Number9dream

by David Mitchell

  I wake up with an aching bladder to a hideous shipwreck noise, very near. The typhoon shoulder-barges the door open when I shift the sack of soil. I piss through the crack, wedging the door between my feet very very carefully indeed. My piss is unthreaded by the wind and probably reaches Singapore. I wonder if the Singapore police will trace it back and fine me. I return to my tarpaulin nest, but going back to sleep is made difficult by the violence in the sky. I wonder if the teahouse at Miyazaki Mountain Clinic is still standing. I hope so. If not, I will help the tea master repair it next weekend. I remember every detail of my last dream. I seem to be in one of my dream binges. When I began my serial uncle visits after Anju drowned, I imagined there lived somewhere the Real Eiji Miyake, in an Adland house with the Real Anju of course, not the one who drowned. This Real Eiji Miyake dreamed me, every night. My waking life was his dream. The typhoon catches its breath, and renews its assault as a gale. I roll over on something hard, and find a medium-size, flat, round stone. I put it in my backpack. The potting shed is not going to blow away, not tonight. The gale catches its breath, and renews its assault as a high wind. It is then that I hear a person, snoring! Inside the potting shed! Amazed, I get up and look behind the narrow partition. My eyes must have adjusted to the darkness, because I can see a woman, asleep. She does not look like a gardener. She must be a visitor who got trapped by the typhoon, and snuck in here for shelter, the same as me. Do I wake her? Or would that scare her? Her eyes open. “Don’t be afraid,” I begin, although I am the one who is afraid. “I was wondering when you would wake up.” She springs up and her kimono swings open. I am too startled to squeak. For a very weird moment, I mistake her for the mother of Yuki Chiyo, the little lost-property girl at Ueno. It cannot be her. Can it? She dabs Godzilla with her thumb, and dabs my nipples with her wet thumb. Her other hand explores my boxer shorts. I begin to realize this is very wrong, that Ai and I are not yet lovers but we are no longer single, but her lips slide open and a million tiny silver fish change direction with one accord. I cannot fight this, or look away, or respond. So I come.

  Over the shoulder of Yuki Chiyo’s mother I see Mrs. Persimmon. She perches on the sack of soil and sucks pulp from her favorite fruit. Shiny stones slide from between her wrinkled lips and fall to earth, ever so slowly.

  The bright garden lies trashed by an orgy of gods. Spilt juices from green veins scent the air. Ripped blooms, torn branches, uprooted shrubs. I find a small, flat, round stone. I put it in my backpack. I would love to stay awhile and watch the pond, but I want to avoid the potting-shed owner, and anyway the Yakushima ferry leaves in ninety minutes. I wade through the ripped bougainvillea and clamber over the wall, in time to surprise a schoolgirl on a passing bus—she grabs the attention of her classmate, but the bus has already moved on. My only witness. Back among the houses, neighbors are already up, discussing the mending of fences. I stop at a Lawson’s and buy a bottle of Minute Maid grapefruit juice and a cup of ramen—kimchi flavor—and ask the girl to add hot water. I eat it on the seawall. Sakurajima belches ash into the spotless sky, and handkerchief waves fold blue to white. Typhoons wreck worlds but the following morning clean worlds up. I phone Uncle Yen to say I am still alive—I tell him I spent the night with friends in Kagoshima, otherwise he will probably insist I pay Iso Garden the entrance fee, he is that sort of man—then I walk the rest of the way to the port. The ferry is waiting—cars and trucks are already being herded on by harbormen with flags and whistles. I fill in my boarding card, pay my fare, wash, brush my teeth. I need a shower, and I need to clean my boxer shorts. I look for a telephone.

  “Typhoon eighteen was on the news,” said Ai, “but it didn’t get much attention because of the pigeons.”

  “Pigeons are grabbing headlines now?”

  “All day yesterday, all over Tokyo, pigeons were flying into buildings, colliding with cars. Like some freaky disaster movie. You can imagine the rumors, theories, and experts cramming the TV stations. Secret government tests, avian flu, Aum cultists, magnetic wave shifts. Then the moon last night had its brightest halo for nineteen years. How ice crystals in the atmosphere could affect pigeons nobody knows, but it adds to the spookiness. And this morning, I went to buy some coffee for breakfast, and the camphor tree in front of the prison was black with crows! What a noise! Worse than a brass orchestra warming up! Seriously, it was as if the prince of darkness was due any moment.”

