by DBC Pierre
I can’t help but smile.
“Couldn’t you just picket McDonald’s?”
I sweep past him to the back steps, out to our alley, and around the corner to the waiting cab, where I huddle in the back.
With Hamish’s noise still pounding along the road, the taxi grumbles away past my house shooting vapor into the night. Light glows in the windows where I once lived. Although it’s an early twenty-first century English household—which is to say a trisexual household of unparented narcissists where, in the twenty minutes I was there, cash and products were transacted to a sum of four hundred pounds, and no fewer than five laws were broken—the sight of it disappearing makes me faint. I gaze through the cab window and realize no mark of mine is left here. In the end I never even designed my prize artwork, which was to be a giant supermarket cart thrown on its side across the river. I look out on a world that won’t know I’ve passed through. Starbucks napkins tumble and scud in the wind. Dudes swagger, blokes plod, lovers stroll head-down, smiling as if into the face of a bright Danish child, past pubs where beer mist swirls, through smells of pizza and yesterday’s sick turned gentle; and wherever the lights are most dazzling, Euro-teens gaggle like piles of socks, each a hundred and sixty-five centimeters tall, approved by Brussels, oblivious to skanks and shanks and shit in the shadows. None see me pass. Their stupor isn’t for me. Now I live outside stupors and delusions, looking in like a ghost from limbo. The clatter and chug of the taxi, its roll and pitch, its gliding blackness in the night make it a phaeton, a hearse led by a blustering team in black plumes, frisking and snorting a path through unknowing mourners. Goodbye, then, carbon footprint, farewell the Royal Mail, adieu lager louts, fish & chips, the Beckhams. Cheerio my dear, beloved place. Smaller lives than yours may come and go, and the seasons within them may flourish and wither.
But this night like a moonlit churchyard—this is my night.
7
My hair crests over my head like the dying wave of capitalism, molded by a corner of aircraft seat. As the flight cost much of the action group fund, I decide to leave the hairdo for my last day alive, styled as it is by costly Enthusiasms.
In other ways I fare less well. Though I managed the flight on less than a gram of cocaine,* dry air has chalked my throat to form cliffs that block my nose from behind. And there was no chocolate milk in business class, a scandal for nearly three grand. Instead eels and champagne siphoned blood to my gut and left my skin translucent. This under aircraft restroom lighting—truth lighting, calibrated for humility and submission—turned me into a working model kit: the Visible Capitalist.
On a brighter note: my drugs arrived safely in my trouser pocket. Guessing that the world would function differently from our derationalized zone, I carried them in the most obvious place—surely nobody would think me so stupid.
And so my funeral cortège reaches Tokyo, megalopolis by the sea, stamped like a pajama with notions of kittens and monsters.
Place where I am tall and strange.
It’s daytime and the gods are with me. I have money and limbo-fuels, and Smuts is never far from sublime food and wine. My last drink will be the most splendid ever drunk. And after that brief and utter decadence, a perfect bonsai of our dimming age, by daybreak at the latest—I’ll be gone, numb to my fate. It was a good idea to come, because clues to my physical life are behind me. Limbo is pure. Standing here naked at a window makes the scene at that window in rehab feel like a dismal previous life.
This window looks out of my room at the Peninsula Hotel. I gaze over all the beetling shapes, sharp folded edges, and up at the pearly sky, and say to myself:
“Rehab—Peninsula Hotel.
“Whoosh.”
After savoring this hearty turn of events, I phone Smuts.
“Say again?” he grunts. “You’re local?”
“Come for a drink.”
“Get real, they’re working me like a dog.”
“Smuts—you know you want to.”
“I’m not free till Wednesday.”
“What day is it today?”
“Saturday.”
“I propose a bacchanal that renders it irrelevant.”
“A what?” Smuts pauses. “Oh, fuck me—you’re in one of your Scarlet Pimpernel phases, uh. Watch out—Pimpernel in Tokyo.”
“You’re a hundred years out. Try nineteenth century.”
“Putain,” he groans. “And why?”
“They had a better decadence than we’re having.”
