The Melancholy of Mechagirl (2 page)

THE MELANCHOLY OF MECHAGIRL

X Prefecture drive time radio

trills and pops

its pink rhinestone bubble tunes—

pipe that sound into my copper-riveted heart,

that softgirl/brightgirl/candygirl electrocheer gigglenoise

right down through the steelfrown tunnels of my

all-hearing head.

Best stay

out of my way

when I’ve got my groovewalk going. It’s a rhythm

you learn:

move those ironzilla legs

to the cherry-berry vanillacream sparklepop

and your pneumafuel efficiency will increase

according to the Yakihatsu formula (sigma3, 9 to the power of four)

Robots are like Mars: they need

girls.

Boys won’t do;

the memesoup is all wrong. They stomp

when they should kiss

and they’re none too keen

on having things shoved inside them.

You can’t convince them

there’s nothing kinky going on:

you can’t move the machine without IV interface

fourteen intra-optical displays

a codedump wafer like a rose petal

under the tongue,

silver tubes

wrapped around your bones.

It’s just a job.

Why do boys have to make everything

sound weird? It’s not a robot

until you put a girl inside. Sometimes

I feel like that.

A junkyard

the Company forgot to put a girl in.

I mean yeah.

My crystal fingers are laser-enabled

light comes out of me

like dawn. Bright orangecream

killpink

sizzling tangerine deathglitter. But what

does it mean? Is this really

a retirement plan?

All of us Company Girls

sitting in the Company Home

in our giant angular titanium suits

knitting tiny versions of our robot selves

playing poker with x-ray eyes

crushing the teakettle with hotlilac chromium fists

every day at 3?

I get a break

every spring.

Big me

powers down

transparent highly conductive golden eyeball

by transparent highly conductive golden eyeball.

Little me steps out

and the plum blossoms quiver

like a frothy fuchsia baseline.

My body is

full of holes

where the junkbody metalgirl tinkid used to be

inside me inside it

and I try to go out for tea and noodles

but they only taste like crystallized cobalt-4

and faithlessness.

I feel my suit

all around me. It wants. I want. Cold scrapcode

drifts like snow behind my eyes.

I can’t understand

why no one sees the dinosaur bones

of my exo-self

dwarfing the ramen-slingers

and their steamscalded cheeks.

Maybe I go dancing

Maybe I light incense.

Maybe I fuck, maybe I get fucked.

Nothing is as big inside me

as I am

when I am inside me.

When I am big

I can run so fast

out of my skin

my feet are mighty,

flamecushioned and undeniable.

I salute with my sadgirl/hardgirl/crunchgirl

purplebolt tungsten hands

the size of cars

and Saturn tips a ring.

It hurts to be big

but everyone sees me.

When I am little

when I am just a pretty thing

and they think I am bandaged

to fit the damagedgirl fashionpop manifesto

instead of to hide my nickelplate entrance nodes

well

I can’t get out of that suit either

but it doesn’t know how to vibrate

a building under her audioglass palm

until it shatters.

I guess what I mean to say is

I’ll never have kids. Chances for promotion

are minimal and my pension

sucks. That’s okay.

After all, there is so much work

to do. Enough for forever.

And I’m so good at it.

All my sitreps shine

like so many platinum dolls.

I’m due for a morphomod soon—

I’ll be able to double over at the waist

like I’ve had something cut out of me

and fold up into a magentanosed Centauri-capable spaceship.

So I’ve got that going for me.

At least fatigue isn’t a factor. I have a steady

decalescent greengolden stream

of sourshimmer stimulants

available at the balling of my toes.

On balance, to pay for the rest

well

you’ve never felt anything

like a pearlypink ball of plasmid clingflame

releasing from your mouth

like a burst of song.

And Y Prefecture

is just so close by.

The girls and I talk.

We say:

start a dream journal.

take up ikebana.

make your own jam.

