Coin Locker Babies (28 page)

“Getting the hang of it, Kuwayama?” asked Nakakura, mopping the sweat from his forehead during a short breather before the dirty dishes began coming back. Kiku leaned against the range and nodded. Nakakura was about three years older than him and had a cherry blossom tattooed on his left arm. “You’re a weird one, aren’t you?” he continued. “Always been so tight-lipped?” Kiku nodded again. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you. You mind?” Ignoring Kiku’s frown, he forged ahead. “Was it a real bummer—killing your own mother, I mean?…”

Kiku scowled and let the piece of cabbage he’d been fingering fall to the floor. “Drop it,” he said softly. “Gives me nightmares.”

Now it was Nakakura nodding. “I get you. Enough said. But you know, I never done anything to my old lady, and I still get
nightmares about her all the time. Drives me nuts, and sometimes I think I’d be better off if she was dead, but it’s not exactly something you can try out to see if you like it. Ends up being kinda permanent. Anyway, now I know it probably wouldn’t help any. Thanks.”

Kiku was staring at the damp floor. Next to the sink was a stack of boxes containing frozen whale meat. When they’d finished washing four hundred tin plates, the cook would probably hack the meat up with the chain saw. Kiku could already see the blizzard of ice and flesh settling gently on the vision behind his eyelids: a smooth, gory globe, stripped of hair and ears and eyes, merging somehow with the lump of meat. As soon as that hot, raw face had disappeared beneath the snow that night, the flashing had started, regular, even, matching his pulse and brighter than the flashbulbs. In between the strokes of light he’d seen another face, the face of the woman before he killed her, the one who looked like him. “Please, stop,” she’d muttered just a moment before she stuck her head in front of the barrel. He could see her, her expression utterly serious, lips forming the words: “Please, stop.” And with each flash, he could hear her. “Please, stop.” “Please, stop.” “Please, stop.” Not knowing what it was she wanted him to stop, he stopped everything, every voluntary muscle in his body.

“Kuwayama’s always spaced out,” said Yamane, coming up to join them. He too was wiping the sweat from his flushed face, and the scar on his skull had turned bright red in the heat. Under constant needling from Nakakura and Fukuda, he had finally told them the story of the operation. It seemed that during the brawl, in the process of killing the four people, he had been badly hurt—smashed in the head by a signpost, as best he could remember. At any rate, the whole left side of his skull had caved in. It was something of a miracle that he had survived at all,
and without brain damage either, but there was no saving the shattered cranium. The bits of bone were fished out of his head, and two doctors used a Bunsen burner to mold a plastic plate to match the shape of his skull.

“But you know, I used to be as spaced out as Kuwayama,” he added, leaning against the wall. The operation to insert the plate had been a success, apparently, but the front right lobe of his brain had got infected; it had taken six more operations—over a hundred hours, all told—to finally cure him. One night, after one of these operations, he’d overheard a couple of surgeons talking about his condition: “Looks like this one’s done for. No way we’re going to save him.” That was the gist of what he heard. Thinking the anesthesia hadn’t yet worn off, they’d left a
multi-angled
mirror above Yamane’s head under the oxygen tent. In it, he could see his own brain covered with a bright web of veins and arteries. It occurred to him that it looked exactly like tofu, so much so that he wouldn’t have been surprised to see chopsticks reaching out and taking a piece. The doctors were still talking, and he knew they were talking about him, but he had the distinct impression it was someone else.

“I think it was ’cause it looked so much like tofu. I stared at it till I was sure it couldn’t be me, till it didn’t matter any more. How could it, if the thing that had been thinking and feeling all the time was just a lump of tofu? I sort of switched off, pretty much like you now, Kuwayama.”

