by Susan Barker
I seldom set foot inside these hothouses of consumer vanity. I hate the smell for a start, that sickly candyfloss spun from manmade fibres and air fresheners. Nor can I tolerate the consumer will-to-power, the self-delusion of the hunter-gatherers stalking the DKNY summer collection. Take that girl over there for example – the one admiring the cashmere twinset. She thinks this 9,000 yen outfit will transform her into the airbrushed beauty of the advertising campaign. And see the girl in the white cotton gloves, with the calamine chalky face. She thinks the blue sash belt she fondles will draw the eyes of her unrequited love away from her psoriasis. That man with the lazy eye and razor-burnt cheeks. He thinks the green diagonal stripes on the tie he has selected will help him get a promotion.
But their concerns are trivial. At times like these I liken myself to an omniscient scarecrow, watching over a field of cabbages as they each primp and preen to be the best-looking cabbage. Blind to the fact they are still only cabbages.
Mary and Katya move up to ladies’ fashions, where the mannequins wear day-glo tank-tops and combat fatigues. Katya secretes herself in a harem-esque corner, drawn to the fur-lined handcuffs. Katya thinks her dominatrix tastes are sired of her own will. But I can trace her bloodline back to the sixteenth century, back to a Ukrainian countess who bathed in the blood of her servants.
Watching Mary browse through a rack of T-shirts, my heart swells with tenderness and fear. One night last week I trailed Mary and her boyfriend home through her quiet neighbourhood.
I kept close behind, listening. And what I heard made my ears retch.
Every night since then Yuji has been fertilizing Mary’s love for him with the fetid manure of his lies. Lies that distort Mary’s emotional attachment, so it no longer corresponds to the brutish, numbskulled reality of him. It is agony to watch Yuji string her along for his own wicked ends.
And yet Mary’s emancipation draws near. The other night it happened, flooding me with deep, immortal joy. She sought me out as her reality blistered and we sat together in the darkness of the refrigerator. Mary thought she was ill, unaware she had seen the first ripples in the looking-glass. Only I can help her. I know the torment of those early days of transcendence only too well.
I must be there when the final exorcism sets her ablaze, freeing her of the unhappy mildew of mankind.
Mary and Katya move across the beige carpeting. Fingers thirsty for exotic textures, they stroke everything within stroking distance. Aroused by a new range of shrink-fit jeans, Katya strides ahead on anorexia-enervated legs. Personal gripes aside, my heart gags on a spasm of pity.
‘What do you think of these?’ Katya asks. ‘Those with hips need not apply.’
Mary is not paying attention. ‘Y’know, I haven’t seen Mariko for two days now.’
‘Hmmm . . .’ Katya is assessing the quality of denim weave. Katya exists in a state of solipsism so extreme she disregards the existence of anything not in her presence. Therefore Mariko, who is not present at this moment in time, does not exist. And non-existent entities do not warrant Katya’s concern.
‘I don’t know where she is. She might have gone back to Fukuoka, but then all her clothes are still in the wardrobe. And she wouldn’t have gone anywhere without saying anything.’
‘Maybe she’s having an affair,’ Katya says. ‘Remember how Sandrine kept missing shifts when she took up with that high-school teacher?’
‘Mariko is not Sandrine,’ Mary says. ‘I’m worried. I turned her room upside down last night looking for an address book. I couldn’t even find her family’s phone number. If she was seeing someone, she’d at least come home to pick up some clean clothes.’
‘Look,’ Katya says. ‘You have nothing to worry about. Mariko will turn up . . .’
But Mary is full of dread. A vision of Mariko lying face down in a ditch explodes like a sordid, tabloid flashbulb in her head. I decide to get to the bottom of this mystery.
I cannonball through tetraspace on my quest to find Mariko. I catapult above the urban fortress of steel and bricks, hollering heavenwards, rupturing infinity. My hyper lens swings left and right, upsilon and phi. Every gluon and positron united in the construction of this cityscape screams itself hoarse for my attention. But ever judicious, I tunnel down upon the subject of my endeavours.
