Mothership

by Bill Campbell

  “There’re more Ainu around than you might think. A lot of them have inter-bred with the Japanese. They don’t look Ainu any more, but … people still feel prejudiced. They don’t advertise, not like your friend Aki. Most of them just try to blend in. They’d lose their social standing, their credit rating, their influence …”

  I knew all about that. I’d spent my whole life escaping, blending.

  “Come on,” Esmeralda said, “time for coffee.”

  We stopped at a coffee shop and squeezed ourselves into tiny armchairs and we each ordered a cup of Blue Mountain at ¥750 a pop. Tiny cups of coffee and tall glasses of spring water.

  “Help me, Esmeralda,” I said. “Jesus, I’m lost.”

  “This isn’t the place you thought it would be.” A neon blue-and-pink reproduction of Hokusai’s Wave flashed on and off in the window. The alley beyond was in shadow. You could hear the whoosh of the subway trains above the New Age Muzak and the murmur of conversation. I wondered whether the sun had already set in the world above. “You’re thinking dainty little geishas, tea ceremonies, samurai swords … cute gadgets … crowds. And you’re on Hokkaido which isn’t really Japan at all, which looks more like Idaho in January, where the cities are new and the people are searching for new souls…”

  “You sound like that sculptor sometimes, Esmeralda.”

  “Oh, Aki … did you fuck him yet, honey? He’s a good lay.”

  “I’m not easy,” I said testily. Actually, in a way, I was a virgin.

  Oh God, I remembered the two of us in the cavern, I remembered the eyes of Molly Danzig, I remembered how he’d stared straight into my eyes, as though he were stalking me. A hairy beast of a man. Lumbering. A grizzly bear tracking me through the snow.

  “Marie? Are you all right?” She sipped her coffee. “They don’t give refills either—five bucks and no fucking refill.” She drained it. “But you know, you should get to know him. You know how hard it is for a red-blooded American girl to get laid here? These people don’t even know you’re there—oh, they’re polite and all, but they know we’re not human. Blacks, Indians, whites, Ainu, we all look alike to them … we all niggers together. Besides, everyone here knows that all Americans have AIDS.”

  “AIDS?” I said.

  “Stick around here, hon, and you’ll know how a Haitian feels back home. Hey, I screwed Mayuzumi once—but I might as well have been one of those inflatable dolls.” She laughed, a bit too loudly. A schoolgirl at the next table tittered and covered her mouth with her hand. “Molly Danzig now … he liked her a lot … actually he was paying her rent you know … he liked to have her around whenever he needed to indulge his secret vice … I guess he thought it was kind of like bestiality.”

  “Molly was—”

  “Shit, darlin’, we all whores, one way or another!” she added. I felt I was being backed into a corner.

  “Aki frightens me.”

  “Don’t he! But he’s the only man in this whole godforsaken country who has the common decency not to roll over and fall asleep right after they come.”

  The neon wave flashed on and off. Suddenly he was there. In the window. The blue and pink light playing over his animal features. “It’s him!” I whispered.

  Aki’s eyes sparkled. He had his sketchpad. His hand was constantly moving in tiny meticulous strokes.

  “What does he want?” I said. “Let’s get out of here before—”

  “What do you mean, hon? I told him to meet us here.” Aki was closing his sketchpad and moving into the coffee shop. A waitress hopped to attention and bowed and rapped out a ceremonial greeting like a robot. His gaze had not once left my face.

  “But—he knew her, don’t you see? He knows you—he knows me—and she’s dead and one of the three goddesses in his sculpture has her face … and the other two are blank…”

  Esmeralda laughed. It was the first time I had ever voiced this suspicion … or even admitted to myself that I had a suspicion … I realized how preposterous it must sound.

  I felt ashamed. I looked away. Stared into the brown circle of my coffee cup as though I could hypnotize myself into the phantom zone. I could hear his footsteps though. Careful, stalking footsteps.

  He stood above me. I could feel his breath. It smelled of honey and cigarettes. He said, “I understand, Marie. It’s spooky there in the moonlight. You are in the middle of a city of a million people, yet inside my snow pavilion you are also inside my art, a sculpted creation. It’s frightening.” He touched my neck. Its warmth shot through me. I tingled.

