The Melancholy of Mechagirl

The longest sequence of her presence anyone has witnessed was in the 1924 classic Moon Silver Jirokichi. The witness was a Kyoto fabric dyer by the name of . His wife had recently committed suicide, leaving their young daughter in his care. He loaded up a library-loan print of Moon Silver Jirokichi into his home projector on no particular evening, his child half asleep next to him. The Kami entered the famous battle scene and the nape of her neck glowed like the tip of a brand. She dragged behind her the long black expanse of her kimono, so vast it covered the forest set, filling up the frame, its silk draping over the corpses of fallen warriors, shrouding their faces in grace and forgiveness, burying them in gentle, total darkness. Director Goto Taizan’s quick, innovative camera work froze, as though struck dumbfounded by what was happening: The Kami threads her way through the battle; the actors do not look at her, their swords clanging together without sound. She pulls apart two men—neither the protagonist, just two men at arms striving. As though they are coming out of a dream, the actors in their costumes and black eye makeup stare at her, their mouths open. Her kimono sweeps over bodies like a tide, rippling and surging. She puts her hands to their cheeks and her face is full of troubled sorrow. She kisses their foreheads. They begin to weep. She folds her sleeves around them and they vanish from the film. She stares out into the camera, into the fabric dyer’s eyes, full of pity and infinite regret, as the screen slowly fills with black silk, the endless, depthless creases of her gown closing around her face until that too disappears and the piano soundtrack goes silent.

You will have heard that she can alter a film permanently—that once, Detective Umon’s Diary, Story No. 6 had a swordfight between two women before the final triumph of Detective Umon in rescuing the Shogun from assassins. You can still find a few scattered grandmothers and grandfathers who saw the first run of the picture and could attest to the scene, fuzzy as long years have rendered it. Oh yes, I think one of the women was named Masami, wasn’t she? Strange, back then, to see two women fighting. Was the other one named Hanako?

Watch until your eyes prickle and you’ll never find the scene now. Film historians say it was filmed but deemed indecent by the motion picture committee. Yet you will have discussed the matter with a professor in Yokohama and heard how at a private party of the screenwriter Yamanaka Sadao the tragic genius arranged an early screening for an elegant young woman he hoped to seduce. In Detective Umon, the auteur felt he had invented himself over again, more dashing and clever and perfect. If a lady would not share her bed with Yamanaka Sadao, she could not resist Detective Umon. As the climax of the film drew near, and the young woman had allowed him to hold her hand very tenderly, a strange woman strode into a heartbreaking shot of the moon rising over the Imperial Residence. She looked up at the moon, and then at the two noblewomen bearing their husbands’ swords and converging on the plum-blossom-strewn courtyard. Who is that? cried Yamanaka. What idiot slut has wandered off the street into my movie?

The Kami turned to look at him, her eyes like caves with no water at their bottoms. When the noblewomen arrived, blood rising in their cheeks like honor affronted, the Kami stood between them and held out her hands. The women struck their swords through her, unseeing, uncomprehending. At the place where the blades touched, the Kami placed her hand. The weapons blinked out. She touched the sleeve of Masami, and Masami, too, shuddered like a skipped frame and disappeared. She kissed Hanako’s cheek and suddenly the courtyard was empty, with not even the Kami remaining, only plum blossoms half disturbed by an inrushing of air. Yamanaka Sadao felt himself too profoundly upset by the whole business to discuss it with his director or to see his elegant young woman again under any circumstances. Masami and Hanako had been cut out wholesale from every print of the film, not only the prints but the scripts, even the scriptmaster’s shooting copy, as though they had never been. The actresses could not be contacted; their agents could not recall any such clients, nor booking any girls for the new Detective Umon film, but if the director had roles to fill they had a number of beauties available.

