The Melancholy of Mechagirl

by Valente, Catherynne M.

  “Something better.”

  DANCING DOWN THE WINDOWS

  It is not that I thirsted for Milo’s dreams. I could have had better from any rice-cooker salesman on Blue Street, marbled with darkness and longing for kisses like maple sap. But Rafu stood in the shadows of Milo’s house, wrapped in the grassy yellow-green perfume of new tatami, showing the stars through her skin, laughing when I told her the jokes Yatsuhashi had snorted to me on the morning train. I rocked on my haunches below her and showed her all the things I could be: tapir, tiger, salaryman, shadow, water.

  I forgot to fix my mouth to the sailor’s wife. Her sawdust-dreams did not glisten. She cried in her sleep, chasing ships I wished to know nothing of, lost in her tired colonial despair.

  I lost weight, as lovers will do.

  On the seventh night I knew my Rafu, I unfolded into a silk screen with lonely tapirs drinking from a moonlit stream painted on my panels. I wanted so to please her. We stood side by side, saying nothing, content. Delicate snow came dancing down the windows. Milo slept on her mat below us and did not see our still, silent lovemaking.

  “I can do that too,” said Rafu coquettishly, when we had finished and sweat shone like water on our screens. “I can fold up into a tapir, a tiger, a salaryman, shadow, water. A girl.”

  “Show me!”

  “Not yet,” she demurred.

  BECAUSE OF HER NAKEDNESS

  “Come away from this tailless old alley cat,” I begged my Rafu, resplendent in the night, golden against the dark. “I have an apartment above Blue Street. I will never throw clothing over you. I will show you the secret Peacocks of Right Intention, who make their nests in the Admiral’s mansion and peck at him when he orders his men to stand in ridiculous lines and speak the nonsense of demonkind. He cannot see them—the poor man thinks he has eczema. It is an excellent joke. I will take you walking through the Carnival of Right Livelihood, and we will eat black sugar burnt in the Ovens of Contentment. You can take the Baku-train with me every night and continue your study of women—I will eat only the dreams of women for your sake! Into the pachinko parlors we will go, hoof in hinge, and in the plinking of those silver balls we alone will hear the clicking movements of stars in perfect orbit and know that nothing is chance.”

  Rafu blushed—her panels blossomed with scarlet as though she could bleed. Milo snored and turned over in her sleep, murmuring in phantom agony, her brown hair caught in her wet mouth. Rafu watched her, tipping slightly toward the woman.

  “No, Akakabu, passion of my elderly years! I love her. I love her, and I will never leave her.”

  “How can you love such a thing?”

  “I love her because of her nakedness, Kabu. She has stood before me and peeled off all her clothes until she was utterly defenseless, her breasts and her shoulders and her lonely sex all for me, for my view, my love, my pity. I know that she had her tongue pierced when she was a girl but took it out when she married. I know that her right breast is somewhat larger than her left, that she has a birthmark at the base of her spine as though someone punched her, and that she has stretch marks on her belly, but no children, for there is nothing here for her to do but eat. These are such precious things to know! I knew them about Chieko, and Kayo, and Masumi, and Aoi too. They all showed me their bodies, and how the world stamped itself onto them. I have not even seen your body the way my mistresses show me theirs. She has been naked before me, Kabu, and I will not abandon a naked girl to the cold.”

  FIRST LADIES

  I admit I was angry, that it was my fault in the end. I begrudged Rafu her naked women, her secret lovemaking in lonely houses full of women who would never see the green and purple of the Peacocks of Right Intention. I wanted to show my Jotai that a Baku, too, can know a human that way, and better, for no one is ever so naked as in their dreams, where everything shameful and bright glistens like sweet fat over bone.

  I curled up into Milo’s heavy sleeping arms, snarling at Rafu, gloating, taking up that flaccid Western mouth in mine and sucking down all her old, buried things, her grief and her loneliness and her cream-thick guilt, her tawdry affair in Okinawa, her lost lover who used to kiss her toes as though she were an angel that might confer blessing. I ate it all, greedily, slovenly. I ate her husband who left her, his sword and his gun and his curling, saluting smile. I writhed against Milo, my black tapir belly taut with her, hard and swollen, grinding into her, sliding off of the hard little cherry pit at the base of her dreams, scraping at it, breaking my teeth on the stone of her soul.

