Number9dream, Page 3

  “Snobology.”

  I watch her wait at the light to cross Omekaido Avenue. This Tokyo weather is extraplanetary. Outside is still oven-hot, but a dark roof of cloud is ready to buckle under the weight of rain at any moment. The pedestrians waiting on the island in the middle of Kita Street sense it. The two young women taking in the sandwich board outside Nero’s Pizza Emporium sense it. The battalions of the elderly sense it. Hemlock, nightingales, E minor—thunnnnnnnnnder! Belly-flopping thunnnnnnnnnder, twanging a loose bass. Anju loved thunder, our birthday, treetops, the sea, and me. Her goblin grin flashed when it thundered. Raindrops are heard—shhhhhhhhh—before raindrops are seen—shhhhhhhhh—quivering ghost leaves—dappling the pavements, smacking car roofs, drumming tarpaulins. My waitress opens up a big blue, red, and yellow umbrella. The light turns green and the pedestrians dash for cover, sheltering under ineffective tents of jackets or newspapers. “Our poor hand-cream model will get drenched,” says Donkey, with a concern that wouldn’t fool anyone. The downpour erases the far side of Omekaido Avenue. “Drenched or undrenched, we need coffee filters,” replies Dowager. My waitress disappears. I hope she finds somewhere dry. Jupiter Cafe fills with holiday refugees being nice to one another. Lightning zickers, and the lights dip in counterpoint. The refugees all go “Wooooooooo!” I help myself to a match and light another Carlton. It would be stupid to confront Akiko Kato until after this storm passes. Dripping in her office I would be about as formidable as a drowning gerbil. Lao Tzu chuckles, chokes, and gasps for air. “My, my, I ain’t seen rain like this since 1971. Must be the end of the world.”

  One hour later and the Kita Street–Omekaido Avenue intersection is a churning confluence of rivers. The rain is incredible. Even on Yakushima, I cannot remember rain quite this heavy. The holiday atmosphere has died, and the customers are doom-laden. The floor of the Jupiter Cafe is, in fact, underwater; we are all sitting on stools, counters, and tables. Outside, traffic stalls and begins to disappear under the foaming water. A family of six huddles on a taxi roof. A baby wails and will not shut up. Group dynamics organize the customers, and there is talk of moving to a higher floor, staying put, navy helicopters, El Niño, tree-climbing, North Korean submarines abducting refugees. I smoke another Carlton and say nothing: too many captains pilot the ship up the mountain. The taxi family is down to three. Junk swirls by. Somebody has a radio, but can tune it to nothing beyond torrential static. The flood level creeps up the window—now it is over halfway up. Submerged mailboxes, motorbikes, traffic signals. A crocodile cruises up to the window and snoutbutts the glass. I wish somebody would scream. Something is twitching in the corner of its mouth—a plump hand with an engagement ring. The beast’s eye settles on me. I know that eye. The animal sidles away with a twitch of its tail. “Tokyo, Tokyo,” cackles Lao Tzu. “If it ain’t fire, it’s earthquake. If it ain’t earthquake, it’s bombs. If it ain’t bombs, it’s floods.” Dowager crows from her perch, “The time has come to evacuate. Young mothers and babies second, senior ladies first, so get out of my way.” “Evacuate to where?” asks a man in a dirty raincoat. “One step outside, the current’ll sweep you clean past Guam!” Donkey calls from the safest place of all, the coffee-filter shelf. “Stay inside and we’ll drown!” The pregnant woman touches her bump, and whispers, “Oh, no, not now, not now.” A priest remembers his drinking problem and swigs from his hip flask. Lao Tzu hums a sea shanty. The wailing baby will not shut up. I see an umbrella shoot down the fiercest artery of the flood, a red, blue, and yellow umbrella, followed by my waitress, rising, falling, flailing, and gasping! She needs me! I don’t think. I jump up on the window counter and unfasten the top window, which is still above the water level. “Don’t do it,” chorus the refugees, “it’s certain death!” I frisbee my baseball cap to Lao Tzu. “I’ll be back for this.” I kick off my sneakers, lever myself through the window, and— —the torrent is a mythical force submerging and buoying me at a cruel velocity. Lit by lightning, I recognize Tokyo Tower, in floodwater up to its navel. Lesser buildings sink as I am swept by. The death toll must be in the millions. Only PanOpticon appears safe, rising into the heart of the tornado. The sea slants and peaks, the wind howls a symphony of the insane. Sometimes the waitress is close at hand, sometimes far away. Just when I don’t think I can stay afloat any longer, I see her paddling toward me on her umbrella coracle. “Some rescuer you turned out to be, Miyake,” she says, gripping my wrist. She glances behind me, and unspeakable horror is reflected in her face. I turn around and see the gullet of the crocodile closing in. I whip my hand out of hers and shove the umbrella away as hard as I can, turn around, and face my death. “No! Eiji! No!” my waitress screams. I am strong and silent before my nemesis. The crocodile rears and dives, its fat body feeding into the water until its tail vanishes. Was it only trying to scare me?