We say:

Next spring

let’s go to Australia together

look at the kangaroos.

We say:

turn up that sweet vibevox happygirl music

tap the communal PA

we’ve got a long walk ahead of us today

and at the end of it

a fire like six perfect flowers

arranged in an iron vase.

INK, WATER, MILK

Three things are happening at the same time.

It will be hard for you to believe—being only a reader with employment concerns and a jaded cultural consciousness and having limited patience for this sort of nonsense—that they are happening all at once. Not only at the same time, but in the same place. One on top of the other. Like three blue bowls nesting. Like three cells of film aligned atop a light box. If you will sit quietly inside the palm of my hand I will keep the wind out and we can watch the three things happen into each other. Like ink and water and milk. I will tell you the truth at the beginning so that you will recognize it in the end: there is nothing in this world but ink and water and milk. Of course it doesn’t make any sense now. Three things are happening at the same time. There will be some natural seepage of cause and effect.

There. This is my hand. It is big enough. There are lines on it like anyone’s hand. A ring. A short, straight scar underneath the pinky finger. Never mind how I got it. It is hard and twisted. The cut was deep. You can rest your tea on it and it will not fall over.

It would be best, really, if you could tell one thing, and I tell another, and a third person tell the third, so that our voices also happen at the same time, interleaving like fingers. But I do not ask for so much cacophony. I will tell them all and you will remember them thatched as tightly as a roof.

INK

A summer moon sits heavy as a buoy on Sagami Bay. Cicadas shriek at it, but it is placid. It bobs up and down on the still water. Among the bells of the real buoys, the soft bells of the moon go unnoticed. The sturgeons deep under the water hear them—and the giant clams.

Kyorinrin also hears the moon. Down in the green-black hills, where the camphor and the cassia and the plum and the red pine and the willow crowd together as close as commuters on the night train, he listens to the moon in an abandoned paper umbrella factory. The windows have holes in them like fists through frost. A hole in the roof sags and gapes like a mouth. The door is bolted and boarded, the pipes burst open like iron flowers, and a sign informs you that you may lease it, if you wish, from a holding company that was liquidated in 1976. The sign is freshly painted. White characters on a vermilion background. Himura Holding Company. Interested Parties Are Begged to Inquire. 075 871 7746.

Inside the paper umbrella factory the floor shines. Kyorinrin does his best to keep it livable. One thousand kerosene lamps burn, on every pallet, crate, employees’ washbasin, manager’s desk, inspection platform, dye sink, industrial lathe, glue vat, bank of lockers, cafeteria table, pile of ledgers, the gleaming floor. They burn during the day and the night, and they burn a deep shade of cyan. Their fuel is also cyan. There are actually only nine hundred eighty-one lamps. But one thousand is a better number.

Kyorinrin makes his home in the foreman’s office. The roof there still keeps rain out. This is important because Kyorinrin is not a person but a large paper scroll. His pages look very old, darkened to a rich animal color. His roller is thick and bronze with a badger stamped on one end and a chrysanthemum on the other. His paper is blank, but that is a temporary situation.

Kyorinrin is not as old as he looks, but he likes to think he provides a sense of continuity. He came to the factory in 1950 in the personal effects of the first foreman, whose name, though unimportant to you and me, was Akiyama Isao. Kyorinrin lived for many years in a glass case along with other objects Akiyama found sacred in a certain private, personal way. These included two small silver rabbit figurines, a photograph of a girl named Akemi who died in the bombardment of Tokyo, a lock of his grandmother’s hair cut on her wedding day, an airplane ticket to a place called Adelaide which Akiyama bought but did not use, a statuette of Jizo wrapped in a red scarf with a red cap on his smooth stone head, a Japanese-to-English dictionary, a miniature onyx elephant with a broken trunk, a map of ordnance sites in the mountains around Yokosuka, and Kyorinrin himself, who bore originally a professionally calligraphed genealogy of the Akiyama clan, inked on commission in 1910, the year Isao was born.

