Number9Dream (45 page)

My face is melted out of position. My tongue is a pumice stone. Saliva, collected in my tongue-root gully, drools out on to my pillow. At my table, Ai chops carrots and apples. For a moment I think – I married Ai, and she is making dinner for our nine children – but then I smell the apple. Nutmeg too. Cat is licking her paws and watches me. Buntaro lets Ai up, she knocks, I am too deeply asleep to wake up, Buntaro confirms I am definitely up here, Ai peers in, sees me, goes out and buys food for a salad. Life is sheer bliss when it wants to be. Ai must trust me, to be alone with me in my capsule while I am dressed – or not dressed – how I am. Being trusted makes me trustworthy. Carrot and apple go together great. She is chopping walnuts – I never much cared for walnuts until this moment – and raisins, and sprinkles them over lettuce. She is wearing old jeans and a faded yellow T-shirt lighter than her skin, and her hair is up. Here is that mythical neck. She scrapes peelings into the garbage bag. She wears thick black-framed glasses that suit her in a quirky sort of way. Ai never, ever tries to impress, and that impresses me
so
much. She has a pirate silver earring. ‘Hey, Kyushu Cannibal,’ she says – I realize all this time she knew I was watching her – and chords inside me change from A flat to loose-string D minor. ‘Why do you keep letters in your freezebox?’

‘Watch out,’ says Ai, ‘I think there may be fish in these bones.’

‘It tastes great.’

‘Do you live entirely on pot noodles?’

‘I vary my diet with pizza, courtesy of Nero. Mind if I finish the salad?’

‘Do, before you die of scurvy. You never told me about your view.’

‘That is no view. Yakushima has views.’

‘It beats the view me and Sachiko have now. We used to overlook a low-security prison exercise yard. That was quite nice. I used to leave the windows open and play Chopin waltzes back to back. But then I returned from class one day to find a vertical rotary carpark had sprung up since breakfast. Now we have a view of concrete six inches away. We want to move, but paying a deposit would wipe us out. Even honest estate agents, if that isn’t an oxymoron, skin you alive. Plus, it’s nice to know that if a fire broke out we could climb out of the window and abseil to safety by breathing in and out slowly.’

The telephone riiiiiiiiings. I answer: ‘Hello?’

‘Miyake!’

‘Suga? Where are you?’

‘Downstairs. Mr Ogiso tells me you have company – but would you mind if I come up?’

I do, to be honest. ‘Sure’.

When Suga enters my capsule I gape. He has had a body transplant. His eczema has vanished. He has a contoured haircut that must have cost ten thousand yen. He is wearing the suit of a Milanese diamond robber, and has the hip rectangular glasses of an electric-folk-singer. ‘Are you going for an interview?’ I ask. Suga ignores me and bows shyly at Ai. ‘Hi, I’m Masanobu Suga. Are you Miyake’s Korean girlfriend?’

Ai bites the head off a celery stick and looks at me quizzically.

‘No,’ I garble ‘Suga, this is Miss Imajo.’

Ai munches. ‘Suga the Snorer?’

Now Suga looks confused. ‘I – er – Miyake?’

‘Uh . . . Some other time.’

‘There won’t be another time for a long time – I came to say goodbye.’

‘Leaving Tokyo?’ I chuck a cushion down for him. ‘Near or far?’

Suga slips out of his sandals and sits down. ‘Saratoga.’

‘Which prefecture is that in?’

Ai has heard of it. ‘Saratoga, western Texas?’

‘Heart of the desert.’

‘Beautiful,’ Ai munches, ‘but wild.’

I find a sort of clean cup. ‘Why are you going to a desert?’

‘I’m not allowed to tell anyone exactly why.’

I pour his tea. ‘Why not?’

‘I’m not allowed to tell anyone that, either.’

‘Is any of this to do with your Holy Grail?’

‘After I left here last week, I went to my office and I got my brain back in gear. So offensively obvious. Write a search program, smuggle it into the file field, and get it to scan through the nine billion files to see if a real Holy Grail site had been hidden anywhere, right. My first attempt backfired. In megabyte terms it was like trying to squeeze China through the Sumida tunnel. The Pentagon immune system recognizes the program as an alien body, zaps it and launches a tracer program. I only just get out in time.’ ‘
The
Pentagon?’ Ai asks. Suga twiddles his thumbs, modest and boastful. ‘So I sleep on the problem for a couple of days, then deep genius busts the door down. Dawn raid of inspiration. I break into the Pentagon immune system, softjack its own OS, muzzle it, and get
it
to search the very files its job is to protect! Like retraining your enemy’s sniffer dogs to show you his hidey-hole. I make it sound easy, I know, but first I had to boot my flight path through six different zombies across six different cellphone networks. Second—’

‘You did it?’

