The Melancholy of Mechagirl

Thomas Walker squeezed his brother’s hand. Martin did not squeeze back.

VELOCITY MULTIPLIED BY DURATION

Sylvie’s Father was with them that week. He was proud. They bought a chicken from Mrs. Stone and killed it together, as a family. The head popped off like a cork. Sylvie stole glances at him at the table. She could see it now. The chocolate hair. The tallness. Hannah framed her Presentation Scroll and hung it over the fireplace.

Sylvie flushed her Spotless trousseaux down the toilet.

She wasn’t angry. You can’t get angry just because the world’s so much bigger than you and you’re stuck in it. That’s just the face of it, cookie. A poisoned earth, a sequined dress, a speculum you can play like the spoons. Sylvie wasn’t angry. She was silent. Her life was Mrs. Patterson’s life. People lived in all kinds of messes. She could make rum balls. And treat soil samples and graft cherry varieties and teach some future son or daughter J

apanese three weeks a month where no one else could hear. She could look up Bouffant’s friend and buy her a stiff drink. She could enjoy the brief world of solitude and science and birth like red skies dawning. Maybe. She had time.

It was all shit, like that Polish kid who used to hang around the soda fountain kept saying. It was definitely all shit.

On Sunday she went out to the garage again. Vita-Pops and shadows. Clark slipped in like light through a crack. He had a canister of old war footage under his arm. Stalingrad, Berlin, Ottawa. Yellow shirt with green stripes. Nagasaki and Tokyo, vaporizing like hearts in a vast, wet chest. The first retaliation. Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles. Clark reached out and held her hand. She didn’t squeeze back. The silent detonations on the white sheet like sudden balloons, filling up and up and up. It looked like the inside of Sylvie.

“This is my last visit,” Clark said. “School year’s over.” His voice sounded far away, muffled, like he didn’t even know he was talking. “Car’s coming in the morning. Me and Grud are sharing a ride to Induction. I think we get a free lunch.”

Sylvie wanted to scream at him. She sucked down her pop, drowned the scream in bubbles.

“I love you,” whispered Clark Baker.

On the sheet, the Golden Gate Bridge vanished.

Sylvie rolled the reel back. They watched it over and over. A fleck of nothing dropping out of the sky and then, then the flash, a devouring, brain-boiling, half-sublime sheet of white that blossomed like a flower out of a dead rod, an infinite white everything that obliterated the screen.

Fade to black.

And over the black, a cheerful fat man giving the thumbs up to Sylvie, grinning:

Buy Freedom Brand Film! It’s A-OK!

THE EMPEROR OF TSUKAYAMA PARK

When first the word was spoken, I heard:

Tsuki-yama—Lord Moon.

And for me, the moon settled onto a dais, with

sixteen-pointed chrysanthemums in his phosphor-hands,

topknot oiled with seaweed and orange,

his hakama fringed in silver worms

which wove on and on,

flooding the nightingale-floor with silk.

The folds of his sleeves creased blue and black

in signet-shadows, descending like stairs to me,

in a poor, threadbare yukata,

my sallow Western skin protruding,

forehead pressed to his white tatami.