Number9Dream

by Unknown

  I shake my head. ‘No, sir.’

  Violence stains Morino’s motionless face. His voice is absolute zero. ‘You are fucking Miriam. You are fucking my little girl.’

  This is the crunch. I shake my head. ‘No, sir.’

  Frankenstein rattles fry splinters in a cup.

  Morino opens a grey document wallet. ‘So for your next trick, you will explain this photograph.’ The horn section pass it down to me. An A4 black-and-white picture of a shabby apartment building. The zoom lens focuses on the third floor, where a kid my age is handing something through a door. A dog with its head in a lampshade pisses in a flower box. I recognize Miriam’s apartment, and me. This is why I am here today. This is bad. No lie is going to get me out of here. But where will the truth get me? Morino clunks his knuckles out of their sockets. ‘My breath is bated. As they say.’ Morino clunks his knuckles into their sockets. My mouth is a sandpit. ‘Now. Why did you show your zit-pus face at the home of my little girl?’

  I tell him everything from Shinobazu pond in Ueno park to the conversation with Miriam. The only bit I leave out is Suga – I claim to do the library hacking myself. Morino nicks the tip off a new cigar. I finish, and judgment hangs in the air. Lizard swivels on his chair. ‘Father?’ Morino nods. ‘It don’t sound right to me. Computer dorks just don’t lug suitcases around stations for a living.’ Mama-san shuts her laptop. ‘Father. I know Miriam matters to you very much, but we need to be in other places very urgently to keep the operation on track. This nondescript child from the beyond beyond who blundered on to private property is exactly what he appears to be. Nagasaki does not employ spies in diapers; his story fills the blanks in Daimon’s; and he hasn’t laid a paw on Miriam.’

  Morino respects her. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘One – you had Miriam trailed by the best surveillance agent in Tokyo for the last two weeks. Two – I’m a woman.’

  Morino narrows his eyes to read me. I lower my eyes. Frankenstein’s mobile phone beeps. He goes into the adjoining room to answer. An airship floats into view behind Morino’s head. Higher up, an airplane glints in high-altitude sunshine. Mama-san takes a disk from her computer and seals it shut in a case. ‘Soon,’ barks Frankenstein into his phone, ‘soon.’ He resumes his seat. Morino finishes reading me. ‘Eiji Miyake. The court finds you guilty. Guilty of being a dumbfuck who sticks his nose through wrong doors. The mandatory sentence is having your testicles cut off, dipped in soy, and placed in your mouth, which will be gaffer-taped until said member is chewed and swallowed by the detainee.’ I glance around at the jurors. Nobody is smiling. ‘However, the court will suspend this sentence on condition you observe an exclusion order. You will never go near Queen of Spades. You will never go near my little girl. Even if you see her in your dreams, I will discover your lapse, and the sentence will be executed. I make myself clear?’

  I dare not taste the freedom I can smell. ‘Completely, sir.’

  ‘You will return to your pointless life. Without delay.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Mama-san stands, but Morino doesn’t dismiss me. ‘When I was a boy half your age, Miyake, my friends and I would capture dune lizards on the Shimane coast. Dune lizards are cunning. You grab one, they detach their tails and skitter away. How do I know you are not leaving us with a tail?’

  ‘Because you scare me.’

  ‘Your father is also afraid of me, but that man has left me with a zooful of tails in his time.’

  The horn players nod. I hear Popsicle giggle.

  ‘Did you just say my father?’

  Morino breathes smoke. ‘Ye-es. You know I did.’

  ‘My real father?’

  ‘Ye-es.’

  ‘As in . . .’

  ‘As in the flesh-and-blood man who banged up your mother, Mariko Miyake, twenty years ago. Who else would I mean?’

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘Not intimately. We meet professionally, on occasion. You seem surprised.’ Morino watches me flounder. ‘So, my operative hit the nail on the head. Again. My, she is good. You really don’t know who your father is, do you? To think, these things happen in real life. A semi-orphan comes to Tokyo in search of the father he has never met. So you thought the ATM messages I had my banking people send you were from your real father?’ His lips bulge slightly in lieu of a laugh. Lizard snickers. Morino taps the document wallet. ‘Everything about your father is in here.’ He fans himself with it. ‘You were buried deep, but my agent can dig up anything. I had you investigated – and your father crops up. We were surprised. Still. You can fuck off now.’ He tosses the document wallet into a metal trashcan. Lizard stands and kicks my chair.

  ‘Mr Morino?’

