Coin Locker Babies

by Ryu Murakami

  Inside, Nakakura was floundering about in a mixture of stringy seaweed and rubble. Kiku pulled on the rope to get him upright and then took stock of their surroundings. The concrete dome actually seemed to be a pillbox with placements for guns in three directions. It was floored with soft mud. Kiku cleared aside what he could of the rubble until he turned up two large clumps of brain coral. The sight reminded him of something Yamane had once said: that when they had done the operation to insert the plate in his skull, he had been able to look right into his own brain, and it had looked exactly like a lump of tofu.

  “Tofu and brain coral,” Kiku muttered into his face mask as he picked up the drill, flipped the switch, and started pulverizing the soft coral; but before he’d gone too far Nakakura stopped him, pointing through the haze of white dust. Something shiny could be seen in the gap Kiku had opened up. Nakakura grabbed the drill from him and carefully dug away the rest of the coral to reveal a silver tube: a gas cylinder made of molybdenum steel. And then several more, until they were floating above a stack of sixteen cylinders each as big around as a person’s thigh. Thick plastic sheeting had been packed between the tubes, and a chain, secured in concrete, was wrapped around the pile. Nakakura cut free the end of the chain, and the cylinders rolled gently apart.

  They decided they would carry out one load of three cylinders apiece, lashing them together to make them easier to manage. At a tug on the rope, Hayashi began hauling them up the steep slope. A faint light shone from where he was waiting for them, like a lamp in a second-story window on a dark street. Several times the rope caught on a sharp piece of coral, but at last Hayashi himself came into view, pulling on the rope for all he was worth. Kiku and Nakakura had left the drill and battery behind, each clutching instead only his bundle of three cylinders. About halfway up the slope, Kiku disturbed two lion-fish hiding in the rock, and they shot out right beside his face. Things started to happen fast right after that.

  He heard a muffled scream and the sound of bubbles escaping, and when he turned, Nakakura was tumbling back down the slope. His regulator had come out of his mouth and he was clutching his forehead with one hand, though he’d somehow managed to keep hold of the cylinders. Baffled as to what could have happened, Kiku signaled Hayashi and was lowered back down to help. When he reached the bottom, he found Nakakura lying on the pillbox still holding his forehead. As Kiku floated down to him, he looked up and pointed at a lion-fish swimming nearby: he had been stung by one of the beautiful but lethal spines that lined the tail fin, and his whole body was going numb. The wound itself must have been horribly painful, but Nakakura, in desperation, managed to pantomime that he wanted Kiku to piss on his forehead. Kiku thought he remembered reading somewhere that the poison was acidic, and urine would counteract the effect. Still, he hesitated, but before he had time to think he found the front of his wet suit being undone for him and his penis dragged out. Leaning over to place the tip of it on the sting, Nakakura squeezed his groin encouragingly. Kiku tried to comply, but the sight of Nakakura there between his legs with his dick on his forehead made him want to laugh, and the more he tried to pee, the more he choked up. Nakakura, unaware of Kiku’s problem, rubbed the pink end around expectantly, while Kiku fought off laughter and concentrated.

  Then, abruptly, Nakakura just let go. Puzzled, Kiku peered into his mask to find his eyes shut tight and his face beginning to contort. His jaw was trembling, and his teeth had drawn blood from his lips. The arm still clinging to Kiku’s thigh had become as hard as steel, and it was this that made him remember: when Nakakura was stung, the regulator had come out of his mouth. He looked over at the cylinders Nakakura had been carrying and noticed that the valve on one of them was bent; fine green bubbles were leaking from it, bursting almost instantly under the pressure and dissolving in the water. When he looked back at Nakakura, he saw that his eyes were now open, the eyeballs bloodshot yet dry and creased like withered fruit. Then, again quite unexpectedly, just when the hand on Kiku’s thigh seemed about to snap the muscle there, he released his hold, opened his mouth, and gave a wail of pale green foam, half scream, half manic laugh. Ignoring the numbness in his thigh, Kiku tried to swim up the slope, but Nakakura stopped him with the rope. Kiku hacked through it with his knife and, signaling for Hayashi to haul him up, began kicking frantically away, but the numbness and the heavy water slowed him down. From somewhere came the thought that he’d had this dream before, any number of times: somebody pursuing him with murder in mind, and his body getting heavy, slow.