  Rafu turned away from me in shame.

  Milo wrapped her arms around me and opened her eyes. “All the other wives have First Ladies’ names,” she whispered, her voice sand-slurred with sleep. “Hillary, Laura, Eleanor, Pat, Libby. What’s wrong with me?”

  “You were supposed to be a boy,” I said cruelly, because I chose to be cruel. “If you had been born as you were meant to, you would get to march about with a fine rifle and shoot at things and drink whiskey and have a lovely time, and no one would ever have left you.”

  “Oh,” Milo said with finality, as though it had finally been explained to her satisfaction. She fell asleep again.

  CREATURES OF STOMACH

  I am sure it has happened before. We are creatures of stomach, after all. My mother told me when I was small and spotted that the first Baku was nothing but a great violet-translucent stomach, maybe with a bit of esophagus, and it floated over rooftops on stormy days, descending to cover sleepers like a blanket and draw up all their dreams into itself with perfect retention. In those days, no one remembered their dreams at all, so deft was the Baku in its slurping of them.

  That Baku surely was blameless, but I am not. I ate too much Milo; I was so full of her my hiccups turned into anchors and dolphins and swam away through the night. Rafu rustled disgust—her gold flushed a jaundiced yellow, so deep was her disapproval of my gluttony.

  I only did it to hurt you, my silken love, my Rafu, my vanished adored. I think that makes it better.

  I tottered on my fat paws, skidding on the slick tatami, drunk, queasy. My skin felt too thick; I wanted to take it off, to go naked before Rafu and be loved as the women in her life had been. I deserved that, didn’t I? I careened into a wooden candlestick, bounced off of a low table of red wood, bruised my snout on Rafu’s corner; she clattered to the floor.

  I threw up on the grass mats and lolled in my decrepitude beside my waste.

  THE UNRUSHED FAMILIARITY OF A HUSBAND

  A man lay on the floor. The substance of my retching. I vomited up Milo’s dream, and it lay on the floor in a white uniform streaked with the silvery stuff of my digestion: tears, the honey of lost days, sweat, night-semen. His officer’s cap tumbled off onto the tatami; his hair was wet and matted like a newborn’s.

  He stirred; Rafu held her slats together in terror, as silent as she could be. The man crawled to Milo’s sleeping shape and curled into it as I had done, with the unrushed familiarity of a husband, or a frequent Baku. He kissed her hair, left streaks of silver on her neck. I watched from the shadows as he called her name and she rolled into waking, rolled into him, her face unfolding into a smile as I sometimes unfold into a man.

  “How are you here?” she marveled, as well she might.

  “I missed you,” he murmured, slurred, unsure of English, as well he might be, having been in my stomach a moment previously. Liar, I thought.

  “I’ve been so lonely,” Milo sighed. “I hate it here. Can’t we go home?”

  “Yes, of course. Tomorrow.” He was not listening to her. The sailor pulled at her frumpy nightgown, pulling her greyish, threadbare underthings away, pulling his sex from his crisp white trousers, clung with silvery dream-glue. She moaned a little, frightened, half-asleep yet.

  “It’s so strange,” he gasped as he thrust awkwardly into her, with all the grace of an elephant falling upon a hapless antelope. “I was in the desert just a moment ago. Everything smelled like oil and sand. There were
men on a raft; they shot at us, and all around them the sea was angry, blue and green, phosphorescent with spilled fuel and algae. It glowed, and the men’s faces were so hollow.”

  Milo began to cry silently. Her body lurched with his motion.

  “We shot back, we had to. I pulled their bodies out of the glowing water.” He started to laugh roughly, pushing faster against her. “And it was so weird, their skin just came off in my hands, like a coat. So soft, like they were made of nothing, with nothing inside, and all we pulled out was skin and blood, no men at all.”

  “Don’t laugh, it scares me,” whispered Milo.

