Salmonella men on Planet Porno: stories - By Yasutaka Tsutsui Page 0,52
bowed as I lay there on top of my wife. But now I could take it no longer. I got up and started yelling at the moustache man. “WHO THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU ARE, YOU SLIMY LITTLE PERVERT?!” I screamed.
But the next words wouldn’t come out. My brain wasn’t working properly, due to fatigue and malnutrition – though being so angry didn’t help. I felt so abjectly worthless that large tears started to fall from my eyes. “Or, or do you mean to rob us paupers of our last remaining pleasure?” I added pathetically.
The moustache man had jumped back at first, startled by the ferocity of my tone. But now he knelt on the floor, stared at me through eyes that were red with tears, and said in a perfectly restrained voice: “Please cooperate with me.”
“Cooperate? With you?! A vile peeping pervert like you?! Who asked you to come and spy on us in bed? I’ll bloody kill you!” And I tried to grab hold of him.
“Just a minute. T-Tanaka, Tanaka, Tanaka’s the name!” he said, resisting me passively with hands behind his back.
As he repeated his mantra, his voice had a hypnotic effect on me. Strength instantly drained from my limbs, and I flopped down onto the floor where I stood.
“If it means we have to feel this miserable,” I said, “I’d rather not save money at all. I’d rather just spend every penny of it. After all, however much we save we’ll never keep up with the rise in house prices.”
At that, the moustache man jumped back to his feet with a cry. “You mustn’t say that, sir!” he said. “I knew you’d say it sooner or later. That’s what makes prices go up – half-desperate people who give up, thinking they’ll never buy a house! They squander their meagre incomes hunting for the latest fashionable goods – and it’s their consumer lifestyles that push prices up and cause big corporations to pollute! The root of all evil is the indiscriminate luxury, the desperate lust for merchandise, the beggar-like vanity of all these salaried workers! Do you want to demean yourself to their level?”
He sounds like a government official, I thought somewhat abstractedly. But I couldn’t find the vigour to contradict him. My body quite lacked the energy to defy him now. I didn’t even have the strength to listen to him any more.
“Well, it’s late now,” the moustache man said at length, having berated me continuously for a full half hour. “Just go to sleep now, ready for work tomorrow. You mustn’t think about anything else. All right, sir?”
My wife, who’d been sitting in bed listening to the moustache man’s lecture, had already fallen asleep and was snoring away without a care.
The moustache man went back up through the ceiling panels. I imagined him crawling around the communal loft space, peering down into other apartments and spying on other couples as they were having sex.
As if she’d learnt her lesson, my wife never again tried to arouse me at night. From that day on, she just went to sleep tamely on her own. Perhaps she wasn’t actually suppressing her desires but had found some other method of satisfying them. Because, far from being hysterical, she always had a glint of pure satisfaction in her eyes. She was probably being satisfied by someone else. It may have been an illusion, because I was hungry and my vision was blurred. But two or three times, when I returned home from work unannounced, I saw my wife and the moustache man hurriedly moving away from each other. Maybe she was having an affair with him. But I didn’t feel like questioning her about it. And anyway, even if I did discover she was having an affair with him – or with a different man altogether – I no longer had the strength to get angry about it. I would have no option but to pretend I hadn’t noticed. In fact, vitality was slipping away from my body day by day, as I wasn’t eating properly. Even my capacity to think straight, to grasp situations and work out how they would develop, was quickly starting to disappear.
“But hey,” I thought incoherently, idly inside my feeble head. “He’s satisfying my wife on my behalf, since I don’t have the energy to. Because of him, I’m released from my wife’s demands. I can go to work without collapsing, so I can carry on working. That’s good, isn’t it? If anything, I