Coin Locker Babies (17 page)

“Then one day the cat disappeared for a while, and when it came back it was acting funny. Pretty soon I noticed its stomach was getting bigger and bigger, and I realized it was going to have kittens. Well, I wasn’t going to miss seeing that, so I didn’t let her out of my sight, and finally she had them, five in all, and no bigger than mice. I guess because I was just a kid and learning about the mystery of life and so on, I got pretty excited and I started doing a little dance around the mother and her kittens—silly, I know, but what do you want; I was just a kid—anyway, it turned out to
be the worst thing I could have done. I found out later that she probably thought I was going to kill the kittens; that’s why she started taking them in her mouth one by one. At first I thought that was normal enough—she was just going to lick off the sticky stuff or something—but then I realized she was eating them, chewing them up and swallowing them, bit by bit. I yelled and even tried to hit her, but she sank her teeth into my hand. Then I was crying, and terrified, and there was the cat, chewing up the last baby. But for some reason, she couldn’t get it down and she spat it out, half-chewed. It just lay there, not moving.

“I decided I needed some help, so I went to find one of my sisters and told her what had happened. She took the kitten and washed it, but it still wasn’t moving. She said it was no use and that I should bury it, so I wrapped it in some newspaper and put it in a plastic bag; then I went out into the yard to dig a hole—I guess the whole thing took about an hour. Then, just as I was finishing the hole, I thought I heard a noise in the bag, but I went ahead with my little funeral anyway. I was about to put the bag in the hole when it started to move. I opened it up and, sure enough, the kitten was still alive. Well, that kitten grew up to be one tough cat, lorded it over the whole neighborhood, and never lost a fight. In its prime, there were an awful lot of one-eyed dogs in that town…”

“And just what, exactly, is this story supposed to mean?” asked Hashi before D was quite finished.

“Nothing in particular, just that the cat cried and came back to life. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?…”

“So you’re saying I’m like this cat?” said Hashi, his voice getting shrill.

“No need to get all hot and bothered. I was just trying to suggest that the woman who left you in the locker probably didn’t
do it because she hated you; she may have done it out of instinct, to protect you—like the cat,” said D.

“Sounds like bullshit to me.”

“Why bullshit?” he objected. “I thought it was a pretty good story.”

“What time of year was all this supposed to happen?” asked Hashi suspiciously. “Winter?”

“No, summer,” said D.

“And what was the name of the cat?”

“Which one?”

“The mother.”

“I called her Peko.”

“And the kitten?”

“It was wild, lived outside, so I never gave it a name.”

“And do you know what made that little cat come back to life and get so strong?”

“I suppose because a lousy start like that made it fight all the harder for something better…”

“Wrong!” said Hashi. “It was hatred, pure and simple.” The fork in his hand dropped to the floor, and with it D’s eyes dropped from Hashi’s face, unable to stand the expression there, one not unlike the mother cat’s as she was eating her kittens. The cook, who had come in with some iced water and persimmons, put a clean fork beside Hashi’s plate.

“I’ll get it later,” she said as he bent to retrieve the other one. D sat staring at the cool, shining fork against the dark floor, wondering whether he should tell Hashi that he was planning a televised reunion with his mother.

“That’s just the way it works,” Hashi continued. “With cats and fish and birds and everything else; they give birth to dozens and dozens of babies, but only a few of them survive, so the babies
are born hating the parents that eat them—in fact, resenting everything around them, every little breeze that touches their skin before their eyes are ever open. They’re born despising everything that’s not them—not consciously, of course, they’ve only got those pulpy little brains, but with every cell in their bodies, instinctively. Everything’s dangerous, everything’s hateful. It’s nature, going on without thinking, like people’s hair and fingernails growing for a while after they’re dead… There’s always a little life left… It was summer, wasn’t it? Must have been summer. And the sun was burning hot, unbearably hot, and the heat started his blood pumping, and he couldn’t stand it any longer and he started to wail… and that’s when he came back to life, came back hating his mother… hating everything!”

“Whoa!” D interrupted. “Now who’s telling stories?… Yours?”

“I suppose so,” said Hashi.

