The Melancholy of Mechagirl

  sixteen-pointed chrysanthemums in his phosphor-hands,

  topknot oiled with seaweed and orange,

  his hakama fringed in silver worms

  which wove on and on,

  flooding the nightingale-floor with silk.

  The folds of his sleeves creased blue and black

  in signet-shadows, descending like stairs to me,

  in a poor, threadbare yukata,

  my sallow Western skin protruding,

  forehead pressed to his white tatami.

  For me, the moon extended a branch of heavy plums

  and with well-water eyes forgave my ignorance of protocol,

  my botched obi, my hair unpinned and ragged.

  When winter came to Tsukayama Park,

  it seemed to me that the strange-limbed tigers

  of his wall-hangings

  rumbled like clouds, and I was permitted to watch

  the sparrows spiral up to his ashen ear. Under his cratered arms,

  I knelt, and whispered tears into the hiragana of my palm-lines,

  obscuring the text with salt and snow.

  For him, I was always penitent.

  I did not question his rule over the cherry trees, the green tide,

  the steam of tea in a glazed cup. I allowed him to stifle

  my breath in twelve layers of white silk, to paint me a new mouth,

  to fold back my hair in beryl combs

  that cut my scalp with piscine teeth. For him, I pressed out my pride,

  flat as a river, and bowed my face to the floor.

  When summer came to Tsukayama Park

  it seemed to me that his voice was the thrust-cry of cicadas,

  that the wind beat drums of star-hide, that I had

  learnt the angle of the closed mouth

  well enough to pass for one of his own.

  But in the midst of my prostrations, my rain-hymns,

  the steeping of my braids in inkwells,

  I heard a woman laugh at me.

  She said that the word was

  Tsukayama—top of the hill—nothing more.

  And for me, the moon was excised from the sky.

  I had no grace left but my face flattened into sun-cracked dirt,

  no patron but the feet of a false moon,

  evaporated into plain grass and a stone stair.

  My kimono dissolved to water,

  and the sparrows turned in shame

  from my nakedness.

  KILLSWITCH

  In the spring of 1989 the Karvina Corporation released a curious game, whose dissemination among American students that fall was swift and furious, though its popularity was ultimately short-lived.

  The game was Killswitch.

  On the surface it was a variant on the mystery or horror survival game, a precursor to the Myst and Silent Hill franchises. The narrative showed the complexity for which Karvina was known, though the graphics were monochrome, vague grey and white shapes against a black background. Slow MIDI versions of Czech folk songs played throughout. Players could choose between two avatars: an invisible demon named Ghast or a visible human woman, Porto. Play as Ghast was considerably more difficult due to his total invisibility, and players were highly liable to restart the game as Porto after the first level, in which it was impossible to gauge jumps or aim. However, Ghast was clearly the more powerful character—he had fire-breath and a coal-steam attack, but as it was above the skill level of most players to keep track of where a fire-breathing, poison-dispensing invisible imp was on their screens once the fire and steam had run out, Porto became more or less the default.

  Porto’s singular ability was seemingly random growth—she expanded and contracted in size throughout the game. A Kansas engineering grad claimed to have figured out the pattern involved, but for reasons which will become obvious, his work was lost.

  Porto awakens in the dark with wounds in her elbows, confused. Seeking a way out, she ascends through the levels of a coal mine in which it is slowly revealed she was once an employee, investigating its collapse and beset on all sides by demons similar to Ghast, as well as dead foremen, coal-golems, and demonic inspectors from the Sovatik corporation, whose boxy bodies are clothed in red, the only color in the game. The environment, though primitive, becomes genuinely uncanny as play progresses. There are no “bosses” in any real sense—Porto must simply move physically through tunnels to reach subsequent levels while her size varies wildly through interlevel spaces.

  The story that emerges through Porto’s discovery of magnetic tapes, files, mutilated factory workers who were once her friends, and deciphering an impressively complex code inscribed on a series of iron axes players must collect (This portion of the game was almost laughably complex and defeated many players until “Porto881” posted the cipher to a Columbia BBS. Attempts to contact this player have been unsuccessful, and the username is no longer in use on any known service.) is that the foremen, under pressure to increase coal production, began to falsify reports of malfunctions and worker malfeasance in order to excuse low output, which incited a Sovatik inspection. Officials were dispatched, one for each miner, and an extraordinary story of torture unfolds, with fuzzy and indistinct graphics of red-coated men standing over workers, inserting small knives into their joints whenever production slowed. (Admittedly, this is not a very subtle critique of Soviet-era industrial tactics, and as the town of Karvina itself was devastated by the departure of the coal industry, more than one thesis has interpreted Killswitch as a political screed.)

