Coin Locker Babies

by Ryu Murakami

  At midnight, the three of them sat down at one of the stalls to put some mentholatum on Tatsuo’s torn ear.

  “Shit! That hurts!” yelled Tatsuo.

  “Shut up,” Hashi told him. “If it gets infected, the germs could get in your head and you’d end up paralyzed. Then you might as well forget about women; even if you did find Emiko, she’d probably have nothing to do with you. You can’t let these things go, you know. At the very least you’d lose an ear, and then we’d have to throw out the stereo. This isn’t like stubbing your toe; the ear’s right there on the side of your head!…” Hashi chattered on to distract Tatsuo while he worked.

  The underground road that ran through The Market intersected another road a hundred meters further on. From time to time, when a car passed this crossing, slowing down to a crawl, the crowd of prostitutes would drift along the tunnel in that direction. If the car contained a customer, the window would glide down, a finger would point at a man or woman, and the person chosen would get in. Other cars stopped just long enough to disgorge someone returning from a trick, and the newcomer would blend into the throng, immediately searching for the next customer. It was one of the latter who attracted Tatsuo’s attention as they sat in the stall. After staring for a long while at her face, he mumbled almost to himself: “It’s Emiko.”

  The girl in question had blown a kiss at the car as she got out, then turned four back somersaults to arrive at the table next to theirs, apparently at the invitation of the bearded, pipe-smoking man sitting there.

  “Shiiiit! So she’s a fucking whore. If I had the Getaway… and my ear wasn’t all fucked up… I’d drag her home right now.” Tatsuo was whispering again. Emiko, however, was speaking just loudly enough to be overheard at the next table.

  “… It’s called ‘marionetting’ and they say it’s crazy! You take some surgical floss and wrap one end up inside a capsule; then you swallow the thing and it unravels on the way down until you get it out the other end with a nice little enema. It takes about seven meters of string—isn’t that incredible?—but when you’ve got it all the way through you can do all kinds of amazing things with it. There’s this French girl who tied the end to a cork so she could plug herself up. I heard somebody did it with a tennis ball. Anyway, when you pull the string they do jump around, just like puppets. It’s the funniest thing…”

  Tatsuo was on the verge of tears. “Shit! Did you hear that? Did you hear the kind of girl she’s become? She used to be too embarrassed to burp out loud, let alone fart, and now she’s talking about dancing around with some string stuck out her ass.” He hopped up. “She’s going with me, even if I have to hog-tie her. I’m going to earn some money and we’re going back to Cebu to live like civilized human beings.”

  Catching sight of Tatsuo approaching, Emiko tried to get away, but he caught her arm and they argued for a moment in Tagalog. Suddenly, Tatsuo slapped her cheek, but when Emiko hit back she caught Tatsuo’s tattered ear and he let out a scream that could be heard throughout The Market. While he lay writhing on the pavement, Emiko came up to where Kiku and Hashi were sitting.

  “Are you Tatsuo’s friends?” she asked. Kiku nodded. “I’m saving enough money for Tatsuo and me to go back to the Philippines. He promised to stop making guns so I’ve agreed to go with him. There’s just one thing I need some advice about: what should I do with the guns he has… get rid of them?”

  “Why don’t you bury them?” Kiku said after a bit of thought. “Do you know Yoyogi Park? There’s a stadium near the west gate. What if you buried the guns and the cartridges there, say—under the third bench on the right? Would that solve the problem?”

  Hashi gave him a funny look. “What do you want guns for?”

  “Oh, you never know when they might come in handy,” Kiku laughed.

  After seeing Tatsuo and Emiko part of the way down the tunnel, Kiku stopped at one of the drugstores to ask if they had any gabaniazid.

