The Melancholy of Mechagirl

by Valente, Catherynne M.

  “No one can destroy me,” says Inari, as though she is considering it for the first time.

  “I’m sure that’s not true,” answers Futsukeshibaba. She pats the fox’s tail comfortingly.

  Inari hopes that the radio-controlled mecha will be sturdy enough for her to wear when it is done. If she does not put the operator figurine inside, there will be room for a fox. So long as the kit experienced good quality control, Inari is confident she will be able to swing her laser-axe just like Junko, the Triumphant Neon Champion of Saturn.

  MILK

  Akemi stands inside the tunnel. She can see it doesn’t really go nowhere. It goes on a long way, but there is a dark circle out there at the end which surely means it connects to the world again. Akemi’s hair is soaked and knotted. She is from a cold city in the mountains—she has never known heat like this, heat that embraces you, clothes you, knows you intimately, suckles at you until you feed it on your sweat. The night beats blue and dark and Akemi feels full of that grasping, manic, gravityless sadness that always comes when she has not slept. She is full of books she might write. She is full of the next two years she will spend alone and she is full of her loneliness. She is full of the cicadas’ scream. She has not cried. The other wives told her not to cry; it upsets the men when you cry.

  She is full of little lights blowing out one by one by one.

  Akemi imagines meeting someone else in the tunnel. Someone beautiful, someone unlike her. His name should be Taro, like the boy in the fairy tale. He could tell her how his parents longed for a child so deeply and the lack of one was such a wound to them that they went to a fertility clinic in Yokohama. In the lobby of the clinic a vending machine would have offered his mother and father peach candies, peach juice, peach tea, peach cookies, and pickled peach slices wrapped in cello-foil. The nurse might have brought them into a cold room with peach-colored walls and introduced herself as Momoko, which means “peach child.” His mother would have laid down in a paper gown with cartoonish peach blossoms printed on it and stood with Taro inside her like a stone in a fruit. Akemi imagined liking this story enough to take Taro home and show him her nakedness in the house inside her house. It is a way she could destroy her husband, as he can destroy her. She has never had that power. She wants to be in a story like that, but the tunnel is empty.

  Many years from now, Akemi will be unable to separate her marriage from Japan. She will not think of the time before it or after it. Japan will be the face of her husband. She will love Japan because it did not leave her. It did not accept her, but it did not leave her. His eyes will be the bays on either side of Yokosuka and his mouth will be a torii gate and his voice will be the schoolgirls on the train and her eyes will be the eyes of the women on a game show she watches on New Year’s Eve, who must keep a perfect smile while battered from all sides with kitchen implements thrown by some offstage hand. And she will write about it forever and inside her writing about it the terrible simple sentence will repeat but never appear: I hated my husband even before he left.

  INK

  The moon has flown up and away to the other side of the hills. A lightening, a still blue change grows in the broken factory windows and everything is wet with the morning to come.

  “Stop now,” whispers Tsuma. “It is time to wash and to sleep.”

  “But I have adventures for her!” cries Kyorinrin. “I have made her discover seven pregnant American women eating squid tentacles fresh from the boil, ashamed of their craving but ravenous. I have made her too fat to fit into the kimono her friend has offered to dress her in so that both of them are humiliated and choose not to speak of it again. I have made her buy genetically modified watermelons in the shapes of cubes and stack them in her refrigerator to stare at but not eat because it is one strangeness too far. I have made her pregnant and then not-pregnant—I am considering letting her milk come in so that she cannot unknow what has happened. I have made her crawl into the storage boxes sunk into the floor of her kitchen, curl around herself and try to disappear into the earth—”

  “Stop it!” cries Tsuma. It is the loudest sound Kyorinrin has ever heard her make. “Stop it! I don’t want to hear about her! I don’t want her wrong name or her sadness or her ignorant mawking at kanji or another story about a Western person in Japan pointing at everything and I don’t want her aloneness, I don’t want it, it’s the size of her whole body, I don’t want to look at it, I hate her, I hate her, I hate her!”

  Tsuma cried bitterly and with every hitching sob I hate her she brought herself down hard on the body of Kyorinrin I hate her leaving 妻 over and over I hate her big and deep and wobbling, 妻 妻 妻 I hate her.

