Number9Dream Read online

  I surprise myself by not chickening out and heading straight back to Shinjuku station, although I do nearly get killed by an ambulance crossing Kita Street. The handful of traffic lights on Yakushima are just there for effect – here they are life and death. When I got off the coach yesterday I noticed that Tokyo air smells of the insides of pockets. I haven’t noticed today. I guess I smell of the insides of pockets too. I walk up the steps of the PanOpticon. It props up the sky. Over the last seven years I have imagined this moment so often I cannot believe it is actually here. But it is here. The revolving door creeps around slowly. The refrigerated air makes the hairs on my arm stand up – when it gets this cold in winter they put on the heating. The marble floor is the white of bleached bone. Palm trees sit in bronze urns. A one-legged man crutches across the polished floor. Rubber squeaks, metal clinks. Trombone-flowers loom, big enough to eat babies. My left baseball boot makes a stupid eeky sound. A row of nine interviewees wait in identical leather armchairs. They are my age, and may very well be clones. Drone clones. ‘What a stupid eeky sound,’ they are all thinking. I reach the elevators and look up and down the signboard for Osugi and Bosugi, Legal. Concentrate on the prize. I could be ringing the doorbell at my father’s house by suppertime today. ‘Where do you think you’re going, kiddo?’

  I turn around.

  The guard at the reception desk glowers. The drone clones’ eighteen eyes swivel this way. ‘Didn’t they teach you to read?’ He raps his knuckles on a sign. VISITORS MUST REPORT TO RECEPTION. I backtrack and bow apologetically. He folds his arms. ‘So?’

  ‘I have business with Osugi and Bosugi. The lawyers.’

  PANOPTICON SECURITY is embroidered into his cap. ‘How swanky for you. And your appointment is with whom exactly?’

  ‘Appointment?’

  ‘Appointment. As in “appointment”.’

  Eighteen drone clone noses scent humiliation upwind.

  ‘I was, uh, hoping to see Ms Akiko Kato.’

  ‘And is Ms Kato aware of this honour?’

  ‘Not exactly, because—’

  ‘So you have no appointment.’

  ‘Look—’

  ‘No, you look. This is not a supermarket. This is a private building where business of a sensitive nature is regularly transacted. You cannot just breeze in. Nobody enters those elevators unless they are employees of the companies housed in here or unless they have an appointment, or a valid reason for being here. See?’

  Eighteen drone clone ears tune into my boondock accent.

  ‘Could I make an appointment through you, then?’

  Way wrong. The guard gears up and one clone pours fuel on the fire by snickering. ‘You didn’t hear me. I am a security guard. I am not a receptionist. I am employed to keep time-wasters, salesmen and assorted scum out. Not to usher them in.’

  Damage control. ‘I didn’t want to offend you, I just—’

  Too late for damage control. ‘Listen, kiddo.’ The guard removes his glasses, and polishes the lenses. ‘Your accent tells me you aren’t from round here, so listen while I explain to you how we work in Tokyo. You scuttle away before I get really irritated. You get your appointment with Ms Kato. You come back on the right day five minutes before your time. You report to me and tell me your name. I confirm your appointment with the Osugi and Bosugi receptionist. Then, and only then, do I let you step into one of those elevators. Am I understood?’

  I take a deep breath.

  The guard opens his newspaper with a snap.

