He strode from the house, his spine straight and proud, his steps turning south toward Blue Street.
When he had gone, Rafu crawled from the corner of the room, her slats digging into the tatami. As she dragged herself the slats of fine dark wood became fingers breaking their nails on the woven grass, her silk screens became shoulders, a stomach, a strong back. She stood up, unfolding into a woman with long, hinged arms, accordioning out from her sweet torso in hanging, tiger-painted screens that ended in graceful hands. She sank down over Milo’s drowned body.
“Save her,” my Rafu wept. “Save her because of her nakedness, how bare she was before me, and how I loved her smaller breast.”
“It’s no good, concealer-of-my-heart. I only know how to eat things.”
BECAUSE YOU ARE NEW
The Paradise of the Pure Land exists within Yokosuka as hair caught in a brush—the teeth of the city rise tall through the tangles and think nothing of them, but deep in the comb, long onyx strands wind and snarl. It is, of course, possible to yank all these strands free with a pitiless fist. They will not protest.
Rafu and I followed the dream of Gabriel through Yoshikura-Chuo and along the highway, through the wet, dank tunnel and up the jungled terraces. He was not hard to follow, being loud and foreign. He ate cherry trees along the way, opening his jaw and swallowing them whole as I might. When he reached the city, he seized in one hand a Peacock of Right Intention, squirming blue and green, and in the other a young girl coming home from a date with an enlisted American on the sprawling grey base. He shoved each into his mouth like two legs of one golden chicken.
On Blue Street, he ate hats, belts, rice-cookers, kerosene lamps, light bulbs, expensive Italian shoes, the Grocers of Perfect Balance, aquariums, streetlamps, Prostitutes of Pure Mind, the Motorcycles of Holy Judgment. Rafu wrinkled her new nose and clapped her screen-arms.
“Is this what you are like, on the inside?” she said.
“This is what everyone is like on the inside,” I sighed.
“It’s not what I’m like!”
“That is because you are new. You did not have a stomach for one hundred years. You are only just learning how to fill it. You do not yet know it can never be filled.”
Just ahead of us, the dream-Gabriel unhinged his jaw and swallowed a drink machine. It expired with a red whine.
“Will he eat us all?”
“Yes,” I said calmly. “He is a dream; he does not know this is not a dream. His real self is somewhere impossibly hot, dreaming of his soft, plain wife who is not named after a First Lady. He eats up the world with a grey boat and a fine cap. Dreams are more literal. More honest.”
“Why are you not afraid?”
“Because I know a thing about the Pure Land he does not.”
Rafu took my tapir-form into her screen arms and kissed my ardent snout. I unfolded into a man in her arms, to match her, to please her. I wanted so to please her.
A PERFECT SHARD OF GOLD
There is no more sacred place in the Pure Land of Yokosuka than the pink palaces of the pachinko parlors. I would have taken Rafu there, to meditate with me in the blue haze of the electronic screens and the heady cigar smoke. Here, the bodhisattvas practice Right Gambling, prone before the unyielding goddesses of luck, their throats ecstatic and bare.
One by one, the dream-Lieutenant ate the goddesses from the ceiling, the green-limbed seraphs of Perfect Chance, sucking their toes down into his throat. Their screams were shattered by the crash and fall of silver balls. The old, shrunken men turning the wheels of the glittering machines did not move—they see nothing of the Pure Land, even when the sun rises over the harbor and grants each citizen of the Right City a perfect shard of gold. He is a dream; I am a dream; we are all dreams, and the flashing arcade lights blind them.
Gabriel laughed, a thick, fatty sound, a gargle, a chortle. The parlor erupted in jackpots and high scores. The goddesses who held back and gave forth at their whim had gone into his great, insatiable belly and held back no more.
“Please,” said Rafu softly. The old men shouted for joy, jostled each other, shook fists at the perplexed proprietor. Rafu’s voice barely sounded among them, but Gabriel turned toward her in hunger, his lips scarlet with secret blood.
“Do you remember,” said Rafu, sliding toward him, “how Milo’s toe was broken when she was six, running too fast after her friends through the forest behind her house? How it is still crooked, and aches, and how you used to rub it for her during thunderstorms until she was well? Do you remember how her waist curved so sweetly in, how her mouth tasted, how even when she had the flu she smelled like childhood to you, clean and innocent and permanent?”
“No,” growled the dream-Gabriel.
“Do you remember how her fingers still had calluses, even though she stopped playing the guitar so long ago? How he
r hair looked when it was tangled, when it was smooth? How her belly sloped, how her birthmark looked, how her ears curved?”
“No,” growled the dream-Gabriel. “Instead, I want to eat you. Then I’ll remember those things.”
“Why are you doing this?”
Gabriel shrugged. “What else is there to do when you visit a foreign country?”