  Her husband put his hands against her ears as if to blot out the sound of his laughter, which spiraled up and higher and further and faster, until water came from his mouth and his hands, water pouring into her, the salt-sea scouring her, shells and fish and sand and blood splashing out of him, into her ears, into her womb, into her mouth. She spluttered, coughed—he pushed the sea through her, and her lips became as blue as the waves, her hair streamed like kelp, his fingers left purple anemones on her ribs.

  “Aren’t you happy I’m back? Why don’t you kiss me? Don’t you love me?”

  And he kissed her, over and over, wet, salty smacks in the dark, and above the sound of them I could hear Rafu crying, huddled like discarded furniture against the concrete wall.

  YOU CAN’T LOVE MEAT

  The dream-vomit sat cross-legged on the floor, waiting for someone to serve him tea. Milo lay broken by him, her face swollen, water dribbling from her mouth.

  “Your name is Kabu. Akakabu,” he said slowly to me. A child might well know its father. “Is my name Lieutenant?”

  “No.” I walked out of the shadow of the American television stand and sat on my haunches next to him. “Your name is Gabriel Salas, but you’re not him, not really.”

  “No, I know that. If I were Gabriel Salas I would still be in the desert, and the sea would be glowing, and I would be able to see cities in the distance, full of crumbling and canny birds.”

  “You’re a dream. Do you understand that?”

  “Whose dream?”

  “Your wife’s. Look at what she dreams you will do to her, and what you have done in her dreaming.”

  The dream-sailor looked down at his wife. His expression was blank. “I loved her.”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t love her anymore. You can’t love meat.”

  “That’s your business.”

  “What do I do now, Akakabu?”

  “This is the Paradise of the Pure Land. You might start with Right Thought. This is also Yokosuka. You might start with burying your wife and lighting incense for her.”

  “That does not sound like something I would do. Instead, I am hungry.”

  “You are hungry because you came out of me, and I am always hungry.”

  “I am going to the city, then. To eat things I like.”

  “What sort of things do you like?”

  Lieutenant Gabriel Salas cocked his head thoughtfully to one side. He picked up his officer’s cap and put it on. “Peacocks. Butterflies. Black sugar. Right Thought.”

  He strode from the house, his spine straight and proud, his steps turning south toward Blue Street.

  When he had gone, Rafu crawled from the corner of the room, her slats digging into the tatami. As she dragged herself the slats of fine dark wood became fingers breaking their nails on the woven grass, her silk screens became shoulders, a stomach, a strong back. She stood up, unfolding into a woman with long, hinged arms, accordioning out from her sweet torso in hanging, tiger-painted screens that ended in graceful hands. She sank down over Milo’s drowned body.

  “Save her,” my Rafu wept. “Save her because of her nakedness, how bare she was before me, and how I loved her smaller breast.”

  “It’s no good, concealer-of-my-heart. I only know how to eat things.”

  BECAUSE YOU ARE NEW

  The Paradise of the Pure Land exists within Yokosuka as hair caught in a brush—the teeth of the city rise tall through the tangles and think nothing of them, but deep in the comb, long onyx strands wind and snarl. It is, of course, possible to yank all these strands free with a pitiless fist. They will not protest.

  Rafu and I followed the dream of Gabriel through Yoshikura-Chuo and along the highway, through the wet, dank tunnel and up the jungled terraces. He was not hard to follow, being loud and foreign. He ate cherry trees along the way, opening his jaw and swallowing them whole as I might. When he reached the city, he seized in one hand a Peacock of Right Intention, squirming blue and green, and in the other a young girl coming home from a date with an enlisted American on the sprawling grey base. He shoved each into his mouth like two legs of one golden chicken.

  On Blue Street, he ate hats, belts, rice-cookers, kerosene lamps, light bulbs, expensive Italian shoes, the Grocers of Perfect Balance, aquariums, streetlamps, Prostitutes of Pure Mind, the Motorcycles of Holy Judgment. Rafu wrinkled her new nose and clapped her screen-arms.

  “Is this what you are like, on the inside?” she said.

  “This is what everyone is like on the inside,” I sighed.

