He’d been traveling nonstop for almost two days now, over thirty hours in the air and another fifteen in airports across Europe and Asia. At every stop he had been met by someone new who had given him new tickets and documentation. A blur. He had sunk into the rhythm of flight. It felt like he was traveling in his own little bubble of space-time like the stick man in a freshman physics lecture, little chalk rocket, alarm clock.
* * *
The immigration hall at Narita was mobbed. Two or three international flights must have landed within minutes of each other. Jordan shuffled through the serpentine queue for foreign nationals. He glanced quickly at his current passport to refresh himself on the particulars. Gordon Patterson, thirty-nine. Seattle. As the line switched back around the stanchions, he filed past the same twenty or thirty faces again and then again. Most looked as tired and rumpled as he felt. He tried to remember if he’d seen any of them before the last flight. He didn’t think so. Would someone be following him? Were they watching now? He had to assume yes.
And then he was next. The immigration officer waved him forward with a desultory flap of his hand. He wore white cotton disposable gloves. He thumbed open Jordan’s passport with a deliberate casualness.
“Business or pleasure, Mr. Patterson?”
Right now. He could do it right now. End it, jump off the carousel. He imagined himself saying the words in hushed urgent tones: “You need to contact the American Embassy right now. I am not Gordon Patterson. My name is Jordan Parrish and I have been kidnapped. People are threatening my family. Pick up the phone, call the embassy, take me into custody.” The nightmare would be over. But then what? Sam would know. He’d kill them all. Jordan believed it absolutely.
“Pleasure,” he said, and the full weight of it fell on his shoulders, the impossibility of escape, the terrible senseless loss. His vision misted over as the officer’s stamp thudded twice.
“Enjoy your stay in Japan.”
He was met in baggage claim by a driver with the lithe build and precisely tousled mop of a young Paul Weller. The traditional black jacket was worn over a casually underbuttoned white shirt and jeans and loafers that would have looked right at home at the Bridgehampton Polo Club. He was holding a sign that said Patterson and he nodded when his eyes caught Jordan’s. “Hey, Mr. Patterson, how was your flight?” When Jordan looked at him blankly he went on. “Any checked bags, sir?”
“Oh. No, I don’t think so,” Jordan mumbled thickly.
“Okay, sir. Follow me. Car’s just outside.” Taking Jordan’s battered carry-on, he waded into the mass of humanity flowing like tar toward the exits.
* * *
Jordan sank into the plush gray wool-upholstered seat in the back of the Toyota Century. The car’s V12 purred with understated power. The driver, who had introduced himself as Kai, drove without speaking, a small creased chauffeur’s cap perched on the back of his head. Tokyo at night was a bewildering maze of narrow wet streets and sweeping thoroughfares all dazzlingly lit by the ubiquitous illuminated billboards and video screens. Times Square would be just another intersection here. That old movie Blade Runner captured the feeling pretty perfectly, Jordan thought, the cacophony of light as whirling, pulsing greens, reds and whites competed with one another for the eye’s attention. The frenetic saturation was so complete that a simple black-and-white billboard of a grizzled Scott Glenn, in a tieless tux, hawking Suntory Whisky, held his eye like the horizon on a heaving sea. The hint of a smile playing at the corner of Glenn’s mouth seemed to confirm the absurdity of Jordan’s situation, just as the rheumy blue eyes acknowledged its tragedy.
The route seemed to wind and double back on itself as the driver whipped down narrow side streets and alleys that suddenly burst out into riotous intersections. Jordan couldn’t tell if Kai was worried about being followed or was just showing off, but he sat back passively as the city unfolded itself through his window. A red-and-white metal tower rose up in the distance, a garishly overdressed twin of Eiffel’s original in Paris. In the foreground a massive shopping complex shone in gleaming curves of steel and glass. They drove on past expensive retail stores and down narrow roads choked with people streaming in and out of bars and clubs.
