Dreams of Speaking

by Gail Jones

  Mr Sakamoto kept looking at his watch. Clare was almost twenty minutes late.

  ‘She’s not coming,’ he said, adjusting his tie.

  ‘She’ll come.’

  Alice was keen to reassure him. In the restaurant he was perceptibly nervous. He had begun pleating the tablecloth and straightening the cutlery. Curious waiters glanced in their direction. Around them was the murmurous sound of other people dining, of knives tapping plates and glasses chinking, conversation between mouthfuls, low and courteous.

  When she walked through the door, Alice knew Clare immediately from Mr Sakamoto’s description. She had, indeed, a slightly Japanese face, and long grey hair held at the back with a clip. She wore a tawny cashmere dress and an overcoat she removed as she walked towards them. Alice thought she looked interesting.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said as she sat down, afluster. ‘Got lost, would you believe it?’

  Clare leaned across the table and shook Alice’s hand.

  ‘Clare Keely,’ she said.

  There was no apparent surprise at Alice’s presence. Perhaps Mr Sakamoto had told Clare of his guest.

  ‘Well, here we are.’

  ‘Here we are,’ Mr Sakamoto repeated.

  They smiled at each other. Small talk ensued, talk about the efficiency of the Métro, the volatile weather, the physical changes evident in Paris. As the meal proceeded, Mr Sakamoto began to relax.

  ‘Why Alexander Bell?’ Clare at last asked.

  ‘I saw men of my age disappear into their possessions. They became their cars, their stereos, their new apartments. They totalled their wealth and drank whisky late at night in smoky bars, looking sullen, looking sad. I wanted something else. It took me a long time to figure it out. I wanted a project to remind me of the complexity of things, and of human endeavour … does that sound pompous?’

  ‘Not at all,’ Clare said, leaning towards him.

  ‘My uncle and I had begun exchanging confidences on the phone and I began thinking, in almost boyishly simple terms, about what a marvellous invention this was. Wondering how it worked. When it entered the world. That sort of thing. I knew of Bell, of course, and his Scottish background may also have been an enticement, a kind of nostalgic attachment …’

  Mr Sakamoto became momentarily shy. Clare smiled at him and nodded encouragement.

  ‘And then,’ he resumed, ‘I realised there was something more here than the history of an invention. A man with a deaf mother and wife, who was obsessed with voice. Something anomalous. Endearing. Something beautifully particular. I suppose I fell in love with him: this burly fellow with a full beard and a life-long weakness for porridge …’

  ‘I’ve seen the pictures,’ Clare said, smiling. ‘A love object, indeed.’

  Alice felt they had begun talking in a kind of code. She wished she was not present at the dinner and began to think of when she might politely excuse herself, and leave them together.

  ‘I discovered too that Alec Bell was permanently grief-stricken. A commonplace identification, I suppose, but he had lost two brothers and then two sons, and I felt this gave us a kinship, an emotional connection. Biography is always presumptuous, as friendship is.’

  Here Mr Sakamoto glanced at Alice.

  ‘But we function, do we not, on elective affinities, on the pertinent associations we find in others …?’

  ‘Well put,’ said Clare.

  ‘I’ve almost finished,’ said Mr Sakamoto. ‘Just a small section on Bell’s visit to Japan in 1898, to meet the Emperor. I’ve been saving it until the end; it will be my conclusion. The Japanese connection, you might say.’

  Clare drained another glass of wine. Alice thought she was drinking too much. She had entered the slurry stage, her body tilted. A stage Stephen used to call ‘imminent loss of verticality’. Alcohol was changing her, entering her metabolism like fog, obscuring the clear and distinct outlines of things.

  ‘You lot are invading Edinburgh,’ Clare suddenly announced.

  Mr Sakamoto raised his head with a questioning look.

  ‘You Japanese tourists. In hordes, every summer.’

  Mr Sakamoto looked stricken. ‘What is this collective noun I’ve become?’ he said.

  ‘Not you. The others.’

  Alice could see Mr Sakamoto’s dismay.

  ‘It satisfies Westerners,’ he said quietly, ‘to see us as a collective, to make us uniform, to dishonour us in this way.’

  Clare seemed not to be listening or not to understand.

  ‘We are no less specific than you,’ he went on.

