1
The sound of Gum's helmet hitting the pavement made Beat start awake. The
low whisper of the radio became audible.
Across from him Mew had lifted one of her thighs over Gum's. The two of them, with skirts hiked, gently kissed each other's lips, making small sounds. The red light of the alley made their bare legs pink. From the corner of Mew's mouth a trail of saliva glistened like a little river of stars. She drew away from Gum, her eyes half-lidded, looked skyward, and breathed deep and hot into the night air. Gum smothered her neck in kisses. She pushed Gum away before unhooking her bra.
"I love Benten at nighttime. It looks fantastic with the lights on your skin. It's like a dream. You have skin like milk."
Beat's head fell to the side. He was asleep again.
2 They had been skating through Kogane-cho all day. Gum stopped, kneeling down in a coiled garden hose. She turned the water on and lifted it over her head. Water poured out over her ash-blonde hair. She gasped.
"So cold!"
Beat took the hose from her, lifted it to his lips, then put his thumb over the water and sprayed it on her. She shrieked and laughed.
"Shhh!" Beat said.
Gum tried to suppress the urge to laugh. Beat sprayed her again.
Garam had been watching.
"I used to be in Poison Jam, you know."
"I figured," Gum said, replacing her helmet. The ash-blonde hair turned almost brown when wet. Beat could never understand why this was so singularly beautiful. Water still coursed down the nape of her neck.
"They fell behind," Garam said. "That's why I left."
"Everyone falls behind," Beat said.
"It's only daylight for some people. Soon it will be dusk. And then, night. When the sun goes down, you can never make it come back up again."
"The sun," Gum said.
With consummate skill, Beat managed to divide the stream of water coming from the hose and spray both of them.
3 The white stone of Shibuya-cho, inlaid with brightly-colored posters. The circuit of buses bringing in people to help move shiny squares. The spirit that rests in a disk, the images that, more resplendent than our stunted imaginations, recline in the light blue sky beside white wandering clouds. A tree, the cultivated, tamed foliage in which the air is hung like a souvenir of sunlight. In the city of eternal childhood, a childhood transposed to the keys of desire and aching and unbearable joy, the people revolve around each other, never seeing the same face twice. On this placid surface, with their wheels scarring the white stone, the GG's skate. Trails of emerald or pumpkin fire bedazzle the onlooker, and as the air rushes in he forgets everything for one white moment. For one white moment he breathes and does not know whether the next breath will come or not.
We laugh at Shibuya-cho, our reflection. We depart from it and return. The only difference, one moreover that we are not aware of, is that we know how much blood goes into clothes.
Tab hitting a green rail and jumping high into the air where, passing in front of the sun, his sprawling shadow crosses the face of a little girl who with still, round eyes had been watching him.
4 "Beat, do you remember when we were in school?" Gum asked. "Mr. Takawa, and the way he moved his lips when he wasn't talking?"
She knew behind the lime-colored lenses his eyes were going far away, into the past.
A room lit by fluorescents that all but destroyed the sunlight from the windows, a dozen rows of identical white shirts; standing up and sitting down in unison. Mr. Takawa at the front of the room pointing to something written on the board. That day's lesson...
"Graffiti is art," he said. "However, graffiti as an act of vandalism is a crime. Every state/province has vandalism laws that apply to graffiti, and local entities such as cities and countries have anti-graffiti ordinances. Violation of these laws can result in a fine, probation or a jail sentence."
One chair above and one to the right sat Gum. She held a pen to her lips and stroked the hair over her ear. Mr. Takawa sat down, lips going furiously, and looked over the papers on his desk. Reaching out, Beat strained to touch a lock of Gum's hair...
"Like I remember school," Beat fairly scoffed, and took off flying down a half-pipe.
Gum and Cube smiled at each other.
"You were in the same class together?" Cube asked.
"Yes, but I didn't remember him. He only brought it up after we had formed the GG's. Not surprising. He was so quiet you wouldn't have known he was there."
"He's changed," Cube sighed.
"Everyone's like that. So quiet you never know they're there."
"Everyone except us."
Watching Beat do hand plants, Cube spat on the ground.
5 Gum whispered into Mew's ear, grinning.
"You... cunt."
Mew frowned.
"You know I hate that word."
Gum pushed the flat of her palm down her inner thigh.
