Coin Locker Babies

by Ryu Murakami

  One of the first things D did when the schedule for a concert in some outlying area had been finalized was organize a party in honor of the local dignitaries and anyone rich enough to be worth asking. These affairs invariably started with speeches by the pols, bankers, or others of note. On this particular occasion, an old man in a tuxedo said something about sports and culture being the lubricants for smooth interchange between the large metropolitan areas and the provinces, and then everyone drank a toast with champagne or whatever drink was handy. Some of the partitions and most of the furniture had been removed from the suite, and the walls were lined with soft, deep couches filled with the well-groomed wives of doctors and businessmen, each clutching a glass. Ice sculptures in the form of birds were ranged along the table that filled the center of the room.

  “It’s beyond me why a man would want to dye his hair at all,” the old fellow in the tuxedo was saying to Matsuyama, “let alone such awful colors. Maybe you can explain it to me.”

  “I thought it would show up better on stage,” Matsuyama said.

  “Well, I think I should tell you that I know quite a few folks who would like to round up all the young people like you, shave their heads, shove ’em in the army, and give them a good dose of discipline,” said the old man.

  “The army, huh? That an interesting gig?”

  “I doubt you’d find it very interesting. You have to follow rules in the army. If you don’t they throw you in the guardhouse, and the next morning they take you out and stand you up in front of a firing squad.”

  “That so?…” muttered Matsuyama.

  “I’ve never actually been in the army,” the man continued, “but if I had, I wouldn’t have minded being in charge of that.”

  “In charge of what?”

  “The firing squad, of course. I’ve always liked the way they say ‘Ready! Aim! Fire!’ It looks so smart in the movies.”

  John Sparks Shimoda was discussing Ch’ing-dynasty ceramics with a woman in a red evening gown who was married to the boss of a porcelain factory, while Kitami was describing the two acts in the floor show that was about to begin to a bigshot in a local newspaper and broadcasting company.

  “One of them is a foreign stripper, and the other—at least I think it’s the same act—is this scrawny kid who shoots himself up with a muscle relaxant and then lets all comers fist him.” The short, bespectacled captain of industry was stroking his shoulder with a sweaty hand.

  “You know what the headline in the morning edition of my paper’s going to be?” he asked. “‘Concert Is Smash Hit.’ That’s what it’s going to say.”

  Tokumaru was deep in conversation with the president of a tennis shoe company who was apparently an old friend. Their talk moved from the state of the economy to boxing to shared memories of a certain gay brothel in Rio by the name of Necropolis. And Toru, not for the first time, was complaining to D about being made to suck up to a bunch of old farts.

  “I’ve got three groupies waiting for me back in the room. How much longer do I have to stick around and listen to this shit?”

  D checked his watch. “Just be patient. It won’t go on forever,” he said, patting him on the cheek.

  When the young foreign performer had removed a number of her clothes, it became clear that while she was quite pretty, her skin had begun to sag across her stomach and down her thighs. Hashi, meanwhile, was trapped on a couch, surrounded by three women in late middle age whose faces had little drifts of fine white powder filling their wrinkles. One was squeezing a slice of lemon over a cracker heaped with caviar. The champagne had turned her earlobes bright red, and she was stealthily rubbing her thigh against Hashi’s leg.

  “When I heard you sing tonight, I suddenly wanted to take a knife to this bit of flab,” she said, taking his hand and pressing it against the flesh in question.

  “Isn’t he stunning?” said another. “Just like a girl. I don’t think I’d be surprised if he grew breasts on that pretty chest of his.”

  “Me either,” rasped the third woman, who had just had an operation on her throat. “He reminds me of a dirty movie I once saw in Hawaii where this Nazi doctor was doing experiments on live prisoners and he decided to attach a pair of tits and an ass to this beautiful young man. He ended up sewing soft skin all over his body, except around his privates. It was all a bit creepy, but he turned out looking gorgeous just the same.”

