At the Tokyo Dark Castle, she spins electric stars. Her name is Kei, as in a lifetime is worth only one night. She is all Himegyaru, California patch, reminds the tourists with their wingmen of a lost planet Brittany Spears. The rest of the world is post-GasAttack. In conversations with other girls of tie-dyed sarongs, ones who have lived too close to nuclear reactors, she refers to herself as a "high-bleached bitch". Outside, the snow negates anyone's idea of California. Another DJ takes over. He's dressed as a serial killer clown. Kei, almost drunk on Streaking Blossoms, meets a crusty punk named Sharky. In his eyes, she sees the shape of her life as a tumor, the way it always was. Outside, the snow remixes ghosts. She decides that like so many here in the club, he is one of the mute-shell children, victims of chronic silent explosions that maim but never kill quick. In her apartment three blocks east of Takeshita Street, she undresses him, tells him to dare truths in the nude. He mentions an old woman who kept planting bombs inside him. He was still a child. She places a hand over his, suggests they make a house free of private wars. She gently lifts his chin, looks into his eyes & smiles. Let me remove the tumor, she says, it will cure the both of us. Will we be like snow? he asks, like it never was? There is a trace of ironic inflection in his dead-boy voice. From within his chest, she pulls out a live grenade. They kiss in arching tongues. They sway like rope bridges. The grenade goes off. The snow rises, seeps in through the windows. Everything is beautiful & white.

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