Authors: Douglas F. Warrick
The Bosch nods, wags a finger at Danny. “Come to me, Danny–thing.”
And Danny does.
“Goodbye, my lovely Stickhead,” says the Bosch. It runs a hand over the parchment skin of Stickhead’s face like a lover. “You were such a good Stickhead, yes?”
It leaps and latches his fingers around Danny’s head, scrambling down around his shoulders.
Stickhead falls.
“Jesus, Danny, no!” Adam, weeping, sobbing, rocking back and forth, making that rattling piggy noise that grown men make when they cry. “Don’t leave me, Danny, Jesus! Please!”
Danny smiles, his own tears drying on his face. Poor Adam. Poor, poor Adam. He steps forward, pulls back his foot, and kicks Adam in the ribs.
“Goodbye, Adam.”
Oh, that feeling. The feeling when the Bosch sinks its fingers into Danny’s temples, when a spider–web of black lines grow like strangle–vines from his touch. It hurts, Christ, it hurts, but his eyes fill up with such brilliant, wonderful light. We remember. You and me. And the others. The other Collected. We remember the wonderful light.
“Danny, no!” someone screams from far away. Someone Danny knew a long time ago.
The fingers sink. Danny’s head is soft clay. The Bosch cackles, and its laughter is music. Danny sees the skin of his arms stretch and discolor from behind the brilliant light swallowing his eyeballs. His veins swell, strain, burst. Red–black fireworks. He smiles. And still smiling, still afraid, Danny falls backward, ever backward, ever and forever and forever and forever backward with the Bosch, and the mud swallows them both.
§
…see the cul–de–sac. The sun rises over it. It rises on the barrier. It sinks through the brush and touches the mud at the creek’s bottom, warming it. And God, to Adam, it feels so good to have the sun on him again. Somewhere above him, a school bus stops and kids get on, swearing and prodding at each other. He shakes his head back and forward. His arms and legs keep twitching. He reaches into his pocket, lights a Camel, inhales. He lets his head loll onto his shoulder and stares at that dead guy… that dead thing… with the stick in his head lying next to him.
He crawls over to the body, wraps his fingers around the stick and pulls it out. Something in his head keeps trying to work its way into the right order, like a cut that won’t quite scab over. He leans on the stick, and it helps him stand. He climbs up the slope. The cut in his mind gets close to healing, then rips open again.
People will talk about this for a long time. About how Adam stumbles onto the cul–de–sac, wet and muddy and hardly able to stand. How he drops the stick on the ground and climbs up to sit on the hood of the abandoned Volvo parked at the curb. They’ll talk about how, when they saw him, he was just sitting there, staring up into the sky, smoking his cigarette. And when he starts screaming, they’ll talk about how long it took for him to stop.
See this and see it well. We all see. All of us who have been collected. You, me, Danny, Stickhead. All of us. And we all agree. Adam has become somewhat… well, curious. Yes sir. Quite curious indeed.
ON THE SURFACE OF THE canal, the Dotonbori district’s neon muscles, its enormous screens, its colored bulbs and strobe lights, are reflected all over again, stretching down into the endless water. The shoppers and the nightclubbers teem in and out of restaurants and karaoke rooms. Peacock people, trying to match the flamboyance of Osaka’s skyline with their clothes, their faces, their gestures. Nothing ever stops moving.
There is a two–dimensional cartoon man on the giant Gilco candy display above the district, smiling with his arms held above his head. He wears a marathonist’s shorts and shirt. And now, he has become self–aware. He is alive. He pumps his colorless arms back and forth, slicing them through the air beside his ribs, his feet push off against the two–dimensional track and carry him nowhere, and he is no longer smiling. Below him, gathered like toddlers and craning their necks to see him, the partying crowd. They aren’t afraid. They rejoice. They are laughing and pointing, aiming phones and cameras up at the spectacle.
The Gilco man keeps running. He can’t stop. Sweat runs down his face and disappears beneath his chin. His chest inflates and deflates unevenly. His posture is crumbling, and soon he will collapse in on himself. He wants to stop. Didn’t he win? Isn’t that why his hands were raised? He’s earned it, it’s not fair, but he can’t stop. Because this is Osaka, and nothing ever stops moving.
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.