by Misumi Kubo
I pressed my forehead to the floor once again and said, “I’m begging you. Just let us get divorced. I’ll leave.”
At that, Keiichiro lifted his head abruptly from the table.
“I won’t let you go. If you insist on divorcing me, I’ll spread these videos and photos everywhere. I’ll send them to his parents’ house and his school. I’ll spread them around the world.”
The light of the screen picked out Keiichiro’s face, a mess of tears and snot, from the darkness surrounding him. If it ever arrived, our child would probably be weak and ugly, just like Keiichiro and me. I didn’t know if I had it in me to love a child like that. I heard my voice say, “Lord Muramasaaaaa, I’m coming!”
Keiichiro let out a long thin wail that worked its way deep inside my ears.
With Machiko in charge, the preparations for our America trip came together in no time. I took the bus to the shopping center one day to pick up a bunch of small items I needed for the vacation. In the department store, beside the lingerie section, I found myself in an area selling baby stuff—onesies and outer clothes, that sort of thing. A baby mannequin smiled out at me from its stroller. If the process of finding a surrogate mother went smoothly, I could be walking around with a baby of my own by next year. I had no home to go back to, and I couldn’t work to make a living, so in a way, Machiko’s plan wasn’t so bad. Just like she said, I wouldn’t have to go through the pain of childbirth, and I could leave all the childrearing to her. I’d be able to spend my time reading manga, watching anime, and making cosplay outfits, just as I had until now. I knew that was a lazy approach to take, but that was how I’d started to think about the whole thing.
I came to a halt in front of a rack of baby socks. I remembered something I’d heard someone on TV say: Babies choose the parents they’re born to. Was there any baby in its right mind who would choose to come to me, knowing what I was like—or, for that matter, to Keiichiro the weed or Machiko the battle-ax? And all via the womb of some American woman we hadn’t met yet? Maybe it would be pressured into it, forced by the others around it to come to me, against its will, in the same way that Keiichiro and I had been forced to do all kinds of horrible things during our school days. I picked up a pair of baby socks. They were so small they fit inside my palm. I might not be able to love the baby that came to me, I thought, but I still wanted to stroke the soles of feet small enough to fit into these kinds of socks, in the same tender way Takumi had touched me.
Sensing someone standing close by, I looked up to see Takumi standing right in front of me, looking very serious. It had been a while since I’d last seen him. He’d gotten some sun and looked like he’d grown even taller.
“Are you having a baby?” he asked. His voice was quavering.
I shook my head. I didn’t know what to do next. I put the socks back on the rack and walked away. On the escalator, the thought struck me that if I were having Takumi’s baby, I’d probably be able to touch it with even more tenderness. Just thinking that, I felt a warm, glowing sensation around my hips, the place where Takumi had once laid his hands and told me to keep warm.
Keiichiro had hidden cameras inside the clock, the stuffed toys, on top of the cabinet we used for dishes, and inside the flowerpots where we kept our houseplants, and there they remained. Everywhere I went in the apartment, I knew they were there, filming me. They were filming me that day as I opened up a notebook and began calculating how much money Takumi and I would need if we were to start living together, Keiichiro’s and my dirty breakfast plates still on the table. I could have two jobs, day and evening, I thought. I leafed through the want ads in the newspaper, but there weren’t any jobs I qualified for. Yet the fantasy of living with Takumi now seemed much more appealing to me than the idea of reading manga, watching anime, and making cosplay costumes all day. There was nothing to stop us from going to some far-off place and starting a new life. I was busy devising plans to apply for scholarships to pay for Takumi’s school fees, thinking about the cost of renting somewhere, and wondering what kind of fabric would be best for our curtains when the door rang. It rang once, then after a while, again. When I picked up the intercom phone, I heard Takumi’s voice.
“It’s me.”