  “No way,” mumbled the young man behind the counter. He had a ratty sort of face. “Sold the last of it about three years back. Doubt we could sell it even if we had any left—the only thing people buy these days is Neutro. There isn’t much market for stimulants; seems all they want is to doze off.” The store was stocked to the ceiling with merchandise; in addition to the Neutro, there were imported peasant costumes, the odd musical instrument, assorted bangles, and smoking paraphernalia. But Kiku was more interested in the framed botanical photographs that decorated the walls. One in particular showed a plant with red trumpet-shaped flowers dangling from fragile stems; “Datura sanguinia,” the caption read. The young guy noticed Kiku staring at it.

  “It’s called ‘red bolatiero,’” he murmured. “That one next to it is a betel nut from Palau, and at the end is some kava from Fiji. Over here’s the pit of a kola nut from Guinea; that’s peyote, coca leaves from Peru, and last you’ve got joppo. Every one of them’s a fine drug, no question. Course, we don’t have any of them here.”

  “Doesn’t Datura have another meaning?” Kiku tried asking. The rat-faced man nodded, fishing out a tattered pamphlet from the clutter on the shelves and handing it to him.

  “Take a look at that,” he said. “I wrote out a translation on the back; you can keep it.”

  Kiku turned the paper over and began reading:

  Monthly Bulletin of the Princeton University Faculty

  Committee on Neurosurgery. July 1988.

  The Hyper-Stimulant DATURA

  In the early years of the eighteenth century, British soldiers billeted in the province of Assam in India reported a series of attacks by a particularly vicious and determined tiger. Under normal conditions, tigers, like other wild animals, have what it is known as an instinctive “attack distance,” i.e., the area of proximity within which prey must come in order to be of interest. Even within this area, however, it was the experience of the soldiers that tigers, when fired upon, would retreat. This particular tiger, it seems, was notable for its complete disregard for guns and its total lack of a set attack distance. Apparently it had already tasted human blood when the series of attacks on the soldiers began, and it managed to kill twenty-eight men before it was finally stopped. Dissection of the animal revealed that it was suffering from advanced bone marrow deterioration, and the bones themselves throughout the body were so severely rotted and brittle that every movement must have caused the tiger great pain. Still, after a thorough examination of the reports submitted by British officers, it is our conclusion that the tiger might actually have continued to exist, to overcome this pain, solely for the purpose of continuing to kill—that the very act of sinking its teeth into human flesh may have been what preserved the animal’s will to live.

  This conclusion is, we believe, corroborated by our colleague Dr. Schubelsweinbach who reports that victims of the nerve agent known as DATURA exhibit symptoms identical to those of this tiger. While the components of the DATURA compound remain classified, it is quite clear that it is manufactured around a nucleus of the indole group. It is thought that the characteristic onset of psychosis is brought about by metabolic changes in celtonin, but the precise mechanism remains undetermined due to the extreme efficacy of the smallest amounts of the toxin. No doubt the enzyme level is the key. The potency of DATURA is estimated as being several dozen times that of LSD-25 and probably as much as a million times that of mescaline.

  We have learned that human tests on DATURA were conducted in strictest secrecy at the Naval Center for Chemical Weapons Research, using imprisoned servicemen as subjects. Records of thirteen of these cases have survived. A previous study suggests that, among other things, DATURA completely destroys all brain functions associated with control or restraint (Millet, 1985). The primary effect of DATURA would seem to be a form of criminal psychosis, the creation of an irreversibly destructive personality ranking with some of history’s greatest villains. But the patients exposed to DATURA exhibited none of the traces of remorse that normally remain in even the most deranged megaloma
niac; instead, they experienced an ecstatic sense of their own power, described as an “explosive exaltation.” Their reaction is thus fundamentally different from what schizophrenics describe as “revenge against lost reality” or the “bliss of death” associated with opium (H. D. Guido).