But the Kami does not do this often—or at least, she is too subtle and careful to be often caught. Where did she take her swordfighting noblewomen? You would like to know; we would all like to know. You will sooner or later come across the rumor that a local boss in Kazakhstan, a warlord if you want to know the truth, was a great fan of Japanese cinema and paid top dollar for original prints. The story goes that he came into possession of both reels of A Story of Floating Weeds and upon his first eager, hungry viewing discovered a sequence between Kihachi’s arrival and the commencement of his long, sad tale. A great ebony palace wholly out of place in the village scenery appeared out of nowhere, its cypress roof green and new, its walls covered in silk tapestries. The camera seemed to grow curious and to stop listening to Kihachi the master storyteller, peering into the new building. Inside, braziers glowed warmly and folk laughed, drinking and eating and greeting each other with deep affection. The warlord thought he saw faces he knew from his boyhood, films he had not seen in years: one of the gamblers from Migratory Snow Bird, the younger daughter from Chibisuke the Midget, a juggler from The Dancing Girl of Izu. And Masami and Hanako, the noblewomen cut from the final edit of Detective Umon’s Diary, Story No. 6! They were pouring tea into cups for all, steam wafting like veils. And among them a beautiful young woman in a black kimono, reclining in the midst of all these people, the arc of her hairline almost painful in its perfection. The woman’s face was unbearably serene. It was like a still lake or a flower fully opened to the sun. Beside her rested a man with sad eyes but a smiling mouth, his hands stained dark the way some fabric dyers get, and in his lap a laughing, clapping child. The warlord leaned in to see her more closely—but the palace and its inhabitants blinked out, leaving no hint that they had ever disturbed the telling of Kihachi’s filial tale.

You will have heard this. You will have dreamed about that place and the taste of the sharp, sweet tea in those cups. But rumors are only that, not worth the breath it takes to repeat them. You will keep looking. You will keep watching. You will not look away from the screen, not even for a moment.

FADE TO WHITE

FIGHT THE COMMUNIST THREAT

IN YOUR OWN BACKYARD!

ZOOM IN on a bright-eyed Betty in a crisp green dress, maybe pick up the shade of the spinach in the lower left frame. [Note to Art Dept: Good morning, Stone! Try to stay awake through the next meeting, please. I think we can get more patriotic with the dress. Star-Spangled Sweetheart, steamset hair the color of good American corn, that sort of thing. Stick to a red, white, and blue palette.] She’s holding up a resplendent head of cabbage the size of a pre-war watermelon. Her bicep bulges as she balances the weight of this New Vegetable, grown in a Victory Brand Capsule Garden. [Note to Art Dept: is cabbage the most healthful vegetable? Carrots really pop, and root vegetables emphasize the safety of Synthasoil generated by Victory Brand Capsules.]

Betty looks INTO THE CAMERA and says: Just because the war is over doesn’t mean your Victory Garden has to be! The vigilant wife knows that every garden planted is a munitions plant in the War Fight Struggle Against Communism. Just one Victory Brand Capsule and a dash of fresh Hi-Uranium Mighty Water can provide an average yard’s worth of safe, rich, synthetic soil—and the seeds are included! STOCK FOOTAGE of scientists: beakers, white coats, etc. Our boys in the lab have developed a wide range of hardy, modern seeds from pre-war heirloom collections to produce the Vegetables of the Future. [Note to Copy: Do not mention pre-war seedstock.] Just look at this beautiful New Cabbage. Efficient, bountiful, and only three weeks from planting to table. [Note to Copy: Again with the cabbage? You know who eats a lot of cabbage, Stone? Russians. Give her a big old zucchini. Long as a man’s

arm. Have her hold it in her lap so the head rests on her tits.]

BACK to Betty, walking through cornstalks like pine trees. And that’s not all. With a little help from your friends at Victory, you can feed your family and play an important role in the defense of the nation. Betty leans down to show us big, leafy plants growing in her Synthasoil. [Note to Casting: make sure we get a busty girl, so we see a little cleavage when she bends over. We’re hawking fertility here. Hers, ours.] Here’s a tip: Plant our patented Liberty Spinach at regular intervals. Let your little green helpers go to work leeching useful isotopes and residual radioactivity from rain, groundwater, just about anything! [Note to Copy: Stone, you can’t be serious. Leeching? That sounds dreadful. Reaping. Don’t make me do your job for you.] Turn in your crop at Victory Depots for Harvest Dollars redeemable at a variety of participating local establishments! [Note to Project Manager: can’t we get some soda fountains or something to throw us a few bucks for ad placement here? Missed opportunity! And couldn’t we do a regular feature with the “tips” to move other products, make Betty into a trusted household name—but not Betty. Call her something that starts with T, Tammy? Tina? Theresa?]