  After solving the axe code, Porto finds and assembles a tape recorder, on which a male voice tells her that the fires of the earth had risen up in their defense and flowed into the hearts of the decrepit, pre-revolution equipment they used and wakened them to avenge the workers. It is generally assumed that the “fires of the earth” are demons like Ghast, coal fumes and gassy bodies inhabiting the old machines. The machines themselves are so “big” that the graphics elect to show only two or three gear teeth or a conveyor belt rather than the entire apparatus. The machines drove the inspectors mad, and they disappeared into caverns with their knives (only to emerge to plague Porto, of course). The workers were often crushed and mangled in the onslaught of machines, who were neither graceful nor discriminating. Porto herself was knocked into a deep chasm by a grief-stricken engine, and her fluctuating size, if it is real and not imagined, is implied to be the result of poisonous fumes inhaled there.

  What follows is the most cryptic and intuitive part of the game. There is no logical reason to proceed in the “correct” way, and again it was Porto881 who came to the rescue of the fledgling Killswitch community. In the chamber behind the tape recorder is a great furnace where coal was once rendered into coke. There are no clues as to what she is intended to do in this room. Players attempted nearly everything, from immolating her to continuing to process coal as if the machines had never risen up. Porto881 hit upon the solution and posted it to the Columbia boards. If Porto ingests the raw coke, she will find her body under control, and can go on to fight her way out of the final levels of the mine, which are impassable in her giant state, clutching the tape containing this extraordinary story. However, as she crawls through the final tunnel to emerge aboveground, the screen goes suddenly white.

  Killswitch, by design, deletes itself upon player completion of the game. It is not recoverable by any means; all trace of it is removed from the user’s computer. The game cannot be copied. For all intents and purposes it exists only for those playing it and then ceases to be entirely. One cannot replay it, unlocking further secrets or narrative pathways; one cannot allow another to play it; and perhaps most importantly, it is impossible to experience the game all the way to the end as both Porto and Ghast.

  Predictably, player outcry was enormous. Several routes to solve the problem were pursued, with no real efficacy. The first and most common was to simply buy more copies of the game, but Karvina Corp. released only five thousand copies and refused to
press further editions. The following is an excerpt from their May 1990 press release:

  Killswitch was designed to be a unique playing experience: like reality, it is unrepeatable, unretrievable, and illogical. One might even say ineffable. Death is final; death is complete. The fates of Porto and her beloved Ghast are as unknowable as our own. It is the desire of the Karvina Corporation that this be so, and we ask our customers to respect that desire. Rest assured Karvina will continue to provide games of the highest quality to the West, and that Killswitch is merely one among our many wonders.

  This did not have the intended effect. The word “beloved” piqued the interest of committed, even obsessive players, as Ghast is not present in any portion of Porto’s narrative. A rush to find the remaining copies of the game ensued, with the intent of playing as Ghast and discovering the meaning of Karvina’s cryptic word. The most popular theory was that Ghast would at some point become the fumes inhaled by Porto, changing her size and beginning her adventure. Some thought this was wishful thinking, that if only Ghast’s early levels were passable one would somehow be able to play as both simultaneously. However, by this time no further copies appeared to be available in retail outlets. Players who had not yet completed the game attempted Ghast’s levels frequently, but the difficulty of actually playing this enigmatic avatar persisted, and no player has ever claimed to have finished the game as Ghast. One by one, the lure of Porto’s lost, unearthly world drew them back to her, and one by one, they were compelled toward the finality of the vast white screen.

  To find any copy usable today is an almost unfathomably rare occurrence; a still shrink-wrapped copy was sold at auction in 2005 for $733,000 to Yamamoto Ryuichi of Tokyo. It is entirely possible that Yamamoto’s is the last remaining copy of the game. Knowing this, Yakamoto had intended to open his play to all enthusiasts, filming and uploading his progress. However, to date, the only film that has surfaced is a one minute and forty-five second clip of a haggard Yamamoto at his computer, the avatar-choice screen visible over his right shoulder.

  Yamamoto is crying.

  MEMOIRS OF A GIRL WHO FAILED TO BE BORN FROM A PEACH

  In the year that they rented the Los Angeles apartment

  with turn of the century plumbing,

  when her hair was cropped short, the bleach rinsed out,

  when he still read Fitzgerald,

  they had given up hope of a child.

  I appeared without warning,

  like the samurai Momotaro, who floated up

  into his mother’s Tuesday washing

  packed into the pulpy womb of a yellow peach.

  And like him, I also cried out to my father:

  Wait, wait!

  when he thoughtlessly drew a knife from the kitchen drawer

  to slice the fruit in quarters.

  It would be nice to think that he paused,

  listening to my sugar-buried exhortation,

  that I sprang from the bed of wet gold

  in a helmet of antlers and a bamboo kusazuri.

  If I had leapt from the honey-bed and kissed my mother’s ear,

  then I, too, might have given bean-dumplings

  to the monkey,

  the pheasant,

  the spotted dog.

  We might have gone together, then,

  trampling the grass with filial feet.

  We might have built a raft of palm fronds, held fast

  by a paste of betel and coconut,

  and sailing across the water,

  we would have slaughtered in seven clean strokes

  the giants of Ogre Island,

  whose flesh was red,

  and blue,

  and black.

