Watson, Ian - SSC (11 page)

 
          
Once
upon a time in the year Two Thousand there will be a hostess in the Queen Bee
cabaret in Tokyo, called Kei. Her marriage to a young businessman has turned
out sadly. He has quar- .
relied
with her.
And why?
Because he is convinced she has the wrong
personality. She is pretty, yes. She is graceful and tactful, yes. They make
love with all the proficiency and enthusiasm that Dr. Sha Kokken had
prescribed. But as his business prospects grow he has grown superstitious—and
the firm’s astrology
computer  has
lately
whispered in his ear that she is wrong for him. That they should have taken
more heed of their horoscopes (which modem science, increasingly conscious of
the existence of patterns in the universe, has validated by the year Two
Thousand) and less of romantic love. That her palm print is incompatible with
his—a fact that he never noticed while they were courting and holding hands.
That her grace and softness will hold him back, for what the firm needs during
the coming millenium is tough aggressive managers for overseas, with tough
aggressive wives to goad them on. So he has grown bitter towards her,
reproaching her for her tender and yielding (though amorous) nature, exhorting
her day by day to reform her personality, to change herself— though into what
she has to change herself he has never quite made up his mind. And this has
gone on until one sad day, simply because she loves him and would not stand in
his way, she has left him.

 
          
Once
upon a time in the year Two Thousand there will be a woman called Kei who works
as a cabaret hostess to support herself, though even in the year Two Thousand
the pay at the Queen Bee is not so good considering the nature of the services
demanded . . .

 
          
Only
a stone’s throw away from Nihonbashi Bridge which travellers used to set off
from in the old days in papanquins borne by high-stepping servants on their way
to Kyoto, which modern man sets off from in neon-striped taxis with automatic
doors on the fifty-seven stages of extravagance known as the Ginza; only a
stone’s throw away from where the metal dragons of the bridge rear their heads
(though only just) between the lanes of the overhead expressway—is the Queen
Bee’s extensive, if shabby, facade. By the year Two Thousand the Queen Bee has
done her damnedest to keep up with the times.

 
          
Kei’s
pliant yielding nature—if it did not seem to qualify her very well for life
with her husband the Almost Twenty-First Century Businessman —did uniquely
qualify her for work at the Queen Bee.

 
          
Today
when a customer walks into that cabaret, he is handed a computer sheet showing
twenty situations—modest traditional bride, brisk nurse tending the wounded war
hero, sailor-suited schoolgirl presenting an apple to the teacher, fat nude trussed
up tightly so that her flesh bulges over the ropes like the Michelin tire man
... he marks the four scenes he likes best, in order of preference; the
computer locates her closest to his heart among the hundred hostesses.

 
          
By
the year Two Thousand the Queen Bee has installed a far more sophisticated
computer of the SWARM variety—a Suggestibility Wizard & Rapport Machine.
As soon as the customer (honored guest, as they say) has chosen the face he
fancies from the catalogue of a hundred pretty faces, and the personality type
he yearns for from the pack of a hundred situation cards-"—take note that
a hundred pretty faces multiplied by a hundred personalities will give him the
choice of ten thousand women—the owner of the pretty face is summoned to the changing
room. Suppose that the pretty face is Kei’s, she will need all her pliant
yielding nature then, for only a genuine yielding nature can accept the
Suggestibility Wizard & Rapport Machine’s imprinting of a fresh personality
upon it without giving signs of a schizophrenia distressing to an honored
guest.

 
          
Once
upon a time in the year Two Thousand there will be a hostess called Kei upon
whose brain a Suggestibility Wizard & Rapport Machine imposes a fresh
personality nightly—which is to say up until two a.m. in the morning when the
Queen Bee shuts up shop and a hundred hostesses, passing through the front
door onto the Ginza, pass through an eraser field too and find themselves out
there among the neon lights, de- hypnotized, with memories of being other
people, so many miniskirted high-heeled swamis dreaming of reincarnation . . .