  “So much for my measly typhoon.”

  “Let me change the subject before your coins run out. I spoke with Sachiko before she went to work yesterday evening. If you need anywhere to stay when you get back to Tokyo, you can crash here. On the sofa. When I say so, which will depend on how I feel. You have to clean up and cook every third day. And you mustn’t answer the phone in case Sachiko’s grandmother calls and assumes you are her live-in lover, or worse still, in case my mother calls and assumes your accent is not Yakushima but French.”

  “Hey . . .” I like the sound of “when I say so.” “Thanks.”

  “No need to decide yet. Mull it over.”

  Several islanders spot me as I board the ferry. Schoolmates’ mothers, cousins’ friends, a sugar cane and fruit wholesaler who does business with Uncle Orange. They ask about life in Tokyo, more out of politeness than interest. I say I am back to collect my winter clothes before the weather changes. Talk is of typhoon eighteen, and how much damage repair will cost, and who is likely to pay for what. I hide in the second-class area, and make a sort of barrier with my backpack to doze behind. A Kansai ladies’ ramblers’ club takes up the rest of the floor around me. They are decked out in flannel shirts, bodywarmers, multiweather trousers, silly hats, and sensible footwear. They unfold maps and plot routes. You can tell the islanders apart easily—they look bored. Because there was no sailing yesterday afternoon the boat continues to fill with passengers. I shuffle up for a man with a greyhound jawline and cheek-bones who asks me what time the ferry arrives at Miyanoura. He pays for this information in unshelled peanuts. I accept a few because it would be rude not to, but in fact I really enjoy them. We munch our way through most of the bag, piling up a mound of husks. Greyhound is a publisher in the Ochiai area of Tokyo and knows Ueno lost-property office—he met Mrs. Sasaki’s sister at a literary dinner once. The engines groooaaarrrrrrrrr into life, the hiking ladies wooooooooo! and the porthole view rotates and slides away. The nine o’clock news bulletin is about the expected resignation of another prime minister following a coalition collapse. “Nothing is older than this morning’s news,” says Greyhound, “and nothing is newer than Pericles.” Pretty soon the offshore reception turns the news to hiss, and the Kirishima-Yaku National Park video clicks on. All islanders know the script by heart. It lullabies us on these crossings.

  All Japan has been concreted over. The last forests are now discarded chopsticks, the Inland Sea is covered and declared a national parking lot, and where mountains once stood apartment buildings vanish into the clouds. When people reach the age of twenty their legs are amputated and their torsos are fitted with interfaces that plug directly into sophisticated skateboards for use in the home or office. My twentieth birthday was back in September, so I am long overdue for this rite-of-passage operation. But I want to keep my legs attached, so I have joined the resistance movement. I am taken to be introduced to our three leaders, who live in Miyakonojo, the rebel hideout. Their bodies are amputated too, for extra camouflage. Their heads sit in a row, drying in the sun. Their necks are trussed to the edge of a bowling alley, and I realize I have been brought before Gunzo, Nabe, and Kakizaki. I hope they don’t recognize me—they could have me executed as a double agent. Fortunately, when they see me they blink—“Messiah! Messiah! Messiah!” This perplexes me. “Are you quite sure?” They seem to be. “The message shall be revealed to you! You alone shall reverse the meteoric dive of humanity into endless suffering!” That sounds great. “How?” Kakizaki smiles tenderly. “Pull out the plug.” Between my feet is a bath plug, with a shining chai
n. I pull. Underneath is earth—since the asphalting laws, earth is forbidden. It stirs, and a worm wriggles upward and out of the hole. Another follows, and another, another. The last Japanese worms. They wriggle their way to a preordained position on a nine-by-nine grid. Each position on this grid is a kanji or kana, written in worm bodies instead of brushstrokes. These words form the true scripture. It is also death for the worms—the tarmac hot-plates their tender bodies. As they sizzle, they smell of tuna and mayonnaise. But their sacrifice is not in vain. In the eighty-one characters I read truth—naked, pure, golden. The secrets of hearts and minds, quarks and love, peace and time. The truth glows in blazing jade on my memory’s retina. I shall impart this wisdom to my thirsty species, and the arid desert of humanity will bloom again.

  “Miyake! Miyake, you mongrel! Wake up!”