"I love it."
Beat turned around. Everyone in the subway started to stir. Autumn leaves borne on a torrent of wind blew through the car.
"What the hell is this?" Gum turned to where Beat was looking, and Mew leaned forward also to look.
Other passengers looked round. The fluorescent lights made their glasses opaque. Their expressions were inscrutable. Leaves slid along floorboards, curled against handrails, tripped over the ranked feet. A brown leaf, caught, fluttered in the crook of Beat's arm. He took hold of it by the stem, turned, and held it up before Gum's face. She closed her eyes and smiled unintentionally as Beat began to softly stroke her nose and her cheeks with it.
"Where are they all coming from?" someone said.
"There must have been somebody carting off a bag of leaves and they got loose."
"But it's not even fall."
Beat looked down at Gum's half-open mouth, her face seemingly radiant.
*
They got off the subway and paused as the stream of passengers flowed around them to the exits.
"We meet at Gekijomae," Beat said. "The others are at Benten Tower and downtown."
"I think I want to go there," Mew said.
"Downtown?"
"Mmm."
"Suit yourself. You're going through the subway?"
"Hahaha."
She took Gum's shoulder and looked at Beat.
"Don't let them touch her face!"
Hopping onto a rail, Mew rode into the darkness.
"Will she be alright doing that?" Beat asked Gum.
"She's from here."
They danced up the stairs and, seeing no one, began tagging billboards.
*
Mew walked beside the tracks, dragging her hand along the sooty subway wall and breathing in stale air. It was the first time she had been here since leaving Benten-cho for the GG's. The constant echoes and the old smell awakened memories. She laughed at old fears. One of the initiation tests of the Noise Tanks was that they would blindfold you and plug your ears and then push you onto a rail. You would have to skate until someone caught you, never knowing if the subway was going to come along and flatten you. When you felt a sudden furious wind, you gasped, and crumbled.
Her reminiscence was interrupted when she heard a noise from some distant stone capillary. Her sight and her hearing returned, and she brushed off an uncertain anxiety. The memories still lingered.
Up ahead, she saw two Noise Tanks with their masks removed, a boy and a girl. The boy had the girl pinned to the wall, whispering to her. She was laughing. What Mew overheard was this:
"And when they ask you?"
"I'll just laugh and say I'd never speak to him."
"Am I really that disgusting?"
"Oh yes. And more."
"What else?"
"Well..."
Never too comfortable listening to other people's conversations, Mew interrupted them.
"Oh, a GG," the boy said.
"Thanks, Dodec."
"Mew?"
"Of course!"
"Who is this?" the girl asked Dodec.
"No one, a GG."
"Bartholin, you know me."
"Mew?" the girl said this time.
Mew rolled her eyes.
"Anyway, I just thought I'd let you know... the GG's are taking Benten."
Dodec wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
"You're joking."
Mew shook her head.
He hastily began to fasten his belt buckle. Bartholin collected her mask from the ground. When they looked up Mew was gone.
"What the - "
Mew rose behind them, her fists behind her ears, and brought her elbows crashing down on the two Noise Tanks' shoulders. She let her breathing become calm again as she listened to their pained groans in the dirt. Then she kicked them each in the side once, grabbed their masks and took off.
Further down the tunnel, she saw lights loom up on the opposite wall, and ducked off to the side thinking it was an oncoming train. It was, but it was running on the other rail. Before she could resume she felt a set of bony fingers, appearing out of nowhere. They danced along her collarbone like a dangling marionette. Spinning around, she saw a tramp covered in filth, teeth reeking with gold, skin slippery like fish scales. It mumbled something incoherent and stumbled closer to her. Without thinking, she dashed off, grinding the tracks.
Another light slowly brightened on the wall, this one containing her shadow. As it became more sharply defined, she looked around to see an impossibly bright light bearing down on her. Astride two miniature comets, she looked at the wall and back to the car, praying that her timing was right. When the roar had about swallowed her, she jumped to the side, ground the wall, and leaped to the top of the subway where with the Noise Tank mask fluttering in her hand like a bird, she lay down and looked ahead for the light that would signal a station.
*
Laughing, Garam and Soda pin a Noise Tank to the wall by his arms, while Combo traces his outline in spray paint. Afterwards they kick him in a blue- flecked side and write on the wall, "COOKIE CUTTER."