           
Once upon a time in the year Two
Thousand a pliant gentle personality will be a prior essential for any girl who
wants to be a Queen Bee hostess and adopt personalities which are not hers,
personalities that need not themselves be particularly pliant or gentle . . .
(For does not Situation Card 64 depict a leather-clad lady whipping her escort
with a riding crop?)

 
          
Once
upon a time in the year Two Thousand there will be a rising young businessman
called Kenzo whose status with the firm ensures his section chief taking him
along precisely once a month to some cabaret or other to entertain clients into
the wee hours of the morning, all expenses paid . . .

 
          
Thus one evening in the year Two Thousand this Kenzo will walk into
the Queen Bee along with his section chief and a client from Kyoto and be
handed a catalogue of a hundred pretty faces, among which he is mildly
surprised to find his wife Kei.
Now whether it was Kenzo’s reluctance to
watch his wife entertaining strangers, or whether he had decided to play a
practical joke upon her (his bitterness not having entirely abated yet), he
chose this particular face from among die hundred to be his hostess; and from
the pack of cards selected number 78—Strength in High Places, the Imperial
Concubine.

 
          
The
transistor hidden in her brassiere gave a beep summoning Kei to the changing
room, where she submitted herself obediently to the Suggestibility Wizard &
Rapport Machine, emerging a few moments later with arrogance and precision,
cruel, bent on power, mind hatching devious plots, mostly centered on the
swift rise to a position of eminence of her new protege, whom she would shortly
meet, cajole, mold and entice. For the whiskies she pressed on her victim at
100 New Yen a shot were transactions of great significance; the colored water
she drank herself (at 100 New Yen a shot) a clever way of evading the
poisoner’s art.

 
          
One
upon a time in the year Two Thousand a rising businessman will summon his lost
wife before him in the image of the Imperial Concubine—and she will cajole him,
mold him, entice him, under the envious eyes of his Section Chief, till he
sighs: “What such a woman could do for me!’’ and falls helplessly in love with
her. . .

 
          
Long
after midnight, when the Section Chief had paid Queen Bee for their night’s
entertainment and Kenzo is travelling home in a neon taxi with stereo chansons
playing softly, he still loves her helplessly and thinks about her; for poetic
justice cuts both ways.

 
          
The
next night on his own he made his way back to the Queen Bee, pointed at that
pretty face in the catalogue, and asked for personality number 78.

 
          
Sitting
opposite the Imperial Concubine, watching with dismay how fast she drained the
glasses of colored water, Kenzo cried out at last:

 
          
“Do
you know who I am, Kei?’’

 
          
And
she smiled the Austere Perfection Smile appropriate to the castration
ceremonies of court eunuchs; and nodded.

 
          
“Do
you know I am your husband?”

 
          
“Husband?”
She laughed lightly, a laugh appropriate to an
enemy’s execution reported earnestly by a doting prince.

           
“With you by my side
—this
you—I could climb so high
. .

 
          
The
prospect of
power.
. . she leaned forward.

 
          
“Shall
I inform you how to twist that Section Chief of yours round your little finger?
Did you take note which girl he chose? What she represented?”

 
          
Shamed,
he shook his head.

 
          
“You
should have noticed—for that was the key to his soul.”

 
          
“I
was too busy noticing you, my darling wife.”

 
          
“Nonsense!
I am an imperial concubine—you know we can never
be wed. We can only meet in safety as conspirators.”

 
          
Once
upon a time in the year Two Thousand there will be a rising young businessman
who conceives an obsession for the Imperial Concubine of the Queen Bee, to
whom he was once married, and woos her a second time, spending all his salary,
then all his savings, on glasses of whisky-colored water, and little dishes of
rice crackers . . . and still her heart—in that incarnation—is chiselled out of
rice.

 
          
And
early every morning at 2 a.m. after his fruitless visits she walks out,
dehypnotized, onto the Ginza, weeping at the Imperial Concubine’s inability to
thaw, and yield.

 
          
In
the year Two Thousand, on the Ginza, once upon a time there will be a benighted
businessman who has gone so deep into debt that he embezzles thousands of New
Yen from his firm to pay the Queen Bee, till his Section Chief discovers and
fires him; who goes with his last pocketful of change to spend it on colored
water and rice crackers for an Imperial Concubine he is sure is at last on the
very point of yielding.

