Number9Dream (6 page)

‘Wicked thoughts!’ Voorman licks his lips. ‘Is that your medical opinion, Doctor? I am not a lunatic, not a malingerer, but a demon? Am I to be exorcised?’

Polonski looks at the prisoner sharply. ‘Do you believe you should be?’

Voorman shrugs. ‘Demons are merely humans with demonic enough imaginations.’

The doctor sits down. The chair scrapes. ‘Just supposing you do possess . . . powers—’

Voorman smiles. ‘Say it, Doctor, say it.’

‘What is God doing straitjacketed in this prison?’

Voorman yawns in a well-fed way. ‘What would you do if you were God? Spend your days playing golf on Hawaii? I think not. Golf is so tedious when holes-in-one are dead certs. Existence drags so . . . non-existently.’

Polonski is not taking notes now. ‘So what do you do with your time?’

‘I seek amusement in you. Take this war. Slapstick comedy.’

‘I am not a religious man, Mr Voorman—’

‘That is why I chose you.’

‘—but what kind of a god finds wars amusing?’

‘A bored one. Yes. Humans are equipped with imaginations so you can dream up new ways to entertain me.’

‘Which you choose to observe from the luxury of your cell?’

Gunfire crackles in a neighbouring precinct. ‘Luxury, poverty, who cares when you are immortal? I am rather fond of prisons. I see them as open-cast irony mines. And the prisoners are more fun than well-fed congregations. You also amuse me, good doctor. Your remit is to prove me either a faker or a lunatic, and yet you end up proving my omnipotent divinity.’

‘Nothing of the sort has been proven.’

‘True, Dr Diehard, true. But fear not, I bear glad tidings. We’re going to change places.
You
can juggle time, gravity, waves and particles.
You
can sift through the dreckbin of human endeavour for tiny specks of originality.
You
can watch the sparrows fall and continents pillaged in your name. Now. I’m going to make your wife smile in a most involuntary way and partake of the chief warden’s brandy.’

‘You are a sick man, Mr Voorman. The Belgian trick stymies me, but—’

Dr Polonski freezes.

Voorman whistles the national anthem of France.

The frame jumps.

‘Time has flown,’ says the doctor. ‘I must be leaving.’

The prisoner chokes. ‘What—’

The doctor flexes his new muscles.

The prisoner screams. ‘
What have you done to me
?’

‘If you can’t discuss things like a rational adult I’ll terminate this interview.’

‘
Put me back, you monster
!’

‘You’ll soon learn the ropes.’ The doctor clips his bag shut. ‘Watch the Balkans. Hot spot.’

The prisoner bellows. ‘
Guards! Guards
!’ The door scrapes open and the doctor shakes his head sadly. Cattle prods buzzing, the guards approach the hysterical prisoner. ‘Arrest that impostor!
I’m
the real Dr Polonski! He’s an infernal agent who made Belgium disappear overnight!’ The prisoner shrieks and twists as the guards wham 5,000 volts through his body. ‘
Stop that abomination
! He’s going to molest my wife!’ His shackled feet bang the floor. Knock, knock, knock.