  Kyorinrin gasps and wheezes and it is pleasure and it is pain. When it is over he curls his paper over his mate and her ink seeps through to the other side of him and she weeps the strange tears of kanji, uncontrollable, indelible.

  In the end there is nothing left of Akemi but 妻.

  WATER

  “You can blow out a sparrow,” Inari says. It is not a question.

  “Yes. It’s no different. What lights us, what lights wood, what lights oil.” Futsukeshibaba braids the smoke of her hair. The sun is restless, lining the bay with lavender, eager for the events of the day to begin their occurring.

  “If I ask you to blow out the Admiral and his men, will you do it?”

  Futsukeshibaba thinks about it. “No,” she sighs. “I could not bear to keep them all inside me.”

  “I didn’t really mean it. It’s already happened and this is the fourth time we’ve watched it. I was only curious what you would say.” Inari looks up at the dimming stars, the bats flapping over the cassia trees. “The trick when writing about Westerners,” she sighs, “is to pretend they are unhuman. Like us or like the opposite of us if we have an opposite. Otherwise the tale is too sad to finish. These are good seats. I thank you for the gift.”

  Behind them a cool blue light pours out like a cup of water. Futsukeshibaba smiles.

  “At the end of storytelling,” she says. “That’s her time.”

  Aoandon leans against the shoulder of her lover. The blue paper lantern will light the way home for the fox and the old woman and she will not say anything about how petty it is to fight about an infidelity that she will not even contemplate for another sixty years. Her carp looks at the smoke of Futsukeshibaba’s kimono and kindles gold with longing. The blue fire in Aoandon burns steady and strong. She is not intimidated by Inari. She lit the way for Ama-no-Uzume to come home from dancing the sun goddess to life again. She knows foxes can see quite well in the dark anyway.

  “You know that I could end you with a snap of my jaws.” Inari says this cheerfully, and it is also not a question.

  “Yes,” says Futsukeshibaba. She smiles wider.

  Below them the sailors have wakened. They eat, they stretch, pop the bones of their spines, look for orders, square cargo, prepare landing parties. Jellyfish clot around the ships, their simple rings and veils staring dumbly up at the masts, the men, the cannons.

  Gently, Futsukeshibaba lifts Inari’s heavy tail. It is as big around as the pillar of a temple, the color of persimmons. She does it so the blue paper lantern of her heart can see it, and she does it with her eyes locked on the eyes of the fox-god. With infinite satisfaction, Futsukeshibaba blows out the light at the end of Inari’s tail.

  MILK

  There is a school of bonsai-cutting that, should part of a tree die or wither, preserves the dead material and incorporates it into the life and sculpture of the bonsai. The tree itself lives, but there is a dead thing in it. It lives around its dead part. The death becomes part of the beauty of the tree until the tree could not be beautiful without it. It is difficult—there is always the danger of the death spreading and taking hold. You cannot remove the death from the tree. That would be dishonest. It would be pretending that the death had never come near. You must be vigilant, keep the dead wood clutched tight so that the slow decay fuels everything else. So that i
t communicates effectively the impermanence of all.

  Akemi is pruning a tree. Her teacher is named Fusao. She has no hope that she will show any talent here. She cannot even bring herself to make the first cut. It seems too monumental a choice.

  At the base of the trunk, there is already a scar. A sigil. It will grow before she notices it, spreading like frost. A death in the shape of a kanji:

  妻

  FIFTEEN PANELS DEPICTING THE SADNESS

  OF THE BAKU AND THE JOTAI

  WHAT SHE WHISPERED

  When you, sweet sleeper, wake in the morning, one arm thrown over your golden-sticky eyes, sheets a-mangle, your dreams still flit through you, ragged, full of holes. You can remember the man with the yellow eyes, but not why he chased you. You can remember the hawk-footed woman on your roof, but not what she whispered.

  That is my fault. I could not help it. I tromped through you in the night and ate up your dreams, a moth through wool. I didn’t want them all, only the sweetest veins, like fat marbling a slab of ruby meat, the marrowy slick of what she whispered, why he ran.

  I am a rowling thing—my snout raises up toward the moon to catch the scent of your sweat. I show my flat teeth to the night wind. I beg permission of your bedclothes to curl up in the curve of your stomach, to gnaw on your shoulders, your breasts, your eyelids. I must open up a hole in you, to crawl through to the red place where your dreams spool out.