  ‘Westerners! Thanks very much.’ Clare was leaning on the table. She tilted her glass.

  ‘I was making an ethical point,’ Mr Sakamoto said, ‘about how generalisation destroys.’

  They both fell silent. At some point in the dinner mild flirtation had dissolved and they were remade as antagonists.

  ‘Don’t be so touchy,’ said Clare, with an aggressive tone.

  Mr Sakamoto said nothing. Alice wondered if she had missed her chance to leave. If she left now, it might seem an act of punctuation to their dispute. Nevertheless, she rose, pushed back her chair, and said her farewells.

  ‘It was nice meeting you, Clare. Enjoy the rest of your journey.’

  Clare nodded vaguely in her direction.

  ‘Phone me tomorrow,’ Mr Sakamoto whispered, making once again the gesture of a phone shape with his thumb and curled hand. ‘Tomorrow.’

  Alice ran through the rain to the Métro station. The wet streets were glazed with light, the air was chill and fresh. She felt the life of the city flare up around her. In its reflective multiplications, its rainy surfaces, it appeared streaming, bathed in a numinous glow. She was pleased to be away from the restaurant and in this bright liquid space. She felt youthful, released. The Seine churned with energy. Lovers were out and about, exhibitionist in their passion. Tilting their heads skyward to give and receive kisses.

  It was almost noon by the time she rang. Mr Sakamoto was in his hotel room, packing to return home. Uncle Tadeo was unwell; he was leaving that afternoon. Alice was taken aback by this news: she couldn’t imagine Mr Sakamoto leaving so soon, so abruptly.

  ‘And Clare?’

  ‘It got worse and worse. She ended up abusing me in language I’d heard her brothers use, years ago. Accused me of deserting her. We parted in acrimony. It was a terrible evening. She slipped and fell as we left the restaurant and when I bent down to assist her, she swore at me.’

  ‘I’ll come to the hotel,’ Alice said. ‘Come with you to the airport.’

  Mr Sakamoto sounded pleased at the offer.

  ‘Uncle Tadeo should have told me when he rang,’ he said distractedly. ‘I had to learn from Haruko that yesterday he rang me from a hospital bed.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Some kind of flu. But it could be pneumonia. At his age, in any case, these things are far more serious.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Alice. ‘I’m on my way.’

  At the airport they drank coffee in an inhospitable café, ringing with noise. Chrome and aluminium clanged about them. A child was somewhere wailing. Mr Sakamoto appeared tired; his eyes were red from lack of sleep. A strange desolation passed over each of them. Alice reflected that this was yet another characteristic of airports – to induce generic dejection and slapdash conversation. But for Mr Sakamoto the cause was precise: he kept trying to ring Uncle Tadeo on his mobile phone, but got no response. They conferred on the reason. He may have been taken for tests; nurses may have confiscated his phone; perhaps he had switched it off in order to take a nap. There were a dozen reasonable explanations, Alice said. She tried to calm him, to mollify his alarm. Electronically modulated announcements, generated by machines, boomed into the café, incomprehensibly.

  ‘Come and visit me,’ said Mr Sakamoto, his voice gentle against the noise. ‘How can you resist it? The kingdom of modernity, the empire of signs, gadgetry, robotics, futuristic inventions. You could meet my daughters
. I could show you Nagasaki.’

  Alice said ‘yes’ without even thinking. Yes, she would visit him in Nagasaki. Soon. Nagasaki.

  She watched her friend enter the exclusive zone of scanning machines, metal detectors and antiterrorist devices. He passed under the archway that somehow knew if he was carrying a gun. He waved. Then he bowed. Alice also waved, and then bowed. The symmetry between them contested the turmoil all around, the rushing passengers, wheeling luggage, the airport staff, the rattling trolleys and impatient lines and bored mingling groups. It was a single event of neat correspondence. It was humane and tender. It was like theatre, like art.

