Mothership

by Bill Campbell

  “No one will do anything,” I said. “But there’s a pattern. The victims are white and black … people who don’t belong to the Yamato race … maybe that’s why none of you people think it’s important … the victims are all subhuman … like me … and I think I’m next, don’t you see? The three goddesses … the Judgment of Paris … and the killer is subhuman too … an Ainu.”

  “What are you trying to say?” Mayuzumi said. “You would not be attempting to pin the blame on Aki Ishii, the Grandmaster of snow sculpting?”

  I gasped. “You knew all along. And you knew that I would come here.”

  Just as the heat was becoming unbearable, one of the serving maids fetched a basket of snow from outside. She knelt down at the edge of the bath and began to sprinkle it over my face, my neck. I shuddered with agony and delight. Another maid held out a lacquerware tray in front of me and began to feed me with chopsticks.

  It was a lobster salad—that is, the lobster was still alive, its spine broken, the meat scooped out of its tail, diced with cucumbers and a delicate shoyu and vinegar dressing, and replaced in the splayed tail-shell with such artistry that the lobster continued to wriggle, its claws clattering feebly against the porcelain, its antennae writhing, its stalk-eyes glaring. I had already started to chew the first mouthful before I saw that my food was not quite dead. But it was too delicious to stop. And knowing I was draining the creature’s life force only heightened the frisson. “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  “Ah,” Dr. Mayuzumi said, “you’re apologizing to the lobster for—”

  “Taking its life,” I said. Wasn’t that what Aki had said about the shrimp?

  “How well you understand us.” I was conscious of a terrible sadness in him. There was more to him than just being a millionaire with a finger in every pie. “I, too, am sorry, Marie Wounded Bird.” He ordered the maid to remove the lacquer trays. “Yet you did not come to dine, but to accuse.”

  “Yes.”

  “You have proof, I hope; a man of Mr Ishii’s standing is not indicted lightly. His reputation … indeed, the reputation of the Snow Festival itself … would be at stake. You can understand why I sought to discourage the press from … ah … untimely revelations.”

  “But he’s killing people!” I said.

  “Mr Ishii is a great artist. He is very precious to us. His foibles—”

  I recoiled. “How can you—”

  “In the grand scheme, in the great circle of birth and rebirth, what can a few lives matter?” he said. “But Mr Ishii’s art … does matter. But now you are here, blowing across our fragile world like kamikaze, the wind of the gods, irresistible and unstoppable. You would melt us down, just as the spring sun will soon melt the exquisite snow sculptures which 1.6 million tourists are about to see …”

  I couldn’t believe this. It was the most familiar line of bullshit in the world. I was soaking in 110°, in the nude, eating live animals and listening to the Mayor of Amity shtick right out of Jaws. My own life was on the line, for God’s sake! I remembered Aki’s eyes … the way he had run his fingers along the nape of my neck … his long dark hair flecked with snow … the quiet intensity with which he spoke of beauty and transience and voiced his resentment of the conquering Japanese … could he really be one of those Henry Lee Lucas types? I knew he had had sex with Molly and Esmeralda. I knew he had been tracking me. Sketching. Sketching. Smelling of tobacco and honey, like my grandfather.

  God, I wanted him and I hated myself for wanting him. For a moment, standing in the snow amid his creation, listening to him—Jesus, I think I loved him.

  “Goddamn it, I can prove it,” I said. “I’ll show you fucking body parts. I’ll show you eyeballs buried in snow and skeletons under the ice.”

  I was doomed to betray him.

  “All right,” said Dr. Mayuzumi. “I feared it would come to this.”

  The limousine moved rapidly towards downtown Sapporo. We sat in the back seat, each hunched into an opposite corner. It was still snowing. We didn’t speak until we were within a few blocks of Odori Park.

  At last, Dr. Mayuzumi said, “Why?”

  I said, “I don’t know, really, Dr. Mayuzumi. Maybe he’s sending a message to the Japanese people … about discrimination, about the way you treat minorities.” I didn’t want to think of Aki just as an ordinary mad slasher. We had too much in common for that. But there was too much evidence linking him to Molly and Esmeralda … and me. Four minorities. Lepers in a land that prized homogeneity above all things. I had a desperate need to see the killings as some political act … it might not justify them, but I could understand such killings. Like the Battle of Little Big Horn … like the second siege at Wounded Knee. “Politics,” I said bitterly.

