Plow the Bones

by Douglas F. Warrick

The peacock people cheer beneath him. The Gilco man says, “Please.” His left foot hooks behind his right ankle, and he almost falls. He corrects his stride, finds his rhythm. He wants to stop. He says, “Help me. I don’t understand. I don’t understand anything.”

  The crowd laughs. Applauds. Several of the people at the feet of the suffering Gilco man fall in love with one another now. The false is turning true, and they are grateful.

  The Outlaw watches from the shadows. He is there and not there. All around him, little vengeances tug at him. He drags a coffin on a chain through the streets of Dotonbori, and everywhere he goes people part to make room, but nobody notices him. He moves through them with one hand hovering above the pistol at his hip.

  §

  I tell him — this American boy who has come to discuss my business with me, who wants to fuck me — I say he doesn’t know anything about Japanese women. Everything he knows is from movies and cartoons and manga. He wants me to be skittish. Frightened. He wants me to be a virgin, and to fear his penis even while I yearn for it. That is what he came for. I tell him, while I am hunched over my desk and my hand jerks and weaves over the page, “You’re an asshole. And a racist.”

  I don’t look behind me, but I can tell his feelings are hurt. I don’t know if anybody has ever said this to him, but now I have, and the rhythm of his breathing hitches and holds, and that’s enough answer. I may as well have hit him.

  I am drawing an eye. Soon I will draw another. The eyes I am drawing will be unhappy. “You come here,” I say, and my hand adds a row of short, brutal lashes to the bottom lid, “with your microphone and your computer and your press credentials.” I picture him in my head as he was on the first day that I met him. “Your stylish beard and your smart–looking glasses. You’re going to create the story you want to create. You’ll edit all the tape together, and when it turns up on the radio back home, it will be the exact same story you thought it would be before you even got on the plane.”

  I can hear him shuffling his feet behind me, trying to find a posture that will make him feel less vulnerable. He says, “Megumi, I… If this is about… I promise the piece will be perfectly respectful, I…” He sighs, and when he speaks again, his voice is low. It trembles. “I’m not sure what I’ve done to upset you.”

  I turn around, and I stare at him. I’m angry. I’m not sure why. Something about the way he says my name, the way he claims ownership over it. For a few heavy seconds, we don’t say anything. I just watch his skin turn blue and then red, blue and then red, blue and then red, as the lighted sign outside my hotel room flashes on and off. He’s sitting on my bed. The hotel’s bed, really. But I paid for it, not him, and he is sitting on it as though this room belongs, however temporarily, to the both of us. I gesture at his notebook. He hands it to me. “ ‘Kodu Garden is everything you’d expect from a major manga studio in the weird and wonderful heart of Osaka,’ ” I say, parroting his narration back to him. “ ‘Everybody — from the lowly mail–cart kid to the colorists and tech–guys at their computer consoles — looks busy, focused, dead–set.’ ” He doesn’t understand. Maybe he can’t. A muscle between his eyebrows is twitching, and his shoulders are tense and rounded. “ ‘In Osaka,’ ” I read, “ ‘The business of giant monsters and long–haired ghosts and, yes, hyper–sexual fantasy’,” I struggle with this last term, partially because it is written in my second language, and partially because his handwriting is quick and cramped and childish, “ ‘is deadly serious.’ ”

  “Look,” he says, “Just…” He’s getting frustrated, arguing with me like we’re a couple, like I’ve made a stupid, hurtful, girlish mistake. “The only reason I read it to you was…”

  “Was because you wanted to impress me,” I say, and I toss the notebook onto the bed and turn back to my work. There is so much to be done. “Because you wanted to make your story real.” Which is what I want to do, too. I draw the brim of a wide cowboy hat above the stern eyebrows. I cut chinks and rips and folds into the hat with my pencil. I make it an old hat, even though it’s just been born. It’s a good hat to hide beneath. “I can’t stop you,” I say, “but I don’t want you telling stories about me.”

