Mosquito
Our rendezvous, the Café Gung-Ho: he, iridescent in the one shaft of light to breach its Happy Hour shade, and I, seeing that beauty for the first time, poised in the doorway, thinking, Fatal, oh so fatal. The bar was deserted, save Harry, a few girls (humans, no gynoids; Harry is a purist), and the radiant one, tall, blond, and cobra-eyed. Breathless, I went to meet him. Dressed like a man, I tried to walk like a man. But I was restive; I wanted to flirt. My alter ego, imprisoned by day within this safe-house of masculinity, rattled the bars of her cage and sulked.
“Kuhn Harry, I sorry,” I said in my best Charlie Chan, “Zipper not tell me you want. I come straight here.” We assumed our roles. I played the all-purpose Oriental; Harry, the street-smart Brooklyn babe to whom, far from home, unsure of yourself, you could confess your appetites and trust your money.
“Yeah. Don’t worry about it. Lord Chandos don’t want to hear about Zipper.” I had abandoned myself to Milord’s bodice-ripping eyes. Harry, who was acquainted with my schoolgirl crushes, briskly continued, “Let’s talk business,” and ordered drinks. I made the wai, sat down; a Mekong appeared before me.
“Lord Chandos wants to take a girl back to London.” The boss paused for sales-pitch effect. “A dtook-gah-dtah.” Of course. Why else was I here? Milord wanted a windup toy, a doll. I stole them; Harry fenced them. Our customer—despite the insistence of his beauty—was just another farang exhausted by human love, one whose lack of credit had led him east to seek the services of a rustler. But what beauty it was: a beauty from the land of ice and snow where, once, I had been happy.
“Dtook-gah-dtah?” I said. “No problem. My speciality. What kind of girls you like, sir?”
“Bad girls,” he said, deadpan. “And call me James.”
“Yes, Mr James. Cartier? Rolex? Tiffany? All fake, of course. All imitation. But very good quality. Very reasonable price.”
“Harry tells me half a million gets me Cartier.”
“You have good taste. Cartier doll very nice. Very Déco. Very bad. But doll have no right, no civil status. You need passport or you never get her out of country.”
“Passport’s my department,” said Harry. “It’ll need a visa, too. I do both for two hundred thousand baht.”
The Englishman sighed. “I’m no longer a wealthy man, Harry.” Sweet farang, I could believe it. You seemed one of those ruined European aristocrats who, impoverished by debts, sought out cheap imitations of the toys to which they had become addicted but could no longer afford. Automata were the playthings of the rich; but here in sex city (where the boys are so pretty), city of angels, dolls, and of night, we fake everything—TVs, software, designer jeans, life.
“In all the world,” I said, “you cannot get better price. And anyone tell you Mr James, Thai lady dolls are number one.”
“We’re putting ourselves at considerable risk. Apart from the trouble of lifting a doll, the Eurobunnies—sorry, James—are down on us for copyright infringement. Someone out there has killed three doll rustlers this month alone. It’s hot: we don’t do this for fun.” Our customer looked uncertain and Harry proceeded with the hard sell. “Mosquito’s just amazing. He’ll get you a Cartier doll, no sweat. He can pass through the pornocracies—Patphong, Nana, Cowboy, Suriwong—like a ghost through walls.”
“As you say,” said the stranger, inhaling languorously on his cigarette, “amazing.” He looked askance, ready to snare my reaction, adding, with studied disinterest, “What’s the secret?” Against my will, ravished, a sad, sad slave to lust, I smiled conspiratorially. Harry saw (he knows my little ways) and drummed his fingers on the table.
“Secret is seven hundred thousand baht. Half of it up front. Secret is no one knows outside this room. Secret is letting us do our job with no questions asked. Then you get your dtook-gah-dtah and everyone’s happy.”
Milord swept back his golden hair. “Seven hundred thousand baht,” he reflected. “I’ll have to think it over.” Harry’s lips didn’t move, but his face screamed, Time waster! The stranger pushed aside his glass and rose. “I’ve some things to do… Nice bar you have here.” Harry picked up a copy of the Bangkok Post and pretended to scan it.
“You know where you can find me…”
“And good to meet you, Mosquito.” His right hand was gloved, concealing, perhaps, a prosthesis. Teasingly, he squeezed my arm. It was an intimation of fellowship, of understanding. “Mosquito: Why do they call you that?”
“Just a name,” I said, “a silly name.”
And then he was gone.
When he had touched me, I had felt a pinprick in my arm, like a discharge of static. I lifted my shirtsleeve and recognized the telltale mark—like that of an insect bite—left by an epidermic tracer.
“What’s wrong?” said Harry.
