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It is not that I thirsted for Milo’s dreams. I could have had better from any rice-cooker salesman on Blue Street, marbled with darkness and longing for kisses like maple sap. But Rafu stood in the shadows of Milo’s house, wrapped in the grassy yellow-green perfume of new tatami, showing the stars through her skin, laughing when I told her the jokes Yatsuhashi had snorted to me on the morning train. I rocked on my haunches below her and showed her all the things I could be: tapir, tiger, salaryman, shadow, water.
I forgot to fix my mouth to the sailor’s wife. Her sawdust-dreams did not glisten. She cried in her sleep, chasing ships I wished to know nothing of, lost in her tired colonial despair.
I lost weight, as lovers will do.
On the seventh night I knew my Rafu, I unfolded into a silk screen with lonely tapirs drinking from a moonlit stream painted on my panels. I wanted so to please her. We stood side by side, saying nothing, content. Delicate snow came dancing down the windows. Milo slept on her mat below us and did not see our still, silent lovemaking.
“I can do that too,” said Rafu coquettishly, when we had finished and sweat shone like water on our screens. “I can fold up into a tapir, a tiger, a salaryman, shadow, water. A girl.”
“Show me!”
“Not yet,” she demurred.
BECAUSE OF HER NAKEDNESS
“Come away from this tailless old alley cat,” I begged my Rafu, resplendent in the night, golden against the dark. “I have an apartment above Blue Street. I will never throw clothing over you. I will show you the secret Peacocks of Right Intention, who make their nests in the Admiral’s mansion and peck at him when he orders his men to stand in ridiculous lines and speak the nonsense of demonkind. He cannot see them—the poor man thinks he has eczema. It is an excellent joke. I will take you walking through the Carnival of Right Livelihood, and we will eat black sugar burnt in the Ovens of Contentment. You can take the Baku-train with me every night and continue your study of women—I will eat only the dreams of women for your sake! Into the pachinko parlors we will go, hoof in hinge, and in the plinking of those silver balls we alone will hear the clicking movements of stars in perfect orbit and know that nothing is chance.”
Rafu blushed—her panels blossomed with scarlet as though she could bleed. Milo snored and turned over in her sleep, murmuring in phantom agony, her brown hair caught in her wet mouth. Rafu watched her, tipping slightly toward the woman.
“No, Akakabu, passion of my elderly years! I love her. I love her, and I will never leave her.”
“How can you love such a thing?”
“I love her because of her nakedness, Kabu. She has stood before me and peeled off all her clothes until she was utterly defenseless, her breasts and her shoulders and her lonely sex all for me, for my view, my love, my pity. I know that she had her tongue pierced when she was a girl but took it out when she married. I know that her right breast is somewhat larger than her left, that she has a birthmark at the base of her spine as though someone punched her, and that she has stretch marks on her belly, but no children, for there is nothing here for her to do but eat. These are such precious things to know! I knew them about Chieko, and Kayo, and Masumi, and Aoi too. They all showed me their bodies, and how the world stamped itself onto them. I have not even seen your body the way my mistresses show me theirs. She has been naked before me, Kabu, and I will not abandon a naked girl to the cold.”
FIRST LADIES
I admit I was angry, that it was my fault in the end. I begrudged Rafu her naked women, her secret lovemaking in lonely houses full of women who would never see the green and purple of the Peacocks of Right Intention. I wanted to show my Jotai that a Baku, too, can know a human that way, and better, for no one is ever so naked as in their dreams, where everything shameful and bright glistens like sweet fat over bone.
I curled up into Milo’s heavy sleeping arms, snarling at Rafu, gloating, taking up that flaccid Western mouth in mine and sucking down all her old, buried things, her grief and her loneliness and her cream-thick guilt, her tawdry affair in Okinawa, her lost lover who used to kiss her toes as though she were an angel that might confer blessing. I ate it all, greedily, slovenly. I ate her husband who left her, his sword and his gun and his curling, saluting smile. I writhed against Milo, my black tapir belly taut with her, hard and swollen, grinding into her, sliding off of the hard little cherry pit at the base of her dreams, scraping at it, breaking my teeth on the stone of her soul.
Rafu turned away from me in shame.
Milo wrapped her arms around me and opened her eyes. “All the other wives have First Ladies’ names,” she whispered, her voice sand-slurred with sleep. “Hillary, Laura, Eleanor, Pat, Libby. What’s wrong with me?”
“You were supposed to be a boy,” I said cruelly, because I chose to be cruel. “If you had been born as you were meant to, you would get to march about with a fine rifle and shoot at things and drink whiskey and have a lovely time, and no one would ever have left you.”
“Oh,” Milo said with finality, as though it had finally been explained to her satisfaction. She fell asleep again.
CREATURES OF STOMACH
I am sure it has happened before. We are creatures of stomach, after all. My mother told me when I was small and spotted that the first Baku was nothing but a great violet-translucent stomach, maybe with a bit of esophagus, and it floated over rooftops on stormy days, descending to cover sleepers like a blanket and draw up all their dreams into itself with perfect retention. In those days, no one remembered their dreams at all, so deft was the Baku in its slurping of them.
That Baku surely was blameless, but I am not. I ate too much Milo; I was so full of her my hiccups turned into anchors and dolphins and swam away through the night. Rafu rustled disgust—her gold flushed a jaundiced yellow, so deep was her disapproval of my gluttony.
I only did it to hurt you, my silken love, my Rafu, my vanished adored. I think that makes it better.
I tottered on my fat paws, skidding on the slick tatami, drunk, queasy. My skin felt too thick; I wanted to take it off, to go naked before Rafu and be loved as the women in her life had been. I deserved that, didn’t I? I careened into a wooden candlestick, bounced off of a low table of red wood, bruised my snout on Rafu’s corner; she clattered to the floor.
I threw up on the grass mats and lolled in my decrepitude beside my waste.
THE UNRUSHED FAMILIARITY OF A HUSBAND
A man lay on the floor. The substance of my retching. I vomited up Milo’s dream, and it lay on the floor in a white uniform streaked with the silvery stuff of my digestion: tears, the honey of lost days, sweat, night-semen. His officer’s cap tumbled off onto the tatami; his hair was wet and matted like a newborn’s.
He stirred; Rafu held her slats together in terror, as silent as she could be. The man crawled to Milo’s sleeping shape and curled into it as I had done, with the unrushed familiarity of a husband, or a frequent Baku. He kissed her hair, left streaks of silver on her neck. I watched from the shadows as he called her name and she rolled into waking, rolled into him, her face unfolding into a smile as I sometimes unfold into a man.
“How are you here?” she marveled, as well she might.