Kiku and Yamane had “tasting duty” for the noon meal. This meant taking samples of the day’s fare around to the section chiefs in Administration and Supervision as well as to the warden himself; the plates were arranged on a red tray and covered with a glass dome before being delivered to the appropriate offices. On any given day the menu might include a mixture of seven parts
rice and three parts barley, salt broiled herring, boiled beans with cabbage, and seaweed soup. The warden took a small mouthful of each and then told Kiku to water his plants. Yamane’s job was to feed his pet sparrows and change the paper in the bottom of their cage.

Taking the kettle the warden handed him, Kiku went to fill it at the sink. When he’d finished watering the geraniums, Yamane called him over to have a look: one of the birds was splashing around in the fresh water, but the other was perched on his palm pecking at a pile of seeds. The warden had left the office for a minute, and Yamane kept glancing nervously at the door. After letting the bird poke around a bit, he suddenly closed his hand and withdrew it from the cage. With the other hand, he began gently stroking the sparrow’s head since it had started to struggle and peck at his finger.

“You try it,” he said to Kiku when the bird had calmed down. It hardly flinched as Kiku reached out to take it, and when it had settled on his hand, Yamane leaned down to put his ear next to the bird’s breast.

“You know, Kuwayama, I’ve been pretty wild since I was a kid, but it’s been a lot worse since the operation. It’s like I’m crazy almost… You know why people sleep, Kuwayama? This doctor told me once: it’s partly to rest the body, but it’s also because the brain needs to rest too, deep down. Seems if you don’t rest the brain deep down, a man turns mean, crazy. I guess that’s what happened to me after my operation; it was pretty bad for a while—I don’t remember all of it, but I remember the attacks and how crazy I’d get. And it wasn’t like I was breaking stuff or beating the nurses with chairs—it was more like there was something strange that was filling up my whole body, and I would die if I didn’t find a way to let it out. It was like my body wouldn’t
listen; they had me tied up the whole time, but I know if I’d ever got loose, I’d have killed dozens of people. Later, when I was a bit more used to it, it got so I could tell when one of these fits was coming on, and I thought up a lot of different ways to try to control them. I tried counting, and I tried Zen. I even used to try singing. But you know what worked best? What do you think? It was listening to the sound of a heartbeat—mine, somebody else’s, didn’t matter, whenever I got desperate that’s what I did. One time my wife brought our son to the hospital; he was just four months old at the time, but he had this great little heartbeat—it really got to me. It’s that baby’s heartbeat I’d try to remember, and somehow that made it all right.”

Kiku put his ear to the bird’s breast. He could feel the warmth of the tiny body and hear the heart, quick yet faint, like the sound of a small engine far off in the distance.

“Kuwayama, are you fast?” Fukuda asked Kiku one night during their free time before bed. He was trying to put together a relay team to represent Food Service No. 3 in the upcoming field day. “You used to be a pole vaulter, right?” Kiku looked at his shoes and said nothing. “If you’re really fast, we could make a killing.” The relays were one of the few chances the men had to wager their rations—candy, underwear, tennis shoes—and parlay them into a real horde. Fukuda explained the situation to him: “The counselors’ team has won three years running—they’re the favorites. Then there’s the body shop; they’ve got at least one guy who’s a ringer—used to be a professional bike racer. Last fall they missed winning by a nose. Hayashi, Nakakura, and I have teamed up with a guy from Food Service No. 2, but if you’re really bad-ass fast, you’re in. You see what this could mean? Since nobody knows anything about you, we could clean up. If we win, we’ll all have chocolate and shit coming out our asses… So, be straight with us: you really fast?”

“I’ll run if I have to,” said Kiku looking up.

“That’s not what I’m asking. I want to know if you’re
fast
.”

“Doesn’t matter to me one way or the other,” said Kiku, not quite to the point. Nakakura pushed in close, clearly pissed off.

“You don’t get it, do you? We’re gonna
bet
on this race! If you’re fast, we’ll be able to stuff our faces with the payoff,” he
yelled. Reining him in, Yamane asked Kiku his best time at a hundred meters.