  Hashi sipped at a strong drink, wondering why he was more or less content to be sitting there with these aging women pawing at him. D had asked them to be nice to the oldsters for PR purposes and to make sure they got permission to use the right concert halls, but in Hashi’s case the assignment was no trouble at all.

  By now, the skinny boy with the armful of muscle relaxant was just finishing his act and acknowledging the applause; in the course of it he had managed to fill himself with a solid gold dildo as big around as a newborn baby. And on that note the party broke up, a little after three in the morning.

  As Hashi was heading back to his room, Toru called after him: “We’ve got a cute little thing coming upstairs later. Why don’t you join us?—once you’ve put Auntie to bed, that is.”

  While he was showering, Hashi tried to think of a way to put Neva off if she crawled in with him. He’d just tell her he was tired, he decided, and hope she took three of her big, round sleeping pills. When he emerged from the bathroom, she was at the mirror removing her makeup.

  “Hashi, there’s something I’d like to talk about,” she said.

  “Could we make it tomorrow? I’m beat,” he told her, turning out the bedside light.

  “Sure. Tomorrow,” she said, getting into the other bed.

  “Neva, you been sleeping well lately?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Are you still taking those big sleeping pills?”

  “No, not any more.”

  “Well, good night,” he said, but Neva started talking in the dark.

  “When I was a little girl, my grandmother would never let me go swimming. She thought the sea was dangerous and I didn’t swim well enough to go in by myself. She was sure I would drown. I always thought she was silly to worry like that, but lately I’ve begun to understand how she must have felt.”

  “Neva, stop yacking and go to sleep.”

  “Why did you cut your tongue?” she asked suddenly.

  “I’ve told you, I wanted a new voice.”

  “Hashi, promise me you’ll start playing it safe from now on. These past few weeks you’ve been crazy—trying to please everyone. You’ve got to figure out what you want and forget about other people.”

  “But it’s me that’s calling the shots now. And besides, haven’t the concerts been a smash thanks to the change?”

  “It won’t matter if you lose track of what you want and who you are,” said Neva.

  “I don’t want to hear about it. Why don’t you take one of those nice fat sleeping pills and check out for a while?”

  “But don’t you see? You’re famous now so everybody’s telling you something different, everybody wants something. They want you to sing louder, they want it more soulful, they want it easier to understand, more love songs, more this, less that… But none of that matters; you’ve got to do what you want to do.”

  “Check. Understood. Now stop talking crazy and go to sleep,” said Hashi.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to nag. I promise I’ll shut up. I just want to tell you what my grandmother said when she finally realized I wasn’t going to listen no matter how many times she told me not to go in the sea. What do you think she said?”

  “How should I know?”

  “She told me not to go in over my head.”

  “OK, OK, now I’m really going to sleep.”

  “Hashi?…”

  “Unh.”

  “You’re going to be a daddy.”

  In the dark his eyes shot wide open. The sheet stretched dim and gray in front of him. “You’re… pregnant?” he murmured. He
knew he should say something more, but he couldn’t think what and his throat had tightened in a knot. “A baby?” he managed at last. “Me? A father?” He suddenly remembered the way the rock-hard baby had rattled against the side of the box he’d carried before burying it. He knew nothing about how an egg grew for all those months in a woman’s belly, and so in his mind he pictured gestation in some dark, anonymous void, until the moment came and, miraculously, the baby emerged, kicking and screaming, from a woman’s crotch. But until that time, he thought you dangled in space somewhere, suspended from unseen wires. Maybe, if you could find the place and give it a shake, the babies inside would rattle too, just as the one in the box had.

  “We’ll talk it all over tomorrow,” said Neva, rolling over to go to sleep. When he thought he’d given her enough time, Hashi slipped out of bed.

  Toru’s room was unlocked. Inside it was dark, but Hashi managed to make out the shape of a young woman curled up on the floor in nothing but gold high heels. She was drooling slightly and smelled of alcohol. When he turned on the light, she rubbed her eyes.

