Number9Dream Read online

  ‘I’ll give it a miss, thank you.’

  ‘Don’t you like popcorn?’

  ‘I, uh, don’t feel strongly about popcorn.’

  She weighs my statement. ‘So you refuse to admit you dislike popcorn.’

  ‘Popcorn isn’t something I like or dislike.’

  ‘Why do you play these games with me?’

  ‘I’m not playing games. I just had a big lunch. I don’t want to eat anything.’

  ‘I hate it when you lie.’

  ‘You must be mistaking me for somebody else.’

  She shakes her head. ‘Mistakes never make it this far down.’

  ‘Okay, okay, I’ll buy some popcorn.’

  ‘Impossible. There is none.’

  I’m missing something. ‘Then why did you offer to sell me some?’

  ‘Look back. I never did. Do you want to see the film or not?’

  ‘Yes.’ This is getting irritating. ‘I want to see the film.’

  ‘Then why are you wasting my time?’ She holds open the curtain. The steeply sloping cinema has a population of exactly three. In the front row I recognize Akiko Kato. A man is next to her. Down the far aisle a third man is in a wheelchair, apparently dead: his neck is bent back brokenly, his jaw gapes, his head is unhinged, and he is quite motionless. I follow his gaze to the night sky painted on the roof of the cinema. I creep down the centre aisle, hoping I can get close enough to the couple to eavesdrop. A loud bang goes off in the projectionist’s room and I hunker down to hide. A shotgun, or an inexpertly opened bag of potato chips. Neither Akiko Kato nor her companion turn around – I creep down to within a couple of rows behind them. The lights fall and the curtain rises on a rectangle of flickering light. An advert for a driving school: the advert is either very old or the driving school only accepts learners with a 1970s bent in clothes and hair. The soundtrack is the ‘YMCA’ song. Next, an advert for a plastic surgeon called Apollo Shigenobo who grafts permanent grins on to all his customers. They sing about facial correction. I enjoy the ‘Coming Soon’ trailers at the Kagoshima cinema – it saves the bother of watching the film – but here there are none. A titanium voice announces the film, PanOpticon, by a director I could never pronounce, winner of a film festival award in a city I could not even pinpoint to the nearest continent. No titles, no music. Straight in.

  In a black-and-white city of winter an omnibus shoulders through crowds. A middle-aged passenger watches. Busy snow, wartime newspaper vendors, policemen beating a black marketeer, hollow faces in empty shops, a burnt skeletal bridge. Getting off, the man asks the driver for directions – he receives a nod at the enormous wall obscuring the sky. The man walks along its foot, looking for the door. Craters, broken things, wild dogs. Circular ruins where a hairy lunatic talks to a fire. Finally the man finds a wooden door. He stoops and knocks. No reply. He sees a tin can hanging from a piece of string vanishing into the masonry, and speaks into it. ‘Is anybody there?’ The subtitles are Japanese, the language is all hisses, slushes and cracks. ‘I am Dr Polonski. Warden Bentham is expecting me.’ He puts the can to his ear and hears drowning sailors. The door opens by itself on to a bleak forecourt. The doctor stoops through. A strange chanting echoes with the wind. ‘Toadling at your service, Doctor.’ A very short man unbows, and Dr Polonski jumps back. ‘This way, if you will.’ Snow is gravelly. Incantations whirl and die and rise again. Keys jangle on Toadling’s belt. Past card-playing guards, through a maze of cages. ‘Your destination,’ he croaks. The doctor gives a stiff bow, knocks, and enters a scruffy office.

  ‘Doctor!’ The warden is decrepit and drunk. ‘Take a seat, do.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Dr Polonski steps gingerly – the floors are not only bare, but half the floorboards have been removed. The doctor sits on a schoolchild’s chair. The warden is photographing a peanut in a tall glass of liquid. Warden Bentham explains. ‘I am penning a treatise on the behaviour of bar snacks in brandy soda.’

  ‘Indeed?’

  The warden checks his stopwatch. ‘What’s your poison, Doc?’

  ‘Not while I’m on duty. Thank you.’

