Coin Locker Babies (16 page)

Kiku watched as the crocodile noisily chewed at a meal of chicken heads, the blood trickling from between his teeth. The thermostat in Uranus was set at 25° Celsius, and eight humidifiers scattered around the apartment pumped a thin fog over the pool, which took up half the large room. The water was choked with a feathery green weed that caught the light and seemed to boil and seethe at the slightest ripple, erupting into waves of glittering green ooze to mark Gulliver’s passing. The bottom was covered with a layer of mud on thick acrylic sheeting pitted with thousands of tiny holes connected to the aerating system. Around the pool were little clumps of bougainvillea, mangroves, and rubber trees, planted right in the dark, coarse soil that carpeted the floor, and the white concrete walls had childish paintings of the sun, birds, a panther, and assorted native people. Twenty infrared lights hung from the ceiling illuminating the whole scene in a dazzling glare.

“Your electricity bill must be murder,” Kiku observed, at which Anemone opened the door to an adjacent room to show him an industrial-grade generator.

“I’ve been hoping you’d come,” she said. “I thought, if you were going to live here, you could help me figure out what kind of birds we could raise.”

“I’ve always liked those big macaws,” he answered after thinking for a moment, “but you should probably get those birds
you see all the time on nature programs, the ones that sit in the crocodile’s mouth and clean its teeth.”

“I don’t think I want that kind. Cleaning Gulliver’s teeth is my job…. once a week, with a screwdriver. It’s our little time together and I’m not sure I’d like being replaced by birds.” To change the subject, Anemone said she wanted to cook Kiku his favorite food.

“Rice omelette,” he said without giving it much thought. Anemone was disappointed. Somehow she’d imagined he would like the same things she did, the only ones she could make without looking at a recipe: beef stew, spinach in soy sauce, and marinated herring roe. And, anyway, she didn’t even know what a “rice omelette” was. When she asked, Kiku, who was flipping through a magazine spread featuring her, answered without looking up:

“An omelette stuffed with ketchup rice.”

“And what’s ‘ketchup rice’?”

“Just rice and ketchup mixed up together.”

“And that’s your favorite food in the whole world?” Anemone was skeptical.

“Sure is,” he told her. “And maybe a little miso soup on the side if you’ve got any, but don’t worry about it. Beggars can’t be choosers.”

Anemone washed out her rice cooker, which hadn’t been touched in several months, and measured three cups of rice. When the rice was done, she dumped it into a bowl, added the ketchup, and stirred, but as she was doing this she began to wonder if there really was any such thing as a “rice omelette.” Maybe Kiku was just pulling her leg.

“Kiku, the rice has turned bright red.”

“So? That’s just what it’s supposed to do.”

“And that’s really all there is to it—rice and ketchup?”

“You mean you didn’t put in any peas?” said Kiku, sounding a bit shocked.

“What peas? You didn’t say anything about peas!”

He reached the kitchen to find Anemone, on the verge of tears, clutching a bowl containing what looked like an iceberg awash in a sea of blood. In the end, at his suggestion, she served the ketchup rice on a bed of spaghetti and garnished with the omelette cut into yellow confetti. When they finished eating, Kiku lay down on the carpet and fell asleep immediately, not even stirring when Anemone pulled off his socks and covered him with a blanket.

Anemone herself wasn’t particularly sleepy, so she decided to read for a while. From time to time, Kiku would twitch and mutter something in his sleep that sounded like “Milk, don’t go in there! It’s dangerous! Milk! No!” Anemone had a brandy and turned out the lights, but just as she was dozing off, Kiku sat bolt upright and screamed. By the time she reached him, he was gasping for air and shaking all over. In the dark, she couldn’t tell what sort of look he had on his face, but as he got up to pace around the room, she realized he must have had a nightmare. If it was just a bad dream, she thought, he should get back to sleep, but if it was a real nightmare he’d be up all night. Those evil thoughts would get into the room and hide in the curtains to watch you, and then how could you possibly go back to sleep?