No. It was Kiku’s. Suddenly Hashi caught hold of the memory that had been playing around the edges of his brain ever since his fork dug into the tomato… An orphanage field trip, coin lockers like a beehive in front of a roller rink. Maybe little brothers and sisters inside. A red-haired lady, tomatoes everywhere, and Kiku, a furious look on his face, stamping on them… and that sour smell.

“Is it hate that makes you sing?” asked D.

“No, not really.”

“Then are you trying to forget your hate?”

“Who knows?” said Hashi.

“‘Who knows?’ Nobody, if
you
don’t. Well, I’ll tell you what
I
know, I know you’re a spoiled brat. When I listen to kids like you talk, it makes me want to puke; in fact if this weren’t my dining room, I would puke, right here. Seems to me kids today
don’t know
much of anything. You were born in a world with central heating
and air conditioning. You don’t know what it means to be cold or hot. You want everybody to feel sorry for you because you’ve had it so tough, but if you ask me, they spoiled you rotten—that orphanage, your foster parents, everybody. I suppose you could say that for a few minutes, just after you were born, you got a bum deal, but then they put you right in the air conditioning, and you haven’t been out of it since. You can whine your lungs out, but you’re never going to get
me
to feel sorry for you.”

Taking a gulp of water, Hashi tried to answer, but nothing came out. If he were Kiku, it occurred to him, he would have said something nasty and taken a punch at D long before this. He poked at the steamed tomato with his clean fork, making an effort not to think about the hard layer of muscles covering Kiku’s body. He hates me now anyway, he thought as he dug out a greenish lump from the middle of the tomato and put it in his mouth.

“Like it?” asked the cook, smiling proudly. “I stuffed it with parsley and seaweed.”

D shoveled up half his melting sherbet in one spoonful. The bits of purple ice sizzled as they melted on his tongue.

Back in the city, Hashi was introduced to the stylist D had arranged to work with him, a woman named Neva. She made a series of sketches showing hair, makeup, and costume possibilities and, after consulting at length with D, took Hashi on the rounds. First stop: hair. The salon, in Aoyama, occupied the eighth floor of a building sheathed in black glass. The woman who met them at the door wore alarming, lizardlike eye shadow. In the window, a neon sign flashed the name of the establishment: Marx. One wall was completely covered with Polaroids of famous clients. The rest of the decor was less like a beauty shop than a nineteenth-century parlor, though with quirky touches such as a dark teakwood
cabinet displaying antique corsets with impossibly small waists. In the center of the room was an old enamel bathtub doubling as a fountain with a marble sculpture depicting a young mermaid surrounded by dolphins, some sort of thorny plant, and a cloud of soap bubbles. There were only two chairs in the whole place.

As Neva entered the room, the four employees stopped what they were doing to greet her.

“Where’s the boss?” she asked one of them.

“He’s just gone out for a sec,” said a young woman with a ribbon tied around her bangs in an odd-looking clump. Telling them to go find him, Neva sat down on a couch. Hashi stood behind her. A few minutes later, a heavyset man in a baseball uniform bustled sweatily into the shop. The letter “P” was embroidered on his cap, and he had a mustache. After wiping his face and lighting a cigarette, he turned to Neva.

“This the kid?” he asked her, one eye drifting shut.

“This is the one,” she said, rising from the couch to run her fingers through Hashi’s hair. She showed the man some of her sketches, and he produced several thick, worn books of his own from the back of the shop. Flipping through the pages, he stopped and pointed at one. Neva nodded. When Hashi asked whose picture it was, the man answered in a high, fluty voice: “Brian Jones at seventeen.”

First they washed his hair, for which the fat man changed the regular nozzle on the hose for an old, rusty brass one. As he rinsed Hashi’s head, he explained that he’d stolen it from the bathroom in a hotel room where Rudolph Valentino had once stayed.

“It’s a lucky charm. I always say with performers ‘Your hair is your trademark…’ So, D’s calling you his ‘Beggar Prince.’ What’s he mean by that?”

“…”

While his hair was being cut, Hashi studied Neva in the mirror. Her eyes and eyebrows were somehow suspended on the surface of her oval face; her lips were pencil thin. Like women must have looked during the war, he thought. She wore a sober, navy blue suit, slightly wrinkled flesh-tone stockings, and high heels, and she carried a heavy-looking purse. Put a little headband on her and get her to stand up straight and salute, and she’d fit right in on any battlefield, he thought, smiling to himself. His eyes met hers in the mirror as she was sawing at her teeth with a piece of dental floss, and he noticed that the hand holding the floss was that of an old woman, wrinkled, dry, and blotchy.

