Best of Asian Erotica, Volume 1

Aqua-Subculture

I sold beautiful curiosities in my shop, so it was only fitting that one walked in.

However, it was not an antiques shop. My merchandise was a living example of years of human manipulation in enhancing specific genetic traits in fish.

I stocked common goldfish, black goldfish supposed to guard the family home from bad chi, calicos, neon tetras, comets and bubble-eyed imported specimens. I rented a corner lot squeezed next to a dim sum restaurant in a neighbourhood shopping mall; contrary to what you may have overheard in the management office, my fish did not end up as fillings in the wantons served up for the lunchtime crowd. A week after I had expanded the shop to include marine fish, Andie sauntered through the door.

I tried not to stare at her. Beautiful women are often defensive and accompanied by protective items such as boyfriends and husbands. But she was alone, a towering, slim beauty whose physique almost blended in with the narrow shelves that overlooked the reef tank. With a Harley-Davidson biker’s cap tilted over her face, she lured me out from behind the counter.

‘How much?’ She tapped the glass of the tank to indicate the black-and-white cleaner wrasse, darting around the bigger fish in the tank like harried waiters. For a natural tank janitor and a collector’s item, I recommended a cleaner shrimp, a miniature automaton coloured like a barbershop pole and equipped with six jointed legs.

‘I am not a beginner,’ she stated in a lilting accent that was definitely not local. Her green contact lenses flashed in the fluorescent light. I was naive to think she was referring to her fish-keeping experience.

‘Come back in three days. Those wrasse are reserved.’ I lied.

Three days later, when I arrived at my shop, she was standing outside the shutter at a quarter to eleven. With those narrow hips wrapped in tight snakeskin jeans, she looked like a boy when viewed from behind. When she turned at the sound of my jangling keys, I saw her breasts constricted under a Boy London T-shirt. ‘Please wait outside, miss.’

I learnt her name after I had bagged a cleaner wrasse. The fish flailed as I handed her the plastic bag ‘It only has one hour before it suffocates.’

‘Kinky,’ she muttered as she took the bag. She was not wearing the green contact lenses this morning. I preferred her eyes naturally tawny. She told me her name because she was fed up with my calling her ‘Miss’ as if I were giving inept instructions to an artillery unit.

‘Andie,’ she said. ‘Like the actress, Andie Macdowell.’ She paused and waited for my response, as if I had flubbed a line of dialogue.

‘I wasn’t named after someone famous.’ I told her after some hesitation. I wished I was called Jacques as an alternative to my pedestrian moniker, Jack.

When I was young, I saw a documentary on TV about Jacques Cousteau, the French underwater explorer. But local mispronunciation would flub the Gallic inflection of Jacques, and make it sound more like Jock.

Andie laughed and removed her biker cap. Her black hair fell to the waistband of her jeans. She looked like a mermaid, the black tresses and their green iridescence shimmering above the scaly faux snakeskin.

We met under the fibreglass model of a whale shark in the aquaria in Kuala Lumpur City Centre. I suggested the trip as a natural progression of shared interests. The aquaria were divided into biotopes: coral reef, Amazon River, Malaysian rainforest and mangrove swamp. A tunnel lit by neon-blue track lights connected each biotope.

‘Arapaimas mate for life,’ I point out to Andie at the Amazon River tank.

Two behemoths drift past us in the green water, their bony heads etched with curlicues and ridged scars.

‘Fools.’ She set her lips together in a compressed line.

‘Sea slugs are hermaphrodites-but can’t self-fertilize. They still need a partner,’ Andie informed me as she pressed her palm on the reinforced glass of the cylinder tank for invertebrates. A specimen unfurled its fuchsia plumes as it clambered over a Venus’ Flower Basket, a glassy hollow sponge that imprisons a pair of male and female shrimp for life.

We followed yellow arrows plastered to the wall of the tunnel to the special aquaria exhibit of the month-Australian sea snakes. A large open tank was covered with mesh wire, flanked by signs that unnecessarily warned visitors not to put their hands inside the tank. I peered through the wire and saw two banded sea snakes entwined in a tight double helix, their bodies rippling together in gentle languor. Inspired by this demonstration, Andie slipped her arms around my waist and squeezed until I jerked in pain.

