Mosquito
“Madame Kito want doll. She have friend come stay. Yakuza.” The pornocracies guarded their dolls well (when renting a doll, a farang was required to leave his passport with the bar as surety); but in the six months I had doll-rustled no one had called my bluff. I knew Willy would be an easy sting.
“Kito, Kito. Always Kito,” he sighed. “It isn’t fair, is it, Gudrun?” The cat jumped from its silken enclave to bathe in the laptop’s effulgence. “It all used to be so different. But home is so far, far away… Do you remember what it was like, Gudrun? This doll here—competent workmanship—but a quasihuman structure like the rest. Unredeemed carbon! Now I remember real Cartier dolls: joaillerie whose insides gleamed with jewels and ivory, platinum and gold. But Thai protein engineers have no skill with ribosomes or RNA. No skill with catalytic antibodies. They just shuffle the genome, or what little they know about it, then pin it all together with polymers and steel. They do not understand the alchemy of the flesh! In Europe, Gudrun, we build atom by atom, nanocomputers controlling molecular tools to make gears, motors, levers, little molecular-sized components that have the same kind of structure as metals and stones, ceramics and resins, each one programmed to replicate itself, to take its place in the divine clockwork…”
His spine had become upright, and his body spasmed, as if galvanized by an unseen puppet master. Long, skeletal fingers tapped the keyboard, and as from a magic lamp, a hologram materialized above us, glowing like ectoplasm in the darkened room. It was a cutaway diagram of a gynoid, its flesh stripped away to reveal its brazen ingenuities. Slowly it began to revolve. “Tabitha. My kleinkunst. In whose arms do you lie now? Oh, Gudrun, she was so very beautiful. Look! What architecture! What supernatural clockwork! Peerless somatics, faultless autonomics. The sacrum, the ilium, the acetabulum of crysoprase, mother-of-pearl, and vermeil. The bloodstones of the abdominal aorta. She was an angel, Miss Cat, a living jewel. Genitalia? Oh, no! Not like these imitations made today, just sex, sex, sex. She was an angel…” He passed a hand across his face. “All the money, Gudrun, that our science gave us, spent on status symbols: arts and objets and toys. Now we farangs have forgotten how to make anything except toys, and nobody wants to buy them, Gudrun, nobody wants to buy.” The cat licked her paws, and the hologram continued to revolve, like a ride in a deserted fairground.
“Madame Kito…” I ventured.
“Yes, Miss Cat, I know, I know. A doll for Madame. Take one. They took my doll a long time ago. My Tabitha. My Tabs. They cannot harm me any more.”
Through the streets we walked, two catgirls arm in arm, invisible amid the midnight crush of Nana. I had chosen one of Willy’s more conservative models; Felis femella is difficult to smuggle. I looked at my companion. Why did James want her? A biochip-and-steel, glycerin-hulled fake? Her scent was cheap. Her makeup overdone. How could her sexual obviousness, her sensationalism, console him for the loss of a genuine Cartier doll? Still the European sons came to Bangkok, their taste either hopelessly corrupted, or forfeit to an overweening desire to again possess a mechanical love, however nonpareil. Back in London, tiring of his new mistress, it would be I who Milord would turn to for consolation. And in me he would find a real doll.
Soon a water taxi was speeding us through the night’s swelter and toward the Honey, where Milord awaited delivery of his dtook-gah-dtah.
“Cute,” he said, after he had had her perform a variety of party pieces and tricks, “but not a spiritual toy. Not like…”
“Like a real doll?”
“Sleep,” he told her, and she stretched out on the bed and closed her eyes. The room, brothelscaped in red and gold, was giddy with mirrors. A poster of one of the latest automaton starlets hung from a flocked wall, her flesh transposed to the glossy world of a photomechanical: a 2-D limbo as deathlessly precious as the world of a pressed flower. The poster, like the TV that covered half the ceiling, was interactive and ran jeux vérités software. Milord stroked his doll’s overextended thighs, as smooth and glistening as yellow wax. “She’ll do. For my purposes.” The photomechanical was sniggering at me. I couldn’t see the joke. The air-conditioning was broken, the room hot and airless, and I needed a drink.
“When do we leave, James?”
“Little Mosquito,” he said tenderly. His leather-sheathed hand reached out to offer a caress. I tilted my head, closed my eyes, and saw us, together, in the rain-shiny London streets. His copper-tipped index finger and thumb clasped my temples.
