Number9dream

by David Mitchell

  The Mongolian halts ten paces away. His gun is cradled in his hand. The shots and lights from the reclaimed land seem far, far away now. My heart shotguns inside my rib cage. My overalls are scratchy and stinking. My final memories of life are the stupidest things. An unclaimed Haruki Murakami novel I salvaged from lost property, half-finished, in my locker at Ueno—what happened to the man stuck down his dry well with no rope? My mother laughing in Uncle Pachinko’s backyard trying to play badminton, drunk, of course, but happy at least. When did that happen? Regret that I never made my pilgrimage to Liverpool. Waking one morning to find a pencil line of snow over my and Anju’s futon, where it had blown in through a crack during an early fall. Is this junk the stuff of life? I hear my name, but I know it was only my imagination. I fight to keep control of my breathing, and sneeze. I never looked at Leatherjacket before, not properly. Yours is the last face I will ever see. Not how you imagine the face of death to look. Quite plain, mildly curious, taut. It has an immunity to emotion caused by the acts its master has made it witness. Do it. It would be too tacky for me to beg. So what are my last words? “I really don’t want to die.” How profound. “I suggest,” says Leatherjacket, “that you crouch.”

  “Crouch?” A crouch-style execution. Why?

  “On the ground. A—how do you say?—fetus position.”

  Why bother? Dead is dead.

  “You should crouch for your own safety,” my killer insists.

  I mangled a stillborn huff that Leatherjacket interprets as a No.

  Leatherjacket primes his gun. “Well, I warned you.”

  So many stars. What are they for?

  Tuna, abalone, yellowtail, salmon roe, bonito, egg tofu, human earlobe. The sushi is piled high. The wasabi is mixed in with the soy sauce to kill any impurities in the raw fish. It clots the soy sauce, sticky blood. I must stop thinking about the bowling alley. I must. We drove through the night since the dogs, it seemed, but the clock here says only 22:14. Little over a hundred minutes to go, I tell myself, but I find it hard to believe in anything good. I am in the grip of a cold that will get much worse before it will get any better. I get some water down my throat, it bloats my stomach. Even breathing is hard. We have the restaurant to ourselves. A family was here, but they shuffled out the moment they saw us. The old waitress stays cool, but the chef stays out back, lying low. I would if I could. Frankenstein lobs a sausage at me. “Why the sulky face, cub scout? Anyone would think you lost your parents.” Lizard smears wasabi in the soy sauce. “Maybe he realized the mastiff I shot back at Goichi’s was his long-lost papa.” Morino flicks his cigar tip at me. “Grin and bear it! Remember your heritage! You’re a Japanese law-abiding straight! You grin and bear it until your walker buckles and your drinking water is mercury oxide and our whole country is one coast-to-coast parking lot. I’m not knocking Japan. I love it. In most places the muscle is at the beck and call of the masters. In Japan, we, the muscle, are the masters. Japan is our gig. So grin. Bear it.” I may have to bear it, but the only thing I can grin about is that until we leave this restaurant my position cannot get worse. Lizard points to a corner of the room. “Father!” Saliva-shiny sushi cud. “See what I spy with my little eye—they got a karaoke machine!” My position just got worse. “Joy of joys.” Morino looks at Frankenstein. “Let loose the wings of song.” Frankenstein sings a song in English with a chorus that goes “I can’t liiiiiiiiive, if living is without yoo-ooo-ooo, I can’t giiiiiiiiive, I can’t take any mooooooooore.” The horn players bay along with the vowels. The noise is so bad I watch for the sushi to sprout maggots. Leatherjacket sips a glass of milk in the corner. He doesn’t seem to belong here either. Morino calls over the elderly waitress who has been nervously serving us. “Sing.” Without arguing she performs an enka number called “Cherry Blossoms of the Inland Sea,” about a mah-jongg gambler who dies to honor a debt, but only after ninety-nine verses. Lizard sings a song called “Electrode Incest” by a band of the same name. It contains no verses, choruses, or chord changes. The horn players clap wildly as Lizard does a turkey dance on the table and licks the microphone. Finally the song is over and Morino gestures me up.

  “No,” I say flatly. “I don’t sing.”

  A hail of sushi slaps my face. The horn players boo.

  “I don’t like music.”

  “Bullshit,” says Morino. “My investigator said you have twenty CDs, loads by that Beatle who got snuffed, a file of sheet music, and a guitar.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Nightmares do their homework.”

  I swab rice off my face. “You had my room broken into?”

  Morino holds his glass for the waitress to fill. “If I thought you had touched my baby girl, you virtual orphan brat, I would have had you broken into. So be grateful.”