Kai grinned in the rearview mirror, speaking for the first time since they had gotten in the car. “Roppongi. This is where all the gaijin come. Good time.” The venom in his voice belied the wide smile in the mirror. They continued up a gradual hill and the bright neon gave way to dull cinder-block buildings with only token bits of tile work to differentiate them from all the other grim functional structures that had sprouted like mushrooms from the rubble of the Second World War.
At the end of a little cul-de-sac the car stopped in front of a plain brown structure, one of a set of conjoined triplets, with the number 47-2 painted in white on the door. Kai switched off the car and said, “Here we are, Mr. Patterson. Welcome home.”
13
GAIJIN
Jordan pushed open the apartment door. The air smelled stale, like no one had been there for a while. To the left there was a narrow kitchen with a small sink, portable stove top, microwave and a rice cooker along the back wall. A half-size washer-dryer and a minifridge were tucked into an alcove opposite. Straight ahead was the living room—small black leatherette sofa, glass coffee table, tatami floor mat and a TV, no room for anything else. A sliding screen led to the bedroom with a single bed and closet. Jordan dropped his bag on the floor. The shower and toilet were off the bedroom. The toilet, a beige Toto with a tiny sink built into the top of the tank, was in a space so small you couldn’t shut the door from the inside.
The bedroom window overlooked the parking lot behind the building. Jordan slid it up, then closed it quickly as a reek of rotting fish and shit wafted up from the alley. It was freezing. He began to shiver uncontrollably. He found a built-in air-conditioning and heating unit mounted on the living room wall. White plastic. All the labels were in Japanese. He pushed every possible combination of buttons and spun the two dials. The appliance came to life with a shuddering sputter of dust and a blast of frigid cold. He twisted both dials the opposite direction and pushed more random buttons, eventually managing to coax out a grudging stream of warmish air.
He grabbed the comforter off the bed and, wrapping it around himself, curled up on the couch under the heater with his feet hanging completely off one end and his arm on the floor. His eyes stung. His stomach was bloated and empty; he felt vaguely nauseated. It was the middle of the night. As tired as he was, sleep seemed hopelessly improbable. It wasn’t just the jet lag, though that was bad enough. He couldn’t still the relentless chatter of voices in his head, but neither could he extract any clear thought from the babble. He found the remote and turned on the TV, an ancient Sony with a CRT that hummed to life with a pinpoint of light and a static electricity sizzle. He flipped through several badly dubbed American shows before settling on a bizarre game show—or was it a talk show?—with a braying toothy host and three giggling girls in matching pigtails and schoolgirl uniforms. He turned the sound up loud enough to compete with the inner chorus, shoved his balled fists between his knees and rocked back and forth, counting down from a thousand as the couch thudded dully against the hollow wall.
* * *
The silence woke him. The television was off. Someone was there.
“Wakey, wakey, Gordo. Half eleven. Lag’ll kill you if you sleep all day.” Booming voice, Australian accent. Jordan opened an eye. Fuzzy shadow, a big man backlit in the doorway. His mouth was so dry.
“Come on, mate, shake it off.”
Jordan forced his eyes open. His whole body felt swollen, pumped full of extra fluid. He struggled to a sitting position and took the proffered hand. It was enormous.
“Who are you?”
“Terry Allison. Good to know ya, Gordo. I’m gonna be your new best mate.” Jordan took in the thick neck, rugby build and the ope
n, acne-scarred face framed in gray-streaked sandy curls and doubted it. “Here, try this,” Terry said and tossed him a little vial. It looked like a bottle of nail polish remover. The only English on it was the one word Cool written in a flowing blue script.
“What is it?” Jordan asked thickly.
“Eye drops. Go on. Wake you right up.” Jordan just looked at him. “Seriously,” Terry said.
The guy seemed sincere and watched him expectantly. His expression had an openness, a lack of apparent guile, that made him totally unreadable. Jordan couldn’t tell if he was putting it on or not. He loosened the cap and Terry smiled and nodded encouragingly.
“That’s it, go on, mate.” It came out “gwanmay.”
He watched the drop fall between blurred, fluttering lashes. The first sensation was cool, then almost immediately it started to burn. He screwed his eye shut and grunted, rubbing at the eye with his fist. He heard Terry’s booming laugh and thought of Dennis. Would they really have him pour acid in his own eyes just for the hell of it?