  ‘Are you still here?’

  ‘Please give me that document wallet.’

  Morino narrows his eyes at Lizard and nods at the door.

  ‘Sir, if you don’t need that information any more—’

  ‘I don’t need it, no, but I enjoy causing you needless suffering. Son will escort you to the lobby. Your friend and mentor Yuzu Daimon is waiting for you. He is feeling drained. Now walk away from this room, or you will be beaten senseless and dumped in a skip.’ I follow Lizard, glancing back one final time at the trashcan before door 333 closes on my father.

  I resolved to walk past Yuzu Daimon, to show my contempt by just ignoring him. That was before I saw his body slumped on the sofa. I have known a few people who died, but I have never actually seen one – so pale, so utterly still. What do you do? My heart is this manic, mechanical punch-bag. The sofa creaks as his limbs shift. His eyes flicker open. His eyeballs wander, then find me. ‘So – what did they – do to you?’

  A sort of weird crunching of gears.

  ‘What did they do to you, Miyake?’

  I can finally speak. ‘They let me go.’

  ‘Two miracles in the same day. Untouched?’

  ‘Scared shitless, but untouched. And not as scared shitless as I was a moment ago. I thought you were dead! What did they do to you?’

  Daimon ignores this. ‘Why – you went to . . . Miriam’s – why?’

  ‘She dropped a library book when we, uh, met by accident in Ueno park the day after your dawn exit. I took it back. That was all.’

  A laugh tries to twitch the corners of his mouth.

  ‘What did they do to you?’

  ‘One litre of blood.’

  I must have misheard. ‘They took one litre of your blood? Isn’t that . . .’

  ‘Rather more . . . than a blood-bank tank, yes . . . I’ll live. It was only my first . . . offence.’

  ‘But what are they going to do with your blood?’

  ‘Test it – sell it, I imagine.’

  ‘Who to?’

  ‘Miyake . . . please. I have no – energy – for an – exposé of illegal markets . . .’

  ‘Can you move? I think you should get to a hospital.’

  Speaking is costing Daimon a lot. ‘Correct, Doctor, yes. I had a sixth of my blood removed as a payment in a Yakuza vendetta. Awful, isn’t it? Yes, I know I’m lucky to be alive. Quite illegal, I agree. But please don’t contact the police because my dad is on the take, too.’

  ‘Okay, but hanging around in this building is a very bad idea.’

  ‘One minute – two minutes – let me – get some breath.’

  I explore the lobby. The exit will let us leave, but not re-enter. The passageway back to the interview room is blocked by a grille locked by Lizard. The glass walls of the lobby are covered by taped plastic sheeting. I peel back a corner – a building site, the perimeter fence and California beach lido, only a soccer-ball kick away. Sunbathers roast on the boardwalks. The Pacific is as glossy as a monster-movie sea. I sneeze. Not a cold, not now, please. I am afraid Daimon could slip into a coma if I don’t haul him away. ‘Try to stand up.’

  ‘Leave me alone.’

  ‘I want to call your parents.’

  Daimon half sits. ‘No, no, definitely, no. Believe me thi
s once. Calling my parents is the very, very worst thing . . .’

  ‘Why?’

  Daimon shakes his head as if avoiding a fly. ‘Politics. Politics.’

  So now what? ‘How much money have you got?’

  ‘Every yen is yours if you leave me alone.’

  ‘Don’t tempt me. Near the entrance to Xanadu I saw a taxi rank. You and me are going to walk over there. You can either give in now or make me shout at you for ten minutes and then give in. Up to you.’

  Daimon sighs again. ‘So masterful when you get roused.’

  We get weird looks as we wade through the crowds, but everyone assumes Daimon is slouched on my shoulder because he is dead drunk. Atomic September sunshine drenches the day. My Japan Railway overalls are gluey with sweat. People flow into Xanadu and out again. The air is crammed with silvery helium balloons and tinsel music. Swarms of conversation pieces, smoke from a corn-on-the-cob stand. I see our reflection in a pair of mile-wide sunglasses. We look like shit. A giant black rabbit produces a midget magician from a top hat, and the world claps. Somewhere a piano and strings perform something beautiful. I feel Daimon heaving. ‘Do you want to be sick?’ I ask him. ‘No. I was laughing at the funny side of today.’ I wonder where the funny side is. ‘Do you have any idea how embarrassing it is for me having my hide saved by you, Miyake?’ Zax Omega leaps across our path, selling models of himself. ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘I imagine it must be pretty humiliating, considering.’ Daimon says nothing more until we get to the taxi rank. His feet drag more heavily, and his breathing is rawer. The taxi door swings open all by itself – down south you still have to open them by hand. ‘Do you know Kita Senju?’ I ask the driver. He nods. ‘Do you know the Tenmaya five minutes from the station?’ The driver nods. ‘This video store is right on the same street—’ I scribble the Shooting Star’s address. ‘Please take my friend there.’ The taxi driver looks dubious, balancing a very good fare against Daimon’s grogginess. ‘Only a bit of sunstroke. In ten minutes he’ll be himself again.’ The fare wins, and the taxi drives Daimon away. I turn back and face the way I came. I have an appointment back in Valhalla with a discarded document wallet in a metal trashcan.

