‘Usually you can tell if a guy’s OK just by looking in his eyes, so I haven’t had any real problems personally, but some of the girls have had bad experiences. I don’t mean anything
really
scary, but, like, letting guys stick their dirty fingers in there to make a little extra money and ending up with an infection or whatever. That’s the sort of thing you hear about, anyway.’
Kawashima stripped, dimmed the lights, and lay face-down on top of the bedspread. The woman sat on the side of the bed and lightly ran her fingernails over his back and buttocks and hamstrings, tracing leisurely circles on the surface of his skin. He felt like a patient being pampered by a nurse. As she helped ease him over on to his back, the woman was telling him about the man she lived with, explaining that he was the one who’d bought her the fur half-coat. She placed a box of tissues next to her on the bed and rubbed oil into her left palm, then began stroking his already erect penis. He lifted his head from the pillow and asked if she wasn’t going to undress as well. Without pausing the motion of her hand, she told him it would cost an extra ten thousand. ‘I’ll pay it,’ he said, and she wiped her hand with a tissue, reminded him that he mustn’t touch her, and wriggled out of her clothing.
Wanting to get a better look at her soft belly and the marks left by the elastic of her pantyhose, he switched on the bedside lamp. The woman made no attempt to conceal her body. It was a body that stirred nostalgic feelings in him: skin your fingers could sink into; breasts with visible veins and dark, downcast nipples; arms and waist and thighs that jiggled with the slightest movement; the pathos of pubic hair; the cracked, yellowed nail of a big toe. He’d once been so accustomed to this sort of body that when he first slept with Yoko the firmness of her flesh actually felt strange to him. Yoko was now twenty-nine and had given birth to a child, but when you touched her neck or arm or ass, the flesh still pressed back. Looking at the supposedly thirty-eight-year-old ass flattened against the bedspread, Kawashima thought: There’s something non-threatening about skin like this. Soft as a spongecake left over from Christmas; skin that yielded to your touch rather than resisting defiantly. It was as if the very cells were conscious of their age and had ceased to assert themselves.
He was drinking this body in with his eyes when he came. The woman wiped him off with a hot, wet towel.
After handing her over 30,000 yen and sending her on her way, he lay back on the bedspread, still naked. He was enveloped in a sort of weightless tranquillity that was like nothing he’d ever experienced before. Far from any danger of his nervous system going haywire. Kawashima had never understood the how or why of those episodes of his - the explosions of shock and terror and rage, the total loss of control - but they always left him feeling miserable afterwards. He’d often wondered if one couldn’t train oneself to develop nerves that wouldn’t crack like that. But the reality, he thought, staring up at the ceiling, is that I’ll probably have to go through this sort of thing forever. He’d just spurted a large volume of semen, and though it had occasioned him no more excitement than a good sneeze, he was enjoying the after-effects. It felt good just lying there gazing at the ceiling. He was aware that the good feeling existed side by side with a chilling sort of loneliness, but even that wasn’t all bad. He was picturing the masseuse’s bulky thighs when something important occurred to him, and he sat up in bed and reached for his briefcase. He opened it, took out the notes, and added a couple of lines:
The woman must be not only young but petite. A large woman would be more difficult to control in the event of any unforeseen glitches
.
7
SANADA CHIAKI WAS AWAKE but needed to lie in bed a while longer. The dial on her electric blanket was turned to high, but because of the Halcion she felt heavy and frozen stiff, from hair to toenails. The phone stopped ringing, and after the high-pitched mechanical whine of her answering machine a subdued male voice eased out of the little speaker.
‘Aya-san, are you going to make it to the office today? Either way, give us a call, will you? If you’re not feeling well, you can have the night off, of course, but we need you to call in. We’ve got you down for an appointment this evening, six o’clock at the Keio Plaza, room 2902, a Mr Yokoyama. He’s a new client, but he sounds young, and he sounds like a gentleman. You’ll probably have to go straight there, considering the time, but drop by the office when you finish, no matter how late it is, all right? And please don’t turn off your—’
A beep signalled an end to the allotted message time. A few moments later the phone rang again.
