Number9Dream

by Unknown

  Queen Erichnid’s wintry eye filled the screen. ‘ScatRat. Say it is not so.’

  ScatRat twanged a whisker. ‘Just an old formality, Majesty. Leave it 2 me. I’ll zip 2 insoluableriddles@evilqueens.sup.org and get da number one brain /***er! Relax! Chinfluff’s in da bag! He won’t stand a s chance in a Bangkok .’ Queen Erichnid closed her eyes in cyberorgasmic delectation. ‘Make it so! And then his stories’ – gassy colours popped and fused – ‘soul’ – she tossed back her head – ‘film rights and book deals in twenty-seven languages’ – her laughing mouth consumed the screen and plunged the website into bronchial black – ‘will be mine! Mine! Miiiiiiiiine!’

  Pithecanthropus, meanwhile, had slipped out of the wired jungle – he knew about jungles – and was exploring the edges of the cavernous website – he knew about caverns, too. He noticed that all the cables twisted into the same giant plug. Above this plug spun a ventilator fan to cool the circuits, and on the grille of this fan, hidden in a rack of Philips screwdrivers, was Goatwriter’s beloved fountain pen. Through the grille Pithecanthropus could make out, using his night eyes, a ladder in a shaft beyond. He grunted thoughtfully, but slipped back to the screen when he heard ScatRat come on-screen again. The rat appeared in a glittering quizmaster jacket, clutching an envelope marked ‘$1 million riddles$’. ‘Got it, Ya Majesty! Da riddle of da millennium!’

  ‘Let us be quite clear,’ said Queen Erichnid. ‘When you fail to answer, your copyright reverts to me.’

  ‘When Sir answers right’ – Mrs Comb shook her tail feather – ‘we go free – with Sir’s fountain pen.’

  ‘O, such a vivid imagination’ – Queen Erichnid sneered – ‘for a scratty-clawed home-help. ScatRat! Let the riddling commence!’

  ScatRat slit the envelope open with his thorny fang. Drum-rolling cued from hidden speakers: ‘What is da most mathematical animal?’

  ‘By heck.’ Mrs Comb folded her wings. ‘What kind of daft quiz is this?’

  ScatRat flobbed nobby gob. It dribbled down the screen. ‘Ya got 1 min, fetacheesepacker!’ A sixty-second stopwatch appeared on-screen. ‘From – now!’ Countdown music began. Goatwriter chewed his beard. ‘The most mathematical animal . . . Well, the case for humans is shattered by a minute of their television . . . Dolphins win the brain weight/body weight ratio discourse . . . However, no cleverer Euclidian geometrician exists than the bolas spider . . . yet the scallop’s knowledge of Cartesian oval lenses is unsurpassed in the kingdom of fauna . . .’ ScatRat chuckled. ‘Ya got thirty seconds!’ Queen Erichnid clapped with glee and danced a rampant rumba with her rodent rogue. ‘I can taste those publishing lunches! Hear the rapture of New Yorker reviewers!’ Worried, Mrs Comb searched her handbag for an inspirational snack, but all she found was an old chestnut. Pithecanthropus chose that moment to tap Mrs Comb’s wing and slip Goatwriter’s fountain pen into her handbag. In the glare of the screen Mrs Comb’s sharp eyes spotted a creature from her direst nightmare jumping between Pithecanthropus’s eyebrows. ‘Fleas!’ she shrieked. ‘I knew it! All along! Fleas!’

  ‘Yes, by jimminy, yes!’ clopped Goatwriter. ‘Of course! The most mathematical animal is the flea!’

  Queen Erichnid’s rumba halted. ScatRat’s leer fell away. ‘Ya gotta say why or it don’t count!’

  Goatwriter cleared his throat. ‘“Fleas subtract from happiness, divide attention, add to miseries and multiply alarmingly.”’

  ScatRat gazed up at his screen idol. ‘Some ya win, Ya Majesty, and some ya—’

  Queen Erichnid muted ScatRat with a double click. You failed me, you corrupted, bugged, cybervermin! Only one punishment fits this crime!’ ScatRat’s ‘nooo-ooo-ooo . . .’ dwindled to zero as the queen dragged him into the recycle bin. The queen’s ire grew dire. ‘As for you, o Bearded One, if you think some legal-eagle babble prevents me from seizing’ – her eyes narrowed with wintry menace while megabytes crackled – ‘the object of my desires, then even for a writer you are cretinous beyond belief ! Stand by – for digitalization!’ She primed the on-screen digitalizer. ‘Five – four—’

  ‘Sir!’ Mrs Comb fluttered but was still meshed fast. ‘Sir!’

