Coin Locker Babies

by Ryu Murakami

  Hayashi had been a water-skiing instructor. With money problems he couldn’t handle, he’d robbed a barbershop. When the old man who ran the place caught him at it and started yelling, he’d tried to shut him up. The barber, though, had bitten him on the hand, and Hayashi had strangled him. “I hate the smell of shampoo, makes me think of that old bastard. They all stink of shampoo, those barbershops. Other thing I can’t stand is somebody’s tongue. When you choke a man to death, his tongue flops out. And it’s longer than you think; hangs down below his chin. I’ve told the other guys before, but I’ll never forget that tongue, flopping out right there in front of me.”

  The six men of the Food Service Unit No. 3 had more than murder in common: all of them were licensed, or at least qualified, to handle small boats. This was natural enough for Sajima as a fishing boat hand and Hayashi as a water-skiing instructor, but before taking the job in the restaurant, Nakakura had operated a cable-laying boat for a salvage company, and Fukuda had been a keen net fisherman when he worked at the shipyard. Realizing he and his fishing buddies could never afford to hire a captain for their weekly outings, he’d decided to cut costs by getting a license for himself. In Yamane’s case, the family of a friend at school had owned a large yacht complete with a motorized launch which he’d learned to use. Before his head injury, he had also learned to scuba dive. And Kiku had picked things up from trips on the dilapidated scow his foster father went fishing in. With the exception of Kiku, the group had one more thing in common as well: all five had failed the test to get into the fifteen-man team that made up the prison’s small-craft training unit. They had been assigned to this kitchen outfit while they waited for the next chance to take the test, six months down the line. Kiku was bunking with them because the counselors thought that the enthusiasm of the other five for the small-craft program might rub off on him and help bring him out of his shell.

  The detention center was a model institution, and even one of the inmates was supposed to have said that if it weren’t for the high concrete perimeter wall and the double-plated iron doors at the entrance, the place could easily be mistaken for a decent boarding school. Its guiding principle was that even the slightest hint of open resistance should be swiftly and firmly dealt with, but as long as you obeyed the rules, the daily routine wasn’t particularly harsh. After all, the facility was equipped with almost everything a young man could possibly need or want, and care was taken to make him feel that he was being fairly treated. Once every other month, for example, a survey was taken to gauge prisoner satisfaction, and a special system had been set up to adjust an inmate’s daily portions of rice or bread according to the amount of physical labor required in his work unit. Still, despite this solicitous attention on the part of the management, whenever the prisoners had a few minutes of free time in the TV room after a hard day’s work, or when they were lying in bed at night before going to sleep, two things inevitably came to mind: the high wall and the double-plated iron doors.

  Inevitably, when a prisoner had a minute to himself, he thought of the world outside. Almost to a man, the inmates of the Juvenile Detention Center, like those in any other prison, drove themselves half-crazy thinking about their families, about life beyond the wall, and like men in any other prison, they spent a good part of their waking life looking for an opportunity to escape. But what was needed in most cases, more than the opportunity perhaps, was a reason—something to drive them to the decision to escape, someone who made them mad enough they had to escape. More often than not, though, a look around failed to turn up the necessary motive, and that was when it hit them: they were caught, shut in, watched every moment, but it was exactly because they tended to lose sight of that fact that they never seemed to work up the dissatisfaction needed to attempt an escape. Here were the guards and the counselors, at every turn, making their life on the inside as comfortable as possible, and distracting them with all this vocational training, clubs, sports, and what have you. And for a while, typically, a prisoner would be distracted. Then, without fail, the wall and iron doors would return to haunt their idle minutes and a new round of wishful thinking would begin: if only the wall would disappear, if only my family were here. The system was perfectly designed, or so it seemed, to keep a prisoner oscillating between these two states until enough oscillations had convinced him to do his time quietly and get the hell out. In the end, the men came to see that what separated them from the outside was not the wall and the double-plated iron doors but time itself, and with this realization came a new determination to shorten their sentence in whatever way they could. The usual appetites and urges were tucked away for the duration, as the toughest of the tough turned themselves into model prisoners bent on accumulating an armful of silver and gold stripes. Once this bitter time-pill had been swallowed, escape was never an issue, and the residents of the Juvenile Detention Center went about their business in a state of semi-hibernation.

