Coin Locker Babies (13 page)

At some point in all this, a skinny man with a large bulge in his underpants had appeared framed in the window next to the fat lady. He looked around shyly as Tatsuo just managed to choke out: “They were… doing… it… owwww, help! Owwww, shit! Owwwww!”

“What’s that ‘it’ mean, eh? Doing
what
exactly? Or do you want to lose this ear?” asked the wrestler, giving a harder tug that made Tatsuo’s legs jerk about even more. The blood was now dripping on the ground, and he was close to fainting. As his head lolled back and his eyes bulged, the crowd rocked with laughter.

Hashi clutched the wrestler’s leg and began to beg.

“Please, I’ll do anything, pay anything, just let him go.” The wrestler looked down at Hashi for a moment, then answered slowly:

“OK. Here’s the deal, faggot. You sing me a song; if I like it, I let the Filipino go…”

A high, thin sound that reminded Kiku of birds singing in the
hills back on the island greeted him as he came to and lifted his face out of a puddle. His right eye still hurt where the wrestler’s hand had landed, and the people in the street all looked a little blurry. As the whistling of the birds gradually grew and formed a melody, he realized for the first time that Hashi, still kneeling at the wrestler’s feet, was singing. The song, however, was the oddest one he’d ever heard. Hashi’s voice now sounded like a telephone ringing in the distance, or tiny speakers playing in his ear. The sound was constant, faintly oppressive, as though an incredibly thin membrane had covered the whole area, sticking to everyone’s skin and seeping in to disturb the nervous system, stimulate the memory. Soon after he started singing, everybody within earshot could feel the effect: vision blurred, colors and smells faded, the air became damp, heavy, and you began sinking to the bottom of the sea, into a private vision summoned by the song.

Kiku found himself watching a jet black horse galloping through a park at dusk. The vision, however, wasn’t like a dream, the scene wasn’t projected in front of his eyes; instead he was pulled into it, as if sucked down into the whorls of paint on a canvas. The horse, pitch black yet bathed in an orange glow, was charging through a grove of trees at a terrific pace. It whinnied as it ran, but the sound grew imperceptibly until it was more a series of small explosions, and Kiku suddenly noticed that the animal’s smooth, shiny coat had changed to metal. He was riding a huge motorcycle through a valley of silver windows. Yet he wasn’t exactly riding the bike; somehow his viewpoint was slightly behind it, following at exactly the same hectic speed, as though he saw everything through the viewer of a movie camera mounted on rails. Things passed in a whirl—he lost track of what was moving so fast. Was
he
hurtling through space? Or the camera? Or the motorcycle? Or maybe it was the lights and
buildings lining the road that were moving and he was standing still? He began to feel dazed, and anxious to get out of the painfully beautiful vision.

“Stop, please!” a woman’s voice begged, and Kiku’s motorcycle vanished. The fat lady was clinging to the man with the big, soft penis and crying uncontrollably. Kiku managed to get to his feet and make his way over to Hashi. He could see the rest of the crowd, frozen where they stood like zombies, their pupils dilated, eyes staring into the distance. Hashi’s song had drawn them back into memories of the deep past, when their brains were still mushy, their minds yet to be formed. The wrestler, lost in his own maze of recollection, had released Tatsuo and fallen on his knees where he tore at his chest and muttered things that made little sense.

“Momma, don’t make such scary faces. Your eyes are funny, a funny color… a scary color. I promise I won’t be naughty any more, Momma—please stop beating the cat…”

“That’s enough,” said Kiku, standing next to Hashi. “Enough.”

“I’ve practiced every day,” said Hashi as they continued on their way to The Market. “I try it out on the kids with holes in their faces or one of my friendly perverts, the cum-and-go crowd. And what I realized is that its power has got nothing to do with the tone or the melody itself; what you have to do is create an environment, a sound that’s no sound at all. You see what I mean? Silence—I mean total silence—stirs up people’s most primitive memories. I base the whole thing on the mating call of the West African pygmy hippo, and it seems to work on everybody—crazies, cripples, and particularly people who think they’re ‘normal.’ You see, everyone carries their own personal silence inside; all my song has to do is bring out a little corner of that silence.”

“What’s the name of the song?” asked Tatsuo.

