He had some cash in the desk, not enough to get far but something. He grabbed the stack of bills and shoved it into his pocket. His adrenaline level was spiking, but everything seemed to be happening so slowly. His eyes felt like the pupils had dilated all the way, like a cat’s when it’s about to pounce. Clothes. He pulled his school knapsack out of the closet and dumped its contents on the floor; ungraded tests and papers drifted lazily down as he grabbed a couple of clean T-shirts and pairs of socks from the dresser and stuffed them in the bag.
“Sam,” he said toward the camera over the stove, “this isn’t what it looks like. I’m not running. I just need a minute to clear my head. To get it straight. I know the rules. I promise. I won’t do anything stupid.” Well, anything else. He had to go. They’d be coming. What else did he need? Nothing, got to go. He shoved Terry’s laptop in the bag. He’d figure out what to do with it.
“I can’t eat fish and fat noodles three times a day. I can’t eat green fucking eggs.” He started to giggle, a little hysterically. “I do not like green eggs and ham, I do not like them, Sam I am.”
They were coming. Time to go. He ran, leaving the front door lazily swaying on its hinges.
30
ONE LIKE
Stephanie lay in bed, too much chatter in her head to sleep. The kids. Alex. Where was it all going?
She couldn’t seem to get the gears to engage. She felt like a passive observer, swept along in the momentum of life around her.
She picked up her phone to make sure the alarm was set. She needed to prep for her superstring lecture early before she woke the kids. Never enough time.
The Instagram icon, kind of a cute animated version of an old Kodak Instamatic, had a red one on it. She remembered the notification and opened it.
She clicked on the heart icon to see current activity and there it was.
Jordanparrish99 liked your picture.
Goose bumps sprang up on her arms and the back of her neck and she felt a chill run through her entire body. It reminded her of one of those silly horror movies when a ghost passes through someone. She felt her throat tighten. She clicked on the picture. Her and the kids on the beach in Hawaii. The only picture she’d ever gotten around to uploading. She and Jordan had signed up when Sophie had become an obsessive Instagrammer.
Obviously it was a mistake, either an ancient “like” that got stuck in electronic limbo and suddenly resurfaced or, more likely, a side effect of some old email address getting hacked by spammers. Still, she couldn’t shake the ridiculous thought that it was somehow Jordan’s ghost reaching out from the ether.
“Stupid,” she whispered out loud as she logged out of the app and rechecked the alarm. She clicked off the screen and pulled the comforter up under her chin.
She didn’t fall asleep until the first gray light was already glimmering sullenly around the edges of the curtains.
31
EYES WIDE OPEN
Jordan counted the money again. He had almost fifty thousand yen, around five hundred dollars. That was the maximum he’d been able to take from the ATM in a day and he was pretty sure by tomorrow the account would be closed. He was in the common area of a capsule hotel in Akihabara. There were a couple of salarymen in suits waiting to check in. Check in was at 5:00 and even if you stayed multiple days you had to check in again every day. Jordan had already put his shoes in the shoe locker and given the key to the man at the front desk. He had paid for the night in cash—four thousand yen—and been given his locker key.
Finally the man at the desk glanced up at the clock, which said just after five, and gave a curt nod to the men, ignoring Jordan completely. Jordan followed the salarymen to the elevator. He got off at the sixth floor. As the elevator door swished shut he heard the men, who had been silent the whole time he’d been there, start an animated conversation. Their laughter faded quickly away as the elevator rose.
The hallway was bathed in a soft yellowish glow. The light came from the open capsules, stacked two on either side of the narrow corridor. It was like a cross between the world’s longest sleeper car and a futuristic mausoleum, more like the latter if he was honest with himself. He found his capsule toward the end of the hall on the left. It was number 637 in the upper row. He pushed the knapsack in and, slipping off the tan sandals, climbed up using the narrow black plastic steps affixed to the side of the lower compartment.
The interior was seamless white fiberglass with a thin mattress covering the floor. There was a television just inside the entrance, which caught Jordan behind his left ear as he wriggled awkwardly into the narrow space. Cursing under his breath, he worked his way in and sat up as high as he could. The capsules were clearly designed for smaller people more accustomed to limited personal space. If he lay flat, Jordan’s feet hung out the entrance into the hall, and if he sat upright, his head was pressed against the ceiling. He managed to close the brown fabric curtain over the entrance and arrange himself in a semireclined slump that offered some stability and put his knees at the right angle to support the laptop. Other than the television, the only furnishing was a narrow shelf along the right side with a control panel beneath it. There were controls for the TV, radio and air conditioner and dimmers for the two lights recessed into the ceiling. The only decoration was a universal no-smoking sign, which had begun to peel away at one corner.
It was surprisingly quiet. Jordan had become inured to the constant noise of the city, but now the silence was shocking; he realized how much of a numbing assault the constant clamor and din had become. He found a setting for the vents that reduced even the muted white noise of the circulating air to a pursed whisper.