  He is quiet behind me for a long time. The lamp above my desk paints my big sketch pad warm yellow. The rest of the room is blue and then red, blue and then red. I draw a pair of lips, big and expressive, held tightly together. I like working in hotel rooms. I like being in a private space that doesn’t really belong to anybody. It’s better than working at my brightly lit desk in the studio, high up in the sky and staring out at the city, a space without privacy that belongs, inarguably, to someone else. It’s better than my own apartment, where everything is mine and all of my drawings become me. Here, I can disappear. I can make my stories come true.

  If I turn my head, his mouth looks like a vagina. I erase, try again.

  The bedsprings squeak. The door opens. The door closes. And I am alone again. And able to tell stories. The American radio producer’s. And mine too.

  §

  The Shinsekai district: the winding labyrinth of streets and alleys, the slot–machine parlors that jangle and crash, the carnival barkers beckoning pedestrians into kushikatsu restaurants and sushi bars, the pensive white people with tourist handbooks. These are the roots, the veins that run along the ground toward the district’s heart, the high white Tsutenkaku tower, built to ape the Eiffel, from the top of which tourists can see the whole city.

  Fifteen feet above the streets, lazy paper fugu fish float like zeppelins. Once, they hung motionless outside of fugu restaurants, paper lanterns with red letters blazing on their flanks. A few hours ago, their painted eyes fluttered open and saw. Their flat gills flared open and breathed. The electric lights in their bellies became hungry. They broke their moorings and floated away from their wires and started searching for little shrimp in the air. They have found none. Now they weave around between buildings, their little fins whirring like hummingbird wings, and the people beneath them glance up at them occasionally, satisfied. The tourists smile uncomfortably, ask each other if this is supposed to be happening. The fish don’t care. They’re hungry, and there are no shrimp in the air.

  The Outlaw stalks beneath them, dragging his coffin by its chain. He follows the feet of his quarry. He is careful to stay beneath the shadow of a floating paper fugu fish, where nobody can see him. Nobody but his bounty, who walks shudder–stepped and nervous, who doesn’t really see The Outlaw, but seems to be dreaming about him even while he walks wide awake. His bounty is American, like The Outlaw is supposed to be. They cancel each other out. The Outlaw represents the American, and that injustice boils in The Outlaw’s guts and causes his lips (big, romantic lips; they look like a vagina at the right angle) to curl up against his stubby teeth.

  The American winds his way through the crowd, takes hard angles into narrow alleys, tries to get lost. He pushes his way around slow–walkers and still–standers who whine and make threatening noises at him. The Outlaw follows. Nobody minds him. They make room for him, staring up at the fugu fish, clapping their hands, distracted by a world remade in the image for which they’ve always been hungry without even realizing it. The Outlaw gains ground. The American runs.

  So he draws his pistol. Oh, his pistol. Lo, his pistol. A thing of obscenity, long and black. The product of a million years and a million pages of elegant, unfair evolution, trailing the invisible ghosts of countless imperfect iterations that were erased before it. The Outlaw stands still. The fugu moves on. Its shadow sloughs off of The Outlaw, and the collected Shinsekai kids turn to stare at him.

  They say, “Oooh.”

  He thumbs back the hammer. The chamber revolves.

  §

  The things I work on in hotel rooms are not the things for which I get paid. The things for which I get paid, I draw at my desk on the eleventh floor of a tall building in Osaka. I draw them where everyone can see them. I draw big–eyed girls with very large tits. Frequently, those girls
are crying. Sometimes, their clothes are torn and their breasts hang out, their delicate arms too thin to shield them from the prying eyes of whatever looms off–panel. I sometimes receive memos directing me to make them look more frightened, less defiant. The girls I draw at work wear armored shoulder–pads and spiky combat boots with thong bikinis. They are menaced by sexually voracious monsters, assaultive aliens, evil mutants, and (sometimes, only sometimes) they are saved just in time by men. I am good at drawing these women. I never, ever, ever draw them in my hotel rooms.

  Right now, I’m shading the Gilco man from the Dotonbori district. I’m cross–hatching the fugu lanterns in Shinsekai. And outside, Osaka is reading my sketches like instructions. With my pencil, I chisel away my city’s good intentions, its static fantasy, and I shape it. This is why we build all those pretty falsenesses. To live in a world where the rules are less boring, where we can all be heroes and slay dragons and save the world and rescue the armored girl in the thong bikini.