“It’s been more than a year since I was clocked, but I’ve done 10.9 three times,” said Kiku. The men grouped around him gasped, and Fukuda immediately put his name on the list. Though he looked a bit put out, Kiku made no objection.

“That’s one weird sonovabitch,” Nakakura muttered as he spread out his bedding. “Weird as
hell
, I tell you. If he’s so fucking fast, why didn’t he jump up and down and tell us he’d run right at the start?

“You know what the guards call you?” he said, raising his voice so Kiku could hear. “‘Lobo’; that’s short for ‘Lobotomy.’ You know—when they take out part of your brain and make a vegetable out of you, the way they do with guys who get fits and things? Lobo, that’s what they call you.”

There was a fair amount of sand scattered about the athletic field at the detention center, apparently brought in over fifty years earlier when the land had been leveled and the soil prepared for crops. It was a fine sand that blew up in a strong wind and might have long since washed away in heavy rains if there hadn’t been a high concrete wall to keep it in place. Kiku scooped up a handful and tossed it in the air just as Fukuda came up.

“Starting to get hot,” Fukuda said. Nodding, Kiku went into his warm-ups, stretching his legs, doing a few jumping jacks and high-kick sprints, loosening up his ankles, and giving his Achilles tendon a good rub.

“Looks real professional,” said Nakakura. Kiku’s muscles seemed to remember on their own what they were supposed to be doing.

There were six four-man teams in the heat, each man running
one lap or two hundred meters. The order for Food Service No. 3 would be Fukuda, Nakakura, and Hayashi, with Kiku as anchor.

“Hey, Kuwayama, you running in this?” said a guard who was standing nearby. “Don’t freak out in the middle of the race and drop the baton.”

The runners lined up, the gun fired, and they were off. Fukuda made a good start and managed to hold on to second place during his lap, perhaps because the body shop team and the counselors were in the next heat. If they finished in the first two places in this heat, they would meet them in the final. Nakakura wasn’t far behind when he got the hand-over from Fukuda, but he didn’t have as much speed, and the runner from the woodshop team was soon threatening to pass him. Sensing the danger, Nakakura tried to trip the guy up as he came level, but it was Nakakura instead who lost his balance, and when the passing runner bumped his shoulder it sent him sprawling on his face. By the time he was up and running again, he was last, more than twenty meters behind the leader. Hayashi and Fukuda gave an audible groan.

“It’s your own fault. You were the one doing the tripping,” they reminded him on his return, when he had to be restrained from laying into the woodshop man.

Hayashi managed to move them into fifth place, but the distance between them and the lead was still almost twenty meters when Kiku stepped out on the track, took a couple of deep breaths and, with Hayashi about five meters away, started running. The other teams could be heard joking that Lobo would probably hit the dirt as well, until they saw him move past one runner almost before they realized he’d set off.

“Never can tell,” murmured Fukuda as they watched him streak away. His form was perfect, his upper body smooth
and steady while his legs did the work. Not even a glimmer of excitement crossed his face as he passed a second runner, but a stir had started in the crowd. As he sped along, Kiku’s gray prison uniform fluttered around him as if ready to shred under the strain. His speed made the other runners seem almost motionless by comparison, and at the finish line he had moved up to second place. His teammates ran up to hug him while the other prisoners sat looking dazed in the stands. Finally someone stood up and called in his direction: “Hey, Lobo! You’re hot shit!” And soon there was a crowd around him as he tried to leave the field.

“You some kind of Olympic star or something?”

“You a pro or what?”

Kiku, not even breathing hard after the race, wiped a bit of sweat off his forehead and looked around at them, as if their questions bothered him. Just then, Yamane came running up.

