Number9dream

by David Mitchell

  The fibers in the neck of the thunder god tear, snap, and scream. I am still gripping it—I never expected it to come loose so soon—it comes away, the saw goes clattering down, I reshift my weight too far, lose my balance, and slide down between the thunder god’s back and the shrine wall. I seem to be falling for the longest time. The floor whacks the breath out of my body. I don’t break my back, but within an hour I will have turned into the incredible walking bruise. My enemy’s head rolls away, wood on wood, and comes to a rest on its side, looking right this way. Hatred, revenge, jealousy, rage—all twisted into the same contortions, and pulled tight. A smear of my blood over one nostril. The woods are too quiet. No adult, no police car, no grandmother. The blackbird has gone. Only the cannon boom of the ocean against the rocks a long way down. The gods are all related, and from this day on they are going to be in a conspiracy against me. I will live a life without luck. So be it. I get to my feet. I pick up the head, cradling it like an infant, and take it outside to the edge of the rock face. The sea breaks over the whalestone’s humpback, and the spray flies. One, two, three—I watch the severed head of the thunder god, all the way down. It vanishes in a white crown.

  three

  Video Games

  I catch a glimpse of my father being bundled into an unmarked van across the baseball field. I would recognize him anywhere. He hammers on the back window, but the van is already through the gates and disappearing into the smoking rubble of Tokyo. I leap onto our patrol stratobike, take off my baseball cap, and rest it on the console. Zizzi flashes me a peppermint smile and off we zoom. Lavender clouds slide by. I train my gun on a chili-pepper schoolboy, but for once things are exactly as they appear. The sunroof of a midnight Cadillac flips open, and out pops a lobster-mobsterBang! Shell and claws everywhere. I drill the rear window and the vehicle explodes in paintbox flames. The van swerves down the road to the airport. In the underpass an ambulance cuts us up—a scalpel-slashing medic leaps onto the front of our stratobike, eyeballs afroth with plagueBang! In the nuts! Bang! The mutant staggers, but refuses to dieBang! Blasted through a billboard. Reload. “You’re my top gun,” croons Zizzi. We get to the airport just in time to see my father dragged into a vanilla Cessna aircraft. I dare not risk a shot at his kidnappers at this range. A mighty chokmakopter eclipses the sun, and zombie spawn abseil to earth. I pulp dozens in midair, but the semolina army of death sludges up too quickly. “Zax, honey!” says Zizzi. “Megaweapon in McDonald’s!” I fire at the golden arches and collect the twenty-third-century rapid-fire bazooka. It purrs as I scythe—soon the runway is a spill of twitching limbs. I pepper the chokmakopter until it nose-dives into the fuel trucks. Octane fuchsia explosions light the world. “Way to go, Zax! Stage Two—Pursue your father’s abductors to their laboratory!” We soar in pursuit of the Cessna—I click my trigger to skip the preamble. We enter the underworld. The sewers are quiet. Too quiet. A gigahydra erupts, nine heads dripping lime slime from nine lassooing necksBang! Cleft like a cabbage. Reload. But from the stump two new heads are born. “Deep-fry the freak!” screams Zizzi—I aim at the beast’s trunk and activate my flamethrower. Whoooooorrrsh! It shrivels in my swath of strawberry fire. A lily-white Lilith, oneBang! and she’s history. A swarm of cyberwasps— bangabangabanga. Reload. My hand is killing me. The tunnel narrows to a dead end. An unseen iron door creaks open—a scientist in silhouette. “My son! You found me! At long last!” I relax and flex my gun hand. “You are just in time”—he rips off his false beard, his briefcase morphs into a grenade launcher—“to die!” The gritty gloom swarms with intelligent missiles, homing in on my body heat. Bangabangabanga! I miss most of them, and can’t even take aim at the impostor. Scarlet pixels of lifeblood splatter the screen. “Zax,” begs my sister, “don’t leave me here—insert a coin to continue. Honey, don’t quit now.”

  “Honey,” mimics a voice over my shoulder, “don’t quit now!” I replace my gun and turn around to face my spectator and his sarcastic applause. My first thought is that he is far too cool to be hanging out in video arcades. Older than me, a sleek ponytail, an earring. Pop-star good looks. “First time in the underworld, right?” His real voice is tailored Tokyoite.