  “It was nothing to do with you,” I found myself saying. “It’s something else— out of my past—that I thought I’d forgotten.”

  “Ah,” he said. Instead of moving his hand, he began to caress my neck in a slow, circular motion. I had a momentary vision of him snapping off my head. I wanted to panic but instead I found myself relaxing under his gentle pressure … sinking into a well of dark eroticism … I was trembling all over.

  “Culture tonight!” Aki said. “A special performance of a new bunraku play, Sarome-sama, put on by the Mayuzumi Foundation for the edification of the … foreign dignitaries.”

  “Bunraku?” The last thing I wanted was to go to a puppet show with him and Esmeralda. I had heard of bunraku in my Japanese culture class at Berkeley— it was all yodelling and twanging and wooden figures in expensive costumes strutting across the stage with excruciating elegance.

  But she wouldn’t hear of it. “Darlin’, everyone will be there. And this is a really weird new show … it’s the traditional puppet theatre, sure, but the script’s adapted from Oscar Wilde’s Salome—translated into a Medieval Japanese setting—oh, honey, you’ll never see anything like it.”

  “But my clothes—” I said. I felt like a puppet myself.

  “And what,” she said, putting her hands on her hips, “are credit cards for, girl?”

  Weird did not begin to describe the performance we witnessed at the Bunka Kaikan cultural centre. The weirdness began with the opening speeches, one by Dr. Mayuzumi, the other by a cultural attaché of the German Embassy, which belaboured endlessly the concept of cultural syncretism and the union of East and West. What more fitting place than Hokkaido, an island so rich in cross-cultural resonances, whose population was in equal parts influenced by the primitive culture of the enigmatic Ainu, by Japan, by Russia, and—in this modern world—by—ah—the “Makudonarudo Hambaga” chain …

  Polite laughter; I had a vision of Ronald McDonald prancing around with a samurai sword.

  I thought the preamble would end soon; it turned out to be interminable. But they had promised a vast buffet afterwards at the expense of the Mayuzumi Foundation. I saw Mayuzumi himself, sitting alone in a box on the upper tier, like royalty. Esmeralda and I were near the front, next to the aisle, with Aki between us. We were both wearing Hanae Mori gowns that we’d splurged on at the underground arcade.

  The lights dimmed. The twang of a shamisen rent the air; then a spotlight illumined an ancient man in black who narrated, chanted and uttered all the characters’ lines in a wheezing singsong. We were in for cultural syncretism indeed; the set—Herod’s palace in Judaea—had been transformed into a seventeenth-century Japanese castle, King Herod and his manipulative wife into a shogun and a geisha, and Salome into a princess with hair down to the floor. John the Baptist, for whom, in Oscar Wilde’s revisionist text, Salome was to conceive an illicit and finally necrophiliac passion, was a Jesuit missionary. The centrepiece of the stage was the massive cistern in which John lay imprisoned. It was such a fascinating interpretation that it was hard to remember that I was sitting next to a man whom I suspected of murder.

  In bunraku, the puppeteers are dressed in black and make no attempt to conceal themselves as they operate their characters. There were three operators to each of the principals. It took only minutes for the puppeteers to fade into the background … it made you think there was something to this ninja art of invisibility. The characters flitted a
bout the stage, their eyelids fluttering, craning their necks and arching the palms of their hands, shrieking in paroxysms of emotion.

  An American audience wouldn’t be this silent, I thought.

  The eerie rhythms entranced me. The rasp of the shamisen, the shrill, sustained wailing of the flute, the hollow tock-tock-tock of the woodblock did not meld into a soothing, homophonous texture as in Western music. Each sound was an individual strand, stubbornly dissonant. The narrator sang, or sometimes spoke in a lisping falsetto. In one scene, as Salome, his voice crescendoed to a passionate shriek that seemed the very essence of a woman’s desire, a woman’s frustration. He knows me, I thought … he has seen me running from my father, bursting with terror and love. I could hardly believe that a man could portray such feelings. At the back of the auditorium, aficionados bursting into uproarious cheering. From the context I guessed it was the moment when Salome demands to kiss John’s mouth and he rebuffs her, and the idea of demanding his severed head first germinates in her mind … for the Salome puppet threw herself across the floor of the stage, the three operators manipulating wildly as she flailed about in savage mimickry of a woman’s despair.

