Haunted Legends (16 page)

I am lost, too. I have mistaken a bicycle wheel for safe harbor. No one is perfect.

It would be better if you closed your eyes. I relate more easily with the sleeping. If you could dream my story, I could lumber along the low river of your spine, snuffling out the parts that are too horrible, too radiant, too private for your witness. I could eat them weeping into your brainpan, and you would wake remembering only salt.

I don’t suppose you are tired. No? Ah, well. Suffice it to say I loved a creature, and that creature is no more. It is the sort of thing dreams were invented to wrangle.

My love was owned by a white woman. She and I met at work, as all modern lovers do, while I was on my nightly rounds. I had curled into the white woman’s arms and fixed my teeth to her mouth, working at her throat, pulling up the jellied marrow of her little housely terrors. Westerners do not have the most complex palate. She dreamed of a husband in a white uniform, a husband with a sword at his hip and also an oily black gun, a cap of gold, eyes of silver. The husband touched the sea and it glowed phosphorescent green, sickly. He did not smile at her; I ate his smile. I saw her over the shoulder of the sad little wife. She was tall and dark, standing in the corner as though she guarded her mistress’s sleep. Her figure was angular, her expression still as a soldier’s.

Rafu, my Rafu! How I have pored over that first glimpse, held it in my paws, packed it into a box with tears and red tissue, taken it out to warm me when the stars had frozen! I rested my chin on the Western woman’s shoulder, gazing at the golden-black thing that I did not yet know was Rafu. She bowed slightly. Her hinges creaked. The silk of her panels fluttered slightly in bashfulness or the night wind. A willowy green slip hung half over her face—my Rafu was a folding screen, a silk monster of beauty like statues. A
jotai,
a screen so old that one day she woke up and had a name and an address and an internal monologue. You earn these things after one hundred years or so. The world owes them to you, if you survive it. “What are you doing here, glory-of-the-evening, in this pretty pale devil’s house?”

Rafu fluttered again. There were golden tigers playing on the silk where her thighs might be. They batted at floaty, cloud-bound kanji like mice.

“Her name is Milo,” whispered my not-yet-beloved. “Her father wanted a boy. I was a present from her friend Chieko, who chose in her youth to be kind to the navy wives because they are worse than children: mute, lost, dead, rigid with stupidity, which is their only defense. Chieko loved
mikon
oranges and had a mole on her left breast. Once a boy kissed it without permission under a persimmon tree, and Chieko never forgot it—she burned warmer and brighter in that moment than she ever did again. Her mother, Kayo, whose favorite perfume was made from lotus and lemon-water, who had a husband whose face was always red and three miscarriages only I witnessed—I never told anyone—bought me from a teahouse in Yokohama, where I belonged to a little girl who turned into an old woman as if by magic. She was called Bachiko and all her kimono were pink with black cherry blossoms. She drank in secret, squatting in the secret shade of me, drinking silver things until she was sick. Her great-aunt, Aoi, loved a man from England who did not love her back, and so she married a ginger farmer whose fingers burned her, and had no children. Aoi found me in a shop in Kama-kura, by the sea, and thought that I would suffice to conceal her from her life. I have had much time to consider women. Milo is no worse than any of them.”

“Her dreams taste like the white membranes of limes.” Rafu shrugged, a peculiar raising and dropping of her slats. “She is sad. She does not speak Japanese. Her husband went to the desert months and months ago. Every day she goes to the market and brings back chocolate, a peach, and a salmon rice-ball for her dinner. She sits and eats and stares at the wall. Sometimes she watches television. Sometimes she walks three miles to Blue Street to look at necklaces in the window that she wishes someone would buy for her. Sometimes she walks along the pier to see the sunken bicycles, pinged into
ruin by invisible arrows of battleship-sonar, crusted over with rust and coral. She likes to pet people’s dogs as they walk them. That is her whole life. What should she dream of?”

“Something better.”

It is not that I thirsted for Milo’s dreams. I could have had better from any rice-cooker salesman on Blue Street, marbled with darkness and longing for kisses like maple sap. But Rafu stood in the shadows of Milo’s house, wrapped in the grassy yellow green perfume of new tatami, showing the stars through her skin, laughing when I told her the jokes Yatsuhashi had snorted to me on the morning train. I rocked on my haunches below her, and showed her all the things I could be: tapir, tiger, salaryman, shadow, water.