  There was no question that this was an almost ideal way to run a jail, with the one drawback being it required the maintenance of a fine balance that could be upset at any moment by a single defector. The greatest potential danger, and the thing that the administration feared most, was suicide. The day-to-day mood in the prison was much like that in a retirement home: low-level, chronic, communal depression; and in such an atmosphere, a single suicide was almost bound to set off a chain reaction. A sufficient number of suicides and the tension level among the inmates would rise, stability would crumble, and the entire prison population would spew out the foul dose of time it had been convinced to swallow. It was with this in mind that Supervision had transferred Kiku to the Food Service Unit; drawn into the common goal of passing the seamanship test, his withdrawal would never progress to the point where he might consider harming himself—or so their thinking went.

  As the steamer began to howl, announcing the rice was done, the din in the kitchen rose to a roar. The whole Food Service division, eighteen men in three teams, was responsible for preparing and serving four hundred people with three meals a day. The teams worked in rotation, two days on and one off, under the supervision of two cooks who provided them with an endless string of chores: chopping onions or cabbage, washing rice, stirring mountains of pickling vegetables, soaking beans, measuring sugar and salt, and so on. When enough for four hundred portions of something was ready, it was divided up among the serving buckets, a ladle with a long handle being used to dredge up the sediment from the tanks of miso soup.

  “Getting the hang of it, Kuwayama?” asked Nakakura, mopping the sweat from his forehead during a short breather before the dirty dishes began coming back. Kiku leaned against the range and nodded. Nakakura was about three years older than him and had a cherry blossom tattooed on his left arm. “You’re a weird one, aren’t you?” he continued. “Always been so tight-lipped?” Kiku nodded again. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you. You mind?” Ignoring Kiku’s frown, he forged ahead. “Was it a real bummer—killing your own mother, I mean?…”

  Kiku scowled and let the piece of cabbage he’d been fingering fall to the floor. “Drop it,” he said softly. “Gives me nightmares.”

  Now it was Nakakura nodding. “I get you. Enough said. But you know, I never done anything to my old lady, and I still get nightmares about her all the time. Drives me nuts, and sometimes I think I’d be better off if she was dead, but it’s not exactly something you can try out to see if you like it. Ends up being kinda permanent. Anyway, now I know it probably wouldn’t help any. Thanks.”

  Kiku was staring at the damp floor. Next to the sink was a stack of boxes containing frozen whale meat. When they’d finished washing four hundred tin plates, the cook would probably hack the meat up with the chain saw. Kiku could already see the blizzard of ice and flesh settling gently on the vision behind his eyelids: a smooth, gory globe, stripped of hair and ears and eyes, merging somehow with the lump of meat. As soon as that hot, raw face had disappeared beneath the snow that night, the flashing had starte
d, regular, even, matching his pulse and brighter than the flashbulbs. In between the strokes of light he’d seen another face, the face of the woman before he killed her, the one who looked like him. “Please, stop,” she’d muttered just a moment before she stuck her head in front of the barrel. He could see her, her expression utterly serious, lips forming the words: “Please, stop.” And with each flash, he could hear her. “Please, stop.” “Please, stop.” “Please, stop.” Not knowing what it was she wanted him to stop, he stopped everything, every voluntary muscle in his body.

  “Kuwayama’s always spaced out,” said Yamane, coming up to join them. He too was wiping the sweat from his flushed face, and the scar on his skull had turned bright red in the heat. Under constant needling from Nakakura and Fukuda, he had finally told them the story of the operation. It seemed that during the brawl, in the process of killing the four people, he had been badly hurt—smashed in the head by a signpost, as best he could remember. At any rate, the whole left side of his skull had caved in. It was something of a miracle that he had survived at all, and without brain damage either, but there was no saving the shattered cranium. The bits of bone were fished out of his head, and two doctors used a Bunsen burner to mold a plastic plate to match the shape of his skull.

