by Susan Barker
She teeters at the entrance to the rabbit’s hole. I must be the one to tug her through.
The aquarium is dank and shaded. Sunlight diffuses through the fish tanks, casting rippling, subterranean shadows across the walkway. From the next floor comes the distant pandemonium that is class 4a of Ashihara elementary school running amok in the tropical-fish section. Thirty-five yelpy, whelpy, scab-eating, blowfish-impersonating eight-year-old runts. I feel a stab of pity for their teacher Mrs Kobayashi. It really isn’t her problem that little Tesuka-kun has forgotten his asthma inhaler, or that Aki-chan has a purple M&M jammed up her right nostril. Mrs Kobayashi’s nine o’clock Valium hasn’t yet worn off, but she prudently decides today’s excursion calls for another half.
I monitor the Cartesian co-ordinates of Mary’s movements until they remain stationary outside the emperor-penguin enclosure. When I arrive Mary is watching the penguins waddle about. She laps absentmindedly at her ice cream and licks up the drips sliding down her knuckles. I squat some ten metres away, behind a small tank of echinoderms and sea urchins. Mary thinks she is the only person in the penguin enclosure. Here are some other things she thinks: Is it true that penguins fall over backwards when they look up at aeroplanes? I wish an aeroplane would fly overhead so I can see. I probably shouldn’t mention to Yuji that I came here today. He will think I am strange for coming here by myself . . .
Little does she know lack of intimacy is the least of her problems with Yuji. Knowledge of her innermost thoughts can be agonizing at times – akin to watching a girl stumble spellbound along the edge of a snarling wolf pit as their fangs snap at the air by her feet.
Mary presses her nose to the glass of the penguin enclosure. One of the emperor penguins peers myopically back at her. He sees her blurry pink face and the fountain hairdo, spurting from her head like effluent from the blowhole of a killer whale. A shiver creeps through Innuk. He sidles closer to his sister Iglopuk, who is sleeping with her bill tucked behind a feathery flipper.
I slink amid the shadows, diligently dogging Mary’s movements from the pamphlet vending machine to the coin-operated submarine. In the tropical-fish section I stow into a pitch-black cleaning supplies cupboard. Through the balsa-wood door I watch, lightheaded from bleach fumes, as Mary dawdles past the Indo-Pacific angelfish. She taps her fingers against a tank, trying to attract the attention of some tiny, stripy anemone zigzagging stupidly about. We proceed to the walrus enclosure, where Mary develops a curious affinity with a 1,206 kg oestrus female of cinnamon brown, whom the aquarium-keepers have named Marilyn. Marilyn reclines, supine on the damp concrete, stretching her fore-flippers and wrinkling her whiskery snout in the sun. The myoglobin percentage in her muscle tissue is hazardously low, afflicting her with the walrus equivalent of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. She spends 94.8 per cent of her day on this same patch of concrete.
At the entrance to the main tank I hunker down beneath a cylinder wall attachment containing an aluminized Mylar fire blanket.
‘Look, Granddad, it’s Jaws!’ The little girl’s Pocahontas plaits bounce excitedly as she skips alongside her grandfather towards Osaka Aquarium’s star attraction: Oscar the albino killer whale.
Granddad halts in front of me. ‘Hello, there. Have you lost something? Can we help you look for it?’ he asks in a very loud voice.
Interfering old . . .! I ‘Shuush!’ vehemently at him. Fortunately Mary is transfixed by Oscar the albino killer whale, and fails to notice. Frowning, the old man draws his granddaughter closer to his side and moves quickly away.
In his 24 by 18-metre salt-water tank Oscar glides in elliptical circles, sleek and agile, averaging 34.2 kph, a specimen of perfect albino health. In the perspex tunnel that cuts through the tank, Mary gawps upwards as Oscar’s deathly white ventral surface passes overhead. Mary imagines Oscar smashing through the tunnel wall, his jaws clamping down on her flesh. She shudders in delight. In truth, nothing could be further from Oscar’s mind. He is too busy being lonely and confused. The tank screws up his echo-location system; all the sonars he sends out rebound meaninglessly back and forth between the tank walls. For the past fifteen months Oscar has been endlessly trying to navigate a maze of mirrors, turning this way and that, searching for the passage back to the Norwegian Sea. Frustrated, Oscar shoots to the top of the tank and lob-tails the surface with his tail fluke. He trills and whistles before submerging again.