Betty smiles. The camera pulls out to show her surrounded by a garden in full bloom and three [Note to Art Dept: Four minimum] kids in overalls carrying baskets of huge, shiny New Vegetables. The sun is coming up behind her. The slogan scrolls up in red, white, and blue type as she says:

A free and fertile tomorrow. Brought to you by Victory.

Fade to white.

THE HYDRODYNAMIC FRONT

More than anything in the world, Martin wanted to be a Husband when he grew up.

Sure, he’d longed for other things when he was young and silly—to be a Milkman, a uranium prospector, an astronaut. But his fifteenth birthday was zooming up with alarming speed, and becoming an astronaut now struck him as an impossibly, almost obscenely trivial goal. Martin no longer drew pictures of the moon in his notebooks or begged his mother to order the whiz-bang home enrichment kit from the tantalizing back pages of Popular Mechanics. His neat yellow pencils still kept up near-constant flight passes over the pale blue lines of composition books, but what Martin drew now were babies. In cradles and out, girls with bows in their bonnets and boys with rattles shaped like rockets, newborns and toddlers. He drew pictures of little kids running through clean, tall grass, reading books with straw in their mouths, hanging out of trees like rosy-cheeked fruit. He sketched during history, math, civics: twin girls sitting at a table gazing up with big eyes at their Father, who kept his hat on while he carved a holiday Brussels sprout the size of a dog. Triplet boys wrestling on a pristine, uncontaminated beach. In Martin’s notebooks, everyone had twins and triplets.

Once, alone in his room at night, he had allowed himself to draw quadruplets. His hand quivered with the richness and wonder of those four perfect graphite faces asleep in their four identical bassinets.

Whenever Martin drew babies they were laughing and smiling. He could not bear the thought of an unhappy child. He had never been one, he was pretty sure. His older brother Henry had. He still cried and shut himself up in Father’s workshop for days, which Martin would never do because it was very rude. But then, Henry was born before the war. He probably had a lot to cry about. Still, on the rare occasion that Henry made a cameo appearance in Martin’s gallery of joyful babies, he was always grinning. Always holding a son of his own. Martin considered those drawings a kind of sympathetic magic. Make Henry happy—watch his face at dinner and imagine what it would look like if he cracked a joke. Catch him off guard, snorting, which was as close as Henry ever got to laughing, at some pratfall on The Mr. Griffith Show. Make Henry happy in a notebook and he’ll be happy in real life. Put a baby in his arms and he won’t have to go to the Front in the fall.

Once, and only once, Martin had tried this magic on himself. With very careful strokes and the best shading he’d ever managed, he had drawn himself in a beautiful grey suit, with a professional grade shine on his shoes and a strong angle to his hat. He drew a briefcase in his own hand. He tried to imagine what his face would look like when it filled out, got square-jawed and handsome the way a man’s face should be. How he would style his hair when he became a Husband. Whether he would grow a beard. Painstakingly, he drew a double Windsor knot in his future tie, which Martin considered the most masculine and elite knot.

And finally, barely able to breathe with longing, he outlined the long, gorgeous arc of a baby’s carriage, the graceful fall of a lace curtain so that the pencilled child wouldn’t get sunburned, big wheels capable of a smoothness that bordered on the ineffable. He put the carriage handle into his own firm hand. It took Martin two hours to turn himself into a Husband. When the spell was finished, he spritzed the drawing with some of his mother’s hairspray so that it wouldn’t smudge and folded it up flat and small. He kept it in his shirt pocket. Some days, he could feel the drawing move with his heart. And when Father hugged him, the paper would crinkle pleasantly between them, like a whispered promise.