  Goatwriter strained against his cable harness. ‘Deuced dastardly diabola!’

  Queen Erichnid’s teeth sparkled with silicon. ‘Three – two—’

  Pithecanthropus pulled out the plug.

  The screen died, and the website vanished as if it had never existed, which in a sense it hadn’t, for Goatwriter, Pithecanthropus and Mrs Comb found themselves sitting in the sun-blasted desert, too astonished to utter a syllable.

  17th September

  A ski resort town in the Nagano Mountains

  Eiji,

  If you tried to contact me after I sprung myself from the clinic in Miyazaki, it was sweet of you, but I couldn’t stay there any longer. Anywhere on Kyushu is too close to Yakushima for comfort. (If you didn’t, I don’t blame you for a moment. I didn’t really expect you to.) I may have problems but the patients there were so scary I figured I’d take my chances back in the big bad world. (At least they give you knives and forks out here.) Burn the last letter I wrote. Burn it, please. I won’t ask you for a single thing but I’m asking you to do this. The only thing Dr Suzuki taught me is that there comes a point in your life, and when you pass this point you can’t change. You are what you are, for better or worse, and that is that. I shouldn’t have told you about the stairs incident. You must hate me. I would. Sometimes I honestly do. Hate myself, I mean. Be careful of counsellors, therapists, head doctors. They poke around, and take things to bits without thinking about how they’ll put it all back together. Burn the letter. Letters like that shouldn’t exist. (Especially on Yakushima.) Burn it.

  So here I am in Nagano. What sunsets they make in these mountains! The hotel is at the foot of Mount Hakuba and the view from my room is swallowed up by the mountain. It needs a different word to describe it every day. You should visit Nagano, someday. In the Edo period all the missionaries from the capital used to ‘summer’ up here, to escape from the heat. I suppose we have the missionaries to thank for naming these mountains ‘the Japan Alps’. Why do people always have to compare things with abroad? (Like Kagoshima, the Naples of Japan, that always sets my teeth on edge.) Nobody knows what the locals used to call the mountains before anyone knew the Alps, or even Europe, was out there. (Am I the only one who thinks this is depressing?) I’m staying as a non-paying guest in a small hotel opened by someone I knew from my days in Tokyo, years and years ago, after I left you in the care of your grandmother. He is a big-shot hotelier now, quite respectable, except for two very expensive divorces, which I’m sure he deserves. (He changed before he reached that critical point where your life is set in concrete.) He wanted me to help scout for a location for a new hotel he wants to build from scratch, but he doesn’t know how much I drink yet, or he’s persuading himself he can ‘save’ me. His favourite two words are ‘project’ and ‘venture’, which seem to mean the same thing. The snows are due in early November (only six weeks away. Another year on its last legs). If I have spent the good-old-days currency I have with my friend by winter, I may go in search of warmer climes. (Old Chinese proverb: guests are like fish – after three days they begin to stink.) I hear Monte Carlo is pleasant for ‘wintering’. I hear Prince Charles of England may be available.

  I had a dream about Anju last night. Anju, a Siberian tiger running past me in a subway (I knew it was Siberian because the yellow stripes were white), and a game where you had to hide a bone-egg in a library. Anju won’t leave me alone. I paid a priest a fortune to perform pacifying rites but I should have spent the money on French wine for all the good it did. I never dream about you – in fact I never remember any of my dreams, except the Anju ones. Why is that? Dr Suzuki seemed to think . . . ah, who cares. Just burn the letter, please.

  STUDY OF TALES

  Bats streamed beyond bracken-matted dusk. Goatwriter mulled at his writing bureau, watching the forest of moss un
til shadows danced. ‘I declare, I could swear . . .’ Goatwriter began. Mrs Comb was clog-polishing there on the stair. ‘Not like that sewer-mouthed ScatRat, I hope, sir.’ Goatwriter stroked the fountain pen of Sei Shonagon. ‘I could swear that in the arboreal soul of this forest . . . far and deep . . . I glean gleams of a truly untold tale . . .’ Whether Goatwriter was thinking in words or talking in silence was unclear. ‘The venerable coach penetrated this forest as far as the track permitted, and has not moved on for seven days . . . quite unprecedented . . . I do believe it is trying to tell me something . . .’

  The evening cooled and Mrs Comb shivered. ‘Foxtrot pudding for supper, sir. You give your eyes a rest and play a nice round of Blind Man’s Scrabble.’ She hoped the venerable coach would move on that night, but doubted it would.

