Coin Locker Babies (32 page)

“Kiku! You haven’t forgotten about the DATURA, right?” He nodded and then was gone. Her eyes gleaming, Anemone swirled a few bits of gritty rust around in her mouth and spat them out on the floor.

More flowers were being delivered to the dressing room: roses. “Who from this time?” Toru yelled at the delivery boy.

“From a food company, canned tuna and crab…” the boy started to explain, but Toru was no longer listening. Matsuyama was standing in the middle of the room checking the tuning on his guitar for the hundredth time. For the occasion he had painted himself from head to toe—hair, skin, and all—lavender on one side and pink on the other. John Sparks Shimoda was submerged in a deep leather couch twirling a drumstick on the tips of his fingers as if rattling an invisible cymbal floating somewhere overhead. A cake arrived, and Matsuyama sent a roadie to find a knife.

“Let’s do it!” he shouted, attacking the cake.

“You can’t eat sweet stuff before you go on stage,” warned Toru, “you’ll throw up.”

“Who gives a shit? Don’t matter if I’m puking my brains out or half-unconscious, I can still kick ass on that guitar,” he said, taking a fistful of cake in one hand and a bottle of champagne in the other. Tokumaru stood in the corner with two smooth-skinned youths trying to tie his bow tie.

Hashi, in the meantime, was pacing in a tight circle, his face slightly flushed, and holding forth at full volume to a ring of reporters and photographers. “I’m going to save the world with
my songs,” he was saying. “That’s all I’m here for: to bring comfort to the hungry, to those in pain and suffering who no longer even realize their need.” It was always like this before a concert. As he explained it, he had to empty himself of everything before he could get charged up again. And there were various ways of doing this; one, today’s, was to talk a lot of bullshit to a pack of journalists, inviting a barrage of stupid questions.

“So let me get this straight: you’re saying that your music is not just giving a bunch of Japanese kids a thrill but a way of saving the world’s starving masses?” Hashi charged around the room, eyes flashing, with two makeup people circling him, as if in orbit, to set his hair with egg whites.

“Does that make your music some kind of religion?” asked another reporter as a pair of video cameras swooped in, lights blazing, to catch a closeup of Hashi’s patent leather shoes. In the background, Kitami could be heard neighing his way through a B-flat scale. “It sounds to me like you’re calling it a religion,” the reporter persisted. “Is that fair to say?”

Neva’s voice on the intercom broke in at that point to announce five minutes to curtain. “There are fifty guards out there tonight, so no funny business and no stirring up the crowd like last time,” she warned them. Matsuyama smashed his champagne glass on the floor and ran a wet comb through his brilliant hair.

“A religion? Not at all,” said Hashi. “It’s more like an explosion in a subway station, with dead people blown all over the place and somebody’s ass hanging from the kiosk like a peach on a tree.” Hashi’s pace had speeded up.

“So you’re saying that to you salvation is an act of terrorism?” said another reporter, tapping Hashi on the shoulder to get his attention as he whirled by.

“Don’t
touch
me!” yelled Hashi. Shoving the reporter back
on his heels, he ran over to Matsuyama, grabbed the cake, and hurled it against the mirrors that lined the room. Gobs of icing splattered in every direction just as Neva rang the buzzer to signal their entrance.

“Let’s do it!” shouted Toru, winding a vinyl scarf around his neck. Kitami stopped for a second to gargle with a little Coke, before they all followed Hashi on the run.

In the first days after the start of their concert tour, newspapers around the country printed reviews along these lines:

But to someone in the audience listening to the words Hashi always started with—“A sweet blues about love and waiting for you in the rain, about worrying you’ll get wet, about waiting at a certain cafe”—it’s like a nocturne played by a blind pianist in wartime London amid a hail of buzzbombs, about the pleasure of watching, bound hand and foot, as a pretty woman types away in a sunlit room, her skin glowing, just the faintest hint of sweat on the curve of her backside… From somewhere beyond the detonations of the rhythm section, Hashi’s nocturne seems to rise out of nowhere, planting the seeds of terror in his ear. Terror. Not the fear that the bombs will get through, penetrate deep into the ground, into his bomb shelter. No, not that at all; rather, the fear that he’ll give in to the urge to see the rockets flash and go running out of the shelter into the night; the fear that he’s about to do something horrible… rape and murder that woman sitting next to him, perhaps, or set fire to his seat; fear that begins to buzz around in his head the moment Hashi starts to sing. And once it gets to him, it won’t let go, from the first scream, more
shrill than feedback, a scream that gets right under his skin, that boils the hot animal fat inside his ears and sends it pouring from his eyes and nose and mouth… Soon, every last person in the hall jumps up, staring transfixed at the stage, as if Hashi were a hypnotist. Like some ingeniously lifelike mural, the gargantuan pig gets dissected again on the dome overhead, out-sized organs pulsing to the rhythm of the bass. Why should those ropes of crimson, undulating veins and muscles remind them of the sea? Not limpid depths inhabited by schools of angelfish—not that sea, but the turbid seas of Genesis, roiling up into a leaden sky pierced now and then by flaming meteors, those ancient oceans where shreds of carbon were sparked into the first signs of life. As they listen, undersea volcanoes dye the ocean floor scarlet with belch after belch of impervious flame.

