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He turned to bite down on a crippled old woman with a cane and a bend in her back like a stair. Her skinny arms were full of silver pachinko balls. She was winning, of course she was winning. His invisible teeth shattered on her dry old skull, scraping off her jaw. She smiled quietly to herself.
“There is a pit in every dream that cannot be eaten,” I said to Rafu. I was so tired. This was a lesson for baby Baku. “It will break you if you try it. Naturally it is the most delicious thing in a dream, and we have all had to learn to curb our desire for it. And in the dream of the Pure Land, the dream Yokosuka dreams waking and sleeping, an old woman sits in a pachinko parlor, our indestructible core, indestructible because she does not know she is the sweetest thing in the world.”
The dream of Gabriel was breaking apart, spilling the silver dream fluid onto the floor, shuddering, shaking, crying out for help. I did not care.
But Rafu opened her arms to him, and ah, I should have known—we are each slaves to our own natures, even in the Paradise of the Pure Land, especially here, and if I know only how to eat, she knows only how to conceal, how to hide a thing from shame. Her arms flipped open, square screen by square screen, and she enveloped him so suddenly he could not move, clapped him up entirely in herself, all wall of golden Rafu.
The dream-Gabriel sobbed in her grasp. The things he had devoured began to tear out of him: 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. The Seven Goddesses of Perfect Chance. They burst from him in his weakness—and burst through the body of Rafu, which was no more than silk, not really, leaving her skin hanging, ragged, torn threads fluttering in the breeze of falling silver.
THEN I WOKE UP
It was only a dream. Sometimes they say that, at the end of stories, in the land where Milo was born. And then I woke up—it was only a dream.
Stories here do not end like that. I cannot wake up. I do not sleep.
Milo cannot wake up. If she could, she would see in her house: a low table of red wood, several windows, a television, chocolate, a peach, a salmon rice-ball, and her friend Chieko’s screen, shattered as though a cannonball had struck it, in a broken pile on the tatami. If she could wake up, she would have to get a new one—they can always get a new anything, these humans.
Only you can wake up, out of all of us, and be relieved. You can assure yourself that we never really existed, that Yokosuka is only a broken old military town, that folding screens never speak with voices like thread spooling. I will leave it all intact for you.
I am fasting now, anyway. I have my penance to pay.
Yet eating dreams is an essential act of waste management in the Paradise of the Pure Land. I did my duty. I swallowed the wreckage of the dream-vomit I spilled out of myself, and also the wreckage of Milo, sodden with seawater. I cleaned everything up, don’t you see? It’s all just the way it was before.
On the 6:17 commuter train, Yatsuhashi told me a joke about a geisha who wouldn’t wear her wig. It rambled and was not funny. Yatsuhashi-san is an idiot. The apartment above Blue Street is empty because she is gone. She was never here, of course—I never brought her to my threshold, I never served her tea with the exquisite abasement of which I am capable. I never showed her the jellyfish. But once there was a glowing cord between our houses, hers tatami-golden and tall, just down the hill from Anjinsuka Station, mine clean and neat as dreams cannot be, polished with a spongey, devoted snout. But in dreams, one can feel the absence of a thing that never was, and so can I.
Rafu will never come here now; the emptiness is permanent.
The Paradise of the Pure Land remains. It is bigger than all of us and notices nothing. It sprawls by the sea, a reef of light, and as I trundle down the leaf-strewn length of Blue Street, the whole of the Pure Land turns to you as if to say something, something important, something profound.
And then you wake up. After all, it is only a dream.
GHOSTS OF GUNKANJIMA
Gunkanjima, or Battleship Island, is a tiny island in Nagasaki Prefecture on which coal was discovered in 1810. A boom followed, and the island was heavily populated and owned from seabed to rooftop by the Mitsubishi Corporation. At one point it was the single most densely populated area on the planet, before or since. Everything was imported to the island, including building materials—not even a blade of grass grew there. Japan’s first concrete buildings were erected to house workers, who tunneled deep under the sea to find the vital coal. Eventually overpopulation and dwindling output began the island’s decline—in 1974 it was permanently closed by Mitsubishi Corp. All remaining workers were sent elsewhere. Today, it is forbidden to all visitors and is being slowly reclaimed by nature.
During WWII, some 1,300 Chinese and Korean slave laborers died there.
The wind here always tasted like metal.
Xiao, Xiao, come to bed. The stair-ferns are soft; the stars are coming through the walls like mice.
* * *
The wind here always tasted of metal, steel come clattering up through the rotten slats of the bridges.
Xiao, the mushrooms have made pillows of the tatami—lay your head next to mine and stop this. No good comes from remembering it.
The wind here always tasted of metal, steel come clattering up through the rotten slats of the bridges strung like laundry between towers, a wheel of knives carving my arches.
Xiao, the old soggy suitcases have opened up; they are packed with grasses and fishtails wizened to moth’s wings. Come fold yourself up with me like a shirt—the sleeve of me longs for the cuffs of you.
* * *
The air moves through itself with pointed toes, each foot creaking a slab of wood, a slab of step in the latticework of bridges and ladders and staircases that connect a city without roads. Up and down the air goes, a tightrope performer with a net of stone, a net of buildings whose teeth have long shattered and fallen out, leaving only jagged crowns to catch the creaking wind. The sound echoes until it strikes the seawall and is swallowed.
The air smoothes its hands on a sightless skirt. It whistles through a window without glass and stares at a bottle left standing, as if someone meant to come back for it. The dust on it is thick as soil. The room is crowded with stale breath, breath reeking of coal dust and seaweed and tobacco and unwashed socks. The air remembers that the Kim brothers lived here before they drowned, all seven of them, in a six-tatami hovel at the top of a tower. They had pimples and kept a cricket as a pet. They fed it pig-gristle carefully culled from seven dinners.
A sewing machine does not protest the delicate spiders which stitch their webs over its casing. There is no chirping in the corner, but the air hears it anyway.
