Number9Dream Read online

  Mr Aoyama, sub-station-master of Ueno, is bald as a rivet-head and has a perfect Adolf Hitler moustache. This is Tuesday, on my first working day at Ueno station lost property office. ‘I am far busier than you can imagine’ – he speaks without taking his eyes off his paperwork – ‘but I make a point of addressing new intake on an individual basis.’ Mile-wide silences open up between his sentences. ‘You know who I am.’ His pen scratches. ‘You are’ – he checks a sheet – ‘Eiji Miyake.’ He looks at me, waiting for a nod. I nod. ‘Miyake.’ He pronounces my name as if it were a food additive. ‘Previously employed on an orange farm’ – he shuffles sheets, and I recognize my writing – ‘on an island of no importance south of Kyushu. Most bucolic.’ Above Aoyama are portraits of his distinguished forebears. I imagine them bickering over who will come alive every morning to pilot the office through another tiresome day. His office smells of sun-faded card files. A computer buzzes. Golf clubs shine. ‘Who hired you? The Sasaki woman?’ I nod. A knock on the door, and his secretary appears with a tray of tea. ‘I am addressing a trainee, Mrs Marui!’ Aoyama speaks in an appalled hiss. ‘My ten-thirty-five tea becomes my ten-forty-five tea, does it not?’ Stressed Mrs Marui bobs an apology and withdraws. ‘Go over to that window, Miyake, look out, and tell me what you see.’

  I do as he says. ‘A window cleaner, sir.’

  The man is immune to irony. ‘Below the window cleaner.’

  Trains pulling in and pulling out in the shadow of Terminus Hotel. Mid-morning passengers. Luggage haulers. The milling, the lost, the late, the meeters, the met, the platform-cleaning machines. ‘Ueno station, sir.’

  ‘Tell me this, Miyake. What is Ueno station?’

  I am foxed by this question.

  ‘Ueno station – Aoyama replays his grave spiel – ’ an extraordinary machine. One of the finest-tuned timepieces in the land. In the world. And this fireproof, thiefproof office is one of the nerve centres. From this console I can access . . . nearly everything. Ueno station is our lives, Miyake. You serve it, it serves you. It affords a timetabled career. You have the privilege to be a minute cog in this machine. Even I began in a position as lowly as yours: but with punctuality, hard work, integrity—’ The phone rings and I stop existing. Aoyama’s face switches to a higher-watt glow. His voice beams. ‘Sir! What a pleasure . . . yes . . . indeed . . . indeed . . . quite. A superb proposal. And may I venture to add . . . yes, sir. Absolutely . . . at the membership brokerage? Priceless . . . superb . . . and may I propose . . . indeed, sir. Rescheduled for Friday? How true . . . we’re all very much looking forward to hearing how we performed, sir. Thank you, sir . . . quite . . . And may I—’ Aoyama replaces the receiver and gazes at it.

  After some seconds I cough politely.

  Aoyama looks up. ‘Where was I?’

  ‘Minute cogs and integrity, sir.’

  ‘Integrity.’ But his mind is no longer here. He closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose. ‘Your probationary period is six months. You will have the chance to sit the Japan Railways examinations in March. So, the Sasaki woman hired you. Not my ideal role model. She is one of these men-women. Never quit work, even after marriage. Her husband died – sad, of course, but people die all the time, and she expects a man’s job by way of compensation. So, Miyake. Rectify your accent problem. Listen to NHK radio announcers. Dump the junk that stuffs your head. In my day high schools trained tigers. Now they turn out peacocks. You are dismissed.’

  I give him a bow as I close the door, but he is watching vacant space. The office outside is empty. The tray is on the side. To my own surprise, I lift the teapot lid and spit into it. This must be work-related stress.