  I would have brought home to them the magic hammer,

  which produced gold whenever it struck the earth.

  Perhaps the peach-musculature muffled my voice,

  or perhaps their neighbor, who had lived alone

  in her little room for 50 years,

  was playing the piano again,

  her foot death-heavy on the reverberating pedal—

  but my father cut the peach with two clean strokes,

  each slice falling onto the cutting board at the same moment

  like four wasting moons.

  THE GIRL WITH TWO SKINS

  I.

  On your knees between moon-green shoots,

  beside a sack of seed, a silver can, a white spade,

  a ball is tucked into the bustle of your skirt:

  like a pearl

  but not a pearl.

  You pulled it up

  round as a beet from between the mint and the beans

  where I had sunk it in the earth,

  as though I fished

  for loam-finned, moss-gilled coelacanth

  at the bottom of the world.

  I thought it safe.

  I crawl to you on belly henna-bright,

  teeth out,

  scratching the basil sprouts—

  eyes flash phosphor. In the late light,

  slant gold light,

  you must see

  the old tail echo

  beneath my muddy dress:

  two, three, nine.

  I howl against the barking churchbells:

  Give it back, give it back,

  I need it.

  II.

  Once I skulked snoutwise through scrap-iron forests,

  And to each man with his silver pail scowled:

  You are not beautiful enough

  to make me human.

  I had a fox’s education:

  rich coffee grounds in every house gutter,

  mice whose bones were sweet to suck,

  stolen bread and rainwater on whiskers:

  slow theogonies of bottle caps and house cats.

  I crouched, the color of rusted stairs,

  and to each boy who chased me

  through rotted wheat laughed:

  You are not beautiful enough

  to turn my tail to feet!

  But this is a story,

  and in a story

  there is always someone

  beautiful enough.

  In a wood I found you

  in the classical way,

  a girl in a dress with a high hem,

  ribbons in her teeth,

  honey on her thumbs.

  (Damn all of you. All your red hair

  just enough like fur,

  Damn all your small mouth,

  your damp smell,

  Damn all your pianos and stitching hoops.

  Had I but paws enough to stamp out

  your every spoken word like snow!)

  You spooled out lessons

  like an older sister:

  Make your waist like this,

  indicating curve.

  Make your eyes like this,

  indicating blue.

  Make your face

  make your skin

  make your clever, clever hands,

  make them this way,

  indicating civilized,

  indicating soft, your own,

  your freckled breast linen-bound.

  The old vixens, with their scabby,

  mushroom-strung claws,

  only said to run from boys,

  and you looked so thick and pure,

  like the inside

  of a bone.

  III.

  I lashed my tail to my waist

  in your gold-wood kitchen,

  ridiculous in blue silk,

  with cornflowers in my ears.

  We bent over squash soup and sour cherries,

  you put your hands over mine

  to show me how to crease dough

  over a silver pan.

  I bit your cheek at teatime;

  you smelled all day of my musk.

  No, you laughed like sugar stirring,

  your feet are too black,

  your teeth are so sharp!

  Can you not stand up straight br />
  in my old dresses?

  Can you not make your flesh

  like mine?

  Shamed, fur flamed across my cheek,

  but you patted it pale with flour and sweet,

  and I wept to be savage and bristle-stiff

  in such a tidy place,

  in such silent, clean arms.

  I slept curled

  at the foot of your bed,

  reeking of lavender and lilac

  though I spied no purple field.

  I growled at moths that plagued your hair

  and woke with every stairwell creak.

  But you brushed back my pelt

  with lullabies,

  into a long braid that fell

  across pillows like shoulder blades.

  You showed me the word kitsune

  in a book with a long ribbonmark

  like blood spilled on the print—

  I chewed the page and swallowed it,

  and learned there only that

  crawling into your arms,

  embarrassed by my heat, my wet nose,

  was like becoming

  a girl with two skins.

  IV.

  This is a story,

  and it is true of all stories

  that the sound when they slam shut

  is like a key turning.

  I was sewing, hands two bloody half-paws—

  it takes such a long time to

  become a woman—

  smears of needle-bitten skin,

  and you scrutinizing the cross-stitching:

  no, no, like this, my love, like mine—

  when he came to call, when you

  with hair sleek as linseed oil

  and my eyes still so black,

  still unable to imitate the blue you demanded,

  danced with him in our kitchen,

  fed him our yellow soups with sprigs of thyme.

  He smiled at me, with pomade in that grin,

  and walking canes, and silverware,

  and spring gloves. I snapped at him,

  for a simple fox may still understand her rival,

  and know what is expected.

  But the recoil! The shrieking of her

  the shrinking into his great smooth arms,

  the lifting of her blue skirts to keep them clear

  of the stink of my fume!

  A vixen chews out the throat of her enemies

  like stripping bark from a birch;