Number9dream

by David Mitchell

  “All of October?”

  “The working hours are brutal, be warned—ten A.M. to midnight, seven days. Added up, it comes to a poor hourly rate. But it would give you a breathing space to land another job.”

  “You would really leave me in charge of the store?”

  “No Al Pacino look-alike has come around asking for you. Hiding here was wise, but you can come out now.”

  “No, I mean—would you trust me with your, uh, business?”

  “My wife does, so I do. And I got a glowing reference from your previous employer.” Buntaro starts toothpicking. “Running the store is easy—I can teach you everything in thirty minutes. And my mom will drop by every evening to pick up the cash and do the accounts. What do you say? Do I tell my wife to book our hotel in our subtropical paradise of American heliports and guides whose makeup never runs?”

  “Of course. Sure. Thank you.”

  “No need to, kid. This is business. Let’s smoke a Marlboro on the step to seal a mutually beneficial package. But don’t tell my wife. I’m supposed to be quitting in time for Kodai’s grand opening.” We go outside and get through most of a packet, listening to the frogs and the rain in the pond. The rain and smoke keep the mosquitoes away. “By the way,” says Buntaro, “does the name Ai Imajo happen to mean anything to you?”

  I scratch the back of my head and nod.

  “Friend or foe?”

  “Friend, I hope. Why?”

  “Apparently she appeared at Ueno lost property this morning to report a lost Eiji Miyake. My mother said you had left Tokyo unexpectedly for family reasons. The young lady made a ‘nice of him to let me know!’ face, thanked my mother, and went away.” I stay poker-faced because I know my landlord is watching from the corner of his eye. “Well.” Buntaro gets to his feet. “I’ll go and tell my wife our good news.” I walk through with him to the entrance hall. Buntaro pretends to check for dust. “I must say, you keep this place neat as a palace. Neater than your luxury penthouse, anyway.” He slaps his shirt pocket and takes something out. “I am a dolt! I forgot. This pictogram thing came for you today. Well. Sleep tight and pleasant dreams.” When Buntaro has gone I take the pictogram into the living room and inspect it by the lamplight. Nagano, Mountain Paradise. Something tells me Buntaro’s memory lapse was no accident—this is from my mother, forwarded by Aunt Yen. I sit down and balance it on my knee. It hardly weighs a thing, but it weighs so much. Skies gray with snow, mountainsides pink with cherry blossom, snow turquoise with sky, happy hikers, happy skiers. More intimate blame-shifting revelations.

  The creator of Goatwriter looks down at me. I cannot see her eyes but I can hear her voice. “I don’t think you’re being very fair to her.” I scowl at her. “You know, we are all of us writers, busy writing our own fictions about how the world is, and how it came to be this way. We concoct plots and ascribe motives that may, or may not, coincide with the truth.” I scowl at the envelope, wondering. “Take your mother. You write her part for her. Have you ever wondered how she writes her part? Go on. Open it now. Spare us further agony.” Just like Mrs. Sasaki, the author is sympathetic and stern in equal measures. I flick the envelope with my finger, moodily, over and over. “Ah,” she sighs, and the drowsy sea in the background sighs too, “the young.”

  Pithecanthropus, meanwhile, had slipped from the wired jungle and was exploring the edges of the cavernous website. He noticed that all the cables led to a single giant plug. Resting on this plug, hidden in a rack of Phillips screwdrivers, Pithecanthropus, with his keen eyes, made out Goatwriter’s beloved writing brush. He stowed it in the waxy hair above his ear, and made his way back to the screen when he heard TV orchestra music announce ScatRat’s return. The rodent was dressed in a glittering quizmaster jacket, clutching an envelope marked “Million Dollar Riddle.” Queen Shrouds hissed in anticipation. “Let us be quite clear. When you fail to answer, your copyright reverts to me.”

  Mrs. Comb clucked. “When Sir answers right, we go free—with Sir’s pen.”

  Queen Shrouds ignored her. “ScatRat—let the riddling commence!”

  ScatRat slit the envelope with a fang. Drum rolls cued from hidden speakers. “What, pray, is da most mathematical animal in da universe?”

  Mrs. Comb tutted. “Well, what kind of a daft question is that?”

  ScatRat slurped his side of the screen in a most disgusting manner. “Ya got sixty seconds, Goatee! Go!” A stopwatch appeared in the corner and countdown music began. Goatwriter chewed his beard. “Let me see now . . . the most mathematical animal . . . well, the case for humans is fatally undermined by their television . . . Dolphins excel in the brain weight/body weight means test. . . . However, no cleverer Euclidean geometrician exists than the bolas spider . . . Yet what of the scallop’s knowledge of Cartesian oval lenses? Oh . . . crikey . . . what can the answer be?” Only fifteen seconds remained, and Queen Shrouds and ScatRat were already dancing a celebratory rumba. “I can see the rapturous reviews!” The queen clapped gleefully. “Taste the publishers’ lunches!” Desperately, Mrs. Comb searched in 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 show her Goatwriter’s writing brush. In the glare of the screen, however, Mrs. Comb’s sharp eyes spotted the focus of her loathing jump between the primitive ancestor’s eyebrows. “Fleas!” she shrieked. “Fleas!”

  Queen Shrouds’s rumba halted. “I beg your pardon?”

  Goatwriter clopped his hoofs. “By jiminy, yes! Of course, the most mathematical animal is the flea!”

  ScatRat’s leer disappeared. “Ya gotta say why or it don’t count!”

