Plow the Bones (23 page)

A few weeks ago, when the American showed up at our office and shook hands with my boss and wandered around with his digital sound recorder and his headphones, I thought I might like him enough to sleep with him. I haven’t slept with many men. Four in total, none of them American. I was curious. Since I was a little girl, I have had a mild obsession with cowboys. The ultimate American hero. I thought that maybe this boy, with his beard and his curly hair and his big brown eyes, was in some way haunted by that old American ghost. Sometimes wishes disguise themselves as intuitions.

I draw the American boy’s curly hair, riding its wild spirals with the tip of my pencil. His sweat and his flight have undone all his careful work to keep it tame and stylish. It defies gravity, climbs the air. I like doing this. It almost makes me like him again.

My boss, smiling like his lips were being pulled from his teeth on hooks, led the American around the office by the shoulder, weaving around desks and saying, “This one speaks English. This one doesn’t speak English. This one is very boring, don’t talk to him. Talk to him, he’s a writer, very good stories.” The American nodded and smiled and looked sweet.

When my boss led him to me, I was drawing a woman in profile, her neck craned and her mouth open. She was crying, humiliated, in pain. I was trying to make her look sexy.

My boss said, “Talk to her. Talk to Megumi–san. She speaks very good English. Very good artist. Very pretty. Talk to her.”

So he did.

My phone vibrates in my pocket and I jump and knock over a stack of finished pages. They spill to the floor, enormous snowflakes, and I swear to myself and dig out my phone. It’s the American boy on his pre–paid Japanese phone.

“What?”

“Megumi, you gotta help me out here, there’s this guy, this fucking guy, oh my god, I just — I don’t know, he’s following me, he’s — he’s fucking shooting at me, for christ — oh my god, what am I going to — ”

I hang up on him and toss my phone onto the bed. My bed. And I turn to collect my spilled pages. I flip through them, taking stock. The poor Gilco man, wrecked and wretched. The hungry flying fugu lanterns. My terrible lovely cowboy with his black coffin on a chain. Then I stop. Somehow one of my work sketches has followed me home, an unfinished piece of soft–core ugliness. I drew it for a computer game we’re developing.
Akuma Fushin Senjō. Demon Distrust Battleground.
The game is an
eroge
, a sex game. The game creates the illusion of interactivity with a series of binary choices. The “correct” choices reward the player with portraits of vulnerability and nastiness. So do the “incorrect” choices. And here is my reward for my choices. An unfinished sketch of a girl, bruised and bleeding, lying on the ground, her breasts defying gravity. She is faceless. Like me, or like the American boy sees me, or wishes I was, prone and hurt and too tired or weak or… or female… to resist. The ideal Japanese girl.

This isn’t mine. This belongs to someone else.

Now I am struck by the urge to finish the sketch. To give the girl her face. The sensation is immediate and hot, like a wave of nausea, and before I can stop myself I have swept the page onto my desk, completing my broken girl, giving her open and defiant eyes, closed and grim and angry lips. This is not what I am allowed to do. This sketch does not belong to me. It is not one of my hotel room sketches. Those I draw for Osaka. I am not selfish. I am doing a service. I am doing a service. I am doing a service.

Still, I know I am finishing this girl for me.

§

The American pushes his way downstairs and into Ebisucho Subway Station, past the throngs of revelers and dancers and nervous optimists. They whisper to each other, compare in hushed and manic tones their notes on the evening’s parade of strangeness and which elements thereof they’ve witnessed, as he shoulders through them, trying to keep his footing, his sanity, feeling acutely each tiny marble of sweat rolling down the back of his neck and soaking into his collar. The Outlaw knows all of this. He can smell the American’s thoughts, his fears. The stale underground breeze pushes the scent of his sweat to the Outlaw’s nostrils, lands like a film on his lips. The Outlaw hauls his coffin onto his back by its chain to keep it from sliding down the stairs in front of him. It’s getting heavier. He feels no pangs of regret for missing the American when he fired earlier. It wasn’t his fault. That’s the way it was drawn. The Outlaw knows this in a different way than he knows the American’s mind. He feels his artist pulling on his tendons from miles away, feels her playing him like a marionette, and he tries not to resent her for it.

Still, he has questions. He doesn’t understand.