  “Perhaps.” He did not look into my eyes.

  The chauffeur parked at the edge of the park.

  We began walking towards the Judgment of Paris tableau. Dr. Mayuzumi strode swiftly through the slush, his breath clouding about his face. I struggled to keep up. I became angrier as we walked. I had come to see him with information and now it seemed he had known all along, that his coming with me now was merely the working out of some preordained drama.

  The full moon lengthened our shadows. Even the snow-shovelling workmen were gone; the empty trucks were parked in neat rows along the Odori.

  Dr. Mayuzumi strode past the snow Sphinx and the Pyramids of Gizeh; I trudged after him, awkward in the short coat that one of the servants had lent me. I was determined not to let him take the lead. I brushed by him. I was furious now. It seemed that this whole town had been built on lies. Snow gusted and flurried. Ice-shards lanced my face. I walked. Snow metropolises rose and fell around me. I didn’t look at them. I tried to quell the cold with sheer anger.

  We passed the columns of the Temple of Poseidon at Sounion, the icy steps of a Babylonian ziggurat, a Mexican pyramid atop which sat a gargoyle god ripping the heart out of a hapless child. Moonlight fringed the ice with spectral colours. Had the buildings grown taller somehow? Were the sculptures pressing in, narrowing the pathway, threatening to crash down over me? A skull-shaped mountain grinned down. Trick of the light, I told myself. I stared ahead. My shoes were waterlogged.

  At length we came to Mt Ida. I marched uphill. They could fix the footprints later. Dr. Mayuzumi followed. We crossed the terrace with its classical friezes, its nymphs and shepherds gesturing with Poussin-like languor.

  In a moment we stood inside Ishii’s secret kingdom, the cave that the audience could not see. The mirror of mirrored mirrors.

  There had been more tunnelling. The walls were lit by reflected moonlight and the cave seemed to stretch forever into blackness, though I knew it was an illusion. Like Wile E. Coyote, we are easily fooled by misdirecting signposts … a highway median that leads to the edge of a cliff … a tunnel painted on to the side of a sandstone mountain. It seemed we stood at the entry to an infinite labyrinth.

  Dr. Mayuzumi took out a flashlight and shone it on the interior of the cave.

  There were the three statues. Molly Danzig stood with her arms outstretched. It was her—but dead, she was more beautiful somehow, more perfect … the statue of Athena had the face of Esmeralda O’Neil. She glowered; she was anger personified. It was just as I had imagined. The third goddess had no face yet … and neither did the boy Paris who was to choose between them.

  I could be beautiful too, I thought. Cold and beautiful. I was tempted. I told myself: I hate the cold. I hate my childhood. That’s why I went away to California.

  Dr. Mayuzumi said, “Look at their eyes … as though they were still alive … look at them.”

  Molly’s eyes: a glint of blue in the gloom. They stared straight into mine. Esmeralda’s looked out beyond the entrance. The Athena statue held a spear and a gorgon-faced shield. God, they were beautiful. But I knew the deadly secret of their verisimilitude.

  “How long can the cold preserve a human organ, an eye, for example?” I said. “Doesn’t this snowclad bea
uty hide death? Tell me there are no human bones beneath …”

  “You would destroy this masterwork?”

  It was too late. Before he could stop me I had plunged my fingers into Molly’s face. I wanted to pull the jellied eyeballs out of the skull, to thrust them in Dr. Mayuzumi’s face.

  The face caved in. There was nothing in my fists but snow, flaking, crumbling, melting against the warmth of my hands. And then, when the snow had melted, two globes of glass and plastic. Two marbles.

  I looked at Dr. Mayuzumi. His look of indignation turned to mocking laughter. All my resentment exploded inside me. I smashed my fists against the statues of my two friends. Snow drenched me. The statues shattered. There were no bones beneath, no squishy organs. Only snow. Tears came to my eyes and melted the snow that had clung to my cheeks.

