The man sat expressionless as he manipulated the controls, his body at a slight angle to the console. The whole time I was watching, he stirred only once to cross his legs. Otherwise only his arm moved as it worked the joystick. The sound FX of a dozen games surged through the arcade in a flood of noise, but it all washed over him without a trace. He wasn’t in RL. His consciousness was submerged in the world behind the screen.
I recognized his face from a magazine. Of course. It was Friday night at the Kokusai-dōri arcade. This was Pak. Or Pak’s player, if you wanted to get technical. It was the first time I had ever seen him in person.
He was as good as they said. The people lined up to play him had all made a special trip down to Shinjuku just for the chance, so it was a safe bet they were better than average themselves. I must have been looking at some of the better players in Versus Town, but one challenger fell after another and Pak hadn’t taken so much as a scratch. This was even more impressive than the performance I’d seen from Keith in Sanchōme.
The counter at the top of the screen ticked from twenty-eight to twenty-nine. Twenty-nine challengers sent packing with their tails between their legs. Pak’s next opponent chose a snake boxer, the same as Pak. Somehow the challenger managed to last to the end of the round, but he couldn’t land any good hits of his own. Pak won the first two rounds by Time Out, and it didn’t seem like it would be long before the victory count ticked up to thirty.
I broke a thousand-yen bill at the change machine.
To be honest, I didn’t want to fight Pak. I would find out who the better player was in the final round of the tournament tomorrow. But I didn’t think it was fair to watch Pak fight without giving him the same chance to see Tetsuo. Just because he’d seen me play in the semifinals didn’t mean I was about to stoop to spying.
I heard a startled cry from near the game cabinet. It sounded like the man who had told me to stand in line. I hurried back to see what had happened.
The player who lost two straight rounds a moment before had just scored a perfect victory over Pak. It would take more than luck for a reversal like that. Maybe Pak had decided to throw the round.
I turned my attention to the screen as the fourth round began and the two snake boxers slid into motion. Pak put his opponent on the defensive with an attack too quick to be countered, but he blocked every complex cancel-attack Pak threw at him. Hoping to use the recovery time to his advantage, Pak moved in for a throw. His opponent throw-breaked. Pak continued chipping away with small attacks.
A determined expression noticeably absent until now settled on Pak’s face. His opponent turned aside each attack he made. He got out of every throw. Dash throws, punch-fakes, tick throws—nothing would take.
It was possible to escape any throw, but only with the right throw break. In theory, you could wait until you saw the throw coming and still have enough time to execute the throw break. In practice, it was virtually impossible to pull it off in the quarter of a second window you had, leaving you to guess which throw your opponent would use and buffer the throw break for that throw. So even if you knew a throw was coming, you never had a 100 percent chance of breaking it. This was the first match I’d ever seen where someone had broken six out of six throws. The challenger won the fourth round with nearly full health.
Pak twisted his neck from side to side, creating loud popping sound FX. The fifth and final round began.
Pak input commands with blinding speed. There were no throws in his arsenal this round. He was coming at his opponent with only rock and paper, hoping to cow him with brute force, but it didn’t change a thing. It was an even match, and the challenger’s health dropped in small, measured increments.
In the end, the fifth round went to Pak. He had come from behind to win the match.
I heard a familiar voice behind me. “He doesn’t stand a chance.” It was the bat lady. Lui. Hashimoto. It struck me as odd that someone who lived in Kabuki-chō would make the trip all the way to an arcade on the west side of the station. As usual her face showed no trace of makeup. She lit up when she noticed me.
“Who?” I asked.
“The old man.”
I peered around to see a small boy seated on the other side of the cabinet. Some elementary school kid on his way home from school. He cast one last rueful look at the screen and stood up.
“Don’t tell me.”
“Yep, that’s the grandson.”
“He could play with both hands behind his back and that poor guy wouldn’t have a prayer.”
“My thoughts exactly.” Lui shrugged. “The things people do for their grandkids.” She motioned at Pak with her small, pointed chin. “You gonna have a go?”
“No, I just wanted to get out of the rain. I can play VT online. Why bother with an arcade? Holy ground or not, I’m not sure what Pak sees in this place.”
“This is where it has to be,” she muttered, more to herself than to me.
“What do you mean?”
“This is the only place a win feels like a win. At least that’s how I think he sees it. This may not be the original ‘holy ground,’ but it’s close enough.”
“A win’s a win. What difference does it make where it happens?”
“It’s not the place itself. When he’s here, they’re together. He’s Pak and himself at the same time.”
“How’s that any different from playing online?”
“For some people, it’s different.”
“I think you lost me.”
“So you’re one of those.” She sounded disappointed.
Next thing I knew, Pak was standing beside us. He’d beaten the player in line behind the old man’s grandson and played through the rest of the computer opponents. Sitting down he had seemed paper-thin. Standing he looked as though he might blow away if the air conditioning hit him just right.
“Want to play?” His voice was much higher than I had expected.
“No thanks.”
“Oh, all right.” He went back to the game.