  “But you know, I used to be as spaced out as Kuwayama,” he added, leaning against the wall. The operation to insert the plate had been a success, apparently, but the front right lobe of his brain had got infected; it had taken six more operations—over a hundred hours, all told—to finally cure him. One night, after one of these operations, he’d overheard a couple of surgeons talking about his condition: “Looks like this one’s done for. No way we’re going to save him.” That was the gist of what he heard. Thinking the anesthesia hadn’t yet worn off, they’d left a multi-angled mirror above Yamane’s head under the oxygen tent. In it, he could see his own brain covered with a bright web of veins and arteries. It occurred to him that it looked exactly like tofu, so much so that he wouldn’t have been surprised to see chopsticks reaching out and taking a piece. The doctors were still talking, and he knew they were talking about him, but he had the distinct impression it was someone else.

  “I think it was ’cause it looked so much like tofu. I stared at it till I was sure it couldn’t be me, till it didn’t matter any more. How could it, if the thing that had been thinking and feeling all the time was just a lump of tofu? I sort of switched off, pretty much like you now, Kuwayama.”

  Kiku and Yamane had “tasting duty” for the noon meal. This meant taking samples of the day’s fare around to the section chiefs in Administration and Supervision as well as to the warden himself; the plates were arranged on a red tray and covered with a glass dome before being delivered to the appropriate offices. On any given day the menu might include a mixture of seven parts rice and three parts barley, salt broiled herring, boiled beans with cabbage, and seaweed soup. The warden took a small mouthful of each and then told Kiku to water his plants. Yamane’s job was to feed his pet sparrows and change the paper in the bottom of their cage.

  Taking the kettle the warden handed him, Kiku went to fill it at the sink. When he’d finished watering the geraniums, Yamane called him over to have a look: one of the birds was splashing around in the fresh water, but the other was perched on his palm pecking at a pile of seeds. The warden had left the office for a minute, and Yamane kept glancing nervously at the door. After letting the bird poke around a bit, he suddenly closed his hand and withdrew it from the cage. With the other hand, he began gently stroking the sparrow’s head since it had started to struggle and peck at his finger.

  “You try it,” he said to Kiku when the bird had calmed down. It hardly flinched as Kiku reached out to take it, and when it had settled on his hand, Yamane leaned down to put his ear next to the bird’s breast.

  “You know, Kuwayama, I’ve been pretty wild since I was a kid, but it’s been a lot worse since the operation. It’s like I’m crazy almost… You know why people sleep, Kuwayama? This doctor told me once: it’s partly to rest the body, but it’s also because the brain needs to rest too, deep down. Seems if you don’t rest the brain deep down, a man turns mean, crazy. I guess that’s what happened to me after my operation; it was pretty bad for a while—I don’t remember all of it, but I remember the attacks and how crazy I’d get. And it wasn’t like I was breaking stuff or beating the nurses with chairs—it was more like there was something strange that was filling up my whole body, and I would die if I didn’t find a way to let it out. It was like my body wouldn’t listen; they had me tied up the whole time, but I know if I’d ever got loose, I’d have killed dozens of people. Later, when I was a bit more used to it, it got so I could tell when one of these fits was coming on, and I thought up a lot of different ways to try to control them. I tried counting, and I tried Zen. I even used to try singing. But you know what worked best? What do you think? It was listening to the sound of a heartbeat—mine, somebody else’s, didn’t matter, whenever I got desperate that’s what I did. One time my wife brought our son to the hospital; he was just four months old at the time, but he had this great little heartbeat—it really got to me. It’s that baby’s heartbeat I’d try to remember, and somehow that made it all right.”

