Coin Locker Babies (29 page)

“You’d better try to get some sleep,” he said as Kiku fell against him, his legs sliding out from under him in different directions. His tongue felt thick in his mouth.

“I… I…’ mmm gonnna runn noww.”

Somehow Yamane managed to persuade the doctor and the guard. “Don’t you see? He’s
got
to run! This is the first thing he’s wanted to do since he got here.” Wrapped in Yamane’s arms, Kiku stumbled outside.

“Please, let me go,” he said finally; “I can walk by myself.” On his own, Kiku swayed about but managed to keep on his feet.
With infinite care he began to massage his legs. “How long till the race?” he asked.

“Seven minutes or so,” said Nakakura.

“Seven minutes to get my blood flowing,” murmured Kiku.

“Hey, you sure you’ll be able to run?”

“Just look,” said Kiku, straightening his back and straining every nerve to make his limbs obey. The drab material of his uniform clung to the muscles knotted along his arms and thighs as his whole body became a rigid pole. In that posture, he leaned forward precariously, but just as he was about to crash to the ground, one leg shot out to catch him: the perfect sprinter’s form. Running is just sticking one leg out after the other so you don’t fall, he told himself. If you can keep going flat out, you’ll never fall. It’s a safe bet that the first ape ever to struggle up off all fours was actually a sprinter. Gazelle, I’m going to run…

Fukuda, in the lead-off spot, ran third behind the counselors’ team which was a clear favorite and the body shop which was a strong second. Meanwhile, Kiku was still rubbing his arms and legs, pausing occasionally to splash water on his head. Yamane came over to check on him. “Sure you’re up to this?” he asked.

Nakakura took the baton with Hayashi screaming that he couldn’t fall this time and managed to hold on to third place, though the pair in front increased their lead. As Hayashi started his lap, Kiku straightened up and walked out onto the track. He would still be in third place when he got the baton, about seven or eight meters behind the leader and only three behind the body shop man. While they waited, the anchor for the body shop, a small guy whose thighs, nonetheless, were thicker than Kiku’s, turned to have a word with him.

“You take this seriously?” he asked. “Not me. No prize money at stake, no reason to get too serious. Don’t go getting a big head if you pass me. I’m just out here for the hell of it.”

The counselors’ anchor was first to get away, then the biker, and finally Kiku. The biker made a tremendous start and quickly closed the gap, but the first-place runner refused to let him pass. Kiku was creeping up on both of them, but he hadn’t been able to shake the effects of the drug completely and his form was off, his arms and legs felt heavy. He was desperately hoping to catch a through draft and let the wind carry him along; if he could find just the right spot, he could slip in between the other air currents. The trick was to make yourself denser, close up your pores, the very gaps between cells, and allow yourself not to be pushed forward by the wind but actually borne along by it. Or at least that was the way it felt.

On the second curve, Kiku swung wide left. As he did so, he seemed to lose his balance, his arms began to flail, and his left foot missed a step, but in the instant he started falling he managed to get his other foot under him and catch himself with a powerful kick that sent a shock through his body and finally woke him up. His head cleared; he could feel himself settle into the cool shaft of air he’d been searching for. In the straightaway, Kiku pulled up behind the leaders. With a burst of speed he let himself slip between the cracks left by the other runners; everything around him seemed to shrink, the world became pale, opaque, two-dimensional, and, for a moment, almost peaceful. The speed had churned up the passing scenery and somehow recast it with his own inner self mixed into it; it was like standing in a pitch-black room and the light being suddenly turned on—the darkness retreating too fast for the eye to see it becoming his own shadow, something taking solid shape. The sand, the two runners just ahead, the bellowing spectators, the cell-blocks, the trees shimmering with soft leaves, the high gray wall all around, and beyond that a smudge of oily smoke rising into the sky…
even Kiku himself—everything seemed to contract at once, and in its place an incandescence, like a light bulb shrinking the surrounding darkness, was kindled in his head. Revealed was a strange, slippery, crimson animal, its coat glowing at the ends; the stadium the animal’s entrails, a spleen; the track with its cloud of dust a lymphatic vessel. The runners were white blood cells and germs… And Kiku remembered, remembered it all in great detail. What had that woman been telling him? Wasn’t it to stop everything and go back to the person he’d been five seconds before? Back. By turning into a lump of red flesh, by having all the features ripped from her face, hadn’t she been trying to tell him something?—to go back upstream, to swim against the current, back into the womb, into her womb, and remember. Yes, that was it! That was what she’d been trying to say. Remember… that
sound
, the one he and Hashi had heard in the padded room. It wasn’t the sound of raindrops outside the window, Hashi; but you were right, it was distorted, heard at a distance, through layers of obstruction, and it would give whoever heard it peace. It was the sound of a human heart beating; that’s what we heard in the hospital: the sound of a heart. It was the beating heart of that woman doomed to be shot one day by the baby she threw away. That woman who was my mother. That woman who had me and left me, in the summer, in a box; that woman who left me for dead, but was trying to teach me something by dying herself, becoming a raw, rubbery thing. In that one instant she was teaching me everything I’d need to know to go on living after I’d been left alone. I can see now: nothing else mattered for her; she stood up and came to me, no one else; and it was for me alone that she spoke. She was a wonderful mother…