I should have left my blackheads alone – I have the complexion of a winged crab attack victim. Somebody on the outside knocks and turns the toilet door handle. I ruffle back my gelled hair, and fumble the door open. It is Lao Tzu. ‘Took your time in there, Captain.’ I apologize, and decide that the PanOpticon assault hour is nigh. Right after one last Carlton. I watch workmen erect a giant TV screen against the side of PanOpticon’s neighbour. The waitress with the perfect neck has finished her shift – the clock says six minutes to three – and changed out of her uniform. She is wearing a purple sweater and white jeans. She looks drop-dead cool. Dowager is giving her a talking-to over by the cigarette machine when Donkey rings the help-me bell – Dowager drops my waitress in mid-sentence and goes over to bestow order upon the sudden throng of customers. The girl with the perfect neck glances at the clock anxiously. She feels her mobile phone vibrate and turns in my direction to talk, cupping her mouth so nobody can hear. Her face lights up, and I am piqued by jealousy. Before I know it I am choosing another brand of cigarettes from the cigarette machine next to her. Eavesdropping is wrong, but who can blame me if I innocently overhear? ‘Yeah, yeah. Put Nao on, would you?’ Naoki a boy or Naoko a girl? ‘I’ll be a little late, so start without me.’ Start what? ‘Amazing rain, wasn’t it?’ She practises piano movements with her free hand. ‘Yes, I remember how to get there.’ Where? ‘Room 162. I
know
we only have two weeks left.’ Until what? Then she looks at me and sees me looking at her. I remember I am supposed to be choosing cigarettes and study the range on offer. On an advert a lawyer-type woman smokes Salem. ‘You let your imagination run away with you again. See you in twenty minutes. ’Bye.’ She pockets her phone and clears her throat. ‘Did you catch all of that, or would you like me to go over any bits you missed?’ To my horror I realize she is talking to me. My blush is so hot I smell smoke. I look up at her – I am still crouching to take my Salems from the dispenser. The girl is not angry as such, but she is as tough as a drill-bit. I search for words to defuse her contempt while keeping my dignity intact. I come up with ‘Uh’. Her stare is merciless. ‘
Uh
,’ she repeats. I swallow hard, and touch the leaves of the rubber plant. ‘I was wondering,’ I flounder, ‘if these plants were, uh, artificial. Are. I mean.’ Her stare is a death ray. ‘Some are real. Some are fake. Some are full of shit.’ The Dowager returns to finish her sentence. I cockroach back to my coffee. I want to run out under a heavy truck, but I also want to smoke a Salem to calm down before I go and ask my father’s lawyer for her client’s name and address. Lao Tzu returns, posturing his behind. ‘Eat big, shit big, live big, dream small. Say, Captain, you wouldn’t have a spare ciggie there?’ I light two sticks with one match. The girl with the perfect neck has finally escaped from Jupiter Café. She gazelles across the puddles over Omekaido Avenue. I should have been honest. One lie and your credibility is bankrupt. Forget her. She is way out of my class. She is a musician at a Tokyo university with a conductor boyfriend called Naoki. I am unemployed and only graduated from high school because the teachers gave me a sympathy vote due to my background. She is from a good family and sleeps in a bedroom with real oil paintings and CD-ROM encyclopaedias. Her film director father allows Naoki to sleep over, on account of his money, talent and immaculate teeth. I am from a non-family, I sleep in a capsule the size of a packing case in Kita Senju with my guitar, and my teeth are not wonky but not straight. ‘What a beautiful young creature,’ sighs Lao Tzu. ‘If only I were your age, Captain . . .’

I surprise myself by not chickening out and heading straight back to Shinjuku station, although I do nearly get killed by an ambulance crossing Kita Street. The handful of traffic lights on Yakushima are just there for effect – here they are life and death. When I got off the coach yesterday I noticed that Tokyo air smells of the insides of pockets. I haven’t noticed today. I guess I smell of the insides of pockets too. I walk up the steps of the PanOpticon. It props up the sky. Over the last seven years I have imagined this moment so often I cannot believe it is actually here. But it is here. The revolving door creeps around slowly. The refrigerated air makes the hairs on my arm stand up – when it gets this cold in winter they put on the heating. The marble floor is the white of bleached bone. Palm trees sit in bronze urns. A one-legged man crutches across the polished floor. Rubber squeaks, metal clinks. Trombone-flowers loom, big enough to eat babies. My left baseball boot makes a stupid eeky sound. A row of nine interviewees wait in identical leather armchairs. They are my age, and may very well be clones. Drone clones. ‘What a stupid eeky sound,’ they are all thinking. I reach the elevators and look up and down the signboard for Osugi and Bosugi, Legal. Concentrate on the prize. I could be ringing the doorbell at my father’s house by suppertime today. ‘Where do you think you’re going, kiddo?’

I turn around.

The guard at the reception desk glowers. The drone clones’ eighteen eyes swivel this way. ‘Didn’t they teach you to read?’ He raps his knuckles on a sign.
VISITORS
MUST
REPORT TO RECEPTION
. I backtrack and bow apologetically. He folds his arms. ‘So?’

‘I have business with Osugi and Bosugi. The lawyers.’

PANOPTICON SECURITY
is embroidered into his cap. ‘How swanky for you. And your appointment is with
whom
exactly?’

‘Appointment?’

‘Appointment. As in “appointment”.’

Eighteen drone clone noses scent humiliation upwind.

‘I was, uh, hoping to see Ms Akiko Kato.’

‘And is Ms Kato aware of this honour?’

‘Not exactly, because—’

‘So you have no appointment.’

‘Look—’

‘No, you look. This is not a supermarket. This is a private building where business of a sensitive nature is regularly transacted. You cannot just breeze in. Nobody enters those elevators unless they are employees of the companies housed in here or unless they have an appointment, or a valid reason for being here. See?’

Eighteen drone clone ears tune into my boondock accent.

‘Could I make an appointment through you, then?’

Way wrong. The guard gears up and one clone pours fuel on the fire by snickering. ‘You didn’t hear me. I am a security guard. I am not a receptionist. I am employed to keep time-wasters, salesmen and assorted scum
out
. Not to usher them
in
.’