  “I hate karaoke and I’m not going to sing.”

  Lizard does a snide imitation. “I hate karaoke and I’m not going to sing.” Then his fist fills my eye and the table becomes the ceiling.

  I pick myself up. My eye sort of sings, throbbing up.

  “I wanted to do that all day.” Lizard examines his knuckles. “Father told you to sing.”

  I shake my head. There is no blood.

  Frankenstein places a chopstick over his index and ring fingers, belches, and snaps the chopstick with his middle finger. “I say Miyake is in danger of a breach of contract, Father.”

  Morino wags his finger. “You have to make allowances. He was never the same after his sister drowned. They had their own little country. Fuck, they had their own language. What a pity he went off to Kagoshima the day she died, selfish fuck that he is. Hey!” He clicks his fingers at the waitress. “More edamame!” Drugged with cold germs as I am, I cannot guess if Morino has a gift for inspired guesses or a skeleton key to the basements of my mind. Either way, I want to spike his eye with my chopstick. I imagine myself doing it. Squirt. His wart throbs. I swear, the thing is watching me.

  According to the Cadillac clock we enter the reclaimed-land perimeter road at 23:04. Thirty minutes later we are still driving. Military band music pumps through the car and a fever pumps through me, or maybe the fever is in the car and the military music in me. Millimeters away from being a killer, I was. I am. Can a chance difference in spin and angle really make me not guilty? I threw. I had to. But I threw. One more hour and the file folder will be mine. Plus a magnificent black eye. I was expecting the pretender to the yakuza throne of Tokyo to be joined by fleets of armored personnel, but no. Just these two Cadillacs. My nose streams uncontrollably, and my neck feels clamped in some sort of truss. Maybe some code of honor binds the two factions to nonviolence. Or, please no, maybe this is a suicide mission. I tell myself if Morino was the kamikaze type he wouldn’t have made it to his age, or even his body weight, but I no longer know what to think. Nobody says much. Morino calls Mama-san, at Queen of Spades, I guess. “Is Miriam at work yet? I called her place. Tell her to call my cell phone the moment she gets in.” Lizard and Frankenstein smoke their Camels, Morino his cigar. I am too ill to want to smoke. Popsicle whimpers in her narcotic sleep. The sea is calm enough to walk on and the sky is stars, acre after acre. The full moon is a six-watt bulb—I could shatter it with a well-aimed stone. Morino makes another call, but nobody answers. “Suicides tend to check themselves out when the moon is full, a nurse once told me. Suicides, and, for some reason, horses.” Finally we slow to a halt, parked at a strategic angle to the horn players’ Cadillac, I guess. I get out. My cramped muscles hurt. Yet another construction site. Tokyo suburbs are demolition dumps or construction sites. The giant terminus building is still a giant foundation. Flat as a pool table, the reclaimed land extends all the way to the mountains. A bridge, with the central section missing, rises on either side of where we stand. I can hear the lazy sea a short distance over the embankment. “Say, Miyake.” His lighter flame dances. “You can monkey up that bridge.” I wonder what the catch is. “Nagasaki is the opposition, and you don’t fit the image
. I don’t want anyone thinking I’m recruiting from kindergarten.” Lizard snickers.

  “Will you give me the file folder?”

  “You are boring me. Not until after fucking midnight. Go.”

  I have walked several paces when Leatherjacket, standing on a mound of boulders, whistles. I thought it was to me but it wasn’t. “Our friends are coming. Nine vehicles.”

  “Nine.” Frankenstein shrugs. “I had hoped for more, but nine is not bad.”

  I begin running up the slope. The bridge is the nearest thing to a safe haven. On the other hand, it is a perfect cell to keep me in. I get within a few meters of the top. I guess I am thirty meters up—high enough to clamp my lungs and make my balls retract. I peer over the parapet and watch Nagasaki’s cars draw up. They park semicircling Morino’s two Cadillacs and flick their beams on full. They kill their engines. Four men in each vehicle file out, each with a combat jacket, a helmet, and an automatic rifle, and take up firing positions. Not for the first time today, I feel I have strayed into an action movie. Morino and his men put on sunglasses. No guns, no night vision. Morino holds his megaphone in one hand and keeps the other in his pocket. Thirty-six heavily armed men to seven. A man in a white suit climbs out at leisure, flanked by two bodyguards. I wait for the order to fire. No file folder. It was all for nothing. Morino’s voice reverbs over the reclaimed land as if his megaphone is a pinhole for the night to talk through. “Jun Nagasaki. Do you have any final requests?”