As they entered the final straightaway, Kiku swung wide, and in a few strides he passed the two men ahead of him. Even after
he crossed the finish line, he went on running, the tape fluttering around his chest. His teammates let out a cheer and surged toward him, but Kiku still wanted to run. His body felt light, as if he could have jumped the gray prison wall without even using a pole. Propelled forward by an energy that seemed to course up through his legs, he ran straight to the wall and hurled the red baton as hard as he could, as if draining every last bit of strength in his body. The baton rose in a high arc, caught the sunlight for a moment, then tumbled out of sight.

Hashi’s records were selling like hot cakes. His fifth single and second album broke all sorts of sales records, and Mr. D’s office was besieged by distributors asking for extra stock. Hashi and Neva had an official wedding ceremony, and D threw a lavish reception; he also installed them in a condominium that took up one whole floor of an apartment tower. Preparing for the reception, he had planned to invite virtually everyone Hashi had ever known: the nuns from the orphanage, Kuwayama, classmates from school, his friends in Toxitown, even the other hustlers who had hung out at The Market. But Hashi refused in no uncertain terms, ripping up the invitations before they could be sent.

“What do you want to go and do that for?” asked D. “You know what the word ‘mankind’ means? Means you’re kind to your fellow man. You’re the person you are today because of all those people, and if you think you got here all by your lonesome, you’re dead wrong.”

“Sorry,
you’re
the one who’s wrong,” said Hashi. “I’ve changed, see? Up to now, everything about my life was a lie. So naturally the idea of meeting all those people from that part of my life gives me the creeps.” The reception went ahead as planned, in an enormous hall decorated with dozens of ice sculptures, but at Neva’s insistence the wedding ceremony itself was just the two of them at the local shrine near their new apartment.

The honeymoon in Alaska and Canada was postponed for a year when it couldn’t be worked into Hashi’s packed schedule of recording sessions, television and radio appearances, filming, and a six-month concert tour. It was, in fact, Neva who made the schedule, going against D’s recommendation that Hashi get some rest. She’d come to the conclusion that it would be better not to give him any time to stop and brood about everything that had happened in the past few months. “At the moment,” she told D, “he’s like a guy who can’t swim who gets thrown in a fast-flowing stream. Rather than dragging him out and letting him rest, it makes more sense to leave him where he is a while and let him learn to swim. If it turns out he’s not up to it and drowns, that’s just proof he wasn’t fit to be out in the water anyway.

“Going on tour is murder, but that’s where real musicians get made. The longer you’re on the road, the more the towns all start to look alike. To make it, you’ve got to be able to put up with the same songs, the same bump and grind night after night. And in the end, even the excitement of the crowds doesn’t get you off any more. When you get to the point that you’re totally strung out, you have to ask yourself if it’s really worth it, if you really like the life.”

A good deal of attention was paid to putting together a band, with Hashi giving D very specific instructions as to style and personnel. The sound was to be as close as possible to French pop groups of the early sixties, with simple, straightforward drums (lots of snare), a muddy bass line, a jazzy guitar (more Django Reinhardt than Jimi Hendrix), a sax, and an accordion—exactly like the band Johnny Hallyday took on tour to Denmark in 1963. He also had two conditions for selecting the musicians: they had to be financially secure and they had to be gay. When D wanted to know why, he refused to say. Neva supposed Hashi wanted the
band members more or less to fall in love with him. As for the money part, perhaps he was afraid that younger guys joining the group to get rich would create problems. Then, too, his peculiar style might not suit most musicians. For Hashi, the idea that music could express human emotions was bullshit; in fact, the whole idea of human emotions made him feel a bit queasy. “Let the sound stand on its own,” he was always telling the players. “What I want is a sound that’s cut loose from you as people, as humans playing music; what I want is naked sound, period—sound washed clean of your sweat glands, your body heat.” His own reasons for setting these conditions were that only well-heeled musicians would take radical risks, and that if they were all gay there was less chance of their turning against him. He had what could be called an intimate knowledge of the art of handling gay men.