“Way to kick ass,” he said, cuffing him playfully on the back of the head. Kiku shut his eyes as a gust of wind blew sand across the field. His skin, cooled by the sweat, was covered with gooseflesh. He opened his eyes again just a crack, but the sand had obscured the world outside and the circle of prisoners around him had become dense, dark shadows backed by a swirling haze. The shadows bore down on him, pointing shadow fingers at the end of shadow arms. Kiku felt faint and looked down at the ground. He had an odd feeling that someone was crouching nearby just out of sight, barely hidden by the pale sand. The thought made him shudder: a woman, no, a red ball of flesh that had been a woman. Brutally vivid, the image, the same one as always, began to flash in Kiku’s head.

“Kiku? Something wrong? You feeling sick?” Yamane was right beside him staring into his white face. “You sick from running?”

“Why are they all crowding me?” Kiku managed to get out.
There were even more people around him now, drawn by his odd behavior. Yamane put his arm around his shoulder.

“They’re all impressed, that’s all. Never seen anybody run like that before.”

“Leave me alone,” Kiku pleaded. “Quit watching me. I haven’t done anything.” He lunged toward a gap in the line but it closed before he could get through.

“You’re good enough to be on TV,” said one of the crowd, grabbing him by the shoulders and shaking him for emphasis. Kiku broke free and squatted down, folding his arms above his head and shielding himself with his jacket. At this point one of the guards arrived and made the crowd back off.

“Kuwayama, you nuts or something? What the hell’s going on here?” he demanded, giving him a shake. Kiku was as still as a rock.

“It’s the rays of the sun, at sundown,” said a prisoner standing nearby. “These guys freeze when the rays start zapping them; then they start foaming at the mouth and go all crazy.”

Kiku was carried to the infirmary still huddled up like a fetus. His body was trembling and covered with cold sweat, and he seemed unable to speak. The doctor tried to give him an injection to calm him down, but his arms and legs were knotted up and the needle bent before it could reach a vein. His teeth had begun to chatter, so an attendant stuffed a towel in his mouth to keep him from biting his tongue. His teammates had followed him into the infirmary.

“Doc, will he be able to run in the finals?” Nakakura asked the question that was on all their minds. The doctor laughed.

“Are you kidding? I don’t even know if he’ll snap out of this or not.”

“Excuse me,” said Yamane, stepping forward, “but I was in a
mental hospital for six months and I once treated a guy like this with a special technique they use in karate to bring people round. Mind if I give it a try on him?” The guard and the doctor mulled it over, but after Yamane assured them there was no risk involved, they allowed him to proceed. As soon as he had the go-ahead, he grabbed Kiku from behind and felt around with his thumb just at the point where the head and neck come together. When he’d found the right spot, he gave a sharp yell and dug in. In response, Kiku’s whole body twitched, he threw back his shoulders, and his face jerked up toward the ceiling. And, just as suddenly, all four limbs shot out, his eyes popped open, and his lips began to move. Quickly, Yamane bent down and pulled the towel out of his mouth.

“Kiku, can you hear me? If you can, blink your eyes. I’m trying to help you, you hear?” Kiku blinked.

“You afraid of something?” Yamane asked next. Again Kiku blinked. “What I want you to do is scream as loud as you can, so loud you think your guts are gonna come out. Trust me, it’ll help.” Yamane delivered his instructions in a strange, deliberate, unaccented tone; he spoke as though reading his lines, and the sound was somehow remote, as if coming through the wall from the next room. Kiku blinked once more, then let out a scream that made the bed shake. The high, hoarse cry went on for what seemed a long time and then died away, leaving Kiku’s shoulders heaving. He had begun to cry.

“What’s scaring you?” Yamane whispered next to his ear. “Try to spit it out. As long as it’s stuck in your throat, it’ll go on bothering you. You’ve got to try to get it out.”

Kiku shook his head violently.

“Listen, Kiku. Get real. You’re like a baby right now. If you give up, if you let this thing beat you, it’s all over. The second you
give in, it’ll be hell for you. You’ve got to spit out whatever it is that’s eating you.”

“I… I…” gasped Kiku, his neck arched like someone with rabies.