Mary watches enviously. He’s having so much fun. It must be great to be a killer whale, to be able to fly up through the water like that.
Mary does not realize exactly how kindred she and Oscar truly are. Oscar tail-spins and arcs through hoops in return for fish. Mary trusses herself up in slinky dresses night after night, to sweet-talk money from salarymen. Both the hostess bar and the aquarium are zoos, catering for different sections of the public.
In the provinces of hyperspace, the darkest penetralia of the universe are uncloaked, heralding the end of quantum privacy.
Mary tucks a stray strand of hair behind her ear as she watches hermit crabs scuttle across their sandy compound. From the first moment I cast my hypergaze upon her, I have possessed perfect knowledge of Mary. Imagine knowing someone so intimately that you know the rate at which her fingernails grow (0.000001 mm/s), that without even having kissed her you know the flavour of her saliva (nicotine and honeysuckle), that you’ve seen her deepest, darkest phobias clamouring at the walls of her psyche (frogs and stepladders).
It is a popular myth that one’s lover should possess an aura of mystery, that to demystify is to throw stagnant pond water upon one’s infatuation. But passion kept alive by mystery cannot be pure . . . Passion that can endure the sight of colon muscles propelling your lover’s last meal towards its timely exit . . . now, that is purity of passion.
Our afternoon at the Osaka Aquarium comes to an end when Mary has to go to work. On the Midosuji line into Shinsaibashi I realize that I have left my chef’s uniform at home. I alight at the station before Mary’s and travel back to my bedsit. I arrive at mission base camp T–30 minutes before my shift. Afflicted by the neurological effects of sleep deprivation, I decide to stretch out on my futon for ten minutes of neurone regenesis. Precisely 103 minutes later I am woken by the angry brring-brring-ing of the telephone. I must have misprogrammed my metaspatial sleep monitor. 7.38 km due east, Mama-san cradles her office phone. She wears a purple kaftan and varicose-vein-support tights. Mr Bojangles is also present, reclining on his rosetta day-bed, chewing at his crocheted booties.
I lift the receiver and hold it cautiously to my ear.
‘Good evening. Have I reached the residence of Watanabe Ichiro?’ Mama-san coolly enquires.
I gulp in an affirmative manner.
‘Oh, good! I am just phoning to check whether Mr Watanabe intends to come into work this evening. Because if Mr Watanabe does not intend to come in for his shift, the management need to know so they can commence searching for the lazy good-for-nothing’s replacement.’
‘I overslept,’ I say.
Mama-san takes a deep breath. Then she warps into high-gear control-freakery. ‘You have fifteen minutes to get here.’
‘I—’
‘We have given the clients seaweed crackers and told them their food is delayed because our kitchen boy is a useless oaf. If you are not here in fifteen minutes, we will tell them their food is delayed because our ex-kitchen boy is a useless oaf.’
Mama-san slams down the receiver, leaving me nursing third-degree frost-bite in my ear. Heady from her power-trip, she leans over to smooch Mr Bojangles, a conga procession of germs dancing from his fur onto her Chanel-rouged lips.
I pop an effervescent vitamin C tablet and pull on my trainers. Luckily for Mama-san my job at The Sayonara Bar is a vital façade for my protection of Mary. If it wasn’t for Mary I wouldn’t have picked up the phone.
I slip through the mirrored double doors, an impressive 23 minutes, 34.2 seconds later. The murky, twilight lounge is strangely free of pestilenc
e tonight. The vermin scourge is limited to three City Hall officials, two postal clerks and a superintendent from the local sewage-treatment plant. It doesn’t take long to get to the bottom of this peculiarity. A mutant strain of Influenza A(H5N2) has been circulating through the air ducts of several major office buildings in the district. It was planted there by biotechnology lab technician Yoshi Kawakata, 27, in a masterful strike against the corporate drones.
‘Hey, sleepyhead! There’s a pizza and a teriyaki chicken platter waiting to be made in the kitchen.’
Mariko, the Fukuoka farmer’s daughter, is perched on a bar stool next to Sewage Superintendent Ishida. Ishida puffs on his cigar and fantasizes about plying Mariko with oysters and champagne before crudely defiling her atop the main control-panel at the sewage-treatment works. Mariko bats her eyelashes and asks him if he would care for another drink. A whimper catches in his throat.