Kiku came over to the bed. Anemone pretended to be asleep but opened her eyes as he reached out to touch her hair.

“Right pig, right pig, left pig. Right pig, right pig, clock, butterfly,” she chanted. “That’s what we used to say as kids to drive away bad dreams.”

“Right pig, right pig, left pig. Right pig, right pig, clock, butterfly,” Kiku repeated.

Anemone made room for Kiku to lie down next to her. The
mattress sagged in the middle, and when she rolled against him the trembling in his damp body echoed through her. She could feel his muscles, as hard as Gulliver’s skin. She felt thirsty.

“I was back on the little island where I grew up,” Kiku said. “We were at the beach and my brother was smashing crabs with a stone and laughing. I told him to stop but he shook his head and kept killing them. So I told him again, but he still didn’t stop. Finally I yelled at him and he started to cry and said he was sorry. I told him I was sorry too, that I shouldn’t have yelled, but when I got to where he was standing, he looked up at me, stuck his tongue out, and started laughing and smashing the crabs again. There was this horrible smell coming from the crabs and I was mad at having been tricked, so this time I punched him—but just lightly. So then he was crying for real. He sat there on the ground saying he couldn’t understand why he wasn’t supposed to kill the crabs. So I told him it was OK, he just wasn’t supposed to laugh while he was doing it. ‘So it’s all right if I cry while I’m smashing them?’ I told him it was. Then he started smashing them again, only this time he was crying, and it got louder and louder, almost like a siren, but even though he was crying, when you looked at him you could see his face was still laughing. So now I’m a bit scared, the whole thing is so weird, and I begin beating on him again, and then I get a little crazy, and somehow I have the rock he was using on the crabs and I start using it on Hashi. And I beat him till his face swells up like a balloon, but he’s still laughing. ‘That the best you can do?’ He starts teasing me, and I run away along the beach but he follows, laughing the whole time, and then he is a big balloon, like a huge swollen baby, and he’s crushing me, he’s really heavy, suffocating me…” As he finished telling her his dream, Anemone seemed about to say something, but he covered her mouth with his hand. “Please don’t say it. I know I’ve
got to be a little more patient and somehow everything with my brother will work out…’ She bit his finger before he could finish.

“Patient?! What are you talking about? Sometimes you don’t make any sense,” she said. “‘Patience’ is the thing I hate most in the whole world. We’re all too patient as it is. It’s the way we’ve been raised: just wait politely, grin and bear it, and supposedly everything will turn out all right. We’re so patient our heads have turned to mush.” Beginning to get a bit excited, she shook off Kiku’s hand which was still holding her jaw.

As his eyes adjusted to the light, he could see a faint vibration in the delicate line of her throat. On her cheek were the same faint red marks from his fingers he’d noticed that night among the weeds. Now she had her eyes tightly closed and her body twisted away from him. The pale blue veins were visible on her eyelids. Kiku took hold of her earlobes and pulled them until she moaned and jerked away: more marks, this time bright red. She rolled over on her stomach, trying to get away, but he pinned her with an elbow in the back. Taking her head between his hands, he watched as the crimson patches around her ears slowly faded to white. Next he tried dragging the tips of his fingers along her skin from her jaw, down her neck, and out onto her breast, leaving a series of wavy, reddish lines. He realized he wanted to dye her whole body red, from head to toe; then, if he stuck her with a pin, she would disappear, leaving only a pool of ketchup in his palm.

When he tried to lift her nightgown from behind, Anemone curled her legs and began to writhe and shake her head. Grabbing her hair, he raised her head to see what her face could tell him; if she were crying, he wasn’t sure what he would do. But her expression was neutral, mouth set, eyes blank. He tried ripping the nylon nightgown down the back, but the material was tough and bit into his hand. He could see her skin where the gown was
wet from the sweat dripping from his forehead. In desperation, he used his teeth to start a tear, and the whole gown came apart in one motion. At the same moment, his teeth nipped her leg and her knees slid under her as her ass jutted out. Grabbing her hips, he tore at her panties.