  The warden empties the last drop from his brandy bottle into an eggcup and disposes of the bottle by dropping it between floorboards. A distant scream and tinkle. ‘Chin chin!’ The warden knocks back his eggcup. ‘Dear doctor, permit me to cut to the quack. The quick, I mean, the quick. Our own Dr Koenig died of consumption before Christmas, and what with the war in the East and whatnot we still have no replacement. Prisons are not priorities in wartime, except to house politicals. We had such high hopes. A Utopian prison, to raise the inmates’ mental faculties, to allow their imaginations to set them free. To—’

  ‘Mr Bentham,’ interrupts Dr Polonski. ‘The quick?’

  ‘The quick is’ – the warden leans forward – ‘the Voorman problem.’

  Polonski shifts on his tiny chair, afraid of joining the brandy bottle. ‘Voorman is a prisoner here?’

  ‘Quite so, Doctor. Voorman is the prisoner who maintains he is God.’

  ‘God.’

  ‘Each to his own, I say, but he has persuaded the prison population to share his delusion. We isolated him, but to no avail. The singing you heard coming in? The psalm of Voorman. I fear disturbances, Doctor. Riots.’

  ‘I see you have a problem, but how—’

  ‘I am asking you to examine Voorman. Ascertain whether his madness is feigned, or whether his tapirs run amok. If you decide he is clinically insane, I can parcel him off to the asylum, and we can all go home for tea and fairy cakes.’

  ‘Of what crime was Voorman convicted?’

  Warden Bentham shrugs. ‘We burned the files last winter for fuel.’

  ‘How do you know when to release the prisoners?’

  The warden is flummoxed. ‘“Release”? “The prisoners”?’

  Akiko Kato looks behind her. I duck down, in time, I think. At the end of the row a rat stands upright in a pool of silver screenlight. It looks at me before climbing into the upholstery. ‘I only hope,’ Akiko Kato’s companion speaks softly, ‘this is urgent.’

  ‘An apparition appeared in Tokyo yesterday.’

  ‘You summoned me from the defence department to tell me a ghost story?’

  ‘The ghost was your son, Congressman.’

  My father is as thunderstruck as I am.

  Akiko Kato flicks her hair. ‘And I assure you he is a ghost who is very much alive. In Tokyo and looking for you.’

  My father says nothing for the longest time. ‘Does he want money?’

  ‘Blood.’ I opt to bide my time while Akiko Kato cuts more rope to hang herself later. ‘I can’t dress up what I have to say. Your son is a crack addict who vowed to me that he would kill you for his stolen childhood. I’ve come across many a damaged young man in my time, but I’m afraid your son is salivating psychosis on two legs. And it isn’t only you he wants. He says he wants to destroy your family first, to punish you for what happened to his sister.’

  Voorman’s cell is a palace of filth. ‘So, Mr Voorman . . .’ Dr Polonski paces over faeces and flies. ‘How long have you believed yourself to be a god?’

  Voorman is in a straitjacket. ‘Let me ask you the same question.’

  ‘I do not believe I am a god.’ Something crunches under his shoe.

  ‘But you believe yourself to be a psychiatrist.’

  ‘Correct. I have been a psychiatrist since I graduated from medical college – with first-class honours – and entered my practice.’ The doctor lifts his foot – a twitching cockroach is glued to his sole. He scrapes it off on fallen masonry.

  Voorman nods. ‘I have been God since I began practising my profession.’

  ‘I see.’ The doctor stops to take notes. ‘What does your profession involve?’

  ‘Chiefly, on-going maintenance. Of my universe.’

  ‘So you created our universe?’

  ‘Quite. Nine days ago.’

  Polonski weighs this up. ‘A considerable body of ev
idence suggests that the universe is somewhat older than nine days.’

  ‘I know. I created the evidence, too.’

  The doctor sits on a shelf-cot opposite. ‘I am forty-five years of age, Mr Voorman. How do you account for my memories of last spring, or my childhood?’

  ‘I created your memories when I created you.’

  ‘So everything in this universe is a figment of your imagination?’