  The lost property office is an okay place to work. I have to wear uncool Japan Railways overalls, but I finish at six sharp and Ueno station is only a few stops down the Kita Senju line from Umejima, near Shooting Star. During my six-month probation period I get paid weekly, which suits me fine. I am lucky. Buntaro got me the job. When I got back from PanOpticon a week ago last Friday, he said he had heard from a contact that there might be a job going there, and would I be interested? You bet, I said. Before I knew it I had an interview with Mrs Sasaki. She is a stern old bird, a Tokyo version of my grandmother, but after talking for about half an hour she offered me the job. I spend the mornings cataloguing – writing date/time/train labels on the items collected by conductors and cleaners when the trains terminate, and housing them on the right metal rack. Mrs Sasaki runs the lost property office and deals with the high-value items in the side office – wallets, cash cards, jewellery – which have to be registered with the police. Suga trains me to do the low-value ones, stored in the back office. ‘Not much natural light in here, right?’ says Suga. ‘But you can tell the month from what gets handed in. November to February, skis and snowboards. March – diplomas. June is all wedding gifts. Swimsuits pile up in July. A decent rain will bring hundreds of umbrellas. Not the most inspiring job, but it beats leaping around a garage forecourt or delivering pizzas, imho.’ Afternoons I spend on the counter, waiting for claimants, or answering the phone. Rush hours are busiest, of course, but during mid-afternoon my job is almost relaxing. My memory is the most regular visitor.

  The leaves are so green they are blue. Me and Anju play our staring game: we stare at one another and the first one to make the other smile and look away wins. I pull stupid faces but they bounce off her. Her Cleopatra eyes are sparked with bronze. She wins – she always does – by bringing her eyes close to mine and opening wide. Anju returns to her higher branch and looks at the sun through a leaf. Then she hides the sun with her hand. The webby bit between her thumb and forefinger glows ruby. She looks out to sea. ‘The tide is coming in.’

  ‘Going out.’

  ‘Coming in. Your whalestone is diving.’

  My mind is on miraculous soccer exploits.

  ‘I really used to believe what you told me about the whalestone.’

  Bicycle kicks and diving headers.

  ‘You spouted such rubbish.’

  ‘Uh?’

  ‘About it being magic.’

  ‘What being magic?’

  ‘The whalestone, deaf-aid!’

  ‘I never said it was magic.’

  ‘You did. You said it was a real whale that the thunder god had turned into stone, and that one day when we were older we would swim out to it, and once we set foot on it the spell would be broken, and it would be so grateful that it would take us anywhere we wanted to go, even to Mother and Father. I used to imagine it happening so hard that I could see it sometimes, like down a telescope. Mother putting on her pearls, and Father washing his car.’

  ‘I never said all of that.’

  ‘Did, too. One of these days I’ll swim out to it.’

  ‘No way could you ever swim that far. Girls can’t swim as well as boys.’

  Anju aims a lazy kick at my head. ‘I could swim there, easy!’

  ‘In your dreams. Way too far.’

  ‘In your dreams.’ Waves break at the foot of the grey humpback.

  ‘Maybe it really is a whalestone,’ I suggest. ‘A fossil one.’

  Anju snorts. ‘It’s just a stupid rock. It doesn’t even look like a whale. And next time we go to the secret beach I’m going to show you and swim out there, me, and stand on it and laugh at you.’

  The Kagoshima ferry crawls across the horizon.

  ‘This time tomorrow—’ I begin.

  ‘Yeah, yeah, this time tomorrow you’ll be in Kagoshima. You’ll get up really early to catch the ferry, arrive at Kagoshima junior high school at ten o’clock. The third years, the second years, then your match. Then you go to the restaurant of a hotel with nine floors and eat while you listen to Mr Ikeda tell you why you lost. Then you come back on Sunday morning. You already told me a zillion times, Eiji.’

  ‘I can’t help it if you’re jealous.’

  ‘Jealous? Eleven smelly boys kicking a bag of air on a pitch of muck?’

  ‘You us
ed to like soccer.’

  ‘You used to wet our futon.’

  Ouch. ‘You’re jealous because I’m going to Kagoshima and you’re not.’

  Anju stays aloof.

  The tree creaks. I didn’t expect Anju to lose interest in our argument so soon. ‘Watch,’ she says. She stands up, feet apart, steadies herself, takes her hands away—

  ‘Stop it,’ I say.

  And my sister jumps into empty air

  My lungs wallop out a scream

  Anju flashes by me

  and lands laughing on a branch below, swinging down to a lower branch. I hear her laughter long after she has vanished in the leaves.