Anemone went limp, her eyes tight shut, as Kiku began to undress. He tried without much luck to stop trembling, and the more he hurried, the worse he shook, and the louder the bed creaked. As he was climbing out of his pants, she opened her eyes and smiled. Sitting up, she ran her tongue along his sweaty side, then hung from his neck giggling quietly. Kiku’s arms eventually gave way under the weight and they sank into the bed, bumping noses as they fell. A loud, simultaneous “ouch” left them both in hysterics.

By flapping his legs, Kiku finally managed to get out of his pants, but he hesitated over the underpants, not quite sure what he was supposed to do with a girl or whether he had to be naked to do it. You left your shorts on when you took a piss, he reasoned…

“Kiku, kiss me,” said Anemone, puckering up, and as soon as their lips came together, Kiku felt her tongue thrusting into his mouth, poking about to find his own. Closing his eyes, he slowly expelled the tongue from far back in his throat, forcing it out between his teeth. They went on kissing for a while, until he worked up the courage to push his tongue into her mouth, but once it was inside, she bit down on it as hard as she could. For a moment, he didn’t realize what had happened, but then the pain hit him and he found himself on the floor next to the bed, his hand pressed over his mouth while Anemone sat wide-eyed, staring at the dripping blood. The puddle of red collecting in his palm looked a lot like ketchup.

When he finally managed to get to his feet, she screamed and
jumped out of bed to escape, but he caught her by the hair and threw her on the floor.

“I… I… I,” she laughed, hardly able to speak, “I was… just so happy… to see how soft your tongue was, since a certain other part was so hard.”

He tried to tell her to shut up, but when he opened his mouth, blood showered her face. She winced as he slapped her and grabbed her by the ankles to pull her legs open. His finger was slippery from the blood, and she stiffened only slightly when he slid it up her ass. Shifting his hips so he could work his cock in behind the finger, he slowly thrust his hips forward, and as the finger slid out and his cock hit home, Kiku came.

A few minutes later, Anemone pulled free and crawled toward the bathroom, blood and cum dripping down her legs onto the carpet. By the time Kiku joined her, she was already under the shower. He washed his hands and then rubbed away the steam on the mirror to examine his tongue. The tip was in shreds and blood was still flowing. Finishing her shower, Anemone wrapped herself in a towel and left the room without a word, while Kiku, still soaking wet, slipped into his pants. When he finished dressing, he walked out to the entrance and mumbled that he would see her later. She started to say something, hesitated, cleared her throat, and finally managed:

“Don’t go. You can’t go. You’ve got to stay here.”

Kiku couldn’t speak. He walked to the window breathing heavily, and muttered a faint “I…” as he opened the curtains. Staring out, his forehead pressed against the glass, he beckoned to her. She tiptoed over to him, the tendons in her feet straining into delicate arches as her scarlet toenails dug into the carpet. “I…” Kiku tried to continue. “I… was born in a coin locker,” he said at last. Adding, “I like you, but I didn’t think a pretty girl
like you…” This time it was Anemone who put her hand over his mouth.

“You don’t have to say anything,” she whispered, pressing her cheek against his. Beads of water fell from her hair to the gooseflesh on her back.

Hashi’s album was recorded at Mr. D’s studio in the mountains of the Izu Peninsula. The studio, dubbed The Spaceship, was an ark-shaped building sheathed in silver metal and topped with a clear bubble roof complete with telescope. Astronomy was Mr. D’s hobby.

D was the youngest child of a straight-laced history teacher who doubled as a sports coach. He had two sisters and five brothers, the eldest being more than twenty years older than him. His parents were middle-aged when he was born, and D’s upbringing had been extremely strict. In the dead of winter, he was forced to go without socks, and at the dinner table he was forbidden to touch his chopsticks until his father was seated. When the stalls selling toys were set up at festival time, D never had any money to buy anything, and he was not allowed to invite friends home. In the end, though he became a high-strung child, he did learn to navigate among the various rules and restrictions of life at home; but there was one that he could never understand, and that was his father’s stricture against eating the fatty part of his meat. According to his father, fat and entrails were vulgar, lower class, and whenever they had roast ham or something special to eat, the fat had to be trimmed away beforehand.