  ‘Precisely. You, this prison, gooseberries, the Horsehead Nebula.’

  Polonski finishes the sentence he is writing. ‘Must be quite a workload.’

  ‘Greater than your puny hippocampus – no offence – could ever conceive. Worse still, I have to keep imagining every last atom, or it all goes “poof”! “Solipsist” only has one l, Doctor.’ Polonski frowns and changes the position of his notebook. Voorman sighs. ‘I know you are sceptical, Doctor. I made you that way. May I propose an objective experiment to verify my claims?’

  ‘What do you have in mind?’

  ‘Belgium.’

  ‘Belgium?’

  ‘I don’t suppose even the Belgians would miss it, do you?’

  My father says nothing. His head is bowed. He has a full head of hair – I don’t need to worry about baldness. This is a dark, delicious, unexpected turn of events. I will announce my presence any moment now, and expose Akiko Kato as a lying viper – I want to keep my advantage a little longer, and build up my arsenal for the battle ahead. Akiko Kato’s mobile phone rings. She gets it out of her handbag, snaps ‘Call back later, I’m busy,’ and puts it back. ‘Congressman. The general election is four weeks from now. Your face is going to be plastered over every candidate board in Tokyo. You will be on television daily. This is not a time to keep a low profile.’

  ‘If I could only meet my son—’

  ‘If he knows who you are, you are doomed.’

  ‘Everybody has a reasonable side.’

  ‘He has a criminal record – GBH, burglary, drugs – as long as your wife’s fur rack. He has a very nasty cocaine habit. Imagine what the opposition would do. “Abandoned Ministerial Love-Child Criminal Swears ‘I will kill him!’”’

  My father sighs in the flickering darkness. ‘What do you suggest?’

  ‘Liquidate the problem before it turns into your political death.’

  My father quarter-turns. ‘Surely you’re not suggesting violence?’

  Akiko Kato chooses her words carefully. ‘I foresaw this day. Plans are in place. Accidents happen in the city, and I know people who know people who can make accidents happen sooner rather than later.’

  I wait for my father’s reply.

  The Polonskis live in a third-floor apartment in an old city house with a gate and courtyard. She hasn’t eaten or slept properly in months. Pale fire shudders in the shade. A convoy of tanks rumbles by. Mrs Polonski slices iron bread with a blunt knife and ladles thin broth. ‘Are you still fretting about that Boorman prisoner?’

  ‘Voorman. I am still fretting, yes.’

  ‘Forcing you to do the job of a court judge, it’s so unreasonable.’

  ‘That doesn’t worry me. In this city there is little difference between the prison and the asylum.’ He captures the tip of a carrot in the bowl of his spoon.

  ‘Then what is it?’

  ‘Is he the slave, or the master, of his imagination? He swore to make Belgium disappear by teatime.’

  ‘Is Belgium another prisoner?’

  Polonski chews. ‘Belgium.’

  ‘A new cheese?’

  ‘Belgium. The country. Between France and Holland. Belgium.’

  Mrs Polonski shakes her head doubtfully.

  Her husband smiles to hide his annoyance. ‘Bel-gi-um.’

  ‘Is this a joke, dear?’

  ‘You know I never joke about my patients.’

  ‘“Belgium.” A shire or village of Luxembourg, perhaps?’

  ‘Bring me my atlas!’ The doctor turns to the general map of Europe and his face stiffens. Between France and Holland is a feature called the Walloon Lagoon. Polonski gazes, thunderstruck. ‘This cannot be. This cannot be. This cannot be.’

  ‘I refuse to believe,’ insists my father, ‘that any son of mine could be capable of murder. His temper must have flared when he met you – your imagination is rewriting what he says and means.’

  ‘I am a lawyer,’ replies Akiko Kato. ‘I am not paid to imagine.’

  ‘If I could only meet my son, and explain—’

  ‘How many times must I say it, Minister? He will kill you.’

  ‘And so I have to rubber-stamp his death?’

  ‘Do you love your real family?’

  ‘What kind of a question is that?’

  ‘Then the steps you must take to protect them are obvious.’