Kyorinrin supposes all these objects make a person, but you can never know very much from the inside of a glass case.

Like the rest of the umbrella factory, the case is broken now. The floor of the office still shimmers with a light snow of shards. Kyorinrin had had enough of silver rabbits and Adelaide and dead girls. He looks at it sometimes from the foreman’s chair. Jizo still stands upright. One rabbit. The lock of hair.

Every evening Kyorinrin rolls luxuriously out to his full length across the factory floor. His paper exults in its own length. Every evening he causes a story to flow over his body in deep, profoundly black ink. Before the sun hefts up over the cinnamon trees, he bathes himself in the employees’ basin and erases what he wrote. He uses the badger end of his roller to spray water down his creases, like an elephant with a working trunk.

The paper scroll does not live alone. Not anymore. He does not remember Tsuma coming, only that one day she was there where she had not been before. She is a kanji representing the word
wife
. Her brushstrokes are very fine. She stands thirty-three centimeters tall. Her ink is black like his own, though in the moonlight the edges of her glisten dark violet. She claims to have absconded from a large advertisement selling refrigerators. It was not an interesting life. Kyorinrin appreciates that.

“Today I am going to write a story about a white woman,” announces Kyorinrin. The badger’s bronze mouth moves when he speaks. His talk echoes.

Tsuma comes out from behind a dye sink crusted with bright pink stains. Violet ripples along her edges like electricity.

“Why would you want to do that?” she whispers.

WATER

A summer moon sits heavy as ballast on Uraga Harbor. Cicadas shriek at it, but it is unworried. It ripples in the quiet water. Among the mating of the cicadas the mating of the moon goes unremarked. The moon knows his own business—and his wife.

A fox who is not really a fox and an old woman who is not really an old woman also know the moon is in rut. They sit together under a persimmon tree high above the harbor. Fireflies dive and spiral around them, but the old woman keeps puffing up her cheeks and blowing them out. When her cheeks puff, they swell up bigger than green gourds and blush silver. The fox eats the fireflies, whether or not their tiny lamps are lit.

The old woman’s name is Futsukeshibaba. She dresses in long white smoke that looks like a white kimono. Her obi is a length of dark water, flowing in a current around her bony waist. Her mouth is very red and her hair is longer than she is tall. It is the same smoke as her clothes. Her mouth glows in the white of her like fire. Futsukeshibaba blows out the lights of the world. That is the kind of creature she is. She desires only to blow out lanterns and lamps and candles. It is what she was made for. She has blown out the Emperor’s personal lamp and would be happy to tell you about it. Once, she snuffed Issa’s lantern when he fell asleep at his work, thereby saving his papers from the otherwise inevitable blaze. When she sees a flame, she yearns to put it out. It looks like a tear in everything to her, a ragged hole through which entropy can leak. Her breath is needle and thread.

Futsukeshibaba watches the blue-black water. She puffs up her cheeks, blows a sparrow out of the air with one quick cough, and hands it to the fox who is not really a fox because he is Inari, a god who wears his fox’s body like it was a salaryman’s suit. Inari crunches the bones in his fox-teeth. His fur gleams the color of saffron, the white tip of his great tail too much like a golden flame for Futsukeshibaba’s comfort. She has already tried to blow it out several times, even though she knows better.

Inari and Futsukeshibaba are watching ships come into the harbor. They are not Japanese ships, but both the fox and the old woman knew that before they got here.

“What happens to the lights you blow out?” asks Inari, who possesses a great deal of curiosity about anatomy. “Where are they after you have extinguished them?”

“In my belly,” Futsukeshibaba answers. She puts her hand there. “I eat them. They live in me forever as I do not generate waste. The inside of me looks like a festival night.”

“But you hate the light so.”

“I am sustained by the thing that violates my heart and breaks the peaceful dark of my mind. I thought you were a trickster god. Pretty standard riddle of existence.”