  Jesus, I thought. I’ve been there.

  I looked at Aki and found that he was looking behind us, up at Mayuzumi’s box. As applause continued, Mayuzumi made a little gesture with his right index finger. Aki whispered in Esmeralda’s ear. She said, “Gotta go, darlin’—be right back.” The two of them slipped into the aisle.

  Was there some kinky triangle ménage between them? I could see Aki and Esmeralda in leather and Mayuzumi all tied up—the slave master playing at being the slave … Esmeralda wasn’t inhibited like me. Maybe they had become so aroused they’d slipped away to one of those notorious coffee shops, the ones with the private booths …

  I didn’t want to think about it too much, and after a while I became thoroughly engrossed in the play. I couldn’t follow the Japanese—it was all archaic—but I knew the original play, and the whole thing was in such a slow-motion style that you had plenty of time to figure things out.

  There was the dance of the seven veils—not the Moroccan restaurant variety, but a sinuous ballet accompanied by drum and flute, and a faster section with jerky movements of the head and eyebrows and the arms obscenely caressing the air … the seven veils were seven bridal kimonos of embroidered brocade … the demand for the saint’s severed head with which to satiate Sarome-sama’s lust … the executioner, his katana glittering in the arclight, descending into the cistern … I gulped … how could they be wood and cloth when I could feel their naked emotions tearing loose from them? A drum began to pound, step by pounding step as the headsman disappeared into the oubliette …

  The drums crescendoed … the flute shrilled … the shamisen snarled … I heard screaming. It was my own.

  A head was sailing out of the cistern, shooting up towards the stage flies! … a human head … Esmeralda’s head.

  For a split second I saw her torso pop from the cistern. Blood came spurting up. The puppet’s kimonos were soaking. The torso thrashed and sprayed the front seats with blood. The claque began to applaud.

  O Jesus Jesus it’s real—

  The head thudded on to the stage. Its lifeless eyes stared up into mine. I was the only one screaming. Wildly I looked about me. People turned away from me. It was as if I were somehow to blame because I had screamed. An announcement started coming over a loudspeaker. There was no panic. The audience was filing slowly out by row number, moving with purposeful precision, like ants. No panic, no shrieks, no nervous laughter. It was numbing. Jesus, I thought, they’re aliens, they’re incapable of feeling anything. Only the foreign guests seemed distraught. They stood in little huddles, blocking the traffic as the rest of them politely oozed around them. The stage hands were scurrying across the stage, moving props about. The Salome puppet flopped against the castle walls with its dollneck wrung into an impossible angle.

  I stared up at Mayuzumi’s box. Mayuzumi was gone.

  Esmeralda’s head was gone. They were mopping up the blood. I could hear a police siren in the distance.

  Then, up the centre aisle, framed in the doorway between two columns of departing theatregoers, I saw Aki Ishii appear as if in a puff of smoke.

  Sketching.

  Sketching me.

  Jesus Christ—maybe he’d lured her away to kill her! I couldn’t control my rage. I started elbowing my way towards him. The audience backed away. Oh yes. We gaijin all have AIDS. Aki backed slowly towards the theatre entrance. There was a shopping bag on his arm. The doors were flung wide and the snow was streaming down behind him and I was shivering in my Hanae Mori designer dress that wasn’t designed for snow or serial killers.

  He backed into the street. The crowd parted. Men with stretchers trotted into the theatre and a police siren screeched. I started to pummel him with my fists.

  “Am I next?” I screamed. “Is that it? Are you sucking out our souls one by one to feed your art that’s going to turn to mush by Friday?”

  He held his hands up. “It’s not like that at all,” he said.

  The wind howled. I was hysterical by now. Fuck these people and their propriety. I shouted at a passing policeman, “Here’s your goddamn sex murderer!” He ignored me. “That shopping bag! The head’s in the shopping bag!” I tried to wrest it from him. I could feel something squishy inside it. There was blood on everything.