I opened the door. The light rushing in from the hallway behind him prevented me from seeing his face properly. He seemed to have grown even taller than the last time I’d seen him at the shopping center, if that was possible. When he kissed me right then and there in the hall, my heart started squeezing itself into a tight little ball. Over and over it squeezed, sending out blood so hot it seemed as if it would boil over at any moment to the farthest reaches of my body. The blood that gathered in my lower half seemed to flow straight into my clitoris, making it swell, and the hollow part of me was crying out for him. I felt that if he didn’t fuck me quickly I would go mad. Our tongues intertwined, and there was a clink of metal as Takumi undid his belt. He pulled down his boxers and entered me. He only had to push his pelvis up a few times before I was letting out an enormous roar, the kind I’d never heard anyone make before, and before I could stop myself I was coming. I took his hand, and led him into the living room, which he’d never set foot in before. We fell back together on the sofa.
I hadn’t been that wet to start off with, but my first orgasm sent warm liquid spilling out from inside me like a tide. Takumi sucked it up noisily. From time to time, we could hear the voices of children playing in the courtyard outside or the twittering of birds, but the only noise I was concentrating on was the one his tongue made moving fast and then slow. He continued licking me, flicking at my clitoris with his pointed tongue, and when he switched to sucking hard, I climaxed again, without knowing I was going to. Quickly, Takumi clambered on top of me, grabbing tight hold of my wrists, which were up by my head, and watched my face as I let out a long roar like a wild beast. Then he stuck his hot tongue inside my mouth and moved it around and around. They called it climaxing, I understood then for the first time, because you were at the very peak of happiness. Takumi was different from how he’d been during our cosplay sex, when he’d always seemed kind of timid. Now there was none of that. When he touched me with his tongue, or his fingers, every movement he made was full of power. Every time his hot tongue or his cold fingers brushed roughly against my nipples or my armpits or the insides of my thighs, I’d get a tingling sensation in my temples. Takumi was the only person I wanted to touch me, ever. When I wrapped my arms around him, I noticed his shoulders had grown wider. And yet. Even this body of his, which was currently shooting up like a sunflower under the blazing midsummer heat, would one day dry up. It suddenly struck me that human bodies started aging from the moment they came into this world, and the thought made me want to throw back my head to cry and howl like a baby.
Cradling my legs, Takumi spread them wide, and then in one fluid movement, he entered me. The tip of him reached right to the very deepest part of me. When I felt him rubbing against me there, I began moving my hips in time with his, wanting to feel him even harder. The pleasure went on and on, so that I was shaking right to the very core of my body. I realized that right in that moment, there wasn’t a thing in this world I was scared of. Imagine, I thought, imagine if a child was conceived from sex that felt as good as this. What a happy thing that would be. Except that couldn’t happen to me, because my body would malfunction and refuse to get pregnant. And because if it did, I wouldn’t be able to see Takumi ever again.
For what seemed like the umpteenth time, Takumi let out a girlish scream and came inside me. I reached a finger down, and tried to taste the semen spilling from my body.
“It doesn’t taste very good,” I said.
As Takumi looked at me, his dark eyes lit up and once again he moved slowly back inside me.
The cameras all over the apartment went on capturing our sex from a multitude of angles. I guessed that when Keiichiro watched this footage, he’d bawl his eyes out again. I opened my legs as wide as I could so he’d be able to se
e. When I came, over and over again, I made sure to make as much noise as I could, so the next-door neighbors would hear. As he whimpered and wailed, Keiichiro would spread the images and videos of mine and Takumi’s sex all around the world. Well, that was fine. He could go ahead and spread them all he wanted. He could show the world what Takumi and I looked like when we were making love. If people wanted to call me a pervert, a weirdo, they could sit there, wherever they were, pointing their fingers at me and laughing.
Our planet, floating in darkness, was covered in a web made of silky, translucent spider’s thread, and every time words or images or recordings came and went across those spindly fibers, they would glisten very beautifully. This moment of mine and Takumi’s would go traveling across that great web, traversing space and time, forever.