  “I stand here frankly amazed, Morino. Have you really sunk so low, so quickly? Five tired goons, one ex–arms dealer—I shall kill you myself, Suhbataar, so painfully, so professionally, and so slowly that even you will be impressed—and an unarmed catamite hiding up a bridge.” So much for my safe haven. “ This is your comeback squad? Do you have an aircraft carrier waiting offshore? Are you hoping to kill me by sheer anticlimax?”

  “I summoned you here to deliver my verdict.”

  “Are you a tertiary syphilitic? Are you Ultraman?”

  “I’ll allow you to apologize with honor. You may kill yourself.”

  “This is beyond stupid, Morino, this is rude. Let me get this right. You seriously fuck up my opening day at Xanadu. Persuading the press that Ozaki fell by accident has been a logistic hernia. You hurl bowling balls at my three managers until their skulls are Lego, and then you damage two innocent bouncers the old-fashioned way and shoot my finest dog. My dog, Morino, is what really hurts. You amateur. No operator of style ever, ever harms an animal.”

  “Style? Importing uninspected shitforbeef burgers from the U.S. and killing off Wakayama schoolchildren with O-157, and then getting your Ministry of Agriculture poodles to blame the radish farmers, is this style? Blackmailing bank executives over the figures you made them cook by refusing to pay back your bubble economy loans: style? You call a ‘Pay up, Mr. Food Manufacturer, or pay for a razor blade in your baby products’ scam style?”

  “Your failure to grasp the fact that the world has progressed since 1970 is why I inherited and expanded Tsuru’s interests and why you are still drawing your operational revenue by scaring loose change out of Shinjuku bar owners. How, oh how do you suppose you will still be alive in five minutes?”

  “You are unaware that I have two secret weapons.”

  “Do you? I am ablaze with curiosity.”

  “The first weapon is your blazing curiosity, Nagasaki. Even in the old days, you spoke before you shot.”

  “Is your second secret weapon as terrifying as your first?”

  “I present to you, ladies”—it is hard for me to catch the next word— “NimQSix.”

  “ ‘Nim—Q—Six.’ A magic robot? A drain unblocker?”

  “A plastic explosive developed by the Israeli secret service.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “Of course you never heard of it. The Israelis do not advertise in Time. But microcells of NimQSix are embedded in the triggers of the guns your dumb fucking apes are holding. The casings of your swanky Kevlar helmets are peppered with the stuff. My compatriot here, Mr. Suhbataar, oversaw the customization of your equipment when he diverted it from his Russian military supplier.”

  Some of Nagasaki’s men turn to look at their boss.

  Nagasaki folds his arms. “In the sad history of sad dumb bluffing fucks with empty hands, Morino, you are the saddest dumbest bluffing fuck of them all. Which weapons do you think I used to wipe out Tsuru? Let me assure you, there is nothing booby-trapped about my hardware.”

  “First, I needed you to bury the Tsuru faction. For this, I thank you—”

  “Thank me when your lying guts are leaking through bullet holes. Now, I have a city to run. Stand away from the motors, you puppy dogs. I ordered those cars myself via our mutual Mongolian and I don’t want to damage the paintwork.”

  Morino stubs his cigar out on the paintwork. “Shut up and learn. NimQSix microcells weigh one twentieth of a gram. A dot on a page. It is a perfectly stable explosive, even under repeat-fire ricochet conditions, until—here is the beauty of the piece—it is oscillated by a specific VHF frequency. Then the microcell explodes with a force ample to blow away body parts. The single oscillator east of Syria is built into my cell phone.” To me, shivering with cold heat thirty meters up, probably with a sniper aiming at my head, this does not sound overly convincing.

  Nagasaki spits. “I am getting bored of this gangster-movie pseudo-science—”

  “Humor me for ten more seconds. NimQSix is the future. You really should take the time to educate yourself. I enter the code—I took the precaution of doing this prior to your arrival tonight—and simply press the DIAL button. Like this—”

  Blossoms of explosions boom and flame and thunder.

  I duck.

  Shock waves scalp the air.

  The reboom echoes off the mountains.

  Finally I peer over the parapet. Nagasaki’s men are scattered around where they were standing. The men who are out of the glare of the headlights are shadowy piles, but the ones who fell in the light—red as a slaughterhouse floor. Most of the torsos still have their legs attached, but the gun hands are blown away. And their heads—imploded by their combat helmets—are nowhere. I never learned the vocabulary I need to take this in. Only in war movies, horror movies: nightmares. The Cadillac door opens and Popsicle falls onto her knees. She gives a yelp of disgust, as if surprised by a spider in the bath. “Yaaa!” Lizard bounds around. “Yaaaaaaaaa! Fucking yaaaaaaaaahaaaaaaaaay!” Nagasaki is still alive—no helmet to remove his skull—and trying to get to his feet. Both arms are shredded stumps after the elbows. Morino struts over and puts the megaphone into his enemy’s ear. “Isn’t science wonderful?” Bang!

