by Nick Mamatas
He enlightened the gourmet public about the availability of cloned ama clitoris sashimi by means of a clever spam program, which he bought in the Akihabara electronics district. A spam program was appropriate since the word spam originally meant `spiced American meat.’
Every night after Yukio came home from the Nippon Real-Doll Corporation, he printed labels for the jars and boxes and address labels and dealt with an increasing number of internet orders and payments. He had rented a garage for delivery of the little unlabelled jars of clitorises, which were received there during the day by Keiko, dressed ordinarily. She would then change into her ama costume, stick the labels on to the jars, skillfully fold the beautiful little cardboard boxes which Yukio produced on his printer, fit a jar into each, and stick on an address label.
Keiko was very busy; and so was Yukio. What with Yukio’s regular work at the Real-Doll Corporation and his after-hours work at home, he became a bit like a Zen monk who had trained himself in No-Sleep, or not much—now he slept standing up in the commuter train instead of looking at manga and anime on his phone; consequently he never watched the News in either manga or anime format. All he knew was that orders were pouring into his home PC. The spam had done its job sufficiently well that consumers were spontaneously spreading the word of the new and affordable (although not cheap) gourmet delight. Keiko told him that by now magazines were writing stories about, and TV channels were talking—she had done some phone interviews. Apparently Yukio was being hailed as the new Mr Mikimoto, but Yukio had no spare time to pay much attention.
Mikimoto-san was the man who invented cultured pearls by putting irritating grains of sand inside oysters, at Pearl Island. To suggest that his cultured pearls were as good as naturally occuring pearls, he had employed amas to dive into the sea around Pearl Island for tourists to admire, and in fact, according to Keiko, Mikimoto-san had invented or revised the see-through costumes of the amas. The ama water-ballet actresses would bring up real oysters, which might or might not contain real pearls, for the tourists to eat authentically in the Pearl Island Restaurant.
One evening an astonishing thing happened. Yukio had woken up automatically as usual in time to get off the commuter train, and was walking away from the station homeward when he saw Keiko coming towards along the street dressed in schoolgirl uniform!
“Why have you become a schoolgirl?” he cried out, but Keiko walked past, ignoring him.
Then along the street came another schoolgirl Keiko, then another, then a couple together.
They were real schoolgirls wearing false faces—latex masks of the real Keiko!
“Excuse me,” Yukio said to a false Keiko, “but where did you get that mask?”
The schoolgirl paused, but remained silent.
Of course, she couldn’t speak while wearing that mask because Yukio wasn’t speaking to her but to the mask. Should he reach out and peel the mask from her true face? That might constitute assault, or even a new perversion, of unmasking schoolgirls.
“Please tell me,” he begged.
She bowed slightly, then beckoned—gestured him back towards the station.
Like a tourist guide for the deaf she led him inside the station to a vending machine. It was one of those that sold the used panties of virgins, which old men would buy and sniff. But now it also sold something else in little bags: those masks of Keiko.
Quickly Yukio bought one. The packaging showed the upper body and face of Keiko, just as on the labels of the jars of clitorises. Keiko held to her lips with chopsticks a clitoris, although now she was using her left hand rather than her right—evidently she had been photoshopped. A speech bubble above her head read: Eat my virgin clitoris.
That was the cheeky message conveyed by the mask. Identities concealed, schoolgirls could tease men naughtily without a blush, without even saying a word or making a gesture. What innocent, or wicked, erotic power they would feel! Clitoris power. Maybe the packaging of other masks had different speech in the bubbles. Or maybe not. Or maybe yes.
Quickly Yukio googled non-manga non-anime News on his phone.
He saw a picture, taken through a window, of a classroom in which all the girls were wearing identical Keiko masks to the consternation of the teacher. He saw a picture of a playground where a dozen Keikos of different heights were strolling. A craze had hit the whole of Japan, probably spreading among schoolgirls everywhere by txt!
Because of trousers, he noticed some boys too, who were also wearing Keiko masks. Ah, the boys were doing that so as to save face!
