Number9dream

by David Mitchell

  Last Wednesday, my second day as a drone at Ueno Station. I am taking a dump during my lunch break, smoking a Salem in the cubicle. I hear the door open, a zipper scratch, and urine firing against porcelain urinal. Then the voice begins—it is Suga, the computer nerd whose part-time job I am taking over at the end of the week, when he goes back to college. Obviously he thinks he is alone in here, because he says this: “Excuse me, are you Suga? Are you responsible for this? Yes, you are Suga, aren’t you?” His voice isn’t his real voice—it is a cartoon voice, and it must scrape the lining off his vocal cords to produce it. “I don’t wanna remember, I don’t wanna remember, I don’t wanna remember. Don’t make me. Can’t make me. Won’t make me. Forget it! Forget it! Forget it!” His voice reverts to its bland, nasal calm. “It wasn’t my fault. Right. Could have happened to anyone. Right. To anyone. Right. Don’t listen to them.”

  I am in a fix. If I leave now the embarrassment reading will be off the scale. I effectively heard him mutter his intimate secrets in his sleep, and I hardly know the guy. But if I stay here, what might he reveal next? How he chopped up the corpse in his bath and put it out with the garbage bit by bit? If he finds me listening, it will look as if I was eavesdropping. What a mess. I cough, flush the toilet, and take a long time to pull my trousers up. When I emerge from my cubicle Suga has disappeared. I wash my hands and walk the roundabout way back to the office, via the magazine stands. Mrs. Sasaki is dealing with a customer. Suga is in the back eating his lunch, and I offer him a Salem. He says no, he doesn’t smoke. I forgot, he told me that yesterday. I go to the mirror and pretend to have something in my eye. If I show him too much kindness he may work out that it was me who heard him being memory-whipped. Nerds may be nerds but you need some brains to be one.

  Later, back at the claims counter, Suga perches on his stool reading a magazine called MasterHacker. Suga has a weird physique—he is overweight around his belly, but he has no butt. Long dangly E.T. arms. He suffers from eczema. His face has been medicated into submission, but the backs of his hands flake, and even in this heat he wears long-sleeved shirts to hide his forearms. A trolley of lost items from the afternoon trains is in the back office waiting for me. Suga smirks. “So you already had the Assistant Stationmaster Aoyama experience?” I nod. Suga puts down his magazine. “Don’t let him intimidate you. He isn’t as big-time as he makes out. The man is losing it, imho. A big shake-up is being announced, Mrs. Sasaki was saying last week. Not that I care. Next week I’m doing my IBM internship. Week after, back to college. I’m getting my own postgrad research room. You can come and see me when I’m not supervising. Imperial University, ninth floor. Near Ochanomizu. I’ll draw you a map. You can get the front desk to call up for me. My Ph.D. is in computer systems, but between you, me, and the lost property—all that academic crap is a cover for this—” He waves MasterHacker. “I’m one of the five best hackers currently working in Japan. We all know each other, right. We break into systems and leave our tags. Like graffiti artists. There is nowhere, right, in Japan I can’t hack into. There’s a secret website in the Pentagon—you know what the Pentagon is, right, the American defense nerve center—called Holy Grail. This site is protected by their top computer brains, right. If you hack into Holy Grail it proves that you are better than they are, and men in black appear to offer you a job. That is what I’m going to do. Imperial University has the fastest modems this side of the twenty-fifth century. Once I get access to those babies, I am in. Then, whoosh, I am out of this shit hole commonly known as Tokyo. Deep joy. You suckers won’t see me for dust.”

  Suga reads MasterHacker while I work. His eyebrows twitch up every time he reaches the bottom of a column of text. I wonder what Suga wouldn’t call a shit hole. Weird, but when I remember that I’ll only be here until I find my father, I almost like Tokyo. I feel I’m on holiday on another planet, passing myself off as a native alien. I might even stay on. I like flashing my JR travel pass to the train man at the barrier. I like the way nobody pokes their nose into your business. I like the way the ads change every week—on Yakushima they change every ten years. I like riding the train every day from Kita Senju to Ueno: I like the incline where it dives below the ground and becomes a submarine. I like the way submarines pass by at different speeds, so you can fool yourself you are going backward. I like the glimpses of commuters in parallel windows—two stories being remembered at the same time. Kita Senju to Ueno is crammed beyond belief in the morning. We drones all swing and lurch in droozy unison as the train changes speed. Normally only lovers and twins get this close to other people. I like the way nothing needs to be decided on submarines. You just stand there. I like the muffled clunking. Tokyo is one massive machine made of smaller components.