  Post-rain sweat and grime regunge Tokyo. The puddles are steaming dry in the magnified heat. A busker sings so off key that passers-by have a moral responsibility to steal his change and smash his guitar on his head. I head back towards Shinjuku submarine station. The crowds march out of step, beaten senseless by the heat. My father’s doorbell is lost at an unknown grid reference in my Tokyo street guide. A tiny nugget of earwax deep inside my ear where I can’t dig it out is driving me crazy. I hate this city. I pass a kendo hall – bone-splintering bamboo-sword screams escape through the window grille. On the pavement is a pair of shoes – as if their owner suddenly turned to vapour and blew away. I feel a boiling frustration and a sort of tired guilt. I have broken some kind of unseen contract. Who with? Buses and trucks clog the arteries, pedestrians squeeze through the gaps. When I was going through my dinosaur phase I read a theory claiming that the great extinction occurred because the dinosaurs gagged to death on mountains of their own dung. Trying to get from A to Z in Tokyo, the theory no longer seems so ridiculous. I hate its wallpaper adverts, its capsules, tunnels, tap water, submarines, air, its NO RIGHT OF WAY on every corner and MEMBERS ONLY above every door. I swear. I want to turn into a nuclear warhead and incinerate this dung-heap city from the surface of the world.

  Two

  LOST PROPERTY

  Sawing the head off a thunder god with a rusty hacksaw is not easy when you are eleven years old. The hacksaw keeps jamming. I rejiggle, and nearly slip from the thunder god’s shoulders. If I fall backwards from this height I snap my spine. Outside the shrine a blackbird sings in dark purples. I wrap my legs around the god’s muscled torso, the same as when Uncle Tarmac gives me a piggyback. I drag the blade across his throat. Again, again, again. The wood is stone hard, but the nick deepens to a slit, the slit becomes a groove. My eyes sting with sweat. The quicker the better. This must be done, but there is no point getting caught. They put you in prison for this, surely. The blade slips and cuts my thumb. I wipe my eyes on my T-shirt and wait. Here comes the pain, in pulses. The flap of skin pinkens, reddens, and blood wells up. I lick it and taste ten-yen coins. Fair payment. Just as I am paying the thunder god back, for what he has done to Anju. I carry on sawing. I cannot see his face from where I am, but when I cut through his windpipe both our bodies judder.

  Saturday, 2nd September is already one hour old. One week since my Jupiter Café stake-out. On the main thoroughfare through Kita Senju the traffic is at low tide. I can see the Tokyo moon down a crack between the opposite apartment buildings. Zinc, industrial, skid-marked. My capsule is as stifling as the inside of a boxing glove. The fan stirs the heat. I am not going to contact her. No way. Who does she think she is, after all this time? Across the road is a photo developer’s with two Fujifilm clocks – the left clock shows the actual time, the right shows when the photos will be ready, forty-five minutes into the future. In the sodium glow my skimpy half-curtain is dungish. Girders crank, cables buzz. I wonder if this building gives me insomnia. Sick building syndrome, Uncle Bank calls it. Below me, Shooting Star is shuttered up and waiting for the night to pass. In the last week I have learned the routine: ten to midnight, Buntaro drags in the sandwich board and takes out the trash; five to midnight, the TV goes off, and he washes up his mug and plate; around now a customer may come sprinting down the street to return a video; at midnight on the nail, Buntaro pings open the till and cashes up. Three minutes later the shutters roll down, he kicks his scooter into life, and off he goes. A cockroach tries to flap free of the glue trap. My muscles ache from my new job. I should chuck out Cat’s bowl, I suppose. Keeping it is morbid, now I know the truth. And the extra milk, and the two tins of quality cat food. Is it edible, if I mix it into a soup or something? Did Cat die instantly, or did she lie on the roadside thinking about it? Did a passer-by whack her on the head with a shovel to put her out of her misery? Cats seem too transdimensional to get hit by traffic, but it happens all the time. All the time. Thinking I could keep her was crazy in the first place. My grandmother hates cats. Yakushima islanders keep chained-up dogs as guards. Cats take their own chances. I know nothing about litter trays, when you bring cats in, when you take them out, what injections they need. And look what happened to it when it dossed down with me: the Miyake curse strikes again. Anju climbed trees like a cat. A summer puma.

  ‘You are so, so, slow!’

  I shout back up through the early mist and floppy leaves. ‘I’m snagged!’

  ‘You’re scared!�
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  ‘I am not!’