  My father shakes his head. ‘This is sheer insanity!’ He combs his hair with his fingers. ‘May I ask a direct question?’

  ‘You are the boss,’ says Akiko Kato in the tone of the boss.

  ‘Is our privacy retention agreement a factor in your calculations?’

  Akiko Kato’s offence is razor-sharp. ‘I resent that insinuation.’

  ‘You must admit—’

  ‘I resent that insinuation so much that the price of my silence is doubled.’

  My father nearly shouts. ‘Remember who I am, Ms Kato!’

  ‘I do remember who you are, Minister. A man with a kingdom to lose.’

  The time has come. I stand up two rows behind my father and the snakewoman who manipulates his life. ‘Excuse me.’ They turn around – guilty, surprised, alert. ‘What?’ hisses Akiko Kato. I look from her, to my father, to her, to my father. Neither of them recognizes me. ‘Well? What the hell do you want?’ I swallow. ‘It is a simple matter. I know your name, and you knew mine, once upon a time: Eiji Miyake. Yes, that Eiji Miyake. True. It has been many years . . .’

  Icicles fang the window of Voorman’s cell. Voorman’s eyelids open very, very slowly. Bombers drone across nearby airspace. ‘Good morning, Doctor. Will Belgium figure in your session notes today?’ The guard with the cattle prod slams the door shut. Polonski pretends to ignore this. His eyes are dark and baggy.

  ‘Sleep badly last night, Doctor?’

  Polonski opens his bag with practised calm.

  ‘Wicked thoughts!’ Voorman licks his lips. ‘Is that your medical opinion, Doctor? I am not a lunatic, not a malingerer, but a demon? Am I to be exorcised?’

  Polonski looks at the prisoner sharply. ‘Do you believe you should be?’

  Voorman shrugs. ‘Demons are merely humans with demonic enough imaginations.’

  The doctor sits down. The chair scrapes. ‘Just supposing you do possess . . . powers—’

  Voorman smiles. ‘Say it, Doctor, say it.’

  ‘What is God doing straitjacketed in this prison?’

  Voorman yawns in a well-fed way. ‘What would you do if you were God? Spend your days playing golf on Hawaii? I think not. Golf is so tedious when holes-in-one are dead certs. Existence drags so . . . non-existently.’

  Polonski is not taking notes now. ‘So what do you do with your time?’

  ‘I seek amusement in you. Take this war. Slapstick comedy.’

  ‘I am not a religious man, Mr Voorman—’

  ‘That is why I chose you.’

  ‘—but what kind of a god finds wars amusing?’

  ‘A bored one. Yes. Humans are equipped with imaginations so you can dream up new ways to entertain me.’

  ‘Which you choose to observe from the luxury of your cell?’

  Gunfire crackles in a neighbouring precinct. ‘Luxury, poverty, who cares when you are immortal? I am rather fond of prisons. I see them as open-cast irony mines. And the prisoners are more fun than well-fed congregations. You also amuse me, good doctor. Your remit is to prove me either a faker or a lunatic, and yet you end up proving my omnipotent divinity.’

  ‘Nothing of the sort has been proven.’

  ‘True, Dr Diehard, true. B
ut fear not, I bear glad tidings. We’re going to change places. You can juggle time, gravity, waves and particles. You can sift through the dreckbin of human endeavour for tiny specks of originality. You can watch the sparrows fall and continents pillaged in your name. Now. I’m going to make your wife smile in a most involuntary way and partake of the chief warden’s brandy.’

  ‘You are a sick man, Mr Voorman. The Belgian trick stymies me, but—’

  Dr Polonski freezes.

  Voorman whistles the national anthem of France.

  The frame jumps.

  ‘Time has flown,’ says the doctor. ‘I must be leaving.’

  The prisoner chokes. ‘What—’

  The doctor flexes his new muscles.

  The prisoner screams. ‘What have you done to me ?’

  ‘If you can’t discuss things like a rational adult I’ll terminate this interview.’

  ‘Put me back, you monster!’

  ‘You’ll soon learn the ropes.’ The doctor clips his bag shut. ‘Watch the Balkans. Hot spot.’