  The drones only know what their own minute component is for. I wonder what the total of Tokyo does. I already know the names of the stations between here and Ueno. I know where to stand so I can get off nearest the exit. Do not ride in the first compartment, says Uncle Tarmac—if the train collides, this is the crumple zone—and be extra alert on the platform as the train pulls in, in case a hand in the small of your back shoves you over the edge. I like the brew of sweat, perfume, crushed food, grime, cosmetics. I like how you can study reflected faces, so deeply you can almost leaf through their memories. Submarines carry drones, skulls carry memories, and one man’s shit hole may be another man’s paradise.

  “Eiji!” Anju, of course. Moonlight bright as a UFO abduction, air heady with the mosquito incense that my grandmother uses to fumigate the lived-in rooms. Anju whispers so as not to wake her. “Eiji!” She perches on the high windowsill, hugging her knees. Bamboo shadows sway on the tatami and faded fusuma. “Eiji! Are you awake?”

  “No.”

  “I was watching you. You are a boy-me. But you snore.”

  She wants to wake me up by getting me angry. “I do not.”

  “You snore like a piggy puking. Guess where I’ve been.”

  Let me sleep. “Down the toilet.”

  “Out on the roof! You can climb up the balcony pole. I found the way. So warm out there. If you stare at the moon long enough you can see it move. I couldn’t sleep. A pesky mosquito woke me up.”

  “A pesky sister woke me up. My soccer match is tomorrow. I need sleep.”

  “So you need a midnight snack to build you up. Look.”

  On the side is a tray. Omochi, soy sauce, daikon pickles, peanut cookies, tea. I see trouble ahead. “When Wheatie finds out she’ll—”

  Anju scrunches up her face and voice for a Wheatie impression. “Your mother may have made your bones, young missy, but inside that head of yours is going to be all my handiwork!”

  I have to laugh. “You went down to the kitchen on your own?”

  “I told the ghosts I was one of them and they believed me.” Anju jumps and lands at my feet without a sound. I know resistance is pointless so I sit up and bite into a squeaky pickle. Anju slides under my futon and dunks an omochi into a saucer of soy sauce. “I had my flying dream again. Only I had to keep flapping really hard to stay above the ground. I could see lots of people moving about, and there was this big stripy circus tent where Mom lived. I was about to swoop down on it when the mosquito woke me up.”

  “Be careful about falling.”

  Anju chews. “What?”

  “If you dream about falling and hit the ground you really die in your bed.”

  Anju chews some more. “Who says so?”

  “Scientists say so.”

  “Crap.”

  “It is not crap too! Scientists proved it!”

  “If you dreamed of falling, hit the ground, and died, how could anyone know that you were dreaming of falling in the first place?” I think this through. Anju enjoys her victory in silence. Frogs start up and die down. In the distance the sea is sleeping. We chomp one omochi after another. Suddenly Anju speaks in a voice I don’t remember her using. “I never see her face anymore, Eiji.”

  “Whose face?”


  “Mom’s. Can you?”

  “She’s ill. She’s in a special hospital.”

  Anju’s voice wavers. “What if that isn’t true?”

  Huh? “Sure it’s true!” Seeing Anju near tears makes me feel as if I’ve swallowed a knife. “She looks like how she looks in the photographs.”

  “The photographs are old.” Why now? Anju wipes her eyes on her nightshirt and looks away. I hear her jaw and throat sort of clench up and her voice comes out wrong. “Wheatie sent me to buy a box of detergent at Mrs. Tanaka’s while you were at soccer practice this afternoon. Mrs. Oki and her sister from Kagoshima were there. They were at the back of the store and they didn’t notice me at first, so I heard everything.”

  The knife reaches my gut. “Heard what?”