‘I got cut off. As I was saying, we need you to leave your pager on. If you pick up this message from outside and don’t have your toys with you, you’ll have to stop by the office or your apartment first. Whatever you do, don’t show up at the appointment without equipment, all right? Anyway, we’re waiting to hear from you. If you’re running short on time, you can call after you’ve arrived at the Keio Plaza. Your period hasn’t started yet, has it? If it—’
The machine cut him off again, and this time he didn’t call back. Chiaki decided she’d better get up and eat something. She looked at the clock and saw that it was already three in the afternoon. The Keio Plaza was only twelve or thirteen minutes away by taxi, but after a three-Halcion sleep she’d need time just to get her blood circulating again. She’d been gradually increasing the dosage recently and knew she’d have to watch that. The pills weren’t cheap, and someone had said that the shop in Shibuya where she bought them was under investigation.
She rolled on to her side and reached for the CD player remote. She hit POWER, saw the little green light come on, and pressed PLAY. It wasn’t the CD she was expecting. She liked to listen to strings first thing on awaking and could have sworn she’d put in a Mozart disc before going to sleep, but oozing out of the speakers now was the theme song from
Wild at Heart
, with a tenor sax that dripped like molasses over her nerve endings. It was music she liked to listen to when masturbating. It’s weird I don’t remember, she thought as she turned off the music - and what if it’s not just because of the sleeping pills? The thought triggered a wave of anxiety, and she decided to try to recall exactly what she’d done before going to sleep. According to the clock it was Friday, which meant she’d been asleep for about fifty hours straight. She’d taken the Halcion late Wednesday morning, after an all-night job for which she’d received 150,000 yen. She hadn’t taken the money to the office yet, either, which explained why the manager was so insistent about her calling in.
The client had been a mild, middle-aged man who after half-heartedly tying her up and poking her with the vibrator had taken her hand and asked her to sleep next to him. She wasn’t sleepy, and because she was concerned about her libido having gone missing the past month or so, and because he wasn’t a type she found repulsive, she’d been prepared to have normal sex with him, as long as he used a condom. So naturally this was the one time the client just wanted to sleep by her side. He fell asleep right away, with his mouth open, and she couldn’t bear even to look at him. He wasn’t a smoker, but his breath was bad and smelled faintly of alcohol, and soon he was snoring loudly without loosening the tight grip he had on her hand. He hadn’t paid her yet, so she couldn’t have left anyway, but her muscles tensed up when she tried to lie still, and the more she told herself she had to sleep, the more it felt as if someone had turned a spotlight on her brain.
Don’t tell me it’s starting up again
, she remembered thinking, and the thought had terrified her and made her think it really was starting up. Any minute now she’d become aware of What’s-her-name lurking up there at the corner of the ceiling, staring down at the man and her.
What’s-her-name had first appeared when Chiaki was in middle school. In the beginning, she’d begged her not to look, but What’s-her-name would just snicker, in a voice that apparently only Chiaki could hear.
This time, as it turned out, What’s-her-name never did materialise, but because her handbag was out of reach Chiaki couldn’t get to the Halcion and had to lie there until dawn, wide awake. By then her muscles were so rigid it hurt, and she was scared. But what really tormented her was the fact that she couldn’t detect so much as zero point one milligram of sexual desire anywhere in her body. If this had happened in the old days, before she’d changed her personality, she probably would have shaken the man awake and demanded sex.
She wasn’t like that any more, though. She’d revamped her personality on the hundred and twenty-fourth day after her eighteenth birthday, the year she graduated high school and entered junior college. In junior college she’d had just one friend with whom she’d go out for tea and share lecture notes and so on, and when she told her about it this girl had said, ‘No way! Is it even
possible
to change your personality overnight?’
I did, Chiaki told herself. I changed my personality just like that. I became modest and reserved, even a little withdrawn, and after that there were lots of people who wanted to be my friend. Not that we necessarily stayed friends very long, but still, I made the change because I realised something: that the sex you have with a man at your own suggestion is just never that good. After all, if you have to ask for sex, it means the man isn’t really into it, right? And guys are never sweet or gentle or thoughtful in bed if they’re not really into it. There’s nothing cute about their faces when they come, either, and you end up wondering what’s the point of rubbing your flesh and organs together like that, having this thing flopping around inside you. It makes you feel even lonelier than if you were alone. And then, after he comes, the man makes an even worse face.