He opened Terry’s laptop and the spinning JET logo came up and dissolved into the bland, infuriating password prompt. God forbid anything be easy. Okay, Terry Allison, let’s start obvious—Terry wasn’t the most complicated guy. Jordan tried every permutation of Terry’s name he could come up with in four-, five-and six-letter versions, with numbers at the end. Nothing. He couldn’t remember if Terry had ever talked about any family. He didn’t think so and, really, couldn’t picture Terry picking some little niece or nephew as his password, anyway. A lot of people used numbers—old phone numbers, important dates. Jordan had no clue where to start so he started at the beginning—0-0-0-0, 0-0-0-1, and so on.
He fell into a bit of a fugue state as he began cycling through the ten thousand four-digit possibilities. He tried to calculate how many five-and six-digit ones there were, and that was without letters. Small blessings department: at least he wasn’t being locked out for too many bad guesses. When 4-4-4-4 was rejected he took a deep breath and flexed his neck, which had begun to ache and cracked loudly as he twisted it from side to side. He realized his fingers were stiff and his legs were cramping, as well. He needed to take a break. The capsule hotels were intended for sleep, not for semiupright work; for that matter the occupants were usually completely drunk and exhausted after missing the last train home at the tail end of a rousing night of karaoke or clubbing. He shut the computer and slid it under his pillow, taking the knapsack with him down to the communal baths on the second floor.
Access to the baths was through the locker room. The lockers were numbered the same as the capsules. Jordan found 637 and opened it with the key around his wrist. He took out the folded robe and pushed in the knapsack, piling his dirty clothes on top. He cinched the belt on the yukata, whose sleeves rode halfway to his elbow, and headed into the bathing area. A few early arrivals were chatting in the hot tub and one older man, who seemed stupefied with alcohol despite the relatively early hour, was sitting on a plastic stool in one of the shower stalls, head lolling on his chest as water cascaded down his creased back.
Jordan hung up his robe and eased into the scalding water of the tub. The conversation stopped and the room went silent except for the stream of water and the muffled groans of the old man in the shower. Jordan let h
is head lean back against the side and his eyes fluttered shut. He had been going for over thirty-six hours now. After leaving his apartment, he had ridden the subway for hours, circling the city until finally getting off at Shinjuku and mingling with the tourists. He was exhausted. The adrenaline that had kept him going was ebbing and he felt shaky. He needed to eat but didn’t think he had the strength to go out. He’d grab something from one of the vending machines in the common room and call it a night. The shower turned off. Jordan looked up; the bathing area was deserted. He laughed; he’d driven them all out just by showing up. Fine, fuck ’em. He lay back and closed his eyes. The drips from the shower hit the tile in little clusters, tapping out bursts of rhythm. His eyes began to flit back and forth beneath his eyelids as he drifted away.
He was in the summerhouse in Maine, thirty years ago, rain on the kitchen roof, even though part of his mind was still here, still leaning back on the tiles of an empty hot tub in a Tokyo capsule hotel where he was hiding from men who were hunting him because he had to conceal the capital crime of looking up a picture of his own family on an abandoned Instagram page in the hinterlands of the worldwide-fucking-web. It was insane.
Suddenly he opened his eyes and sat up. The rhythm. He had seen Terry log on to his computer at school a hundred times. Not from the keyboard side, but he remembered the rhythm, tik-a-da-tik. Four letters, or numbers, very quick. And typed with one hand he was almost positive. The left hand. So not numbers unless it was 1-2-3-4 or something like that. Four-letter word. He laughed out loud. That sounded like Terry.
32
FUCK, SHIT, COCK...
“Fuck, shit, cock, twat, suck, bitch.” No, bitch was five... He had been absolutely sure. It seemed so right but now the certainty was fading. “Ass1, ass2, ass3...” He stared at the keys, focusing on the left side—q-w-e-r-t-a-s-d-f-z-x-c-v—then he saw it. He knew it was right even before he typed it. He entered it fast with his left hand: a-r-s-e, tik-a-da-tik. The JET logo spun apart and he was at the desktop, a picture of Terry and five smiling JET teachers standing in front of the Hub of Roppongi. He was in.
* * *
The apartment door was unlocked so she walked in. Alex was sitting at the kitchen counter with a man Stephanie had never met. He was attractive in a doughy, bland, older sort of way, friendly face. Alex looked pale and a little tired but he smiled when Stephanie came in.
“Hello, stranger,” he said, pushing back his chair. “I’m sorry. Dr. Stephanie Parrish, this is...” The other man stood up and came around the counter with a warm smile, hand extended.
“Delighted to meet you, Dr. Parrish. Please call me Sam.”
* * *
Buried alive. The dark was total. He reached his hand out and felt the sides of the casket, oddly smooth and hard. He sensed the weight of the earth above and all around the box. How did things like that happen? Weren’t you supposed to make sure the guy was finished, properly DOA, before you planted him? Then he heard them, like dozens of little bellows wheezing and blowing each in their own rhythm. He reached out with his toe and found the soft woven curtain and pushed it open. A dim light illuminated the interior of his capsule. He wriggled around and stuck his head out into the hallway. The sound of the men snoring all around him was louder now.
Pairs of feet stuck out of the occasional curtain and one man was passed out on his knees with only his head in his capsule, looking for all the world as if he had just been guillotined and the executioner was waiting for the torso to fall before presenting the severed head to the howling mob.