Mariko is nowhere near a ditch; she is not even lying down. She is standing in a shopping mall in the Osaka suburb of Juso. For the past 2 hours 14 minutes, she has been watching a salesman demonstrate how to carve roses from radishes using a special paring knife (retailing at 1,999 yen). Mariko has suffered a mild nervous collapse – the consequence of pimping her integrity night after night. She will be mesmerized by the salesman and the deft, silvery flash of his knife for a few hours yet.
Mary, Katya and I leave the department store and journey across the Chuo line to the suburb where Mary lives. They have three hours to kill before work, and intend to spend it sitting at the carp pond beside the town shrine, drinking sake.
‘They will think we are dissolute women for drinking in the afternoon,’ Katya teases.
‘They can think what they like,’ Mary replies.
Mary has always been careful to present a clean-cut image of herself to the residents of her town, but, heady with her imminent departure, she has grown careless. On Monday, at 11.41 a.m., Mary hung laundry out on her balcony wearing only her underwear. It sent the old man at the bamboo-shoot stall across the street completely agog, and he spent the rest of the day telling his customers of the foreign floozy on the second floor.
Mary and Katya sit down, roll up their jeans and dangle their bare feet in the sun-spangled water. Solar radiation unmitigated by ozone falls upon Mary’s shoulders, inciting melanocytes to blossom darkly. The carp pond is encircled by azalea bushes, and a few pensioners in flopsy sunhats, taking gentle, constitution-improving strolls. They drink oolong tea from plastic flasks and admire carp shadows passing through the plankton murk. If only these pensioners could see the spectacular carnival of fins and scales that is the true carp reality, they would fall to their arthritic knees. Once Mary is a seasoned hyperexcursionist like myself, we will return to this pond, and watch the carp shimmer by like majestic airborne zeppelins. In the meantime she bats the pond water with her toes, and deep in the azalea bushes I swat at the mosquitoes dive-bombing my jugular.
Mary bites into a rice cracker, igniting the epithelium of her tongue with chilli flavourings. Katya takes a hardened swig of sake.
‘You seem different lately,’ Katya says to Mary. She senses Mary’s transformation.
Mary bites her lip, unsure whether to confide the glitch in reality she has experienced. ‘Different how?’ she asks.
‘Restless.’
‘It must be because it’s springtime.’
‘How have things been with Yuji lately?’
‘He’s been busy this past week. I haven’t really seen him.’
Good! He must be cheating on her, thinks Katya. A tintinnabulation of glee rings out in her cadaver’s heart. ‘Yamagawa-san works those boys hard,’ she says.
Mary slaps a mosquito on her forearm. The mosquito’s internal organs seep through its caved-in fuselage. Reduced to a brownish smear on Mary’s arm, its tracheae continue to squeeze, like tiny bellows, driven by the cosmic imperative of life.
‘I hate getting bitten,’ Mary complains.
Katya hasn’t much to say on the topic. As a child her staple diet consisted of potatoes grown in plutonium-contaminated soil. The mosquitoes leave her well alone. Mary takes a sip of sake, and the anterior lobe of her liver groans, having scarcely metabolized the alcohol from last night.
As the silence yawns between them, Mary asks: ‘Do you ever get the feeling that there’s more to it than this?’
‘More to what? The carp pond?’
‘To everything.’
‘Everything? Do you mean spiritually? Like religion?’
Katya’s vapidity is as boundless as the sea. Sensitive to her disdain
, Mary says: ‘Oh, I don’t know. Just ignore me.’
Mary self-consciously closes her eyes and lifts her face to the sun. Katya stares into the water, recommencing the ongoing love affair with her reflection. Oh, to hurtle from these bushes and tell Mary that I understand exactly what she means . . .
A gentle breeze billows sun-baked dust over the pond.
But I must practise restraint. I must be patient until the time is ripe.
There is little to recommend the barren wasteland of Argonon. The planetary atmosphere is so thick with clouds of zinc and nickel that the sun can scarcely penetrate it. Even on a mild day visibility never exceeds a metre or two. The metallic dust of Argonon has achieved galaxy-wide notoriety. Propelled by the power of starlight, it wafts across the frozen darkness of interstellar space, settling on any planetoid it meets. Did you know five per cent of all dust on Earth originates from Argonon? It frosts our shelves and furs our skirting boards and radiators. It dances in shafts of light among the rafters of empty suburban attics.
