Libra - Don Delillo [42]
Mitsuko took him into the land of nūdo. Billboards, photographs, leaflets, lamppost signs, nudes in booths and theaters, neon and paper nudes, models to be photographed, nudes arrayed in colored lights, strangely pale beneath the fake rose glow. Rain-slick streets like the streets in his reveries, movie shadows and dark-coated men, Mitsuko’s little pouting mouth, her language of sighs and hints, reverie of stillness, perfection of desire, her legs slightly parted, arms at her sides.
She did none of the things Reitmeyer had said she’d do, and Ozzie didn’t ask.
In the bubble he worked in a hot glow, marking intercept paths, checking the oscilloscope for traces of electron motion that represented air traffic within a given sector.
Through the all-night watches he engaged officers in conversation, asked them questions about world affairs. It turned out he knew more than they did. They didn’t know the-basic things. Names of leaders, types of political systems. The younger officers were the worst informed, Joe College types, which served to justify some old suspicion of his about the way things work.
A crackling voice requesting winds aloft at eighty thousand feet, a voice outside the dome of night, beyond the known limits.
There were bars and bar girls near the base but he preferred going to Tokyo, alone, where he visited Konno in the huge development near the factories. The coppery smog was so thick it obscured the setting sun. Konno smoked Luckies and talked about the struggle to exist. He worked only part-time, an elevator operator, because the country was awash in college graduates. Sometimes Mitsuko showed up and she and Ozzie made love to Thelonious Monk records, weird plinking and bonging blues, sort of Japanese come to think of it. Other times Konno took him to the Queen Bee, a nightclub with elaborate floor shows and gorgeous women drifting through the smoke like one hundred slit-skirt versions of a Howard Johnson’s hostess. It occurred to Lee that he ought to wonder what an elevator man and a pfc. were doing in a place like this.
Konno would slouch in, taking off his raincoat and dragging it along the floor as they were led to a table in a platformed area above the tourists, the Japanese businessmen, American officers, contract pilots (recognizable by their drab short-sleeve shirts and fancy sunglasses, whatever the weather). Konno pocketed checks without seeming to pay and one night introduced Lee to a hostess named Tammy, a woman in a silver dress and shiny face paint.
Konno believed in riots.
Konno believed the U.S. had used germ warfare in Korea and was experimenting with a substance called lysergic acid here in Japan.
Life is hostile, he believed. The struggle is to merge your life with the greater tide of history.
To have true socialism, he said, we first establish capitalism, totally and heartlessly, and then destroy it by degrees, bury it in the sea.
He was a member of the Japanese-Soviet Friendship Society, the Japanese Peace Council, the Japan-China Cultural Exchange Association.
Foreign capital, foreign troops dominate modem Japan, he said.
All foreign troops are U.S. troops. Every Westerner is an American. Every American serves the cause of monopolistic capital.
Tammy took Lee to a Buddhist shrine.
One night at the Queen Bee, Konno announced that MACS-1, Lee’s unit, would soon leave for the Philippines. This was news to the young Marine. He was beginning to like Japan. He liked coming to Tokyo. He counted on these discussions with Konno, who was able to argue Lee’s own positions from a historic rather than a purely personal viewpoint, from the ashes, the rebuilt