He asked the Keiko who still lingered by the machine, “Keiko, did you do this without consulting me? To prove that you’re clever too?” What a perfect ecological loop, that the same machines which sold the used virgin underwear of schoolgirls should provide the same schoolgirls with these masks . . .
But of course she wasn’t the real Keiko, and besides she had no intention of speaking.
How could Keiko have organised the rapid manufacture of all the masks and their supply to vending machines? Yukio ripped open the packaging and unfolded the latex mask. On the back of the chin, to his horror he saw: ™ Nippon Real-Doll Corp.
Had he fallen asleep at work without realizing and talked in his sleep? Had he been too clever for himself? Had part of him exploited himself schizophrenically out of company loyalty? Or had the company security-psychologist decided that Yukio was behaving oddly, and investigated his computer?
Oh foolish Yukio, to have copyrighted the label with Keiko’s image in his own name at work, borrowing the company’s copyright software—that was how they had found out!
But then the company perceived a unique business opportunity: the Real-Doll Corporation could turn real schoolgirls everywhere into clitoris-power dolls of his Keiko! A million texting schoolgirls could spread a craze within a few days, or maybe a few hours. And Yukio couldn’t complain or sue, nor could Keiko. For one thing, Yukio had committed industrial theft. But, even more worryingly, the Real-Doll Corporation’s psychologist-detective may have also found out the true source of Genuine Cloned Ama Clitoris Sashimi.
Yukio bowed to the false Keiko, then hurried home.
“Who are you?” he said to Keiko in the four-mat room. Quickly he explained what he had discovered—Keiko had been too busy labeling in the rented garage that day to watch any news. And he added: “You must wear a mask from now on, or else I won’t know you!”
“Do you mean wear my diving mask?”
“More like a mask of Kate Winslet, I think . . . No, wait!”
The big oval of latex cut from the Keiko mask fitted the diving mask perfectly. Superglue secured it. Her false eyes, false nose, and false mouth squeezed flatly against the inside of the glass, as if she had dived to a depth of such pressure that her features had become two-dimensional. Her photoshopped clitoris forever would touch her flat lips.
Since the false genuine face which she wore a few centimeters in front of her real face was in fact her true face, this negated that falsity and bestowed a mysterious and mystical authenticity upon her actual face, even though that was now invisible, as mystical things often are.
A Zen-like state came over Yukio. He knelt before Keiko, like Pinocchio praying to the Blue Fairy to make him real. By not-seeing what he was seeing, Yukio began to worship her countenance.
Unseeing too, a blind goddess, Keiko heard his mantra of worship.
“My Beloved, My Beloved, My Beloved . . . ”
Whale clitoris sashimi was only an illusion, from which Yukio was now freed by enlightenment. Probably its sublime taste was also an illusion caused by exorbitant price. He would eat Keiko’s clitoris instead.
Ian Watson started writing science fiction in Japan in the late 1960s, where he was supposed to be a lecturer but his university was on strike for 2½ years. Many novels and story collections later, his most recent are respectively Mockymen (Golden Gryphon, 2003, and Immanion Press, 2004) and The Butterflies of Memory (PS Publishing, 2006), which isn’t a sequel t
o The Flies of Memory (Gollancz, 1990). His previous collection, The Great Escape (from Golden Gryphon) was a Washington Post “Book of the Year.” Throughout 1990 he worked eyeball to eyeball with Stanley Kubrick on A.I. Artificial Intelligence, subsequently directed by Steven Spielberg, for which Ian has screen credit for Screen Story. His first collection of poetry, The Lexicographer’s Love Song, appeared in 2001 from DNA Publications, and he has won a Rhysling Award for his SF poetry. He and Roberto Quaglia began collaborating three years ago, resulting in a now complete book of linked stories, The Beloved of My Beloved, of which the “Moby Clitoris” is one, currently seeking an English language publisher—it already found a Japanese one. Ian lives in a tiny English village midway between Oxford and Stratford with his black cat Poppy, and his web site with fun photos, run by Roberto, is at www.ianwatson.info. He and his Spanish translator and Hungarian publisher maintain a website (www.ajeno.intelmedia.co.uk) to spread greater awareness of the unknown Colombian poet Miguel Ajeno.
