The Windup Girl Read online

  And then she grabs Emiko's hair and yanks her up. Emiko gasps as her body arches. She catches a glimpse of the bearded man staring in surprise at the sudden violent gesture, at her abasement. A flash of the crowd. The ceiling with its glow worm cages. Kannika drags her further back, bending her like willow, forcing her to thrust her breasts out to the crowd, to arch further still, to spread her thighs as she struggles not to topple sideways. Her head touches the teak of the stage. Her body forms a perfect arc. Kannika says something and the crowd laughs. The pain in Emiko's back and neck is extreme. She can feel the crowd's eyes on her, a physical thing, molesting her. She is utterly exposed.

  Liquid gushes over her.

  She tries to rise, but Kannika presses her down and dumps more beer in her face. Emiko gags and splutters, drowning. Finally Kannika releases her and Emiko jerks upright, coughing. Liquid foams down her chin, spills down her neck and breasts, trickles to her crotch.

  Everyone is laughing. Saeng is already offering the bearded man a fresh beer, and he is grinning and tipping Saeng and everyone is laughing at how Emiko's body twitches and jerks now that she is in a panic, coughing the liquid from her lungs. She is nothing but a silly marionette creature now, all stutter-stop motion—herky-jerky heechy-keechy—with no trace of the stylized grace that her mistress Mizumi-sensei trained into her when she was a girl in the crèche. There is no elegance or care to her movements now; the telltales of her DNA are violently present for all to see and mock.

  Emiko continues coughing, almost retching at the beer in her lungs. Her limbs twitch and flail, giving everyone a chance to see her true nature. Finally she gets a full breath. Controls her flailing movements. She reverts to stillness, kneeling, waiting for the next assault.

  In Japan she was a wonder. Here, she is nothing but a windup. The men laugh at her strange gait and make faces of disgust that she exists at all. She is a creature forbidden to them. The Thai men would happily mulch her in their methane composting pools. If they met her or an AgriGen calorie man, it is hard to say which they would rather see mulched first. And then there are the gaijin. She wonders how many of them claim membership in the Grahamite Church, dedicated to destroying everything that she represents: her affront to niche and nature. And yet they sit contentedly and enjoy this humiliation of her even still.

  Kannika grabs her again. She has disrobed now and has a jadeite cock in her hands. She shoves Emiko down, pushing her onto her back. "Hold her hands," she says, and the men reach out eagerly, grip her wrists.

  Kannika pries her legs wide and then Emiko cries out as Kannika takes her. Emiko turns her face aside, waiting out the assault, but Kannika sees her avoidance. She pinches Emiko's face in one hand and forces her to show her features so that the men can see the effect of Kannika's ministrations.

  The men urge Kannika on. Begin to chant. Count in Thai. Neung! Song! Sam! Si!

  Kannika indulges them with a building rhythm. The men sweat and watch and shout for more for the price of their admission. More men are holding her down, hands on her ankles and wrists, freeing Kannika for her abuse. Emiko writhes, her body shaking and jerking, twitching in the ways that windups do, in the ways that Kannika excels at bringing out. The men laugh and comment on the freakish movements, the stutter-stop motions, flash-bulb strange.

  Kannika's fingers join the jade between Emiko's legs, play at Emiko's core. Emiko's shame builds. Again she tries to turn her face aside. Men are gathered around, close, staring. More crowd behind, straining for a glimpse. Emiko moans. Kannika laughs, low and knowing. She says something to the men and increases her tempo. Her fingers play in Emiko's folds. Emiko moans again as her body betrays her. She cries out. Arches. Her body performs just as it was designed—just as the scientists with their test tubes intended. She cannot control it no matter how much she despises it. The scientists will not allow her even this small disobedience. She comes.

  The audience roars approval, laughing at the bizarre convulsions that orgasm wrings from her DNA. Kannika gestures at her movements as if to say, "You see? Look at this animal!" and then she is kneeling above Emiko's face and hissing to Emiko that she is nothing, and will always be nothing, and for once the dirty Japanese get what is coming to them.

  Emiko wants to tell her that no self-respecting Japanese would do these things. Wants to tell her that all Kannika plays with is a disposable Japanese toy—a triviality of Japanese ingenuity, like Matsushita's disposable cellulose handlegrips for a cycle-rickshaw—but she has said it before and it only makes things worse. If she remains silent the abuse will end soon.