  Fujifilm says two o’clock has come and gone. A single night is stuffed with minutes, but they leak out, one by one. My capsule is stuffed with Stuff. Look up ‘stuff’ in a dictionary, and you get a picture of my capsule above Shooting Star. A shabby colony in the empire of stuff. An old TV, a rice-cracker futon, a camping table, a tray of cast-off kitchen utensils courtesy of Buntaro’s wife, cups containing fungal experiments, a roaring fridge with chrome trimmings. The fan. A pile of Screen magazines, offloaded by Buntaro. All I brought from Yakushima was a backpack of clothes, my Discman, my Lennon CDs and my guitar. Buntaro looked at my guitar doubtfully the day I arrived. ‘You don’t intend to plug that thing in anywhere, do you?’ ‘No,’ I answer. ‘Stay acoustic,’ he warns. ‘Go electric on me, and you’re out. It’s in your contract.’ I am not going to contact her. No way. She will try to talk me out of looking for my father. I wonder how long it will take for Cockroach to die. The glue trap is called a ‘cockroach motel’, and has windows, doors and flowers printed on the side. Traitor cockroaches wave six arms – ‘Come in, come in!’ It has an onion-flavoured bait-sachet – curry, prawn salad and beef jerky are also available at all good Tokyo supermarkets. Cockroach greeted me when I moved in. It didn’t even bother pretending to be scared. Cockroach grinned. Who has the last laugh now? I have! No. It has. I can’t sleep. In Yakushima night means sleep. Not much else to do. Night does not mean sleep in Tokyo. Punks slalom down shopping malls. Hostesses stifle yawns and glance at their patrons’ Rolexes. Yakuza gangsters fight on deserted building sites. High-schoolers way younger than me engage in gymnastic love-hotel sex-bouts. In an apartment high above, a fellow insomniac flushes a toilet. A pipe behind my head chunders.

  Last Wednesday, my second day as a drone at Ueno station. I am taking a good solid dump during my lunch break, smoking a Salem in the cubicle. I hear the door open, a zipper scratch, and the chime of urine against porcelain urinal. Then the voice begins – it is Suga, the computer nerd whose part-time job I am taking over from the end of the week when he goes back to college. Obviously he thinks he is alone in here. ‘Excuse me, are you Suga? Are you responsible for this?’ His voice isn’t his real voice – it is a cartoon voice, and it must scrape the lining off his vocal chords to produce it. ‘I don’t wanna remember, I don’t wanna remember, I don’t wanna remember. Don’t make me. Can’t make me. Won’t make me. Forget it! Forget it! Forget it!’ His voice reverts to its bland, nasal calm. ‘It wasn’t my fault. Could have happened to anyone. To anyone. Don’t listen to them.’

  I am in a fix. If I leave now we’ll both be embarrassed as all hell. I feel as though I have heard him mutter a secret in his sleep. But if I stay here, what might he reveal next? How he chopped up the corpse in his bath and put it out with the garbage bit by bit? If he finds me listening, it will look like I was eavesdropping. I cough, flush the toilet, and take a long time to pull my trousers up. When I emerge from my cubicle Suga has disappeared. I wash my hands and walk the roundabout way back to the office, via the magazine stands. Mrs Sasaki is dealing with a customer. Suga is in the back eating his lunch, and I offer him a Salem. He says no, he doesn’t smoke. I forgot, he told me that yesterday. I go to the mirror and pretend to have something in my eye. If I show him too much kindness he may twig it was me who heard him being memory-whipped.

  Later, back at the claims counter, Suga perches on his stool reading a magazine called MasterHacker. Suga has a weird physique – he is overweight around his belly, but he has no bottom. Long dangly ET arms. He suffers from eczema. His face has been medicated into submission, but the backs of his hands flake, and even in this heat he wears long-sleeved shirts to hide his forearms. A trolley of lost items from the afternoon trains is in the back office waiting for me. Suga smirks. ‘So you already had the Assistant Station-Master Aoyama experience?’ I nod. Suga puts down his magazine. ‘Don’t let him intimidate you. He isn’t as big time as he makes out. The man is losing it, imho. A big shake-up is being announced, Mrs Sasaki was saying last week. Not that I care. Next week I’m doing my IBM internship. Week after, back to uni. I’m getting my own postgrad research room. You can come and see me when I’m not supervising. Imperial Uni, ninth floor. Near Ochanomizu. I’ll draw you a map. You can get the front desk to ring up for me. My masters is in computer systems, but between you, me and the lost property, all that academic crap is a cover for this—’ He waves MasterHacker. ‘I’m one of the five best hackers currently working in Japan. We all know each other. We swap info. We break into systems and leave our tags. Like graffiti artists. There is nowhere, right, in Japan I can’t hack into. There’s a secret website in the Pentagon – you know what the Pentagon is, right, the American defence nerve centre – called Holy Grail. This site is protected by their top computer brains, right. If you hack into Holy Grail it proves that you are better than they are, and men in black appear to offer you a job. That is what I’m going to do. Imperial Uni has the fastest modems this side of the twenty-fifth century. Once I get access to those babies, I am in. Then, whoosh, I am out of this shithole commonly known as Tokyo. Deep joy. You suckers won’t see me for dust.’

