Tea From an Empty Cup

TEA FROM AN EMPTY CUP

Pat Cadigan

www.sfgateway.com

‘Now, why would anyone become a prostitute?’ the white guy asked, sipping his iced coffee through a long, skinny straw.

Across the table, the Japanese guy raised his eyebrows, making his guarded face into a mask of mild surprise. ‘You mean, somebody
isn’t
?’

The white guy’s laughter echoed in the mostly empty cafe. ‘Oh, man. Things must be really
non-ruly
on your planet.’

The Japanese guy eyed the tall glass of iced coffee sweating pretty beads of condensation as the white guy sipped at it. Retro beverages were so all-pervasive these days, it was impossible to tell whether anyone really liked iced coffee. According to rumor, most places just poured day-old crude over ice and disguised it with artificial flavors and ersatz cream. ‘That’s Nature for you. With some she’s into the red zone, with others, there isn’t even a meter. You goin’ my way?’

‘What kind of value do I get?’ asked the white guy, watching the other smooth the front of his Guinness T-shirt. Not sake, but Guinness, for chrissakes; what kind of an Oriental was he, anyway? He even turned up his nose at tea.

‘What kind of value you lookin’ for?’ Without waiting for an answer, the Japanese guy dug in the well-traveled bag parked on the seat beside him and came up with a pouch the white guy recognized as the carrying case for a very expensive model of hotsuit. Then he put his other fist on the table, paused as if trying to decide something and then opened his hand to reveal a sapphire-blue gel cap on his palm.

‘Christ.’ The white guy rolled his eyes. ‘What’d you do, put your brain under the pillow and you got that instead of a dime?’

‘Hey, it’s not what you think,’ the Japanese guy said. ‘There’s a creation myth in there. Among other things. And it’s all genuine.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘I
swear
. Distilled from millennia of racial memory –’

‘Uh-
huh
.’

‘I could show you the chromosome they stripped it offa,’ the Japanese guy said defensively. ‘One hundred purebreds got scraped for this.
One hundred
. In a
hospital
. This is pure
pharmaceutical
–’

‘So I take it and what? What’s the big myth?’

‘Lots of big myths. All the big myths you want. The big creation myth.’

‘So tell me about it.’

The troubled look on the Japanese guy’s face wasn’t one of his rehearsed expressions. ‘You don’t really want me to spoil it for you.’

‘If it’s so great, you can’t spoil it. Come on, let’s hear it. Just one.’

The Japanese guy hesitated for a long moment.

‘I just want to know what I’m getting,’ the white guy persisted. ‘That’s how we do things on
my
planet.’

‘Sure, but just telling it doesn’t do it justice.’

‘I believe you. All I want is just to know one thing to watch for. What if I think it looks boring and I skip it? I could do that, you know, I’m not Japanese. I might not know better.’

The Japanese guy let out a breath. ‘Okay. There were these two gods, Susanoo and Amaterasu. They were brother and sister –’

‘
Susan?
’ The white guy’s perfect features were scornful as he flicked the menu button to his right for another iced coffee. ‘You expect me to believe
Susan
is a Japanese name?’

‘Not
Susan
, you idiot,
Susanoo
. And that was the
brother’s
name, Amaterasu was the
sister
. You gonna let me tell this or not?’

The white guy waved carelessly with one hand. One of the wait staff materialized so suddenly, he almost hit her in the face. Seeming not to notice, she slid another iced coffee onto the table and removed the empty glass. The white guy took it, closed his thin Anglo lips around the fat, transparent straw and sucked hard, his cheeks hollowing. His blue eyes stared hard at the Japanese guy. ‘So?’ he said, taking his lips from the straw. ‘Tell!’

The Japanese guy nodded resignedly. ‘Susanoo was a one-god riot on wheels, tearing everything up,’ the Japanese guy said, watching the white guy continue to drink his day-old crude. Maybe it was true, what his foster father used to say years ago, that Westerners thought using garbage for culture was recycling. His foster father had been white, a minor bureaucrat named Clark who always wanted to be anything else but what he was. This guy seemed to suffer from the same ailment. ‘Party time was all the time, it was all really
non-ruly
, as someone I know would say.

‘So one day, Amaterasu, who was always real patient with this
yabo
, was weaving sacred garments with her sacred maidens and Susanoo tosses this dead, flayed horse into the room, just to hear all the sacred ladies scream. Which they do, and one of the sacred maidens even accidentally pricks her sacred genitals and dies.’