“Fuck me. And is it all whoosh? Do I have to bail you out with money?”
“I come as a capitalist, my friend. I’ve stepped into that fading light.”
“Putain. Capitalist Pimpernel in Tokyo. Then you’ll know why I can’t come and play, markets are down, the boss is all over me. You should’ve let me know.”
“I thought you didn’t do bosses.”
“Wish I didn’t, uh. I wish I didn’t. This one’s a sour prick, one of those downer mouths like a fish. So miserable yesterday I almost called the cunt’s wife to send his sword round in a taxi.”
“I have the remedy,” I say. “You know you want it.”
“Mate—I’m being sponsored at this kitchen. Long story, but I can’t blow it. Things are already stressed.”
“What time do you finish?”
“I’m not going crazy tonight, I mean it. Come for a meal if you can behave yourself. But it won’t be a late night, we’ve got inspectors coming. Yoshida-san’s spraining a testicle trying to get a tank ready to move the fish to.”
“Thought you didn’t do fish.”
“Not just any fish—fugu. Japan’s finest, uh. It’s the next big thing, poisons. Flavors aren’t enough anymore. Come around six, I’ll explain. And mate—Pimpernel can fuck off—uh?”
“You’re a century out.”
“Pu-tain.”
Smuts gives me an address to go to at nightfall. I’m dampened by the call; even asking where this urge springs from that demands company for my death. But I decide it’s not a need for witnesses, or any such lurking psychology. Just a last good drink. And Smuts will surely warm to the idea of a drink, in the end. As to my end, I leave it to the Enthusiasms for now. In a perfect night I’d have a gun, the definitive suicidal tool. But for now, well. We’ll see what instruments come.
I admit to flagging the word “poisons.”
Ah, the Enthusiasms and their mysterious ways. We’ll surely observe them, in the night’s high moments, over wine. For now, to quell fatigue and seediness I pull the blackout curtains over my window and lie on the bed smoking a cigarette, while on television a manga rabbit-girl gets raped by a schoolboy. When she weeps you can see up other girls’ skirts in the reflection of her tears. The Japanese like tears. By the time I lie back into the pillow, dreams come quickly and feverishly. I toss and crawl over the bed and finally wake with a start. A sense of knowing runs through me: that I’ve had my last sleep, my last dream. A ventilation fan hums in the room. Early night has fallen outside. Concerns come flocking: How will I die? How will I break the news to Smuts? Intoxication is the key. Our nimbus must be so shimmering and high as to be immune to outside reason.*
I get up and do a line off the bathroom counter. As it sets about its frosty work, more key conditions come to mind for tonight: for instance, my mission must never come into contact with ordinariness. Nor will I entertain obligations or tangles or tedium, neither use my brain to compute routine or pointless things.
These must be steadfast rules.
I throw water on my face, towel it off, then throw the towel on the floor, to harm the environment. Splashing Jicky onto my wrists and temples, I go up in a decadent shimmer. Whoosh! Two miniatures of vodka even seem to go from the mini-bar down my throat; I only notice when I find the bottles empty. And because a night w
ith Smuts can be unpredictable, I slip the remaining miniatures into my coat, noting there’s even a full-sized bottle of red wine, a fine Pauillac, in the cabinet.
Surely for Smuts’s rare palate.
With my hair remolded into a sort of shark fin by the nap, I carve aerodynamically through the lobby and out to a waiting cab, having to slouch in the seat to keep it intact.
So begins our night of nights, my friend.
The San Toropez Restaurant occupies the third floor of an office building in Shinjuku, a bustling, money-infested district of Tokyo. Stepping from the elevator, I find the dining room large and open, more landscaped than furnished, with poles of light beaming down on low tables: a sumptuous space, minimal, empty, and silent. What a resonant cradle of nimbus. I seem to be the first guest. Looking around, I see an aquarium spanning the back wall with a seascape of sand and pebbles, and a stone pagoda at one end. It’s a tank you could stand up to your neck in and walk ten good strides through. Waves of green-tea light shimmer out, dappling the paper screens of the room while spiky fish, dumpy fish, and fish like mangled umbrellas hover inside with bug-eyes, and an octopus lurks in the pagoda. As I stand watching, a cook nets a fish and it puffs like a balloon, pimpling with little spines.