  “It’s not what I’m like!”

  “That is because you are new. You did not have a stomach for one hundred years. You are only just learning how to fill it. You do not yet know it can never be filled.”

  Just ahead of us, the dream-Gabriel unhinged his jaw and swallowed a drink machine. It expired with a red whine.

  “Will he eat us all?”

  “Yes,” I said calmly. “He is a dream; he does not know this is not a dream. His real self is somewhere impossibly hot, dreaming of his soft, plain wife who is not named after a First Lady. He eats up the world with a grey boat and a fine cap. Dreams are more literal. More honest.”

  “Why are you not afraid?”

  “Because I know a thing about the Pure Land he does not.”

  Rafu took my tapir-form into her screen arms and kissed my ardent snout. I unfolded into a man in her arms, to match her, to please her. I wanted so to please her.

  A PERFECT SHARD OF GOLD

  There is no more sacred place in the Pure Land of Yokosuka than the pink palaces of the pachinko parlors. I would have taken Rafu there, to meditate with me in the blue haze of the electronic screens and the heady cigar smoke. Here, the bodhisattvas practice Right Gambling, prone before the unyielding goddesses of luck, their throats ecstatic and bare.

  One by one, the dream-Lieutenant ate the goddesses from the ceiling, the green-limbed seraphs of Perfect Chance, sucking their toes down into his throat. Their screams were shattered by the crash and fall of silver balls. The old, shrunken men turning the wheels of the glittering machines did not move—they see nothing of the Pure Land, even when the sun rises over the harbor and grants each citizen of the Right City a perfect shard of gold. He is a dream; I am a dream; we are all dreams, and the flashing arcade lights blind them.

  Gabriel laughed, a thick, fatty sound, a gargle, a chortle. The parlor erupted in jackpots and high scores. The goddesses who held back and gave forth at their whim had gone into his great, insatiable belly and held back no more.

  “Please,” said Rafu softly. The old men shouted for joy, jostled each other, shook fists at the perplexed proprietor. Rafu’s voice barely sounded among them, but Gabriel turned toward her in hunger, his lips scarlet with secret blood.

  “Do you remember,” said Rafu, sliding toward him, “how Milo’s toe was broken when she was six, running too fast after her friends through the forest behind her house? How it is still crooked, and aches, and how you used to rub it for her during thunderstorms until she was well? Do you remember how her waist curved so sweetly in, how her mouth tasted, how even when she had the flu she smelled like childhood to you, clean and innocent and permanent?”

  “No,” growled the dream-Gabriel.

  “Do you remember how her fingers still had calluses, even though she stopped playing the guitar so long ago? How he
r hair looked when it was tangled, when it was smooth? How her belly sloped, how her birthmark looked, how her ears curved?”

  “No,” growled the dream-Gabriel. “Instead, I want to eat you. Then I’ll remember those things.”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  Gabriel shrugged. “What else is there to do when you visit a foreign country?”

  He turned to bite down on a crippled old woman with a cane and a bend in her back like a stair. Her skinny arms were full of silver pachinko balls. She was winning, of course she was winning. His invisible teeth shattered on her dry old skull, scraping off her jaw. She smiled quietly to herself.

  “There is a pit in every dream that cannot be eaten,” I said to Rafu. I was so tired. This was a lesson for baby Baku. “It will break you if you try it. Naturally it is the most delicious thing in a dream, and we have all had to learn to curb our desire for it. And in the dream of the Pure Land, the dream Yokosuka dreams waking and sleeping, an old woman sits in a pachinko parlor, our indestructible core, indestructible because she does not know she is the sweetest thing in the world.”

  The dream of Gabriel was breaking apart, spilling the silver dream fluid onto the floor, shuddering, shaking, crying out for help. I did not care.

  But Rafu opened her arms to him, and ah, I should have known—we are each slaves to our own natures, even in the Paradise of the Pure Land, especially here, and if I know only how to eat, she knows only how to conceal, how to hide a thing from shame. Her arms flipped open, square screen by square screen, and she enveloped him so suddenly he could not move, clapped him up entirely in herself, all wall of golden Rafu.