The Melancholy of Mechagirl (6 page)

“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, light bulbs, 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.

THEN I WOKE UP

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 had 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.

GHOSTS OF GUNKANJIMA

Gunkanjima, or Battleship Island, is a tiny island in Nagasaki Prefecture on which coal was discovered in 1810. A boom followed, and the island was heavily populated and owned from seabed to rooftop by the Mitsubishi Corporation. At one point it was the single most densely populated area on the planet, before or since. Everything was imported to the island, including building materials—not even a blade of grass grew there. Japan’s first concrete buildings were erected to house workers, who tunneled deep under the sea to find the vital coal. Eventually overpopulation and dwindling output began the island’s decline—in 1974 it was permanently closed by Mitsubishi Corp. All remaining workers were sent elsewhere. Today, it is forbidden to all visitors and is being slowly reclaimed by nature.

During WWII, some 1,300 Chinese and Korean slave laborers died there.

The wind here always tasted like metal.

Xiao, Xiao, come to bed. The stair-ferns are soft; the stars are coming through the walls like mice.

* * *

The wind here always tasted of metal, steel come clattering up through the rotten slats of the bridges.

Xiao, the mushrooms have made pillows of the tatami—lay your head next to mine and stop this. No good comes from remembering it.

The wind here always tasted of metal, steel come clattering up through the rotten slats of the bridges strung like laundry between towers, a wheel of knives carving my arches.

Xiao, the old soggy suitcases have opened up; they are packed with grasses and fishtails wizened to moth’s wings. Come fold yourself up with me like a shirt—the sleeve of me longs for the cuffs of you.

* * *

The air moves through itself with pointed toes, each foot creaking a slab of wood, a slab of step in the latticework of bridges and ladders and staircases that connect a city without roads. Up and down the air goes, a tightrope performer with a net of stone, a net of buildings whose teeth have long shattered and fallen out, leaving only jagged crowns to catch the creaking wind. The sound echoes until it strikes the seawall and is swallowed.

The air smoothes its hands on a sightless skirt. It whistles through a window without glass and stares at a bottle left standing, as if someone meant to come back for it. The dust on it is thick as soil. The room is crowded with stale breath, breath reeking of coal dust and seaweed and tobacco and unwashed socks. The air remembers that the Kim brothers lived here before they drowned, all seven of them, in a six-tatami hovel at the top of a tower. They had pimples and kept a cricket as a pet. They fed it pig-gristle carefully culled from seven dinners.

A sewing machine does not protest the delicate spiders which stitch their webs over its casing. There is no chirping in the corner, but the air hears it anyway.

* * *

Hsin. Wake up. It is time to go to work.

Work? Watching paper dissolve to dirt? Watching spectacles rust? The coal is gone; there is nothing to dredge up. Why don’t we go down to the east wall and watch the tide strangle the shore?

Hsin. If you do not get up you will be punished. You are assigned to the sea-shaft today—that’s twelve bridges across the roofs and all those stairs, all those stairs down to the mine mouth. And there is rain.

Xiao, pretty sparrow-wife, who will punish me? The foremen are gone, everything is gone, there are only the quiet termites boring through banisters, and they do not care if we are tardy.

Please, please wake up. I am tired too, my bones are full of black too, my spine wavers in me like a flapping flag, but I am ready, I am going to my assignment. We must make the best of it.

No. I won’t go back there, not there.

* * *

The air disturbs needle-leaved weeds—there is green on Gunkanjima, now. It is a corpse; corpses are always gardens. Caterpillars wriggle in its gutters; out of its stone lips sprout loud mustaches of greenery—the air moves its hand over them and sees nothing, sees only the splintered staircases winding down past their own shadows. Somewhere down there is the entrance to the long, dripping jaw—a shaft sunk deep below the sea, a shaft that vomited up black sludge and bile and bodies.

The air does not want to go down into it.

It never dug those ant tracks through the basalt, but Chen and Zhao did, Chen and Zhao who met washing the soot from their faces, Chen and Zhao who told endless jokes about the carpenter and his angry hammer when all the candles had guttered, who filled their floor with muffled laughter. Chen and Zhao—and Hsin, who was never late, and whose breath smelled of sour plums. They all came back to the towers, towers bristling the island like a brush, they all came back with damp shoulders, damp from that cool, wet tunnel where their palms turned black.

The air does not want to go down. Old voices come up through broken stairs like ferns; ferns throw roots down through broken stairs like voices—the air sits down heavily and puts its head in its hands.

* * *

Hsin, it’s dark. The wind—

Tastes like metal, yes. It’s always dark in the lower levels—the towers eat the sun. Come back up, you don’t want to be down there, down with the algae and the old rain and the rusted pipes.

It’s dark, dark like the inside of a bone. Why do I wake up here, Hsin, with a drainage grate for my pillow? The bars, the bars in my flesh—

Because you fell, Xiao. You wake up there because you fell.

I fell?

You wake up down there and then you come running to me to wake me up for a shift I worked sixty years ago. You don’t see the puddle I sleep in every night, the seawater that falls out of my mouth whenever I speak, the coal-phlegm that coats my hair. You never see it, not since the sea came in, but it’s all right, it’s all right—

The sea came in—

The sea came in, my love, the sea came in through a crack in the shaft ceiling—I saw it open like a womb releasing its water. I stared at it; I could not move—

The sea came in and I fell—

The sea came in and Zhao put his arms over my head but my mouth was full of salt, full of salt, and Zhao floated up in the rush, in the foam, he floated in the foam and I could see his blue shirt tear on the rocks—

Yes. And the Kims’ cricket sat on the tatami, waiting for its supper. It waited and I fell, it waited and I fell and it sang as I fell and its song stopped when the grate broke me in pieces—

The sea came in and my mouth was full of salt but at least I was clean, I was clean in the dark and the helmet lights went out one by one and it was so dark down there in the mine mouth and the water—

tasted like metal.

tasted like metal.

And I fell, I fell from the bridge-labyrinth, I put my feet onto the boards, onto the slats, and I balanced there like a circus girl, arms out, arms out, and I could hear the sea sucking through the shaft, a hole in the sea where the shaft was, and I remembered Zhao’s blue shirt and the carpenter with his hammer, I remembered your plums and the prickle of your mustache on my lips, I remembered how your cheeks tasted always of coal, and I fell, I fell so far, through all those bridges and ropes and stairs, I fell and the cricket sang and the drainage grate came thudding through me—

Xiao, Xiao, hush, it’s all right, you don’t have to remember it. No good comes of remembering it.

The wind, oh, the wind screaming up to me—

Darling, darling, it doesn’t matter now. Hush, hush, the mushrooms are soft, the ferns are a sweet-smelling bed—

Hsin, you have to wake up. You’ll be punished if you don’t wake up—

* * *

On Gunkanjima, there is nothing but air. It inhabits empty rooms; it disturbs shoe tongues left splayed on the grassy floor; it rustles the shreds of ceiling paper that hang down like prayers tied to the branches of black trees.

It falls. It climbs back up with the sun to lie exhausted on a sodden floor beside itself.

The tide rolls in and out again.