  I watch Suga read MasterHacker while I work. His eyebrows twitch up every time he reaches the bottom of a column of text. I wonder what Suga wouldn’t call a shithole. What would make Suga happy? Weird, but when I remember that I’ll only be here until I find my father, I almost like Tokyo. I feel I’m on holiday on another planet, passing myself off as a native alien. I might even stay on. I like flashing my JR travel pass to the train man at the barrier. I like the way nobody pokes their nose into your business. I like the way the adverts change every week – on Yakushima they change every ten years. I like riding the train every day from Kita Senju to Ueno: I like the incline where it dives below the ground and becomes a submarine. I like the way submarines pass by at different speeds, so you can fool yourself you are going backwards. I like the glimpses of commuters in parallel windows – two stories being remembered at the same time. Kita Senju to Ueno is crammed beyond belief in the morning. Us drones all swing and lurch in droozy unison as the train changes speed. Normally only lovers and twins get this close to other people. I like the way nothing needs to be decided on submarines. I like the muffled clunking. Tokyo is one massive machine made of smaller components. The drones only know what their own minute component is for. I wonder what Tokyo is for. I wonder what it does. I already know the names of the stations between here and Ueno. I know where to stand so I can get off nearest the exit. Do not ride in the first compartment, says Uncle Tarmac – if the train collides, this is the crumple zone – and be extra alert on the platform as the train pulls in, in case a hand in the small of your back shoves you over the edge. I like the brew of sweat, perfume, crushed food, grime, cosmetics. I like how you can study reflected faces, so deeply you can almost leaf through their memories. Submarines carry drones, skulls carry memories, and one man’s shithole may be another man’s paradise.

  ‘Eiji!’ Anju, of course. Moonlight bright as a UFO abduction, air heady with the mosquito incense which my grandmother uses to fumigate the lived-in rooms. Anju whispers so as not to wake her. ‘Eiji!’ She perches on the high windowsill, hugging her knees. Bamboo shadows sway and shoo on the tatami and faded fusuma. ‘Eiji! Are you awake?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I was watch
ing you. You are a boy-me. But you snore.’

  She wants to wake me up by getting me angry. ‘I do not.’

  ‘You snore like a piggy puking. Guess where I’ve been.’

  Let me sleep. ‘Down the toilet.’

  ‘Out on the roof! You can climb up the balcony pole. I found the way. So warm out there. If you stare at the moon long enough you can see it move. I couldn’t sleep. A pesky mosquito woke me up.’

  ‘A pesky sister woke me up. My soccer match is tomorrow. I need sleep.’

  ‘So you need a midnight snack to build you up. Look.’

  On the side is a tray. Omochi, soy, daikon pickles, peanut cookies, tea. I see trouble ahead. ‘When Wheatie finds out she’ll—’

  Anju scrunches up her face and voice for a Wheatie impression. ‘Your mother may have made your bones, young missy, but inside that head of yours is going to be all my handiwork!’

  As always, I laugh. ‘You went down to the kitchen on your own?’

  ‘I told the ghosts I was one of them and they believed me.’ Anju jumps and lands at my feet without a sound. I know resistance is pointless so I sit up and bite into a squeaky pickle. Anju slides under my futon and dunks an omochi into a saucer of soy. ‘I had my flying dream again. Only I had to keep flapping really hard to stay above the ground. I could see lots of people moving about, and there was this big stripy circus tent where Mum lived. I was about to swoop down on it when the mosquito woke me up.’