“It’s an original,” Hashi answered. “I may call it ‘The St. Vitus’s Blues.’ As far as I can tell, people who have convulsions get real calm when they hear it, but everybody else is in for a treat too…”

At the entrance to The Market, a foreigner dressed like a priest was preaching from the pulpit of an empty industrial spool, backed up by scratchy recorded hymns. An open-collar shirt, black pants, and high rubber boots were complemented by a knotted rope around his neck, and the whole ensemble was topped off with a garland of hibiscus flowers. He was flanked by a sign that read “REPENT!” in enormous letters and “Cleanse your soul at the Church of Our Lady Juanita” in smaller ones. His Japanese was impeccable, except for an “e” sound that occasionally crept in where an “i” should have been.

“Brothers and sesters, go away from thes place! You come here to satesfy the lust of the flesh, but your money will only buy you greater loneliness. Look on thes place! Who are these women? They are mothers and wives and sesters. They are
your
mothers and wives and sesters! What can your money buy you here? Shame and misery, that’s what! And some of you others, you’ve come for the pitiful HO-MO-
SEX-
UAL, and you see hem puff his cigarette and weggle his pretty behind and you fall under hes spell. But what does JESUS have to say to the HO-MO-
SEX
-UAL? JESUS does not SUFFER the HO-MO-
SEX
-UAL! I say unto you, the judgment of SODOM is coming to thes place!”

The Market was a four-lane highway that ran through a tunnel in the area. The guards had apparently been bought off so that the tunnel could serve as a ready link between customers on the outside and the services provided inside. The system seemed to work, since the stalls that lined the road were doing
a brisk business—with one difference: the commerce was almost completely silent. Not a voice could be heard as buyers and sellers, whatever the commodity, conducted their transactions in whispers, their lips pressed against each other’s ears. The street stalls were fairly rudimentary, just a table and some chairs set up along the side of the road where the customers sat down and waited for the prostitute in attendance—in some cases a woman, in others a man—to quietly bring them a drink. The list of drinks was simple: watered-down beer or a kind of sweet wine in dark bottles. The freelance whores lining the street advertised with creative postures but rarely went out of their way to approach a passing customer. The men, it seemed, had been there from the beginning, but the number of women had increased suddenly when the underground highway had opened. Now they lined the tunnel, leaning against the walls, smoking with one hand and hiking up their skirts with the other. One woman had got hers up further than the rest, and the silver ring embedded in the fleshy lips between her legs glittered in the ancient yellow fluorescent light. A black woman languidly sucked grapes from a bunch, skinning them deftly with her mouth and letting them roll on her tongue like green marbles. Her dress, split down the back to the top of her ass, barely covered the sour, velvet skin beneath. A young girl was dancing in the street in toeshoes tied with white ribbons. On her thigh was a tattoo of a hydrofoil, and around her neck she wore a snakeskin collar complete with leash. A pair of twins had been painted on her buttocks, one per cheek, and they seemed to be clutching the real, lighted candle protruding between them.

In addition to the women, the tunnel walls were lined with makeshift drugstores which dealt almost exclusively in tranquilizers, the non-addictive drug of choice for both the
working girls and their customers. A tranquilizer called Neutro, in fact, could almost have been said to be the pillar on which the social system of The Market was built. It was Neutro that one had to thank for the placid whispers, the smooth conduct of commerce minus the usual irritations and problems. Under a Neutro-induced haze, activity along the subterranean road was reduced to mutters, sighs, and muffled coughs, the sound effects of a concert hall between the movements of a symphony. The Market was a circus with the soundtrack left off, a silent parade, a muted ballet with only a light ringing in the ears gently lulling the spectator into the general torpor. Not silence exactly, but an odd, noiseless noise, like rustling silk, or soft footsteps on wet concrete—like a tongue sucking at a gap between two teeth, or skin on skin, or clear sake being poured into a glass. The Market was a masked ball with only the sound of the feathers fluttering on a thousand strange costumes. Those who saw it for the first time invariably said they thought they had died and gone on to some other life.

At midnight, the three of them sat down at one of the stalls to put some mentholatum on Tatsuo’s torn ear.

“Shit! That
hurts
!” yelled Tatsuo.