  As far as can be determined, the user of DATURA experiences a complete loss of memory in the initial stages, followed by euphoria. The final stages have been compared to extreme psychosis (Tournelle, Sorbonne, 1986), but it would be more accurate to suggest that the patient comes to resemble some new life form in human shape. In the midst of feeling an intense well-being, the subject begins to destroy everything around him. Again according to the surviving clinical reports, the initial physical symptom is dilation of the pupils, followed by vomiting of a greenish foam. Patients were then said to develop extraordinary strength, examples of which included one prisoner who burst a leather football between his hands and then tore it to shreds. At this point, the destructive urge, particularly directed toward living things, sets in and does not abate until death. The subjects became obsessed with killing and were absolutely uncontrollable short of being killed themselves.

  DATURA was banned worldwide in the Cairns Accord in 1987. In reality, however, a large part of the existing stockpile—approximately three tons, in solid, liquid, and gas forms—was never destroyed but instead sealed in drums and sunk somewhere in the ocean. A certain amount of the chemical surfaced in 1978 during the People’s Church incident in Guiana, where its effects were first seen on a large number of people. This incident, and a toxological assessment of DATURA, will be taken up in a later issue.

  Sometime around 1:00 A.M., a black Rolls Royce pulled slowly into the shadowless light of The Market. The fluorescent tubes buried in the walls and ceiling of the tunnel cast a strange, indirect glow over the scene as if everything were covered in a thin coating of phosphorescent plankton that had seeped down into the cavern, filling the air with tiny beads of cool light. The figures loitering at the edges appeared as nothing more than vague, dimensionless outlines. Light and dark were somehow reversed in their effect; a castaway drifting on the sea at night might spot a distant harbor light and make for it as quickly as he could, but the denizens of the cavern seemed to long for a hint of shadow to creep off to and escape the perpetual, sallow lighting. Into this world the Rolls moved like a mobile refuge, and people crowded around as though eager to be swallowed up in its glossy blackness ringed in chrome. Young men in drag, women fiddling with their makeup, dancers and beggars—everyone stopped and drifted toward it. But the dark, green-tinted windows of the car revealed nothing but the twisted reflection of a beggar woman clutching a bunch of dried flowers.

  Meanwhile, Kiku was telling Hashi about DATURA:

  “I heard about it from Gazelle. Don’t you think it’s got to be incredible stuff? With just a little bit we could make this whole place into a deserted city like the one back home.” Hashi, however, was staring at the car, no longer listening. “Hashi, have you heard anything I’ve been telling you? We could make this whole place into a giant playground—go looking for dogs, check out empty theaters, explore like we used to… Hey, come on, don’t tell me you like this dump!”

  Hashi wasn’t listening; he was watching as the window of the Rolls slid down and the beggar woman thrust in her dried flowers followed by her head. The next instant she pulled back with a wild scream: someone inside had set her hair on fire. They could hear a giggle from the prostitutes as the smell of burning hair wafted in their direction.

  “Yes,” Hashi said eventually, “I like this place. I love putting on makeup, making a fuss of myself. I love singing. Don’t you see, Kiku? I’m gay—you know, homosexual. And you’ve always been part of my problem. You’re strong, and I’m jealous of that. I’ve always been the weakling, the one running away from something. Do you remember the last field day we had at school? I was the only one who didn’t go out; I watched the whole thing from the classroom. But I wasn’t really sick or anything, I was just faking. I was always faking in those days, always copping out. I couldn’t stand being laughed at. And I hated you because you were so good-looking, because you could pole-vault. In the end, I couldn’t even stand to be around you; you made me hate myself.”

  As Hashi spoke, a man in a white suit and red bow tie had climbed out of the Rolls with an incredibly tall white woman clinging to his shoulder. They stood by the car while the man took her wrists and lifted her arms to sniff under them; his face was at just the right height.

  “Kiku, what I’m telling you is that I’m gay. I like men. You may hate me for it, but it’s what I am.” The man with the Rolls had casually thrust both hands up under the woman’s skirt and was weighing her ass in his palms like melons. The woman brought her face close to his, and he withdrew one hand to pry her mouth open, catching her long, pointed, scarlet tongue in his fingers as it darted out, then starting to dance with her, red tie to red tongue, and giving a wave in Hashi’s direction.

