Bite Me

Then, about a block along the way to his next marker, he turned, went back to the Nike store, and bought a pair of running shoes for himself. They were bouncy and light and on his way to the next mark, he started skipping, but then caught himself and returned to deliberately pacing out his steps with his sheathed sword. People might ignore a tiny Japanese man in an orange porkpie hat and socks, with a sword, but if you went around expressing unrestrained joy, they would have you in a straitjacket before you could belt out a verse of “Zippity Do-Dah.”
    Next Okata found himself in the very soft and satiny world of a Victoria’s Secret boutique. It was nearly Valentine’s Day, and the entire store was festooned in pink and red, with very tall mannequins standing around in very small swaths of underwear. It smelled of gardenias. Young women moved back and forth, trailing bits of silk, not really talking, each entranced with her own decoration, inand out of fitting rooms, back to shelves, touching, feeling, stroking the lace, the satin, the combed cotton, then moving on to the next soft scene. He imagined that this must be what it was like in the control room for a vagina. He was an artist, and had never been in a control room, nor a vagina for nearly forty years, but he was sure he remembered it having a similar sensation. This was embarrassingly public, though, and he sat on a round red velvet settee to conceal the sudden memory rising in his trousers.
    He was approached by a petite Asian girl with a name tag. He gave her his list and said, “Please,” and was shocked out of his fuzzy, separate world when she answered him in Japanese.
    “Is this for your wife?” she asked.
    He didn’t know what to say. She was there in the room with him, this young girl, in a vagina control room with him and his distant erotic memories. He could feel his face go hot.
    “A friend,” he said. “She is sick and sent me here.”
    The girl smiled. “She seems to know exactly what she wants, and her sizes are here, too. Do you know what color she likes?”
    “No. Whatever you think is best,” he said.
    “You wait here. I’ll go get some samples and you can pick.”
    He wanted to stop her, or bolt out the door, or crawl under the cushion of the settee and hide his embarrassment, but gardenia was in the air like opium, and therewas music playing with the rhythm of slow sex, and the young women moved like diaphanous ghosts around him, and his shoes were very, very comfortable, so he watched the young girl picking out pairs of bras and panties, gathering them like rose petals to be sprinkled over a snowy path to heaven.
    “Does she like basic black?” said the girl, noticing all the black denim peeking out of the Levi’s bag.
    “Red,” Okata heard himself saying. “She likes red, like rose petals.”
    “I’ll wrap these up for you,” she said. “Will this be cash or charge?”
    “Cash, please.” He handed her two hundred dollars.
    He waited on the settee, willing away his whereabouts, the smell and the music, the women moving, and thought about kendo exercises, training, and how tired—how really exhausted—he felt. By the time the girl returned to press the pink bag and his change into his hand, he was able to stand without embarrassment. He thanked her.
    “Come again,” she said.
    He started to leave, and then looked at the burned-up girl’s map and saw the pictures of the pig, cow, and fish, and realized that it was going to be an ordeal to explain to a butcher what he needed, so he called to the salesgirl.
    “Excuse me. Could you do me a favor, please?”
    On a fresh piece of pink stationery with red and silver hearts on it, she wrote in English: 4 quarts, cow, pig, or fish blood. It would be much easier dealing with a new butcherwith an order slip to hand them. He thanked her again, bowed, and left the store.
    It was no small irony that when he finally found a butcher who could sell him blood, it was a Mexican in the Mission who had to have Okata’s one-item shopping list translated into Spanish. Of course, he had blood. What self-respecting Mexican butcher didn’t save the blood for Spanish blood sausage? Okata didn’t understand any of that. He only understood that after walking half the City carrying jeans, sneakers, and a pink bag of underwear, he finally had a gallon of fresh blood for his burned-up gaijin girl. After he left the shop the butcher went to the phone and dialed the number on the card