           
Once upon a time on the Ginza there
will be a tender yielding hostess, Kei by name, who submits to a
Suggestibility Wizard & Rapport Machine nightly, till one night she
submits to it no more. . . who elopes from the Queen Bee with her protege,
passing through an erasure field as she leaves the door, to become . . .

 
          
“Oh Kenzo!”

 
          
“Oh Kei!”

 
          
.
. . the tough hard wife of a ruined exbusinessman, with whom she walks along
the Ginza through the neon forest—for they can’t afford a taxi fare—till at
last they come to Shim- bashi Station where the shoeshine people have left
their equipment out overnight—who would steal shoeshine equipment?

 
          
In
the year Two Thousand there will be a tough handsome couple shining people’s
shoes in the early morning as the trains rattle overhead and the neon taxis
swing past. You can still see this couple, older now and beginning to suffer
from chest trouble from the exhaust fumes, shining and repairing shoes on the
street by Shimbashi Station through the night.
If you look
for them carefully.
Once upon a time in the future.

 
          
This
story is brought to you by a Suggestibility Wizard & Rapport Machine
programmed to print out stories about itself suitable for junior high schools
during the slack periods of the day, by courtesy of the management, Queen Bee
Cabaret, Tokyo, tax-deductible for educational purposes.

 
          
We
do not sell merchandise; we sell human nature.

 
          
Who
else can recreate with her body the immortal works of Tadanori Yokoo, morning
star of Japan's economic sunrise in the mid-Twentieth century, quite as
myself
? Gazing at his superbly ironic body on pages 18 and
19 of the priceless first edition of
Posthumous
Works
(presented to me by my Master as a necessary part of my equipment) I
can sense his petulant eyes and surly lips meeting mine across the years. T
lies alone on a maroon paisley bed, posters pasted on the walls, body propped
on a slim elbow . . . and if I were able to travel back in time and knock on
his door I'd open my mouth wide as a lockjaw moon and hold that pose till he
was amazed, compelled to pout in his bored way, “Well I guess I can use your
face”— he’d never guess that neither lockjaw nor lock- anything can cramp my
style after the hours of muscle-training I’ve undergone.

 
          
Admittedly
false pride can ruin a good performer who has to be quite selfless when she
comes to submerge herself in her role. Yet how can I help feeling just a little
proud of being the best interpreter of T in all Japan? For I know I am. No one
has devoted more to her art. Is this pride? I don’t think so. My only joy is to
feel what flowers must have felt in the gone days of Ikebana, had they been
gifted with consciousness: the fulfillment of being part of a design. For I am
an intelligent flower that has the privilege of arranging itself—according to
T’s immortal graphic designs, prescient patterns of our new Japan to which the
whole world turns.

 
          
My
Master is a man of taste—one of the first businessmen to turn away from the old
artists of a dead world, those Manets and Rubenses and Utamaros, leaving the
girls who specialized in creating them to drag their wasted talents round
country fairs and department store roofs. But the etiquette of praise is very
strict. We feel that open praise is a little vulgar. That is for foreigners to
lavish. My Master cannot exactly praise my nightly performances—in fact he must
sit with his back to them, in the place of honor. Only when he has a guest to
dinner can he sit facing me across the table and take notice of me. I may also
hear a word of praise from the guest. Yet it isn’t praise or fame that I think
about as I hold my pose there perfectly still. Am I worthy of T and his design?
That’s all I wonder.

 
          
My
Master usually phones immediately after lunch so that I can be in place when he
gets home in the evening. Apart from the
Posthumous
Works
open in front of me as I wait for his call, my room is perfectly
bare. The costume cupboards
closed,
everything neat.
My whole life being in here, I want nothing to distract me from T’s ideas. Here
I eat and here I sleep and on my holiday here I often remain, meditating.
Rarely do I open the paper screen windows. What need is there to? It’s all in
T’s own work, foreseen so many years ago—the blazing highrise buildings, the
trains with giant plastic flowers sprouting from them, the crashing
helicopters, naked girls globed in fishbowl helmets, lunar city under the
smoking volcano, rays of the sun diffracted into broad red beams by the smog
and skyscrapers, our flag spread open in the sky at last for visitors from
abroad to wonder at. . . .

