Fantastic Metropolis

And it was then that those same elements of irony, contempt, and desire that I had earlier seen at war in his face, reappeared to continue their struggle. He bent down to kiss me. Not merely the will to survive, not merely the bitterness of a jilted heart, but lust, thick and muddy, prompted me to draw back my lips and bite deep, deep, my cruel dental work injecting customized protozoans, my mouth filling with blood and his scream.

He jerked backward, as if shot by a high-powered rifle, and fell trembling and shivering by my side. Already he had passed from a mild sweat to chronic dehydration. His mad, beautiful eyes—delirious with the last stages of malarial fever—regarded me with puzzlement. “That, darling,” I said, “is why they call me Mosquito.” With a great effort I managed to sit up so that I was able to cradle his head in my arms. His blood was thickening, turning his brain into a stew. He was so beautiful. One of the most beautiful men I had known. A fatal beauty. “Didn’t you even like me,” I said, “a little?”

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I left the hotel with his Panama over my eyes, and with my mouth still filled with the saline taste of blood, still echoing with his scream. His voluminous clothes undermined any attempt at inconspicuousness. But the concierge had seen a doll enter, a man leave. After they had found the body, they would ponder on how a Cartier doll had come to murder her client; they would open her up, look for faults, scratch their heads, destroy her; they would forget about the ill-dressed man.

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In the small hours, above the Gung-Ho in Harry’s private rooms, I changed into some spare he-clothes and sprawled out on the sofa while the boss quizzed me about those new Seiko dolls I was supposed to have checked out. I lied fantastically. I was in no mood to talk of mad farang scientists and their poisonous girls.

“That Englishman,” he said, after we had finished a bottle of Mekong. “Hear from him again?”

“No.” I flushed, but the shadows hid me. It was not shame, of course, but embarrassment. I had been such an idiot.

“Good. Why is it always Englishmen with you, Mosquito?”

“Because…” But I was so tired. Tired of this ridiculous body, this extravagant heart. A fly droned lazily in the torpid confine of the lounge; moonlight was seeping through the blinds. I remembered another moonlit world, the land of ice and snow where, once, I had been happy. Even in the last days of empire, it was a land of masques and bergomasques, of enchantment, of moonlight, calm, sad and beautiful. Life then was a long fête galante, a fairy tale. I had wanted to be part of that marvellous world, that land of satisfied desire, part of its genuineness. More than a woman, I had wanted to be joaillerie. They were not like their eastern sisters, but elegant courtesans with the most ethereal of manners, the beloved mistresses of lords, the trusted confidantes of ladies.

I sometimes think I shall never return.

“I’m through with Englishmen,” I said. It was doll world, not they, that I had been enamoured of. Ah, I am a fake of fakes, an impostor; my life, a banal porno flick, a cheap jeu vérité. But sometimes, half awake, half asleep, I dream that I have put off this unwieldy flesh, that, more than a woman, I have become a doll. A real doll, beloved of princes and kings.

“My funny valentine,” laughed Harry, “we’ll have another customer tomorrow. Another Englishman, perhaps. Go. Go home. Go home to Zipper. Go on, before I break your arms. Go home to bed.”

And I did. But the dream, unreal as love, persists.

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“Mosquito”, Richard Calder’s second story, first appeared in Interzone #32 (December 1989).