Eardrum-rattling music filled the arcade. A perfect harmony of sound FX, real and artificial, engulfed us.
“I’m sorry about the other day,” Lui offered.
“Don’t worry about it. It’s not your fault.”
“Things been rough since then?”
“Even if they were—and I’m not saying they are—that still doesn’t make it your fault.”
“You two are closer than I thought.”
“If we were close, we wouldn’t fight.”
“Don’t be so sure. It’s not easy figuring out if someone’s special,” she said. “Two perfect strangers struggling to understand each other. It’s finding out the differences that lets them fight.”
“This from experience?”
“Maybe it is.” She shrugged again. “Like magnets: opposites attract. People are the same. Everyone has their flaws, their quirks. Rub them together, you get friction. It’s the places where they’re different that locks them together.” Lui paused to wind a strand of red-brown hair around her finger. “Our shop’s not open yet, but maybe you could drop by.”
We walked in the rain from the station’s west gate to Kabuki-chō. The building Lui’s shop was in looked exactly as it had the first time I saw it, lost somewhere between up-and-coming and down-and-out on the outskirts of the entertainment district. The aura of desolation surrounding it reminded me a little of the JTS Saloon.
The laser at the front of the shop was doing its best to spell out the name of the establishment on the wet asphalt, but the water pooled in the uneven ground scattered the light, making it difficult to read. The oscillator was still broken, warping the store’s name and casting blue beams unpredictably up and down the street.
Lui leaned back against the door of the shop. “Still looking for that blue cat?”
“Uh, yeah, I guess. It’s Fumiko who’s looking, really.”
“That right?” Lui nodded to herself. “So what you’re searching for isn’t as impo
rtant as the search.”
“You don’t think she wants to find it?”
“I didn’t say that. That’s the point of the whole thing, but— how can I put it. It’s like getting a can of peaches when you’re sick.”
“Peaches?”
“No canned peaches from Mom when you came down with a cold?”
“It was Jell-O, actually. Just a batch of the instant powder stuff, but that was fine by me.”
“Canned peaches, Jell-O—it’s all the same. You want to get over your cold, but you know that when you do, no more special treats. See where I’m going?”
“I’ve got the idea.”
“Good. Now take a look at that wall.”
Lui raised her arm and pointed with an outstretched finger. As she did, she lifted her cloak-or-was-it-a-shawl, looking for all the world like a bat with one upraised wing. Her long claw indicated a concrete block covered with moss.
Light burst from the broken laser. A blue cat appeared on the concrete, then vanished.
“No way.”
“Getting there is half the fun. Now here you are.”
The path of the laser bent again with a soft pop, and the blue cat flickered to life on the concrete block. If you looked closely, it was obviously part of the store’s name distorted out of shape. But for a brief moment, it was a blue cat sitting on the street corner.
“Not the usual stuff urban legends are made of, but it seems to have caught on. Your girlfriend isn’t looking for the cat. She’s looking for someone to look for the cat with.” Lui lit a cigarette. The laser beam danced in the smoke.
“Like Hashimoto, maybe?”
“Like Hashimoto how?”
“Maybe Hashimoto isn’t looking for Jack, he’s just looking for people to look for Jack with him.”
“Interesting thought.” She took a long drag on her cigarette and let it burn down another seven millimeters. “I can’t really say. I don’t know how to get inside the head of a virtual character like Hashimoto.”
Lui hadn’t brought me here to visit her shop. For some reason, she decided it was time to show me the cat. The first time I asked her about it she’d gone out of her way to hide it from me. I don’t know what had changed her mind now. Answerless, I headed home.
On the train, my thoughts kept going to that kid. I envisioned him fighting Tetsuo, gracefully breaking one throw after another in time to the sound FX of the wheels as they raced over the tracks. No matter how many times I tried, I couldn’t land a throw on him. The kid had a smirk textured on his face.
An email appeared on my cell phone. Just two words: “Drop dead.”
I switched on my music, but the batteries had died.
I called Fumiko from the platform at Mizuhodai. She didn’t waste any time getting to the cross-examination.
“Where have you been?”
“The arcade.”
“Again?”
“You weren’t in class.”
“I came late.”
“You weren’t there when I was there.”
“You didn’t think to wait and see if I’d show up? Or maybe follow me when I walked off?”
“It didn’t seem like the thing to do.”
“What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing,” I said. “This is pretty normal for me, actually.”
“‘Does not play well with others’? Is that what they wrote on your report card back in elementary school?”
“Junior high and high school too.”
I heard Fumiko’s sigh over the phone. “At least tell me you feel bad about it.”
“I do.”
“Really? With you, it’s hard to tell.”
“I guess.”
“Just guess?”
With each dodge of her questions I could feel the thread that bound us together fray a bit more. My words were converted to signals that traveled through space and cables just to reach her. But then those emotionless signals were turned back into words, and maybe something got lost in the translation.
I moved my ear off the warm handset.
“Are you even listening?”
“I’m listening.”
“Don’t you have anything to say?”
“I’m saying it.”
