What You Do Not Know You Want Page 0,3

No way, not her. River of dollars, many drinks. You can't get pregnant your first few times, the marine laughs, later, on her back, then her front. A medical fact, he says. Sure, a warning goes off, but she's too drunk now to fight-stop me if you know this joke, okay? and he does call her next weekend, and the next, and the next. `My boyfriend this, my boyfriend that,' she says to make the other hairdressers jealous. Three months the doctor gives her the news. You guess it yet! Pregnant as Queen Turtle. Funny, hey? Her boyfriend tells her their baby will be a beautiful Filipino-American son, okay, no problem, they move to California, okay. She weeps with joy. Good man, good father, not like her father, the fat sweaty incest pig. He promises to phone next night from base. Guess what? No call. Two weeks later an officer at the base tells her she isn't the first girl to be duped by an American saying, `Hey, babe, I'm a marine, stick with me.' She has no one to discuss pregnancy to, so she begs and borrows and spends everything on a private clinic. Keep it secret. The operation is a five-star fuckup. Half her womb gets sucked out too. She can't stand for six months. Blood all the time. Well, this joke's over almost. Years later the same girl, she lives in Honolulu. She does hair for rich wives. Hears their chatter about husbands, about affairs, about babies. Some days she wants cut their wrists, some days hers, some days the wrists of this world. So. Whatever line you're to begin, don't. All of them I heard already, okay?"

"Do I look like a fucking marine?" I shut the door.

"What did you do to the door? Monday night in room 404 was no more restful than Sunday. "What did you do to the door?- Hearing someone jibber at whatever stalks their dreams unnerves the lemon yellow shit out of me. Wallpaper and paste is what separates our waking selves from those jibbering night stalkers. I padded down to the Coke machine at the end of the corridor, hoping to encounter Wei. All I met were black moths. Back in my room i took it round of aspirin, stripped, and watched my body in the mirror to see too, was an It inhabiting a Me. The jury was out. I took the elevator up to the roof to try to see your last view, but the tiny access stairs were locked by the shiny new padlock. The replacement for the one you'd cur through. So I had to make do with sitting on the steps. Back in my room I read a story from Death in Midsummer called "Patriotism," where a military husband and wife commit seppuku together. Sex in death and death in sex. You loved it too; you'd underlined your favorite passages. I smoked a spliff but couldn't stop crying. Sadness is fertile and thorny and takes root in any soil.

Werewolf was all sympathy when I complained about my nightmareprone neighbor. "The Holiday Inn's the eighty-floor fucker out by the lagoon. They insulate the walls there. Four hundred bucks a night. You'd like it. You'd sleep like a baby." Little wonder your wife checked out early, I very nearly told him. I walked to Shore Bird Beach Broiler for the breakfast buffet and the view of bikinis in the sun. Options re: Yukio Mishima's knife had dwindled to a pretty pathetic clutch. The police had not contacted me. In the Hawaii Times I saw that my personal ad-"Nozomu, contact me about Vulture"-had been misprinted as "Nozomi, contact me about vultures." Jesus Vegetable Christ. I caught a bus to Honolulu Center and spent the day making inquiries at various lost-property offices in museums, malls and the bus station, wherever I could think of; consulted the owners of antique shops; considered engaging a private detective, for ten seconds, before I realized how stupid I'd sound. Real-life Maltese Falcon quests are wastes of time. You do not find a lost object in a city unless you know exactly where to locate it, in which case it isn't really lost. The place itself got to me. Nightingale may love it here, models are paid to love Hawaii, but I wouldn't be sorry if Oahu sinks under a tsunami and soon. Palm trees are tarantula ugly. Honolulu is concrete ugly. Waikiki is glitzy ugly. Jetloads of Westerners microwaving themselves are pink ugly. Ala