 
          
Last
night I posed in the cool crazy
White
Smile
from that vintage year 1966: stooping in front of the white china
toilet with the split seat, bowing with a big toothy grin, my slip hanging off
one shoulder showing both breasts, bending over to pull my red knickers down
below my knees . . .

 
          
The
night before I was a New York Girl in a brown wig with curls, my left arm
sticking straight up in the air waving above a smudge of brown armpit, right
hand grasping a telephone speaker to a mouth red with lipstick, bright vermilion
tongue sticking out cheekily over my lower lip—and my huge eyes blank white
contact-lens cut-outs in my face. The telephone dial-box hanging down by my
waist, ballooning red skirt pinned neatly to it, showing off my sky- blue
knickers, black suspenders, a blue stocking and a red stocking, against a
backdrop of mid-air Manhattan with a blond beachguard cutout appraising me . .
.

 
          
Earlier
in the week, I was the girl jockey bent double over my black plastic steed with
my hair streaming in the wind and a fresh mackerel clasped between my teeth.

 
          
I’ve
stood nude before Mt. Fuji with my
hair done
up in a
towel, teeth in a foam of tingling toothpaste.

           
I’ve been the bare-breasted vampire
at the seaside. I’ve been the Japanese Mona Lisa squeezing a jet of milk—thin
white plastic strand—from one nipple while my other hand toys with my clitoris
inside my white panties, mouth wide open, eyes rolled upwards, flowing golden
mane, masturbating maniac of the rocks . . .

 
          
The
telephone buzzes.

 
          
My
Master appears on the screen, I bow to him,
he
nods a
quick acknowledgment.

 
          
“I
have a guest tonight . . . Kindly do The
Gratitude
of Aeschylus.”
And breaks the connection, vanishing in the whirlpool of
his own
light, busy man.

 
          
My
heart leaps with joy, for The
Gratitude
of Aeschylus
is one of the most complex, most demanding, most aesthetically
satisfying of all T’s works. I shall need all the time there is.

 
          
Adding
cream dye to the already hot water in my bath behind the sliding door, I
submerge myself totally, closing my eyes and breathing through a straw while I
run down all the details of this demanding role . . .

 
          
Like
a ballerina on tiptoes with legs wide apart I shall have to stand, pointed toes
concealed in blue rubber mermaid fins that cling to my legs as far as the
knees. Apart from a red Noh mask taped to my crotch, my only other article of
dress is a diving helmet with an abnormally broad glass window. The air-hose
from this coils round my body under my left breast, down behind my thigh, back
between my legs, before doubling into the mouth of the Noh mask . . . the
spectator sees the pipe as entering my vagina, is supposed to believe I’m
breathing out of my own womb—the ultimate self-sufficiency. In reality the hose
passes between the tightness of my buttocks and is taped to the small of my
back. You can imagine how much muscle control it takes to maintain this pose—
tiptoes, legs wide straddled, sucking in oxygen all the way up that long hose,
without giving any sign of doing so!

 
          
A background rich in objects and flourishes.
Five red
plastic butterflies, an apple tree with a half dozen chewed apple cores and a
blue serpent, a vermilion devil with a flintlock rifle squeezing his wife’s
nipple, a blazing nude stabbing her Hindu lover while a headless wedding guest
stands by in a frock-coat, with a gravedigger in a yellow T-shirt; and in the
distance those twin obsessions of the 1960s, the Moon and a nuclear mushroom—oh
so many things, such richness! I have to put out flat plastic models of all
these things while the dye is drying on me. Flat, because two-dimensionality
is an essential part of The
Gratitude of
Aeschylus,
unlike White
Smile
which
called for a three-dimensional toilet bowl . . . and I too must seem flat and
twodimensional, my widespread legs in the same vertical plane as my body,
which isn’t easy—believe me—even for a specialist. . . .