The drummer they chose was a thirty-one-year-old Japanese American named John Sparks Shimoda whose day job was running an antique shop specializing in Ch’ing dynasty pieces. Shimoda had been playing drums since he was eight, and in his teens, while living on the West Coast, had actually sat in with the Lee Connitz group. Six years earlier, he had come to Japan with his lover and patron, the head of the Japanese branch of a fountain pen company. Though he only worked off and on, he had continued to keep his hand in as a studio musician. The bass player was a twenty-nine-year-old photographer named Toru who had started as a hairdresser and gone to the States to take pictures of hair fashions. He came back with three new habits: jazz bass, cocaine, and sleeping with men. Six years ago he had been given a suspended sentence for possession. In a pinch, he could make it with women too. On guitar was Yuji Matsuyama, twenty-two, the only son of the owner of a large firm that provided security guards for the huge industrial complexes along the coast east of
Tokyo. Matsuyama had had private guitar lessons beginning in elementary school; Wes Montgomery was his idol. He, too, was capable of sex with women so long as they were thin and relatively odor-free. The sax player was Hiroshi Kitami, twenty-one, the scion of a long line of doctors who was forced to break with family tradition because he was color-blind and couldn’t get into medical school. The failure had led to his parents’ divorce, which resulted in Kitami living with his mother, who managed several condominiums. After dropping out of music school where he had studied clarinet, he had gone on tour as the accompanist for a chanson singer. He was just back, and free. Finally, the accordion slot was taken by Shizuya Tokumaru. Tokumaru, sixty-two, was well known as a composer, and with over a dozen hits to his credit was able to live comfortably on his royalties. He had got his start in a tango orchestra while still at school, and his arrangement of “Olé Guapa” was still something of a legend in postwar tango history. In addition to his musical notoriety, he was a regular at The Market in Toxitown and known as a connoisseur of beautiful boys. Once a year he made a pilgrimage to Rio de Janeiro to sample the local talent.

When the players had been picked, Hashi gave the group a name: Träumerei.

Almost immediately, Träumerei took off on five weeks of closed rehearsals at D’s studio in the Izu highlands, and from the very start Hashi was pleased with the way things went. D had promised to put together the best band that money could buy and he’d kept his promise. Each of the five musicians brought an uncommon sensitivity to his playing (which Hashi attributed partly to sexual orientation), and as time went by he could feel his voice wrapping around their sound. There were none of the irritations that had routinely cropped up with previous bands,
and it was a treat to be able simply to describe what he had in mind—an intro like the sound of rain on a stormy spring night, say—and hear it pouring out of their instruments.

“You guys are fabulous! Real poets!” he told them. As the rehearsals progressed, his enthusiasm grew.

The studio was large enough for each man to have his own room. Wake-up call was at 11:00
A.M
., but Matsuyama, the guitarist, was up by nine even if they’d rehearsed until nearly dawn the night before. He had a morning regime that included a strenuous workout combining calisthenics and karate, but he went for an occasional ride on his motorbike as well. In general, he was the quietest of the group, and often, before the others crawled out of bed, he could be seen out on the lawn that sloped down to the coast road sipping tea and watching the birds peck at pieces of apple he’d set out for them. The last up was usually Toru who would invariably make his appearance, singing, only after all the others were at the breakfast table and the cook was about to go rouse him forcibly. The lyrics were always the same: “Hey, baby! Let me squeeze your lemon juice, till it flows down round your feet…” His silk shirt and flannel pants reeked of aftershave. Toru, unlike Matsuyama, could seldom keep his mouth shut, and it made little difference to him who was listening.

“Hey, Kitami, watch that second beat in the third bar of ‘Rust.’ Don’t blow it, you hear? Eggs sunnyside up, again?… Any of you guys have a tape of the ’79 Grammies? I’m trying to remember who won the gospel award… By the way, did you know that TWA is the only airline that lets cats ride inside with the passengers? Rest of them don’t allow any kind of pets at all.”