A train pulls in next to the platform, breathing cold air that smells like fuel and ammonia. On the train’s flank are wide–eyed manic–happy Kewpie dolls painted in pink. Their eyes roll in their faces, their ball–and–socket arms spin like Ferris wheels. The American stumbles into the train, and the Outlaw lets him go. There is a scene being set within that car, and his artist is gracious. She gives him the scene, lets him see it happening, even as the doors slide closed and the train rolls down the tunnel.

The scene is this:

The American, alone, surrounded by the flat advertisements on the train’s walls, the models silent, following him with their eyes. He breathes heavy. He pulls his pre–paid Japanese cellphone from his pocket, thinking,
I don’t believe in any of this. None of this is real.
He feels unstuck, a reel of film unsprocketed. His thoughts keep coming to him in full sentences, the kind of narration he would write if he were producing a radio piece, and he wants it to stop. He wants to think the way he normally thinks, in impulses, in flashes of image and emotion, but that doesn’t seem to be an option.

In the corner, obscured between the wall and the subway bench, something is moving. It tries to pull its knees to its chest, can’t find room, kicks out, pulls in again. The American closes his eyes tight enough to blast color bursts behind his eyelids, procrastinating. Then he opens his eyes and says, “Ma’am?” And then he waits.

The voice is rotten and dry, the voice of a victim, but there is fire behind it, it bites, it snaps, it says, “Do what you’re going to do. That’s why you’re here.”

The American says nothing. He is trying not to think, and failing. He narrates himself.
I walk toward this girl I’ve found. I know she shouldn’t be here, know that she’s part of the nightmare–Osaka as sure as the thing with the gun behind me. But I walk toward her anyway. I want to believe that she’s real, that’s she’s normal, maybe a comrade in all this craziness, and so I take a few tentative steps. And she is revealed.

She is revealed. Trying to push herself up the wall away from him, too weak and too injured. She falls back onto the floor of the subway car, onto her back with her legs open to him. She is absurd, propped up on her elbows and staring through a curtain of wet hair, with her spiked shoulder pads and the belt slung around her naked waist and her black bikini (one strap is broken, and her left breast remains barely concealed).

“Um,” says the American.

The rows of long fluorescent lights on the ceiling flicker, darken, brighten. The car shakes as the train rolls over the tracks, whispering to the tunnel as it weaves through and within it. The faces on the posters stare at the American expectantly.

She says, “Fuck me. I won’t stop you. I can’t.”

He can see it like a shadow–puppet show in his head, the things he could do to her, the choreography of fetishism he could inflict, intricate and infinite, the binary choices and their consequences, and he hates himself.
This isn’t me
, he thinks.
That’s not who I am.
Still, the imagined show goes on: the things he could remove from her, the things he could add to her, the places and positions in which he could add them. It is endless.

“Stop it,” he says.

“Come on,” she growls, and her eyebrows twitch again and again. With every word, her head snaps forward, like she’s taking bites of the stale recirculated train air. She says, “You saved me from the Threat. You win.”

“Stop talking,” says the American, while the shadow–show in his head loops back and plays again, double–speed, legs entwined, muscles arching and releasing, hands grasping, searching, finding. Oh god, the things his hands could find. Outside of his head, his fingers find their way into his hair and tug, then find their way down to his ears and press hard against them. He closes his eyes, but that renders the images in perfect color and depth, and his eyelids shoot back open.

She leans to one side, reaches up with one bruised hand, grasps at the center string of her bikini top with fingers whose nail beds are caked with old blood, and she rips. The string protests, then gives up and breaks. She gestures one–handed at her breasts. “These are yours as much as they are mine. Maybe more.”

“No,” says the American, “really. Please stop. When is this goddamn train going to stop? Don’t people ever need to get off this fucking thing?” He shouts, “I’m a good person!” and his voice breaks and turns boyish, a piggy squeal.

He tries to make a list of famous feminists in his head, and all he can come up with is Camille Paglia, sitting next to him in his internal shadow–show watching him shower filth over the fake girl in the train car, drudging up quotes from some long–ago Women’s Studies course he thought he had forgotten, lecturing, “Sexual freedom, sexual liberation. A modern delusion. We are hierarchical animals. Sweep one hierarchy away, and another will take its place, perhaps less palatable than the first.”

The fake girl in the train car hisses, “You need to fuck me. Now. Those are the rules. You saved me from the Threat.”

