Haunted Legends (17 page)

“No.” I walked out of the shadow of the American television stand and sat on my haunches next to him. “Your name is Gabriel Salas, but you’re not him, not really.”

“No, I know that. If I were Gabriel Salas I would still be in the desert, and the sea would be glowing, and I would be able to see cities in the distance, full of crumbling and canny birds.”

“You’re a dream. Do you understand that?”

“Whose dream?”

“Your wife’s. Look at what she dreams you will do to her, and what you have done in her dreaming.”

The dream-sailor looked down at his wife. His expression was blank.

“I loved her.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t love her anymore. You can’t love meat.”

“That’s your business.”

“What do I do now, Akakabu?”

“This is the Paradise of the Pure Land. You might start with Right Thought. This is also Yokosuka. You might start with burying your wife and lighting incense for her.”

“That does not sound like something I would do. Instead, I am hungry.”

“You are hungry because you came out of me, and I am always hungry.”

“I am going to the city, then. To eat things I like.”

“What sort of things do you like?”

Lieutenant Gabriel Salas cocked his head thoughtfully to one side. He picked up his officer’s cap and put it on. “Peacocks. Butterflies. Black sugar. Right Thought.”

He strode from the house, his spine straight and proud, his steps turning south toward Blue Street.

When he had gone, Rafu crawled from the corner of the room, her slats digging into the tatami. As she dragged herself the slats of fine dark wood became fingers breaking their nails on the woven grass, her silk screens became shoulders, a stomach, a strong back. She stood up, unfolding into a woman with long, hinged arms, accordioning out from her sweet torso in hanging, tiger-painted screens that ended in graceful hands. She sank down over Milo’s drowned body.

“Save her,” my Rafu wept. “Save her because of her nakedness, how bare she was before me, and how I loved her smaller breast.”

“It’s no good, concealer-of-my-heart. I only know how to eat things.”

The Paradise of the Pure Land exists within Yokosuka as hair caught in a brush. The teeth of the city rise tall through the tangles and think nothing of
them, but deep in the comb, long onyx strands wind and snarl. It is, of course, possible to yank all these strands free with a pitiless fist. They will not protest.

Rafu and I followed the dream of Gabriel through Yoshikura-Chuo and along the highway, though the wet, dank tunnel and up the jungled terraces. He was not hard to follow, being loud and foreign. He ate cherry trees along the way, opening his jaw and swallowing them whole as I might. When he reached the city, he seized in one hand a Peacock of Right Intention, squirming blue and green, and in the other a young girl coming home from a date with an enlisted American on the sprawling grey base. He shoved each into his mouth like two legs of one golden chicken.

On Blue Street, he ate hats, belts, rice cookers, kerosene lamps, lightbulbs, expensive Italian shoes, the Grocers of Perfect Balance, aquariums, streetlamps, Prostitutes of Pure Mind, the Motorcycles of Holy Judgment. Rafu wrinkled her new nose and clapped her screen-arms.

“Is this what you are like, on the inside?” she said.

“This is what everyone is like on the inside,” I sighed.

“It’s not what I’m like!”

“That is because you are new. You did not have a stomach for one hundred years. You are only just learning how to fill it. You do not yet know it can never be filled.”

Just ahead of us, the dream-Gabriel unhinged his jaw and swallowed a drink machine. It expired with a red whine. “Will he eat us all?”

“Yes,” I said calmly. “He is a dream; he does not know this is not a dream. His real self is somewhere impossibly hot, dreaming of his soft, plain wife who is not named after a First Lady. He eats up the world with a grey boat and a fine cap. Dreams are more literal. More honest.”

“Why are you not afraid?”

“Because I know a thing about the Pure Land he does not.” Rafu took my tapir-form into her screen-arms and kissed my ardent snout. I unfolded into a man in her arms, to match her, to please her. I wanted so to please her.

There is no more sacred place in the Pure Land of Yokosuka than the pink palaces of the pachinko parlors. I would have taken Rafu there, to meditate
with me in the blue haze of the electronic screens and the heady cigar smoke. Here, the bodhisattva practice Right Gambling, prone before the unyielding goddesses of luck, their throats ecstatic and bare. One by one, the dream-Lieutenant ate them from the ceiling, the green-limbed seraphs of Perfect Chance, sucking their toes down into his throat. Their screams were shattered by the crash and fall of silver balls. The old, shrunken men turning the wheels of the glittering machines did not move—they see nothing of the Pure Land, even when the sun rises over the harbor and grants each citizen of the Right City a perfect shard of gold. He is a dream; I am a dream; we are all dreams, and the flashing arcade-lights blind them.

Gabriel laughed, a thick, fatty sound, a gargle, a chortle. The parlor erupted in jackpots and high scores. The goddesses who held back and gave forth at their whim had gone into his great, insatiable belly and held back no more.

“Please,” said Rafu softly. The old men shouted for joy, jostled each other, shook fists at the perplexed proprietor. Rafu’s voice barely sounded among them, but Gabriel turned toward her in hunger, his lips scarlet with secret blood. “Do you remember,” said Rafu, sliding toward him, “how Milo’s toe was broken when she was six, running too fast after her friends through the forest behind her house? How it is still crooked, and aches, and how you used to rub it for her during thunderstorms until she was well? Do you remember how her waist curved so sweetly in, how her mouth tasted, how even when she had the flu she smelled like childhood to you, clean and innocent and permanent?”

“No,” growled the dream-Gabriel.