  Anju laughs her wild zither when she knows she is right. The forest floor is a long way down. I worry about rotted-through branches snapping. Anju never worries because I always do her worrying for her. She skip-reads her way up trees. She finds fingerholds in coarse bark and toeholds in smooth bark. Last week was our eleventh birthday, but already Anju can climb the gym ropes faster than any of the boys in our class, and, when she is in the mood, multiply fractions, read second-year texts and recite most Zax Omega adventures word for word. Wheatie says this is because she grabbed most of the brain cells when we were growing inside our mother. I finally unpick my T-shirt and climb after my sister, swift as a three-toed sloth with vertigo. Minutes later I find her on the top branch. Copper-skinned, willow-limbed, moss-stained, thorn-scored, dungareed, ponytail knotted back. Waves of spring sea wind break on the woods. ‘Welcome to my tree,’ she says. ‘Not bad,’ I admit, but it is better than ‘not bad’. I have never climbed so high before. We have already trekked up the razor escarpment to get here, so the view is awesome. The fortress-grey mountain-faces, the green river snaking out of the gorge, the hanging bridge, mishmash of roofs and power lines, port, timber yards, school soccer ground, gravel pit, Uncle Orange’s tea-fields, our secret beach, its foot rock, waves breaking on the shoals around the whalestone, the long island of Tanegashima where they launch satellites, glockenspiel clouds, the envelope where the sea seals the sky. Having bombed as tree-climber-in-chief, I appoint myself head cartographer. ‘Kagoshima is over there . . .’ I am afraid to let go and point, so I nod. Anju is squinting inland. ‘I think I can see Wheatie airing the futons.’ I can’t see our grandmother but I know Anju wants me to ask ‘Where?’ so I don’t. The mountains rise towards the interior. Miyanoura Peak props up the sky. Hill tribes live in the rainshadow – they decapitate the lost tourists and make the skulls into drinking bowls. And there is a pool where a real webby, scaly kappa lives – it catches swimmers, rams its fist up through their bum-holes and pulls out their hearts to eat. Yakushima islanders never go up into the mountains, except for the tourist guides. I feel a lump in my pocket and remember. ‘Want a champagne bomb?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Anju suddenly monkey-shrieks, swings, and dangles down in front of me, giggling at my panic. Scared birds beat away near by. Her legs grip the branch above.

  ‘Don’t!’ is all I can blurt.

  Anju bares her front teeth and chicken-wings her arms. ‘Anju the bat.’

  ‘Anju! Don’t!’

  She swings to and fro. ‘I vant to suckkk your bluddd!’ Her hair clasp falls away and her ponytail streams earthward. ‘Bother. That was my last one.’

  ‘Don’t dangle like that! Stop it!’

  ‘Eiji’s a jellyfish, Eiji’s a jellyfish!’

  I imagine her falling, ricocheting from branch to branch. ‘Stop it!’

  ‘You’re even uglier upside down. I can see your bogies. Hold the tube steady.’

  ‘Swing back up first!’

  ‘No. I was born first so you have to do what I say. Hold the pack steady.’ She extracts a sweet, unpeels the wrapper and watches it flutter away into the sea-greens. Watching me, she puts the sweet in her mouth, and lazily swings herself back upright. ‘You really are such a wuss!’

  ‘If you fell Wheatie would murder me.’

  ‘Wuss.’

  My heartbeat gradually calms down.

  ‘What happens to you when you die?’ So Anju.

  I don’t care as long as she stays upright. ‘How should I know?’

  ‘Nobody says the same thing. Wheatie says you go to the pure land and walk in gardens with your ancestors. Boooring. Mr Endo at school says you turn into soil. Father Kakimoto says it depends what you were like in this life – I’d get changed into an angel or a unicorn, but you’d come back as a maggot or toadstool.’

  ‘So what do you think?’

  ‘When you die they burn you, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘So you turn into smoke, right?’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘So you go there.’ Anju lets go of the tree and shoots the sun with both hands. ‘Up, up and away. I want to fly.’