  The Mongolian is climbing nearer. A man-shaped hole in the dim dark. I can see his almost-smile. His cowboy boots count off my remaining moments. Lizard and the Cadillac headlights strobing the battleground may as well be events from another lifetime. Are Morino and Frankenstein still watching? If I take my eyes off the Mongolian, I am afraid my killer will halve the distance when I look back. My adrenalin is fighting my fever, but I have no way to use this energy loaned by fear. No amount of adrenalin will keep me alive when I hit the ground after that drop. No amount of adrenalin will let me disarm a real, live mercenary with a real, live gun. Fuck, no. I am dead. Who will miss me? Buntaro will find a new tenant by next Saturday. Mum will enter her cycle of guilt, blame and vodka. Again. Who knows what my father will feel? My stepmother will probably buy a new hat to celebrate. Akiko Kato will have a little paperwork to process. Cat will find a new pad. She was only ever in it for the milk. My uncles, their wives and my cousins back in Yakushima will be shocked and distraught at the news, of course, but they will all agree that Tokyo was trouble and Japan is not the fortress of safety it used to be. My grandmother will receive the news with a blank face and a long silence which will last half a day. Then she will say, ‘His sister called him, so he went.’ My list ends there. And this is assuming that my body turns up. Burying me in a pit under a future runway with the others down there would surely make a whole load more sense. Buntaro will report me in a week as a missing person, and everyone will shrug and say he trod in his mother’s footsteps. Here he comes, checking his gun. What was it all for? Anju was overwhelmed by the ocean. I am just underwhelmed. I sneeze again. Sneezing, now! Why bother? The breeze is cool off the drained sea.

  I decide to kill an hour before I re-enter Valhalla. First, I find a telephone. I call Mrs Sasaki at Ueno, but the moment I hear her voice I hang up in panic, or shame. Either I must tell her an outright lie – or I tell her the outright truth. I cannot do either. So I call Buntaro, who is easier – he jumps down the telephone line. ‘Guess what, lad! Kodai’s eyes are actually open! Inside my wife! Open! Imagine that! And get this – he is sucking his thumb! Already! The doctor said this is unusual, so early on. Early developer, the doctor actually said that.’

  ‘Buntaro, I—’

  ‘I was watching this baby video earlier. Maternity is . . . beyond belief. Ever wondered if embryos get thirsty? They do! So they drink up the amniotic fluid, and then pee it out again! The same as being hooked up to a never-ending supply of Budweiser. Except amniotic fluid tastes better. Waiting to be born must be nine months of sheer bliss. Like a bar where you never have to pay the bill. Like the late sixties. And we never remember a thing.’

  ‘Buntaro, a friend is—’

  ‘Have you any idea how much pregnancy rearranges a woman’s internals? By the third trimester, the uterus is touching the breastbone. Placental mammals really have it tough. That’s why—’ A woman in the background at Shooting Star screams her lungs out. ‘Hang on, I’ll turn down the volume. Watching Rosemary’s Baby. Get a few pointers if Kodai turns out to be the son of Satan. A midwife at the hospital was saying—’

  ‘Buntaro!’

  ‘Is anything the matter?’

  ‘Really sorry, but I’m calling from a box and my card is about to die. A friend is coming to Shooting Star by taxi. He donated some blood, but they took too much and he needs a lie-down – please, when he gets there, would you show him up to my room? I’ll explain later. Please.’

  ‘And will his trousers needing pressing? Or how about a massage, or—’

  The beeps go. Perfect. I hang up.