I guided Andie to the shark tank, expecting a little more tenderness from her. A nurse shark burrowed its snout into the sand, scavenging for leftovers.

The PA crackled and a voice announced feeding time. Kids rushed to the glass as a diver descended into the tank clutching a wire mesh bag of frozen fish. The diver dealt out the fish like an underwater Jesus feeding the five thousand; the food in the bag did not run out.

Aware of his audience, the diver let his hand linger in the maw of a black-tip reef shark to the shrieks of alarm from the children. Andie smiled at this spectacle, her lips stretched back, revealing teeth that overcrowded her mouth. She was all torpedo sleekness in a grey, sleeveless dress.

We exited the aquaria and flowed into the lunchtime crowd.

Andie stayed in a service apartment opposite KLCC. A basket of fruit on the coffee table enhanced the sparseness of the living room. I noted the absence of an aquarium.

‘What did you do with the wrasse?’

‘I bought it as a gift.’ She waved her hand around as if the question were lingering cigarette smoke and changed the subject. ‘Are you hungry?’

We phoned for sushi from a Japanese restaurant near KLCC that provided delivery. Our food would arrive in thirty minutes. Andie selected a pomegranate from the fruit basket. As she started peeling away the skin of the fruit, she told me a story.

A beautiful girl was born to a Thai mother and Swiss father. Her father left not long after she was born. When the girl came of age, she found out that she was different from her friends. She looked like a girl, but was not one on the inside.

‘How so?’ I asked Andie.

‘She can’t have children. She has no womb,’ Andie replied, and with the sudden shift to present tense, I realized she was talking about herself. Andie had Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome; her body had resisted the development into a male by remaining stubbornly feminine. She was not a transsexual and she hated the term ‘intersex’.

‘I’m not a freak!’ Andie ranted, ‘I’m not caught between the two sexes.

Males and females are the ones who are strange, because they are the ones who are incomplete. Women are always searching for their other halves and all that magazine bullshit.’

Andie took a deep breath, piled the pomegranate seeds into a glass bowl and joined me on the sofa. She put her head in my lap and asked me to drop the seeds into her mouth. I asked her what I had done to earn this pleasure.

‘I just spent a whole afternoon with you,’ she smiled up at me. ‘And you’re the first guy I’ve met around here who doesn’t ask dumb questions about me. You live in the “now”. Suppose it comes from watching fish all the time.’

The seeds burst with a tart pop. As the juice spilled, it stained my fingertips scarlet. Like the diver with the shark, I let my fingers remain between her lips for a second too long. She sucked and nipped the pads of my finger, not quite playful. If she drew any of my blood, it mingled with the juice.

Over one of our sushi dinners, I mentioned mating to Andie, about how marine creatures did not go through the awkwardness of sex on dry land.

When she had cleared her plate, she went to the bathroom. Andie called for me after ten minutes. I heard the taps running from outside and knocked on the bathroom door.

She poured in the bath salts and the foam and issued me instructions:

‘Don’t turn around until I say so.’

I heard the taps running, water gushing out. Inspired, I invented a name for a new cocktail: ‘Sex in the Bath’. Foam spilled over the rim on the bathtub and drifted over to my bare feet.

‘You can look now.’

Andie had skimmed off a layer of thick foam and fashioned a bikini out of it: bubbles shining on her wet skin like sequins sewn onto a body stocking.

The water sloshed around as I climbed inside the tub. I lifted aside a handful of wet hair pressed against her shoulder blades, strands of kelp left on white sand at high tide. The strap of lather on one shoulder had split. I nipped and rasped my teeth along the ridge of a collarbone until I reached the notch at the base of her neck. I dipped my tongue in, the skin tasting salty the same as the mussels at dinner a few hours before. The rest of the makeshift bra had dissolved, exposing her tiny rosewood nipples. My hand reached between her thighs and sought out her niche, fingers discovering that her hole was as shallow as a navel. Andie gasped and shoved me back with the contained violence of a self-defence class. We slid in rhythm against the wall of the tub. Male sea snakes cannot disengage from females until mating is complete.

My livingroom had a built-in marine aquarium, equipped with backlit glass, harsh and vivid like a screensaver. The cleaner shrimp from my shop were servicing a blue-striped angelfish.

