Ok. And the sleeves were huge, and hung down—”
“That would be the osode...they resemble dewlaps, the sleeves. The osode goes on over the kosode, or the undergarment. That picture had to have been very old...by the time I left Japan, most women who still wore the kimono for important functions wore only the kosode, as the main garment. By the Edo period, kosode was no longer thought of as a mere undergarment, but as a thing to be worn alone. Many years before that, women would wear up to twelve kimono, each one positioned so as to reveal just a bit of the one beneath.”
“I can’t see how anyone could move in that many layers—they must’ve looked like sumo wrestlers.” Shutting off the gun, Harumi began stacking the wooden trays, but as she got up to her feet, something in Masafumi made him shout past the beaded doorway, “Ignazio, do you mind if I help Harumi carry these to the restaurant?”
Above the whining drone of his own tattoo gun, his boss shouted back, “Go on, kid...get yourself a bite while you’re there. I’ll be a while with this guy,” and as easily as that, Masafumi, with two of the trays in hand, left the shop and began to follow Harumi to her workplace. As she walked ahead of him, Masafumi wondered how her arms and legs would look, if she were to add additional designed bands just under her existing torso-and-upper-limbs tattoo, in a different pattern, like layered kosode—
“Awww, looks like Queen Mary Jane has a court now.” A brief sideways glance past Harumi’s stiffening back revealed a bulky tan-suited shape, surmounted by a blob of a face topped with limp bristles of short-cut dull-brown hair, and balanced on each side by thick slug-meaty ears.
Walker Ulger. He of the empty pistol and the unfulfilled longing for that unseen armor. From what Harumi had been telling Masafumi over the last few weeks, ever since she’d opened up to him in the alleyway, Ulger had been making more and more stops at her employer’s restaurant; no longer content to settle for his free meal of saffron-hued momengoshi steeped in fermented miso wrapped in konbu, he had begun to wait around the inside of the place while others were eating, watching them, and making strange comments about the food, and the people eating it. But since this part of the city was seldom if ever visited by the police (whose budget cuts were legendary, according to the headlines of the various daily papers on sale in those hinged metal boxes on every other street corner), the shop owners put up with their private security guard’s antics, least he, too, turn on them, as the Vietnamese street gangs in the Twin Cities had gutted those two cities back in the teens.
And always, whenever he saw Harumi, he would bring up the nano-yarn sweater, as she dismissively dubbed the carbon-nano-tube body armor he so persistently sought. And daily, she would tell Masafumi...who merely sat and nodded, waiting for the autoclave to finish sterilizing the various implements of his trade, even as he’d steal glances at the vats of nano-ribbons steeping in the brilliant pigments. Harumi like to talk, so he seldom had to say much to her, and he never mentioned the lessons in nano-ribbon implantation Ignazio had been giving to him. In exchange for a full body tattoo, one of his boss’ customers—a worker at a sporting goods company a few cities away whose products (various athletic balls) used nano-technology, and whose workers actually made the ribbons of the stuff in their spare time, since all one had to do was attach a small slip of sticky paper to a patch of nano-tubes only one-third of a millimeter high, then keep pulling the nano-tubes, which clung to each other, and formed a long transparent sheet, which was then pulled into ribbons, something which was automated in some other plants, but done by hand locally—would “pay” Ignazio for his work with bundles of the stuff. Thus, the nano-tubes used by Ignazio weren’t the same kind used by doctors to create living body armor...while composed of the same carbon nano-tubes, the “official” nano-ribbons began their existence in plants devoted to nothing but their creation, resulting in a more uniform product, always two meters long in sheet form, while the hand-pulled ones were only around a meter in length. Which boiled down to a simple difference: “official” body armor was far more dense and therefore stronger, due to the person laying it down being able to work for a longer period of time with the same continuous strand or “ribbon” before going on to the next piece.
But for Ignazio’s purposes, the shorter lengths of “yarn” worked out exceptionally well...once Masafumi became used to wearing the magnifying goggles needed for such minute work, he soon became adept at judging just how much “ribbon” he would need per body design to be augmented. All he had to do was gently score the flesh, just a shade harder than a fingernail scrape, then drop on the nano-ribbon, and let it settle down onto the waiting depression in the skin. In many ways the work reminded Masafumi of the African and South Pacific body ornamentation resulting from opening wounds on the body, then putting something in them, to prevent them from healing flat and smooth.
And once the ribbons were in place, with their inherent capability to store solar energy, they would make even the most basic tattoo (or raised brand) look virtually alive. As he studied under his boss, Masafumi wondered if that was part of the allure of body armor for this Walker Ulger person...the subtle sheen of augmented flesh, like a badge that could never be removed, or a pistol which never needed to be polished. It was sad, how lacking this Ulger person had to be, to desire such outward amplification of his being, of his status, such as it was....
When Harumi said nothing to the man, but kept on walking, he moved directly in front of her, blocking the sidewalk with his spread-apart feet and his elbows-jutting arms, his hands placed on both hips. The restaurant was only half a block away, but Masafumi knew that even if he and Harumi were to try and walk in the street, alongside the passing cars, Ulger would find some other way to block their path, perhaps one which would leave her morning’s work lying in fleshy piles on the heat-shimmered asphalt.
“You want to carry these? Because if you do, I already have help.”
“Yeah, I see that...is he your new tattoo-boy? He gonna finish up your arms and legs for you? Or is he gonna outline what you do have with nano-yarn? He gonna quilt you? I think he’s gonna turn you into a coloring book, black outlines around everything—”
“Yes, he is. Are you satisfied? Or do you intend to stick around and watch him do it?”
“I thought he was a tattoo-boy...only he don’t like to do what he does to others, does he?” Ulger looked at Masafumi with a chin-first thrust of his shapeless, bristled head, peering at the Japanese man’s ink-free arms and lower legs.
Considering Ulger’s law enforcement skills, Masafumi decided that giving the city over to any street gang, of any ethnicity, would be a more pleasant option.
“I wouldn’t know, I haven’t seen him naked. But my friend here is full of surprises, so I’m not assuming anything about him.” Harumi shifted her tray of tofu from one arm to the other, then made a break for it in the narrow space between Ulger’s left elbow and the brick façade of the storefront next to the Japanese eatery. Masafumi likewise slipped past the rent-a-pseudo-cop, albeit making sure that he grazed the man’s mushrooming waistline with the hard corner of one of the wooden trays. Noticing that the man failed to flinch at the glancing blow, Masafumi smiled, and followed Harumi into the pungent-smelling interior of the restaurant. Behind him, he felt the heavier footfalls of Ulger, so he didn’t startle when he heard the blatty voice say in his ear, “And where do you think you’re going, huh?”
“Into the kitchen, where do you think the tofu goes, huh?” Harumi snapped over her shoulder, and then Masafumi and the young woman were in the kitchen, past the swinging doors which smacked directly into Ulger’s belly as they shuddered to a stop. The kitchen was hot, filled with sizzling, boiling and sputtering meat noises, and lest he be overcome by a torrent of culinary nostalgia for his homeland, Masafumi simply asked, “Where’s the back door?” and followed Harumi’s pointing finger, before hurrying past the stooped black-haired cooks hovering over the flaming burners, and quitting the room for the somewhat less humid alleyway beyond.
It wasn’t until he was a couple of back-doors away from his own boss’ shop that Masafumi realized he had company, there in the alley. Ulger. Waddle-stomping toward him from between two buildings, his manju-shaped face working into a doughy frown. But before the man could speak, Masafumi said quietly, “Sir,