For some reason, more than any of the other taboos, this one took on a particular fascination for him, and, in his early years, D
was constantly thinking about the secret delights of the white bits cut away by his mother’s carving knife. Finally one day he found a scrap of raw bacon fat discarded in the sink and he promptly popped it in his mouth. It slithered across his tongue and down his throat, leaving a trail of salt and greasy savor that excited him so much he almost wet his pants. The fat passed on to his stomach where it danced a little jig, as if to remind him that everything else he’d ever eaten was as dry and tasteless as straw by comparison.

After this first encounter, he was able to procure a fairly regular supply of fat behind his mother’s back, but one day his father caught him roasting a bit of pork on the stove.

“You little animal!” he shouted at him several times, smacking him finally in the face and sending him away without dinner. This was the second time D had been hit by him.

The first was soon after he entered elementary school. He had been diagnosed as nearsighted, but his father dismissed the condition as a sign of weakness and ordered him to spend an hour a day in Zen meditation staring at the distant mountains. The first beating, as punishment for neglecting the exercise, made quite an impression since it was a pretty rare event in the house. Not that his father was opposed to corporal punishment or doubted its efficacy; but his children had always been sufficiently afraid of him to do whatever was necessary to avoid being beaten. Thus singled out for an unusual punishment, D was humiliated, demoralized. His shame developed into a mild neurosis, and he began missing school, which only made his father angrier. His mother had nothing to say to him except to urge him to apologize, and his brothers and sisters, too, deserted him, with the exception of one sister who occasionally took his side.

When he was in the fourth grade, D tried to hang himself, but he was found in time and cut down. Soon afterward, while he was
still in bed with a bandage around the burn marks on his neck, his father came and gave him a short lecture.

“Life is tough. It’s full of things that you may not like, but you’ve got to accept them like everybody else.” At this point he produced a small telescope and laid it by D’s pillow. “Here, this is for you. Whenever something’s bothering you, look at the stars; it will remind you how small you really are, and I promise you, you’ll feel much better.”

For the next three years, D did little else besides look through the telescope. In middle school, he even won a prize for the diary he kept of his observations; he called it “The Changing Milky Way.” One day, however, his father died suddenly of a heart attack, and while he was helping sort through his papers, he came across a stack of pornographic pictures of sweaty young men with shaved heads, in acrobatic poses. Nothing but young men. D hid the pictures away in his own room and consulted a precocious classmate:

“Can homos have children?” he asked him.

“Sure, why not? They’ve got sperm like everybody else, and plenty of them don’t let on they’re queer and get married and have children and everything.” His friend was something of an expert. “Seems they even like to keep their wives pregnant all the time so they don’t have to do it with them.”

“And is it hereditary?” he asked next.

“That I don’t know,” his friend admitted.

D, as it happened, was already aware of his own preferences. Not that he didn’t fancy doing it with women, but to get that far he had to have eaten a particular food: fat. It became a kind of ritual; he would sit down to a plate of fat, eye it for a while, savor the aroma, rub some around on his lips, and then let it dissolve on his tongue. As it slid down his throat and began to burn in his
belly, he would invariably begin to want a woman. After orgasm, however, just as invariably, he would feel the digesting fat begin to coat his insides, sapping the heat from his body and leaving him feeling sick.

D’s career thus far had centered around the discovery and promotion of two bona fide rock stars. The first he had found in the days when he still worked for a record company; he had ignored the skepticism and opposition of the other producers and pushed the singer through to a debut. His reward was a smashing success. The second came after D had struck out on his own, and this time he independently produced eight albums for the singer before he finally moved to an English label. Each of the eight had gone gold, making D an immensely wealthy and powerful man. In both cases, he had picked singers who, according to the common wisdom, had no commercial value, but to him there had been no doubt from the beginning that the two kids were stars just waiting to be discovered.