  I want Osaka to be the thing it dreams about. I’m doing a service.

  I draw the American boy, the radio producer, with his eyes wide and frightened behind his plastic–framed glasses, twisting his shoulders and jerking his neck to see the thing that’s chasing him. Somewhere in Osaka, it happens. I don’t cause this to happen. This relationship between me and the dream–come–true outside my window, it’s a push–and–pull, a symbiosis. I introduce stimulus with my drawings, and the stimulus changes what I draw.

  A few weeks ago, when the American showed up at our office and shook hands with my boss and wandered around with his digital sound recorder and his headphones, I thought I might like him enough to sleep with him. I haven’t slept with many men. Four in total, none of them American. I was curious. Since I was a little girl, I have had a mild obsession with cowboys. The ultimate American hero. I thought that maybe this boy, with his beard and his curly hair and his big brown eyes, was in some way haunted by that old American ghost. Sometimes wishes disguise themselves as intuitions.

  I draw the American boy’s curly hair, riding its wild spirals with the tip of my pencil. His sweat and his flight have undone all his careful work to keep it tame and stylish. It defies gravity, climbs the air. I like doing this. It almost makes me like him again.

  My boss, smiling like his lips were being pulled from his teeth on hooks, led the American around the office by the shoulder, weaving around desks and saying, “This one speaks English. This one doesn’t speak English. This one is very boring, don’t talk to him. Talk to him, he’s a writer, very good stories.” The American nodded and smiled and looked sweet.

  When my boss led him to me, I was drawing a woman in profile, her neck craned and her mouth open. She was crying, humiliated, in pain. I was trying to make her look sexy.

  My boss said, “Talk to her. Talk to Megumi–san. She speaks very good English. Very good artist. Very pretty. Talk to her.”

  So he did.

  My phone vibrates in my pocket and I jump and knock over a stack of finished pages. They spill to the floor, enormous snowflakes, and I swear to myself and dig out my phone. It’s the American boy on his pre–paid Japanese phone.

  “What?”

  “Megumi, you gotta help me out here, there’s this guy, this fucking guy, oh my god, I just — I don’t know, he’s following me, he’s — he’s fucking shooting at me, for christ — oh my god, what am I going to — ”

  I hang up on him and toss my phone onto the bed. My bed. And I turn to collect my spilled pages. I flip through them, taking stock. The poor Gilco man, wrecked and wretched. The hungry flying fugu lanterns. My terrible lovely cowboy with his black coffin on a chain. Then I stop. Somehow one of my work sketches has followed me home, an unfinished piece of soft–core ugliness. I drew it for a computer game we’re developing. Akuma Fushin Senjō. Demon Distrust Battleground. The game is an eroge, a sex game. The game creates the illusion of interactivity with a series of binary choices. The “correct” choices reward the player with portraits of vulnerability and nastiness. So do the “incorrect” choices. And here is my reward for my choices. An unfinished sketch of a girl, bruised and bleeding, lying on the ground, her breasts defying gravity. She is faceless. Like me, or like the American boy sees me, or wishes I was, prone and hurt and too tired or weak or… or female… to resist. The ideal Japanese girl.

  This isn’t mine. This belongs to someone else.

  Now I am struck by the urge to finish the sketch. To give the girl her face. The sensation is immediate and hot, like a wave of nausea, and before I can stop myself I have swept the page onto my desk, completing my broken girl, giving her open and defiant eyes, closed and grim and angry lips. This is not what I am allowed to do. This sketch does not belong to me. It is not one of my hotel room sketches. Those I draw for Osaka. I am not selfish. I am doing a service. I am doing a service. I am doing a service.

  Still, I know I am finishing this girl for me.