  “He’s my sponsor,” said Hashi. “Everybody calls him D—he’s loaded. They say D stands for ‘Director,’ but he claims it’s ‘Dracula.’” Hashi went on to tell him how they’d met.

  The first time had been purely a business transaction: Hashi had sold his ass to him. It was soon after he had arrived in the city, and he’d already decided he should be in Toxitown, but he had no idea how to get through the fence. So, completely broke, he’d taken a job as a garbage collector, going around dressed in a blue uniform picking up trash at bars and restaurants, until one day he ran into a fag hanging out next to one of his dumpsters who told him how to get into The Market via a passage in a subway station. Without even bothering to change out of his uniform, Hashi had gone straight there.

  “And that’s when I met Mr. D. You know, Kiku, I could tell from the minute I saw him in that car window that he wanted me—there’s this special look, kind of hot and bothered, when a man wants you.”

  Summoned by D’s driver, he had pushed his way through a crowd of wigs and powder and perfume. At first, D had laughed at him, along with the driver and the other whores.

  “Rather an original costume for this line of work,” he’d said.

  They had gone to a hotel—an amazing place, the only thing like it Hashi had ever seen was the Bullet Train station. Everything in the restaurant on the top floor sparkled: the ceiling, the walls, the night lights outside the window. The food was Chinese, and Hashi had had bear paws, fried frog, and sweet-and-sour pork. He liked the pork best; so much so he’d eaten eight big pieces, but all that rich food on an empty stomach, combined with a bad case of nerves, had made him feel sick, and, not knowing that one was supposed to go to the toilet, he’d puked all over the floor. When he was done, he was sure D would yell at him and throw him out; but he was wrong.

  “Incredible,” D had said, laughing—“just like those ancient Romans.”

  The sheets on the bed were cream-colored and shiny. After they got undressed, Mr. D had wanted to talk.

  “What is it exactly that you do in that uniform?” he asked. Hashi had explained. “And do you like collecting garbage?” he went on.

  “No,” Hashi had answered, his tongue poised above D’s navel, “but I suppose I’ll get used to it.” The silk sheets made a funny screaky noise as Hashi’s thin legs rubbed against them; D listened appreciatively to the sound and asked another question.

  “And what is it you really like doing?”

  “Singing,” Hashi had said without missing a beat.

  “Then sing something for me now,” said D, delighted, but Hashi had been too nervous to produce a note. To calm him down, D had stroked his face, telling him over and over how beautiful he was. “I bet you look just like your mother, a real beauty.” At that Hashi had started to talk, and before he knew it he was telling D everything: about the coin locker, the bougainvillea, the orphanage, the island… everything.

  “You should go on TV,” was D’s advice. “You’d be a hit; the sympathy alo
ne would do it.”

  After D came, Hashi got up to go, but as he was getting dressed, D grabbed him playfully and toppled him onto the carpet. “Let’s try some makeup,” he suggested; “you’re going to look even more stunning.” First he shaved Hashi’s eyebrows. When he saw his eyebrowless face in the mirror for the first time, Hashi had a creepy feeling that someone else was looking back at him, someone horny. It was the face of all those men who wanted to touch him. But D forged ahead. “Now for some lipstick,” he said, pulling a tube from his pocket. When Hashi tried to refuse, D had pinned him down and done the honors himself, getting the awful, greasy stuff in his mouth. But this time when he looked in the mirror he had a different sensation, as if he were seeing his own face in some more natural state, as it was always meant to be. A strange, intoxicating power welled up in him; he felt he could do almost anything.

  “I think I might have a try at that song now,” he told D. “You name some emotion, some way you want to feel, and I’ll sing a song to make you feel like that.”

  “OK, make me feel nervous, then irritated, and then break my heart,” D had told him. So, after giving a precisely hummed performance of the dance passage in Strauss’s Salome, Hashi sang the tune produced by playing “Round Midnight” backward, and finished with a fairly straightforward version of “All the Flowers in the World.” D was a little pale by the end, apparently in shock.