And she had always called him Ga Noh. The chimera. The shapeshifter.
He recalled her eyes open, another time, as he crushed himself into her as though he might fuse their bodies, her left leg hooked in the corner of his elbow, her knee bent back to her ear and her foot bobbing, bobbing in the air with thrusts that were almost violent, almost rape. But those wide eyes were not hateful. Or afraid. Did memory distort them into something passionate?
He had buried his face, buried his soul, in the thick dark jungle between her legs. She had held his head there. Pushing him onward, urging him to lose himself further. And she had done the same for him, avidly lapping like a dog drinking water, her eyes on his all the while, watching for his pleasure and watching for his magic-until his shame at his gift and for how he was using her made him squeeze his eyelids shut.
He smelled her skin now. He smelled the hair of her head, her hair down there. Her hard slender calves were unshaven, hairy as a boy's. It excited him. A few hairs grew from the corona of her nipples. It enthralled him, all of it-every detail pretty or plain- because she was not a dream, not a fantasy; real flesh and blood, a creature of the earth and forest, hands not fossilized white like the aristocracy of her race but with dirt and blood under their fingernails.
Or was she? Was she so real, now? Hadn't she become a fantasy after all, like a porn movie android, like a seemingly three-dimensional actress in a holovid?
Why couldn't he forget her? He had tried. And sometimes, for months even, had succeeded. But some ghosts couldn't be exorcized.
Why had she returned again, as if reincarnated, at this time specifically? What was happening, or not happening, in his life to bring her back with such extra intensity?
The tease of Janice's attraction to him? The beautiful slanted eyes of Yuki? Or was it even John Fukuda, longing for his murdered wife? Aching for his dead twin brother, a missing half, the absence of which couldn't help but leave him shattered and incomplete? In empathizing with Fukuda too much, had Stake only reopened his own war wounds?
She did care for me, he chided himself. Hateful- afraid-of his doubts. He reminded himself of something else she had said. Something she had told him before being led into the air cavalry craft. Her tone dark and strong again, not her bedroom whisper.
"T'ank you, Ga Noh. T'ank you, take care, take care of me. Some time I take care you. I take care you, too."
Tears burned Stake's eyes like acid. Angrily, he swiped his wrist across his face. And then he pulled his window's shade.
When John Fukuda entered his own bedroom, he heard a soft hissing sound and realized the Ouija phone was still activated inside his jacket pocket. He closed his door, slipped out the gadget, and stared down at it as if to melt it in the heat of his gaze.
Was that a tiny voice he heard? Small as the voice of an insect that had crawled inside the thing through a hole in its mouthpiece?
Slowly, as if afraid it might explode in his hand, explode against his skull, Fukuda lifted the device to his own ear. Held it an inch away from touching.
"James."
"My God," he whispered. He trembled more inside than outside. "Yuriko." "James."
John Fukuda dropped the phone to the carpet. And then he stomped the heel of his shoe upon it.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
the outsider
Dai-oo-ika lifted his eyeless head to watch Dolly appear out of the labyrinth of sewer tunnels, a plastic shopping bag in hand. She stepped over the streaming brook of a run-off channel and hoisted herself up onto the tiled platform that was their home, pulling the hanging blanket back into place behind her to offer some illusion of security. As she hunched down beside him and started opening her bag, the old woman paused to frown at her companion.
"Did you get bigger while I was gone, or what? I don't know how you keep looking bigger but you won't eat a damn thing I give you." She rustled through her bag. "Can't say I haven't tried. How about this?" She extracted a banana, all black and soft except for its end. She broke this off and extended it to him. The tentacles that were all he had for a face, ringed in black and silvery bands, writhed and squirmed but did not reach out for the morsel. His hands remained on his knees. "No?" Dolly said. "Christ, are you fussy or don't you ever eat at all?" She crammed the good banana end into her mouth, then peeled the gelatinous rotting section and ate that, too.
Watching her, Dai-oo-ika thought of his child mother again. Nourishing him with her love. Embracing him to her chest. He missed her; a yawning canyon of inarticulate yearning. Yes, that was the hunger he always felt.
Dolly settled in beside him, sitting on her stained mattress. She produced her syringe filled with a metallic sand of microscopic nanomites, almost insects and almost machines. "Time for my medicine again, Junior," she told him. "You be a good boy and watch over me while I rest." She injected a measure of the nanomites into a vein in her wrist, then sighed and hid the syringe back inside her coat. She leaned her head against the tiled wall, closing her eyes. "Don't let those punks steal my stuff while I'm resting," she purred grumpily. "They try to… steal… my mediciii…"
Dai-oo-ika continued to watch her, as she had requested. He watched her eyeballs move back and forth beneath their thin lids as if tossing and turning under a ratty blanket in troubled sleep. He sensed that there was no rest for her species, even at rest. But then, he had his own disturbing dreams, didn't he? Not only of the past-of his lovely, angelic child mother, kissing his belly-but of a future time that would come, or at least was intended to come. He had been having one of these dreams just before Dolly had returned from foraging. Dai-oo-ika had envisioned a burning and mostly flattened city, stretching out black and twisted to all horizons. Below him, thousands of upturned faces and arms lifted in praise. The faces were a mix of human and nonhuman, but all were charred black, blistered by fire and deformed with radiation. Silvery pus ran out of heat-sealed eyes. Yet despite the pain these people must be feeling, they were singing to him, all in one voice of adoration. And he looked down upon them from a great height. For he was huge. Huger than an elephant. Vast. He was their god.
Arms lifted, so many arms lifted as if to embrace him. It would take that many to embrace him. But when he had been small, it had taken only one pair. Having remembered those arms, he could not forget them again. How he longed to be enfolded in them just one more time.
Dai-oo-ika stirred, shifted his growing bulk. The blue tarp he had been wearing as a poncho made a crinkling sound as he removed it, but Dolly was too lost in her dreams to be bothered by the noise. He moved closer to her. And spread his thick arms, to embrace her. His friend. He loved her. She was all he had for a mother now.
Dolly gave a dreamy, muffled moan as her face was pressed against his white belly. He squeezed her tighter, until she not only indented his flesh, but began to slide into it. Where only moments earlier the flesh of his belly had been firm as the flank of a whale, now it was a yielding cloud of cells, a raw pudding of protoplasm that let Dolly's body break its surface, submerge beneath it.
Dai-oo-ika embraced Dolly until there was nothing left to embrace. And when he opened his arms again, she was gone.
He knelt there in their little corner of Punktown, surrounded by her cartons of junk, his arms spread empty. On one level, he felt nourished again at last. But on another level, the embrace had left him feeling only emptier still. His friend had fed him. And his friend had gone.