  “A gaijin philistine with a stupid theory,” said Mayuzumi.

  I beat my arms against the empty snow, I buried myself elbow deep. I wept. I had understood nothing at all. The marbles slipped from my fingers and skated over a stretch of ice.

  I felt Dr. Mayuzumi’s hand on my shoulder. He pulled me from the slush. There was so much sadness in him. “And I thought you understood us …”

  He gripped me and would not let go. His hands held no comfort. His finger-nails dug into my flesh … like claws.

  “I thought you understood us!” he rasped. His teeth glinted in reflected moonlight … glistened with drool … his eyes narrowed … his mouth smelled of honey and tobacco.

  I thought you understood us … what did that mean?

  And all at once I knew. When he had greeted me in the bath, when I mumbled I’m sorry at the writhing lobster, had he not said How well you understand us? I had completely missed it before … “You’re an Ainu too, one who’s been able to pass for a Yamato,” I said. “You’ve blended with the Japanese … you’ve climbed up to a position of power by hiding from yourself … and it’s driven you mad!”

  “I’m sorry, … oh, I’m sorry,” he said. His voice was barely human. Still he would not let go. In the dark I could not see his face.

  “Why are you apologizing?” I said softly.

  “I need your soul.”

  Then I realized that he was going to kill me.

  The flashlight illuminated him for a moment. His face was caving in on itself. Dark hair was sprouting up through the skin. I felt bristles push up from his palms and prick my shoulders. I was bleeding. I struggled. His nose was collapsing into a snout.

  “Bear people!” I whispered.

  He could not speak. Only an animal growl escaped his throat. He had become my father. I was caught inside the nightmare that had haunted me since I was winchinchala. I kicked and screamed. He roared. As his body wrenched into a new shape, I slipped from his grasp. The cavern shook and rumbled. Snow crashed over the entrance. I could hear more snow piling up. The cave was contracting like a womb. We were sealed in. The whine of the wind subsided.

  The flashlight slid across the snow. I dived after it. I waved it in the air like a lightsabre. Its beam was the only illumination. It moved across the eyes … the teeth … I could smell the foetid breath of a carnivore. I was choking on it. “What are you?” I screamed.

  He roared and the walls shook and I knew he no longer had the power of human speech. He began to lumber towards me. There was no way to escape. Except by stepping backwards … backwards into the optical illusion that suggested caves within caves, worlds within worlds.

  I backed into the wall. The wall pulsated. It seemed alive. The very snow was living, breathing. The wall turned into a fine mist like Alice’s mirror … I could hear the tempest raging, but it was infinitely far away.

  I was at the edge of an icy incline that extended downwards to darkness.

  The bear-creature that had been Dr. Mayuzumi fell down on all fours. He pounced. I tripped over something … a plastic bag … its contents spilled on to my face. In the torchlight I saw that it was Esmeralda’s head. The severed trachea snaked into the snow. There were no eyes. I bit down on human hair. I retched. There was blood in my throat. The bear-creature reared up. I screamed, and then I was rolling down the slope, downwards, downwards—

  And then I was in a huge cavern running away from the were-bear my father with his rancid breath and the wind whistling through the broken window-pane and—

  Darkness. I paused. Strained to listen. The bear paused too. I could hear him breathing, a savage purr deep as the threshold of human hearing, making the very air vibrate.

  I swung the flashlight in an arc and saw—

  The fangs, the knife-sharp claws poised to strike and—

  There was music. The dull thud of a drum. The shriek of the bamboo flute and the twang of the shamisen, and—

  The bear sprang! The claws ripped my cheeks. I was choking on my own blood. I fell and fell and fell and my mouth was stopped with snow and I was numb all over from the cold and I was sliding down an embankment with the bear toying with me like a cat with a mouse and I screamed over and over, screamed and tasted blood and snow and—

  I heard a voice: Be still, my son. The voice of my grandfather.

  I was slipping away from the bear’s grasp.

  Into a circle of cold blue light.

  In the circle stood Aki Ishii. He was naked. His body was completely covered in tattoos: strange concentric designs like Neolithic pottery. His long black hair streamed in a wind that seemed to emanate from his lips and circle around him; I felt no wind. Smoke rose from a brazier, fragrant with tobacco and honey.