  In the city it was still light. Alice wandered the inner streets of Paris feeling bereft. Her time had been so governed by the presence of Mr Sakamoto – even on days when they met for only half an hour – that all was emptiness, now, and mere purposeless strolling. Shoppers carried plastic bags of groceries and clutched their baguettes; tourists peered into windows at Parisian delectables; elderly men and women strolled arm in arm. There were babies in prams, young people in trendy clothes, small dogs trotting along on extendable leads. There was a hum all about, the sound of daily life continuing, a sound congenial and easy on the ear. Stone, wood, concrete, metal: these held up the city before and around her with impressive solidity. She wondered what Paris-in-ruins would be like. What would this city be in a thousand years’ time? What might remain? What might fall away? She moved as the traffic commanded, halted on the pavement by red lights, walked when given green permission. There might be decentralisation, no cities at all. There might be shattered spaces and underground retreats. There might be something from the movies: skyscrapers of vertiginous and impossible height, sky channels of zooming vehicles, never colliding, rocket-driven shoes and virtual windows in homes. Everything would be automated – food, sex. Everything would be subject to arcane systems of regulation and the haunting, invisible power of the state. Late capitalism. Simulation. New-improved forms of loneliness.

  As Alice turned into rue Franc Bourgeois, she saw ahead of her, in the crowd, someone she recognised. It was not a friend, or a colleague, but a woman resembling herself. The woman had come out of a bakery holding a cardboard box tied with string, and as she stepped across the threshold from the store to the street, Alice saw her face in a three-quarter profile. It was an almost dreadful moment, a kind of teasing apparition, a joke, a mistake. Yet the resemblance was remarkable. The woman’s hair was cut differently and a little longer, just past her shoulders, and she may have been slightly smaller in height, but overall the likeness was unmistakable. Alice began following the woman with the cardboard box, not sure exactly why, not sure what compulsion drove her. On the other hand, she reasoned, why wouldn’t one follow one’s chanced-upon double?

  The woman with the box walked directly to rue Rivoli, then headed towards the Hôtel de Ville. The pavements were crowded with pedestrians, and once or twice Alice lost her, then saw again her bobbing head and firm trajectory. Alice was trying to decide if she should catch the stranger, and tap her on the shoulder, and surprise her in the way she herself had been surprised, but something inhibited her. Dusk was descending and perhaps this, above all, this sense of an indeterminate time of shadows and mauve air and the blinking on of sodium-vapour lamps, the time of ephemeral passage and uncertain presences, caused her to hesitate. She bumped into shoppers and workers hurrying home; she felt lumpish and slow. People’s bodies were obstacles; their pale faces passed indifferently. This was, she supposed, closing-time clamour, the hurry towards exits and journeys home. All of a sudden the woman again disappeared. Alice accelerated a little, rushing forward, and realised that the woman had gone down the steps, into the Métro. Streams of people passed her, engrossed by destinations. Alice had paused only for a moment, but perhaps had lost her chance. She headed downwards into the concrete caverns, with their tunnels and signs and tiled routes into darkness, with their mechanical wind and tumultuous roar.

  Alice had lost her. She should have been bolder and claimed the happy accident of resemblance. She walked back up the stairs, feeling her failure. And almost at once she began to doubt what she had seen: could she have simply imagined, or needed a mirror?

  That night Alice dreamed of Mr Sakamoto. She was pushing through crowds, looking for someone. Figments and spectres swam in the air. People walked right through her: she was a nothing, empty space. Shop windows did not reflect her image. She descended steps and saw before her twin branching tunnels. Choosing the left, the more dimly lit (and thinking, in dream-thought: this is rather foolish), she came upon Mr Sakamoto waiting on an empty platform. He looked happy to see her. He smiled and opened his arms broadly in a welcoming gesture. His overcoat formed a shell; he became a refuge.

  PART TWO

  12

  Tokyo from the sky.

  Night navigation by aircraft, formally sheer terror, is one of the consummate art forms of the twenty-first century. Out of deep black, extending all the way to space, comes a pool of illumination, a nocturnal fire. It tilts and slides, as if insecure and unearthly, yet as the plane descends it begins slowly and by gradations to balance, becoming a disc, a shelf, a platform of arrival. At some thousands of metres one can detect concentrations of light and traceries of streets. One can look down upon systems, mysterious as any computer. There are logical patterns of identical shapes, mostly cuboid, rectangular, exceeding the boundary of the eye. There is a confusion of horizons and non-horizons, a fellowship of continuous spaces.

  From her pod-like window, with her face pressed to the glass, Alice watched Japan come closer and closer. The plane dipped and circled. At a certain point she could make out billboards, vast and effulgent, coloured with a palette even Georges Claude would find astounding, and, beyond that, headlights of cars, the beaded tracks of highways and roads, the photosynthetic flare of shopping and commercial districts. Electrical city. This was Edison’s dream. This was light in every form, dividing the shimmering world from the velvet darkness.