I forgot to fix my mouth to the sailor’s wife. Her sawdust-dreams did not glisten. She cried in her sleep, chasing ships I wished to know nothing of, lost in her tired colonial despair.

I lost weight, as lovers will do.

On the seventh night I knew my Rafu, I unfolded into a silk screen with lonely tapirs drinking from a moonlit stream painted on my panels. I wanted so to please her. We stood side by side, saying nothing, content. Delicate snow came dancing down the windows. Milo slept on her mat below us, and did not see our still, silent lovemaking.

“I can do that, too,” said Rafu coquettishly, when we had finished and sweat shone like water on our screens. “I can fold up into a tapir, a tiger, a salaryman, shadow, water. A girl.”

“Show me!”

“Not yet,” she demurred.

“Come away from this tailless old alley cat,” I begged my Rafu, resplendent in the night, golden against the dark. “I have an apartment above Blue Street—I will never throw clothing over you. I will show you the secret
Peacocks of Right Intention, who make their nests in the Admiral’s mansion and peck at him when he orders his men to stand in ridiculous lines and speak the nonsense of demonkind. He cannot see them—the poor man thinks he has eczema. It is an excellent joke. I will take you walking through the Carnival of Right Livelihood, and we will eat black sugar burnt in the Ovens of Contentment. You can take the Baku-train with me every night, and continue your study of women—I will eat only the dreams of women for your sake! Into the pachinko parlors we will go, hoof in hinge, and in the plinking of those silver balls we alone will hear the clicking movements of stars in perfect orbit, and know that nothing is chance.”

Rafu blushed—her panels blossomed with scarlet as though she could bleed. Milo snored and turned over in her sleep, murmuring in phantom agony, her brown hair caught in her wet mouth. Rafu watched her, tipping slightly toward the woman. “No, Akakabu, passion of my elderly years! I love her. I love her, and I will never leave her.”

“How can you love such a thing?”

“I love her because of her nakedness, Kabu. She has stood before me and peeled off all her clothes until she was utterly defenseless, her breasts and her shoulders and her lonely sex all for me, for my view, my love, my pity. I know that she had her tongue pierced when she was a girl, but took it out when she married. I know that her right breast is somewhat larger than her left, that she has a birthmark at the base of her spine as though someone punched her, and that she has stretch marks on her belly, but no children, for there is nothing here for her to do but eat. These are such precious things to know! I knew them about Chieko, and Kayo, and Bachiko, and Aoi, too. They all showed me their bodies, and how the world stamped itself onto them. I have not even seen your body the way my mistresses show me theirs. She has been naked before me, Kabu, and I will not abandon a naked girl to the cold.”

I admit I was angry, that it was my fault, in the end. I begrudged Rafu her naked women, her secret lovemaking in lonely houses full of women who would never see the green and purple of the Peacocks of Right Intention. I wanted to show my
jotai
that a Baku, too, can know a human that way, and
better, for no one is ever so naked as in their dreams, where everything shameful and bright glistens like sweet fat over bone.

I curled up into Milo’s heavy sleeping arms, snarling at Rafu, gloating, taking up that flaccid Western mouth in mine and sucking down all her old, buried things, her grief and her loneliness and her cream-thick guilt, her tawdry affair in Okinawa, her lost lover who used to kiss her toes as though she were an angel that might confer blessing. I ate it all, greedily, slovenly. I ate her husband who left her, his sword and his gun and his curling, saluting smile. I writhed against Milo, my black tapir-belly taut with her, hard and swollen, grinding into her, sliding off the hard little cherry pit at the base of her dreams, scraping at it, breaking my teeth on the stone of her soul.

Rafu turned away from me in shame.

Milo wrapped her arms around me and opened her eyes. “All the other wives have First Ladies’ names,” she whispered, her voice sand-slurred with sleep. “Hillary, Laura, Eleanor, Pat, Libby. What’s wrong with me?”

“You were supposed to be a boy,” I said cruelly, because I chose to be cruel, “if you had been born as you were meant to, you would get to march about with a fine rifle and shoot at things and drink whiskey and have a lovely time, and no one would ever have left you.”