  I nod. The real world fades in.

  “It was the same for me, my first time in the underworld.”

  Laser zaps, vampire howls, coin rattles, cyclical video-game music. “Oh.”

  “You see your father, so you let your guard down. A dirty trick! Next time, shoot the egghead on sight. It takes about nine shots to kill him.”

  “Well. Sorry I died and spoiled your fun.”

  The most casual of shrugs. “You’re doomed from the first coin. You pay to postpone the ending, but the video game always wins in the long run.”

  My last half-Marlboro has died in the ashtray. “Very deep.”

  “Actually, I was waiting for my date in the pool hall upstairs. Looks like she’s playing the be-late-keep-him-on-tenterhooks game. So I came down to make sure she hadn’t fucked up and was waiting outside. I saw you, wrapped up in Zax Omega and Red Plague Moon, and had to stay to watch. Did you know your tongue pokes out when you concentrate?”

  “No.”

  “It’s a two-player game, really. It even took me two weeks to master it.”

  “That must have cost you a fortune.”

  “No. My father owns a man who owns a distributor.”

  No reply presents itself. “Well, hope your date shows up soon.”

  “The bitch had better. Or I’ll flay her alive.”

  Saturday night in Shibuya bubbles and sweats. One week since my sleepless night, I decided to come exploring. It never ends! Uncle Yen took me out last year to his bar in Kagoshima, but that is nothing compared to this. Neither are the prices. Drones drink in squadrons, ties loose, collars undone. She-drones have their office uniforms stuffed into shoulder bags. I damn drones too much, considering I am one now. But I only pretend to be one. Maybe we all start out that way. Same as Mr. Aoyama. Couples on dates. Americans and beautiful women in moon-glasses. I bet the waitress with the perfect neck has a whole phone book of boyfriends like my spectator in the video arcade. A giant DRINK COCA-COLA cascade of magma maroons and holy whites. I suck a champagne bomb and walk on. Hostesses wave geriatric company presidents into taxis. In an amber-lit restaurant everyone knows one another. A giant Mongol warrior scooters past, flanked by bunny girls handing out leaflets advertising a new shopping complex somewhere. Girls in cellophane waistcoats, panties, and tights sit in glass booths outside clubs, offering chitchat and 10-percent-off coupons. I imagine scything through the crowds with the twenty-third-century megaweapon. The clouds are candy colored from the lights and lasers. Outside Aphrodite’s Soapworld a bouncer runs through the girls pinned up on the board. “Number one is Russian—classy, accommodating. Two, Filipina— attentive, well-trained. The French girl—well, need I say more? The Brazilian—dark chocolate, plenty of bite. Number five, English—white chocolate. Six is German—home of the weiner. Not an ounce of flab on the Koreans. Number eight are our exotic black twins, and number nine—ah, number nine is beyond the grasp of ordinary mortals—” He catches me gawking and cackles. “Come back in a decade or so, sonny, with your summer bonus.” I wander past an electronics shop, and on TV notice someone oddly familiar walking past an electronics shop. He stops, examines the TV, amazed and semi-appalled at how he must appear to other people. I buy a new pack of Marlboros. As I pass by the red lanterns of a noodle shop and smell the kitchen vapors pumped out, I suddenly remember how hungry I am. I peer through the window—it looks greasy enough to be affordable, even for me. I slide open the door and enter through the strings of beads. A steamy hole with a roaring kitchen. I order fried tofu noodles with green onions, help myself to a glass of iced water, and sit by the window, watching the crowds wash by and crunching ice cubes. Happy twentieth birthday, Eiji Miyake. Now I can begin to talk about My Teenage Years. Buntaro handed me a fine crop of cards this evening—one from each of my four
aunts. The fifth letter was another one from the ministry of unwelcome missives, which, evidently, is still operating its Get Miyake campaign. I light up a Marlboro and take out the letter again to reread, trying to figure out whether it is a step forward, backward, or sideward.