  “How could you be so wrong?” Aki said. “How could you fail to understand me? I told you the truth. It’s not me—it’s—it’s—” His eyes glowed. That odour of honey and tobacco again … startled, I remembered where I’d smelled it before … on my grandfather’s breath. I kept on hitting him with my fists but my blows were weak, dampened by snow and by my own bewilderment. You’ve got no right, I was thinking, no right to bring me those bad dreams … no right to remind me …

  He grabbed my wrists. I struggled. His sketchpad flew into the snow. The wind flipped the pages and I saw face after face … beautiful women, … beautiful and desolate … my own face. “My art,” Aki said. There was despair in his voice. “You knocked my art out of my—” He let go abruptly. Scurried after the sketchpad, his black duster flailing in the wind like a Dracula cape. He found it at last. He cried to me across the shrieking wind: “We’re both bear people. You should have understood.” And he ran off into the darkness. He vanished almost instantly, like one of those puppeteers with their ninja arts.

  It was only then that I realized that my dress was dripping with blood. It was caking against my arms, my neck. The wind and the sirens were screaming all at once.

  No one’s going to ignore this killing, I thought. A consular officer … a public place … a well-known artist hanging around near the scene of both crimes …

  But as I watched the audience leaving in orderly rows, as I watched the policemen solemnly discoursing in hushed tones, I realized that they might well ignore what had happened.

  I was going to have to go to someone important. Someone powerful. Power was all these people understood.

  3

  Das Unbeschreibliche,

  Hier ist’s getan …

  Faust

  Midnight and the snow went on piling. I walked. Snow smeared against the blood on my clothes. I walked. I had some notion of finding my way back to the ryokan, making a phone call to the Tokyo office, maybe even to Oakland. I could barely see where I was going.

  Bear people …

  No one in the streets. The wind whistled. Sushi pennants flapped against restaurant entrances. I breathed bitter liquid cold. At last I saw headlights … a taxi.

  By two in the morning I was outside the Mayuzumi estate. There were wrought-iron gates. The gates had been left open and the driveway had been recently shovelled. He let me off in front of the mansion.

  A servant woman let me in, rubbing her eyes, showed me where to leave my shoes and fetched clean slippers. She swabbed at my bloodstains with a hot towel. Then she hande
d me a clean yukata and watched while I tried to slip it on over my ruined gown.

  It was clear that I—or someone—was expected. Perhaps there was a local geisha club that made house calls.

  “Mayuzumi-san wa doko—?” I began.

  “Ano … o-furo ni desu.”

  She led me up the steps to the tatami-covered foyer. She slid aside a shoji screen, then another and another. We walked down a succession of corridors— I walked, rather, and the maid shuffled, with tiny muffled steps, pausing here to fuss with a flower arrangement, there to incline her head towards a statue of the Amida Buddha. Beyond the Buddha image was a screen of lacquered wood on which were painted erotic designs. She yanked the screen aside and then I was face to face with Dr. Mayuzumi … naked, sitting in a giant bath, being methodically massaged by a young girl who sang as she kneaded.

  He was a huge man. He was, I could see now, remarkably hirsute, like Aki Ishii; his eyes were beady and set closely together; he squinted when he looked at me, like a bear eyeing a beehive.

  Behind Dr. Mayuzumi, the shoji screens had been drawn aside. The bathroom overlooked the rock garden where Molly’s body had been. Snow gusted behind him and clouds of steam tendrilled between us.

  “Ah,” he said, “Marie Wounded Bird, is it not? The reporter. I had thought we might meet in less … informal surroundings, but I am glad you are here … “Tomichan! Food for our guest! You will join me for a light supper,” he said to me. It was an order.

  “You have to help me, Dr. Mayuzumi,” I said. “I know who the killer is.”

  He raised an eyebrow. With a gesture, he indicated that I should join him in the bath. I knew that the Japanese do not find mixed bathing lewd, but I had never done it before; I balked. Two maids came and began to disrobe me. They were politely insistent, and the hot water seemed more and more enticing, and I found myself being scrubbed with pumice stone and led down the tiled steps … the water was so hot it hurt to move. I let it soak into my pores. I watched the snowflakes dance around the stone lantern in the cloister at the edge of the rock garden.