D had a genius for picking out talented young men, but it was genius based on a system. Five days a week, he would gorge himself on fatty meat before making his rounds; any kid who still looked good to him on a bellyful of fat was invited to dinner. Those who failed to answer “music” when asked about their interests were fucked and sent home. Those who said the magic word were booked for a return engagement. Before these second meetings, D would eat an enormous quantity of fat and empty himself in a random vagina; then he was ready to try out the young man’s musical talents. If the system was followed to the letter, his judgment at the audition was absolutely foolproof. Hashi was only the third ever to pass muster.

In Hashi’s case, not only had D consumed the requisite quantity of fat, but the woman herself had had a big white body—a good
sign. As he listened to Hashi’s song, however, his reaction hadn’t been what could be called typical: he’d felt an overwhelming need to puke all over the bed, a feeling that only gradually faded into a warm sensation in his gut. The song had been almost atonal, the voice reedy and hoarse, but from the moment Hashi opened his mouth the tune had seemed to rush in through D’s pores to grab at his insides. When it had finally subsided, D realized the room had grown horribly silent. It was only afterward he understood that his brain had resisted Hashi’s song but the other organs had fallen instantly under its spell. And when he asked for an encore, Hashi sang a second song that rattled him even more, giving him moments of pleasure as intense as the gloom it also caused.

To say the least, the performance set him thinking. The kid can definitely sing—no doubt about it, damnedest thing I ever heard. Problem is, the first time you hear him, it makes you feel like shit, and people who feel like shit don’t buy records. What I’ve got to do is figure out some way to get people to hear the kid sing without knowing what they’re listening to; then when they think they’re hearing him the first time, they’ll actually have heard him before. The solution, fortunately, was simple enough: promote Hashi as the Coin Locker Boy, letting the addictive, repellent singing take over in due course.

The day Hashi finished making his first record, D told him he could have anything he wanted for dinner. Hashi ordered a rice omelette. They were in the dining room of The Spaceship looking out over the ocean. On the wall was a print of men dressed like priests and hermaphrodite children riding enormous butterflies with lips on their wings—an illustration from a two-volume study of Incan myths that D had published. The wallpaper was a deep, lustrous red, the floor a gold metal that rang oddly as D’s cook, a tall, muscular, high-heeled woman, entered the room.

“Do you want crab or shrimp in that rice omelette?” she asked.

“Crab,” said Hashi. “Uh… excuse me…,” he added, staring at her, “didn’t you play volleyball in the Olympics? I remember seeing you on TV.”

“Must have been my mother,” the woman laughed. “But I used to throw the javelin,” she said, flashing a mouthful of gold caps. D decided on some duck pâté and a cassis sherbet.

“Heard you and the drummer had a squabble yesterday. What did you say to him? He was mad as hell,” said Mr. D.

“I told him he was making a lot of noise… ’cause he was.”

“The drummer?”

“… I hate it when they just pound away.”

“He’s the best drummer around,” said D.

“Then I guess I just hate drums.”

“Hate drums? What do you mean, ‘hate drums’?”

“Like I said, they make too much noise.”

“Hashi, you’re a weird sucker,” said D, his narrow eyes narrowing a bit more. In all the time Hashi had known him, he had never caught a glimpse of D’s pupils. The pâté glistened on his lips and teeth. “You told me once you like Helen Merrill better than Carmen McCrae.”

“So?”

“So why?”

“No particular reason,” said Hashi.

“There must be a reason,” D insisted.

“No, not really. That’s just the way it is. I like Clara Neumaus better than Elizeth Cardoso, Schwarzkopf better than Maria Callas. Anything wrong with that?”

“Maybe not. But there does seem to be a pattern forming: you pick the sister types over the mother types all the way down the
line. Perhaps because there’s always a mother type around when people are born,” he speculated.