  Tokyo

  September 8

  Eiji Miyake,

  I am your father’s wife. His first wife, his real wife, his only wife. Well, well. My informant at Osugi & Bosugi tells me you have been trying to contact my husband. How dare you? Was your upbringing so primitive you were never taught shame? Yet somehow I always suspected this day would come. So, you have learned of your father’s influential status and are seeking quick cash. Blackmail is an ugly word, done by ugly people. But blackmail demands panache and pliable victims. You possess neither. Presumably, you believe you are clever, but in Tokyo you are a greedy boy from the countryside with a mind mired in manure. I will protect my daughters and my husband. We have paid enough, more than enough, for what your mother did. Perhaps this is her idea? She is a leech. You are a boil. My message to you is simple. If you dare to attempt to intimidate my husband, to show your face to any of our family, or to request a single yen: then, as a boil, you will be lanced.

  I drain the soup from the bottom of the bowl. A dragon chases its tail around the world. So. For my coming-of-age birthday I also received a paranoid stepmother who underlines too much, and two or more step-sisters. Unfortunately the letter itself won’t help me find my father—it was unsigned, unaddressed, and posted in a northern ward of Tokyo, which narrows down the search to about three million people, assuming it was even written there. My stepmother is no fool. Her negative attitude is yet another hurdle. On the other hand, to be pushed away, I have to be touched. Also, my father didn’t write the letter himself—so at worst, this means he still isn’t sure about meeting me. At best, it means he hasn’t actually been told I am trying to contact him. It is at this moment that I realize I don’t have my baseball cap. This is the worst unbirthday present I could receive. I call myself a name that earns a dubious glance from my neighbor. That cap was the last present I had from Anju. I think back—I had it in the video arcade. I leave, and backtrack through the currents of pleasure seekers.

  Zax Omega and Red Plague Moon is still plying for trade, but my baseball cap has gone. I search the rows of students pummeling the offspring of Street Fighter; a crowd of kids gathered around 2084; the booths of girls digitizing their faces with those of the famous; the alleys of salarymen playing mah-jongg with video stripstresses. All these people like my mother paying counselors and clinics to reattach them to reality: all of us people here paying Sony and Sega to reattach us to unreality. I identify the jowly supervisor by the way he jangles his keys. I have to yell into his ear. I smell the wax. “Anyone handed in a cap?”

  “Wha’?”

  “I left a baseball cap here, thirty minutes ago?”

  “Why?”

  “I forgot it!”

  “You forgot why you left it?”

  “Never mind.”

  I remember my spectator. In the upstairs pool hall, he said. I find the back stairs and go up. The sudden quietness and gloom are sub-aquatic. Three rows by six of ocean blue tables. I see him on the far side, playing alone, and on his head is my baseball cap. His ponytail is fed through the strap gap. He pockets a ball, looks up, and gestures me over. “I figured you’d be back. That’s why I didn’t chase after you. Want to win it off my head?”

  “I’d rather you just took it off your head.”

  “Where’s the fun in that?”

  “There isn’t any. But it is my cap.”

  He sizes me up. “True.” He presents my cap with a courtier flourish. “No offense meant. I’m not really myself tonight.”

  “I should thank you for rescuing it.”

  He smiles an honest smile. “You’re welcome.”

  My move. “So, uh, how late is she now?”

  “When does ‘late’ become ‘stood up’?”

  “I dunno. Ninety minutes?”

  “Then the bitch has well and truly stood me up. And I had to pay for this table until ten.” He gestures with his cue. “Play a few frames, if you’re not busy?”

  “I’m unbusy. But I’m too broke to bet.”

  “Can you afford one cigarette per game?”

  I am sort of flattered that he takes me seriously enough to offer me a game of pool. All I have had in the way of company since I got to Tokyo has been Cat, Cockroach, Suga, and Buntaro’s sarcasm. “Okay.”

  Yuzu Daimon is a final-year law student, a native of Tokyo, and the most gifted pool player I have ever met. He is brilliant. I mean it. He lets me win a couple of frames out of politeness, but by ten o’clock he mops up seven more in U-turn-spinning, jump-shotting, unerring style. He sinks shots the way a master hit man assassinates. We hand in the cues and sit down to smoke our winnings. My plastic lighter is shot: a flame flicks from Daimon’s thumb. It is a beautiful object. “Platinum,” says Daimon.

  “Must be worth a fortune.”

  “It was my twentieth-birthday present. You should practice more.” Daimon nods at the table. “You have a good eye.”

  “You sound like my sports teacher in high school.”