“Oh,” Milo said with finality, as though it had finally been explained to her satisfaction. She fell asleep again.

I am sure it has happened before. We are creatures of stomach, after all. My mother told me when I was small and spotted that the first Baku was nothing but a great violet-translucent stomach, maybe with a bit of esophagus, and it floated over rooftops on stormy days, descending to cover sleepers like a blanket and draw up all their dreams into itself with perfect retention. In those days, no one remembered their dreams at all, so deft was the Baku in its slurping of them.

That Baku surely was blameless, but I am not. I ate too much Milo; I was so full of her my hiccups turned into anchors and dolphins and swam away through the night. Rafu rustled disgust—her gold flushed a jaundiced yellow, so deep was her disapproval of my gluttony.

I only did it to hurt you, my silken love, my Rafu, my vanished adored. I think that makes it better.

I tottered on my fat paws, skidding on the slick tatami, drunk, queasy. My skin felt too thick; I wanted to take it off, to go naked before Rafu and be loved as the women in her life had been. I deserved that, didn’t I? I careened into a wooden candlestick, bounced off a low table of red wood, bruised my snout on Rafu’s corner; she clattered to the floor.

I threw up on the grass mats and lolled in my decrepitude beside my waste.

A man lay on the floor. The substance of my retching. I vomited up Milo’s dream, and it lay on the floor in a white uniform streaked with the silvery stuff of my digestion: tears, the honey of lost days, sweat, night-semen. His officer’s cap tumbled off onto the tatami; his hair was wet and matted like a newborn.

He stirred; Rafu held her slats together in terror, as silent as she could be. The man crawled to Milo’s sleeping shape and curled into it as I had done, with the unrushed familiarity of a husband, or a frequent Baku. He kissed her hair, left streaks of silver on her neck. I watched from the shadows as he called her name and she rolled into waking, rolled into him, her face unfolding into a smile as I sometimes unfold into a man. “How are you here?” she marveled, as well she might.

“I missed you,” he murmured, slurred, unsure of English, as well he might be, having been in my stomach a moment previously.
Liar,
I thought. “I’ve been so lonely,” Milo sighed. “I hate it here. Can’t we go home?”

“Yes, of course. Tomorrow.” He was not listening to her. The sailor pulled at her frumpy nightgown, pulling her grayish, threadbare underthings away, pulling his sex from his crisp white trousers, clung with silvery dream-glue. She moaned a little, frightened, half-asleep yet.

“It’s so strange,” he gasped as he thrust awkwardly into her, with all the grace of an elephant falling upon a hapless antelope. “I was in the desert just a moment ago. Everything smelled like oil and sand. There were men on a raft; they shot at us, and all around them the sea was angry, blue and green,
phosphorescent with spilled fuel and algae, it glowed and the men’s faces were so hollow.”

Milo began to cry silently. Her body lurched with his motion.

“We shot back, we had to. I pulled their bodies out of the glowing water.” He started to laugh roughly, pushing faster against her. “And it was so weird, their skin just came off in my hands, like a coat. So soft, like they were made of nothing, with nothing inside, and all we pulled out was skin and blood, no men at all.”

“Don’t laugh, it scares me,” whispered Milo. Her husband put his hands against her ears as if to blot out the sound of his laughter, which spiraled up and higher and further and faster, until water came from his mouth and his hands, water pouring into her, the salt-sea scouring her, shells and fish and sand and blood splashing out of him, into her ears, into her womb, into her mouth. She spluttered, coughed—he pushed the sea through her, and her lips became as blue as the waves, her hair streamed like kelp, his fingers left purple anemones on her ribs. “Aren’t you happy I’m back? Why don’t you kiss me? Don’t you love me?” And he kissed her, over and over, wet, salty smacks in the dark, and above the sound of them I could hear Rafu crying, huddled like discarded furniture against the concrete wall.

The dream-vomit sat cross-legged on the floor, waiting for someone to serve him tea. Milo lay broken by him, her face swollen, water dribbling from her mouth.

“Your name is Kabu. Akakabu,” he said slowly to me. A child might well know its father. “Is my name Lieutenant?”