‘Oh,
that
could happen.’ The white guy grinned sarcastically. ‘I know lots of people with their good parts pierced and they’re all real alive, still.’

The Japanese guy stared back at him flatly. ‘Sure. If you call that living.’

‘Hey, if it’s not your idea of excitement, it’s not, but you can’t tell me there are no Japanese with pierced –’

‘
Seiken shirazu
,’ said the Japanese guy, putting his head in his hands for a moment. ‘Are you gonna let me tell this?’

‘Yeah-yeah. A sacred maiden takes a sacred prick in her sacred genitals and dies. So then what?’

The waiter who had brought the iced coffee set a cup of green tea in the middle of the table. The Japanese guy looked up, furious. ‘Get that outa here.’

‘
I
ordered that, thank you very much.’ The white guy pulled it over next to the iced coffee.

‘Amaterasu gets even more fed up with her
yabo
brother than I am with you,’ the Japanese guy went on, glowering at the tea, ‘and she goes into this cave to sulk. That’s it – the whole world goes dark.’

The white guy raised one skeptical eyebrow. ‘The
whole
world? Or just Japan?’

‘Back then, Japan
was
the whole world,
manuke
.’

‘You
wish
.’

‘No,
you
wish, all of you, you
gaijin
sheep –’

‘Whoo, gaijin, the man says!’ The white guy raised both hands and wiggled his fingers. ‘Sampling those Mishima breakbeats again, are we?’

The Japanese guy slipped the gel cap into a tiny pocket on his shirtsleeve and made getting-ready-to-get-up-and-leave motions.

‘Okay, okay, I’m sorry. Finish the story. Or was that it?’

‘All the other gods got together outside the cave and tried to get her to come out again, but she wouldn’t.’ The Japanese guy paused as if he were trying to decide if he really wanted to continue. ‘Then the Dread Female of Heaven –’

‘The
who
? Of
what
?’

‘The Dread Female. Of Heaven.’ The Japanese guy groaned. ‘Okay, what’s your problem now?’

‘What’s so dread about her?’

The Japanese guy’s smile was sly. ‘You’ll find out if you’re lucky. The Dread Female of Heaven started dancing and dancing and dancing, and she starts getting very aroused, and all the other gods start getting very aroused, because this is a very sexy dance. And at the hottest part, she does this really, really hot move, so hot that it makes everyone go off. Including her. So everyone’s laughing –’

‘
Laughing
?’ The white guy’s face was incredulous. ‘You guys
laugh
when you come?’

‘You could be the lucky winner who finds out,’ the Japanese guy said, unperturbed. ‘The gods laugh. Demons laugh. If they let you in on things, you’ll laugh too.’

‘I bet. So that’s it? Everybody comes and laughs, ha-ha, happy ending? Or do we get to ride up and down in the cave?’

‘What do you think this is, a theme park?’

‘Oh, hell, I can go to any club in the
universe
to see somebody dance –’

‘Not like the Dread Female,’ said the Japanese guy confidently.

‘No? Half a block from here, there’s this woman, she’s got
six
rings, all of them charged,
inside
–’

‘You’re right. I’d dread
that
, I’m surprised you don’t.’ The Japanese guy looked revolted. ‘What if it got fried in there? What if it got fried
off
?’ He shuddered. ‘Anyway, aren’t you married?’

‘Yeah, I’m married, but it’s nothing serious. It’s not like I told her my real name or anything.’ The white guy spread his hands. The backs were scarred, deliberately, but not very well. Home brew – someone had tried to brand over a scarification or vice versa. The resulting keloids weren’t decoration, just damage. The Japanese guy couldn’t stand the sight. ‘If I want to get my magic wand charged and polished, I can go anywhere. Hell, I can even go
home
. I thought you had something here, and you’re gonna give me a hard-on over some ass-shaker. Dread Female of Heaven, sure. Mistress Inga the Dominatrix can suck the marrow out of your bones without mussing her hair.’

‘If she saw Ama no Uzume’s sacred genitals, she’d fall down coming and laughing like a hyena.’ The Japanese guy put up a hand as the white guy started to say something. ‘Look, I guess I was wrong about you. You’re just too
out here
for this stuff –’

The white guy was halfway out of his seat. ‘You callin’
me
a fuckin’
tourist
? Shithead, do you know
who I am
?’