  “Oh, please. Say, Miyake, I’ve decided Saturday owes me compensation for being stood up. What say we go to a bar and find a pair of girls.”

  “Uh, thanks. I’d better pass.”

  “Your girlfriend will never find out. Tokyo’s too big.”

  “No, it’s nothing like that—”

  “So you don’t have a woman waiting anywhere?”

  “Not a nonimaginary one, no, but—”

  “You’re trying to tell me you’re gay?”

  “Not as far as I know, no, but—”

  “Then you took a vow of celibacy? You’re a member of a cult?”

  I show him the contents of my wallet.

  “So? I’m offering to foot the bill.”

  “I can’t mooch off you. You already paid for the table.”

  “You won’t be ‘mooching’ off me. I told you, I’m going to be a lawyer. Lawyers never spend their own money. My father has a hospitality account of a quarter of a million yen to get through, or his department will face a budgetary reassessment. So you see, by refusing you put our family in a difficult position.”

  That’s quite a lot of money. “Every year?”

  Daimon sees I am serious, and laughs. “Every month!”

  “Mooching off your father is even worse than mooching off you.”

  “Look, Miyake, I’m only talking about a couple of beers. Five at most. I’m not trying to buy your soul and definitely not your body, no offense. C’mon. When’s your birthday?”

  “Next month,” I lie.

  “Then consider it a premature birthday present.”

  Santa Claus works behind the bar, Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer emerges from the toilets holding a mop, and elves in floppy hats wait on the tables. I watch snowflakes dance on the ceiling, smoking a Marlboro lit by the Virgin Mary. Yuzu Daimon drums along to psychedelic Christmas carols. “It’s called the Merry Christmas Bar.”

  “But it’s September ninth.”

  “It’s December twenty-fifth every night in here. It is what we call a chick magnet.”

  “I might be being naive, but might your girlfriend have just been held up?”

  “You are being beyond naive, Miyake. What decade was this Yakushima place shipwrecked in? The bitch stood me up. I know it. We had an arrangement. A special arrangement, not the sort you just forget about. If she wanted to be there, she would have been, and I am now as single as a newborn babe, and she is jet trash to me. Jet trash. And don’t turn around right now, but I believe our feminine solace has just arrived. Over in the nook between the fireplace and the tree. The one in the coffee leather, the other in the cherry velvet.”

  “They must be models. They wouldn’t look at me twice. Once.”

  “I said I’ll pay for
your drinks, not massage your ego.”

  “I mean it.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Look at how I’m dressed.”

  “We’ll say you work as a roadie.”

  “I’m not even well-dressed enough to be a roadie.”

  “Then we’ll say you work as a roadie for Metallica.”

  “But we’ve never met them.”

  Daimon buries his face in his hands and chuckles. “Ah, Miyake, Miyake. What do you think bars are for? Do you think all these people enjoy paying exorbitant prices for pissy cocktails? Finish your beer. Whiskey is the drink you take on missions to penetrate the enemy interior. No more buts! Look at Cherry. Imagine yourself untying the cords of that bodice thing she’s wearing with your front teeth. A simple yes or no will do: do you want her?”

  “Who wouldn’t? But—”

  “Santa! Santa! Two double Kilmagoons! On the rocks!”

  “So, after the rape,” Daimon says in a loud voice as we take the adjacent table, “their world is bulldozed. Razed. She stops eating. She rips out the telephone. The only thing she shows any interest in are her dead son’s video games. When her husband—my oldest friend, as I told you— leaves home for work in the mornings she is already there, hunched over the pistol, wasting men on the sixteen-inch Sony. When he gets back, she hasn’t moved a muscle. Breakfast dishes still on the table, she doesn’t care. Bangabangabang! Reload. Back in the real world, the police drop the case—sexual assault during a night on the bare mountain? Forget it. Most men just can’t begin to understand what an experience like that . . . I despair of our sex, sometimes, Miyake. So. Nine months pass this way. She doesn’t leave the house once. Not a single time. He is going frantic with worry. Finally he asks a psychiatrist for advice. Somehow, the shrink concludes, she has to be reintegrated into society or risk sinking into self-willed autism. Now, they originally met in their university orchestra—she was a xylophonist, he was a trombonist. So he buys two tickets for Pictures at an Exhibition, and day by day, erodes away at her resistance until she agrees to come. Cigarette?