  You put your arm around me in the night. Do you remember? My belly was taut and black, a tapir’s belly, a tapir’s snout snuffling for your breath as a pig for truffles. You were my truffle, my thick, earthy mushroom. You were delicious, and I thank you for my supper.

  A JEWEL WE MAY NOT GNAW

  At dawn, blue light shines on my woolly stump-tail. I catch the tin-patched 6:17 commuter train from your house to my home, deep in the Paradise of the Pure Land. My friend Yatsuhashi lumbers on board at your aunt’s house, the one with the wide white porch. She is fat and full of your aunt’s dreams of straddling her supervisor while he recites Basho. She takes her seat in the empty car; I take mine. She sits up and her tapir body unfolds neatly along three creases to become the body of a respectable businessman in a respectable black suit. I, too, unfold and straighten my tie. The attendant brings cups of hot, sweet matcha, but we refrain, straining at the pelt with the night-feast. If you saw us, you would not think we had snorted and snuggled against you all through the dark and moony hours. You would think: There go two wealthy and reputable gentlemen, off to their decent, clean desks in the city.

  But we have worked our shifts already, and we aim toward home, hurtle toward it, home to the peach tree of immortality and the pearl-troughs of enlightened discourse, where we will disgorge our meals for the pleasure of eating them again.

  “Kabu,” says Yatsuhashi, though she knows my full name is Akakabu. She insists on the familiar because she has no manners. “Do you think that dreams taste more like cherries or more like salmon roe? I can never decide.”

  “With respect, Yatsuhashi-san, the comparison with roe is not at all apt. Recall that at the bottom of a dream is a hard jewel we may not gnaw, the jewel of the sleeping soul, clung with dream-meat and sugar. Roe is sweet and soft and bursts on the tongue in a shower of golden salt—how rare is the roe-dream! Only the very young and the very old have no pit on which we may break our teeth if we are not careful.”

  “Of course you are right, Kabu. But I cannot escape the feeling of fishiness; the dreams of sex-starved aunts wriggle in me so!”

  That is my friend’s way of talking. Many Baku talk like this, because they are not sensible, and all they eat all night are the kinds of dreams which do not agree with a tapir’s stomach: drunken dreams, fever dreams, sickness dreams, the dreams of enfeebled children. These are so rich it is hard to resist, like a tiny table set with a cake so moist it wets the cloth, but they make a Baku babble and walk into walls.

  Disembark for Yokosuka-Chuo Station.

  The mechanical voice is slim and soft and breathy, a dream-voice. I approve. I obey.

  THE PARADISE OF THE PURE LAND

  Does it surprise you that Pure Land has a train station? It has many. We are subtle, we who inhabit this place—not only Baku but many other beasts and tsukumogami and dragons and maidens with the moon in their hair and bodhisattva with bare feet. We let humans build grey, stocky towers in the Gardens of Right Practice; we let them bring great gun-bristled ships to the Lotus Harbor; we let them pave the Avenue of Yellow Smoke and set up pachinko parlors there. We let them call Pure Land Yokosuka, and we watched the Butterflies of Perfect Thought sizzle on the neon of their nightclub advertisements. We were clever—we are safe, a dream in their sleeping, hidden beneath a human city, where no one, not even their soldiers with golden buttons, will ever think to look for heavenly pavilions.

  It is not that there is no sadness in the Paradise of the Pure Land. On the contrary, we must all report for sadness once in our long, endless, peach-saturated lives, so that we may have something hard and terrible to hold against the beauty of the Pure Land. No one likes to talk about their sadness, but we have all reported on schedule and done our duty. I want to tell you about mine, I want you to dream about it, but manners make it difficult to get to the point.

  I have an apartment above Blue Street in the Paradise of the Pure Land. The street does not really have a name—it has a number—but the humans thoughtfully paved it with sparkling blue stones, perhaps in some instinctive nod to our tastes, and so we and they call it Blue Street, for we are all of us together sagacious folk. From its window I can see the bay, the green water foamed with trash so that each wave is tipped with beer bottles, cellophane, detergent boxes, swollen manga, orange rinds. Beneath the surface is an improbable depository of bicycles, dumped by poor souls who could not parse out the arcane laws of garbage removal—our nature does shine through in places, and complexity of order is paramount in the pure land of contemplation. Jellyfish tangle in the wheel spokes, confused, translucent, lost.