  “Mrs. Oki said, ‘Of course the Miyake girl hasn’t shown her face here.’ Mrs. Tanaka said, ‘Of course, she has no right to.’ Mrs. Oki said, ‘She wouldn’t dare. Dumping her two kids on their grandmother and uncles while she lives it up in Tokyo with her fancy men and fancy apartments and fancy cars.’ Then she saw me.” The knife turns itself. Anju gasps between tight chains of sobs.

  “What happened?”

  “She dropped her eggs, and hurried out.”

  A moth drowns in the moonlight.

  I wipe Anju’s tears. They are so warm. Then she brushes me away and hunches up in a stubborn crouch. “Look,” I say, wondering what to say. “Mrs. Oki and her sister from Kagoshima and Mrs. Tanaka are all witches who drink their own piss.” Anju shakes her head at the daikon pickle I offer her. She just mumbles. “Broken eggs. Everywhere.”

  FUJIFILM says 02:34. Sleep. Sleep. You are feeling sleepy. Your eyelids are veeeeeerrry heavy. I don’t think so. Let me sleep. Please. I have to work tomorrow. Today. I close my eyes but see a body falling through space. Cartwheeling. Cockroach is still fighting the glue. Cockroaches have sensors that start the legs running even before the brain registers danger. How do scientists find these things out? Cockroaches even eat books if nothing juicier comes along. Cat would have kicked Cockroach’s butt. Cat. Cat knows the secret of life and death. Wednesday evening, I get home from work. “Good day at the office, dear?” asks Buntaro, drinking iced coffee from a can. “Not bad,” I say. Buntaro drains the last drops. “What are your coworkers like?” “I haven’t met many. Suga, the guy I’m replacing, believes he is a sort of archcybercriminal. Mrs. Sasaki, my boss, doesn’t seem to like me much but I sort of like her anyway. Mr. Aoyama, her boss, is so uptight I’m surprised he can walk without squeaking.” Buntaro lobs his can into the trash, and a customer comes with a stack of videos to return. I climb up to my capsule, slump on my futon, and read Akiko Kato’s letter for the hundredth time. I practice my guitar as the room fills with suburban dusk. I can’t afford any light fittings yet, so all I have is a decrepit lamp that the previous tenant stowed in the back of the closet. I suddenly decide to admit to myself that the vague hope I have entertained all my life, that by coming to Tokyo I would bump into my father sooner or later, is laughable. Instead of setting me free, the truth makes me too depressed to play the guitar, so I fold my futon into a chair and switch on the TV, salvaged from the trash last week. This TV is a pile of crap. Its greens are mauves and its blues pink. I can find five channels, plus one in a blizzard. All the programs are crap, too. I watch the governor of Tokyo announce that in the event of an earthquake all the blacks, Hispanics, and Koreans will run amok, loot, rape, and pillage. I change the channel. A farmer explains how a pig gets fat by eating its own shit. I change the channel. Tokyo Giants trounce Hiroshima Carp. I get the box of discount sushi from the fridge. I change the channel. A memory game comes on in which contestants are posed questions about tiny details in a section of film they have just watched. I imagine a shadow crouching in the corner of my eye. It launches itself at me and I half-drop my dinner.

  “Gaaah!”

  A black cat lands at my feet. It yawns a mouth of hooks. Its tail is dunked in white. It has a tartan collar. “Cat,” I blurt pointlessly, as my pulse tries to calm itself. It must have jumped onto my balcony from a ledge and entered through the gash in the mosquito netting. “Get lost!” Cat is the coolest customer. I do the sudden stomp people do to intimidate animals, but Cat has seen it all before. Cat looks at my sushi and licks its lips. “Look,” I say to it, “go and find a housewife with a freezer full of leftovers.” Cat is too cool to reply. “One saucer of milk,” I tell it, “then you go away.” Cat downs it as I pour. More. “This is your last saucer, okay?” As Cat laps more genteelly, I wonder when I started talking to animals. It watches me blow the fluff off the last of my sushi. So I end up eating a box of crackers while Cat chews on fresh yellowtail, octopus, and cod roe.