  The megaphone turns to me. “Seasonal fireworks, Miyake. Now listen. Midnight has passed. So the file folder in the Cadillac is all yours. Yes. Father keeps his word. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to appreciate your hard-earned information because you’ll be dead as a fucking dodo. I brought you along just in case Nagasaki wheeled your father out of retirement. I credited the cretin with too much cunning, so it seems we have one witness too many to the night’s entertainment, instead of a possible bargaining chip. Mr. Suhbataar has asked to put the bullet through your head, and as he is the chief architect of my master plan, how could I say no? If it makes you feel any better, you were a forgettable boy who would have lived the bored, stifled, colorless life of your countrymen. And yeah, your father is a meaningless jerk too. Believe me, you will miss nothing. Sweet dreams.”

  Why bother? Dead is dead.

  “You should crouch for your own safety,” my killer insists.

  My fear mangles my response to a stillborn huff.

  “No?” Leatherjacket primes his gun. “Well, I warned you.”

  In his hand is not his gun but his cell phone. He enters a number, leans over the parapet, points down at the Cadillacs, and crouches.

  The night rips open its guts, I am knocked over by a sheer wall of noise, the bridge sha
kes, a metallic, stony hail falls, I glimpse a flaming piece of car arcing overhead, and the file folder containing my father is cinders. The night rezips. The echo sonic booms off the mountains. Gravel presses into my cheekbone. I sort of stand—to my surprise, my body still works. Smoke pours upward from the craters where the Cadillacs were parked.

  Leatherjacket enters another number into his cell phone. I crouch, wondering what could be left to blow up—is he a walking bomb who explodes his own evidence?—but this time the cell phone is only a cell phone. “Mr. Tsuru? Suhbataar. Your wishes regarding Mr. Nagasaki and Mr. Morino have been realized. Indeed, Mr. Tsuru. Just as they sowed, they reaped.” He puts his phone away and looks at me.

  Burning and crackling.

  My lip is bleeding where I bit it. With the part of me that can still speak, I say something like “Are you going to kill me?”

  “I am thinking about it. Are you afraid?”

  I nod. Very, very afraid.

  “Fear is not necessarily a weakness. I disdain weakness, but I disdain waste. To survive, you must persuade yourself that tonight was another man’s nightmare into which you accidentally strayed. Find a place to hide by daybreak, and stay hidden for many days. If you assist the police in any way, you will be killed immediately. Do you understand?”

  I nod, and sneeze an enormous sneeze.

  By the time I look up, I am alone with the smoke and the night.

  five

  Study of Tales

  THE ALL-CONSUMING

  Goatwriter peered out at the starless night. His breath misted up the window. He counted only three noises: the candle spluttering on his writing bureau; Mrs. Comb battling in her sleep, growling “Don’t-Care was made to care, Amaryllis Broomhead!”; and Pithecanthropus, snoring in his undercarriage hammock. The whisperings were later than usual tonight. Goatwriter rummaged for his spectacles. He examined a lost volume of poems written by Princess Nukada in the ninth century, and by and by Goatwriter was oblivious to the here and now. This insomnia had been Goatwriter’s regular nocturnal guest since midsummer. The Venerable Bus parked itself between midnight and the early hours, Goatwriter woke, and nothing could make him sleep again. He did not mention his insomnia: not even to his best friend, Pithecanthropus, and certainly not to Mrs. Comb, who was sure to prescribe a curative bitterer than the complaint. Nor did he mention the whisperings that often came to him. In the beginning, Goatwriter believed they originated in the Aberdeen waterfalls where the Venerable Bus had rested that week, but this theory was scotched when he heard them again on the Solomon Islands on Maundy Thursday. Goatwriter then wondered if he were going insane, but no, all his mental faculties seemed as muscular as ever. Goatwriter had finally started believing that his whisperings came from his writing brush—the selfsame brush Lady Shonagon used to write her pillow book, thirteen thousand crescent moons ago. What did they want, these suspirations? Goatwriter heard a rush, a rustle, and Princess Nukada was left on the shelf. He pressed his ear against the brush. Yes, syllables were bubbling up again. Goatwriter dipped his brush in ink and began to write the words he heard, slowly at first as words spattered singly, but then quicker, as sentences filled and over-spilled.