Almost Transparent Blue by Ryu Murakami Read Free Book Online Page B

buttocks jiggled.
    Kei opened her eyes and asked, Hey, so ya stayed over last night with that whore-lady?
    Shut up, stupid, she's not like that, I said, swatting at the little insects flying around.
    Ah mean Ah don' care, Ryū, but ya got to watch about getting a dose, like Jackson said, some of the guys around here have got it real bad, ya could rot to pieces. Kei pulled on just her panties and fixed coffee, Moko stretched out a hand and said, Hey, give me a smoke, one of those mint-flavor Sah-lem.
    Moko, that's Say-lem, not Sah-lem, Kazuo told her, getting up.
    Rubbing his eyes, Yoshiyama said loudly to Kei, No milk in mine, O.K.? Then he turned to me—my finger still in Moko's ass—and said, Last night when you guys were messing around upstairs, I got a straight flush, you know, really right on, a straight flush in hearts—Hey, Kazuo, you were there, you can back me up, right?
    Without answering him, Kazuo said sleepily, My strobe's gone somewhere, somebody hiding it?

    Jackson said I should wear makeup again, like I'd done before. That time, I thought maybe Faye Dunaway'd come to visit, Ryū, he said.
    I put on a silver negligee Saburô said he'd got from a pro stripper.
    Before everybody arrived in Oscar's room, a black man I'd never seen before came and left nearly a hundred capsules; I couldn't tell what they were. I asked Jackson if he might have been an M.P. or a C.I.D. man, but Jackson laughed, shaking his head, and answered, Naw, that's Green Eyes.
    "You saw how his eyes are green? Nobody knows his real name, I heard he'd been a high school teacher but I don't know if it's true or not. He's crazy, really, we don't know where he lives or whether he has a family, just that he's been here a lot longer than we have, seems he's been in Japan an awful long time.
    Don't he look like Charlie Mingus? Maybe he came after he'd heard something about you. He say anything to you?"
    That black man had looked very uptight. I'll give you just this much, he'd said, then rolled his eyes around the room and left as if he were making an escape.
    His face hadn't changed even when he saw Moko was naked, and when Kei asked him, How about some fun? his lips had trembled but he didn't say anything.
    "You'll get to see the black bird sometime, too, you haven't seen it yet, but you, you'll be able to see the bird, you've got them kind of eyes, same as me." Then he'd gripped my hand.
    Oscar said not to take any of those capsules, because Green Eyes had once passed around laxatives. He told me to throw them out.
    Jackson sterilized a battlefield syringe. I'm a medic, he said, so I'm a real pro at shots, right?
    First they shot me up with heroin.
    "Ryū, dance!" Jackson slapped my butt. When I stood up and looked in the mirror, I saw what looked like a different person, transformed by Moko's painstaking, expert makeup technique. Saburō passed me a cigarette and an artificial rose and asked, What music? I said make it Schubert and everyone laughed.

    A sweet-smelling mist floated before my eyes and my head was heavy and numb. As I slowly moved my arms and legs, I felt that my joints had been oiled, and that slippery oil flowed around inside my body. As I breathed I forgot who I was. I thought that many things gradually flowed from my body, I became a doll.
    The room was full of sweetish air, smoke clawed my lungs. The feeling that I was a doll became stronger and stronger. All I had to do was just move as they wanted, I was the happiest possible slave. Bob muttered Sexy, Jackson said Shut up. Oscar put out all the lights and turned an orange spot on me. Once in a while my face twisted and I felt panicky. I opened my eyes wide and shook my body. I called out, panted low, licked jam off my finger, sipped wine, pulled up my hair, grinned, rolled up my eyes, spit out the words of a spell.
    I yelled some lines I remembered by Jim Morrison: "When the music is over, when the music is over, put out all the lights, my brothers live at the bottom of the