*
In a neon cloud, Cube slashes a corner with paint, eradicating the tag of a deposed gang.
*
Two Noise Tanks rush up to Yo-yo, who is making a GG's tag. They pull him down by his jeans and begin to pummel his back. He shouts. His mouth frothing, he manages to kick them away, at the cost of exposing his belly. But he laughs as Pirahna and Mew appear. Gritting their teeth, they ram their elbows into the Noise Tanks' chests.
*
Having tagged the plaza, Beat and Gum looked up at the moon. In the glow of Benten, it looked like only a color in the sky. The moon is always denuded by a cityscape.
"Have I ever told you how badly I want to kill myself?" Beat said. "Everyday I think, 'Will I do it today?' and then something happens to make me stop thinking about it, or I find a reason not to. One day there won't be a reason to hold out any longer. And then - "
"But why do you want to kill yourself? You're the happiest person I know."
"Because I'm happy. Everytime I see the lights of Benten-cho and smell the night air, everytime I stand on the bridge with you and the others and watch the sunset. How long do you think it can last? Do you think we're immortal? That's not even it. I just said I wanted to kill myself so I don't mind dying. What's worse than dying is not being young. And that is all we know how to be. Look at us, look at them down there, spraying paint on each other, running from the Keisatsu. How long until it's no longer charming? How long until it's just ridiculous? And because these days are so wonderful, the rest of life seems dreary, too dreary. I want to kill myself because I'm happy and I never want to let go of happiness."
"So then - "
"There is no way out."
She stepped closer to him, looking at her hands as she lightly traced the outline of his collarbone under his shirt. His breath fanned her wrists. Suddenly she looked up into his eyes.
"What if I was your way out?"
"Are you saying that because - "
"The look in her deep brown eyes penetrated him.
"No."
His hands flew to her shoulderblades, she clutched his shirt. But then there was a sound. They saw Mew emerge from the shadows, twirling a Noise Tank mask on her index finger.
Beat stepped behind Gum and ran his fingertips down the small of her back, taking hold of her hips. He squeezed them, once, and pushed her away.
"When the sun sets," he called.
She rolled down the embankment into Mew's open arms where the two whirled around in the momentum, laughing.
Across from him Mew had lifted one of her thighs over Gum's. The two of them, with skirts hiked, gently kissed each other's lips, making small sounds. The red light of the alley made their bare legs pink. From the corner of Mew's mouth a trail of saliva glistened like a little river of stars. She drew away from Gum, her eyes half-lidded, looked skyward, and breathed deep and hot into the night air. Gum smothered her neck in kisses. She pushed Gum away before unhooking her bra.
"I love Benten at nighttime. It looks fantastic with the lights on your skin. It's like a dream. You have skin like milk."
Beat's head fell to the side. He was asleep again.
2 They had been skating through Kogane-cho all day. Gum stopped, kneeling down in a coiled garden hose. She turned the water on and lifted it over her head. Water poured out over her ash-blonde hair. She gasped.
"So cold!"
Beat took the hose from her, lifted it to his lips, then put his thumb over the water and sprayed it on her. She shrieked and laughed.
"Shhh!" Beat said.
Gum tried to suppress the urge to laugh. Beat sprayed her again.
Garam had been watching.
"I used to be in Poison Jam, you know."
"I figured," Gum said, replacing her helmet. The ash-blonde hair turned almost brown when wet. Beat could never understand why this was so singularly beautiful. Water still coursed down the nape of her neck.
"They fell behind," Garam said. "That's why I left."
"Everyone falls behind," Beat said.
"It's only daylight for some people. Soon it will be dusk. And then, night. When the sun goes down, you can never make it come back up again."
"The sun," Gum said.
With consummate skill, Beat managed to divide the stream of water coming from the hose and spray both of them.
3 The white stone of Shibuya-cho, inlaid with brightly-colored posters. The circuit of buses bringing in people to help move shiny squares. The spirit that rests in a disk, the images that, more resplendent than our stunted imaginations, recline in the light blue sky beside white wandering clouds. A tree, the cultivated, tamed foliage in which the air is hung like a souvenir of sunlight. In the city of eternal childhood, a childhood transposed to the keys of desire and aching and unbearable joy, the people revolve around each other, never seeing the same face twice. On this placid surface, with their wheels scarring the white stone, the GG's skate. Trails of emerald or pumpkin fire bedazzle the onlooker, and as the air rushes in he forgets everything for one white moment. For one white moment he breathes and does not know whether the next breath will come or not.
