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.
* * *
Hsin. Wake up. It is time to go to work.
Work? Watching paper dissolve to dirt? Watching spectacles rust? The coal is gone; there is nothing to dredge up. Why don’t we go down to the east wall and watch the tide strangle the shore?
Hsin. If you do not get up you will be punished. You are assigned to the sea-shaft today—that’s twelve bridges across the roofs and all those stairs, all those stairs down to the mine mouth. And there is rain.
Xiao, pretty sparrow-wife, who will punish me? The foremen are gone, everything is gone, there are only the quiet termites boring through banisters, and they do not care if we are tardy.
Please, please wake up. I am tired too, my bones are full of black too, my spine wavers in me like a flapping flag, but I am ready, I am going to my assignment. We must make the best of it.
No. I won’t go back there, not there.
* * *
The air disturbs needle-leaved weeds—there is green on Gunkanjima, now. It is a corpse; corpses are always gardens. Caterpillars wriggle in its gutters; out of its stone lips sprout loud mustaches of greenery—the air moves its hand over them and sees nothing, sees only the splintered staircases winding down past their own shadows. Somewhere down there is the entrance to the long, dripping jaw—a shaft sunk deep below the sea, a shaft that vomited up black sludge and bile and bodies.
The air does not want to go down into it.
It never dug those ant tracks through the basalt, but Chen and Zhao did, Chen and Zhao who met washing the soot from their faces, Chen and Zhao who told endless jokes about the carpenter and his angry hammer when all the candles had guttered, who filled their floor with muffled laughter. Chen and Zhao—and Hsin, who was never late, and whose breath smelled of sour plums. They all came back to the towers, towers bristling the island like a brush, they all came back with damp shoulders, damp from that cool, wet tunnel where their palms turned black.
The air does not want to go down. Old voices come up through broken stairs like ferns; ferns throw roots down through broken stairs like voices—the air sits down heavily and puts its head in its hands.
* * *
Hsin, it’s dark. The wind—
Tastes like metal, yes. It’s always dark in the lower levels—the towers eat the sun. Come back up, you don’t want to be down there, down with the algae and the old rain and the rusted pipes.
It’s dark, dark like the inside of a bone. Why do I wake up here, Hsin, with a drainage grate for my pillo
w? The bars, the bars in my flesh—
Because you fell, Xiao. You wake up there because you fell.
I fell?
You wake up down there and then you come running to me to wake me up for a shift I worked sixty years ago. You don’t see the puddle I sleep in every night, the seawater that falls out of my mouth whenever I speak, the coal-phlegm that coats my hair. You never see it, not since the sea came in, but it’s all right, it’s all right—
The sea came in—
The sea came in, my love, the sea came in through a crack in the shaft ceiling—I saw it open like a womb releasing its water. I stared at it; I could not move—
The sea came in and I fell—
The sea came in and Zhao put his arms over my head but my mouth was full of salt, full of salt, and Zhao floated up in the rush, in the foam, he floated in the foam and I could see his blue shirt tear on the rocks—
Yes. And the Kims’ cricket sat on the tatami, waiting for its supper. It waited and I fell, it waited and I fell and it sang as I fell and its song stopped when the grate broke me in pieces—
The sea came in and my mouth was full of salt but at least I was clean, I was clean in the dark and the helmet lights went out one by one and it was so dark down there in the mine mouth and the water—
tasted like metal.
tasted like metal.
And I fell, I fell from the bridge-labyrinth, I put my feet onto the boards, onto the slats, and I balanced there like a circus girl, arms out, arms out, and I could hear the sea sucking through the shaft, a hole in the sea where the shaft was, and I remembered Zhao’s blue shirt and the carpenter with his hammer, I remembered your plums and the prickle of your mustache on my lips, I remembered how your cheeks tasted always of coal, and I fell, I fell so far, through all those bridges and ropes and stairs, I fell and the cricket sang and the drainage grate came thudding through me—
Xiao, Xiao, hush, it’s all right, you don’t have to remember it. No good comes of remembering it.
