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:
Polite laughter; I had a vision of Ronald McDonald prancing around with a samurai sword.
I thought the preamble would end soon; it turned out to be interminable. But they had promised a vast buffet afterwards at the expense of the Mayuzumi Foundation. I saw Mayuzumi himself, sitting alone in a box on the upper tier, like royalty. Esmeralda and I were near the front, next to the aisle, with Aki between us. We were both wearing Hanae Mori gowns that we’d splurged on at the underground arcade.
The lights dimmed. The twang of a shamisen rent the air; then a spotlight illumined an ancient man in black who narrated, chanted, and uttered all the characters’ lines in a wheezing singsong. We were in for cultural syncretism indeed; the set—Herod’s palace in Judaea—had been transformed into a seventeenth-century Japanese castle, King Herod and his manipulative wife into a shogun and a geisha, and Salome into a princess with hair down to the floor. John the Baptist, for whom, in Oscar Wilde’s revisionist text, Salome was to conceive an illicit and finally necrophiliac passion, was a Jesuit missionary. The centerpiece of the stage was the massive cistern in which John lay imprisoned. It was such a fascinating interpretation that it was hard to remember that I was sitting next to a man whom I suspected of murder.
In bunraku, the puppeteers are dressed in black and make no attempt to conceal themselves as they operate their characters. There were three operators to each of the principals. It took only minutes for the puppeteers to fade into the background ... it made you think there was something to this ninja art of invisibility. The characters flitted about the stage, their eyelids fluttering, craning their necks and arching the palms of their hands, shrieking in paroxysms of emotion.
An American audience wouldn’t be this silent, I thought.
The eerie rhythms entranced me. The rasp of the shamisen, the shrill, sustained wailing of the flute, the hollow tock-tock-tock of the woodblock did not meld into a soothing, homophonous texture as in Western music. Each sound was an individual strand, stubbornly dissonant. The narrator sang, or sometimes spoke in a lisping falsetto. In one scene, as Salome, his voice crescendoed to a passionate shriek that seemed the very essence of a woman’s desire, a woman’s frustration. He knows me, I thought ... he has seen me running from my father, bursting with terror and love. I could hardly believe that a man could portray such feelings.
At the back of the auditorium, aficionados burst into uproarious cheering. From the context I guessed it was the moment when Salome demands to kiss John’s mouth and he rebuffs her, and idea of demanding his severed head first germinates in her mind ... for the Salome puppet threw herself across the floor of the stage, the three operators manipulating wildly as she flailed about in savage mimicry of a woman’s despair.
Jesus, I thought. I’ve been there.
I looked at Aki and found that he was looking behind us, up at Mayuzumi’s box. As applause continued, Mayuzumi made a little gesture with his right index finger. Aki whispered in Esmeralda’s ear. She said, “Gotta go, darlin’—be right back.” The two of them slipped into the aisle.
Was there some kinky triangle menage between them? I could see Aki and Esmeralda in leather and Mayuzumi all tied up—the slave master playing at being the slave . . . Esmeralda wasn’t inhibited like me. Maybe they had become so aroused they’d slipped away to one of those notorious coffee shops, the ones with the private booths.
I didn’t want to think about it too much, and after a while I became thoroughly engrossed in the play. I couldn’t follow the Japanese—it was all archaic—but I knew the original play, and the whole thing was in such a slow-motion style that you had plenty of time to figure things out.
There was the dance of the seven veils—not the Moroccan restaurant variety, but a sinuous ballet accompanied by drum and flute, and a faster section with jerky movements of the head and eyebrows and the arms obscenely caressing the air . . . the seven veils were seven bridal kimonos of embroidered brocade . . . the demand for the saint’s severed head with which to satiate Sarome-sama’s lust ... the executioner, his katana glittering in the arclight, descending into the cistern ... I gulped . . . how could they be wood and cloth when I could feel their naked emotions tearing loose from them? A drum began to pound, step by pounding step as the headsman disappeared into the oubliette.
The drums crescendoed ... the flute shrilled ... the shamisen snarled ... I heard screaming. It was my own.
A head was sailing out of the cistern, shooting up toward the stage flies ... a human head . . . Esmeralda’s head.
For a split second I saw her torso pop from the cistern. Blood came spurting up. The puppets’ kimonos were soaking. The torso thrashed and sprayed the front seats with blood. The claque began to applaud.
O Jesus Jesus it’s real—
The head thudded onto the stage. Its lifeless eyes stared up into mine. I was the only one screaming. Wildly I looked about me. People turned away from me. It was as if I were somehow to blame because I had screamed. An announcement started coming over a loudspeaker. There was no panic. The audience was filing slowly out by row number, moving with purposeful precision, like ants. No panic, no shrieks, no nervous laughter. It was numbing. Jesus, I thought, they’re aliens, they’re incapable of feeling anything. Only the foreign guests seemed distraught. They stood in little huddles, blocking the traffic as the rest of them politely oozed around them. The stagehands were scurrying across the stage, moving props about.
The Salome puppet flopped against the castle walls with its doll-neck wrung into an impossible angle.
I stared up at Mayuzumi’s box. Mayuzumi was gone.
Esmeralda’s head was gone. They were mopping up the blood. I could hear a police siren in the distance.
Then, up the center aisle, framed in the doorway between two columns of departing theatergoers, I saw Aki Ishii appear as if in a puff of smoke.
Sketching.
Sketching me.
Jesus Christ—maybe he’d lured her away to kill her! I couldn’t control my rage.
I started elbowing my way toward him. The audience backed away. Oh yes. We gaijin all have AIDS. Aki backed slowly toward the theater entrance. There was a shopping bag on his arm. The doors were flung wide and the snow was streaming down behind him and I was shivering in my Hanae Mori designer dress that wasn’t designed for snow or serial killers.
He backed into the street. The crowd parted. Men with stretchers trotted into the theater and a police siren screeched. I started to pummel him with my fists.
“Am I next?” I screamed. “Is that it? Are you sucking out our souls one by one to feed your art that’s going to turn to mush by Friday?”
He held his hands up. “It’s not like that at all,” he said.
The wind howled. I was hysterical by now. Fuck these people and their propriety. I shouted at a passing policeman, “Here’s your goddamn sex murderer!” He ignored me. “That shopping bag! The head’s in the shopping bag!” I tried to wrest it from him. I could feel something squishy inside it. There was blood on everything.
“How could you be so wrong?” Aki said. “How could you fail to understand me? I told you the truth. It’s not me—it’s—it’s—” His eyes glowed. That odor of honey and tobacco again . . . startled, I remembered where I’d smelled it before . . . on my grandfather’s breath. I kept on hitting him with my fists but my blows were weak, dampened by snow and by my own bewilderment. You’ve got no right, I was thinking, no right to bring me those bad dreams ... no right to remind me . . .