  The following morning, Pithecanthropus was digging through deep creaking coal seams in search of diamonds. Mrs Comb’s birthday was coming up, and several nights ago the venerable coach had been overtaken by a convertible with a radio playing a song about how diamonds are a girl’s best friend. Mrs Comb was no girl, it was true, but Pithecanthropus hoped that the friend part might rub off in his favour. Past tasty pockets of earthworms, truffles and larvae dug the early ancestor, past droll trolls, moles, addled adders and bothered badgers, down where Pithecanthropus could hear the earth furnace boom to a rhythm all its own. Hours cannot dig so far, and Pithecanthropus lost all track of time. ‘You hulking great lout,’ an impossibly distant voice found him, much later. ‘Where are you the one time I need you?’ Mrs Comb! Pithecanthropus swam upward with a mighty breaststroke, up through the loosened earth, and within a minute resurfaced. Mrs Comb was flapping in circles like a headless chicken, waving a note. ‘Here you are last! Muck-grubbing around in a crisis!’ Pithecanthropus grunted. ‘Sir has upped and offed! I knew he wasn’t himself last night, and this morning I find this note on his writing bureau!’ She thrust it at Pithecanthropus, who groaned – all those squiggles skidding over their paper. Mrs Comb sighed. ‘Three million years you’ve had to learn how to read! The letter says Sir has gone into this mucky forest! All on his own! He said he didn’t want to drag us into nowt dangerous! Dangerous? What if he meets a mild cannibal much less a wild animal? What if the venerable coach drives off tonight? We’d never see Sir again! And he forgot his asthma inhaler!’ Mrs Comb began sobbing into her apron, which wrung Pithecanthropus’s giant heart. ‘First his story, then his pen, and now he’s lost himself!’ Pithecanthropus grunted imploringly.

  ‘Are . . . are you sure? You can track Sir in this thick-as-thieves forest?’

  Pithecanthropus grunted reassuringly.

  I hear Buntaro let himself in downstairs. ‘Hang on,’ I yell, ‘I’ll be right down!’ Two o’clock already – today is the last day of my exile. I feel tired again – it rained last night, and fat fingers kept prising me awake. I kept thinking somebody was trying to force a window somewhere. I arrange the pages of the manuscript how they were on the writing bureau, and pick my way between the books to the trapdoor. I shout down – ‘Sorry, Buntaro! I lost track of time!’ Goodbye, study of tales. I go down to the living room where a dark figure closes the door behind me. My heart rams itself up my throat. She is a middle-aged woman, unafraid, curious, reading me. Her hair is short, severe and as grey as a feared headmistress’s. She is dressed in forgettable clothes, anonymous as a shot in a mail-order catalogue. You would pass her a hundred times and never notice her. Unless she suddenly appeared in your living room. How owlish and scarred she is. Her stare goes on and on, as if she has every right to be here, and is waiting for the intruder – me – to explain himself. ‘Who, uh, are you?’ I eventually manage. ‘You invited me, Eiji Miyake.’ Her voice you would not forget. Cracked as cane, dry as drought. ‘So I came.’

  A passing lunatic? ‘But I never invited anyone.’

  ‘But you did. Two days ago you sent an invitation to my letter-drop.’

  Her? ‘Morino’s detective?’

  She nods. ‘My name is Yamaya.’ She disarms me with a smile as friendly as a dagger thrust. ‘Yes, I am a woman, not a man in drag. Invisibility is a major asset in my line of work. However, discussing my modus operandi is not why I am here, is it? Won’t you offer me a chair?’ All too weird. ‘Sure. Please sit down.’ Mrs Yamaya takes the sofa, so I take the floor by the window. She has the eye of a meticulous reader, which makes me the book. She looks behind me. ‘Nice garden. Nice property. Nice neighbourhood. Nice hidey-hole.’

  Over to me, it seems. I offer her a Marlboro from Daimon’s final box, but she shakes her head. I light mine. ‘How did you, uh, trace me?’

  ‘I obtained your address from the Tokyo Evening Mail.’

  ‘They gave you my address?’

  ‘No, I said I obtained it. Then I trailed Mr Ogiso here yesterday evening.’

  ‘With respect, Mrs Yamaya, I asked for a file, not a visit.’

  ‘With respect, Mr Miyake, get real. I receive a note from a mysterious nobody asking for the selfsame file I compiled for the late Ryutaro Morino three days before the night of the long knives. How coincidental. I earn a living by unpicking coincidences. Your note was a bleeding lamb tossed into a swimming pool of sharks. I had three theories – you were a potential client testing my professionality; someone with a potentially lucrative personal interest in Eiji Miyake; or the father of Eiji Miyake himself. All three were worth a follow-up. I do so, and I discover you are the son of the father.’