I go to the kitchen and put my apron on. An hour slogs by. I am watching over Mary, incarcerated in the karaoke booth, joylessly caterwauling ‘La Isla Bonita’ at the demoralizing behest of the two postal workers, when Katya struts into the kitchen. Finding it preferable to scrub filth from the dishes of the dissolute than to converse with Katya, I remain hunched over the sink. My failure to be suitably awed by her presence torments her.
‘Hey, loverboy,’ she drawls. ‘What happened to you earlier? Girlfriend wouldn’t let you out of bed?’
Katya chews aniseed-flavoured gum. A salivary solution of sorbitol, glycerine and E320 compounds swills about her mouth. She reminds me of a camel with earrings. I rinse a plate and put it on the draining board.
‘How am I going to break the news to Mary, Watanabe? She’ll be devastated to hear you’ve met somebody else . . .’
Katya tightens the thumbscrews with a smirk. Panicky quarks fly from my solar plexus. Fortunately, Katya’s alpha emissions possess no knowledge of my inner pledge to safeguard Mary. She suspects I am attracted to Mary, but regards my attraction as rudimentary and third-dimensional. I pity Katya. This squalid type of love is all she will ever know. I rinse some cutlery and place it on the draining board.
‘You know, she’s wanted you since your first ever shift . . .’
With a stroke of luck the millionaire electronics magnate Ohara-san steps into the bar. Rich, decrepit, and possessed of a soft spot for the milky curves of Western ladies, Ohara is Katya’s current undertaking. Her nostrils twitch as she detects his presence (her nasal receptors are highly attuned to the scent of wealth – a formidable olfactory skill). And she trails her nose into the lounge, determined as a bloodhound closing in on its prey.
Time drips on like a festering stalactite. I prepare a Greek salad with a side order of octopus tentacles drizzled in soya. I prepare an order of fried potatoes and chilli sauce. I skim crumbs from the oil in the deep-fryer with a metal spatula. I yelp with pain as a spiteful speck of oil bespatters my wrist.
I decide it is time to take flight from this Godforsaken kitchen.
In a single metaspatial bound I shoot up into hyperspace. I pirouette upon the shroud of light pollution cloaking the city, up where the stars are strung across the sky like incandescent paper garlands. Eternal truth floods my cranium as I hurtle through the brilliant, lunatic realm where epistemological warfare has human logic in shreds. I see the tumult of humanity down below, a million destinies unfolding, like poorly enacted classroom dioramas.
Way down below, buildings are crammed cheek by jowl, town planning reduced to a game of Tetrus. Families sit hypnotized, captivated by the subliminal urgings of their television sets; pubescent vampires prowl the grounds of Osaka castle; lesbian arsonists race from a blazing building as the smoke-stifled cries of a woebegone husband fade out of earshot.
Way down below, Mary sits in the Sayonara Bar karaoke booth. Cigar smoke prickles across her corneas like static electricity. Her smile muscles atrophied hours ago, surrendering themselves to a fatigued grimace. The salaryman next to her, his cheeks flushed with more units of alcohol than his body can metabolize, tells her she reminds him of a famous actress.
Ohara-san is up on the stage, singing ‘New York, New York’. He punctuates the rising crescendo of New York, New York, with kicks, his joints protesting with rusty creaks. Katya sways reverentially, smiling as though enraptured by his singing, when really she is enraptured by his wealth. Palms clash in fervent accolade as he returns to his seat.
‘That was wonderful!’ Katya breathes as though his performance had been a spiritual journey and Ohara-san her Svengali.
His liver-spotted hand gives her thigh a firm, appreciative squeeze. Ohara-san thinks: Yes, I will take the blond one tonight . . . but will she be willing? My Katya will persuade her, trick her if necessary. My Ukrainian princess has never let me down before.
An icy splinter penetrates my heart. What kind of a man is this Ohara-san? I enter his memory depository and witness the grisly history of his yakuza-assisted electronics empire, his violent intimidation of rival firms into bankruptcy. While his wife, a blubbery, medicated wreck, stumbles about their hill-top mansion, Ohara-san and his cronies comb the red-light district for nubile bitches to use and abuse. Sometimes he’ll take a few Polaroids, which he’ll leave about the house the next morning to taunt Mrs Ohara.