Breakfast lasted until late, but half an hour after it was over, rehearsal started and continued without a break until dinner. Each man had his instrument, his score, his own sound, but it was
generally left to Kitami to make sure the number added up to a coherent whole and moved along as it was meant to; not because he was especially good at this but because no one else was much interested in doing it. The role fell to the youngest player partly because he hero-worshiped Hashi, the only person younger, and seemed determined to serve as his go-between with the band. During the session he would stand close to Hashi and repeat every instruction that came from his mouth as if through a loudspeaker:

“That guitar riff needs to sound more metallic… And see if you can go easy on the bass from the second bar where the accordion comes in… And put a little heat into that final drum roll, could you?”

The reminders might almost have been unnecessary since the other four seemed quite willing and able to give Hashi the sound he wanted, that stripped-down sound without a trace of sweat or blood in it. In fact, it was often Kitami who, for all his eagerness, found himself odd man out in this group with its cool, crisp, mechanical sound. After a particularly frantic sax solo that stood out from the seamless line, the others would give him a hard time, obliging Hashi sometimes to come to his rescue, patting him on the back as he looked around sheepishly and telling him he’d done “just fine.”

In the first week of rehearsals, Neva phoned D three times.

“Things seem to be coming together pretty much along the lines Hashi had in mind, but something’s still bothering me… there’s something missing. The band is too tight, too perfect. It’s not the kind of thing that works in a concert; you’ll have half the audience asleep in their seats and the other half heading for the doors. Hashi has no idea what it means to sing in front of a crowd that size.” But each call produced the same response from D.

“I don’t want you to say anything until Hashi realizes the
problem himself. And don’t worry about it; those guys in his band aren’t likely to sit around and just take orders forever. He’ll hear about it from them soon enough.”

Around seven, the tall cook would march into the practice session and wave perfunctorily to indicate that dinner was ready. Before their period of seclusion began, they had all been given the option of ordering a special, personalized menu, but only John Sparks Shimoda had availed himself of the opportunity, the rest being content to eat whatever the cook put in front of them. Shimoda the gourmet, however, had ordered several cases of wine and other provisions to satisfy his needs. Nor was it just in the matter of taste that Shimoda seemed a little different from the rest. Though his features looked Japanese enough, his hair was almost silver and his skin was pale and thin, revealing a net of bluish veins below. He also had a morbid fear of dirt that nearly made him vomit once when he happened to notice dark smudges under Matsuyama’s fingernails. While the others usually finished dinner as quickly as they could and went off to do other things, Shimoda would linger at the table savoring whatever dish had been prepared for him with only Neva for company. She, it seemed, was the only one who could put up with endless conversations about porcelain, screens, ivory carvings and other Chinese antiques.

There was a two-hour break following dinner, during which Hashi studied videos of various lighting effects that might be used on the tour: lights thrown from spherical mirrors, lasers, a device that resembled a funhouse mirror, a 3-D film projected on a dome, and a machine that cast huge silhouettes of the band on a screen. Hashi finally came up with an idea to run by the design crew: a film of pigs being dissected, projected on the inside of a huge domed screen, combined with a pump that spewed out glittery, metallic confetti.

While Hashi was watching videos, Matsuyama used to go for a walk, sometimes returning dripping wet from a dip in the sea. Kitami religiously practiced scales on his sax, while Shimoda played chess by himself. Toru would call his lover or watch TV or amuse himself creating a new style for Neva’s hair; he seemed somewhat at a loss, not having enough players for a game of mahjong. Tokumaru read books on gardening or called in a masseuse from a nearby inn before lying down for a nap. But once the rest period was over, they all got back to work again until three in the morning or later.

When Hashi and Neva were finally alone in their room, Neva often began haranguing him about the band:

“Hashi, I know you’re pretty pleased with things, but I’m telling you, I know this business, and at this rate Träumerei will end up self-destructing in no time. You haven’t even been together ten days and already the band sounds like it’s twenty years old. It’s too neat, too cold-sounding, like a bunch of corpses up there playing something they’ve played a million times before.”

“You think I can’t hear it?” said Hashi, who was already much more subdued than he had been when rehearsals had started. “I began to hear it myself a few days ago, but I don’t know what to do about it. In the beginning I couldn’t believe how good they were, just about perfect. Now I keep thinking they must be laughing at me behind my back.”

“Well, you had me fooled. It looked to me like you were sailing along loving every minute of it. But I don’t think you realize just how much energy it takes to make a concert tour work. At the level you’re playing at now, you’d never make it beyond the first show.”

“So you’re saying we need to pull together, up the energy level and really work as a group?” asked Hashi.