I’m sorry, Takumi. I guess having met me is one of those things that might stick to you, like those strands of spiderweb that brush against your face and seem impossible to remove. I’m a stupid, fat, ugly, perverted housewife with fertility problems, but I want you to know that I’m so, so grateful to you for all the time we’ve spent together.
3
The Orgasm from 2035
I ALWAYS THOUGHT THAT once I got into high school I’d get a little taller and my boobs would get bigger, but as things turned out, I’ve grown just a piddling three millimeters since the third year of middle school, and I’m still only an A cup. I guess being short isn’t such a bad thing (I get a lot of people saying how “short and cute” I am) but I’m desperate to do something about my chest, which is basically no different from a elementary-school kid’s. I’ve tried all kinds of stuff that’s supposed to be good for boosting your bust size—making myself eat loads and loads of cabbage and chicken as well as various massages and exercises and creams. My friend Akutsu is always telling me not to worry, that boobs get bigger naturally when a guy fondles them, but she’s never gone out with a guy and she’s an A cup like me, so she’s not exactly the greatest authority on these things.
The first time Takumi felt me up, I felt really bad for him that my boobs were so small. I was convinced they were going to be a major letdown for him, so I kept checking his expression, but his eyes were closed and he had this super-serious look on his face, so I really couldn’t tell at all what he was thinking. Being fondled by him didn’t really feel good at all, just a little tickly, but I put up with it on the basis that this was bound to make them bigger.
According to my plan, I should have lost my virginity to Takumi around the end of the summer. I was sure that if I had actual sex, then there was no doubt my boobs would grow. But then my plan kind of ground to a halt. It’s a week today that Takumi hasn’t come into work. I’ve sent him a few messages, but he hasn’t replied to any of them. Which means the summer vacation’s nearly over and I’m still a virgin in an A cup.
Monday was my day off from my summer job at the pool. It was two o’clock in the afternoon and I was sitting on the riverbank in the sweltering heat. The grass, which had grown as tall as the average adult ever hopes to get, stretched off into the distance. Akutsu got up on the only bench for miles around whose wood has started to rot and shouted: “It’s so fricking hot!”
She tucked up the hem of her skirt and waved the promotional fan she’d been handed outside the station back and forth between her legs. The fan was advertising a new pachinko complex that had just opened. I was wearing shorts, and I felt pretty sure that if I stayed too long sitting on that bench baked by the midday sun my legs would actually start to cook, so I sat down on the grass alongside it instead. When I turned to look up at Akutsu, her head was blotting out the exact spot where the sun was, its edges blazing with scorching light. I quickly shut my eyes, watching the yellow afterimage flicker and float on my eyelids. The sky was gray like a dirty old sheet. I figured the pain in my temples must be something to do with the photochemical smog everyone was talking about.
“I’ve got something to show you,” Akutsu had said when she called me earlier.
We met up for lunch at one of those chain family restaurants by the main road.
“So what’s this thing you want to show me?” I’d asked, once we’d been chatting a while.
“No way, I can’t tell you here! Not with all these people around. Let’s go to the riverbank,” Akutsu said, widening her eyes deliberately. And so it was that we’d ended up here, where nobody else was stupid enough to be hanging out at this time of the year.
Akutsu had been moaning about how the air-conditioning in the family restaurant was turned up too high and was making her shiver, but the moment we got on our bikes and started pedaling she’d moaned, “You’ve gotta be kidding, this is just way too hot. Hang on a sec.”
She went into a nearby convenience store and came out with an ice pop sticking out of her mouth.
I tried getting up on the bench beside Akutsu. She was about as short as I was. When I stood on tiptoes, I could just about see the river way off in the distance, beyond the stretch of grass and the rocks that the heat had dried to a whiteish color.
“Show me that thing you were going to show me.”
Akutsu nodded, crouched down on the bench, and took a small notebook out of her bag. I crouched down beside her.