“Wait for it.” Still laughing. The burn was fading to a stinging tingle. He blinked several times and looked around. Not blind. Everything looked brighter. Clear.
“Fucking awesome, right? Menthol or something. Wakes you up, makes ’em white, too. Gooks’re nuts for the stuff. Go on, do the other one.” Jordan did and held out the vial. “Nah, keep it. Got shelves of it. Got more goodies for you, too.”
He tossed a white envelope on the coffee table. “Gordon P” was written on the front in a blocky childlike hand.
Jordan tore it open with puffy fingers and tipped out the contents, a wad of thousand-yen bills, an HSBC ATM card, a laminated ID and a brass key.
“PIN’s first four of your name—probably want to change that. Key opens front door and the trash thing.” He gestured toward the lot behind the building. “Try not to lose the ID—they’re real pains in the ass about it.” Jordan picked up the ID. His face, looking startled, deer in the headlights. Gordon Patterson, and the logo was JET in pale blue letters with a silhouette of an adult holding hands with a child wearing a backpack.
“What is this—” Jordan started to say.
“Japan Exchange and Teaching. You’ll be teaching English. It’s a piece of piss.”
“I don’t—”
“Sure you do. Come on, take a walk with me. Help you stay awake and we can get acquainted.” Without waiting for a response he threw open the front door and strode out. Freezing air swirled into the stuffy room and startled Jordan to his feet. He stuffed the money, key and bank card into his pocket and, grabbing his coat from the floor, followed Terry out.
* * *
They walked fast, downhill, through a maze of small streets that suddenly opened up onto a major road with an elevated freeway running overhead. Jordan was assaulted by the bustle and reek of the city. There was a pervasive smell of dry cleaning, bleach, steam and fish that seemed to leach out of every doorway and grate. He felt like he was walking in mud while all around him cars and bicycles swerved and gyred. Terry talked as they walked.
“A lot of gaijin in Roppongi all the time—that’s why we put our people here, blend right in.”
“Gaijin?”
“Yeah, that’s us. Sort of gook for foreigner. Not exactly foreigner, more like outsider, or other.” He thought a second. “Alien, that’s more the sense of it. Anyway, if we put you in Shibuya, you’re gonna be noticed, but here you’re Susan Fucking Storm.” Jordan looked at him blankly. “You’re invisible, mate.”
They came to an intersection where three roads converged and passed under the freeway. “So here’s how it goes. Think of this like purgatory. You do a year here working for JET, establish a little history, figure out who you are, who you want to be. Then you move on. On to the good stuff. It’s a small life here, but it’s manageable. Most clients settle right in.” They joined the crush crossing diagonally to the far corner dominated by a cotton-candy-pink café called Almond with pink-and-white-striped awnings.
“When we first started out we lost a couple. We used to set ’em up nice from the get-go—you know, fancy apartment, access to all the money—and they’d go crazy—hookers, drugs, buying everything.” He leaned in with a confidential whisper. “Arabs and Africans, mostly. Anyway, one fella OD’d and another got arrested and eventually sent home.” He drew a finger across his throat with a wicked smile.
“Sam brought a shrink in and she had this whole spiel about rebuilding the superego from scratch or some pile of horseshit like that.” The smile again. “But it works. You’ll see.”
He took Jordan by the elbow and steered him through a knot of people to a low wrought-iron section of fence along the curb. He raised his arm and a black taxicab appeared out of nowhere. Terry opened the door and helped Jordan in.
He spoke to the cabbie in rapid Japanese and sat back with a sigh. They drove in silence for a while. The driver wore white cotton gloves and handled the cab with brisk precision as they hurtled through roundabouts and down side streets.
“And what about you?” Terry said. “I’m told you’re not exactly happy to be here. You know that’s a first—most of ’em, it’s us or dead in a ditch somewhere.”
“That was the idea,” Jordan said under his breath.
“What, dead?”
“Too chicken.”