STATIC OVERPRESSURE

The day of Sylvie’s Presentation broke with a dawn beyond red, beyond blood or fire. She lay in her spotless white and narrow bed, quite awake, gazing at the colors through her Sentinel Gamma Glass window—lower rates of corneal and cellular damage than their leading competitors, guaranteed. Today, the sky could only remind Sylvie of birth. The screaming scarlet folds of clouds, the sun’s crowning head. Sylvie knew it was the hot ash that made every sunrise and sunset into a torture of magenta and violet and crimson, the superheated cloud vapor that never cooled. She winced as though red could hurt her—which of course it could. Everything could.

Sylvie had devoted a considerable amount of time to imagining how this day would go. She did not worry and she was not afraid, but it had always sat there in her future, unmovable, a mountain she could not get through or around. There would be tests, for intelligence, for loyalty, for genetic defects, for temperament, for fertility, which wasn’t usually a problem for women but better safe than sorry. Better safe than assign a Husband to a woman as barren as California. There would be a medical examination so invasive it came all the way around to no big deal. When a doctor can get that far inside you, into your blood, your chromosomes, your potentiality and all your possible futures, what difference could her white gloved fingers on your cervix make?

None of that pricked up her concern. The tests were nothing. Sylvie prided herself on being realistic about her qualities. First among these was her intellect; like her mother Hannah she could cut glass with the diamond of her mind. Second was her silence. Sylvie had discovered when she was quite small that adults were discomfited by silence. It brought them running. And when she was angry, upset, when the world offended her, Sylvie could draw down a coil of silence all around her, showing no feeling at all, until whoever had affronted her grew so uncomfortable that they would beg forgiveness just to end the ordeal. There was no third, not really. She was what her mother’s friends called striking, but never pretty. Narrow frame, small breasts, short and dark. Nothing in her matched up with the fashionable Midwestern fertility goddess floor-model. And she heard what they did not say, also—that she was not pretty because there was something off in her features, a ghost in her cheekbones, her height, her straight, flat hair.

Sylvie gave up on the fantasy of sliding back into sleep. She flicked on the radio by her bed: Brylcreem Makes a Man a Husband! announced a tinny woman’s voice, followed by a cheerful blare of brass and the morning’s reading from the Book of Pseudo-Matthew. Sylvie preferred Luke. She opened her closet as though today’s clothes had not been chosen for years, hanging on the wooden rod behind all the others, waiting for her to grow into them. She pulled out the dress and draped it over her bed. It lay there like another girl. Someone who looked just like her but had already moved through the hours of the day and come out on the other side. The red sky turned the deep neckline into a gash.

She was not ready for it yet.

Sylvie washed her body with the milled soap provided by Spotless Corp. Bright as a pearl, wrapped in white muslin and a golden ribbon. It smelled strongly of rose and mint and underneath, a blue chemical tang. The friendly folks at Spotless also supplied hair rinse, cold cream, and talcum for her special day. All the bottles and cakes smelled like that, like growing things piled on top of something biting, corrosive. The basket had arrived last month with a bow and a dainty card attached congratulating her. Until now it had loomed in her room like a Christmas tree, counting down. Now Sylvie pulled the regimented colors and fragrances out and applied them precisely, correctly, according to directions. An oyster-pink shade called The Blossoming of the Rod on her fingernails, which may not be cut short. A soft peach called Penance on her eyes, which may not be lined. Pressed powder (The Visitation of the Dove) should be liberally applied, but only the merest breath of blush (Parable of the Good Harlot) is permitted. Sylvie pressed a rosy champagne stain (Armistice) onto her lips with a forefinger. Hair must be natural and worn long—no steamsetting or straightening allowed. Everyone broke that rule, though. Who could tell a natural curl from a roller these days? Sylvie combed her black hair out and clipped it back with the flowers assigned to her county this year—snowdrops for hope and consolation. Great bright thornless roses as red as the sky for love at first sight, for passion and lust.