“So my older sister is like really into anime and stuff. I mean she does all the full-on freaky stuff, like making fan comics and going to Comiket, and all that. So she sometimes looks at these online forums for hard-core cosplayers, and she started telling me that there are these photos that are like huge in the community right now. . . . God, this is so fricking sticky!”
Akutsu tossed the stick of her ice pop onto the grass, and wiped her fingers on her skirt.
“At first, I figured I’d just message them to you, but I thought it might shock you or whatever. My sister had printed them out anyway, thinking it might be someone from our school. Our printer’s so old and crappy it’s kind of hard to see, but look at this. Don’t you think this—” Akutsu stopped suddenly mid-flow and looked me right in the eyes. “Look, Nana. Are you really sure you wanna see this?”
The sound of an ambulance passing over the bridge, siren blaring, came carried on the wind. I didn’t say the word “yes,” but I nodded, and Akutsu handed me a few sheets of paper stapled together and folded in quarters. On each sheet was a bunch of small photos, showing a guy in a purple costume like a lab coat, a long blue wig, and small spectacles. Looking at the full body shots on the first page, I had no idea who it was, but then I turned the page to see a selection of close-ups. When I saw the guy’s profile, shot from the right, my chest started to sting like someone was piercing it with a long needle. All the makeup he was wearing had made them less noticeable than usual, but the two small moles beneath his right eye were still definitely visible.
“Takumi.” I whispered his name without meaning to.
“So it is, right!?” Akutsu sounded almost pleased. “I can’t believe he’s into this kind of stuff! It’s such a shock! Do you know this anime?”
“No. No idea. I, like, never watch anime.”
As I spoke, I noticed how dry my throat was. I took a sip of the now thoroughly warm bottle of mineral water my mom had forced me to take to prevent me from getting heatstroke.
“I think my sister said it was Magical Girl something-or-other. They show it on Saturday mornings, and there’s, like, tons of fan sites for it. My sister says the pictures were sent to one of the fan sites, with his name and address on them.”
“You mean he sent them in? In his own name?”
“Can you imagine? Who in their right mind would do a thing like that, right! Apparently there’s more stuff that’s way weirder…”
Akutsu inserted her straw into a carton of sugary milk tea she’d bought at the convenience store and sucked at it thirstily.
“What do you mean by ‘weirder?’”
“Hmmmmmm . . . Apparently, the videos are way more out there than the photos, even. By out there I mean . . .”
Akutsu on
ce again put her mouth to the straw and sucked hard, gulping down the liquid.
“You mean, like, porn?”
With the straw still stuck in her mouth, Akutsu rolled her eyes toward me and nodded demurely.
“My sister figures it’s the girl he was going out with who sent them in, actually. In both the photos and the videos, you can’t really see her face, so it seems kind of likely. But honestly, can you believe it? Him, of all people? He’s got such a goody-two-shoes vibe, but then it turns out he’s doing all this sketchy stuff in secret! Skipping work, too. Well, I think he’s a moron for letting himself get into this kind of situation.”
Noticing how quiet I’d gone, Akutsu added, “Sorry.”
As I listened to her talking, I remembered the time I’d followed Takumi to the old apartment building across the river. He hadn’t seen me sneaking into the lobby behind him, and I watched him taking the elevator up to the seventh floor. I used the stairs to follow him and emerged just in time to see him stepping into the apartment at the very end of the hall. There was no hesitation to his movements, which made me think he’d done this a bunch of times before. I went up to the door and put my ear to it but couldn’t hear a thing. Just as I was thinking about going home, I heard a woman’s voice coming from a room facing the hall, the curtains in its window drawn.
I strained my ears to hear. The woman was moaning. I gripped the bars on the windows so tightly my fingers began to hurt. On the other side, Takumi was having sex with someone. Just thinking that, my heart started beating so hard I could feel it moving there, underneath the wires of my bra. I wedged my head in between the bars of the grate so I could get my ear even closer to the windowpane.