  Even if she is New People, there is nothing new under the sun.

  * * *

  Yellow card coolies crank at wide-bore fans, driving air through the club. Sweat drips from their faces and runs in gleaming rivulets down their backs. They burn calories as quickly as they consume them and yet still the club bakes with the memory of the afternoon sun.

  Emiko stands beside a fan, letting it cool her as much as she can, pausing in her labors of ferrying drinks for customers and hoping that Kannika will not catch sight of her again.

  Whenever Kannika gets hold of her, she drags her out to where the men can all examine her. Makes her walk in the traditional Japanese windup way, emphasizing the stylized motions of her kind. Makes her turn this way and that, and the men joke about her aloud even as they silently consider buying her once their friends have gone away.

  In the center of the main room, men invite young girls in their pha sin and cropped jackets out onto the dance floor and make slow turns around the parquet as the band plays Contraction mixes, songs that Raleigh has dredged from his memory and translated for use on traditional Thai instruments, strange melancholy amalgamations of the past, as exotic as his children with their turmeric hair and their wide round eyes.

  "Emiko!"

  She flinches. It's Raleigh, motioning her toward his office. Men's gazes follow her stutter-stop movements as she passes the bar. Kannika looks up from her date where they twine hands and nuzzle close. She smiles slightly as Emiko goes by. When Emiko first came to the country, she was told that the Thais have thirteen kinds of smile. She suspects that Kannika's denotes no good will.

  "Come on." Raleigh says, impatient. He leads her through a curtain and down the hall past where the girls change into their work clothes, then through another door.

  The memorabilia of three lifetimes lines his office's walls, everything from yellowed photographs of a Bangkok lit entirely by electricity to an image of Raleigh wearing the traditional dress of some savage hilltribe in the North. Raleigh invites Emiko to recline on a cushion on the raised platform where he does his private business. Another man is already sprawled there, a pale tall creature with blue eyes and blond hair and an angry scar on his neck.

  The man startles when she comes into the room. "Jesus and Noah, you didn't tell me she was a windup," he says.

  Raleigh grins and settles on his own cushion. "Didn't know you were a Grahamite."

  The man almost smiles at the taunt. "Keeping something this risky. . . You're playing with blister rust, Raleigh. The white shirts could be all over you."

  "The Ministry doesn't give a damn as long I pay the bribes. The guys who patrol around here aren't the Tiger of Bangkok. They just want to make a buck and sleep through the night." He laughs. "Buying her ice is more expensive than paying the Environment Ministry to look the other way."

  "Ice?"

  "Wrong pore structure. She overheats." He scowls. "If I'd known beforehand, I wouldn't have bought her."

  The room reeks of opium and Raleigh busies himself filling the pipe again. He claims that opium has kept him young, vital through the years, but Emiko suspects that he sails for Tokyo and the same aging treatments Gendo-sama used. Raleigh holds the opium over its lamp. It heats and sizzles, and he turns the ball on its needles, working the tar until it turns viscous, then he quickly rolls it back into a ball and presses it into his pipe. He extends the pipe to the lamp and breathes d
eeply as the tar turns to smoke. He closes his eyes. Blindly offers it to the pale man.

  "No, thank you."

  Raleigh's eyes open. He laughs. "You should try it. It's the one thing the plagues didn't get. Lucky for me. Can't imagine going through withdrawal at my age."

  The man doesn't answer. Instead, his pale blue eyes study Emiko. She has the uncomfortable feeling of being taken apart, cell by cell. Not so much that he undresses her with his gaze—this she experiences every day: the feel of men's eyes darting across her skin, clasping at her body, hungering and despising her—instead his study is clinically detached. If there is hunger there, he hides it well.

  "She's the one?" he asks.

  Raleigh nods. "Emiko, tell the gentleman about our friend from the other night."

  Emiko glances at Raleigh, discomfited. She is fairly certain that she has never seen this pale blond gaijin at the club before, at least, that he has never attended any special performance. She has never served him a whiskey ice. She wracks her memories. No, she would remember. He has a sunburn, obvious despite the dim flicker of the candles and opium lamp. And his eyes are too strangely pale, unpleasantly so. She would remember him.