“Shut up,” Hashi told him. “If it gets infected, the germs could get in your head and you’d end up paralyzed. Then you might as well forget about women; even if you did find Emiko, she’d probably have nothing to do with you. You can’t let these things go, you know. At the very least you’d lose an ear, and then we’d have to throw out the stereo. This isn’t like stubbing your toe; the ear’s right there on the side of your head!…” Hashi chattered on to distract Tatsuo while he worked.

The underground road that ran through The Market intersected another road a hundred meters further on. From
time to time, when a car passed this crossing, slowing down to a crawl, the crowd of prostitutes would drift along the tunnel in that direction. If the car contained a customer, the window would glide down, a finger would point at a man or woman, and the person chosen would get in. Other cars stopped just long enough to disgorge someone returning from a trick, and the newcomer would blend into the throng, immediately searching for the next customer. It was one of the latter who attracted Tatsuo’s attention as they sat in the stall. After staring for a long while at her face, he mumbled almost to himself: “It’s Emiko.”

The girl in question had blown a kiss at the car as she got out, then turned four back somersaults to arrive at the table next to theirs, apparently at the invitation of the bearded, pipe-smoking man sitting there.

“Shiiiit! So she’s a fucking whore. If I had the Getaway… and my ear wasn’t all fucked up… I’d drag her home right now.” Tatsuo was whispering again. Emiko, however, was speaking just loudly enough to be overheard at the next table.

“… It’s called ‘marionetting’ and they say it’s
crazy
! You take some surgical floss and wrap one end up inside a capsule; then you swallow the thing and it unravels on the way down until you get it out the other end with a nice little enema. It takes about seven meters of string—isn’t that incredible?—but when you’ve got it all the way through you can do all kinds of amazing things with it. There’s this French girl who tied the end to a cork so she could plug herself up. I heard somebody did it with a tennis ball. Anyway, when you pull the string they
do
jump around, just like puppets. It’s the funniest thing…”

Tatsuo was on the verge of tears. “Shit! Did you hear that? Did you hear the kind of girl she’s become? She used to be too embarrassed to burp out loud, let alone fart, and now she’s talking
about dancing around with some string stuck out her ass.” He hopped up. “She’s going with me, even if I have to hog-tie her. I’m going to earn some money and we’re going back to Cebu to live like civilized human beings.”

Catching sight of Tatsuo approaching, Emiko tried to get away, but he caught her arm and they argued for a moment in Tagalog. Suddenly, Tatsuo slapped her cheek, but when Emiko hit back she caught Tatsuo’s tattered ear and he let out a scream that could be heard throughout The Market. While he lay writhing on the pavement, Emiko came up to where Kiku and Hashi were sitting.

“Are you Tatsuo’s friends?” she asked. Kiku nodded. “I’m saving enough money for Tatsuo and me to go back to the Philippines. He promised to stop making guns so I’ve agreed to go with him. There’s just one thing I need some advice about: what should I do with the guns he has… get rid of them?”

“Why don’t you bury them?” Kiku said after a bit of thought. “Do you know Yoyogi Park? There’s a stadium near the west gate. What if you buried the guns and the cartridges there, say—under the third bench on the right? Would that solve the problem?”

Hashi gave him a funny look. “What do you want guns for?”

“Oh, you never know when they might come in handy,” Kiku laughed.

After seeing Tatsuo and Emiko part of the way down the tunnel, Kiku stopped at one of the drugstores to ask if they had any gabaniazid.

“No way,” mumbled the young man behind the counter. He had a ratty sort of face. “Sold the last of it about three years back. Doubt we could sell it even if we had any left—the only thing people buy these days is Neutro. There isn’t much market for stimulants; seems all they want is to doze off.” The store was stocked to the ceiling with merchandise; in addition to the
Neutro, there were imported peasant costumes, the odd musical instrument, assorted bangles, and smoking paraphernalia. But Kiku was more interested in the framed botanical photographs that decorated the walls. One in particular showed a plant with red trumpet-shaped flowers dangling from fragile stems; “
Datura sanguinia
,” the caption read. The young guy noticed Kiku staring at it.

“It’s called ‘red bolatiero,’” he murmured. “That one next to it is a betel nut from Palau, and at the end is some kava from Fiji. Over here’s the pit of a kola nut from Guinea; that’s peyote, coca leaves from Peru, and last you’ve got joppo. Every one of them’s a fine drug, no question. Course, we don’t have any of them here.”