  A platoon of boyfriends and girlfriends – not to mention the battalion of the bothered young families five years will transform the couples into – swill me down a shopping mall to a podium. Musicians perform something twiddly and ribboned. Mozart, maybe. By accident I find myself in the front row. A fat cellist, two thin violinists, a dumpy viola player and a girl playing a Yamaha grand piano. If dog owners grow to look like their pets, musicians turn into their instruments. Except pianists – how could a human resemble her piano? Complexity, maybe. Her hair covers her face – she bends over the keyboard, as if a god were whispering the tune. The pianist has one of those perfect necks – curves, smoothness, toughness, hollows, bumps, all just so. She is in a cream silk dress – sweat dapples mark her spine – and she plays barefoot. The music finishes and everyone claps. The string section bask in the applause – the pianist just turns around and gives a modest bow. Ai Imajo. It really is Ai Imajo. I look for a hiding place but I am walled in by handbags, pushchairs and melting ice creams. Ai Imajo looks right my way and a blush grenade goes off in my face. Then I realize she is looking but not seeing. She is still dazzled by the brightness of the music. Then she smiles at me – definitely – and mimes a head-butt. I manage a feeble wave before getting pushed back by penguins carrying tree-sized bouquets of flowers. A hippopotamus woman looped in beads makes the microphone scream with feedback. I wander off to find a shady corner of Xanadu where I can sit down. I don’t want to embarrass Ai Imajo in front of her music student friends.

  Valhalla blots out the sun. When my hour is up, I slip through a gap in the perimeter fence and into its unfinished shadow. I can see three security guards smoking in the mouth of the main entrance, but sneaking up between rows of blocks, piping, coils of cable and drainage channels is easy. If I am being watched from Valhalla itself I am in trouble; I hope seeing Ai Imajo has used up today’s coincidence quota. I nearly trip over a coil of cable. It sidewinds into life and enters Valhalla through a ventilation duct. No place for a snake, Snake. Skirting the guards’ field of vision, I get to the foot of the pyramid, and begin looking for a way in. The construction is vast – it takes about five minute per side. I pass the hotel lobby entrance, and curse myself for not leavin
g it wedged open with something – I could probably have forced the inner shutter somehow. Twenty minutes later I am back to the main entrance and its three guards. I consider trying to pass myself off as a boilerman or something – I am still in my work overalls – but when I creep close enough to overhear them discussing the best way to cripple a man, I change my mind. I backtrack to the basement ramp that Frankenstein drove down earlier in the afternoon. I spy on the guard lodge from behind a digger. Its window faces crossways, not up the ramp. I think if I stay against the wall I can reach it without being seen. Then, maybe, I can crawl past. The main danger is from any vehicles ascending the ramp as I am making my way down. Still, there were only three Cadillacs in the entire carpark. I think.

  It works. I reach the lodge without being caught. On the guard’s TV I hear ‘And it’s a clash of the Giants and the Dragons in front of sixty thousand on this sweltering afternoon in the Dome as homeboy Enoki limbers up, and I can well imagine what must be going through the mind of that young battler at this moment in time’, and so on. I smell pork katsu and hear a microwave ping. I get down on my knees and scramble past – my foot slips in fine gravel, surely he must have heard, I carry on anyway, past his door, under the barrier arm and away into the dark, bracing myself for a shout and alarms. I dash behind a column, my heart percussion-capping. Nothing. He must be stone deaf. I am now an unauthorized intruder. Calm down. I am walking into a building to pick up a piece of unwanted refuse from a bin. The three Cadillacs are still parked in a row, which is not a good sign, but as long as my father is safe in the metal bin I can find a hiding place somewhere in the hotel and retrieve him when the coast is clear. Staying in the darkest wedges of shadow, I make my way to the portal door, and slip through. I sort of remember the way. The place is still deserted. Snake is wandering this maze of swinging doors, too. Grown to canoe length. I pass the toilet where Daimon and I were put on ice – abrupt laughter rings out. My nerves snap, I dart ahead, and clear the next corner just as the laughter spills into the corridor. It follows me for the next three turnings. Then it dies down. Then it changes direction and heads towards me – does it? I double back in panic – I thought I doubled back – and end up down a dead end with a drinks machine in the alcove. I listen. The voices of two men are getting nearer. Maybe I can squeeze down the side of this drinks machine – I can, but as I try to twist around behind it my foot gets caught in a loop of cable. At that moment the voices appear in front of the machine. I freeze. If I move they will hear me. If they look down the side of the machine they will see my leg. I feel a sneeze getting nearer. A transformer juts into the small of my back. It hornet-hums and is hot as an iron.