Damage control. ‘I didn’t want to offend you, I just—’

Too late for damage control. ‘Listen, kiddo.’ The guard removes his glasses, and polishes the lenses. ‘Your accent tells me you aren’t from round here, so listen while I explain to you how we work in Tokyo. You scuttle away before I get really irritated. You get your appointment with Ms Kato. You come back on the right day five minutes before your time. You report to me and tell me your name. I confirm your appointment with the Osugi and Bosugi receptionist. Then, and only then, do I let you step into one of those elevators. Am I understood?’

I take a deep breath.

The guard opens his newspaper with a snap.

Post-rain sweat and grime regunge Tokyo. The puddles are steaming dry in the magnified heat. A busker sings so off key that passers-by have a moral responsibility to steal his change and smash his guitar on his head. I head back towards Shinjuku submarine station. The crowds march out of step, beaten senseless by the heat. My father’s doorbell is lost at an unknown grid reference in my Tokyo street guide. A tiny nugget of earwax deep inside my ear where I can’t dig it out is driving me crazy. I hate this city. I pass a kendo hall – bone-splintering bamboo-sword screams escape through the window grille. On the pavement is a pair of shoes – as if their owner suddenly turned to vapour and blew away. I feel a boiling frustration and a sort of tired guilt. I have broken some kind of unseen contract. Who with? Buses and trucks clog the arteries, pedestrians squeeze through the gaps. When I was going through my dinosaur phase I read a theory claiming that the great extinction occurred because the dinosaurs gagged to death on mountains of their own dung. Trying to get from A to Z in Tokyo, the theory no longer seems so ridiculous. I hate its wallpaper adverts, its capsules, tunnels, tap water, submarines, air, its
NO RIGHT OF WAY
on every corner and
MEMBERS ONLY
above every door. I swear. I want to turn into a nuclear warhead and incinerate this dung-heap city from the surface of the world.

Two

LOST PROPERTY

Sawing the head off a thunder god with a rusty hacksaw is not easy when you are eleven years old. The hacksaw keeps jamming. I rejiggle, and nearly slip from the thunder god’s shoulders. If I fall backwards from this height I snap my spine. Outside the shrine a blackbird sings in dark purples. I wrap my legs around the god’s muscled torso, the same as when Uncle Tarmac gives me a piggyback. I drag the blade across his throat. Again, again, again. The wood is stone hard, but the nick deepens to a slit, the slit becomes a groove. My eyes sting with sweat. The quicker the better. This must be done, but there is no point getting caught. They put you in prison for this, surely. The blade slips and cuts my thumb. I wipe my eyes on my T-shirt and wait. Here comes the pain, in pulses. The flap of skin pinkens, reddens, and blood wells up. I lick it and taste ten-yen coins. Fair payment. Just as I am paying the thunder god back, for what he has done to Anju. I carry on sawing. I cannot see his face from where I am, but when I cut through his windpipe both our bodies judder.

Saturday, 2nd September is already one hour old. One week since my Jupiter Café stake-out. On the main thoroughfare through Kita Senju the traffic is at low tide. I can see the Tokyo moon down a crack between the opposite apartment buildings. Zinc, industrial, skid-marked. My capsule is as stifling as the inside of a boxing glove. The fan stirs the heat. I am not going to contact her. No way. Who does she think she is, after all this time? Across the road is a photo developer’s with two Fujifilm clocks – the left clock shows the actual time, the right shows when the photos will be ready, forty-five minutes into the future. In the sodium glow my skimpy half-curtain is dungish. Girders crank, cables buzz. I wonder if this building gives me insomnia. Sick building syndrome, Uncle Bank calls it. Below me, Shooting Star is shuttered up and waiting for the night to pass. In the last week I have learned the routine: ten to midnight, Buntaro drags in the sandwich board and takes out the trash; five to midnight, the TV goes off, and he washes up his mug and plate; around now a customer may come sprinting down the street to return a video; at midnight on the nail, Buntaro pings open the till and cashes up. Three minutes later the shutters roll down, he kicks his scooter into life, and off he goes. A cockroach tries to flap free of the glue trap. My muscles ache from my new job. I should chuck out Cat’s bowl, I suppose. Keeping it is morbid, now I know the truth. And the extra milk, and the two tins of quality cat food. Is it edible, if I mix it into a soup or something? Did Cat die instantly, or did she lie on the roadside thinking about it? Did a passer-by whack her on the head with a shovel to put her out of her misery? Cats seem too transdimensional to get hit by traffic, but it happens all the time. All the time. Thinking I could keep her was crazy in the first place. My grandmother hates cats. Yakushima islanders keep chained-up dogs as guards. Cats take their own chances. I know nothing about litter trays, when you bring cats in, when you take them out, what injections they need. And look what happened to it when it dossed down with me: the Miyake curse strikes again. Anju climbed trees like a cat. A summer puma.