  Leave Ueno Station through the park entrance, go past the concert hall and museums, skirt around the fountain, and you come to a sort of tree garden. Homeless people live here, in tents made of sky-blue plastic sheeting and wooden poles. The best tents even have doors. I guess Picture Lady lives there. She appeared at the claims counter just before my lunch break on Thursday. It was the hottest day this week. Tarmac as soft as cooking chocolate. She wore a headscarf tied tight, and a long skirt of no clear color or pattern, and battered sneakers. Forty, fifty, sixty years old, hard to tell beneath the ingrained grime. Suga saw her coming, did his smirk, announced it was his lunch break and slipped away. The homeless woman reminds me of the farming wives on Yakushima, but she’s more spaced out. Her eyes don’t focus properly. Her voice is cracked and hissed. “I lost ’em.”

  “What have you lost?”

  She mumbles to her feet. “Has anyone given ’em to you yet?”

  My hands reach for the claim pad. “What is it you lost?”

  She shoots a glance at me. “My pictures.”

  “You lost some pictures?”

  She takes an onion out of her pocket and unpeels the crispy brown skin. Her fingers are scabby and dark.

  I try again. “Did you lose the pictures on a train or in the station?”

  She keeps flinching. “I got the old ones back . . .”

  “It would help me if you could tell me a little more about—”

  She licks the onion. “But I ain’t got the new ones back.”

  “Were the pictures valuable?”

  She bites. It crunches.

  Mrs. Sasaki appears from the side office, and nods at Picture Lady. “Roasting weather we’re having, isn’t it?”

  Picture Lady talks through onion cud. “I need ’em to cover up the clocks.”

  “We don’t have your pictures today, I’m afraid. Maybe tomorrow you’ll come across them. Have you looked around Shinobazu Pond?”

  Picture Lady scowls. “What would my pictures be doing there?”

  Mrs. Sasaki shrugs. “Who knows? It’s a cool spot on a hot day.”

  She nods. “Who knows . . .”

  I watch her wander away. “Is she a regular customer?”

  Mrs. Sasaki straightens up the desk. “We’re a part of her schedule. It costs nothing to be civil to her. Did you work out what her ‘pictures’ are?”

  “Some sort of family albums, I figured?”

  “I took her literally at first, too.” Mrs. Sasaki speaks carefully, the way she does. “But I think she’s talking about her memories.” We watch her disappear in the shimmer. Cicadas wind up and wind down.

  The moon has moved. Anju sips her tea, calm again. I am between sleeping and waking. I am doing my best to remember our mother’s face. I think I remember a perfume she wore, but I cannot be sure. Remembering her voice is easier. I feel Anju settle inside my sleeping curl. She is still thinking. “The last time we saw her was at Uncle Yen’s in Kagoshima. The last time we left Yakushima.”

  “The secret beach birthday. Two years ago?”

  “Three. Two years ago was the rubber dinghy birthday.”

  “She left suddenly. She was staying all week, then she just wasn’t there.”

  “Want to know a secret?”

/>   I am awake again. “A real one?”

  “’Course it’s a real one. I’m not a little kid.”

  “Go on, then.”

  “Wheatie told me never to tell anyone, not even you.”

  “What about?”

  “When she left that day. Mom, I mean.”

  “You kept a secret for three years? I thought she left because she was ill.”

  Anju yawns, indifferent to what I think or thought.

  “Tell me.”

  “I was sick that day. You were at soccer practice. I was doing homework on the downstairs table. Mom started making tempura.” Anju’s voice has gone sort of limp. I prefer it when she blubbers. “She dipped weird stuff into the batter.”

  “What weird stuff?”

  “Stuff you can’t eat. Her watch, a candle, a tea bag, a lightbulb. The lightbulb popped when she put it in the oil and she laughed funny. Her ring. Then she arranged everything on a dish with shiso leaves and put it in front of me.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She said she was playing. I said, ‘You’ve been drinking.’ She said, ‘It’s all Yakushima’s fault.’ I asked her why she couldn’t play without drinking. She asked me why I didn’t like her cooking. She said to eat my dinner up like a good girl. I said, ‘I can’t eat those things.’ So she got angry. You remember how she got on her visits sometimes?”