Suga lets the details slide. ‘I did it. But the number of Holy Grails it had to check was, right, deeply cosmic. Think about it. Nine billion files, at the apex of nine billion pyramids, each one built of nine billion files – as far as I had dared to look. After turning loose my search program, I drowse off. Deep Sleep City. It is eleven in the morning by now, right – I worked at my computer since seven the evening before. What next? I wake up to find three men searching my office. Mid-afternoon, deep shock. One guy – a hacker, I can tell – is downloading all my personal files on to a hand-held drive I never even saw before. Second guy, an older headmaster type, is making an inventory of my hardware. The third is this fat sunburned foreigner in a cowboy hat leafing through my Zax Omega mangas and drinking my beer. I was too amazed to be scared. The headmaster guy flashes some ID at me – Data Protection Agency, ever heard of that? – and tells me I have violated the Japan/United States Bilateral Defence Treaty and that I have the right to remain silent but that if I don’t want to be tried for espionage under US jurisprudence at the nearest military base, I had better get down on my knees and blab for dear life.’

‘Is all this true?’ Ai asks me.

‘Is all this true?’ I ask Suga.

‘I was wishing to hell that it wasn’t. The buggery scene in
Shawshank Redemption
keeps flashing before me. The headmaster gets out a matchbox-sized recorder and starts firing questions. I’m expecting him to strap electrodes to my balls. How had I got into the Pentagon in the first place? How had I softjacked their anti-viral OS? Was I working alone? Who had I spoken to since? Had I heard of any of the following organizations – I hadn’t, I can’t even remember them now. They know what schools I went to, where I live, everything. Then the hacker guy talks technical data – I can see he is impressed with my zombie ring. Even so, it gets dark, and I don’t know what they plan to do to me. Finally, the foreigner, who has been flicking through my photo albums and
MasterHacker
, speaks to the headmaster, in English. I realize he is the one in charge here. I ask if I can take a leak. The younger hacker accompanies me – I ask him for some more lowdown but he shakes his head. We get back to my office and headmaster offers me a job or prosecution under some very scary-sounding law. He describes the job, and the money – serious wooow! Artificial intelligence, missile shield systems—’ Suga bites his lip. ‘Oops. That’s the only downer. I can’t go around telling anyone about it.’

‘What about IBM and your university?’

‘Yeah, that was my next question. Headmaster nods at the foreigner – the foreigner barks an order into his mobile. “Already taken care of, Mr Suga,” the headmaster tells me. “And we can arrange a PhD if your parents are worried about qualifications. Would MIT be acceptable? Other details can be worked out later.” In fact, I fly out the day after tomorrow, so I have a million things to do. I brought you a present, Miyake. I considered tropical fruit, but this is a bit more personal. Here.’ He produces a square case, flips it open and unclips a black flat thing. ‘This is my finest home-cultivated computer virus.’ For the second time in two days I am being given a computer disk. ‘Uh . . . thanks. Nobody ever gave me a virus before.’ Ai mutters something, and then speaks up: ‘If those things get into hospital systems they put lives at risk. Do you ever think about that?’ Suga nods and slurps his tea. ‘Ethical cyberexplorers are responsible, right. Ghosts in the machine, not nerdish vandals. We are a growing breed. Over sixty-five per cent of top-flight systems explorers are ethical.’ Ai gives Suga a black look. ‘And over eighty-five per cent of all statistics are made up on the spot.’ Suga soldiers on. ‘Take this virus – “Mailman”, I call it – it delivers your message to every addressee in the address book of whoever you send it too. Then it duplicates itself and delivers itself to all the addresses in those address books – and so on, for ninety-nine generations. Neat or what? And totally harmless.’ Ai looks unconvinced. ‘Spreading junk mail to tens of thousands of people doesn’t strike me as especially ethical.’ Suga has a proud-father beam. ‘Not junk mail! Miyake can spread whatever message of joy and peace he wants to hundreds of thousands of users. It isn’t the sort of thing I can take to Texas, being as how Saratoga is a top-secret research installation, right, and it would be a shame to let it go to waste.’