  “Quick,” calls my waitress, but barbed teeth mesh my right foot and yank me under. I pound the crocodile but I may as well be punching a mighty cedar. Down, down, down, I kick and struggle in slow motion, but I only succeed in thickening the high-speed clouds of blood spewing from my punctured calf. We reach the floor of the Pacific. It is heavily urbanized—then I realize the crocodile has chosen to drown me outside Jupiter Cafe, proving that reptiles have a sense of irony. The customers and refugees look on as if the crocodile and I are a circus act. The storm must have passed, because everywhere is swimming-pool blue and tap-dancing light and I swear I can hear “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” playing. The crocodile watches me with Akiko Kato eyes, suggesting that I see the funny side of having my bloated corpse stowed in a lair and being snacked on over several weeks. I lighten as I weaken. I watch Lao Tzu help himself to my final Carlton and doff my cap. Then he mimes stabbing himself in the eye and points to the crocodile. A thought unsilts itself—yesterday my landlord gave me my keys—the one for the storefront shutter is three inches long and might serve as a minidagger. Twisting into striking range is no easy feat, but the crocodile is taking a nap, so it fails to notice me fit the key between its eyelids and ram the sharp point home. Squeeze, squelch, squirt. Crocodiles scream, even underwater. The jaws unclamp and the scaly terror of the salty deep thrashes off in spirals. Lao Tzu mimes applause, but I have already gone three minutes without air and the surface is impossibly distant. I kick feebly upward. Nitrogen fizzes in my brain. Sluggishly I fly, and the ocean sings in ten thousand soprano chorus lines. Face submerged, searching for me from the stone whale, is my waitress, loyal to the last, hair streaming in the shallows. I and the girl with kaleidoscope eyes gaze longingly at each other, until, overcome by the beauty of my own death, I sink in slow, sad circles.

  As a cord of scarlet sun picks the lock of dawn, the priests of Yasukuni Shrine light my sandalwood funeral pyre. My funeral is the most majestic within living memory. The whole nation is united in mourning. Traffic is diverted around Kudanshita to allow the tens of thousands to come and pay their respects. The flames lick my body. Ambassadors, my uncles, heads of state, Yoko Ono, all in black. My body blackens and blazes. His Imperial Majesty wished to thank my parents, so here they are reunited for the first time in nearly twenty years. The journalists ask them how they feel, but they are both too choked with emotion to reply. I never wanted such an ostentatious ceremony, but, well, heroism is heroism. My soul rises with my ashes and hovers among the television helicopters and pigeons. I rest on the giant torii gate, wide enough to drive a battleship under, enjoying my new perspective of human hearts.

  “I should never have abandoned those two,” thinks my mother.

  “I should never have abandoned those three,” thinks my father.

  “I wonder if I can keep his deposit,” thinks Buntaro Ogiso.

  “I never even asked him his name,” thinks my waitress.