Jordan had fallen asleep with the computer on and the battery had died. He’d have to get a charger. Akihabara was the electronics center of Tokyo, so he could grab one as soon as the stores opened. His watch said almost five in the morning. He should try to go back to sleep. His mind wouldn’t stop, though. He’d excised the offending entries from the server log but he couldn’t tell if the information had been backed up anywhere else.
He needed a story. Why had he run? Why had he broken into Terry’s place? Why the fuck did he have the computer? He needed something plausible and soon. The longer he was off the reservation, the more dangerous it got for Stephanie and the kids. Jesus, what had he done?
Before the battery had died he’d gone through Terry’s calendar. Last Friday: “D gone. Out w GP. Book M plus two. 50thou. Lex?” D, Dennis. GP, that was him. M, Miki, the girl. She was a hooker. Of course she was a hooker. It was all part of Terry’s grand unified theory. Jordan was furious with himself. How fucking naive could he be, how racist, really? How else could you explain believing that this beautiful young girl was ready to fuck some middle-aged gaijin she’d just met? On Thursday there had been an entry that read “Pull GP bedroom,” so it looked like Terry had been as good as his word about the camera in the bedroom, anyway. There was a lot of JET stuff—new teachers’ evaluations, report deadlines. All in all, it was a surprisingly dull schedule for a guy working as a facilitator for mass murderers and mobsters trying to flout international law and maybe defraud a few insurance companies in the process.
* * *
Jordan had no memory of falling back to sleep. He was wide-awake now so he decided to check out early. It was probably good to keep moving and keep as low a profile as he could.
They could be out there, looking for him. He needed to know what else was on the laptop. He slipped out of the capsule and walked down the narrow hallway. The televisions had been left on in a few capsules and laugh tracks and muted dialogue mixed with the noises of drunken sleep. The air smelled of stale alcohol and cigarette smoke, mixed with locker room and morning breath, and underneath it all, a sour hint of vomit. Jordan breathed through his mouth until the elevator started down. He was the only one in the bathroom as he showered and changed into fresh clothes. At the front desk he traded the locker key for his shoes and walked out into the gray early morning.
Akihabara was ablaze with garish neon and massive vertical anime posters. Directly across from the hotel a shop was just opening its doors. It was on the ground floor of a building that went up twenty stories, all electronics and home theater shops. There was a massive pink-and-green banner over the entrance with kanji that Jordan didn’t understand but he could see the racks of cheap consumer gear, some unboxed and haphazardly piled up in plastic bins. He went in and quickly found a universal power adapter with tips in every conceivable shape and size. He paid in cash and tucked it into his knapsack before heading west down a narrow street that threaded its way between the fragile towers of steel and glass that leaned out over the street like gangly mantises peering down at their scuttling prey.
Within a few blocks the sky appeared overhead as the towers gave way to modest two-story residential buildings and then a long wall of perfectly stacked brown sheets of slate behind which, Jordan saw through an iron gate that punctuated the stone, slumbered a medieval monastery with great sweeping roofs of black tile and immaculately tended gardens. Ahead an older man in a rumpled black suit, with a sparse black comb-over and a briefcase swinging jerkily at his side, kept his face buried in an illustrated paperback and muttered aloud to himself as he hiked up the gentle grade, completely monopolizing the sidewalk. Jordan was forced to slow down, and after a couple of throat clearings went completely unacknowledged, he stepped over the low iron railing and into the street to make his way around.
The taxi came from nowhere. It rounded the corner fast and swerved just in time. Jordan saw the driver’s face seemingly frozen in a grimace, caught midexpletive, as the cab passed within inches. He only heard the blare of the horn afterward, though he thought it must have come before and just taken longer to penetrate. Then everything went quiet except for the clatter of bamboo from the monastery garden. The man was staring at Jordan with an annoyed expression, still clutching his book. Jordan looked away, throat dry, heart thumping in his chest, and stepped back onto the sidewalk.
He walked faster, head down,
his back and shoulders beginning to ache from the constant weight of the knapsack. At the top of the rise he walked under a bridge just as a red commuter train burst from a tunnel below him, headed for the station at Akihabara. The noise startled the pigeons nesting in the girders and they fluttered their wings in protest. There was a large apartment building on the right when he came out from the underpass. People were hurrying down the steps of the boxy, postwar structure. No one looked at the pale American as they hurried to the subway or the underground parking.
Jordan crossed the street. The city was waking up. The sidewalk was wide and bordered a narrow park whose trees overhung the low wall. The buildings ahead got bigger and taller as the road widened into a main boulevard with traffic coming in at each roundabout, flowing west toward Shinjuku. Ahead on the right he saw a stream of schoolkids dressed in gray uniforms heading into a tall marble-and-glass-fronted building. Beyond the school to the left he saw an enormous wheel and the edge of a roller coaster.
Jordan knew where he was now. He picked up his pace and, rounding the corner, saw the huge silver bubble of the Tokyo Dome rise up behind the Ferris wheel. There was a whole shopping complex built around the dome and foreigners flowed in and out all day.
Exit Strategy Page 11