“Mosquito bite Mosquito,” I said, scratching. Harry burrowed into his paper. A nasty, unidentified virus simply called klong fever was ravaging Bangkok. It was said to be transmitted by insect bites, only affect males, and leave its victims impotent. But since no farang had been known to succumb, Harry had shown little concern.
The tracer could be removed with tweezers; but its itch, counterpointing that which I felt in my loins, made me reluctant to destroy it. I wanted him; and he, it seemed, wanted me. Did I ask myself why? No, my darlings. Mosquito has an extravagant heart. Closing my eyes, I beheld the blazing lines of Mr James dancing across my retina, like the afterimage of a fierce summer’s day your aching eyes have forestalled on. I saw him, incandescent among dark, London streets, a lean man dressed in light, window-shopping for automata. His cold eyes appraise their wonderful, jewelled forms, as he walks down Piccadilly and into Bond Street. And there, in a Cartier showroom, he sees me, and falls hopelessly in love.
I heard Harry throw aside his paper, the scrape of his chair. “Make hoochie-coochie with a customer again,” he said, “and I’ll break your arms.”
That’s Harry.
That evening, back at my condo, I prepared for work. Seiko mechanettes (they of the regenerative maidenhead) had recently been decanted for bars in the Silom Road and Harry wanted a report. On the heat-ruptured surface of my dresser I placed my creams, paints, and powders, my unguents and emollients; then, laying out my she-clothes, I sloughed off my daytime skin and became The Doll. My alias winked at me from the other side of the mirror. She has a delicate, childlike face, my sister, with vestiges of puppy fat about the cheeks. Bobbed hair gives her an appearance of delinquency, as do the eyes, crescent and puckish, burning like black suns. The lips are set in a pout, communicating both desire and disdain. And the complexion—the faultless, lacquered flesh of the gynoid—proclaims her synthetic. Her sartorial ensemble? A leopard-print body stocking and six-inch stilettos. The genitals, of course (always a problem) have to be secured with Scotch tape, giving the appearance of a distended mons veneris. I smiled, checking my fangs. Perfect.
I lay on the bed and browsed through some physical culture magazines while the radio murmured of love lost and found to the indifferent whup, whup, whup of the fan. The microscopic transmitter throbbed, caterwauling across the city to Milord. I pressed it to my lips. Instantly, the imperative of that evening’s work was subverted by a premonition that he would call, not tomorrow, not next week, but tonight. And I preened myself, again and again, jittery as a girl preparing for her first date. My deceptions were unrivalled, if incomplete. Harry, who had paid for my implants and other, more radical, surgery, had insisted I retain a flow of testosterone in my veins. Only a man could imitate a doll. Women, it was said, were too real. For dolls are not women; they are man’s dreams of women. Made in man’s image, they are an extension of his sex, female impersonators built to confirm his prejudices, sexual illusionists. I too was practiced in sexual sleight of hand, my womanhood as unreal and as pathologically exquisite as a doll’s. So exquisite, it was almost grotesque.
The intercom buzzed. “Someone to see you, Madame,” said Zip. “A Mr–” But Zip was given no time to complete the formalities. Instead of “James” (my heart lurched, telling me it was so) came the announcement of electromagnetic crackle and bar-brawl sound effects. I rolled off the bed, nauseous with anticipation. The hallway stank of roasted Bakelite. Mr James had been unnecessarily heavy-handed; Zip was a valet, not a security guard (though his cosmetic musculature and barrel chest often led people to conclude otherwise). I breathed deeply, trying to remember my lines, quell my stage fright, ignore the anxious clickety-clack of my high heels on the teakwood parquetry. I made my entrance.
Milord stood over a broken coffee table, silk jacket ripped, Panama askew, his leather-gloved prosthesis smoking; and Zip, horizontal amid the debris, scorch marks either side of his shaven head, looked up at him dead-eyed with a demeanour as hard and vulnerable as the Mapplethorpe portraits that lined my walls. Hands on hips, lips quivering like a spoilt, refractory child’s, I cued in: “You want kill me too?” His eyes grazed my body like the feather-light tips of rapiers. It was a good body, I reassured myself; an expensive body; a body I always regretted having to camouflage by day. Exaggeratedly feminine, it was grafted onto a small-boned, somewhat adolescent infrastructure, like a piquant allegory of innocence burdened by desire. “You very naughty, Mr James. Just look at poor Zipper!”
“Mosquito?” I curtsied in acknowledgement. “Good God, I’ve seen a lot of he-shes in Bangkok and some of them were fantastic… but you… Seems you might be worth all this trouble.”
“I think Trouble your middle name, Mr James.”
“Sorry about Man Friday.”