  "Go on." Raleigh urges. "Tell him what you told me. About the white shirt. The kid you went with."

  Raleigh is normally fanatic about the privacy of guests. He has even talked about building a separate stairwell for patrons, simply so they will not be seen entering and leaving Ploenchit tower at all, an access passage that would allow them to enter from a block away, under the street. And yet now he wants her to reveal so much.

  "The boy?" she asks, stalling for time, unnerved by Raleigh's eagerness to expose a guest, and a white shirt, at that. She glances at the stranger again, wondering who he is, and what sort of hold he has on her papa-san.

  "Go on," Raleigh motions impatiently, the opium pipe gripped in his teeth. He leans into the opium lamp to smoke again.

  "He was a white shirt," Emiko begins. "He came with a group of other officers. . ."

  A new one. Brought around by his friends. All of them laughing and egging him on. All of them drinking free because Raleigh knows better than to charge, their good will worth more than the liquor. The young man, drunk. Laughing and making jokes about her in the bar. And then stealthily returning later, in privacy, hidden from his colleagues' prying eyes.

  The pale man makes a face. "They'll go with you? With your kind?"

  "Hai." Emiko nods, showing nothing of what she thinks of his contempt. "White shirts and Grahamites."

  Raleigh laughs softly. "Sex and hypocrisy. They go together like coffee and cream."

  The stranger glances sharply at Raleigh, and Emiko wonders if the old man can see the disgust in those pale blue eyes or if he is too stoned on opium to care. The pale man leans forward, cutting Raleigh out of the conversation. "And what did this white shirt tell you?"

  Is there a flicker of fascination there? Does she intrigue him? Or is it simply her story that interests him?

  Despite herself, Emiko feels a stirring of her genetic urge to please, an emotion that she hasn't felt since her abandonment. Something about the man reminds her of Gendo-sama. Even though his blue gaijin eyes are like pools of chemical bath acid and his face is kabuki pale, he has presence. The air of authority is palpable, and strangely comforting.

  Are you a Grahamite? she wonders. Would you use me and then mulch me? She wonders if she cares. He is not beautiful. He is not Japanese. He is nothing. And yet his horrifying eyes hold her with the same power that Gendo-sama used to exercise.

  "What do you wish to know?" she whispers.

  "Your white shirt said something about generipping," the gaijin says. "Do you remember?"

  "Hai. Yes. I think perhaps he was very proud. He came with a bag of newly designed fruits. Gifts for all of the girls."

  More interest from the gaijin. It warms her. "And what did the fruit look like?" he asks.

  "It was red, I think. With. . . threads. Long threads."

  "Green hairs? About so long?" He indicates a centimeter with his fingers. "Thickish?"

  She nods. "Yes. That's right. He called them ngaw. And his aunt had made them. She was going to be recognized by the Child Queen's Protector, the Somdet Chaopraya, for her contribution to the Kingdom. He was very proud of his aunt."

  "And he went with you," the man prompts.

  "Yes. But later. After his friends were gone."

  The pale man shakes his head impatiently. He doesn't care about the details of the liaison: the boy's nervous eyes, the way he approached the mama-san and how Emiko was sent up to wait for him to follow a safe time later, so that no one would make the connection. "What else did he say about this aunt?" he asks.

  "Just that she rips for the Ministry."

  "Nothing else? Not where she rips? Where they have test fields? Nothing of that sort?"

  "No."

  "That's it?" The gaijin glances at Raleigh, irritated. "This is what you dragged me here for?"

  Raleigh rouses himself. "The farang," he prompts. "Tell him about the farang."

  Emiko can't help but show her confusion. "Sorry?" She remembers the white shirt boy, bragging about his aunt. How his aunt would be given a prize and a promotion for her work with ngaw. . . nothing of farang. "I don't understand."

  Raleigh puts down his pipe, scowling. "You told me he talked about farang generippers."

  "No." She shakes her head. "He said nothing about foreigners. I am sorry."

  The scarred gaijin makes a face of irritation. "Let me know when you've got something worth my time, Raleigh." He reaches for his hat, makes to stand.

  Raleigh glares at her. "You said there was a farang generipper!"