What am I doing with a slut like this?
That’s what the expression on his face says.
A slut like this
, Chiaki muttered, imitating a gruff, masculine voice as she struggled up on to her elbows.
How low can you get?
Looking down at her T-shirt, she could see the outline of the nipple ring. She’d done the piercing herself seventy-one days ago. It had hurt when she pushed the needle through, and again when she pulled it out, but it had been a total success. After about a week all the pain was gone. And by the thirty-third day not a trace of scabbing or scarring remained. Chiaki was proud of herself. And the guys at the body-art shop in Shibuya, a hundred and sixty-three steps from the entrance to Tokyu Hands, had been so helpful and nice. Next she wanted to get a tattoo. To be able to choose your own pain - it’s a little scary, she thought, but it’s wonderful, too. She tugged at the neck of her T-shirt and peeked down at the ring.
Her clients lately had all been of the worst sort - men who weren’t interested in the more exciting types of play but only in getting their rocks off as quickly as possible. In private life she’d been dating three different guys, but each of them had stopped calling recently, for various reasons - like the way she tended maybe to overreact when they messed up her room. Judging from the
Wild at Heart
CD and the fact that she wasn’t wearing panties, she must have masturbated before sleeping, probably for a long time. She seemed to recall it vaguely: spurred on by her desire to feel desire when there was nothing there, reaching for it until her own moaning sounded fake to her and she began to fear that it would turn into someone else’s voice altogether, but being spared that when the third Halcion tablet kicked in and sucked her down in a whirlpool of sleep.
Things had not been going well lately. She stroked the silvery ring with her index finger and thought: This is all I can really believe in right now. Even when she caressed it herself, it felt like someone else’s touch. It was a fourteen-gauge surgical stainless steel ball-closure ring with an inner diameter of twelve point seven millimetres. ‘What’re you, nuts?’ her customers often asked her. ‘Why would you do that to yourself? ’ Piercings scared them, like tattoos on yakuza thugs, and inwardly Chiaki would sneer at these men:
Because I enjoy watching worms like you squirm
.
She was thinking she’d have to pierce the other nipple sometime soon, when the blood finally began coursing through her Halcion-frozen body. A piercing took courage, though. First she’d need to reclaim her sex drive. Not that being horny made you brave, but the total absence of lust frightened her because it had always been the first stage of that awful cycle, the one she’d never been able to tell anyone about. The cycle of terror that took hold with the sudden realisation that she alone was to blame for all the bad things happening around her. Once the Nightmare began, she wouldn’t be choosing her own pain any longer - it would be choosing
her
- and courage would be the last thing she’d be capable of.
She climbed out of bed and stood there on the carpet for a moment, checking herself for dizziness or nausea. She found both, naturally, along with a chill that vibrated in her bones. What she needed was some vitamin C and stomach medicine. She took a step towards the refrigerator, measuring her stride so that she’d arrive in precisely five steps. She could pour some Vittel mineral water into the 8,935-yen Baccarat tumbler she’d bought a hundred and eighteen days ago, then drop in some cherry aspirin and two Alka-Seltzers. Just watching the millions of tiny bubbles might calm her down some, she was thinking, when she reached the refrigerator and noticed her shiny red Swiss Army knife in a wicker bowl on the dining table. Knife, scissors, can opener, bottle opener, corkscrew, file - it had everything. I have to remember to take that with me, she thought. She’d been forgetting about what the customer she’d had a hundred and seventy-one days ago had shown her. With surgical precision, he’d used a pair of scissors to extract the elastic band from a plastic shower cap. He positioned the elastic band between her legs and passed a rope through the loops, front and back, then tied the rope around her waist, making a sort of open-crotch thong. He arranged it so that only her clitoris was protruding between the strands of elastic. That was exciting. Maybe if she did it again, her libido would have no choice but to come rushing back. Before opening the refrigerator, Chiaki slipped the knife into her handbag.