  §

  The American pushes his way downstairs and into Ebisucho Subway Station, past the throngs of revelers and dancers and nervous optimists. They whisper to each other, compare in hushed and manic tones their notes on the evening’s parade of strangeness and which elements thereof they’ve witnessed, as he shoulders through them, trying to keep his footing, his sanity, feeling acutely each tiny marble of sweat rolling down the back of his neck and soaking into his collar. The Outlaw knows all of this. He can smell the American’s thoughts, his fears. The stale underground breeze pushes the scent of his sweat to the Outlaw’s nostrils, lands like a film on his lips. The Outlaw hauls his coffin onto his back by its chain to keep it from sliding down the stairs in front of him. It’s getting heavier. He feels no pangs of regret for missing the American when he fired earlier. It wasn’t his fault. That’s the way it was drawn. The Outlaw knows this in a different way than he knows the American’s mind. He feels his artist pulling on his tendons from miles away, feels her playing him like a marionette, and he tries not to resent her for it.

  Still, he has questions. He doesn’t understand.

  A train pulls in next to the platform, breathing cold air that smells like fuel and ammonia. On the train’s flank are wide–eyed manic–happy Kewpie dolls painted in pink. Their eyes roll in their faces, their ball–and–socket arms spin like Ferris wheels. The American stumbles into the train, and the Outlaw lets him go. There is a scene being set within that car, and his artist is gracious. She gives him the scene, lets him see it happening, even as the doors slide closed and the train rolls down the tunnel.

  The scene is this:

  The American, alone, surrounded by the flat advertisements on the train’s walls, the models silent, following him with their eyes. He breathes heavy. He pulls his pre–paid Japanese cellphone from his pocket, thinking, I don’t believe in any of this. None of this is real. He feels unstuck, a reel of film unsprocketed. His thoughts keep coming to him in full sentences, the kind of narration he would write if he were producing a radio piece, and he wants it to stop. He wants to think the way he normally thinks, in impulses, in flashes of image and emotion, but that doesn’t seem to be an option.

  In the corner, obscured between the wall and the subway bench, something is moving. It tries to pull its knees to its chest, can’t find room, kicks out, pulls in again. The American closes his eyes tight enough to blast color bursts behind his eyelids, procrastinating. Then he opens his eyes and says, “Ma’am?” And then he waits.

  The voice is rotten and dry, the voice of a victim, but there is fire behind it, it bites, it snaps, it says, “Do what you’re going to do. That’s why you’re here.”

  The American says nothing. He is trying not to think, and failing. He narrates himself. I walk toward this girl I’ve found. I know she shouldn’t be here, know that she’s part of the nightmare–Osaka as sure as the thing with the gun behind me. But I walk toward her anyway. I want to believe that she’s real, that’s she’s normal, maybe a comrade in all this craziness, and so I tak
e a few tentative steps. And she is revealed.

  She is revealed. Trying to push herself up the wall away from him, too weak and too injured. She falls back onto the floor of the subway car, onto her back with her legs open to him. She is absurd, propped up on her elbows and staring through a curtain of wet hair, with her spiked shoulder pads and the belt slung around her naked waist and her black bikini (one strap is broken, and her left breast remains barely concealed).

  “Um,” says the American.

  The rows of long fluorescent lights on the ceiling flicker, darken, brighten. The car shakes as the train rolls over the tracks, whispering to the tunnel as it weaves through and within it. The faces on the posters stare at the American expectantly.

  She says, “Fuck me. I won’t stop you. I can’t.”

  He can see it like a shadow–puppet show in his head, the things he could do to her, the choreography of fetishism he could inflict, intricate and infinite, the binary choices and their consequences, and he hates himself. This isn’t me, he thinks. That’s not who I am. Still, the imagined show goes on: the things he could remove from her, the things he could add to her, the places and positions in which he could add them. It is endless.

  “Stop it,” he says.

  “Come on,” she growls, and her eyebrows twitch again and again. With every word, her head snaps forward, like she’s taking bites of the stale recirculated train air. She says, “You saved me from the Threat. You win.”

  “Stop talking,” says the American, while the shadow–show in his head loops back and plays again, double–speed, legs entwined, muscles arching and releasing, hands grasping, searching, finding. Oh god, the things his hands could find. Outside of his head, his fingers find their way into his hair and tug, then find their way down to his ears and press hard against them. He closes his eyes, but that renders the images in perfect color and depth, and his eyelids shoot back open.