“Do you remember how her fingers still had calluses, even though she stopped playing the guitar so long ago? How her hair looked when it was tangled, when it was smooth? How her belly sloped, how her birthmark looked, how her ears curved?”

“No,” growled the dream-Gabriel. “Instead, I want to eat you. Then I’ll remember those things.”

“Why are you doing this?”

Gabriel shrugged. “What else is there to do when you visit a foreign country?” He turned to bite down on a crippled old woman with a cane and a bend in her back like a stair. Her skinny arms were full of silver pachinko balls. She was winning, of course she was winning. His invisible teeth shattered on her dry old skull, scraping off her jaw. She smiled quietly to herself.
“There is a pit in every dream that cannot be eaten,” I said to Rafu. I was so tired. This was a lesson for baby Baku. “It will break you if you try it. Naturally it is the most delicious thing in a dream, and we have all had to learn to curb our desire for it. And in the dream of the Pure Land, the dream Yokosuka dreams waking and sleeping, an old woman sits in a pachinko parlor, our indestructible core, indestructible because she does not know she is the sweetest thing in the world.”

The dream of Gabriel was breaking apart, spilling the silver dream fluid onto the floor, shuddering, shaking, crying out for help. I did not care.

But Rafu opened her arms to him, and ah, I should have known—we are each slaves to our own natures, even in the Paradise of the Pure Land, especially here, and if I know only how to eat, she knows only how to conceal, how to hide a thing from shame. Her arms flipped open, square screen by square screen, and she enveloped him so suddenly he could not move, clapped him up entirely in herself, all wall of golden Rafu.

The dream-Gabriel sobbed in her grasp. The things he had devoured began to tear out of him: hats, belts, rice cookers, kerosene lamps, lightbulbs, expensive Italian shoes, the Grocers of Perfect Balance, aquariums, streetlamps, Prostitutes of Pure Mind, the Motorcycles of Holy Judgment. The Seven Goddesses of Perfect Chance. They burst from him in his weakness—and burst through the body of Rafu, which was no more than silk, not really, leaving her skin hanging, ragged, torn threads fluttering in the breeze of falling silver.

It was only a dream. Sometimes they say that, at the end of stories, in the land where Milo was born.
And then I woke up—it was only a dream.
Stories here do not end like that. I cannot wake up. I do not sleep.

Milo cannot wake up. If she could, she would see in her house: a low table of red wood, several windows, a television, chocolate, a peach, a salmon rice-ball, and her friend Chieko’s screen, shattered as though a cannonball struck it, in a broken pile on the tatami. If she could wake up, she would have to get a new one—they can always get a new anything, these humans. Only you can wake up, out of all of us, and be relieved. You can assure
yourself that we never really existed, that Yokosuka is only a broken old military town, that folding screens never speak with voices like thread spooling. I will leave it all intact for you.

I am fasting now, anyway. I have my penance to pay.

•  •  •

Yet eating dreams is an essential act of waste management in the Paradise of the Pure Land. I did my duty. I swallowed the wreckage of the dream-vomit I spilled out of myself, and also the wreckage of Milo, sodden with seawater. I cleaned everything up, don’t you see? It’s all just the way it was before.

On the 6:17 commuter train, Yatsuhashi told me a joke about a geisha who wouldn’t wear her wig. It rambled and was not funny. Yatsuhashi-san is an idiot. The apartment above Blue Street is empty because she is gone. She was never here, of course—I never brought her to my threshold, I never served her tea with the exquisite abasement of which I am capable. I never showed her the jellyfish. But once there was a glowing cord between our houses, hers tatami-golden and tall, just down the hill from Anjinsuka Station, mine clean and neat as dreams cannot be, polished with a spongey, devoted snout. But in dreams, one can feel the absence of a thing that never was, and so can I.

Rafu will never come here now; the emptiness is permanent.

The Paradise of the Pure Land remains. It is bigger than all of us, and notices nothing. It sprawls by the sea, a reef of light, and as I trundle down the leaf-strewn length of Blue Street, the whole of the Pure Land turns to you as if to say something, something important, something profound.

•  •  •

And then you wake up. After all, it is only a dream.

Afterword

I lived in Japan for two years as the wife of a naval officer, and it was one of the strangest, loneliest times of my life. For a Westerner, Japan is literally the world of magical reality, everything unexplained, most things surreal. Yokosuka itself is a depressed military town, with little joy or
fanfare to share with visitors. To prepare myself, being the kind of girl I am, I read reams of Japanese fairy tales and mythology. I’m not sure this made it any easier. It was in that reading that I came across the
tsukumogami,
a species of beasties that are born when an inanimate object turns one hundred years old. There are many kinds: stirrups, tea kettles, swords, shoes, folding screens. Folding screens have always seemed like such intimate objects to me, I was fascinated with the idea of a living one—and when imagining what a
jotai
might witness in its time, my mind returned again and again to the lonely navy wife, adrift in Japan, tilting toward suicide. That she might be saved from her ghosts by the resident demons of Japan seemed only right.

Carolyn Turgeon is the author of two novels,
Rain Village
and
Godmother: The Secret Cinderella Story.
Her third,
The Mermaid,
a retelling of the original little mermaid story, is forthcoming in 2011.

Her website is
carolynturgeon.com
.

Karen had come alone, on a whim, to this city full of lovers. Saw a special in the Sunday paper and thought,
that . . . that’s what I need now
. The promise of Mexico: bird cages and parrots and sweeping flowers that tumbled over rooftops and along fences, margaritas and sand, tile floors and churches. Something to remind her: there is more than this, this heartbreak, now.