  “Ahem.” Goatwriter allowed himself a faint smile. “Fleas subtract from happiness, divide attention, add to miseries, and multiply alarmingly.”

  ScatRat gazed up at his screen idol. “Some ya win, Yer Maj, some ya—” Queen Shrouds muted him with a doubleclick of her fingers. “You corrupted, bugged cybervermin, only one punishment fits this crime!” ScatRat’s “nooooooooo” diminished in volume as he was dragged to the recycle bin where all his ones were zeroed. The queen turned her furious gaze to Goatwriter. Gigabytes crackled. “And if you think, O Billy Goat, some legal-eagle babble prevents a real live witch”—Mrs. Comb gasped as the queen tossed away her crown and resumed her hideous cronehood—“yes, Witch Shrouds herself, from seizing the object of her desires, then even for a creator of fiction you are cretinous beyond belief!” She primed the on-screen digitizer. “Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . .”

  Pithecanthropus pulled the plug on the project. The system crashed and the website of the witch vanished as if it had never existed, which in a sense it hadn’t, for Goatwriter, Mrs. Comb, and Pithecanthropus found themselves sitting in the sun-blasted desert, too astonished to utter a syllable.

  September 20

  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. I didn’t 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 made me realize 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 counselors, 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. 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 nonpaying guest in a small hotel opened by someone I knew from my days in Tokyo, years and years ago, after I left you to the tender mercies of your grandmother. He is a big-shot hotelier now, quite respectable, except for two very expensive divorces, which I’m sure he deserved, just as he deserves his success now. (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 favorite two words are project and venture. 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 [or Yakushima?] 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 an underpass (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 rites for her soul, but now I think that 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.

  THE STUDY OF TALES

  Goatwriter sat at his writing bureau and watched bats stream from the bracken-matted dusk. Shadows danced in the forest of moss. “I declare, I could swear . . .” Goatwriter thought. “Not like that sewer-mouthed ScatRat, I trust, sir,” replied Mrs. Comb, who was polishing the stair. Goatwriter stroked the writing brush of Lady Shonagon, and thought “. . . in the arborescent soul, far and deep, I may glean the truly untold tale. The Venerable Bus penetrated this forest seven days ago and has not moved on. Unprecedented. What might it signify?” The evening was cooling. 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 they would wake up somewhere else the following morning, but doubted that they would.

  The Venerable Bus had traveled nowhere that night. Pithecanthropus was on his morning dig, tunneling through creaking coal seams in search of diamonds for Mrs. Comb’s birthday, for he had heard that they were a girl’s best friend and might put in a word in his favor. This far down Pithecanthropus could hear the earth furnace boom and clang to its own rhythms. Hours are not found so far below the land, among troll larvae and veins of unknown metals, and Pithecanthropus lost all track of time, so he could not have said when it was that an impossibly distant voice found him at last. He strained to listen. “You hulking great lout! Where are you when I need you?” Mrs. Comb! Needing him! Pithecanthropus swam upward through the loosened earth with a mighty breast-stroke, and resurfaced within sixty seconds. Mrs. Comb was flapping in circles as wildly as any headless chicken, waving a note. “Here you are at last! Muckgrubbing 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 the stove!” She thrust it at Pithecanthropus, who groaned—all those squiggles skidding over the 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! Alone! He said he didn’t want to drag us into anything dangerous! What if he meets a mild cannibal much less a wild animal? What if the Venerable Bus drives off tonight? We’d never see Sir again! And he forgot his asthma inhaler!” Mrs. Comb began sobbing into her apron. The sight 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 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 prying me awake. I kept dreaming somebody was trying to force a window somewhere. I tidy the pages of the manuscript on the writing bureau, and pick my way between the books to the trapdoor. I shout down—“Sorry, Buntaro! I lost track of the time.” I go down to the living room, where a shadow closes the door behind me. It is not Buntaro. My heart rams itself up my throat. She is a slight, severe, middle-aged woman, unafraid, curious, reading me. She is dressed in forgettable clothes, anonymous as a face in a catalog. You would pass her a hundred times and never notice her. Unless she suddenly appeared in your living room. How owlish and scarred and gray 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 mail drop.”

  Her? “Morino’s detective?”

  “Correct. 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 you asked me to drop by, is it? I hope you will 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 neighborhood.”

  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. I trailed Mr. Ogiso here yesterday evening to note when we could talk undisturbed.”

  “With respect, Mrs. Yamaya, I asked for a file, not a visit.”

  “With respect, Mr. Miyake, see it from my point of view. 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 professionalism; 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.”

  “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. Precisely. To consider this very question.”

  “How much money do you want?”

  “Please, Mr. Miyake. You are too poor to bribe a bicycle inspector.”

  “Then what are we supposed to be considering
? Whether or not I deserve it?”

  Mrs. Yamaya’s murmur could hush a stadium. “Deserve is a hazardous verb. It is best to leave it out of the equation.”

  “So what does enter the equation?”

  The garden crow hops over to the balcony and peers in.

  Mrs. Yamaya folds her arms. “Consequences.”

  The doorbell goes and I twitch—hot ash falls on my legs—and 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 goes 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 setup organized with Mrs. Yamaya, and I’ve 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. “Hello, sir! 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 his love come in.” 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 Jesus Christ of 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’ smiles are ironed on—holding a brochure called “Truth” 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 file folder on my father is snuffed out right away—the envelope is labeled “Tokyo Evening Mail—Correspondence Box 333.” Inside is a letter, addressed to me in the handwriting of a very old person. I sit down and slit it open.