  The upside-down face of Mr. Ikeda, my ex–sports teacher. A half-eaten tuna and mayonnaise sandwich wilts in his hand. I jerk up, groaning with annoyance. Mr. Ikeda assumes I am just sleepy. I have to remember something, and look away, but Mr. Ikeda buzzes back into my field of vision. . . . “I saw you in the ferry terminal, but then I said to myself, ‘No, Miyake is in distant Edo!’ What are you doing back so soon? The big city too much to handle, hey?”

  I am forgetting something. What is it? “Not really, sir. Actually, I—”

  “Ah, to be young in Tokyo. I could almost envy you if I wasn’t already me. I spent the first two Great Primes of my life in Tokyo. I waltzed into the top sports university—you wouldn’t have heard of it—and a wild young thing I was, too. The days I had! The nights I had! My nickname among the ladies gives you the full story. Ace. Ace Ikeda. Then in my first teaching post I put together one of the finest high school soccer teams Japan ever saw. Could have gone all the way to the national cup qualifiers, if the referee hadn’t been a geriatric, blind, crippled, corrupt, menstruating, dribbling sack of slug shit. Me and my boys—our nickname? The Invincibles! Not like”—Mr. Ikeda waves his hand in disgust at the students in their YAKUSHIMA JUNIOR HIGH tracksuit tops—“this pack of mongrels.”

  “Are you coming back from a friendly game, sir?”

  “Nothing friendly about that bloated faggot tapeworm Kagoshima coach. During the typhoon last night I was praying a truckload of Agent Orange would crash into his house.”

  Whatever I had been charged to remember, it has slipped away. “So, what was the score, sir?”

  Mr. Ikeda grimaces. “Kagoshima Tosspots—twenty. Yakushima Mongrels—one.”

  This knife I cannot resist twisting. “One goal? A hopeful sign, sir.”

  “Kagoshima Tosspots scored an own goal. Well, doubtless I’ll be seeing you around.” Mr. Ikeda skulks off. The tourist video clicks off—we must be within broadcasting range of Yakushima. I look through the window and see the island, sliding over the horizon. The prime minister promises that under his guidance the country will become a lifestyle superpower. Greyhound cracks open a peanut. “Politicians and sports coaches both need to be smart enough to master the game, but dumb enough to think it matters.”

  I remember my dream.

  “Are you unwell?” asks Greyhound.

  “I . . . dreamed I was a sort of Sanzohoshi carrying the Buddhist scriptures from India. I was shown the divine knowledge necessary to save humanity from itself.”

  “I’ll give you six percent on the first ten thousand copies sold, nine percent thereafter.”

  “But I can only remember one word.”

  “Which is?”

  “Mumps.”

  “As in . . .”

  “Yeah, the illness that makes your neck swell up.”

  “Mumps . . . what?”

  “Mumps . . . nothing.”

  “Deal’s off.” Greyhound shakes the bag. “Sorry. I ate the last peanut.”

  Yakushima increases in size every time I take my eyes off it. One of the hiking-club ladies’ hats flies away over the sea, and I turn away from the coos and consternation to hide my laugh. I can see the jetfoil in Miyanoura harbor . . . the new tourist center . . . the taxi stand. Mitsui’s father still drives his taxi. Leaving a place is weird, returning is weirder. In eight weeks nothing has changed on the island, it seems, but nothing is the same. The bridge, the crushed-velvet mountains, the prison gray escarpments. A book you finish reading is not the same book it was before you read it. Girls are the same, too, perhaps, in the morning. Not that I would really know. Here comes the quay—one of the cable throwers shouts, “Hey, Miyake!,” waves, and spits into the swell—one of Uncle Tarmac’s mah-jongg drinking crowd. The gangplank is lowered, and I join the big group of disembarking passengers. I should go and pay my respects to the head of the family here in Kamiyaku, Uncle Pachinko, or at the very least give Aunt Tarmac a call to say I need to stay over tonight. Problem is, once word of my homecoming is out I will have a spontaneous celebration to fend off, and I won’t make it to Anbo until the day after tomorrow. The point of this visit is to pay my respects to Anju. I am still dithering outside the ferry ticket office when a van pulls up and the wholesaler offers me a lift. “Going as far as Anbo?” I ask. “Jump in,” he replies, and we drive off. “Warm day,” I say. “Rain soon,” he answers, and I nod. Rain is always a safe bet on Yakushima. The wholesaler is a silent man, so there are no embarrassing silences or sly questions. He gestures to me to help myself to a sack of ponkan oranges, the island’s chief export and easily the best fruit product in Japan, if not eastern Asia. I must have eaten ten thousand of them in my life. Cut me open, you get ponkan juice. I watch the forgotten details of my home. Rusty oil drums by the vacation homes, the tiny airstrip—I used to think it was huge—and the dying sawmill. I am so far southwest that I have caught up with the shabby summer leaves. We pass a cluster of sleek racing cyclists in tropical-fish colors. Over the bridge, the waterfall. “Anbo village,” says the quiet wholesaler, slowing to let a tanuki cross the road ahead. “Welcome back, Eiji.”