Mortality rates on Argonon are high, and what little of life there is is generally understood to be nasty, brutish and short. Despite this Argononians have a reputation for kindness that puts the creatures of more inhabitable planets to shame. Though a tourist destination for the clinically insane, anyone who has been there will tell you the same thing: if you’re in a fix, an Argononian will cut off his fourth arm to help you.
Owing to the poor quality of life, long periods of birth prohibition are imposed upon the Argononians. It was during one of these times of prohibition that a girl and a boy had the misfortune of being born. The parents of the twin siblings tried to cover up the birth, but rumours escalated until a Depopulation Enforcement Officer was sent to investigate.
‘This is a serious violation,’ he said as he paced about the living room.
A titanium squall whipped against the windowpane. The two mothers and three fathers hung their heads.
‘It was an accident,’ Father no. 3 piped up. ‘How can we be guilty of a crime we did not know we were committing?’
‘You cannot profess ignorance in this day and age,’ the Depopulation Enforcement Officer barked back. ‘The eight stages of the reproductive process cannot be completed without a certain degree of premeditation.’ He looked at the babies sleeping in the crib, respiratory filters clamped against their faces. ‘I am afraid I am going to have to take them both.’
The three fathers went limp with despair. Mother no. 1 put her head in her hands and wept. Mother no. 2 sank to her knees and clawed at the carpet.
The Officer sighed. ‘Very well. I will let you keep one.’
The parents took out a ten-spiln coin. On one side was the Argonon symbol for heaven; on the other, the symbol for earth. They named the boy Solaris and the girl Terestra. Then they threw the coin in the air.
Shortly afterwards the Depopulation Enforcement Officer left with the baby Solaris tucked beneath his arm. Congratulating himself on his diplomacy, he returned to his office and filled out the necessary paperwork. He then despatched the baby to where all illegal births were sent: down the chute to the wormhole incinerator.
The wormhole incinerator was a transport project gone wrong. Scientists from a planet next door but one to Argonon had tried to modify a neutron star with lasers and matter-processors. The resultant wormhole was meant to provide a short cut across the universe, but, owing to miscalculations, all spacecrafts that entered were instantly compressed into anti-matter. Realizing their mistake, the scientists changed tack. The wormhole was no longer a transportation device but a dumping ground for the refuse of the solar system. This was where baby Solaris was sent.
His sister Terestra continued to grow up on their home planet. A virtuous and contented girl, she loved everything about Argonon, from its blackened skies to its arsenic-ridden soil. She learnt to love the heavy respiratory filter attached to her face as though it were her own flesh. Life on Argonon was all Terestra knew, and she had no complaints.
One day she was strolling across the manganese wastelands when a lump of cobalt fell on her head.
‘Hey!’ she cried angrily, through her respiration-mask filter. She glared up at the sky, but visibility was only 0.7 metres and she saw nothing.
‘Terestra, this is your brother Solaris.’
‘Is this a joke?’ Terestra asked suspiciously.
‘No, it’s not a joke. You can’t see me because I am anti-matter.’
A hot gust of iron filings blustered by. Terestra bristled with irritation. She thought this joke in poor taste. ‘My brother is dead,’ she said coolly, ‘whereas you are obviously alive, and very sick in the head to boot. Now, if you’ll excuse me . . .’
‘I am not dead,’ the voice said indignantly. ‘What you call dead, I call Argononian prejudice.’
Terestra walked on through the dense dust clouds. She hoped her tormentor would leave her alone.
Instead he pleaded: ‘I want you to join me, Terestra. I have been watching over you for the past few weeks, and I want to rescue you from this toxic lump of metal. When they tossed that coin you were the loser. Your reality thus far is nothing but a tiny impurity in an extraordinary unseen universe.’
Terestra stopped walking. Hand on hip, she said: ‘OK, so how exactly do you intend to rescue me?’
The voice came back at her: ‘By telling you that you must jump down the chute into the wormhole incinerator.’
Terestra laughed. ‘You are a lunatic. Now get lost, you conceited piece of anti-matter.’
And to illustrate her point, Terestra scooped up a handful of manganese soil and swung her arm round, flinging it out like a toxic Catherine wheel.
Many years later, Solaris and Terestra freewheel across the cosmos. They echo wild laughter as they leapfrog asteroids and hopscotch over meteor showers.