Next they went to a fancy hotel with a fountain in the lobby, where Neva ordered Hashi’s costumes, five identical sets, from a shop in the basement: five black satin blouson jackets and five pairs of toreador pants with little bows down the sides. Since they had a photo session later, she explained, they wanted the silk shirts altered on the spot. While they were waiting, the manager, an older gay man, told Neva the story of a trip he’d taken the month before to a South Pacific island in the company of a male actor. He repeated the same details over and over: how they had gone deep-sea fishing and the actor got so excited when he was about to land a swordfish that he’d sprained his ankle and nearly fallen overboard; how the locals made fun of him; how they’d smoked the thing and had a party; how they’d forced him to be the floor show, making him stick a neon bulb up his bum and do an imitation of a phosphorescent fish—that kind of thing. Neva nodded at all the right places in the story and managed to talk him into a five percent discount.

“From now on, you’ve got to pay attention to how you look,” she said when they were back in the car. As he stared at the ravaged hands clutching the wheel, Hashi felt they belonged
to someone else. “You’ve got to be fashion-conscious,” she was saying. “Fashion is the silliest, vainest game there is, which is exactly why it’s so much fun. Do you know what clothes and makeup are for? Why we put them on? It’s simple: just to take them off, to have something to strip away in order to feel naked. Clothes are there to make other people think about what they can’t see. But that, of course, is the great joke, because when you strip off the clothes and wash off all that makeup, what do you have? Zero, that’s what. But then again, that’s the fun of it, don’t you think?” She laughed for the first time since they’d met.

Hashi’s publicity stills were to be shot on a set that consisted of a large-scale model of the city, complete with Tokyo Tower. Since they had some work to do on the model, he went to have a look at some of the other studios while they were getting it ready. In the first, sumo wrestlers were waltzing with pregnant women in a plastic watermelon patch. The melons were fitted with blinking lights. A young man with a megaphone explained that they were shooting a commercial for a tranquilizer.

In the studio next door, an orangutan waving an American flag was hanging from the turret of a tank, but as the cameras started to roll, the monkey dropped off. The trainer tried to coax it back up with a lump of sugar, making a muffled apology about the lights probably being too bright. They decided to lower the lights until the orangutan was in position and then turn them up as shooting started, but when the lights dimmed, the ape let out a long, low screech. In the dark, the trainer did what he could, wrapping one of the monkey’s hands around the gun turret and the other around the little flag, but as the lights came up several of the women on the set screamed: the flag was nowhere to be seen, and the hairy little hand held a swollen monkey penis which
it was vigorously pumping. As Hashi stood there laughing, Neva came up from behind to tell him that they were almost ready on the set. The smile faded from his lips when he saw her glance at the penis, a troubled look showing on her face.

As they walked back to the studio, they passed twin girls in swimsuits with baskets of fruit balanced on their heads. The girls glistened all over with some sort of oil, and they were crying. One had a thermometer in her mouth. After them came a man, apparently their manager, screaming “Tits! All the asshole wants is tits! Tits, tits, tits!” The strong smell that came from the girls as they passed made Hashi turn, and as he did so, a melon fell from one girl’s basket and split at her feet, showering bright red toenails with flesh and seeds. While the manager was wiping her feet, she noticed Hashi staring at her and smiled, thermometer and all. Hashi did not return the smile.

That night Hashi drank for the first time in his life. The photo session had run three hours over schedule, ending well past midnight, and after taking him to dinner Neva invited him to a bar on the top floor of a tall building. Hashi said he was worn out from smiling so much and following the photographer’s orders, and she suggested that he have a drink. He hesitated, instinctively hating anything to do with alcohol from years of Kuwayama’s nightly drinking. After a few drinks, this usually quiet man would get loud and talkative; it also made his piss stink, Hashi remembered. He would drone on about how much he had suffered, about the joys and sorrows in life, and in the end he would start to cry and break into an old mining song. That was as much as Hashi knew about liquor.