  The prisoner bellows. ‘Guards! Guards!’ The door scrapes open and the doctor shakes his head sadly. Cattle prods buzzing, the guards approach the hysterical prisoner. ‘Arrest that impostor! I’m the real Dr Polonski! He’s an infernal agent who made Belgium disappear overnight!’ The prisoner shrieks and twists as the guards wham 5,000 volts through his body. ‘Stop that abomination! He’s going to molest my wife!’ His shackled feet bang the floor. Knock, knock, knock.

  I should have left my blackheads alone – I have the complexion of a winged crab attack victim. Somebody on the outside knocks and turns the toilet door handle. I ruffle back my gelled hair, and fumble the door open. It is Lao Tzu. ‘Took your time in there, Captain.’ I apologize, and decide that the PanOpticon assault hour is nigh. Right after one last Carlton. I watch workmen erect a giant TV screen against the side of PanOpticon’s neighbour. The waitress with the perfect neck has finished her shift – the clock says six minutes to three – and changed out of her uniform. She is wearing a purple sweater and white jeans. She looks drop-dead cool. Dowager is giving her a talking-to over by the cigarette machine when Donkey rings the help-me bell – Dowager drops my waitress in mid-sentence and goes over to bestow order upon the sudden throng of customers. The girl with the perfect neck glances at the clock anxiously. She feels her mobile phone vibrate and turns in my direction to talk, cupping her mouth so nobody can hear. Her face lights up, and I am piqued by jealousy. Before I know it I am choosing another brand of cigarettes from the cigarette machine next to her. Eavesdropping is wrong, but who can blame me if I innocently overhear? ‘Yeah, yeah. Put Nao on, would you?’ Naoki a boy or Naoko a girl? ‘I’ll be a little late, so start without me.’ Start what? ‘Amazing rain, wasn’t it?’ She practises piano movements with her free hand. ‘Yes, I remember how to get there.’ Where? ‘Room 162. I know we only have two weeks left.’ Until what? Then she looks at me and sees me looking at her. I remember I am supposed to be choosing cigarettes and study the range on offer. On an advert a lawyer-type woman smokes Salem. ‘You let your imagination run away with you again. See you in twenty minutes. ’Bye.’ She pockets her phone and clears her throat. ‘Did you catch all of that, or would you like me to go over any bits you missed?’ To my horror I realize she is talking to me. My blush is so hot I smell smoke. I look up at her – I am still crouching to take my Salems from the dispenser. The girl is not angry as such, but she is as tough as a drill-bit. I search for words to defuse her contempt while keeping my dignity intact. I come up with ‘Uh’. Her stare is merciless. ‘Uh,’ she repeats. I swallow hard, and touch the leaves of the rubber plant. ‘I was wondering,’ I flounder, ‘if these plants were, uh, artificial. Are. I mean.’ Her stare is a death ray. ‘Some are real. Some are fake. Some are full of shit.’ The Dowager returns to finish her sentence. I cockroach back to my coffee. I want to run out under a heavy truck, but I also want to smoke a Salem to calm down before I go and ask my father’s lawyer for her client’s name and address. Lao Tzu returns, posturing his behind. ‘Eat big, shit big, live big, dream small. Say, Captain, you wouldn’t have a spare ciggie there?’ I light two sticks with one match. The girl with the perfect neck has finally escaped from Jupiter Café. She gazelles across the puddles over Omekaido Avenue. I should have been honest. One lie and your credibility is bankrupt. Forget her. She is way out of my class. She is a musician at a Tokyo university with a conductor boyfriend called Naoki. I am unemployed and only graduated from high school because the teachers gave me a sympathy vote due to my background. She is from a good family and sleeps in a bedroom with real oil paintings and CD-ROM encyclopaedias. Her film director father allows Naoki to sleep over, on account of his money, talent and immaculate teeth. I am from a non-family, I sleep in a capsule the size of a packing case in Kita Senju with my guitar, and my teeth are not wonky but not straight. ‘What a beautiful young creature,’ sighs Lao Tzu. ‘If only I were your age, Captain . . .’