Roberto Quaglia (www.robertoquaglia.com) hails from Genoa in Italy, where he ran a bar for years, won prizes for photography, and became one of the few Surrealist city councillors in the world. Currently he lives much of the year in Bucharest because he learned to speak Romanian, though he may also live in Moldova where people also speak Romanian. Robert Sheckley enthusiastically prefaced Roberto’s surreal satirical SF double-novel Bread, Butter and Paradoxine (published in English by Delos International). He continues to take thousands of photographs. Genoa is the city of Christopher Columbus, who perhaps discovered America, and now America discovers Roberto Quaglia, which they can also do in “The Penis of My Beloved” in Claude Lalumière & Elise Moser’s anthology Lust for Life. Roberto cruises the motorways of Europe in a white Mercedes with no wing mirrors so that he will always see into the future. His recent collection of essays, also from Delos, Pensiero stocastico (Probabilistic Thought), considers such matters as “The Advantages of Human Clonation,” “The Miracle of the Multiplication of Loaves and Fishes and Porn Photos on the Internet,” and “The Myth of Diana, the Death of the Sad Princess.” He has also written the remarkable Jonathan Livingshit Pigeon, much better than a seagull.
LYDIA'S BODY
Vylar Kaftan
The girl did everything for him. She polished his boots with bear grease and swept the floor with a willow broom. She washed the sheets, both sets, once a week. She dried them on a clothesline near their house—the one-room log cabin she guessed he’d built himself. Sometimes the Wisconsin breeze blew more dirt into the sheets as they fluttered, the linen stained with human fluids she couldn’t scrub out.
He went hunting most days, the man she believed to be Lydia’s father. Sometimes he’d stroke her hair and say, “I’ll be back by nightfall, my Lydia, with fresh meat.” The girl smiled at him, grateful for his presence at night when the panthers screamed. He trudged off through the forest, shotgun slung to his back, and she closed the door behind him. The door had no lock. No one was around for miles except the Chippewa, who ignored them.
The girl leaned against the door each morning, in the single room that had become her new home—her prison. She repeated to herself, in case she forgot: My name is Amanda Barnes. I’m twenty-six years old. I was born in 1980. I don’t belong here. But then she looked at her body, the unfamiliar skinny arms, her work-raw hands, and wondered how much longer she’d stay.
Mix cornmeal with water, and bake into johnnycakes. Thrust the dash into the churn with regular strokes.
This body knew its required tasks. The body’s hands mixed the cornmeal, stoked the stove, braided the onion tops together and hung them in the attic. Amanda found these chores instinctive—a way of listening to her core, where some ancestral spirit guided her. No words were spoken—she simply knew, the way she knew her heartbeat.
Of course she’d told the man who she was—two years ago, when she woke up here. He’d blamed the fever and given her medicinal whiskey that she vomited back up. She couldn’t blame him—her story was unbelievable. How should she tell him she’d fallen asleep and awoken in another time, with no idea how she’d gotten here? She was only a little surprised to discover that the body had magic in it. Dishes cleaned faster than expected. The dirt floor swept itself at the barest touch. Magic must have brought her—but she couldn’t reverse it.
Her old life was fading away. She remembered drinking cinnamon lattes, driving to work, skimming the Internet personals—these were the habits of a film character somewhere, in a theater she had been in once. They happened in darkness, and when the movie ended she was here, blinking in the sunlight of 1838.
Mend shirts with tiny stitches, overlapping each other so they look like white paint. The tighter your stitches, the less likely they’ll rip. I’m careful when mending his shirts.
He’d come home at night, with a dead deer or even a bear. Amanda marveled at how he slung the corpse around, the meaty weight under full control. She sometimes watched him working shirtless, as he smoked meat in a hickory fire or planted potato seeds. When he split firewood, the log cracked on the axe’s downstroke—almost before he touched it, like the wood opened itself for him. He worked to provide for her—not her, but Lydia, whose body she was in.