“Not organic. Not modern doll. Backed up. Running in an hour.” He straightened his hat and fumbled in his pockets. “Chocolates? Flowers?” I asked, mock expectant.
“Seem to have lost my cigarettes.” I bent down, retrieving a silver cigarette case lying beneath a scree of broken glass. I helped myself.
“Light me.” Like a tiny, nervous dragon, a Dupont flickered and withdrew. “Nice lighter.”
“Nice workmanship,” he said, screwing a monocle into his eye, and awarding me a detailed examination. “Unreal.”
“Unreal as a doll. Unreal as love…”
“And cool. I’m impressed.”
“Tracer. Stung me in Gung-Ho. I know you come. I not stupid.”
“I don’t believe you are, dear boy, or you would never have allowed me to find you.”
“Curiosity, Mr James.”
“Desperation, I’d guess. Oh, I know all about you Mosquito…” He turned his back to me, stepping over Zipper and walking to the window, to stare down at the night-transfigured city thirty floors below. “Aren’t you tired of working for that American pimp? Is he the one who tells you to speak and act like some second-rate Suzie Wong?”
I let fall a tear, not altogether crocodile, but prompted more by the exigencies of coquetry than by genuine sorrow or regret. It was wasted. He did not deign to look me in the face.
“Harry likes me to talk that way,” I said, throwing off my Third World guise. “Says it reassures the clients. What exactly do you know about me, James?”
“Everything, little Mosquito…” A blue-grey nimbus of spent nicotine was forming above his head, like the signature of a prosecuting angel. “How would you describe your childhood?”
“Idyllic.” He laughed.
“Spoilt little rich boy. Your father a big name in sericulture. And your youth?”
“Gilded.”
“But oh so soon tarnished! You studied at Cambridge, yes?”
“I was happy there…”
“I’m an Oxford man myself. Anyway, you took a postgrad in Comparative Literature. Your thesis: ‘The Second Decadence: Literature of the 1990’s.’ Then you got into that scrape with Lord Dagenham’s son. And he only fourteen. How wicked. Your father ordered you back to Thailand. Cut you off without a satang. Poor Mosquito, it’s been downhill ever since…”
“How do you know all this? And why tell me?”
“Because I’m feeling philanthropic, dear boy. How much money do you get from the American?”
“Not enough to leave him. This apartment’s his. He keeps nearly all the money from our jobs. Even Zipper’s on loan. My father’s made it impossible for me to get a decent job…”
“I wouldn’t have you wasted on decency, Mosquito. The next job’ll be just you and me. And this time you’ll take enough of the percentage to enable you to shake Harry off for good.”
“So much?”
“I need my doll, Mosquito. My Cartier doll. And I need her tonight. Passport, visa—I have my own contacts for that. But I must have my doll before morning.”
“Do you need your doll so bad, James?”
“Name your price.” He about-faced; I held his reptilian stare. There had been other Englishmen. Some, quite pretty. None had offered me escape. But I had known that one would come who would be special, who I would recognize by his incomparable beauty, who would, at last, carry me off to his castle in the sky. My prince.
“I don’t want money, James,” I said tremulously, “I want to go back to the land of ice and snow. Take me with you, James. Take me to England.” In petulance, he swung open the plate-glass doors and stepped onto the veranda. The tropical night crashed into the room. I followed him outside.
“Dear boy, what sort of foolishness is this?”
“The first time I saw you…” I began, but he cut me short.
“Please—let’s not make this complicated. Mosquito, you don’t want to go to Europe.” He waved his hand over the roofs of Bangkok. “Look out there. You think Europe can compete with this? The Old World is dead, Mosquito. Names: that’s all she has. The names of her jewellers and goldsmiths, her clockmakers and couturiers. And now even they are being taken from her. Forget Europe, Mosquito. She has been plundered and raped. Nobody speaks of her any more…”
Below us the city glistened like a well-oiled body, rippling under the stars. It offered forbidden technologies, flaunted stolen ideas. It mocked the impotent West. Europe had sickened, its economy in misrule. An empire of style, it had surrendered manufacturing to the Pacific Rim and the Americas, investing instead in the refinement of those luxury goods coveted by the Information Revolution’s arrivistes: jewels and perfumes, elegancies of cloth and design, and, most perverse of fabulations, the automata. But with the passing of the aube du millénaire, Europe’s fashion masters were confronted by a world increasingly fickle, increasingly philistine. Japanese disinvestment prompted recession, and from the Atlantic to the Urals, the continent was eclipsed by foreign vulgarizations of its genius.
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?”
“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.