  “I wish John were here today,” thinks Yoko Ono. “He would write a requiem.”

  “Brat,” thinks Akiko Kato. “A lifelong earner comes to a premature end.”

  It would be stupid to confro
nt Akiko Kato until this storm passes. Dripping in her office I would be about as formidable as a drowning gerbil. Lao Tzu chuckles, chokes, and gasps for air. “My, my, I ain’t seen rain like this since 1971. Must be the end of the world.” But no sooner has he spoken than the storm turns itself off at the main. The pregnant women laugh. I think about their babies. During those nine aquamarsupial months, what do babies think about? Gills, swamps, ocean trenches? When does thought begin? Do sperm scheme against other sperm, the way commuters elbow ahead in the Tokyo rush hour? Do the unborn know they are? At what age did Anju and I learn that the world is actually two: one outside, and one inside, which we call “imagination”? A stupendous discovery, you would have thought, but I have no memory of the day. For babies in wombs, imaginings must be reality. On Omekaido Avenue, pedestrians peer upward from under umbrellas, awnings, and doorways, checking the lack of rain with the backs of their hands. Umbrellas close. Clouds scroll offscreen. Jupiter Cafe’s doors slide open and my waitress comes back, swinging a bag. “Took your time,” Dowager thanks her. My waitress hands her the filters. “Next time I’ll do my very best to pick a supermarket with shorter lines.” “Did you hear the thunder?” asks Donkey, and I suspect she is not such a bitch really, just a weak person under the influence of Dowager, who does not like camaraderie among her crew. “Of course she heard it! Everybody in Tokyo heard it! My Aunt Otane heard it, and she’s been dead nine years.” My money says Dowager tampered with the life insurance and shoved Aunt Otane down a very long flight of highly polished stairs. “The receipt? The change?” My waitress stows her umbrella away and gives Dowager the receipt and coins. She has an invisible irony field cloaking her, which intercepts and destroys incoming attacks. The clock says 14:31. I bisect an almond flake with my thumbnail and draw pentagrams in the ashtray with a toothpick. Here is an unpleasant thought: How do I know Akiko Kato is actually working in PanOpticon today? Suppose I barge past her secretary, flaming with righteousness, only to arrive at her desk to find a “Back Thursday” Post-it note stuck to her computer monitor? I would look like a complete idiot. The entire office would remember me and laugh at me. In my wallet I carry Ms. Kato’s card, which I borrowed from my grandmother’s fireproof box when I was eleven. I had intended to study voodoo and use it as a totem. AKIKO KATO, ATTORNEY, OSUGI & BOSUGI. I make a deal with myself. I will order an iced coffee, smoke one final Carlton: and then I call. There. If Akiko Kato answers the phone I will go straight over. So I wait until my waitress is at the counter, and go up to place my order with her. She is about to meet my eyes, when Dowager growls “Dishes!” and my girl goes back to the sink. “Refills aren’t free,” Dowager tells me. I cannot change my mind now, even if I am in danger of needing a caffeine detox program. “Uh . . . I know. An iced coffee, please.” I am served brusquely, and wait until the bioborgs kill Lao Tzu. I swap a Carlton for a match, and devise a telephone strategy brilliant enough to reduce hardened Tokyo PAs to putty.

  “Good afternoon, Osugi and Bosugi, how may I help you?”

  I inject my voice with its maximum authority. “Ye-es”—My voice squeaks as though my balls are still in puberty free fall. I blush—I am nearly twenty!—fake a cough, and restart three octaves below. “I would like to ask if Ms. Akiko Kato is in the office.”

  “Do you want to speak with her?”

  “No, I would like to, I mean, yes, please, thank you, I would like to.”

  “To what, sir?”

  “Uh . . . to speak with her.”

  “May I ask who’s calling?”

  “I am a, uh, business associate. A professional one.”

  “I see, and do you conduct your business anonymously or do you have a name people can call you by?”

  I am sweating. “I have a name.”