Smuts emerges from the back soon after. He winds toward me smiling easily, arms swinging loose, in a black Mao smock with its sleeves rolled up. I see his gaze as I saw it on the day of the glass door, like a set of headlights under his brow. He’s leaner than he was, with a heavier shadow of whiskers, and muscles more veined, as if his bones had sucked his skin closer to him. Still, no sculptor of Rome ever imagined such a stern working animal as Smuts.
“Pu-tain”—he recoils—“d’you come from a whorehouse?” He waves a tunnel through my scent, flicks an eye over my hair, and nods at the wine in my hand. “And drink, to a restaurant? Did you bring food as well? Is it a fucking picnic?”
“A gift.” I hand him the bottle as we hug.
“Fuck me.” He checks the label. “Type of shit you drink with Doritos. Can’t believe people still buy this crap with corks in.”
I note that his accent has stopped commuting between South Africa and England, finally settling on the English side, with just an occasional flat souvenir.
“It’s from the hotel.” I frown at the wine.
“Mate. Times have changed.” He pulls me through a galley separated from the dining room by a bar, where he thumps down the bottle. Three Japanese chefs hiss a welcome. As I nod back, Smuts’s phone rings in his pocket. “Not again.” He fumbles it out and kills the call: “Imprinted like a duckling.”
“Who’s that?”
“Never mind. Follow me, I’ll show you a wine. A twenty-first century wine. Rare privilege for you tonight, uh, Putain. Then you can tell me why you’re here.”
“You’ve just defined it. I knew you wouldn’t let me down.”
“Let you down? You’re going to grow wings. Decadent times call for decadent wines. Don’t get used to it, though, it’s the boss’s private stash. Fucked-up little ninja.” Laughter tumbles from Smuts’s mouth in gentle barks, he dips his head to let them out. “Only wish we could drink together—you still around Wednesday?”
“No. But surely after you finish—?”
“Surely nothing, we work with deadly poisons. Serious business, harder than flying a plane. Then we’re back at seven in the morning for inspectors. Envy you, though—this is a unicorn wine, you mightn’t see it again in a lifetime.”
“But surely—”
“Fuck off, Pimpernel, you’re drinking alone.”
“Hm.” I leave the subject for now.
Smuts looks at me sideways: “Ever hear of ‘travel’?”
“Is this a joke?”
“As a function of palate. Things have changed with wine, uh. We’ve identified another element of taste—called travel. Nobody understands it yet. A kind of propulsive length, a panoramic effect. You’ll hear scientists speculate about ethanol re-uptake, but your romantics whisper about hormones. They say passions can imprint hormones—and as we know, hormones can fly. A grape can receive them. Anger, lust, despair. Love. That’s why a true winemaker sleeps within seventy meters of his head vine.”
A larder lined with shelves stands at the far end of the kitchen where boxes and packets sit like graphic artworks, tagged with ribbons and calligraphy, carefully dated and labeled with the place’s name. Lights go on as we enter, and Smuts turns to me:
“Ever hear of Toque-Mesnil?”
I shake my head. Though I feel like a hundred yen, blunted by fatigue and philosophical locomotion, and now by the prospect of drinking alone—I revel watching Smuts in his world of unheard-of things. I can’t see how his grand wheeze about wine can lead anywhere but nimbus. He takes me to a stack of white foam cases at the back of the larder and slaps a hand on top.
“First,” he says, “get it out of your head that wine’s just a drink. Real wine is like a missing human gene. It vaccinates you against mundanity, against bad life. And forget about your old-time wine tasters, a new elite has developed with high-octane senses. People who won’t wait forty years to discover that a cork has reacted with their old vintage and fucked their evening.” Smuts pauses to stretch his frame, stroke his face. Then he points at me: “They want a wine with a cap that locks like the tip of a missile. Those people drink Toque. There’s evidence that up to three in ten bottles have the travel effect. Production’s confined to ten acres of Mediterranean lava with a cemetery in the middle—locals say widows’ tears cause travel in the grape. Whatever it is, the next five vintages are sold—and nobody knows who to.”