  “Noooo…” she groaned. Her face looked familiar… front row, hat… he remembered. When she finally realized there was someone else in the room, she struggled to her feet and lurched over to drape herself around Hashi’s neck. She was a lot taller than him, but he scarcely had time to notice before the high heels seemed to melt under her and she collapsed on the floor, taking him with her.

  “Yur Hashi,” she slurred, her eyes peering from the narrowest of slits. “You really him?” He nodded, feeling her breasts pressing against him. “Come on,” she said. “Fuck me. I hate that foreplay shit. I like it shoved in me while I’m dry as a bone. Go on, baby, make it hurt,” she said, spreading her legs. Hashi began to undress, thinking this would be his first time with a woman whose skin didn’t wobble about when she lay down.

  Since the wedding, Hashi had slept with three other women on the sly. All three, however, had been about the same age as Neva, and all three had been embarrassed to get undressed in front of him. Each time he had been made to shut his eyes, and each time he had crawled into bed next to a body with layers of slack flesh that seemed to have no relevance to the thighs and flanks and arms they hung from. It all rippled like slurry with too much water in it, and when you pinched it, it didn’t spring back. Yes, all in all, they had been oddly comforting bodies. But this young woman was different. The firm, molded flesh on her thighs and ass refused to quiver no matter how much he shook it, and she lay confidently before him, lights on, legs spread, reveling in herself.

  After a few minutes of grappling, Hashi was still limp. Even after she sat up enough to get his cock in her mouth, it made no difference.

  “Come on, honey, get hard for Momma,” she crooned as best she could with her mouth full.

  “What did I tell you? He can’t make it with the young ones,” said Toru, standing in the doorway with Matsuyama. They were both grinning.

  “Whew, thought my tongue would break off,” said the girl, sitting up. “Hashi, love, something tells me you’re im-po-tent.”

  “You been watching all this time?” said Hashi. They nodded, still grinning, as Hashi rushed them. Dodging the punch, Toru grabbed his arm and threw him on the bed.

  “Calm down, Hashi. We’ll show you how it’s done,” he said as Matsuyama turned the woman over on her hands and knees and unzipped his fly. The buckle on his belt clanked in rhythm with the thrusting of his hips. “You know,” Toru continued, “Shimoda called it just right. He said that once a guy sells his ass, that’s the way it is. What he’s really selling is his shame. So no matter how much a kid like this waves her butt in his face, he’ll never get it up again. That Shimoda’s real smart. For a woman, they say, it’s all the same, but for a man, it means the end of this,” he said, winking at Hashi and walking over to prod the girl’s grinding thigh with the tip of his snakeskin boot. “Hashi, love, you’re an orphan,” he laughed. “You never knew your mother, and now all you want in a woman is some flabby tit to suck on—mmmmmmm.”

  Hashi, white-faced, grabbed an ashtray from the nightstand and threw it as hard as he could, but Toru ducked and it shattered against the wall.

  “Shut the fuck up!” he shouted, making another charge at him. This time Toru offered no resistance, allowing Hashi, who was much the smaller of the two, to punch him a few times in the chest. He had stopped laughing. Matsuyama, who by now had finished with the girl, pulled Hashi away.

  “You’re an orphan faggot whore,” Toru said, his tone suddenly serious. “Today you might be a great singer, but not too long ago you were an orphan faggot whore, and there’s no way you’re ever going to forget it. But that’s exactly the point: you shouldn’t ever forget it—that’s what old guys like us learn from all these years of shit. It doesn’t make a piss of difference whether you can fuck a pig groupie…”

  “Pig??!” muttered the girl, her tongue thick in her mouth.

  “Yeah, pig!” said Toru, kicking her harder than before. “Hashi, there are plenty of assholes out there who go bad as soon as they get there hands on a little money. But those are the ones who forget where they came from and suddenly start thinking they were born in a limousine. We don’t want that happening to you now, do we? No matter how good the grub, no matter how plush the hotel, no matter who’s kissing your ass, don’t ever forget: you’re an orphan faggot whore. I guess we wouldn’t bother telling you this except we really dig backing you up. It’s not often you come across this kind of gig—together we’re pretty hot; we all think so. So don’t forget: orphan… faggot… whore. Don’t you go screwing it up.”