Terry nodded. “Well, you chose right. This is take two. You get to start over, do it all better. Maybe start a family.”
“I have a family,” Jordan muttered. His eyes were shining.
Terry covered Jordan’s hand with his own; his eyes had gone hard and still. “No, mate. You don’t. That’s important.”
Abruptly the cab pulled up at one end of a sprawling urban park. Terry paid and they got out.
“You gotta see this,” he said, the moment forgotten, all hail-fellow-well-met again. “Happens every Sunday. I come whenever I can. It reminds you of where you are.”
Jordan sullenly followed him up the service road ringing the park, assaulted by a din he couldn’t make any sense of. There was a muted roar of machines with dissonant shrieking in the distance and, between, something that sounded as though it may have been music once. As they rounded the corner Jordan saw beyond the overhanging trees to a packed road jammed with Japanese teens in costume. There were ersatz punks with towering pink Mohawks, Elvis impersonators with slicked pompadours, kilted rockers, safety-pinned, parachute-panted ’80s kids in pale face paint with weeping mascara, and then there were the bands. Every ten feet another stage was set up.
Each was powered by its own gas generator. A punk band, then three girls playing ska, then a greaser howling out “Hound Dog” over a karaoke track and four transvestites playing heavy metal. There must have been a hundred bands ringing the park. Many had little clusters of fans in front; some played with furious abandon to empty space. It was as if every cliché of Western popular culture had come out to vie for supremacy in a medieval melee.
They walked past thirty or forty stages until the crush finally thinned out to a last couple of Elvises, one white pantsuited, the other young, sneering black-leather-clad. When they had passed and conversation was finally possible, Terry said, “Another fucking planet, right? And remember, you’re gaijin.”
14
OMISOKA
Alex had bailed on Christmas but he’d insisted on New Year’s Eve at his place. Just the four of them. Stephanie accepted. It would be easier. What else would they do, sit at home watching Times Square on TV or, God forbid, going down to the Charles to huddle in the cold with all the happy revelers, all the intact families and young people in love? She was surprised he wouldn’t be out at some glittery party. Probably had invitations but was taking the hit out of guilt over Christmas. Mercy invite. Fine, she’d take it.
* * *
Jordan heard the front door open. He was folding. The television
was set up with an Xbox and Kinect just like the one in his cell in what he now thought of as the dark time. He didn’t turn around. It could only be Terry. He registered the heavy breathing, tried to guess the time. Hard to say; it seemed like it was nearly always dark outside and his internal clock was still completely scrambled. Concentration creasing his brow, he slowly brought his hands together, guiding two strands of the animated protein on the screen until the hydrogen bonds held with a satisfying click.
“They told me about your little game,” Terry said in the doorway. “But I don’t get it. What’s the point? You play ‘GTA’?”
Jordan shook his head and rotated the puzzle on the screen, chewing on his lower lip.
“Don’t know what you’re missing, mate. That’s a proper game. Steal cars, ram the cops, bang hookers, shoot ’em after for extra points. Wicked.”
Jordan nodded his head and zoomed in on one dangling chain. Terry sighed in exasperation.
“It’s just a puzzle,” Jordan said. “But a very beautiful one.” He heard Terry unzip his coat and, a moment later, heard it hit the chair and then slide with a soft hiss to the floor. Something was set down on the kitchen counter and the cupboards were opened.
“Where are your plates? Never mind.” Clattering of dishes.
“No, it’s lovely,” Jordan said almost to himself. Terry was opening a bag and serving something out. “Life is proteins.” Jordan’s voice took on a rolling meter, as if he were lecturing to a room full of freshmen. “They are literally magical microscopic machines that perform all the functions of life. The mystery is how they form. They’re these long strands of amino acids chained together single file like a string of buoys that magically fold themselves into the exact right shape to work as a pump or a switch or an assembler of other machines. It seems like they should clump up in an infinite number of ways but they don’t. They follow rules, some of which we understand but most of which we don’t.” As Jordan twisted the strand on the screen, red arrows started to flash and there was a dissonant buzzing sound. Jordan shook his head.
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