  Even without the rope, Nakakura was still managing to follow him up the channel, screaming his uncanny scream, as if he were gargling and laughing all at once. Hayashi kept pulling from above, and Kiku was at last able to crawl up onto the ledge, but the exertion, difficult to judge in the cool half-weightlessness, had been too much for him. For a moment, everything went black and he could feel himself slipping away, but he knew that if he lost consciousness he would have problems with the regulator. Crouching over, he tried to force as much air as possible into his lungs, willing himself, ordering himself to breathe. He could hear his heart. Breathe in! Out! In! Out! His heart kept beating. Hesitantly he opened his eyes, coming face to face with a lobster waving its antennae. He could hear breathing behind him and turned just in time to see Hayashi reaching out to help Nakakura up over the edge. He tried to yell at him to stop, but the yell died in a glub-glub of bubbles as Nakakura caught hold of Hayashi’s hand. Behind the mask, Kiku could see Hayashi’s face twist with pain as he tried to free himself. Nakakura had drawn his knife, and as he drove it into Hayashi’s stomach, Kiku took aim with his spear gun. The silver harpoon shot across the space between them and buried itself deep in Nakakura’s throat.

  33

  Hashi was sitting by the bathtub. Finally, noticing that his fingers were spongy and wrinkled, he reached up, still holding the kitchen knife, to turn off the shower. Blood was spiraling down the drain. Thinking nonetheless that he must have dreamed that he stabbed Neva, he stumbled, soaking wet, into the bedroom. He called her name, but she was nowhere to be found. He then went methodically from room to room looking for signs that she had been there: ash in the ashtrays, wrappers from the caramels she liked to eat, makeup on the nightstand, her shoes in the hall, dirty dishes. He put the knife back on a shelf in the kitchen, but failed to turn up any evidence of her. It must have been a dream, he told himself.

  Still, for a dream, it had left an amazingly vivid image in his head of Neva’s bulging white stomach with the knife sticking out of it and a smear of dark blood. He could hear D’s voice saying he was nuts, and anxiously began to wonder if he wasn’t right. Having dreams you couldn’t distinguish from reality—that was a sure sign, wasn’t it? He remembered the old woman he used to see picking through the garbage back on the island. She was nuts; she used to point at an empty sky, yell “Plane!” and throw herself flat on the ground. That’s how I’ll end up, he thought. But why? He must have guessed right all those years ago: that batty old woman really was his mother. Or maybe it was his punishment for having cut his tongue; maybe everything he saw was invisible to other people, and everything other people saw was somehow twisted out of shape for him.

  He took an ice cube from the refrigerator and gripped it in his hand until the numbness began to hurt. Then he turned on a burner on the stove and thrust his palm into the flame, giving a yelp of pain. He scribbled a few numbers in a column on a sheet of paper and tried adding them up. Finally he opened the newspaper and read aloud from the obituaries: “Yoshio Gyoura, 83, calligrapher, died at 2:25 A.M. on the eleventh of heart failure at Matsuyama Memorial Hospital. The funeral will take place at the Gyoura Academy of Writing Arts, 9–3 Honcho, Matsuyama City, with the widow, Yoshie Gyoura, of 3–4 Kamiiricho, Matsuyama, as chief mourner.” He could still read, at least. Seems normal enough, he thought to himself.

  A clear plastic bag in the kitchen sink caught his eye, with something red inside that, seen from closer up, turned out to be a wad of blo
odstained cotton. There it was—the evidence he’d been looking for—and he could feel the hair on his arms prickling at the sight. The police were probably on their way right now to arrest him, and there’d be a trial, and he’d end up just like Kiku, shut away in a gray building somewhere behind bars and wire and a high wall. I’m weak, he thought; there’s no telling what would happen to me in a place like that.

