The Melancholy of Mechagirl Read Online Free PDF Page B

the beauty of the Pure Land. No one likes to talk about their sadness, but we have all reported on schedule and done our duty. I want to tell you about mine, I want you to dream about it, but manners make it difficult to get to the point.
    I have an apartment above Blue Street in the Paradise of the Pure Land. The street does not really have a name—it has a number—but the humans thoughtfully paved it with sparkling blue stones, perhaps in some instinctive nod to our tastes, and so we and they call it Blue Street, for we are all of us together sagacious folk. From its window I can see the bay, the green water foamed with trash so that each wave is tipped with beer bottles, cellophane, detergent boxes, swollen manga, orange rinds. Beneath the surface is an improbable depository of bicycles, dumped by poor souls who could not parse out the arcane laws of garbage removal—our nature does shine through in places, and complexity of order is paramount in the pure land of contemplation. Jellyfish tangle in the wheel spokes, confused, translucent, lost.
    I am lost too. I have mistaken a bicycle wheel for safe harbor. No one is perfect.
CLOSE YOUR EYES
    It would be better if you closed your eyes. I relate more easily with the sleeping. If you could dream my story, I could lumber along the low river of your spine, snuffling out the parts which are too horrible, too radiant, too private for your witness. I could eat them weeping into your brain-pan, and you would wake remembering only salt.
    I don’t suppose you are tired. No? Ah, well.
    Suffice it to say I loved a creature, and that creature is no more. It is the sort of thing dreams were invented to wrangle.
BASHFULNESS OR THE NIGHT WIND
    My love was owned by a white woman. She and I met at work, as all modern lovers do, while I was on my nightly rounds. I had curled into the white woman’s arms and fixed my teeth to her mouth, working at her throat, pulling up the jellied marrow of her little housely terrors. Westerners do not have the most complex palette. She dreamed of a husband in a white uniform, a husband with a sword at his hip and also an oily black gun, a cap of gold, eyes of silver. The husband touched the sea and it glowed phosphorescent green, sickly. He did not smile at her; I ate his smile.
    I saw her over the shoulder of the sad little wife. She was tall and dark, standing in the corner as though she guarded her mistress’s sleep. Her figure was angular, her expression still as a soldier’s. Rafu, my Rafu! How I have pored over that first glimpse, held it in my paws, packed it into a box with tears and red tissue, taken it out to warm me when the stars had frozen!
    I rested my chin on the Western woman’s shoulder, gazing at the golden-black thing that I did not yet know was Rafu. She bowed slightly. Her hinges creaked. The silk of her panels fluttered slightly in bashfulness or the night wind. A willowy green slip hung half over her face—my Rafu was a folding screen, a silk monster of beauty like statues. A Jotai , a screen so old that one day she woke up and had a name and an address and an internal monologue. You earn these things after one hundred years or so. The world owes them to you, if you survive it.
    “What are you doing here, glory-of-the-evening, in this pretty pale devil’s house?”
    Rafu fluttered again. There were golden tigers playing on the silk where her thighs might be. They batted at floaty, cloud-bound kanji like mice.
TO CONCEAL HER FROM HER LIFE
    “Her name is Milo,” whispered my not-yet-beloved screen. “Her father wanted a boy. I was a present from her friend Chieko, who chose in her youth to be kind to the Navy wives because they are worse than children: mute, lost, dead, rigid with stupidity, which is their only defense. Chieko loved mikon oranges and had a mole on her left breast. Once a boy kissed it without permission under a persimmon tree, and Chieko never forgot it—she burned warmer and brighter in that moment than