My stare flicks between Smuts and the artillery cases.
“Then”—he draws back as if one might explode—“there’s a world above that. A handful of palates who know of a decadent wine with travel in almost every bottle. Production limited to four acres of rare geology, a soil coincidence of a million and a half years, dating back to the first human ancestor. A unicorn vineyard, where the winemaker lives in the vines.”
He lifts the lid from the topmost case. There, laid out like glittering projectiles, seductive and menacing, lie three black bottles.
“That wine, my friend—is Marius.”
I stare as if they might rise up. Each has a simple white label headed in black, with golden capitals: marius. The white of each label bears a different subtitle in script: Symphony, Simpatico, or Symposium.
The Enthusiasms are with me.
“Go for a Symphony.” Smuts points. “The boss won’t be in for a while, and I’ve got ten minutes before service—I’ll show you something that’ll pop your nuts.”
He hides the used case under the stack and we leave the larder, picking up a wine balloon on our way past the bar. Across the dining room, up a stair, sits a corridor with restrooms where an attendant kneels polishing door handles. He stands to bow as we pass to the end. Smuts unlocks the farthest door, opening it onto a cubic room without windows. The ceiling is white, the walls are white, and the floor is white, neither glossy nor dull. The door handle is white, the door is white. A white table with two white chairs stands centered in the room, where hidden lighting throws no stronger shadow than a vaguely graying milk.
“The White Room,” whispers Smuts.
Whoosh. The white of the bottle’s label becomes a hole, its lettering hangs in space; and as the black wine splashes out, it tosses crimson skirts around the glass that flare in sparkling colors across the table. Smuts presses the balloon to his nose:
“So what are you doing here?”
“Visiting.”
His brow falls.
“Drink with me, Smuts.”
“Did you inherit a restaurant?”
“No.”
“Then I can’t. The time comes, Putain, when we have to get serious. When w
e have to put something back. When our childhood is over.”
I observe the wine for a moment. “Want a line?”
“What?” His brow crumples. “Where did you get lines?”
“Brought them from home.”
“Mate, fuck.” He shrinks back. “It’s beyond Pimpernel now, fuck me. You brought coke through Narita Airport? In Japan they’ll bang you up without charge, you’ll disappear.” He shakes his head, hisses some curses, and eventually leans toward me, clutching the glass. “Pimpernel, Pimpernel—what are you doing here really?”
It’s too early to confide. The secret’s uncomfortable, but if my plan’s to survive it needs a tower of the loftiest nimbus. I shrug, and nod at the balloon: “Can’t I taste it?”
His jaw twitches left and right. He doesn’t shift his scowl.
“Anyway, lot of noise for an Australian wine.” I study the label. “It’s not even five years old.”
“Shut up. You know nothing. Did I ever mention Didier Le Basque? My sponsor. It’s him who sources the wine. He’d tell you about the winemaker. Unbelievable story, a man who abandoned decadence to try and grow a grape with the answer to life inside it. A guy who maybe discovered the secret to living.”
“Oh, yes? And what is it? Ideology or product?”
“Don’t know. I think it’s more of a punch line.”
“Hm. And do you know it?”
“No. Didier says you have to ask the man himself. Great story leading up to it, though, about the moment when he understood what things were about. I know this much: In the late eighties a Maserati Ghibli Spyder was found abandoned on a bend near Monte Carlo. Not far from where Princess Grace died. Pretty sure the Basque said Spyder. It was traced to a pair of bikini models, sisters, from Paris—and an Englishman called Pike, a wild man who was seen driving one of them. Think about this: wine is always judged in little sips. It’s always been about wine tasting. The bouquet, how it looks in the glass. They even spit it out afterwards. They spit it out! But what happens after a full bottle? What’s the effect over a night? As the Basque puts it: you can admire an ocean from the beach—but to love it you have to swim out. Pike knew that. Drank European vintages to oblivion, logged their behaviors, met with their gods.”
