So we avoided that scene. We didn’t harden the skin on our thumbs to fine Corinthian leather in hopes of cashing in. We played games to play games.
I didn’t have the words to stop my friend from traveling down the road he’d chosen. It reminded me of the end of The Lord of the Rings, when the elves sailed off into the True West. I was a hobbit who knew the power of the ring only too well, but I was Merry to his Frodo. He knew that where he was going there was no coming back, and a part of me was a little jealous of that determination. I felt the power of the ring, even felt my hold on RL slipping away at times, but I hesitated. I lacked the courage to take that final step, even while deep inside, I hoped to make that journey myself someday.
My friend managed to eke out a living on his allowance for a little while, but eventually he had to go back to Hokkaido. His cell number and email worked through the end of May, but by June even those had been disconnected. In the end it wasn’t the west he disappeared into, but the north.
Sooner or later, everybody dies. I figure it’s best to spend your life doing what you enjoy. Every morning when I stand and look into the mirror, that time is still my own. I wonder how much longer that will last.
These are the sorts of things that run through my head each night while Tetsuo fights in the arena.
The clock on my DVR read 6:15. Morning had stolen up on me. I could hear birds chirping through my shutters. My room was much warmer than it should have been for June thanks to the residual heat from the television and game console’s having been on all night. Locked in the same position for hours, my knees creaked in protest as I stretched my legs.
Tanaka had logged out hours ago. The identity of the snake boxer who’d beaten him was still gnawing at me, but I didn’t have a clue whether or not he was the same character who’d been ganking people down in Sanchōme. Tanaka’s only defeat for the night had been at the hands of the mystery snake boxer.
The night’s score for Tetsuo: 97 wins, 2 losses.
CHAPTER 4
FEEBLE SUNLIGHT BATHED MY DESK. The air was still. Outside the window, row upon row of feathery clouds drifted through the Shinjuku sky. It was almost summer, but even in a long-sleeve shirt I could still feel the chill in the air. I was sitting by the window in a seat two rows from the back of a small, dimly lit classroom, listening to my economics professor.
The room was alive with sound FX. Gusts of wind rattling the window panes. Pencil lead gliding across paper. The guy in front of me rocking in his seat.
It was 11:28 AM. I ventured a quick stretch. I’d just crossed the halfway mark of my second ninety-minute lecture of the day, and my health gauge was running low. It was all I could do to grip my mechanical pencil in my right hand. The disks of my back were screaming in agony. Expecting students to sit for ninety minutes at a time in such poorly designed chairs raised serious questions about the Japanese educational system. The chairs department stores lined up beside the stairs so elderly shoppers could take a load off were the pinnacle of comfort by comparison. I was starting to consider myself a man of preternatural endurance, a human copy machine whose sole purpose on this earth was to transcribe text from the blackboard onto sheets of loose-leaf paper for hours on end.
The professor, a man of about fifty, was delivering an impassioned speech in front of the blackboard. Mr. Yamawhatsit or Mr. Somethingawa. I couldn’t remember his name. I rested my chin on folded hands, only half listening to the lecture.
If you had two identical widgets, and the price of one of them dropped, the cheaper widget would sell more units. The drop in price would translate into an effective increase in real wages. If, however, the cheap widget was of inferior quality and the standard of living rose, he claimed, people would stop buying the cheap widget.
RL was full of convoluted laws in which I had little to no interest. Thankfully, the topic of the next lecture would be Game Theory. I didn’t know what games had to do with economics, but it sounded like it might be something worth listening to.
Fifteen minutes before the end of class, the professor dropped a bombshell. “We finished early today, so I think we have time for a quiz.” Ignoring the boos erupting from the seats, he started handing out the quiz. The stacks of neatly Xeroxed quiz papers gave the lie to his “finishing early.” Clearly this was a setup, but I held my tongue and filled in my name.
The sunlight shining into the room traced the shadow of the windowsill on the dingy recycled paper. I attempted to read a few of the questions but soon gave up. They may as well have been written in Greek. It was an open-note quiz, but the only notes I had with me were from today, and this was only the second lecture I’d attended since the beginning of April.
Luckily, I knew that for quizzes like these, it was usually more important to be there to write your name on the paper than to actually answer the questions. It was actually a weird sort of luck that he had decided to give a quiz on one of the few days I’d shown up.
The professor told us we could leave once we’d finished. I hadn’t written a thing other than my name, but I lacked the guts to walk up to the podium and hand in a blank sheet of paper. So I turned to my old pastime of staring up at the fluorescent lights.
Seven minutes before the end of class, a girl in the front row stood up. She’d been sitting smack dab in the middle of the row. She set her quiz on the podium and left without breaking her stride. The sort of people who voluntarily sat front and center were usually the ones who looked over their answers again and again before turning them in, even when they knew they were perfect. Guess you never can tell.
I watched the girl as she walked toward the door. She had on a moss-green jacket and a pair of soft-looking denim jeans. The bag slung over her shoulder was about three times the size of mine. Her neatly trimmed, shoulder-length hair bounced as she walked, alternately revealing and concealing the white nape of her neck. She wasn’t wearing her glasses today.