“That’s right…
you
. You’re scared to death of something, you’re shaking like a leaf and bawling like a baby. You don’t have to pretend with me. I want to help. What is it you keep seeing? What’s got you scared shitless?”

“It’s a face,” Kiku managed.

“Whose face?” urged Yamane.

“A woman’s face, and she’s looking at me.”

“Who is this woman?”

“I don’t know.”

“You do too. You’ve got to know her.”

“But I don’t. I really don’t.”

“Just say it! You
know
her!”

“Dammit, I don’t! Her face blinks on and off, like a light. Shit! Shiiiiit! It’s my mother! But I
don’t
know her. She carried me nine months, but I
don’t know her
! We only met once; how could I know her? She’s wearing this bright red sweater, and her face—it’s bright red too—blood red. It’s not even a real face, it’s a big red egg, no eyes, no nose, no ears, no hair, no nothing! I don’t know any woman like that. But
that’s
what I can’t get out of my head, that bloody mess. And it’s talking to me, telling me to stop. ‘Please, stop,’ it keeps saying over and over and over. But I don’t know what it is I’m supposed to stop. How should I? Stop
what
?!”

Yamane gently wiped away the sweat on Kiku’s forehead and around his mouth. “Can you hear me, Kiku?” he asked again. Kiku blinked. “OK. Now listen carefully and do exactly what I tell you. You’ve got to chase this picture out of your head, and
the words along with it. I want you to have nothing in your head but sounds… Now, what do you hear?”

“Your voice… Yamane’s voice.”

“Is that all? Listen carefully.” Kiku closed his eyes.

“I can hear people shouting.”

“They’re playing games on the field. Anything else?”

“Cars, or maybe a big truck, and horns.”

“What else?”

“Birds singing.”

“That’s right, they’re in the trees outside. But I’m sure you can hear other stuff. What else?”

“Footsteps, but soft, like somebody wearing slippers or barefoot. The bed squeaking, your breath, someone swallowing, some other people breathing, a glass or something rolling on a table, the wind, a flag fluttering, kids’ voices, and maybe somebody kicking a ball, a rubber one that needs air in it, and bells… or my own ears ringing… no, somewhere over the hill there’re bells ringing. I’m sure of it: bells.”

“And how are you feeling?” Yamane asked.

“Now I can hear your voice, I feel all relaxed.”

“Great!”

“And I can hear the rain.” It wasn’t raining. “Raindrops, falling right here near my head. Big, fat ones, and they sound loud, but gentle too—nice, steady raindrops.”

“Are you sure it’s rain?” asked Yamane.

“Sure. I’ve heard it before. Seems like I heard it when I was just a little kid.”

“That so? I think I get it now… Kiku, how about a little nap?” he said, signaling the doctor to inject a sedative. Kiku twitched slightly as the needle pricked his skin, but a moment later his whole body went limp.

He had the feeling that he had become a tiny bug crawling along the ground. His bug ears were filled with the dripping sound, and before he quite knew what was happening, he’d been sucked into a huge drop. The sound grew louder and the woman’s face appeared. “Please, stop,” she repeated. Kiku did; he ceased all activity, reverting to the self he’d been five seconds earlier. And that’s the way he stayed, being himself, only five seconds ago. As he was sucked further down into the drop, the water began to darken, becoming at last a brilliant red—shimmering, scarlet water shot through with rays of light. As himself five seconds before, Kiku was sinking, sinking at a fearful rate, down into the depths of this slimy, thick red water.

Suddenly, he remembered and let out a shout. Everyone in the infirmary turned to look as he sat up in bed.

“What’s going on?” the doctor said. “That shot should have knocked him out.” Kiku rubbed his eyes, banged the sides of his head, and waggled it about. He tried to stagger out of bed, pushing the doctor’s arms away. Feeling as though every bone in his body had been broken and his blood turned to ice, he slumped weakly to the floor. Yamane did his best to prop him up.