  Kiku put his ear to the bird’s breast. He could feel the warmth of the tiny body and hear the heart, quick yet faint, like the sound of a small engine far off in the distance.

  21

  “Kuwayama, are you fast?” Fukuda asked Kiku one night during their free time before bed. He was trying to put together a relay team to represent Food Service No. 3 in the upcoming field day. “You used to be a pole vaulter, right?” Kiku looked at his shoes and said nothing. “If you’re really fast, we could make a killing.” The relays were one of the few chances the men had to wager their rations—candy, underwear, tennis shoes—and parlay them into a real horde. Fukuda explained the situation to him: “The counselors’ team has won three years running—they’re the favorites. Then there’s the body shop; they’ve got at least one guy who’s a ringer—used to be a professional bike racer. Last fall they missed winning by a nose. Hayashi, Nakakura, and I have teamed up with a guy from Food Service No. 2, but if you’re really bad-ass fast, you’re in. You see what this could mean? Since nobody knows anything about you, we could clean up. If we win, we’ll all have chocolate and shit coming out our asses… So, be straight with us: you really fast?”

  “I’ll run if I have to,” said Kiku looking up.

  “That’s not what I’m asking. I want to know if you’re fast.”

  “Doesn’t matter to me one way or the other,” said Kiku, not quite to the point. Nakakura pushed in close, clearly pissed off.

  “You don’t get it, do you? We’re gonna bet on this race! If you’re fast, we’ll be able to stuff our faces with the payoff,” he yelled. Reining him in, Yamane asked Kiku his best time at a hundred meters.

  “It’s been more than a year since I was clocked, but I’ve done 10.9 three times,” said Kiku. The men grouped around him gasped, and Fukuda immediately put his name on the list. Though he looked a bit put out, Kiku made no objection.

  “That’s one weird sonovabitch,” Nakakura muttered as he spread out his bedding. “Weird as hell, I tell you. If he’s so fucking fast, why didn’t he jump up and down and tell us he’d run right at the start?

  “You know what the guards call you?” he said, raising his voice so Kiku could hear. “‘Lobo’; that’s short for ‘Lobotomy.’ You know—when they take out part of your brain and make a vegetable out of you, the way they do with guys who get fits and things? Lobo, that’s what they call you.”

  There was a fair amount of sand scattered about the athletic field at the detention center, apparently brought in over fifty years earlier when the land had been leveled and the soil prepared for crops. It was a fine sand that blew up in a strong wind and might have long since washed away in heavy rains if there hadn’t been a high concrete wall to keep it in place. Kiku sc
ooped up a handful and tossed it in the air just as Fukuda came up.

  “Starting to get hot,” Fukuda said. Nodding, Kiku went into his warm-ups, stretching his legs, doing a few jumping jacks and high-kick sprints, loosening up his ankles, and giving his Achilles tendon a good rub.

  “Looks real professional,” said Nakakura. Kiku’s muscles seemed to remember on their own what they were supposed to be doing.

  There were six four-man teams in the heat, each man running one lap or two hundred meters. The order for Food Service No. 3 would be Fukuda, Nakakura, and Hayashi, with Kiku as anchor.

  “Hey, Kuwayama, you running in this?” said a guard who was standing nearby. “Don’t freak out in the middle of the race and drop the baton.”

  The runners lined up, the gun fired, and they were off. Fukuda made a good start and managed to hold on to second place during his lap, perhaps because the body shop team and the counselors were in the next heat. If they finished in the first two places in this heat, they would meet them in the final. Nakakura wasn’t far behind when he got the hand-over from Fukuda, but he didn’t have as much speed, and the runner from the woodshop team was soon threatening to pass him. Sensing the danger, Nakakura tried to trip the guy up as he came level, but it was Nakakura instead who lost his balance, and when the passing runner bumped his shoulder it sent him sprawling on his face. By the time he was up and running again, he was last, more than twenty meters behind the leader. Hayashi and Fukuda gave an audible groan.