I need to get Mary out of there. Now.
Across the ceiling runs a network of copper piping – the Pyrosafe Ltd sprinkler system Mama-san installed after a spectacularly bleak fire-risk assessment. Any one of the three fire alarms in the hostess bar will activate the sprinkler system, but only the corridor alarm is beyond the range of Mama-san’s CCTV cameras. I hang up my apron and sneak towards the exit, monitoring the people in the lounge. Absorbed as they are in their meaningless social and monetary transactions, I don’t even register as a peripheral blip.
The fire alarm outside is a manual, break-glass affair. Buildings like this one are notorious death traps. The reprobates will be ditching their laptops in the scramble to get out. I would be rubbing my palms in anticipatory glee were I not so preoccupied by Mary’s welfare.
I count backwards from three and ram my fist into the glass of the fire alarm.
The glass remains intact. Owing to a lethal manufacturing blunder its tensile breaking point is excessively high. What if there was a real fire? What then? Frustrated, I pull off a trainer and hammer the glass with my heel until it shatters. There is an interim of a 1/30th of a second as electrons speed round the electrical circuit. Then the deafening, air-raid squawk of the fire alarm. In an additional 2.4 seconds hydraulic pressure builds up in the sprinkler pipes and activates the irrigation system. The spray is discharged with a satisfactory range of 3.2 metres, dousing all and sundry.
I allow myself a moment to bask in the gentle radiance of a job well done, before hot-tailing it to the stairwell. My ingenuity results in a complete minesweep of the lounge. Clients and hostesses hasten exit-wards, hearts drumming a panicky cadence. Psychosomatic responses include amplified pulserate, hyperventilation and weakened sphincter muscles. Mama-san gathers abandoned coats, her face a frozen masque. Stephanie begs a drunken postal worker to get off his stool, but he continues to sip whisky and remark: ‘It’s raining indoors! A miracle! Fetch me my umbrella.’ Other salarymen hurtle pell-mell down the six flights of stairs. Ohara-san clutches the arm of Katya on the way down, scowling because his suit is wet.
Hidden from view in the foyer of the Big Echo karaoke, I watch the Sayonara Bar evacuees file outside to dripdry on the pavement. The collective mind lattice buzzes as mental corpuscles jolt and jangle. Scintilla illuminates the air with psychedelic sparks. Cerebral kinematics, animated by the unexpected calamity, have leapt up a notch.
Emigrés from other bars in the building also mill around. Heads crane upwards, eagerly seeking flames, a wisp of smoke, anything to justify their ordeal. Mama-san walks round, distributing sodden coats among her shivering customers. Ohara-san’s assistant calls the chauffeur on his mobile phone, instructing him to take
the boss for a rub-down at another hostess establishment. ‘It looks like a false alarm,’ people remark to one another. Those amorous for disaster lament their lot.
In the entire building, only one person remains.
I hyperzoom up to the lounge. Mary stands beneath a sprinkler, dark-blond hair plastered to her scalp, her face marmoreal beneath streaming rivulets. Though the wailing fire alarm is only 7.5 decibels below the pain threshold, Mary welcomes it. It bulldozes all memory of the night’s customers from her consciousness.
Mary has never felt so calm. She closes her eyes and lifts her face to the sprinklers. The white light of her soul disperses into a wild, iridescent spectrum of colour, streaming from her sternum. I pass through her, slithering amid her psychic entrails, and see something that astounds me. Mary knows there is no fire. She knows because a latent, undeveloped faculty has told her so. It is a faculty she will remain unaware of until it explodes. As unexpectedly as it did for me.
A shiver creeps down my spine. The time for Mary to join me is growing near.
9
MR SATO
I
As you know, Sunday has never been a day of rest in the Sato household. It has always been a day of sizeable undertakings, such as the painting of the garden fence, or the clearing of leaves from the gutters. I remember how keen you were to don your headscarf and go from room to room, polishing every stick of furniture to an immaculate sheen. Resolute in the division of labour, you insisted that I attend only to the outdoor chores. If I offered to mop the floor or wipe the slats of the venetian blinds you would brandish your feather duster and cry: ‘No husband of mine!’ Of course, since you are no longer here, the responsibility to maintain our household’s exceptional standards of cleanliness has fallen upon me. I think you will find I am doing a fine job.