  I am lost too. I have mistaken a bicycle wheel for safe harbor. No one is perfect.

  CLOSE YOUR EYES

  It would be better if you closed your eyes. I relate more easily with the sleeping. If you could dream my story, I could lumber along the low river of your spine, snuffling out the parts which are too horrible, too radiant, too private for your witness. I could eat them weeping into your brain-pan, and you would wake remembering only salt.

  I don’t suppose you are tired. No? Ah, well.

  Suffice it to say I loved a creature, and that creature is no more. It is the sort of thing dreams were invented to wrangle.

  BASHFULNESS OR THE NIGHT WIND

  My love was owned by a white woman. She and I met at work, as all modern lovers do, while I was on my nightly rounds. I had curled into the white woman’s arms and fixed my teeth to her mouth, working at her throat, pulling up the jellied marrow of her little housely terrors. Westerners do not have the most complex palette. She dreamed of a husband in a white uniform, a husband with a sword at his hip and also an oily black gun, a cap of gold, eyes of silver. The husband touched the sea and it glowed phosphorescent green, sickly. He did not smile at her; I ate his smile.

  I saw her over the shoulder of the sad little wife. She was tall and dark, standing in the corner as though she guarded her mistress’s sleep. Her figure was angular, her expression still as a soldier’s. Rafu, my Rafu! How I have pored over that first glimpse, held it in my paws, packed it into a box with tears and red tissue, taken it out to warm me when the stars had frozen!

  I rested my chin on the Western woman’s shoulder, gazing at the golden-black thing that I did not yet know was Rafu. She bowed slightly. Her hinges creaked. The silk of her panels fluttered slightly in bashfulness or the night wind. A willowy green slip hung half over her face—my Rafu was a folding screen, a silk monster of beauty like statues. A Jotai, a screen so old that one day she woke up and had a name and an address and an internal monologue. Y
ou earn these things after one hundred years or so. The world owes them to you, if you survive it.

  “What are you doing here, glory-of-the-evening, in this pretty pale devil’s house?”

  Rafu fluttered again. There were golden tigers playing on the silk where her thighs might be. They batted at floaty, cloud-bound kanji like mice.

  TO CONCEAL HER FROM HER LIFE

  “Her name is Milo,” whispered my not-yet-beloved screen. “Her father wanted a boy. I was a present from her friend Chieko, who chose in her youth to be kind to the Navy wives because they are worse than children: mute, lost, dead, rigid with stupidity, which is their only defense. Chieko loved mikon oranges and had a mole on her left breast. Once a boy kissed it without permission under a persimmon tree, and Chieko never forgot it—she burned warmer and brighter in that moment than she ever did again. Her mother Kayo, whose favorite perfume was made from lotus and lemon water, who had a husband whose face was always red and three miscarriages only I witnessed—I never told anyone—bought me from a teahouse in Yokohama, where I belonged to a little girl who turned into an old woman as if by magic. She was called Masumi and all her kimono were pink with black cherry blossoms. She drank in secret, squatting in the secret shade of me, drinking silver things until she was sick. Her great-aunt, Aoi, loved a man from England who did not love her back, and so she married a ginger farmer whose fingers burned her, and had no children. Aoi found me in a shop in Kamakura, by the sea, and thought that I would suffice to conceal her from her life.

  “I have had much time to consider women. Milo is no worse than any of them.”

  “Her dreams taste thin and bitter, like the white membranes of limes.”

  Rafu shrugged, a peculiar raising and dropping of her slats. “She is sad. She does not speak Japanese. Her husband went to the desert months and months ago. Every day she goes to the market and brings back chocolate, a peach, and a salmon rice-ball for her dinner. She sits and eats and stares at the wall. Sometimes she watches television. Sometimes she walks three miles to Blue Street to look at necklaces in the window that she wishes someone would buy for her. Sometimes she walks along the pier to see the sunken bicycles, pinged into ruin by invisible arrows of battleship-sonar, crusted over with rust and coral. She likes to pet people’s dogs as they walk them. That is her whole life. What should she dream of?”