I thought about it for a moment. It wasn’t easy, explaining the maelstrom raging inside me, devouring my life. Tetsuo fought for the sake of fighting. If there was any other reason, I didn’t know what it was. Right now, all I had room for in my head was the Versus Town tournament. I was even playing out fights in my head while on the toilet.
I couldn’t put into words the reason I was letting this one thing consume my life. But that didn’t mean Fumiko didn’t have a right to know. So I tried to find the words for something I didn’t even understand myself. It was grueling and exhausting, but she deserved that much.
Fumiko broke the silence. “You really are Fast Eddie.”
“Who?”
“That character Paul Newman played.”
“Sorry? Paul Newman?”
“The Hustler, remember? We talked about it before.”
“I can never remember foreign names. Not on the first try, at least.”
“That’s because you don’t pay attention to me.”
“Don’t start.”
“You just nod your head to get through the conversation.”
“That’s not true.”
“A lot more people know about Paul Newman than the president of Hudson Soft’s trains.”
“Probably.”
“Your knowledge base is off. Way off.”
“You’re right.”
“Eddie treats his girlfriend in The Hustler bad too. She dies at the end, you know.”
“I didn’t, actually.”
“I don’t plan on dying anytime soon.”
“That’s a relief.”
“You use words to keep people at a distance.”
“Sorry. I don’t know any other way to talk.”
The line fell silent. I didn’t know what else to say. I’d already said everything. I wasn’t going to lie to her, and I didn’t want to repeat myself.
“Asshole.”
Ten seconds later, the line went dead.
I’d forgotten to tell her I’d found the blue cat.
I stood on the platform staring at my cell phone for a couple of seconds before walking out into the rain-slick streets. In the dim glow of car taillights and streetlamps I walked over to the video rental store in front of the station. That night I watched The Hustler for the first time.
Fast Eddie was, as the title suggests, a pool hustler. He was a real bastard who stole money from unsuspecting marks, took them for all they had, and then left them to fend for themselves.
He dreamed of beating pool legend Minnesota Fats and didn’t care about anything else. Fumiko had it right; he sacrificed his friends, his girlfriend, everything he had for pool.
He was just like me, standing in the corner beside the train doors. He didn’t want to play Minnesota Fats to win ten thousand dollars. The money was nothing to him. There was something inside, some reason only he knew, that drove him to do it. Hell, maybe he didn’t even know what his reason was, but he knew it was there. For him, it was the most important thing in the world.
Tetsuo had to see things in Versus Town through to the end. It wasn’t about anyone else. It was something I had to prove to myself.
Nearly three weeks had passed since I met Fumiko. I couldn’t say whether she was my girlfriend or not. We were always together at school, but that didn’t amount to much. Things in RL were more complicated than that. There was no way of knowing what flags you had to trip to make a relationship work. Maybe I was the only one who felt that our search for the blue cat was leading the two of us somewhere special.
I considered myself lucky to have met Fumiko, but did she feel the same?
Outside the rain poured down on the city.
CHAPTER 11
ANOTHER SUNNY DAY IN VERSUS TOWN.
/> The same scenery filled the TV screen. The same turquoise blue sky. The same butter roll clouds. The same textures covering the ground and walls. Today only one thing was different: Tetsuo stood in the middle of the tournament ring.
A character in a suit with a mic approached Tetsuo as he stepped out of the ring.
> The karateka Tetsuo, ladies and gentlemen. Congratulations on making it to the semifinals. I think it’s no understatement to say you’ve been on fire.
> So far so good.
> You’ve hardly taken any damage at all.
> That’s more luck than anything.
> You knew that your opponents were members of the socalled top four?
> Yeah.
> So how do you feel?
> Pretty much like I always do, I guess.
> You must keep a pretty cool head then.
It was two hours into the finals of the second season tournament. Tetsuo had scored an almost perfect win over 963 in the first match, and just now he had defeated Keith. Tetsuo’s match was the last of the quarterfinals.
The interviewer who had just finished talking with Tetsuo was one of the sysadmins. The chat they’d just had would be broadcast to all of the players watching the tournament.
The first three quarterfinal spots were held by Tanaka, an eagle claw, Tetsuo, a karateka, and Pak, a snake boxer. A nameless snake boxer had claimed the last spot. There was a thirty-minute break before the quarterfinals began.
Having gone through the motions with the interviewer, Tetsuo took refuge in the prep room set aside for the contestants. Dressed in full ninja regalia, Hashimoto was waiting in silence by the entrance.
> Congratulations.
> Thanks.
> I see I was right.
> Don’t start. I got lucky is all.
> Is that humility I detect? Next thing I know rain clouds will be gathering over Versus Town.
Hashimoto looked up at the ceiling with deliberate nonchalance. Tetsuo shrugged.
> So, find anything?
Everyone who made it to the finals had already earned a reputation in the arena. But with the exception of a win against Tanaka, the nameless snake boxer who found himself in the quarterfinals was a relative unknown with no record to speak of. Hashimoto had suspected this dark horse challenger might be Ganker Jack.
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