The American stomps on the floor, waves his arms. He screams, “What threat? What are you talking ab — this is crazy, I have to…”

The train turns a corner, sways, and throws him down. He feels himself tumbling, and then feels himself hit bottom and roll. Into her. Onto her.

In his head, Camille Paglia says, “The devil is a woman.” She says, “The serpent is not outside Eve but in her. She is the garden and the serpent.”

He is sprawled over her now, with his head on her stomach and his torso between her legs, hyperventilating too quickly and harshly to cry. But he does feel like crying.

The fake girl grabs him by the hair and hauls him over her. She is strong. Too strong. She pulls his face up to her own and spits. Then she says, “You have to do this.”

For a second, the American almost does. He can feel his hand hovering over her breast. He can feel his cock rubbing against the fly of his jeans, so close to her tissue–thin bikini–bottoms that he can feel her heat. Then Camille Paglia again, in his head, saying, “For a decade, feminists have drilled their disciples to say, ‘Rape is a crime of violence but not of sex.’ This sugar–coated Shirley Temple nonsense has exposed young women to disaster. Misled by feminism, they do not expect rape from the nice boys from good homes who sit next to them in class.”

The train stops. The doors open. And the American is on his feet again, and running out of the train, onto some empty platform, up the stairs. The tears come. Behind him, the girl is raging, screaming, “Someone has to fuck me!”

And in his head, Camille Paglia says, “Each generation drives its plow over the bones of the dead.”

§

When I met the American boy for drinks and introductions on that first night, I suggested a bar within walking distance of his hotel. I wore a dress I thought was sexy and I did my make–up. I tried to look like a girl from some old Western movie, with my cowgirl boots and my fishnet stockings and my piled–high hair. I even drew a beauty mark on my cheek with my eyeliner pencil. I knew what I was doing. I’m not stupid.

He is calling me again, leaving another panicked voicemail. I already know what it says. The girl in the train car. My big mistake.

I’ve drawn all of it, not because I want to, but because it’s true. I introduce stimulus, and the stimulus changes what I draw. Push–and–pull. Symbiosis.

Now, my beautiful old cowboy is crawling up onto the platform. He has caught up with the train. Other people have found her, my poor defiant sex–doll girl. My cowboy finds her spent and sweaty. I draw her eyes again, less defiant. Exhausted. When she sees him with his coffin and his gun and his hat, looming over her, she says, “Are you the Player, or the Threat?”

I didn’t anticipate this. I didn’t know what I was doing, finishing her, saving her to Osaka’s hard drive. She comes with prerequisites, of course. The Player and the Threat. She can’t exist without them, and her existence demands theirs.

My cowboy sucks cigarette smoke into the negative space where his lungs should be, then exhales. He flicks the cigarette away, and it spirals down the length of the train car. He says, “Don’t reckon I’m either.” Then, “Where did he go?”

Faithful, obedient cowboy. Searching for the American, because I asked him to.

On that first night, I sat at a conspicuous table at the front of the bar and waited for him. I pretended to send text messages on my phone, although I have no real friends to whom I would send them. My hands shook. When the American boy walked through the door and saw me, he looked… disappointed. Sad. I watched his fantasy of me (humble, shy, delicate, a girl the world whispered but never spoke aloud) crumble and decay. It was a fantasy he’d crafted before he ever met me, a faceless fantasy that while he zipped through Osaka at his company’s expense, he might find a Japanese doll to shatter and rebuild.

Another buzz from my pocket, another message from the American boy. The intervals between calls are getting shorter.

The rest of the night, he squirmed and wriggled and tried to fit me back into his fantasy. “The world is a big, crazy place,” he said, as though I didn’t know. He said, “I mean, I assume you’re a virgin,” and before I could tell him I wasn’t, “I mean, maybe you’re not, but… I mean, what I’m trying to say is… I want to be fair,” he said, “I won’t shy away from the double–standard, either, you know? The, y’know, the weird, uh, rape fantasy epidemic in this country, all that,” staring at my tits, speaking fast enough to disallow me from adding anything. He lectured me, citing Western feminists I’ve never heard of. If I tried to talk about sex, he blanched and changed the subject. We went on like that for two hours, him lecturing, me trying to find a gap in his monologue into which I could insert myself.