Amanda had thought about leaving, but there was nowhere to go. The nearest town was forty miles away, and she didn’t know what direction. Wisconsin was frontier territory—just fur traders, Indians, and settlers who wanted to avoid other people. She’d asked where town was, but he didn’t say. “Why would you go there, Lydia?” he’d ask. “It’s too far, and there’s nothing to see. Someday I’ll take you, when you’re older.”
Someday. Amanda clung to that idea, as she scrubbed their undergarments. She didn’t know what magic had summoned her, nor who Lydia was. If something connected her to this body, she couldn’t see it. She’d stopped praying to find her way home. Even her mantra—My name is Amanda Barnes—felt useless. Just unrelated syllables—a spell with its life drained away. With each day, the idea of leaving became harder to remember. Despite her mantra, there was him, and he was the only reason she saw that drew her to this time.
It was impossible not to love him. That was the problem. Perhaps if she’d grown up here—if she remembered him swinging her in his arms, or leaning down to ruffle her hair—perhaps then, she could accept him as a father. But Amanda was twenty-six, and this man not much older—thirty-three, or a bit more. He was attractive, kind, and hardworking. He brought in fresh-killed meat, and hoed the potatoes with his strong arms, and once he shot a wolf that was nosing around the cabin door.
On Sunday nights, they sang hymns together. Their voices blended, tenor and soprano, and Amanda knew she could never tell him how she felt. He thought he was her father. Maybe, in a sense, he was—but he was all she had. At night as she listened to him sleep across the room, she thought about how they harmonized on the high notes, and how cold it was to sleep alone.
I like how gravy simmers. A bubble pauses, swelling on the surface. It grows so large it might escape and float away. But the bubble bursts, because it must. It returns to the pot, to be served for his dinner.
He came home one night, flushed with November’s chill. “Poor huntin’ out there.”
Amanda served his meal, buttering his potatoes. The attic was full of onions and smoked meat. Soon the blizzards would begin, and she—again—would be stuck inside the cabin for six months. Last year she’d gone nearly mad with boredom. Still—sometimes he’d go looking for fresh meat, and she’d worry. What if he didn’t come back? What if a wolf attacked him? What would she do on her own?
“What happens to me?” she asked aloud.
“Hmmm?”
“What happens to me,” she said, changing her train of thought, “in a few years? I’m nearly grown. What then?”
He chewed on his venison. “I dunno,” he said. He spoke with difficulty, as if he’d been considering it. “Frank might want you. He’s the man I trade with in town.”
“Am I property, to be given away?” she asked bitterly.
“Lydia! I wouldn’t do that.” He stabbed his fork into the fried onions. “I wouldn’t give you to any man you didn’t want.”
“Well, I have to think about my future.” Future—the word recalled something, about the butterscotch candies she kept in her desk . . . She shook her head. My name is Amanda Barnes . . .
He stirred the onions around his plate. “Want me to find someone for you? I could send you back East to work as a servant. I don’t got any living relatives. It’s just us, Lydia. You ’n me. At least out here, it’s just us. We can live any way we want. No one will bother us.”
“Who would cook for you if I left?”
He set his fork down. The fire in the hearth crackled. “I don’t need much. I’d get on all right.”
“Alone?”
He stood up. An upset person had nowhere to storm to, except the attic loft. Even there no one could hide, not long—everything was visible from below. He moved to the fire, next to the glassless shuttered windows. “I’d get a wife, I suppose.”
“Why haven’t you?”
“I don’t want one.”
Amanda took a guess. “Because of my mother?”
He jumped like she’d shot him. He turned to face her. “Yes.”
Amanda closed her eyes. “Do I look like her?”
His response was hoarse, and a long time coming. “Yes. Yes, you do, Lydia.”
He likes his meat fried with potatoes. The potatoes are in the attic. He never goes up there—that place is my own. Listen. A blizzard is coming.
Amanda was in the attic, getting a string of onions for supper. All meals were the same each week—potatoes and onions, and whatever meat he brought home. He never came up here—somehow, she knew. She had memories that felt like someone else’s. He was hunting again. Amanda worried about him, alone in the woods. But he took his shotgun, and he kept it well-oiled.