Hashi ate the outside of the omelette, then stuck his fork into the rice flecked with bits of scarlet crab. In the middle of it all, the fork punctured a steamed tomato, releasing a sourish smell that brought back a memory of someone stamping on a raw tomato. It was a child’s sockless foot in small black tennis shoes, and when the thing had rolled by, the foot snapped out, sending a spray of red juice flying. The smell now was identical, pervasive, a smell that might have filled the air at the instant of his birth.

“Mr. D, I’m going to be a singer,” said Hashi, half announcing, half asking.

“Of course you are. Now eat your omelette.”

“I’m really happy,” said Hashi, trying to picture the future.

“Fine, now eat,” said D. “It’s bad for the farmers if you kids stop eating rice.”

“But do you know why I’m so happy?” asked Hashi.

“Because you’re going to be a star.”

“It’s partly that, but it’s also ’cause I feel like I’ve broken out of myself, left something behind. You see what I mean?”

“No, can’t say I do. But I can tell you this: you are going to sell records, kid.”

“You know, there wasn’t one thing on that island I loved, not one thing. I may have thought there was at the time, but there was nothing there for me. So that’s why I broke out; something told me that there must be something better somewhere, that there must be a place I could find something to love. At night, after I’ve been singing all day, I go to bed and everything seems obvious. I spent my whole life up to now in a daze. The whole place was wrong for me, and I had to leave it, I had to get clear.

“You often hear these stories about a pet, a little cat or
something, that gets lost and then taken in by a new owner who lives far away. It stays for a while, but it can never quite settle down, and one day it just takes off and goes on this long journey, overcoming all these obstacles to find its way back home—its real home, that is. I guess I’m one of those cats, and when I got to the city, when I got to sing, I knew I was finally home.”

“A lost kitten, eh? Maybe so,” said D. “But seriously, Hashi, would you stop yacking and eat that rice?… I know I’ve told you that there’s something about rice that gives me the creeps. Not you? Don’t you get the feeling there’s something a little off about it, the way it just sits there in the dish? It’s a bit like a rugby ball, if you see what I mean: it’s safe enough, predictable, as long as you’ve got it in your hands or you’re pinning it on the field, but once you kick it and you’ve got it rolling along end over end, there’s no telling where it’ll go. Exactly like rice. It’s like farming itself, and all us Japanese are basically farmers deep down… You see what I’m getting at here?”

“Can’t say I do, exactly,” said Hashi, bewildered.

“Doesn’t matter one way or the other. Let’s drop it. But your story about the cat did remind me of a little puss I found when I was a kid. My dad was a tough old bastard—used to get mad at me if I cried at a sad movie—but he did have a soft spot for animals, and when I found this cat, he let me keep it out in the storehouse. Now this was some cat, beautiful long hair—black, brown, and cream, all mixed together—and I always thought it probably escaped from a pet shop somewhere. Anyway, I found it while it was still a kitten, and it got pretty attached to me. But that cat taught me something I’ve never forgotten: cats have this way of competing with each other to see who can be most aloof—it’s their way of showing their strength. You know anything about psychology? Suppose we have two cats, people, whatever; call
them A and B. There’s always going to be one of them who’s the leader, who calls the shots, and that’s always the one who doesn’t seem to care, the one who’s most casual about the whole thing. You follow me?”

“…”

“Maybe it’d be easier to understand if we say A and B are a man and a woman. Now suppose A falls in love with B, but B acts as if she doesn’t give a shit about A; naturally, B’s gonna have A by the balls. With cats it’s the same thing, indifference is power; and it’s even worse with the kind that costs a pile of money and has a pedigree and all that shit. Then you have to take care of it like it was made of gold because if it dies your investment goes down the toilet. It’s not long before the cat figures this out—it doesn’t have to worry about where its next meal is coming from, it doesn’t have to worry about anything—and then it has you; it’s won the war of indifference. Maybe that’s why the one I had as a kid was such a good cat; it was just a stray that followed me home, so I didn’t really care if it lived or died, and that meant I won the war right at the start. All I had to do was give it a little milk when it came rubbing its head against my leg and that cat was mine. Wherever I went, it came along, whatever I did, it was right there watching.