Suga leaves, I finish the salad and slice a melon for dessert. I take some down to Buntaro, who nods at the ceiling, and waggles his little finger questioningly. I pretend not to understand. No way am I going to make a pass at Ai. There is a sort of not-yetness between us. I tell myself. She is clearing a space on the table. ‘Time for my insulin. Want to watch, or are you squeamish about needles puncturing human skin?’

‘I want to watch,’ I lie.

She gets a medical box from her bag, prepares the syringe, disinfects her forearm, and calmly slips the needle in. I flinch. She is watching me watching her as the insulin shoots into her bloodstream. I suddenly feel humble. Making a pass at Ai would be as uncouth as yelling at a flower to hurry up. Plus, if she rejected me I would have to microwave myself out of existence. ‘So, Miyake,’ says Ai as the needle slides out. ‘What’s your next move?’

I swallow dryly. ‘Uh . . . what?’

She dabs a droplet of blood with sterilized cotton wool – ‘Are you going to stay in Tokyo now you’ve changed your mind about tracking down your father?’ I get up and wipe my frying pan. ‘I . . . dunno. I need money before I can do anything else, so I’ll probably stay at Nero’s until something better comes along . . . I want to show you a couple of letters my mother wrote to me.’

Ai shrugs. ‘Okay.’

I brush the ice granules off the plastic – she reads them while I finish the dishes and take a shower.

‘Long shower.’

‘Uh . . . when I take a shower I feel I’m back on Yakushima. Warm rain.’ I nod at the letters. ‘What do you think?’

Ai folds them neatly into their envelopes. ‘I’m thinking about what I think about them.’ Fujifilm says ten o’clock. We have to leave – Ai wants to be home before the stalkers leave their bars, and I have to get to work before midnight. Downstairs, Buntaro munches Pringles and watches a movie full of cyborgs, motorbikes and welders. ‘Have a nice salad?’ he asks so innocently I could kill him. I nod at the screen.

‘What are you watching?’

‘I am testing the two laws of cinematography.’

‘Which are?’

‘The first law states “Any movie with a title ending in ‘-ator’ is pure drivel”.’

‘The second?’

‘“The quality of any movie is in inverse proportion to the number of helicopters it features.”’

‘In a way,’ Ai says as we arrive at Kita Senju station, ‘I wish you hadn’t shown me those letters.’

‘Why not?’

Ai jangles loose change. ‘I don’t think you’ll like hearing what I really think.’ The last moths of autumn swirl around a stuttering light.

‘Hearing what you really think was the point of showing you.’

Ai buys her ticket – I show my pass – and we walk down to the platform. ‘Your mother wants you in her life, and your life could be a whole load richer with her in it. Your standoffishness isn’t helping you or her. Those letters are a peace treaty.’

I feel sort of jabbed by that. ‘If she wanted me to contact her, why didn’t she give me her Nagano address?’

‘Did it occur to you she might be afraid of giving you the power to reject her?’ Ai hunts out my eyes. ‘Anyway, she did tell you where she is – “Mount Hakuba”.’

I shake my gaze free. ‘“Mount Hakuba” is no address.’

Ai stops walking. ‘Miyake, for someone so bright’ – bzzzzzzzzz! goes my sarcasm detector – ‘you are one virtuoso self-delusionist. There can be no more than ten hotels at the foot of Mount Hakuba. Compared to finding a nameless man in Tokyo, finding your mother is a breeze. You could find her by tomorrow evening if you actually wanted to.’

Now the girl is trespassing. I know I should leave it but I can’t. ‘And why exactly do you think I don’t want to?’

‘I’m not your shrink.’ Ai shrugs curtly. ‘You tell me. Anger? Blame?’

‘No.’ Ai is clueless about all this. ‘She had seven years to unabandon us, and another nine years to unabandon me.’

Ai frowns. ‘Okay, but if you don’t want to know what I really think about your issues, then talk about the weather instead of showing me personal letters. And hell, Miyake—’ I look at her. ‘What?’ Ai semi-snarls. ‘Do you
have
to smoke?’ I put away my MacArthur lighter and slide my Parliaments back into my shirt pocket. ‘I had no idea it bothered you so much.’ Once the words are out I know they are way too snide. Ai snarls, full on. ‘How could it not bother me? Since I was nine my arm has been a pin-cushion, just so my pancreas doesn’t kill me. I endure a hypo twice a year while you line your lungs with cancer – and the lungs of everyone downwind – just so you can look like the Marlboro Man. Yes, Miyake, your smoking
really
bothers me.’

I cannot think of a single thing to say.