‘Humans think they can study animals in tanks and cages, and put them into categories.’

Dressed in a terry-wrap robe, Andie walked over to the window, her profile slashed into shadows by the Venetian blinds. Her rants began like our lovemaking, a sharp tangential stab in a random location, growing in intensity as she located an available target.

I tried to distract her. I pointed to the aquarium. ‘Are you talking about my fish?’

‘You make them sound like they’re your property.’

I went over and put my arms around her to soothe her displeasure.

‘You don’t own me-I’m not one of the fish in your shop.’

‘I have a duty to my shop.’

‘Your shop is your property, which has its own set of conditions. She loosed the belt on the robe and opened it before taking my hand and pressing it on her soft breast, ‘Duty is unconditional. When you’re with me, you are beyond all that.’

‘No.’ I struggled to deny my body’s responses. ‘Can we talk about you?

Or us??’

Andie rolled her eyes at me and pushed me back towards the sofa.

‘Remember the deal, Jack? You don’t ask dumb questions about me or anything. We enjoy what we can when we can.’

On the sofa, the bathrobe fell down around Andie as she climbed above me, a goddess holding up the canopy of the night sky with her body. It was dim under her robe as the moist velvets of our mouths mingled. When she placed her mouth around what she humourously called my ‘seahorse’, I forgot about duty or business.

Andie was right; my shop was my property and my duty although I had been neglecting it. Dead live food drifted in plastic basins, air pumps broke down and filters clogged up with algae and gave off the metallic tang of nitrates.

My courtesy transformed into curtness with customers. As families waited for a table outside the dim sum restaurant, they allowed their children to wander into my shop. I shooed them away with a broomstick, annoyed that these conventional lives and their offspring had intruded into my floating world.

A man entered the shop, tall and white-haired, his skin so tanned that it gave off a violet lustre in the strip lights of the fish tanks. His appearance attested to a life spent under the sun. The juxtaposition was odd; what was his interest in an indoor hobby like aquarium fish-keeping? I realized the connection when he put a plastic bag on the counter; the cleaner wrasse was swimming inside.

‘I’m returning the wrasse. My wife told me she bought it from here,’ he said with a faint European accent.

I did not answer and tightened my grip on the broom handle. Andie had lied to me about her marital status. Deceived as I was, I had no desire to be killed by a jealous husband.

‘Okay, relax.’ He held up a gnarled hand to assuage me. ‘My ex-wife.

Well, not until she signs the papers. If she signs them.’

I waited for him to get interrogative. Would he ask me to step outside for a fistfight in front of the dim sum restaurant? When I still did not speak, he said, ‘Thank you.’

‘What for?’

‘Andie has no real friends in KL. I suggested a change of scene to her.

We even bought a studio apartment in Mont Kiara last year.’ He pushed the wrasse towards me. ‘Since no one’s going to live there now, there’s no need to decorate it.’

I opened the till to give him a refund for the fish.

‘No, please. I insist.’ He refused the money. I asked him what was his job. ‘I own a scuba-diving school in Thailand. Hey, maybe you should try it one day.’

I ignored his offer and blurted, ‘Do you still have feelings for Andie?’

He smiled as if I had articulated something he could not admit to himself.

‘We live apart, but we are not separated. She goes and returns. Nothing’s definite with her and that’s the deal.’

‘I know.’ I agreed and thought of the male and female shrimp inside the Venus Flower Basket, an arrangement of complete security but defined by soft translucent bars.

Andie sent a blank email with a photo attachment to my business mail address; a fuzzy snapshot of sea snakes mating, taken with an underwater camera. I replied with a brief thank you and never heard from her again.

My customers thought I had closed my shop for a month. Instead, I renovated it and got rid of the marine fish and invertebrate tanks. I applied for a license to sell dogs and cats. The shop was noisier with barks and meows, but at least it distracted me from thinking about Andie. My new employees did not understand why I was obsessed with checking the sex of new puppies and kittens. I was looking for recurrences of Andie’s condition in nature.

Of course, I never found any, but conventional family life found me when a petite woman walked into my shop one evening, tearful that her boyfriend had stood her up outside the dim sum restaurant.

However, my fiance baulked at making love in the bathtub. She told me I could get hurt. She did not understand when I replied that I had already been hurt that way.