  “Tunkashila …” I murmured. I crawled towards him. Clutched at his feet in supplication.

  The bear reared up at the edge of the circle. In the pale light I saw him whole for the first time. His face still betrayed something of Mayuzumi; his body still contained the portly outline of the magnate; but his eyes burned with that pure unconscionable anger that comes only in dreams.

  “Be still,” said Aki Ishii. “You may not enter the circle. It is I who am the shaman of the bear people. You cannot gain true power by taking men’s souls; you must give in equal measure of your own.”

  And then I saw, reflected in the wall of ice behind us, mirage-like images of Molly Danzig and Esmeralda O’Neil. They were half human, half cave painting. They too were naked and covered with tattoos. They had become Ainu, but I saw that they were also my people … they were also the Greek goddesses … Molly, who had fled from her home and herself and sought solace in the arms of strangers, had been incarnated as domesticity itself; Esmeralda, whose diplomatic career belied her bellicose nature, had become the goddess of war. What was I then? There was only one goddess left: the goddess of love.

  But I was incapable of love, because of what my father had done. I hated him, but he was the only man I had ever loved.

  Three musical instruments materialized in the smoke of the incense burner. Molly plucked the shamisen of domestic tranquillity out of the air; Esmeralda seized the war-drum. One instrument remained: the phallic bamboo flute of desire. I took it and held it to my lips. Of its own accord it began to play, a melody of haunting and erotic sweetness. And the drum pounded and the shamisen sounded … three private musics that could not blend … until we faced the bear together.

  “My son,” said Aki Ishii softly, “you must now reap the fruits of your own rage.”

  The bear exploded. His head split down the middle and the mingled brains and blood gushed up like lava from a volcano. His belly burst open and his entrails writhed like snakes. The drumbeats were syncopated with the cracking of the bear’s spine. Shards of tibia shredded the flesh of his legs. Blood splattered the ceiling. The walls ran red. Blood rained down on us. Each piece of the bear ate away at itself, as though dissolving in acid. The smoke from the brazier turned into a blood-tinged mist. And all the while Aki Ishii stood, immobile, his face a mask of tragedy and regret.

  I didn’t stop playing until the last rag of blood-drenched fur had been consumed. Small puddles of blood were sip
honing into the snow. The images of my dead friends were swirling into the mist that was the honey-tinged breath of Aki Ishii, shaman of the bear people. Only the eyes remained, resting side by side on an altar of snow. Aki nodded. I put down the flute and watched it disappear into the air. I knelt down and picked up the eyes. They were hard as crystal. The cold had marbled them.

  “I’m sorry,” Aki said. The light was dimming.

  “Are you going to kill me?” I whispered, knowing that was what an apology presaged.

  “I’m not going to take anything from you that you will not give willingly,” said the snow sculptor. He took me by the hand. “The war between the dark and the light is an eternal conflict. Dr. Mayuzumi wanted what I wanted … but his magic is a magic of deceit. He was content with the illusion of power. But for that illusion, he had to feed on real human lives. This is not really the way of bear people.”

  “The dead women—”

  “Yes. I planted a piece of those women into the snow sculptures. We made love. I captured a fragment of their joy and breathed it into the snow. Dr. Mayuzumi devoured them. They were women from three races the Japanese find inferior, but each race has done what the Ainu have not done—they have fought back—the blacks and the reds against the white men, the whites against the Japanese themselves. That was what made him angry. Our people have had their souls stolen from them. By stealing a piece of each of the three women’s souls, tearing them violently from their bodies in the moment of death, he sought to give himself a soul. But a soul cannot be wrested from another person; it is a gift.”

  He took my other hand. And now I saw what it was that I had feared so much. I thought I had locked it up and thrown away the key, but it was still there … my need to be loved, my need to become myself.

  “Now,” said Aki Ishii to me, “you must free yourself, and me.”

  I held out the bear’s two marble eyes. He took one from me. We each swallowed an eye in a single gulp. It had no taste. It was like communion. And then he kissed me.