The wind, oh, the wind screaming up to me—
Darling, darling, it doesn’t matter now. Hush, hush, the mushrooms are soft, the ferns are a sweet-smelling bed—
Hsin, you have to wake up. You’ll be punished if you don’t wake up—
* * *
On Gunkanjima, there is nothing but air. It inhabits empty rooms; it disturbs shoe tongues left splayed on the grassy floor; it rustles the shreds of ceiling paper that hang down like prayers tied to the branches of black trees.
It falls. It climbs back up with the sun to lie exhausted on a sodden floor beside itself.
The tide rolls in and out again.
THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT SPACE/ TIME
I.
In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was a high-density pre-baryogenesis singularity. Darkness lay over the deep and God moved upon the face of the hyperspatial matrix. He separated the firmament from the quark-gluon plasma and said: Let there be particle/anti-particle pairs, and there was light. He created the fish of the sea and the fruits of the trees, the moon and the stars and the beasts of the earth, and to these he said: Go forth, be fruitful and mutate. And on the seventh day, the rest mass of the universe came to gravitationally dominate the photon radiation, hallow it, and keep it.
God, rapidly redshifting, hurriedly formed Man from the dust of single-celled organisms, called him Adam, and caused him to dwell in the Garden of Eden, to classify the beasts according to kingdom, phylum, and species. God forbade Man only to eat from the Tree of Meiosis. Adam did as he was told, and as a reward God instructed him in the ways of parthenogenesis. Thus was Woman born and called Eve. Adam and Eve dwelt in the pre-quantum differentiated universe, in a paradise without wave-particle duality. But interference patterns came to Eve in the shape of a Serpent, and wrapping her in its matter/antimatter coils, it said: Eat from the Tree of Meiosis and your eyes will be opened. Eve protested that she would not break covenant with God, but the Serpent answered: Fear not, for you float in a random quantum-gravity foam, and from a single bite will rise an inexorable inflation event, and you will become like unto God, expanding forever outward.
And so Eve ate from the Tree and knew that she was a naked child of divergent universes. She took the fruit to Adam and said unto him: There are things you do not understand, but I do. And Adam was angry and snatched the fruit from Eve and devoured it, and from beyond the cosmic background radiation, God sighed, for all physical processes are reversible in theory—but not in practice. Man and Woman were expelled from the Garden, and a flaming sword was placed through the Gates of Eden as a reminder that the universe would now contract and someday perish in a conflagration of entropy, only to increase in density, burst, and expand again, causing further high velocity redistributions of serpents, fruit, men, women, helium-3, lithium-7, deuterium, and helium-4.
II.
This is a story about being born.
No one remembers being born. The beginnings of things are very difficult.
A science fiction writer on the Atlantic coast once claimed to remember being born. When she was a child, she thought a door was open which was not, and ran full-tilt into a pane of plate glass. The child version of the science fiction writer lay bleeding onto a concrete patio, not yet knowing that part of her thigh was gone and would always be gone, like Zeus’s thigh, where the lightning god sewed up his son Dionysus to gestate. Something broke inside the child, a thing having to do with experience and memory, which in normal children travel in opposite directions, with memory accumulating and experience running out—slowly, but speeding up as children hurtle toward adulthood and death. What the science fiction writer actually remembered was not her own birth, but a moment when she struck the surface of the glass and her brain stuttered, layering several experiences one over the other:
the scissoring pain of the shards of glass in her thighs,
having once fallen into a square of wet concrete on a construction site on her way to school and her father pulling her out by her arms,
her first kiss, below an oak tree turning red and brown in the autumn, when a boy interrupted her reciting Don Quixote with his lips on hers.
This fractured, unplanned layering became indistinguishable from an actual memory of being born. It is not her fault; she believed she remembered it. But no one remembers being born.