  Just then, there was a knock at the front door, and he nearly fainted with fright; but then he thought this might be a good chance to see whether or not he really was crazy. After the second knock, he looked out through the peephole and, sure enough, he could see two police uniforms. He unlocked the door and waved them in, expecting them to grab him and slap on the handcuffs. Instead, they bowed.

  “Sorry to bother you at this time of night, with your wife and everything,” the older one said, “but we have to ask you a few questions, if you don’t mind.”

  “I see. Come in, then,” said Hashi, though he didn’t see at all.

  “It must have been a shock,” said the other, looking carefully around the room. Hashi nodded, smiling forlornly. The cop soon found the knife on the shelf in the kitchen.

  “Was this what she used to try to kill herself?” he asked, showing it to Hashi. Again he nodded. “Pretty old-fashioned,” the man added. “By the way, how come there’s no blood on it?” Hashi stood up and faced him.

  “I washed it off,” he said, his voice a bit too loud.

  “And what was it exactly that you were fighting about? Another woman?”

  “Sort of,” Hashi managed. “You see… there was this groupie who was always showing up, saying I was getting it on with her, all sorts of lies, but Neva believed her and she got furious.” He was beginning to get the hang of it. The rules were the same as for an interview: even when you had no idea what you were being asked, you just looked the questioner in the eye and answered with a wistful little smile.

  “I get you,” said the cop. “Must be tough being famous. Looks great on TV but I guess you people have your troubles, too. It says here that your wife’s pregnant. That right? It also says she said you told her she should get an abortion and that made her suicidal…”

  Hashi took a bottle of orange juice out of the refrigerator and poured them each a glass. When he asked them if they’d like to sit down, they seemed to loosen up a bit, and one of them confessed he was dying to know what it was like being a star.

  “Well,” said Hashi, “I know this one singer, you’d know the name, who has to fart like hell to relax herself during rehearsals.” The tidbit seemed to tickle the two cops. Hashi laughed along to keep them company, though while he was laughing he began to feel his original notion had been right: that none of this was real. The laughter soon died away, and after smoking a couple of cigarettes apiece, the men got up to leave. As he was seeing them to the door, Hashi couldn’t help saying:

  “Tell me I’m dreaming, will you?… But where do you people go when you’ve finished in this dream? Do you just vanish—poof?” The cops stood scratching their heads and grinning.

  “That’s it,” one of them chuckled, “—and let’s hope it’ll be a better one next time.” They bowed again and started to shut the door.

  “Wait a second,” Hashi called after them. When they turned back, he stepped up to the nearest one and touched his cheek. “This is a dream, right? Honestly, I need to know. And if that’s all it is, then my stabbing Neva’s not really a crime.” The policemen exchanged a quick glance.

  “Now let me get this straight,” said one of them. “You’re saying that you stabbed your wife?”

  “No, I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head as they moved in on either side of him. “That’s what I’m asking you.” His voice by now was very small. They had a short whispered conference, and Hashi reached up again to touch their cheeks. No doubt about it: skin, grease, and sweat. When a dream cop was this real, how did you go about getting rid of him?

  “It’s getting a bit late for little jokes, sir,” they said eventually. “Anyway, at least your wife’s injuries don’t seem to have affected the baby. What we suggest is that you go pay her a visit in the hospital.”

  Hashi shut the front door and stood for a moment stroking its hard metal surface. Wondering if he had lost the feeling in his hands, he bent down to touch the rug, catching dust balls between his fingers. He rubbed his hand across the table, then picked up the bottle of orange juice and licked at one sour drop that had fallen on the back of his hand. He thought of King Midas who had turned everything he touched to gold. It must have been sad not to be able to feel anything you touched as something living. His throat tightened as he remembered that Midas had ended up as the last living soul on earth. Probably just the heat, he thought, switching on the air conditioner. It came to life with a rumble, and an oily draft blew into his face. He laid his cheek against the window pane, seeking the soothing coolness of the glass, but it clouded over and quickly warmed to the temperature of his skin.