“Are you pleased with me?” London melted in a blue-white flash, and darkness, cold and impassioned, slapped me to the floor, tied me up, stood back to watch me twitch and convulse, then embraced me, like a repentant lover. When I came to, Milord was pouring himself a scotch from the minibar, his smoking claw plucking ice from a thermos.
“Sorry about the ECT, dear boy, but I fear this really is the only way to ‘say good-bye.’ Don’t try to get up. Your vertical hold’s rather wonky.”
I knew I had lost. I would always lose. Because I’m not the real thing. Because I’m not even a poor fake. Just a fake of a fake. Not even bijouterie.
How I longed for genuineness…
The photomechanical, startled by the commotion, had stepped out of frame; now she peeped round the borders of her world, angry at having been disturbed from her little death.
I just wanted to be your doll, Mr James, just wanted to be part of your collection. But no time for self-pity. He loves me, he loves me not. So it goes. He was just like the rest, only prettier. Smile. Keep him talking. This psycho was manoeuvring for the coup de grâce. Delay.
“You were supposed to take me with you.” My lips were as numb as my arms and legs. “You were supposed to be the one…”
“What a revolting idea.”
“Then let me go. There’s no need for this. I won’t tell.”
“Oh? And you seemed to have such a crush on me. Truly, I was flattered…”
“Mr James, I’m not worth it. I’m just a romantic fool. Why are you doing this?”
“Perhaps you think it’s the money? You think I circumvented Harry because I’m a poor, penniless Europunk? It’s true, money was a problem, once. My family had shares in Cartier. When the crash came, we were ruined. I had to sell everything, including, of course, my dolls. But now Cartier pays me very well. Very well indeed.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Mosquito, you don’t understand anything.” He sat astride me, a playground lout, the copper electrodes held tauntingly before my eyes, like creepy-crawlies he might at any moment put down my blouse. Reflected in his monocle I saw a green-eyed little fool, my sister, her red-lipped mouth agape in a comic-book cliché of “pain and surprise.” Milord was enjoying himself. He was a nasty boy.
“People seem to prefer the second-rate. Copies. Imitations. We thought at first President Kennedy would help. But all he did was pontificate about Protectionism and the need for Free Trade. As long as no one pirated American intellectual property, Washington didn’t seem to care. Afraid of upsetting Tokyo and her allies. Then Brasilia vetoed us at the GATT. The world was flooded with dolls from Bangkok and Manila. Why couldn’t you have stuck with your radios and TVs, your cameras and washing machines? Why manufacture automata? It was all we had left. The only thing that made us special. You stole our copyrights, our names. Cartier, Givenchy, Lalique, Fabergé, Coty—all the houses from London to St. Petersburg. And now we have nothing left. But that will change, Mosquito. I am, if you like, part of the vanguard of quality control. A recruit to the guerrilla army of taste. I buy dolls for the House of Cartier. Counterfeit dolls. And in Paris, Mosquito, they change them. Thai dolls aren’t like their Western originals. Nanoengineers here use foetal tissue as a template. A dtook-gah-dtah is, in many respects, remarkably human. We have, after all, the evidence of bijouterie. Cartier Paris set out to bridge the hardware-wetware divide, to write a computer virus that could be transmitted from machine to man…”
“Klong fever?” I said, finding my tongue.
“Of course. It’s an STD: computer language translated into biology through enzymes man and machine both share. Every doll, after its program has been infected, is shipped back to Thailand, a man-hungry pathogen. But none of you will suspect: Dolls are supposed to be disease-free. And the real beauty of all this, Mosquito, is that the virus is an ethnic weapon. Only Orientals are affected. It’s prejudiced against certain kinks in your DNA: the gene, for instance, that gives you those pretty, slitty eyes!” He forked his fingers and made to gouge me. I flinched; he relaxed his threat. “The virus only commandeers cells displaying those idiosyncrasies that characterize your poor, overconfident race. Then the pogrom begins. It replicates, targets the hypothalamus, and creates a hormonal imbalance, causing impotence in the male. In, say, three generations, your gene pool won’t fill a petri dish.”
“Revenge. Is that all you want?” Mr James was a considerable disappointment. “I thought you had more imagination. More fascination.”
“I want,” he said, wiping a hand across my mouth and smearing my cheek with lipstick, “to see your industry suffer. I want an end to cheap imports. I want a world I know only as a memory to return, a world of grace and style, of beautiful automata…” The black, leather-sheathed hand descended.
“This is all too impromptu, Mr James.”
“The others—they were just petty thieves. They didn’t have your class. It’s a pity you have to share their fate…”
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?”
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.
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.
“Mosquito”, Richard Calder’s second story, first appeared in Interzone #32 (December 1989).
Copyright © 1989 by Richard Calder.
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An Interview with Richard Calder