  A careworn buzzard rises on a thermal.

  ‘In an airplane?’

  ‘Who wants to fly in a pongy airplane?’

  I suck my champagne bomb. ‘How do you know airplanes pong?’

  Anju crunches her champagne bomb. ‘Airplanes must pong. All those people breathing the same air. Like the boys’ changing room in the rainy season, but a hundred times worse. No, I mean proper flying.’

  ‘Like with a jetpack?’

  ‘No such things as jetpacks.’

  ‘Zax Omega has a jetpack.’

  Anju airs her recently acquired sigh. ‘No such thing as Zax Omega.’

  ‘Zax Omega opened the new building at the port!’

  ‘And did he arrive by jetpack?’

  ‘No,’ I admit, ‘by taxi. But you’re too heavy to fly.’

  ‘Sky Castle Laputa flies, and that’s made of rock.’

  ‘If I can’t have Zax Omega, no way are you having Sky Castle Laputa.’

  ‘Condors, then. Condors weigh more than me. They fly.’

  ‘Condors have wings. I don’t see any wings on you.’

  ‘Ghosts fly without wings.’

  ‘Ghosts are dead.’

  Anju picks champagne bomb shrapnel from her teeth. She is in one of those moods when I have no idea what she is thinking. Leaf shadows hide my twin sister. Parts of Anju are too bright, parts of Anju are so dark she isn’t even here.

  Jerking off usually sends me to sleep. Am I normal? I never heard of a nineteen-year-old insomniac. I am no war criminal, no poet or scientist, I’m not even lovelorn. Lustlorn, yes. Here I am, in a city of five million women, cruising into my sexual prime, when females should be posting themselves to me naked in padded envelopes, single as a leper. Let me see. Who is riding the caravan of love tonight? Zizzi Hikaru, wet-suited as per the lager ad; the glam-rock mother of Yuki Chiyo; the waitress from Jupiter Café; Insectoid-woman from Zax Omega and Red Plague Moon. Back to good old Zizzi, I guess. I ferret around for some tissues.

  I ferret around for matches to light my post-coital Mild Seven, but end up having to use my gas stove. One throttled Godzilla, and I am wider awake than ever. Zizzi was disappointing tonight. No sense of timing. Is she getting too young for me? Fujifilm says 01:49. What now? Clean myself up? Practise my guitar? Write an answer to one of the two epoch-shifting letters I received this week? Which one? Let’s stick with the simpler: Akiko Kato’s reply to the letter I wrote after failing to see her. The single sheet of paper is still in the plastic bag in the freezebox with The Other. I put it on the shelf next to Anju but it kept laughing at me. It came . . . when was it? Tuesday. Buntaro read the envelope as he handed it to me. ‘Osugi and Bosugi, Legal. Chasing lawyer ladies? Be careful, lad, you could end up with injunctions slapped on where it hurts. Want to hear my lawyer joke? What’s the difference between a catfish and a lawyer? Guess – go on. No? One is a scaly, bottom-dwelling scum-sucker, and the other is a catfish.’ I tell him I’ve already heard it and dash up the videobox-stacked stairs to my capsule. I tell myself I am expecting a negative answer, but I wasn’t expecting that Akiko Kato’s ‘No’ would pack such a slap. I already know the letter by heart. Its greatest hits include: Disclosure of a client’s personal data constitutes a betrayal of trust which no responsible attorney could consider. Pretty final. Furthermore I feel obliged to refuse your request that I forward mail which my client has stated categorically he does not wish to receive. Not much room for doubt there. Not much room for a reply, either. Finally, in the event that legal proceedings are initiated to force data regarding your patrimony to be released, assisting your enquiries at this early stage represents a clear conflict of interest. I urge you not to pursue this matter, and trust that this letter clarifies our position. Perfectly. Plan A is dead on arrival.
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