  “I can’t put you through to Ms. Kato without a name.”

  “Taro Tanaka.” The duddest of all dud names.

  “Taro Tanaka. And your call would be concerning . . . ?”

  “Uh . . .”

  “Hello? Is anyone there?”

  “Yes. Sorry?”

  “Mr. Tanaka, I asked you why you want to speak with Ms. Kato.”

  “Oh, I see. Sorry. Uh, it’s a confidential matter.”

  “Of course, but what do you wish to discuss with Ms. Kato?”

  “Uh . . . legal matters.”

  “Naturally, Mr. Tanaka. Well. Ms. Kato is with the senior partners at the moment, and can’t come to the phone. If I could take down your number, company, and a rough outline of your business, I can ask Ms. Kato to return your call later today, or maybe tomorrow. Or possibly the day after.”

  “Naturally, uh, yes.”

  “So?”

  “Uh . . .”

  “Mr. Tanaka?”

  I fall, drown, whatever, and hang up.

  A C or a D, but not quite an automatic fail. I found out that Akiko Kato is in her PanOpticon lair. As I sit here jingling the icebergs in my coffee glass they fuse, clink. I pour in the twin juglets of syrup and cream, and watch them swirl and bleed. If I were Zax Omega I could antigrav up to your office window in a few seconds. That would get your attention quickly enough. Do you daydream about meeting me? How do I appear in your daydreams? The pregnant women are talking about the agony of childbirth. I learn that male doctors never administer anesthetic because they believe the pain strengthens the mother-baby bond. I learn that their friend was told by her husband to drive herself to the hospital when her labor pains began, because he had to play golf with his boss. My waitress is doing a tour of the tables, emptying ashtrays into a bucket. Come this way, I order her telepathically, empty mine. Mine is the only ashtray in the entire cafe she forgets. Dowager is on the telephone, simpering sweetly. Donkey appears to have shrunk to a microscopic height when I was looking away. A guy crossing Kita Street catches my attention: I swear I saw him cross from the same point before I made the phone call. I focus on him, tracking his progress among all the puddle hoppers. He waits for the green man. He crosses Omekaido Avenue and waits for the green man. He recrosses Kita Street and waits for the green man. He recrosses Omekaido Avenue and waits for the green man. I follow him for one, two, three more circuits. What is his story? Is he a private detective, a bioborg, a lunatic brought out by the humidity? My bladder tells me it will no longer be ignored. I walk to the toilet door and push, but the door pushes back. I go back to my seat, embarrassed, and avert my eyes when the door opens, so the occupant will not suspect me. This is how I lose my place to a submissive-looking high school girl, who reemerges fifteen minutes later as a boob-tubed Neo-Tokyo wet dream. I race to the door but lose—again—to a mother with a leg-crossing infant. “Emergency!” she giggles at me, and slams the door in my face. My bladder shrieks at me that I am violating the terms of its contract. I stay by the door this time and try to think of sand dunes. Toiletless Tokyo plays this trick on you—to use a toilet you have to go into a cafe, where you have to buy a bladder-filling drink, and so the endless cycle goes on. On Yakushima I just found a bush to piss behind. The mother and kid finally come out and I hold my breath, fumble with the lock on the other side, and dispose of my three coffees. I run out of breath, and have to breathe in. Urine, margarine, chemical pine. Not so smelly, but I think better of wiping the rim. After washing my hands I squeeze a blackhead, and my initial success persuades me to gamble on less profitable sites until I resemble the victim of a flying-crab swarm. I try out my reflection from various angles. I, Eiji Miyake, Experienced Tokyoite. Is my rugged Kyushu tan already pasting over? My reflection plays the staring game: we tie, both looking away at the same time. An impatient knocking starts up on the door. “Sorry, just coming!” I call. I ruffle back my gelled hair—extra-hard formula—and worry at the lock until it opens.

