Mosquito
James was very still. I rested my head against his shoulder, and he let it stay. Like so many of his kind, he had come to ask the sweatshops of Bangkok to provide consolation for his lost toys. Outside, tattooed upon towers of glass and jade, vast holograms of Buddha recalled the transitoriness of all things.
“I can do it, James.”
“I used to have a collection. Even as a child,” he said, in childlike reverie. “Being without them these last few years…” And those cold, grey eyes softened. “It’s been hard,” he said, “hard.” His flesh was hard. I felt its panel-beaten contours through the cool silk of his Italian suit; and on tiptoes, I sought his mouth. He arched an eyebrow, his face hectic with the effort, it seemed, to at once express irony, contempt, and desire. “So little Mosquito wants to be my R and R?’
“I want—I want to be your doll.” I pulled his head down and found his lips. “Please,” I said, “I want to be part of your collection…”
“Cartier? Tonight?” he mumbled.
“Yes,” I answered, “anything.” And not unreluctantly, he allowed me to kiss him. In time I was sure I could make him love me.
A tuk-tuk sped me along the Sukumvit Road. Before leaving I’d thrown on a skirt—just long enough to conceal the bifurcation of my thighs—and put in my green, luminous contacts: trademark of a Cartier doll. (Cartier nanoengineers in Geneva had revived Jeanne Toussaint’s panther-jewellery designs of the 1930’s.) I had arranged to meet James later at the Honey Hotel, where I would present him with my catch. Nana Plaza would be my hunting ground.
At Soi Asoke I hailed a long-tailed boat, the klongs having reclaimed much of the city, making it once more the Venice of the East. The taxi churned the dark waters of Sukumvit, scattering the reflected images of pagodas and shopping malls that sat like peroxide lilies on a black pond stained white by the city’s glare. The traffic thickened and before me rose Nana, a gigantic lily pad, pale and bright, a night bloom releasing its bouquet of sex into the smog-filled air. Above, an insect susurration: Autogyros, caught like moths in searchlights panning the sky, were falling to earth in swarms, unloading cargoes of sweettoothed breeders eager for Nana’s delights. I paid my ferryman and alighted.
Nana was doll city, very gynoidal, very het. It still possessed some of the shantytown ambience of sixty years ago when it had soothed the nightmares of American GIs; but now superimposed upon its skyline of poured concrete and twentieth-century slum were undulating whiplash curves and geometric lines copied from the European art nouveau and art déco renaissance of the aube du millénaire. This stylistic heterogeneity was exemplified in the person of Nana’s mammasan, Madame Kito. Kito, the daughter of a farang and a doll, belonged to that caste of half humans we called bijouterie: hybrid jewels as distinguished from all-precious joaillerie. Ostracized by humans and automata alike, bijouterie lived as pariahs, envying and hating those whose holistic integrity so rebuked them. Whenever I came to Nana, Kito’s lonely, jealous, violent heart called to mine.
I moved through a confluence of dolls. A few repros were at work—ball-jointed, porcelain-skinned “antiques” who offered their brass, umbilical keys to passersby—as well as a handful of aboriginals—nonreflective pieces of walking, talking AI, who, like Zipper, were from a time before nanotechnology replaced microelectronics. In one doorway, a matching pair of crystal torsos—Lalique?—displayed, like deep-sea tropical fish, neural networks of polychromatic liquids. (The opposite, of course, of most configurations. Dolls, like my favourite candies, are usually soft on the outside, hard within.) But enough of Nana’s denizens approximated my own design for me to cruise the doll-saturated streets in anonymity.
Walking with a gynoid’s sexual precision, I checked off each bar name, seeking my prey. There was House of Dolls, Tin Lizzie, Columbine’s, Club Puberty, and an S-M parlour, Judy’s. Some crew-cut boys eating at a noodle-stall called out: “Where you going, pretty sex doll?” and “Over here, clockwork poo-ying.” Ahead, the bar I sought signalled its wares via a sign featuring neon-green eyes, beneath which, in Gothic script, flickered: WILLY HOFMANNSTHAL’S DOLL KELLER. Willy was a Cartier aficionado.
In the acid noon of the Keller’s light show, amber-skinned dolls with incongruous, jade-green eyes performed, in bamboo cages above my head, their generic dance, The Lordosis. Many of these girls were state-of-the-art Cartier: poo-ying mee-ow (or, in European nomenclature, Felis femella), the results of cross-species genetic splicing. They sported whiskers, tails, and pointy ears, or else were leopard-spotted or striped like tigresses. Compared to them my reshaped lines were passé. But Willy’s dolls seemed unconcerned. They were too busy lifting beer glasses to the lips of their farangs, and prattling their babyish subtongue, their programs—inspired by an aesthetic of cuteness—stage-managing their mimes of little-girl adoration. I found the number one girl and told her I had a message from Madame for Mr Willy. I was led upstairs.
He was an old man, sitting on the bare boards of a room naked but for a rice-paper screen. On his knees was a laptop. The spectral light of its VDU had him mesmerized. I coughed; his head turned with a rheumatic scrunch, and while his watery eyes focused on my loveliness, the powder-blue visage of a cat peeped inquisitively from the folds of his dressing gown. He stroked its head. “Ah, Gudrun, one of your sisters has come to call. What can we do for you, Miss Cat?”