  The cemetery hammers and saws with the empire of insects. The trees shimmer and stir. The afternoon simmers, as the ancient October recipe suggests. The Miyake corner is one of the best-tended corners of the enclosure—my grandmother still comes every morning to clean, weed, sweep, and change the wildflowers. I heard she was making money by doing the same for the graves of islanders who have left for Osaka and Tokyo, who cannot get back for the Obon week of the dead in August. I bow before the main family stone, and walk around the side to the smaller one that was erected just for Anju. It is inscribed with the death name the priest chose for her, but I never bothered learning the kanji because I think it is just a way for temples to palm more money from mourners. Anju is Anju. I pour the afternoon’s dust off her with mineral water, and arrange the flowers I picked walking down from the road. Clusters of white stars, pink comet tails, crimson semiquaver berries. I make an offering of a champagne bomb, and unwrap one for myself, too. Then I light the incense. “This is a present from Mom. From Miyazaki. She says hello, and she’ll come and see you properly one day after she gets married. I found our father, eventually, but I also found he’s a prize jerk, and we were best off without him, believe me.” I take out my three flat, round stones and build Anju a pyramid. I sit on the step and press my ear against the tombstone to see if I can hear anything. The sea breathes peacefully beyond the edge where the land falls away. I want to kiss the tombstone, so I do. It is hot against my dry lips. A dark bird with rose eyes is the only witness. I lean back in the sun and think about nothing in particular until my champagne bomb explodes. So little lasts. Mountains, classic songs, friendships, perhaps, and not much else. Maybe I doze for a while, because suddenly the glossy sky is turning matte, and mist is flanking down Mount Miyanoura. The sea is beery. I brought our great-uncle’s kaiten journal to read parts to Anju, because they both died in the ocean, but I think if Anju can hear me here she can hear me anywhere, and this afternoon I think being here is louder than saying anything. Ants have discovered Anju’s champagne bomb. I make another unplanned break
with recent Miyake tradition. “Hey, sis, guess who I’m going to see now?”

  I half-expect to meet my eleven-year-old self retrieving his sports bag from behind the lichen-disfigured stone lions in the Neck. I never went back to the thunder god shrine. His beheading made the Kyushu newspapers. Nobody assumed a local would vandalize our own heritage. A famous craftsman was brought from Kyoto to replace the missing head. You can see the head in the tourist brochures. Even so, the forest has all but reclaimed the dead-kid path. Every winter the thunder god’s believers become fewer. Gods die, the same as pop idols and sisters. The hanging bridge no longer looks so safe. The sun has gone in. A nightingale sings about another world. A monkey curses his luck in this one. The river is hurrying and swollen with typhoon rain. Over half the farms in the valley have fallen into disuse since Anju and I lived here. Old farmers die too, and their sons move away to mainland cities, do very well for themselves, and never come back, like Uncle Yen has done. I realize that I have left Yakushima too, without ever meaning to. Life never labels the last time you do something. Rice-field terraces and old storehouses are allowed to collapse, typhoons doing the job at a better price than demolition companies. The valley is between rain and not rain. I kick stones. The roof of my grandmother’s house reminds me of Buntaro’s unkempt beard. Shrubs sprout from the eaves. I watch the old place, and think of all the family dramas that have happened in its rooms. Shuttlecocks trapped in drainpipes, broken greenhouse panes, Anju’s complex burglar traps. Mist is already gathering on the lower slopes of the valley. My grandmother is a sour old lady but she loved Anju, too, in her fierce way. Leaving a picture lets you see the things in it. What is there to lose? The worst that could happen is that she throws a rolling pin at me and screams at me to go away, but after some of the people I have met in the last eight weeks that would amount to a polite refusal.