“Come!” orders Hashi. “At my feet!” says the song. You know so little, though you think you know it all. Loosen those screws in your heads and let the fat flow in. Let your bodies shake; that’s the first step, and soon you’ll be walking down the rail tracks at dawn, waist deep in the bodies of stray dogs, the wind tugging at their entrails. Don’t worry—the train will explode seconds before it runs you down, and lines of girls, dripping with amber-colored jewels, will greet you, their hair dusted with broken glass. You’re king! To hell with that tired old scene you say makes you sick. It’s a mirage, a lie, your own personal magic lantern show. You know what you’ve got to do: smash the projector, torch the whole show! You’re inches away from this pale, thin membrane and, beyond, a scummy wall and, beyond and beyond, pig guts and, beyond them all, a rainy, fruit-juice universe.

His tongue clicking sharply into the mike, Hashi reeled off the names of the band members as shreds of glittering foil rained
from the ceiling marking the end of the concert. “Thank you. Thank you,” he murmured. “We couldn’t do it without your love. Tonight I want you to pray with me for the souls of three girls attacked in a park in Yokohama almost seventy years ago. A sailor on leave butchered them, gouged out their stomachs, and jerked off inside those hollow things. Tonight, let’s pray for their souls; let’s pray for love, as only love is going to save this world, my friends. Thank you.” As Hashi finished, a line of club-wielding security guards with attack dogs flanked the stage and headed toward the front row of the audience while the band broke into their theme song.

“The story’s just begun,” Hashi sang, ratcheting up the already drum-tight atmosphere in the hall. Everyone was standing, straining, the front row on the verge of rushing the stage but held in check by the barking dogs. Then, in mid-phrase, Matsuyama launched his pick into the audience and the stage went black. The band disappeared, replaced by the guards, and in one instant the mirage vanished, bombs, pigs, animal fat and all, and the crowd, as if reluctant to be left alone with the aftermath, headed en masse for the exits, trading mindless smiles and platitudes with one another.

Hashi ran straight to the dressing room, where Neva was waiting to fold him in her arms. For a moment or so they sucked at each other’s lips, then Hashi poured half a bottle of beer over his head, draining the rest in one gulp and smashing the bottle on the floor.

“How many times do I have to tell you?” someone shouted. “Excited is one thing, but you’ve got to stop acting like some dumb kid.”

Matsuyama, after stripping to the waist, wandered over to Hashi and began licking at the beer and sweat dripping down his neck and jaw.

“So, whaddya think? Am I a genius or what?” Hashi asked him. “Have I got a throat like an aluminum bellows or what?”

Kitami was snickering as he poured a stream of beer over Shimoda, who had collapsed on the couch. Then he too smashed the bottle, adding to the layer of shards and suds that already covered the floor. When D came on the intercom to announce that he’d arranged a party in a suite on the top floor of their hotel, they made their way through the crush of groupies waving flowers and stuffed toys at them to a line of limousines waiting near the back entrance.

One of the first things D did when the schedule for a concert in some outlying area had been finalized was organize a party in honor of the local dignitaries and anyone rich enough to be worth asking. These affairs invariably started with speeches by the pols, bankers, or others of note. On this particular occasion, an old man in a tuxedo said something about sports and culture being the lubricants for smooth interchange between the large metropolitan areas and the provinces, and then everyone drank a toast with champagne or whatever drink was handy. Some of the partitions and most of the furniture had been removed from the suite, and the walls were lined with soft, deep couches filled with the well-groomed wives of doctors and businessmen, each clutching a glass. Ice sculptures in the form of birds were ranged along the table that filled the center of the room.

“It’s beyond me why a man would want to dye his hair at all,” the old fellow in the tuxedo was saying to Matsuyama, “let alone such awful colors. Maybe you can explain it to me.”

“I thought it would show up better on stage,” Matsuyama said.

“Well, I think I should tell you that I know quite a few folks
who would like to round up all the young people like you, shave their heads, shove ’em in the army, and give them a good dose of discipline,” said the old man.

“The army, huh? That an interesting gig?”

“I doubt you’d find it very interesting. You have to follow
rules
in the army. If you don’t they throw you in the guardhouse, and the next morning they take you out and stand you up in front of a firing squad.”

“That so?…” muttered Matsuyama.

“I’ve never actually
been
in the army,” the man continued, “but if I had, I wouldn’t have minded being in charge of that.”

“In charge of what?”

“The firing squad, of course. I’ve always liked the way they say ‘Ready! Aim! Fire!’ It looks so smart in the movies.”

John Sparks Shimoda was discussing Ch’ing-dynasty ceramics with a woman in a red evening gown who was married to the boss of a porcelain factory, while Kitami was describing the two acts in the floor show that was about to begin to a bigshot in a local newspaper and broadcasting company.

“One of them is a foreign stripper, and the other—at least I think it’s the same act—is this scrawny kid who shoots himself up with a muscle relaxant and then lets all comers fist him.” The short, bespectacled captain of industry was stroking his shoulder with a sweaty hand.

“You know what the headline in the morning edition of my paper’s going to be?” he asked. “‘Concert Is Smash Hit.’ That’s what it’s going to say.”

Tokumaru was deep in conversation with the president of a tennis shoe company who was apparently an old friend. Their talk moved from the state of the economy to boxing to shared memories of a certain gay brothel in Rio by the name of
Necropolis. And Toru, not for the first time, was complaining to D about being made to suck up to a bunch of old farts.

“I’ve got three groupies waiting for me back in the room. How much longer do I have to stick around and listen to this shit?”

D checked his watch. “Just be patient. It won’t go on forever,” he said, patting him on the cheek.