We laugh at Shibuya-cho, our reflection. We depart from it and return. The only difference, one moreover that we are not aware of, is that we know how much blood goes into clothes.
Tab hitting a green rail and jumping high into the air where, passing in front of the sun, his sprawling shadow crosses the face of a little girl who with still, round eyes had been watching him.
4 "Beat, do you remember when we were in school?" Gum asked. "Mr. Takawa, and the way he moved his lips when he wasn't talking?"
She knew behind the lime-colored lenses his eyes were going far away, into the past.
A room lit by fluorescents that all but destroyed the sunlight from the windows, a dozen rows of identical white shirts; standing up and sitting down in unison. Mr. Takawa at the front of the room pointing to something written on the board. That day's lesson...
"Graffiti is art," he said. "However, graffiti as an act of vandalism is a crime. Every state/province has vandalism laws that apply to graffiti, and local entities such as cities and countries have anti-graffiti ordinances. Violation of these laws can result in a fine, probation or a jail sentence."
One chair above and one to the right sat Gum. She held a pen to her lips and stroked the hair over her ear. Mr. Takawa sat down, lips going furiously, and looked over the papers on his desk. Reaching out, Beat strained to touch a lock of Gum's hair...
"Like I remember school," Beat fairly scoffed, and took off flying down a half-pipe.
Gum and Cube smiled at each other.
"You were in the same class together?" Cube asked.
"Yes, but I didn't remember him. He only brought it up after we had formed the GG's. Not surprising. He was so quiet you wouldn't have known he was there."
"He's changed," Cube sighed.
"Everyone's like that. So quiet you never know they're there."
"Everyone except us."
Watching Beat do hand plants, Cube spat on the ground.
5 Gum whispered into Mew's ear, grinning.
"You... cunt."
Mew frowned.
"You know I hate that word."
Gum pushed the flat of her palm down her inner thigh.
"I love it."
Beat turned around. Everyone in the subway started to stir. Autumn leaves borne on a torrent of wind blew through the car.
"What the hell is this?" Gum turned to where Beat was looking, and Mew leaned forward also to look.
Other passengers looked round. The fluorescent lights made their glasses opaque. Their expressions were inscrutable. Leaves slid along floorboards, curled against handrails, tripped over the ranked feet. A brown leaf, caught, fluttered in the crook of Beat's arm. He took hold of it by the stem, turned, and held it up before Gum's face. She closed her eyes and smiled unintentionally as Beat began to softly stroke her nose and her cheeks with it.
"Where are they all coming from?" someone said.
"There must have been somebody carting off a bag of leaves and they got loose."
"But it's not even fall."
Beat looked down at Gum's half-open mouth, her face seemingly radiant.
*
They got off the subway and paused as the stream of passengers flowed around them to the exits.
"We meet at Gekijomae," Beat said. "The others are at Benten Tower and downtown."
"I think I want to go there," Mew said.
"Downtown?"
"Mmm."
"Suit yourself. You're going through the subway?"
"Hahaha."
She took Gum's shoulder and looked at Beat.
"Don't let them touch her face!"
Hopping onto a rail, Mew rode into the darkness.
"Will she be alright doing that?" Beat asked Gum.
"She's from here."
They danced up the stairs and, seeing no one, began tagging billboards.
*
Mew walked beside the tracks, dragging her hand along the sooty subway wall and breathing in stale air. It was the first time she had been here since leaving Benten-cho for the GG's. The constant echoes and the old smell awakened memories. She laughed at old fears. One of the initiation tests of the Noise Tanks was that they would blindfold you and plug your ears and then push you onto a rail. You would have to skate until someone caught you, never knowing if the subway was going to come along and flatten you. When you felt a sudden furious wind, you gasped, and crumbled.
Her reminiscence was interrupted when she heard a noise from some distant stone capillary. Her sight and her hearing returned, and she brushed off an uncertain anxiety. The memories still lingered.
Up ahead, she saw two Noise Tanks with their masks removed, a boy and a girl. The boy had the girl pinned to the wall, whispering to her. She was laughing. What Mew overheard was this:
"And when they ask you?"