The doctors sewed up her thigh. There was no son in her leg, but a small, dark, empty space beneath her skin where a part of her used to be. Sometimes she touches it, absentmindedly, when she is trying to think of a story.
III.
In the beginning was the simple self-replicating cell of the Void. It split through the center of Ursa Major into the divine female Izanami and the divine male Izanagi, who knew nothing about quantum apples and lived on the iron-sulfur Plain of Heaven. They stood on the Floating Bridge of Heaven and plunged a static atmospheric discharge spear into the great black primordial sea, churning it and torturing it until oligomers and simple polymers rose up out of the depths. Izanami and Izanagi stepped onto the greasy islands of lipid bubbles and in the first light of the world, each saw that the other was beautiful.
Between them, they catalyzed the formation of nucleotides in an aqueous solution and raised up the Eight-Sided Palace of Autocatalytic Reactions around the unmovable RNA Pillar of Heaven. When this was done, Izanami and Izanagi walked in opposite chiral directions around the Pillar, and when Izanami saw her mate, she cried out happily: How lovely you are, and how versatile are your nitrogenous bases! I love you! Izanagi was angry that she had spoken first and privileged her proto-genetic code over his. The child that came of their paleo-protozoic mating was as a silver anaerobic leech, helpless, archaeaic, invertebrate, and unable to convert lethal super-oxides. They set him in the sky to sail in the Sturdy Boat of Heaven, down the starry stream of alternate electron acceptors for respiration. Izanagi dragged Izanami back to the Pillar. They walked around it again in a left-handed helix that echoed
forward and backward through the biomass, and when Izanagi saw his wife, he crowed: How lovely you are, and how ever-increasing your metabolic complexity! I love you! And because Izanami was stonily silent, and Izanagi spoke first, elevating his own proto-genetic code, the children that came from them were strong and great: Gold and Iron and Mountain and Wheel and Honshu and Kyushu and Emperor—until the birth of her son, Fiery Permian-Triassic Extinction Event, burned her up and killed the mother of the world.
Izanami went down into the Root Country, the Land of the Dead. But Izanagi could not let her go into a place he had not gone first, and pursued her into the paleontological record. He became lost in the dark of abiogenetic obsolescence and lit the teeth of his jeweled comb ablaze to show the way—and saw that he walked on the body of Izanami, which had become the fossil-depository landscape of the Root Country, putrid, rotting, full of mushrooms and worms and coprolites and trilobites. In hatred and grief and memory of their first wedding, Izanami howled and heaved and moved the continents one from the other until Izanagi was expelled from her.
When he stumbled back into the light, Izanagi cleaned the pluripotent filth from his right eye, and as it fell upon the ground it became the quantum-retroactive Sun. He cleaned the zygotic filth from his left eye, and as it fell upon the ground it became the temporally subjective Moon. And when he cleaned the nutrient-dense filth from his nose, it drifted into the air and became the fractal, maximally complex, petulant Storms and Winds.
IV.
When the science fiction writer was nineteen, she had a miscarriage. She had not even known she was pregnant. But she bled and bled and it didn’t stop, and the doctor explained to her that sometimes this happens when you are on a certain kind of medication. The science fiction writer could not decide how to feel about it—ten years later, after she had married the father of the baby-that-wasn’t and divorced him, after she had written a book about methane-insectoid cities floating in the brume of a pink gas giant that no one liked very much, she still could not decide how to feel. When she was nineteen she put her hands over her stomach and tried to think of a timeline where she had stayed pregnant. Would it have been a daughter. Would it have had blue eyes like its father. Would it have had her Danish nose or his Greek one. Would it have liked science fiction, and would it have grown up to be an endocrinologist. Would she have been able to love it. She put her hands over her stomach and tried to be sad. She couldn’t. But she couldn’t be happy either. She felt that she had given birth to a reality where she would never give birth.