  "No. . ." Emiko shakes her head. "Wait!" She puts out a hand to the gaijin. "Wait. Khun, please wait. I know what Raleigh-san is talking about." Her fingers brush his arm. The gaijin jerks away from her touch. He steps out of reach with a look of disgust.

  "Please," she begs. "I did not understand. The boy said nothing about farang. But he used a name. . . . it could have been farang," She looks to Raleigh for confirmation. "Is this what you mean? The strange name? It could have been foreign, yes? Not Thai. Not Chinese or Hokkien. . ."

  Raleigh interrupts, "Tell him what you told me, Emiko. That's all I want. Tell him everything. Every single detail. Just like you're talking to me after a date."

  And so she does. As the gaijin sits again, listening suspiciously, she tells everything. About the boy's nervousness, how he couldn't look at her, and then how he couldn't look away. How he talked because his erection would not come. How he watched her undress. How he talked about his aunt. Trying to make himself seem important to a whore and a New People whore at that, and how strange and silly that had seemed to her, and how she hid her thoughts of him. And then finally the part that makes Raleigh smile in satisfaction and the pale scarred man's eyes widen.

  "The boy said the man Gi Bu Sen gives them blueprints, but he betrays them more often than not. But his aunt discovered a trickery. And then they made the successful rip of the ngaw. Gi Bu Sen did hardly anything for them with the ngaw. It was all his aunt's work, in the end." She nods. "That is what he said. This Gi Bu Sen tricks them. But his aunt is too brilliant to be tricked."

  The scarred man studies her closely. Cold blue eyes. Pale skin like a corpse. "Gi Bu Sen," the man murmurs. "You're sure that was the name?"

  "Gi Bu Sen. I am sure."

  The man nods, thoughtful. The lamp that Raleigh uses for his opium crackles in the silence. Far below on the street, a late-night water seller calls out, his voice floating up through the open shutters and mosquito screens. The noise seems to break the gaijin from his reverie. His pale eyes focus on her again. "I would be very interested to know if your friend returned for another visit."

  "He was ashamed, afterward." Emiko touches her cheek, where she hides a fading bruise with makeup. "I think he will not—"

  Raleigh interrupts. "Sometimes they come back.
Even if they feel guilty." He shoots her a dark look. She makes herself nod in confirmation. The boy will not be coming back, but it will make the gaijin happy to think so. And it will make Raleigh happy. Raleigh is her patron. She should agree. Should agree with conviction.

  "Sometimes." It's all she can manage. "Sometimes they come back, even if they are ashamed."

  The gaijin eyes them both. "Why don't you go get her some ice, Raleigh?"

  "It's not time for her next round. And she's got a show coming up."

  "I'll cover the loss."

  Raleigh clearly wants to stay, but he's smart enough not to protest. He forces a smile. "Of course. Why don't you two talk?" He looks at her significantly as he leaves. Emiko knows Raleigh wants her to seduce this gaijin. To entice him with herky-jerky sex and the promise of transgression. And then to listen to him and report, as all the girls are asked to.

  She leans closer, letting the gaijin see her exposed skin. His eyes trace across her flesh, following the line of her thigh where it slips beneath her pha sin, the way her hip presses against fabric. He looks away. Emiko hides her irritation. Is he attracted? Nervous? Disgusted? She cannot tell. With most men, it is easy. Obvious. They fit such simple patterns. She wonders if he finds a New Person too disgusting, or if perhaps he prefers boys.

  "How do you survive here?" the gaijin asks. "The white shirts should have mulched you by now."

  "The payments. As long as Raleigh-san is willing to pay, they will ignore."

  "And you live somewhere, too? Raleigh pays for that as well?" When she nods, he says, "Expensive, I suppose?"

  She shrugs. "Raleigh-san keeps a tally of my debts."

  As if summoned, Raleigh returns with her ice. The gaijin pauses as Raleigh comes through the door, waits impatiently as Raleigh sets down the glass on the low table. Raleigh hesitates, and when the scarred man ignores him, he mumbles something about enjoying themselves and leaves again. She watches the old man's departure thoughtfully, wondering at the hold this man has over Raleigh. Before her, the glass of icy water sweats, seductive. At the man's nod she reaches for it and drinks. Convulsive. Before she knows it, it is gone. She presses the cold glass against her cheek.