“Does it taste good?”

“It tastes like the opposite of desire.”

Inari accepts this. He thinks of the sweet incense of his shrine not far from here, of the electric green spiders in the paws of his statues.

“I don’t know why you insisted we watch this,” he sighs. His furry chest expands like a little sun and contracts again. “I’m bored, to be perfectly clear.”

Prows glide into the harbor; sails and rigging luff and swing. Men sink anchor, secure lines, go about the work of making landfall. They are not Japanese men, but the fox and the old woman knew that before they got here.

“We don’t have to stay. I know you are fond of the theater. It was meant as a gift.”

Inari reaches up one paw and draws a persimmon out of the tree. It is not yet the time for persimmons. The fruit comes out like a drop of oil squeezed from a cloth, the branch bleeding orange, the wind groaning against the wood.

“If you hoped I would stop it—”

Futsukeshibaba interrupts. She does it so softly, like blowing out the fox’s voice.

“Long ago I knew a blue paper lantern named Aoandon. She had a lilac-colored tassel with a pretty knot in it. She was rectangular. On one side of her a faded carp swam upstream. It used to be painted in real gold, but by the time I met her, only the outline remained, like a skeleton. I did not mind.

“Aoandon was not less accomplished than I. Her nature determined that she appear at storytelling festivals and competitions, a soft blue glow appearing when the last tale is told, lighting the way home. Once, she illuminated the midnight path of Murasaki Shikibu, whose sandals were very pale ash wood with charcoal silk straps that nested between her toes. Aoandon was always reluctant to admit that the great lady was tipsy with plum wine and ghost stories, but there it is. When she saw a darkness, she yearned to kindle it.

“I discovered her after a boasting tournament, guiding home a man who successfully claimed to have made love to every woman in a certain prefecture and left a different flower in each of their navels. He was so drunk he tried to seduce me. But I looked only at the blue paper lantern. Glowing as bright as the pole star. I wanted to blow her out. I wanted to eat her. I wanted her to exist in me forever. She looked at me with the eyes of her carp and we recognized immediately that we could so easily annihilate one another with the softest breath, the merest flicker. I could extinguish her, and she could burn me alive. The boastful man saw our intent gaze and ran.”

“Obviously, you became enemies. Or did you blow her down right then, before she could strike?”

Futsukeshibaba shakes her head. The smoke of her hair wisps.

“That is a human game. We fell in love.”

MILK

A summer moon sits heavy as a hand on Tokyo Bay. Cicadas shriek at it, but it does not answer. It makes a fist in the open water. Among the judgments of the city, the judgment of the moon goes unheard. The naval officers on watch suffer under it but have no name for it.

The woman walking the streets of Yoshikura does not hear it. She hears the cicadas, their mating sounds like engines screeching in her brain. She hears doors open and shut. She hears her own steps and the buzz of vending machines red and gleaming in the dark. She is not a Japanese woman. The machines anchor her new world. They tell her where she is—she lives suddenly in a place without numbers. There are no signs to tell her what a road is called or what the addresses of the houses might be. The vending machine closest to home has hot and cold coffee cans, a melon drink, milk tea, and large bottles of lemonade and cold tea. Most of the others don’t have the bigger bottles, and she clings to this. For her, Japan is a series of sigils: a liter bottle of brown tea means home. The bus from the American base to her neighborhood has kanji that look to her like a princess’s ball gown, a running dog, and the bars of a jail. But she has already met another Navy wife, a blonde woman who wears a great deal of khaki, who says that she takes that same bus, but the characters look to her like opera glasses, a typewriter, and the pillars of a country house. She told the other wife:
For foreigners, Japan is a Rorschach painting
. The blonde gave her a strange look and turned around to have a different conversation with the Captain’s wife. The wives call each other by their husbands’ ranks and their husbands’ surnames. It is as though, without them there, they speak with their husbands’ mouths.