 
          
In
place, on tiptoe, in green fins, legs straddled, eyes wide open, seeing
everything bathed in green by my contact lenses . . . not heeding the dinner
party, where is it?
might
make my eyes flicker with
curiosity create some nervous excitement betray itself in a twitch or flush.

 
          
Many ways of blanking attention during the hours of the pose, for
me precious hours, when identical with T’s concepts of The Woman.
Let
mnemonic jingles loose in my head or advertising lyrics. Silently chant mantras
and sutras. Mouth the syllable OM mentally. . . . Consider koans, what is the
sound of one hand clapping. Attempt to reach a million by counting up in tens.
Start a tape-loop of thoughts swinging round my head, doesn’t matter what they
are. Start telling myself a story, about
anything,
never get beyond the opening lines, over and over in new forms seeking
perfection. Visualize a light year. Hypnotize myself by staring at a light or
a shiny surface till the whole room fades out, only the bright light fills the
universe, float up to meet it weightless bodiless. All these techniques taught
in Image School.

 
          
This
is a tape-loop of thoughts, doesn’t matter what they are, in place, on tiptoe
in green fins, legs straddled, eyes wide open, seeing everything . . . not
heeding . . .

           
Round the table they’re eating raw
live lobster, shells stripped away from neatly-diced foamy pink backs, from which
they pluck tiny cubes of flesh with their lacquer chopsticks, intact feelers
questing
the air vaguely, leg joints flexing in and out
gently in a parody of motion.

 
          
The
lady of the house kneels on the mats beside n each man in turn, splashing
Johnnie Walker Black ie Label into the tiny porcelain cups.

           
The guest, drinking, not eating as
much as he ought to, art expert revered by everyone, has been like a father to
his corpulent host; who is red-faced and always looks overheated as if somebody
is busy cooking him, who secretly prefers a hand of poker.

 
          
“So
you’re still with this Yokoo brought-to-life thing?”

 
          
Quietly smirking.

 
          
Turning
a shade redder with concern, the gasring under him hotting up, the host looks
worried sick.
Mistake to say “Why yes, shouldn’t I be?”

 
          
“Maybe
the market is turning against him,” he theorizes, trying to catch the guest’s
suggestion on the wing. If I’m fast I can swap her with one of my less
enlightened friends? Hot tips in art are so hard to understand, harder than the
I
Ching’s
hexagrams as used in
business.

 
          
“Now
I didn’t say anything was wrong with Yokoo. He was a good boy. But what’s
life
that you bring something to it,
that’s the irony ...”

 
          
“Fill
his glass,” the host whispers.

 
          
“As
if poor Yokoo is some sort of hologram— you know holograms?”

 
          
Nod.
Of course a businessman knows holography, information storage and
retrieval.
. . but is he being goaded with his knowledge?

 
          
“Holography?
yes
, so we shoot our
laser beams at him, Hey Presto, up he jumps, rescued from flatland. But what is
more true art
this I ask you
my boy,
information retrieval—or creation of it!”

 
          
Boiling
a shade redder, “. . . which is most use to you, storing data or pulling it out
again
. .

 
          
“Exactly!
Now you’re catching on. An artist—- or a
businessman!
Listen
my boy while I read you this
telex.” Fumbling in his kimono sleeves, for a crumpled photostat.
“ANTENNAE OF THIS MULTICELLULAR ORGANISM
HUMANITY PROBE THE ENVIRONMENT NOT SO MUCH TRANSMITTERS AS RECEIVERS THE
SENSUAL LABORATORY THE INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE RANDOM
SAMPLES WE TAKE OF OUR ENVIRONMENT ARE DEVICES TO EXPAND OUR ABILITY TO ABSORB
etcetera etcetera SIGNED MARK BOYLE.”

 
          
Urgent need to know, more Johnnie Walker.
“When did this
message arrive?”

 
          
“Sixty
years ago! I’ve had it up my sleeve since then.”

 
          
Head
sunk in hand, to his wife’s alarm.
More Johnnie Walker.

 
          
“Can’t
understand, can’t understand, just a businessman.” Large tears, fat boiled out
of his face, sweat of panic as the stocks plunge.