As she walked past my desk, she dropped a notebook into the empty chair beside me. A name was written across the front. Fumiko something or other. An obvious reading for the kanji didn’t come to mind.
Page after college-ruled page of letter perfect calligraphic text flashed before my eyes as I flipped through the notebook. Next to my sad loose-leaf sheets, Fumiko’s notes looked as though they’d been shot out of a laser printer.
Why would she leave me her notes? What was in it for her? What was the catch? A dozen questions raced through my head, but I set them aside and got down to the business of copying answers from the page Fumiko had dog-eared.
More sound FX heralded the end of class. I turned in my quiz and left the room.
Fumiko stood in a patch of shade beside the door, resting her back against the rose-gray wall. I walked over to her.
“Thanks for the notes.”
“Sure thing.” That anime-saccharine voice. “Etsuro, right?”
“That’s me.”
“You only come to the classes they take attendance in.”
“Looks like.”
“I’m Fumiko Nagihara. A lot of people have trouble with the last name.”
“Oh yeah?”
“It’s kind of an unusual reading for those kanji, don’t you think?”
“I guess.”
“Right…So, you just showed up for the quiz today?”
“Not really. It was just a coincidence.”
“Just a coincidence you happened to be here the one day we have a quiz?”
“That’s right.”
“That’s quite a superpower you got there.” Fumiko smiled her hamburger-shop smile.
I gave a noncommittal grunt, which she took as a cue to further mock my less-than-stellar attendance record. At least she went to the trouble of leavening her rude comments with another smile.
It turned out Fumiko and I had the same major. She claimed to have been there at orientation and the freshman party, but I couldn’t recall seeing her. Then again, I was pretty bad when it came to remembering faces. In my best v
irtual scorekeeping mode, I told her this made us even at one win apiece. Fumiko headed off for her next class.
A hazy moon hung in the narrow sky over Shinjuku. Beneath, neon lights bathed the streets in garish reds, blues, and greens. My cheeks were flushed with heat, and the warm wind blowing out of the south wasn’t helping.
It was 7:57 in the evening in Kabuki-chō Itchōme. The streets were aglow in synthetic light. After the lecture, some people from my class had invited me out, and we’d made a beeline for the bars.
By June, everyone had more or less sorted out who they were going to be friends with, and who they weren’t. The people I would have called my friends were ghosts who attended the university in name and name alone. Just because people joined the same department when they started university didn’t mean they had assigned seats next to each other like in junior high, and it was no guarantee they’d even end up taking the same classes. We all just happened to have more or less the same academic aptitude, and we’d all applied to and been accepted by the same university. So I might have known my classmates, but that didn’t necessarily make them my friends. The brutal truth of it was that they had about as much to do with me as the bat lady, fresh out of hibernation, that I’d met on the streets of Shinjuku.
I didn’t ordinarily join my classmates for drinks, and they didn’t ordinarily invite me. I decided to go out with them on a whim. Spending time in the virtual world had stirred up memories of my friend who disappeared into the north, and I’d been feeling a little down that day. Maybe like attracts like, because we were all ready for a drink.
Later, when we left the bar, I broke off from a small group who decided they hadn’t had enough to drink yet and started walking to the station.
Shinjuku overflowed with sound FX. Squadrons of feet pressing against asphalt. The hum of electricity through neon tubes. Laughs and shouts and the labored enthusiasm of street vendors hawking their wares blended together in a perfect harmony.
It was at the heart of this maelstrom of sound that I ran into Fumiko Nagihara. She was standing in front of an arcade near the Shinjuku Koma Theater. That a straitlaced girl like Fumiko wouldn’t go out drinking with her classmates came as no surprise. That she would be out wandering around Kabukichō after the drinking had ended did. Good little girls were supposed to be at home at this hour, discussing the nightly news with their parents.
Fumiko’s attention was riveted on the contents of a transparent bin at the entrance of the arcade. She wore the determined expression of a young child who thought she could bore a hole through the glass if only she stared hard enough.
Without warning, her burning gaze shifted to me. I can’t say why, but in that instant I knew what it felt like to be a superhero with the weight of a weary world on his shoulders. What self-respecting superhero could look into the face of a helpless girl, eyes brimming with hope, and not heed the call of justice?
“Etsuro.”
“Hey.”
“It’s just too cute. I’ve gotta have it.” She lifted her arm slowly, as though parting the air took great effort. Her outstretched finger came to rest pointing at a crane game. A menagerie of pink stuffed animals breathing fluffy golden flames peered out from within.
“I wouldn’t waste my time,” I said. “That claw looks loose.”
“What, are you some kind of crane game expert?”
“If playing twice, maybe three times in my life makes me an expert, then yes.”
“I’ll just have to win it myself, then.”
The soundtrack of the arcade was an old hit exhumed from the graveyard of folk songs past. Fumiko stepped up to the crane game. I could see the back of her neck, pale beneath the loose strands of her short bob haircut.