  From the garden I hear a crow craw-crawing. I wonder what happened to Mrs Yamaya to make her so sad but so steel-willed. ‘You know my father?’

  ‘Only socially.’

  Only socially. ‘Mrs Yamaya, I would like to ask you more cleverly and indirectly, but, uh, will you please give me the file on my father?’

  Mrs Yamaya forms a cage with her long, strong fingers. ‘Now we have got to why I am here. To consider this very question.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Please, Mr Miyake. We are both perfectly aware of your financial non-position.’

  ‘Then what are you here to consider? Whether or not I deserve it?’

  The crow hops over to the balcony and peers in. It is as big as an eagle. Mrs Yamaya’s murmur could hush a stadium. ‘No, people in my line of walk must never allow “deserve” to enter the equation.’

  ‘What does enter the equation?’

  ‘The consequences.’

  The doorbell rings and I twitch – hot ash falls on my legs. The doorbell rings again. What an invasion! A specially rigged light strobes on and off several times, for Mrs Sasaki’s sister’s deafness, I guess. I stub out my cigarette. It lies there, stubbed. The doorbell rings again – I hear a slight laugh. Mrs Yamaya doesn’t move. ‘Aren’t you going to answer it?’

  ‘Excuse me,’ I say, and she nods.

  Stupidly, I am too fazed to put the chain on the door, and the two young men seem so pleased to see me that for a moment I panic – this is a set-up organized with Mrs Yamaya, and I walked straight into it. ‘Hi there!’ they beam. Which one spoke? Immaculate white shirts, conservative ties, sheeny, computer-generated hair – hardly regular Yakuza garb. They irradiate health and positive vibes. ‘Hey, feller! Is this a bad time? Because we have great news!’ They are either going to produce guns or tell me about a spectacular discount kimono service.

  ‘You, uh, do?’ I glance behind me.

  ‘You bet I do! You see, Lord Jesus Christ is waiting outside the door of your heart at this very moment – he wants to know if you have a few minutes to spare so he can tell you about the joy that will be yours – if you unlock your heart and let in His Love.’ I breathe sheer relief – they take this as a ‘yes’ and turn up their zeal volume even higher. ‘Your heart seems no stranger to trouble, my friend. We are here with the Church of the Latter Day Saints – perhaps you’ve heard of our missionary work?’

  ‘No, no. I haven’t actually.’ Another stupid thing to say. When I finally close the door – these Mormons’ sm
iles are ironed on – and get back to the living room nobody is there. I open the balcony doors, surprised. Did I imagine my grim visitor? ‘Mrs Yamaya?’ The crow is gone too. Nothing but the layered buzzes and summer creaks and hisses. A butterfly with gold-digger eyes mistakes me for a bush. I watch it, and moments telescope into minutes. When I go back in I notice what I missed at first – a brown envelope, lying on the sofa where Mrs Yamaya had sat. Any brief hope that she left me the document wallet on my father is snuffed out right away – the envelope is labelled ‘Tokyo Evening Mail – Correspondence Box 333’. Inside is a letter, addressed to me in the spidery hand of a very old person. I sit down and slit it open.

  Where mossy drapes hung so thick that Goatwriter could no longer push onward, he sploshed in a babbling brook. The stream jaggered clattery underhoof not with rolling stones, but with dinner plates. The water was the colour of tea. Goatwriter sipped a mouthful – high-quality, cool tea. He drank his fill and his head cleared. ‘A stream of consciousness!’ he rejoyced. ‘I must be in the Darjeeling foothills.’ Goatwriter paddled upstream. Lantern orchids bloomed the noon gloom beneath spinster aspidistra. Opal-wingtipped hummingbirds probed syrup-bleeding figs. Far above the forest canopy was chalk-dusted with daylight. It seemed to Goatwriter that these random dabs of light formed words. ‘All my life, I searched for the truly untold tale in the arcane, in the profound. Could my quixotic quest be a quite quotidian query? Does profundity hide in the obvious?’

  Goatwriter paddled into a glade misty with sunlight. A girl with flaxen hair swing-swung, singing a melody with no beginning and no name. Goatwriter reached the foot of her tree. Her voice was that of the whisperings, heard by the old goat nightly since midsummer. ‘You are in search of the truly untold tale.’ She swung up, and Antarctica drifted unmeasured miles.