Solaris says to Terestra: ‘Remember that terrible fuss you kicked up when I first told you to jump down the chute of the wormhole incinerator?’
Terestra turns a fetching shade of pink. ‘Don’t remind me! I gave you such a hard time.’
Solaris shrugs. ‘I barely remember . . . Hey! A supernova! Let’s go and do some solar windsurfing. Last one there is an Argononian filter valve.’
Mary and Katya are sluggish as bees sunk in honey. The afternoon sun has microwaved their cerebella and their vision flickers, strobe-lit. They brush the grit stuck to their legs and roll their jeans down over the tiny craters indenting the backs of their calves. They complain that they don’t want to go to work. They want to sleep while the 500 ml of alcohol they have jointly imbibed seeps through the multiple stages of catabolic breakdown. Groaning, they pull sandals over feet coated in an invisible microslime of algae and pond protozoa.
I keep my distance as they make their way down the quiet, residential lane from the town shrine to the station. They pass three schoolboys in judo uniform who are tearing about beside a paddy-field, shucking sherbet-filled liquorice sticks. The schoolboys suspend their adolescent mayhem as Mary and Katya pass by, but when I follow 13.1 seconds later the fattest of the trio ‘yeeeoww’s at me and lashes out a karate chop that stops mere centimetres from my sternum. I stumble from the kerb into the road and the boys crumple up with laughter. Hypersonic enmity rays fly from my psyche. I transmit a telepathic warning to my fat aggressor: Laugh it up while you can, Koji Subaro, because with that much cholesterol in your subclavian artery your karate-chopping days’ll be over before you’re thirty. On a deep, subliminal level Koji Subaro registers my ominous message. Despite the sunshine and laughter of his playmates, he shivers long and hard at the sight of my receding back.
Eager to delay their arrival at work, Mary and Katya stop for a coffee at the Mister Donut beside the station.
I wait in the mouth of a shopping arcade, beneath the awning of a dilapidated hardware store. I watch them sit at a table with a double espresso and Americano. The happy, shiny lighting in Mister Donut’s blanches all who enter into featureless zombies, but no
t Mary. She blows a stream of sake-sweetened breath across her coffee and heat from its caffeinated depths speeds to the surface, yearning to be borne away by this angelic breeze. The heavenly red welt of her glottis clamps shut as a sip of coffee slips down her throat. It washes over her tonsils, voluptuous their pendular caress. A soft, gaseous belch travels from Mary’s stomach to her mouth, where it silently passes into the jarring, external world of Not-Mary. She seals her lips. Her lips are unlike anyone else’s. Her lips are a throbbing, scarlet universe unto themselves.
Beside her the Ukrainian sourpuss frets over the number of kilocalories in a double espresso. A shop girl in bubblegum-pink uniform arranges glazed doughnuts in the counter display with metal tongs. In the shop girl’s stomach is a starchy bowling ball composed of four chocolate doughnuts. Earlier she stowed fourteen cinnamon twists into her duffel bag, to distribute among the Holy Brotherhood of Leptus when she returns to the compound tonight. She knows the doughnuts will be appreciated after their long day of levitation and magical incantation.
All over the nation the working day draws to a close. Pulse rates slow to low, elephantine thuds as a tide of people wash back from the city to the suburbs. Brains switch to autopilot and internal monologues grow languid, muddled by low blood-sugar levels and a day’s worth of unprocessed memory. Clothes crisp and fresh that morning are now rumpled, smudged with LaserJet ink. Fatigue stalks these work-tired souls home: a grey, monolithic entity.
Among the laggard masses I spot him straight away. His heart is a pneumatic drill on amphetamine overdrive, his pores filled with tense baubles of sweat. He wishes to be inconspicuous, yet he is the most conspicuous individual anyone has seen all day. He enters a record shop in the arcade and begins flicking through the jazz section. All customer eyes abandon the J-pop and World music compilations to focus on this man and the scar covering half his face. The disfigurement incites shock, revulsion and delight. I personally think it unremarkable. Perhaps I should remind you that in the fourth dimension all features, external and internal, exist on an equal plane, and the surface of the face is no more prominent than what lies beneath. I am no more interested in his scar than the density of his nose cartilage.