The claw missed the spot Fumiko was aiming for by about ten centimeters. She was five hundred yen poorer, and the plush object of her adoration hadn’t even budged. It occurred to me that she might have some sort of congenital defect preventing her from understanding how these games worked. Say you’ve found the stuffed animal of your dreams, but it’s buried under half a dozen other stuffed animals. Only a mental defective would go straight for the stuffed animal at the bottom. If you have a stack of dishes in the sink, you don’t grab a dish out of the bottom of the stack. Where does this common sense go the minute people step up to a crane game? It works just like the dishes: you start with the one that’s easiest to lift and work your way down.
When I explained this to Fumiko, she puffed out her cheeks in frustration. “So you’re pretty good at games, huh?”
“Yeah, pretty good.”
“Like, professional good?”
“I don’t know any professional gamers.”
“But you are good.”
“Sure, I guess.”
“Then you do it.”
I arched my eyebrows. “I play shooters and fighting games. They’re nothing like this. I hardly ever even come to arcades.”
“Why not?”
“The games I play you play from home, over the Internet.”
Fumiko was still puffing out her cheeks. On the face of it, we might have been tied at one win apiece, but if you weighed one pilfered attendance card against a notebook full of quiz answers, the attendance card came up awfully light.
I stepped in and put my hands on the controls.
On my first five hundred-yen coin, I won three stuffed animals. I even won the little flame-breathing guy, but Fumiko was unimpressed. She yanked on the strap of my bag and told me she wanted to try a different game. I told her it was a waste of time and money, but my objections were overruled. I found myself being forcibly dragged inside.
Out of all the games in the arcade, Fumiko decided on a fighting game in a head-to-head cabinet. It was brand-new, and it used the same fighting system Versus Town did. Games in head-to-head cabinets were designed so you could either play against the computer or another person in the arcade. The cabinets contained back-to-back screens so you could fight an opponent literally standing opposite you on the other side of the cabinet. The winner of the match got to keep playing, but it was game over for the loser. If the loser wanted to play again, he had to pony up more money. If the loser kept putting in coins, the winner could conceivably keep playing indefinitely. Fighting games were all about the survival of the fittest.
Before the Internet took off, it had been a very profitable setup. I’d heard of entire arcades filled with nothing but fighting games. Grown men with pockets stuffed full of hundred-yen coins would go to the arcades to meet up with their friends and battle away the hours. Stories like that had captured my imagination as a kid, but before I was old enough to do it myself, the fighting game fad was already a distant memory. Now the arcades had only a handful of fighting games tucked away in the corners, patronized by a steady stream of nostalgic diehards.
I slid a coin into the slot.
Fumiko chose a karateka. She wasn’t bad. Under her control, the karateka held its own against the computer. Using different combinations of joystick motions and button presses to execute moves was a difficult concept for the uninitiated to grasp, but it only took Fumiko two or three tries before she was pulling off some of the trickier attacks. Compared to her performance on the crane game, she was a natural.
She had just defeated her second computer opponent when a challenger appeared. He was good. He countered Fumiko’s attack, and her karateka sailed into the air. Before the karateka had a chance to plant its feet solidly back on terra firma, its health gauge was at zero.
Fumiko frowned. “What was that?”
“That was a midair combo.”
“I figured that much out. What I want to know is why’d he use different attacks in the air than he used on the ground?”
“You noticed? I’m impressed.”
“Don’t make fun.”
“He was watching you to know what counter to use.”
“That’s impossible.”
“People do it all the time. It’s like baseball. If a batter can
read a pitcher’s body language, he can figure out what kind of pitch he’s going to throw.”
“If it’s that easy, why doesn’t everyone hit a homerun?”
“Knowing what’s coming isn’t everything, but it’s a start. If you practice, and have a response for anything he might throw at you ready to go in the blink of an eye, then you’ve got the upper hand.”
“Isn’t that cheating?”
“The guy who taught me to play said there’s no rule against reacting to what you see.”
“What happened to ‘cheaters never win’?”
“Look out, here comes the next round.”
It was a best-of-three match, and Fumiko lost both games in a grand total of twenty seconds. It was hardly a match at all.
“That is really frustrating.”
“Sure is.”
“I wanna go again.”
“Fine by me, but you’re gonna lose.”
“I won’t know until I try.”
I sighed. There were things I understood that Fumiko didn’t. She was a kid who’d just swung a bat for the first time, and now she wanted to go up against the New York Yankees. It might have looked like a fair fight; they both had the same joystick, the same buttons, the same screen. But the gulf of experience between Fumiko and her unseen challenger was wide and unfathomably deep.
Fumiko lost the next match in under thirty seconds. I thought about telling whoever was playing her to go easy, since she was obviously a beginner, but I didn’t say anything. She had sat down at a head-to-head game, so if a challenger wanted to wipe the floor with her, there wasn’t anything she could do about it. Those were the rules of the RL arcade.
Fumiko rose to her feet in a huff. “It’s only a game. So how come I feel so humiliated?”
“Because it’s only a game. C’mon, let’s go.”
“Not so fast. I want revenge.” Her eyes gleamed with determination. “This is the kind of game you play, right?”
“Forget it.”
“Why?”
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