’ll hang side by side, hidden against the bricks. Paralyzed inside our silk, but spinning faster and faster. Passing into our next phase. Then, we’ll escape. (Inside his cocoon, the Agent will turn blue and suffocate.)

“And look,” I say, counting down the wall: twenty-one workers, and twenty-two cocoons. When he sees the black sac, I feel his neck stiffen. “We have spun one for you.” I smile down at him. The Agent is stumbling around beneath me, babbling something
that I admit I make no great effort to understand. The glue sticks my knees to his shoulders. Several of us busy ourselves with getting the gag in place, and this is accomplished before the Agent can scream once. Gin and Nishi bring down the cast-iron grate behind him.

The slender Agent is heavier than he looks. It takes four of us to stuff him into the socklike cocoon. I smile at the Agent and instruct the others to leave his eyes for last, thinking that he will be very impressed to see our skill at reeling up close. Behind me, even as this attack is under way, the other
kaiko-joko
are climbing into their cocoons. Already there are girls half swallowed by them, winding silk threads over their knees, sealing the outermost layer with glue.

Now our methods regress a bit, get a little old-fashioned. I reel the last of the black cocoon by hand. Several
kaiko-joko
have to hold the Agent steady so that I can orbit him with the thread. I spin around his chin and his cheekbones, his lips. To get over his mustache requires several revolutions. Bits of my white fur drift down and disappear into his nostrils. His eyes are huge and black and void of any recognition. I whisper my name to him, to see if I can jostle my old self loose from his memory: Kitsune Tajima, of Gifu Prefecture.

Nothing.

So then I continue reeling upward, naming the workers of Nowhere Mill all the while: “Nishi. Yoshi. Yuna. Uki. Etsuyo. Gin. Hoshi. Raku. Chiyoko. Mitsuko. Tsaiko. Tooka. Dai.

“Kitsune,” I repeat, closing the circle. The last thing I see before shutting his eyes is the reflection of my shining new face.

The gulls landed in Athertown on July 11, 1979. Clouds of them, in numbers unseen since the ornithologists began keeping records of such things. Scientists all over the country hypothesized about erratic weather patterns and redirected migratory routes. At first sullen Nal barely noticed them. Lost in his thoughts, he dribbled his basketball up the boardwalk, right past the hundreds of gulls on Strong Beach, gulls grouped so thickly that from a distance they looked like snowbanks. Their bodies capped the dunes. If Nal had looked up, he would have seen a thunderhead of seagulls in the well of the sky, rolling seaward. Instead, he ducked under the dirty turquoise umbrella of the Beach Grub cart and spent his last dollar on a hamburger; while he struggled to open a packet of yellow mustard, one giant gull swooped in and snatched the patty from its bun with a surgical jerk. Nal took two bites of bread and lettuce before he realized what had happened. The gull taunted him, wings akimbo, on the Beach Grub umbrella, glugging
down his burger. Nal went on chewing the greasy bread, concluding that this was pretty much par for his recent course.

All summer long, since his mother’s termination, Nal had begun to sense that his life had jumped the rails—and then right at his nadir, he’d agreed to an “avant” haircut performed by Cousin Steve. Cousin Steve was participating in a correspondence course with a beauty school in Nevada, America, and to pass his Radical Metamorphosis II course, he decided to dye Nal’s head a vivid blue and then razor the front into tentacle-like bangs. “Radical,” Nal said drily as Steve removed the foil. Cousin Steve then had to airmail a snapshot of Nal’s ravaged head to the United States desert, $17.49 in postage, so that he could get his diploma. In the photograph, Nal looks like he is going stoically to his death in the grip of a small blue octopus.

Samson Wilson, Nal’s brother, took his turn in Cousin Steve’s improvised barber chair—a wrecked church pew that Steve had carted into his apartment from off the street. Cousin Steve used Samson as a guinea pig for “Creative Clippers.” He gave Samson a standard buzz cut to start, but that looked so good that he kept going with the razor. Pretty soon Samson had a gleaming cue ball head. He’d cracked jokes about the biblical significance of this, and Nal had secretly hoped that his brother’s power over women would in fact be diminished. But to Nal’s dismay, the ladies of Athertown flocked to Samson in greater multitudes than before. Girls trailed him down the boardwalk, clucking stupidly about the new waxy sheen to his head. Samson was seventeen and had what Nal could only describe as a bovine charm: he was hale and beefy, with a big laugh and the deep serenity of a grazing creature. Nal loved him, too, of course—it was impossible not to—but he was baffled by Sam’s ease with women, his ease in the world.

That summer Nal was fourteen and looking for excuses to have extreme feelings about himself. He and Samson played a lot of basketball on summer nights and weekends. Nal would
replay every second of their games until he was so sick of his own inner sportscaster that he wanted to puke. He actually had puked once—last September he had walked calmly out of the JV try-outs and retched in the frangipani. The voice in his head logged every on-court disaster, every stolen ball and missed shot, the unique fuckups and muscular failures that he had privately termed “Nal-fouls.” Samson had been on the varsity team since his freshman year, and he wasn’t interested in these instant replays—he wanted the game to move forward. Nal and his brother would play for hours, and when he got tired of losing, Nal would stand in the shade of a eucalyptus grove and dribble in place.

“It’s just a pickup game, Nal,” Samson told him.

“Quit eavesdropping on me!” Nal shouted, running the ball down the blacktop. “I’m talking to myself.”

Then he’d take off sprinting down the road, but no matter how punishing the distance he ran—he once dribbled the ball all the way down to the ruined industrial marina at Pier 12, where the sea rippled like melted aluminum—Nal felt he couldn’t get away from himself. He sank hoops and it was always Nal sinking them; he missed, and he was Nal missing. He felt incapable of spontaneous action: before he could do anything, a tiny homunculus had to generate a flowchart in his brain. If
p
, then
q;
If
z
, then back to
a
. This homunculus could gnaw a pencil down to a nub, deliberating. All day, he could hear the homunculus clacking in his brain like a secretary from a 1940s movie: Nal shouldn’t! Nal can’t! Nal won’t! and then hitting the bell of the carriage return. He pictured the homunculus as a tiny, blankly handsome man in a green sweater, very agreeably going about his task of wringing the life from Nal’s life.