  Hashi wanted to object, wanted to tell them they were wrong about him and older women. He wasn’t sure exactly what it was, but there was something soothing about those soft bodies, something that reminded him… of that soothing room. He wanted them to know that the reason he was this way had nothing to do with being an orphan, or even with being a whore; it was that sound, the one he and Kiku had heard all those years ago in that rubber-padded room. He sang because he was looking for that sound; his songs were his way of getting close to it. And it was only in a padded room he could hear it, a room made of a woman’s ample, bare body—walls, floor, furniture, all from the full inner thighs, a room gently contracting and expanding, pulsing in and out, endlessly, softly enclosing him—only there, inside, could he hear it.

  From the window of his suite, the whole town was visible. Across the way, Hashi could see the remains of the party: ice birds melted into formless lumps, and the skinny young man, quite naked, asleep on a table. Hashi stared out into the night. It had begun to rain, and each light bristled with silver needles, but behind the panes of glass he could hear nothing, feel nothing. In high school, he remembered, he had stared out a window… to watch Kiku pole-vault. Suddenly, he could smell something… something familiar… what? Closing his eyes, he searched his brain until he knew: chalk dust, he thought to himself with a muffled laugh. After a particularly good jump, Kiku would smile and wave at him. “That’s my brother,” he would tell his classmates, pointing in his direction. Just as the far-off island and the sea now came floating up outside the window, the naked man across the way sat bolt upright and let out a silent scream. Hashi shuddered. His face in the glass was superimposed on the young man’s body. Everything seemed to have become transparent, interchangeable; the body, the lights of the city beyond, the sea and the island in his mind—it was all the same thing, and for a moment he had no idea where he was. His face had slipped down somewhere in between these hazy images, and he was falling. He couldn’t breathe; the impossibly thick, rain-spattered glass had cut him off from any air, had cut off everything. He pounded at it as hard as he could. No good. Suddenly he noticed that the man across the way was waving the enormous, solid gold dildo as he munched a piece of leftover bread. Try this, he seemed to be saying. This should do the trick.

  25

  On the day that Kiku, Yamane, Nakakura, and Hayashi joined th
e Nautical Training Unit and were transferred to a new cell-block, Yamane had had a terrible headache since early in the morning, and was covered with gooseflesh and clammy sweat.

  “This damned plastic plate in my skull must be out of whack,” he told them. “If I pass out and go all stiff, don’t talk to me or try to move me. If you touch the plate in one or two places, there’s no telling what’ll happen.”

  “You mean it could kill you?” Kiku asked.

  “No, not that. Don’t suppose I’d mind that much,” said Yamane forcing a smile. “No, more likely it’d kill you.”

  When they got to their new quarters, they were expected to pay their respects to the senior people there, but Yamane, in too much pain to talk, could only crouch by the door shaking. Kiku, who by now had a single silver stripe on his prison uniform, tried to cover for him, explaining that he had a bad cold, but the older inmates took offense all the same.

  “The bastard’s got no manners,” somebody said.

  To take their minds off Yamane, Nakakura hit on the idea of offering to give some of them a massage, but as soon as he started rubbing one man’s shoulders, somebody else gave a loud sniff.

  “Buddy, you need a bath,” he said.

  “Yes sir, I know, sir. Whenever I get sweaty…,” Nakakura started to explain, but his voice trailed off.

  “Smells like a bitch in heat,” said one of the other prisoners. “Kinda makes you horny.”

  Nakakura grimaced. Afterward he explained to Kiku that the comment had made him think of his mother: “In summer you could smell her from the next room. Most of the time it was OK, but you could always tell when she’d been with a man from the way she smelled.” As he went on prodding at the older fellow’s back, however, he merely smiled at Kiku and Hayashi and pretended for a second to be wringing his neck. It was just a gesture, the lightest of jokes, but another guy standing behind him noticed and blew up.