"I'll just laugh and say I'd never speak to him."
"Am I really that disgusting?"
"Oh yes. And more."
"What else?"
"Well..."
Never too comfortable listening to other people's conversations, Mew interrupted them.
"Oh, a GG," the boy said.
"Thanks, Dodec."
"Mew?"
"Of course!"
"Who is this?" the girl asked Dodec.
"No one, a GG."
"Bartholin, you know me."
"Mew?" the girl said this time.
Mew rolled her eyes.
"Anyway, I just thought I'd let you know... the GG's are taking Benten."
Dodec wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
"You're joking."
Mew shook her head.
He hastily began to fasten his belt buckle. Bartholin collected her mask from the ground. When they looked up Mew was gone.
"What the - "
Mew rose behind them, her fists behind her ears, and brought her elbows crashing down on the two Noise Tanks' shoulders. She let her breathing become calm again as she listened to their pained groans in the dirt. Then she kicked them each in the side once, grabbed their masks and took off.
Further down the tunnel, she saw lights loom up on the opposite wall, and ducked off to the side thinking it was an oncoming train. It was, but it was running on the other rail. Before she could resume she felt a set of bony fingers, appearing out of nowhere. They danced along her collarbone like a dangling marionette. Spinning around, she saw a tramp covered in filth, teeth reeking with gold, skin slippery like fish scales. It mumbled something incoherent and stumbled closer to her. Without thinking, she dashed off, grinding the tracks.
Another light slowly brightened on the wall, this one containing her shadow. As it became more sharply defined, she looked around to see an impossibly bright light bearing down on her. Astride two miniature comets, she looked at the wall and back to the car, praying that her timing was right. When the roar had about swallowed her, she jumped to the side, ground the wall, and leaped to the top of the subway where with the Noise Tank mask fluttering in her hand like a bird, she lay down and looked ahead for the light that would signal a station.
*
Laughing, Garam and Soda pin a Noise Tank to the wall by his arms, while Combo traces his outline in spray paint. Afterwards they kick him in a blue- flecked side and write on the wall, "COOKIE CUTTER."
*
In a neon cloud, Cube slashes a corner with paint, eradicating the tag of a deposed gang.
*
Two Noise Tanks rush up to Yo-yo, who is making a GG's tag. They pull him down by his jeans and begin to pummel his back. He shouts. His mouth frothing, he manages to kick them away, at the cost of exposing his belly. But he laughs as Pirahna and Mew appear. Gritting their teeth, they ram their elbows into the Noise Tanks' chests.
*
Having tagged the plaza, Beat and Gum looked up at the moon. In the glow of Benten, it looked like only a color in the sky. The moon is always denuded by a cityscape.
"Have I ever told you how badly I want to kill myself?" Beat said. "Everyday I think, 'Will I do it today?' and then something happens to make me stop thinking about it, or I find a reason not to. One day there won't be a reason to hold out any longer. And then - "
"But why do you want to kill yourself? You're the happiest person I know."
"Because I'm happy. Everytime I see the lights of Benten-cho and smell the night air, everytime I stand on the bridge with you and the others and watch the sunset. How long do you think it can last? Do you think we're immortal? That's not even it. I just said I wanted to kill myself so I don't mind dying. What's worse than dying is not being young. And that is all we know how to be. Look at us, look at them down there, spraying paint on each other, running from the Keisatsu. How long until it's no longer charming? How long until it's just ridiculous? And because these days are so wonderful, the rest of life seems dreary, too dreary. I want to kill myself because I'm happy and I never want to let go of happiness."
"So then - "
"There is no way out."
She stepped closer to him, looking at her hands as she lightly traced the outline of his collarbone under his shirt. His breath fanned her wrists. Suddenly she looked up into his eyes.
"What if I was your way out?"
"Are you saying that because - "
"The look in her deep brown eyes penetrated him.
"No."
His hands flew to her shoulderblades, she clutched his shirt. But then there was a sound. They saw Mew emerge from the shadows, twirling a Noise Tank mask on her index finger.
Beat stepped behind Gum and ran his fingertips down the small of her back, taking hold of her hips. He squeezed them, once, and pushed her away.
"When the sun sets," he called.
She rolled down the embankment into Mew's open arms where the two whirled around in the momentum, laughing.