  The plane landed with a thump, seeming to impress itself in the tarmac.

  Alice stayed her first night in a hotel of crushing anonymity. The staff at the narrow front counter bowed and smiled, made intelligent signs to direct her to the elevators, but the ‘businessman’s choice’ felt like a mausoleum. Lighting was dim and sombre; the corridors of the hotel, undecorated, had a fusty and airless atmosphere, and the room into which she gained access with her chunky key was a small brown box, dominated by an intrusive television mounted like a gigantic bug on the ceiling. There was a miniature shower cell, a telephone, and green plastic slippers wrapped in cellophane. The smell of stale cigarette smoke was all-pervasive. The windows would not open. The lamp was not strong enough to read by. It did not feel like Japan. It did not feel like anywhere. Outside, in a chasm seven floors below, traffic moved in restless queues, this way and that. From this distance the cars appeared wholly automatic, with no actual drivers or human component. Alice was reminded of funerals – their eerie systems of motorisation in removing dead bodies, their distended time.

  A few weeks ago Mr Sakamoto had e-mailed, setting out the choices: the tourist hotel (which he recommended, but Alice decided she could not afford), the love hotel (strictly for liaisons; ‘just in case,’ Mr Sakamoto said), the businessman traveller’s hotel (a.k.a. budget) and the sleeping capsule (the claustrophobe’s nightmare). It had been a simple choice. She had booked on the internet, attracted by the fact the hotel was in the mellifluous-sounding Nishiogikubo district, and was the cheapest available on the list. Her disappointment was huge. Alice realised she had been entertaining in her head a kind of literary Japan – of screens and wooden floors and tastefully minimalist interior design. There was perhaps a shackuhachi flute playing somewhere in the distance and the sweet, tinkling sound of dripping water. Although she knew these items were unlikely to feature in a cheap Tokyo hotel, some part of her yearned irrationally for their reassuring appearance, for some indication, in
any case, that was not this denuded hotel-land, blanked by corporate dullness.

  Alice glanced around the room, her gaze coming to rest on the telephone. She would ring Mr Sakamoto tomorrow, when she arrived in Nagasaki.

  Alice slept poorly and could not remember her dreams. In the middle of the night, her eyes flew open. Something, somewhere, had awoken her with a jolt. Outside the window was the whitish sheen of ambient neon light, and a billboard flashing, make-believing, speaking to everyone and no one.

  Ground level. Daylight.

  Tokyo was all verticality and titanium shine. Curved surfaces reflected people as jellyfish. There was fluted steel, trapezoidal glass and plasma-screen messages, escalators aplenty, virtual and actual realities. In the brown chemical haze, in the confusing thrum, Alice tried hard to orientate herself. She was helped at last by a myopic, crew-cutted stranger who directed her with hushed tones and butterfly gestures of the hand. When she could not understand, he helped her into a taxi.

  The city was shifting its pixels, achieving and losing definition. Alice had a headache. A helicopter throbbed above, like a UFO. She closed her eyes, clutching her backpack, and summoned Mr Sakamoto’s face, said hello to him, smiled and imagined him expressing delight at her arrival. Travel contained this instructive discombobulation. Alice was learning her foreignness, experiencing the unbecoming of places. Yet in her bafflement and travel-tiredness she was still exulted; the great city swung around her as the taxi pulled away. There was a frieze of colour, light, synthesised community. Glass towers bent above, replacing the sky.

  The railway station was a booming labyrinth, stuffed with hurrying people. No one moved slowly. Fast motion was not, it seemed, exclusively cinematic; it was the quality that excited Tokyo citizens into post-modern haste. The crowd seemed to Alice good-looking, well-dressed and athletically speedy. Everyone but she knew where to go, and went there in a rush. She stood still, full of perplexity and admiration. There were signs she could not read – kanji, katakana – and glistening stalls of foodstuffs, trinkets and toys. Three stalls in her compass sold mobile phones: she was triangulated by their appeals and their handsome salesmen. One stall had as its emblem a cartoon phone with a smiley face and waving arms; it looked vaguely like a baby, as if phones were evolving nonsensically towards the human.