  The knocker is Lao Tzu. “Thought you’d passed out in there, Captain.” I mumble an apology for making him wait, and resolve to attack PanOpticon without delay. Then one of those megaweird coincidences takes place. Cutting across the foreground strides Akiko Ka
to herself, in the flesh, right here, right now, only five millimeters of glass and two meters of air, max, separating us. In slo-mo she turns her head, looks straight at me, our eyes meet, she looks away and carries on walking. First I am slugged by disbelief—my imagination must be running away with me, right? Then I am slugged by belief. It was her. In my fantasy earlier she had not aged: in reality she has, but even so, I know it was her, I know it. Lidded cunning, aquiline nose, wintry beauty. Go, Miyake! Chase after her! Jupiter Cafe’s doors take an age to open, then I am running in pursuit—

  Baseball cap, idiot!

  I dart back to Jupiter Cafe, bang into a cyclist as we flounder in the mirroring veer-right-veer-left-veer-right trap, retrieve my cap, and race to the crossing, where the green man is flashing already. After two hours or more in the air-conned cafe my skin tingles, crackles, and pops in the dire afternoon heat. Akiko Kato—wearing a lethally smart navy blue business suit—has made the far side, and I must either risk the traffic turning and sprint across or else risk losing her before she enters PanOpticon. I sprint. The donorcycles rev, the taxis nudge forward, the angry red man stands with his hands on his hips, but I make the far bank without bouncing off a hood. I dodge upstream through the crowd, clipping insults and dropping “Excuse me!”s. I am within hailing distance when she reaches the revolving door of PanOpticon, but she ignores the entrance and continues walking toward Shinjuku Station. Now I have the chance to catch her up and detain her, but I feel now that doing so would make her less sympathetic to my cause. What woman would help a man who has been blatantly stalking her? Worse still, what if she misunderstands before I can begin explaining? What if she screams, “Rapist! Pervert! Help!” and a pack of Tokyoites turns on me? However, I cannot just let her melt into the crowds either, not since this woman is the key to finding my father. So I compromise for the time being, and just trail her, reminding myself that she does not know the adult Eiji Miyake’s face. Yes, I should wait until she enters a shop or cafe or train compartment, then I can position myself for an accidental encounter. I feel power, anxiety, and weakness. She never turns around, not once. Why should she? We pass under a row of scraggly trees, dripping dry. The afternoon is growing old: freed schoolgirls mill around cosmetics shops, with sophisticated Tokyo bodies. I cannot believe I spent so long cooped up in that stuffy coffee shop. Still, my stakeout finally paid off. I stay a steady ten meters behind Ms. Kato, focusing on her navy blue–pinstriped shoulders. She gives off an aura. A jet in the blue. A damp underpass takes us under rail tracks as a train passes. We emerge into dense sunshine on busy Yasukuni Avenue, lined with plush bistros and cell-phone shops blaring intricate guitar riffs. I clang my shin on a bicycle—following people in real life is not easy. The sun steam-irons the pavement and gutter, rinsed air magnifies the heat, and sweat gums my T-shirt to my skin. Between a shop that sells ninety-nine flavors of ice cream and a Belgian waffle shop, Akiko Kato turns and disappears down a narrow side street. I hack through a jungle of housewives waiting outside a Milanese boutique, and find myself in an alley that could be from a gangster movie: no sun, trash cans on wheels, sooty canyon walls. My quarry stops outside what appears to be a cinema—not a respectable one, not down here—and turns around to see if anyone is following her. She has already seen me, so there is no point trying to hide. I glance at my watch and quicken my stride, worriedly, lowering my baseball cap as I rush past her. I smell her perfume: rose-musk and high treason. Rounding the next corner, I stop and peer back—she has already entered the building. The Ganymede Cinema. I double back. Today’s film is not porn—it is a feature movie called, oddly, PanOpticon. The poster shows only a row of screaming Russian dolls and tells me nothing of what the story might be about. I hesitate. I want a cigarette, but I left my pack at Jupiter Cafe, so I make do with a champagne candy. I have to decide now.