  He thought about when he was small, when he and Kiku had lived on the island, and it seemed somehow that the surface of his body had been far more sensitive back then. His skin had always been tingling somehow, like the raw pink flesh of a wound or sunburn, and the slightest change in the wind or the angle of the sun had triggered a response from his whole being. Since then, his skin seemed to have acquired a coating of some kind—thin vinyl or powder or oil—piled layer upon layer to cut him off from the outside world. He couldn’t be sure any longer of what he was feeling; his eyes and ears and nose were no longer even part of him. He had to wake himself up, make his skin tingle again and escape this dream. And abruptly it occurred to him that the only way out was to die inside it, to die in the dream.

  Closing his left hand into a fist, he picked up the knife on the table and drew it across his wrist. A crimson line opened in the white skin, and blood spurted out. Instantly, Hashi was terrified, not because of the blood but because he couldn’t feel a thing; it seemed even a dream death wouldn’t return him to the living world.

  He ran out of the apartment and jumped into the elevator. As soon as it was moving, he punched the button on the emergency intercom, stopping the elevator between floors and bringing a voice squawking from the box:

  “Hello?… Hello?… Hello?… What’s going on up there?”

  “Just get me out of here,” Hashi screamed, punching the button again and again. “I’ll pay you anything you want.”

  “You gotta fire in there? Power outage? What? What’s the problem?”

  “This elevator’s trying to take me somewhere! The door’s going to open in hell! Get me out!” Hashi was kicking the wall.

  “You’ve got to tell me what’s happened. You’re between the eleventh and twelfth floors. Listen carefully: is the light working?” Hashi flailed at the box, trying to smash the voice, the little man inside it talking to him. Before long the elevator started down again. When the door opened on the ground floor, he was greeted by two men with fire extinguishers and tool boxes.

  “What the hell?!” one of them said when he saw Hashi’s wrist. “Where’d you do that?” Ignoring them, Hashi stumbled past and out into the street where he started to run. The bleeding showed no sign of stopping, so he found a doctor’s clinic and rang the buzzer. The lights were off and there was no answer, but he stood pounding on the door until a young man stuck his head out of a second-story window.

  “What do you want?” he yelled.

  “I’ve cut myself,” said Hashi, holding up his bloody wrist.

  “That so?” said the man in the window. “Well, too fucking bad.” The window slammed shut.

  His vision was beginning to blur, but as he staggered down the middle of the road he could see the thirteen towers in the distance, like tall cocoons woven by some great shiny bug, spitting out its thread until one day—though who knew when?—it all became so heavy it fell apart. He lay down in the median strip that separated the lanes of the boulevard. Headlights flash
ed through the bushes and then vanished. He sniffed at the earth, but there was hardly any smell, only a dry barrenness. Sleep! he told himself. Something was seething inside him, and as he drifted off to sleep, he felt he would like to cut himself open, scoop out whatever it was, and hurl it at this fat maggot of a city.

  Kiku was digging a hole in the sand. Next to him on the beach was a stiff body in a wet suit. When the hole was deep enough, he rolled the body into it while Anemone, holding a red plastic umbrella, said a quiet prayer. A breeze came up as Kiku began to fill the hole with sand, and Anemone pressed her hands over her eyes. When the funeral was finished, Kiku broke off a thick branch from one of the mangrove trees hanging down over the beach and began whittling away the smaller twigs. He measured the pole against his own height, and then, sticking it in the sand, bent it to test its strength. As he worked, the old man and the black goat appeared at the top of the bank and picked their way down to the beach. Scooping up some wet sand, he rubbed it between his hands to wash away the oil, leaving a rainbow film that spread out on the water.