Walking Like Deer
"Walking Like Deer" by Miles Efron
Issue 3.16
Tokyo, 1962.
Again and again, we become animals. You a moth, me a lizard. As the cameras roll, clad in our rubber suits, we lay waste to the studio’s mini-Tokyo, and to each other. At night, it’s even worse. We battle in your Ueno-district apartment. We grow crueler by the day as the end of shooting approaches—and with it, the end of our contracts.
“What if I stayed in Tokyo?” you suggest one night. “After we wrap.”
“No,” I say. “I travel constantly.”
“We both do!”
“But this is no life for a woman.” My Godzilla-sized stupidity. You’re laughing as you eject me from your apartment, which gives me a moment of hope. Then the door slams in my face, and I wander Tokyo until dawn, hating myself for being so provincial.
The next day, during our scene on the misty river bridge, you breathe molten lava in my face. And you scream a scream so furious it seems to come right from the toenails you painted cherry-red last night. When I’m old and dying, I’ll remember that scream.
But after just a day to cool off, you phone me, as if none of it happened. I can hear you filing your nails on the other end of the line as you invite me to the arthouse cinema. We spend hours there watching Kurosawa, Bergman, Eisenstein. Finally, with stiff necks, we spill out into the narrow street, so late at night all the humans are sleeping. As we walk arm-in-arm to your apartment, we stop to watch a cat climbing a camphor tree. I can see you memorizing how it moves, weightless on its silent paws.
—
We’ve both studied the great suit actors. We can reference every frame of Gojira—every roar, every toy jetfighter batted from the sky. We know the commitment it takes to become a true monster. To channel the inherent beast-ness of the creature. Before you came, I felt so alone in that commitment. You changed everything. I knew it for sure the afternoon before shooting began, when we rehearsed, just the two of us, in your dressing room.
“No,” you insisted. “The roar must come from a wound in your soul. Something real. What was the worst day of your life? The worst pain you ever felt?”
I resented getting notes from an upstart like you. But I sensed the talent there, too, so I spoke honestly. After all, it was an easy question to answer. “The day I failed to qualify for university. My father leered at me in the stupidest imaginable way when he said, ‘Guess you’ll be joining me at sea, then.’” For a moment, I feared you’d judge me for not naming the day my granny died.
But all you said was, “Then use that.”
An auspicious start. But I hated you the time you told me my gait looked feminine. And without even thinking, you nicked my arm with a paring knife the time I told you I thought Audrey Hepburn would make a sexy Mothra.
We’ve tried to dial back the jealousy and competition. To no avail, of course. The only saving grace is the quality of our work. Every time we fight on camera, Director Tanaka weeps at his good fortune. “Bravissimo! Bravissimissimo!” Then we limp back to your apartment and sleep for sixteen hours straight.
—
For the Bunka no Hi holiday, they announce the sets will close. So you and I visit the Ueno zoo to learn from the animals.
“See how the monkey looks over his shoulder?” you say. “He’s telling us, ‘How dare you!’”
Of course, I spend my time with the reptiles. The lime-green grass lizard. The monitor, with its skin like an avocado peel. Outside, the weather has turned cold. But inside, the snake house is tropical and verdant. With my coat folded in my lap, I rehearse smiling so all my teeth show, and I catch the jealous look on your face. To think I made you jealous! All day I walk on air.
—
As we drive to the hot springs in Hakone, the season’s first snow probes the upland persimmon orchards. In the mountains, ice crystals dust the cedar forests and the bamboo along the creeks. You crack your window as we discuss walking like deer.
“Naked is the way to do it,” I insist. “And I have a long neck, so—”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” you say. “Stilts. The only proper deer walk is on stilts.”
“Well. If you need props for something so basic. . . . If you can’t even channel a simple ungulate—”
It’s as if a bomb cyclone of low pressure pours in, draining our car of good will. Your face flashes red. Our voices spike in volume and pitch. The heat blasts from the register like a furnace in a steel mill. You claw at the door. “Let me out of here! Let me go!”
With one hand I steady the wheel. With the other I clutch the hem of your dress as you try escaping the car, stepping into the highway at full speed. Soon we’re on the shoulder, surrounded by police.
Do you apologize after my night in jail? As you walk me away from the police station in the snow, you grin and tell me, “When we get home, I’ll show you how great the stilts look.”
—
Shooting ends in a week. You’ll return to Osaka. My agent booked me an audition in Hollywood. We walk in the snow. We eat our meals, saying nothing. Your apartment resembles our tiny Tokyo on the studio’s soundstage. Broken glass. Torn fabric. Cigarette burns.
“I wish I’d never come here,” you whisper while I pretend to sleep. “I had an actual life. A fiancé. Friends. How could I have been so stupid?”
I lie there like a corpse until you hurl a glass of water against your bedroom wall. My eyes flutter open as you say, “Broken glass. Watch your feet on your way out.”
—
The remaining days pass like a Nembutal fantasy.
I decline the wrap parties and the meals at Tanaka’s favorite restaurants. At night, I go to the movies alone. Usually I leave with no memory of what I just watched.
For days, I loiter around the studio in-costume. Sometimes I hear you on set, practicing your moth vocalizations. Your costume wings follow you like ship sails.
You told me once your sister drowned as a girl. “I never felt grief,” you said. “All I felt was hate.” The way you look at me now, it’s like I’m tangled in weeds at the bottom of a black lake.
—
Finally the day comes when we will shoot the film’s climax. A showdown to the death in the Ginza. Alone in my dressing room, I step into the sagging bulk of my costume. As I adjust the suspenders, I catalog my many mistakes—picturing myself as an illiterate fisherman bobbing on a mackerel boat with my father. That’s what you deserve. That’s who you are.
From your dressing room, I hear your vocal warmup. “Good blood bad blood good blood bad blood…” I imagine knocking on your door. You take me in. You stroke my hair and whisper, “That’s my good monster.”
But it all evaporates the moment I zip the lizard mask over my face. Drowning in latex fumes, I feel the familiar, impossible-to-fake welter of rage rising up the back of my throat. I choose this. I’m ready for you.
We meet in battle.
You burn me. You eviscerate me. I hurl you over mountains while you spew fire. You electrocute me using a nuclear reactor. We wound each other, struggling against gravity and muscle and hate. How many replica cars do we crush? How many sugar-cube buildings topple before you finally lay me down, as you must, letting my rubber body sink into the kiddie-pool-sized Tokyo Bay?
As I wait for Tanaka to cut the scene, the last thing I see is you standing on the shore, screaming in primal triumph. In that moment, I know I’ll never see you again—not in person. We’ll both retreat to our dressing rooms to nurse our contusions and lacerations. Then, after the rest of the crew has left the premises, returning to their families, each of us will sneak out the back, to walk home alone in the cold.
—
Miles Efron is a writer from Charlottesville, Virginia. His fiction has appeared in Blood+Honey, 100-Foot Crow, and Porcupine Literary, among other places. His website is milesefron.com.
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