The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection
- Автор: Датлоу Эллен, Виндлинг Терри
- Год: 1992
- Язык: английский
- Год: St.Martin’s Press
- Жанр: Ужасы
Электронная книга - «The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection». Краткое содержание книги:
My grandfather had taken me to my first communion. Nobody else came. He knelt beside me and shouted out loud: “These damned priests don’t know what this ritual really means.” They made him wait outside the church.
God I hated my childhood. I hated South Dakota.
The man stared back at me with naked interest. I hadn’t seen that here before either. People never looked you in the eye here. I had become an invisible woman. It occurred to me then that we were invisible together, he and I.
I stopped listening to Esmeralda, who was babbling on about the social life of the city of Sapporo—explaining that it wasn’t all beer, that the shiny-modern office buildings and squeaky-clean avenues were no more than a veneer—and just stared at the man. Although he was looking straight at me, he never stopped sketching.
“Anyway, hon, I’ll give you my card . . . and . . . here’s where the reception’s going to be . . . the Otani Prince Towers . . . rooftop, with a mind-boggling view of the snow sculptures being finished up.” Esmeralda made to leave, and I said something perfunctory about seeing her again soon.
Then I added, “Do you know who that man is?”
“That’s Ishii, the snow sculptor. Aren’t you here to interview him?”
It showed how confused I’d become after seeing my fellow traveler lying dead in the snow. Aki Ishii was one of the grand masters on my list of people to see; I had his photograph in my files. It had been black and white, though. I couldn’t have expected those eyes.
And he was already walking toward me, taking the long way around the cloister.
He said to me: “Transience and beauty . . .’’He was a soffspoken man. “Transience and beauty are the cornerstones of my art. It was Goethe, I think, who said that all transient things are only metaphors . . . should we seize this moment, Miss Wounded Bird? Or is the time not yet ripe for an interview?”
“You know me?” I said. I had suddenly, unaccountably, become afraid. Perhaps it was because there were only the two of us now . . . even the corpse had been carried off, and the Americans had tramped away down the cloister.
The temperature fell even more. At last I started to shiver.
“I know you, Miss Wounded Bird—perhaps you will let me call you ‘Marie’— because the Tribune was kind enough to send me a letter. I knew who you were at once. Something about your body language, your sense of displacement; you were that way even with your fellow countrymen. I understand that, you see, because I am Ainu.”
The Ainu ... it began to make sense. The Ainu were the aboriginal inhabitants of this island—blue-eyed neolithic nomads pushed into the cold by the manifest destiny of the Japanese conquerors. There were only 15,000 pure-blooded Ainu left. They were like the Lakota—like my people. We were both strangers in our own land.
It occurred to me that I was on the trail of a great story, an important story. Oh, covering the festival would have been interesting enough—there’s nothing quite like the Sapporo Snow Festival in all the world, acres and acres of snow being built up into vast edifices that dissolve at the first thaw. It’s all some Zen-like affirmation of beauty and transience, I had been told . . . and now I was hearing the grand master himself utter those words over the site of a sex murder . . . hearing them applied with equal aptness to both art and reality.
“Perhaps I could escort you to the reception, Marie?” he said. Behind his Japanese accent there was a hint of some other language, perhaps German. I seemed to remember from his dossier that he had, in his youth, studied in Heidelberg under a scholarship from the Goethe-Institut. It was quaint but kind of attractive. I started to like him.
We left the rock garden together. He had an American car—a Mustang— parked by the gate. “I know the steering wheel is on the wrong side,” he said apologetically, “but HI drive carefully, I promise.”
He didn’t. The thirty kilometers back into downtown Sapporo were terrifying. We lurched, we hydroplaned, we skidded, past tiny temples enveloped in snow, past ugly postmodernist apartments, past row houses with walls of rice paper crammed along alleyways. Snow bent the branches of the trees to breaking. The sunset glittered on roofs of glossy tile, orange-green or cobalt blue. I was glad he was driving with such abandon. It made me think less of Molly Danzig, laughing over how she’d been fleecing the rubes at the karaoke bar, trading raunchy stories about men she had known, wolfing down airline food in between giggles . . . Molly Danzig, who in death had become part of an ordered elegance she had never evinced in the twelve hours I had sat beside her on the plane from San Francisco.
The reception was, of course, a massive spectacle. These people really knew how to lay on a spread. The top floor of the hotel had been converted into a Styrofoam and plastic replica of the winter wonderland outside. Three chefs worked like maniacs behind an eighty-foot sushi bar. Elsewhere, cooks in silly pseudo-French uniforms sliced patisseries, carved roasts, and ladled soup out of swan-shaped tureens. Chandeliers sparkled. Plastic snowflakes rained down from a device in the ceiling. You could have financed a feature film by hocking the clothes on these people’s backs—Guccis, Armanis, Diors—a few of those $5,000 kimonos. Although Aki had thrown on a stylish black leather duster, I found myself hopelessly underdressed for this shindig. It didn’t help that everyone was studiously ignoring us. Aki and I seemed to be walking around in a private bubble of indifference.
One wall was all glass. You could see down into Odori Park, on the other side of Sapporo’s three-hundred-feet-wide main drag. The snow sculptures were taking shape. Once the festival started they would be floodlit. Now they were ghostly hulks haunching up toward the moon. This year’s theme was “Ancient Times”; there was a half-formed Parthenon at one end of the park, a Colosseum in the foreground, an Egyptian temple complete with Sphinx, a Babylonian ziggurat . . . all snow.
A huge proscenium filled one end of the lounge, and on it stood a corpulent man who was crooning drunkenly into a microphone. The song appeared to be a disco version of “Strangers in the Night.” There was no band.
“Jesus!” I said. “They should shoot the singer.”
“That would hardly be wise,” Aki said. “That man is Dr. Mayuzumi himself.”
“Karaoke?” I said. There’s only one karaoke bar in Oakland and I’d never been to it. This fit the description all right. As Dr. Mayuzumi left the stage to desultory applause, someone else was pushed up onto the stage amid gales of laughter. It turned out to be Esmeralda O’Neil. She began singing a Japanese pop song, complete with ersatz Motown gestures and dance steps.
“Oh,” Aki said, “but this is the club where your . . . friend . . . used to work. Miss . . . Danzig.” He pronounced her name Danjigu.
“Let’s get a stiff drink,” I said at last.
We went and sat at the sushi bar. We had some hot sake, and then Aki ordered food. The chef pulled a pair of live jumbo shrimp out of a tank, made a few lightning passes with his knife, and placed two headless shrimp on the plate. Their tails wiggled.