The man kept going without responding, and Amon thought he hadn’t heard him or had ignored him. But after a few more strides he made a sudden right and went over a small fence of dark metal bars in a single hop. There he stopped—in an alley paved with small stones—and took out what appeared to be a sweet bean bun from a pocket. Amon scrambled over after him hauling the heavy sack, and plopped it down on the other side, where he leaned over with his hands on his knees to catch his breath. When he lifted his head, the man had already finished his bun and was chowing on some sort of sandwich. Mouth watering despite the smell of the man, Amon bent over to rummage inside his sack for a rice ball, tearing off the wrapper and swallowing it down almost without chewing. He only realized after he was done that there had been fish flakes at the center.
From Amon’s sack, the man withdrew a bottle of some translucent liquid, popped it and took a big swig. Amon imitated him by rustling a darker drink out of his sack and draining it in seconds like the last time. He watched the man chuck the bottle down the alley, where it hit the wall at the end and bounced to a stop on the rocky ground. Amon was about to do the same with his when he noticed something about it and his hand paused. It had tasted like a coffee chocolate sports drink but the bottle was unlabeled, with no brand name or logo. No list of ingredients or disclaimers. Just a clear plastic tube with a residue of shaded fluid at the bottom. It had been designed for Free Citizens who could see it on the ImmaNet. What it looked like to the bankdead or anyone else was irrelevant. If he thought about it, this was true of the bottle, of the vending machine it had come from, and of everything else in the city—from the gutters to the peaks of the highest towers—as though it all existed to say that his senses, his mind, his body, were not welcome. But then what was this man doing here, a lone bankdead far away from the camps that could support him? And this raised further questions, like how he had found Amon, why he had bothered to approach him, and what his reason was for offering to guide him now.
When the man scarfed down a rice ball of his own and started back towards the fence, Amon tried clicking on him but his profile failed to pop up. If he was going to get answers, Amon realized, he would have to ask. “Hold on a second,” he said.
The man stopped with his hand already on the fence and turned his head to look at Amon.
“Can I ask your name?”
The man just stared back impassively, his intense gaze seeming to almost meet Amon’s but not quite, their eyes just shy of contact. After a few silent seconds, Amon became nervous and felt he had to say something. “S-so how much farther to the Sanzu River do you think?”
“We’re going somewhere else first.”
“Oh. W-where to?”
Letting this question go as well, the man turned around, put his other hand on the fence, and bent his knees to jump.
“Wait!” Amon called out and the man gave him another off-target stare over his shoulder. The rice ball seemed to have merely whet Amon’s appetite, and when he got the chance he wanted to eat more, much more. But now that his thirst seemed to be sated at last, a touch of relaxation had settled on him—his muscles looser, his pulse slower—and this feeling had awakened yet another long-neglected urge. “Before we start moving again, is there a washroom nearby?”
The man pointed towards the end of the alley with his left index finger and then bent it to the right. Amon hadn’t noticed until then, but apparently the alley continued to the right, and stepping over to the far wall, he saw that it was shaped like an L. There was a door at the end that looked like some sort of service entrance, but he approached to find no handle. As he was trying to pry it open from the crack beside the jamb, he noticed a sharp, sweet smell emanating from around his feet and realized what the man had taken him to mean by “washroom.”
The situation had grown too urgent for Amon to be picky.
“Um, do you have any …”
A roll of toilet paper bounced off the wall, skipping and tumbling over the rocks, before coming to a rest on the ground beside where Amon was already crouching.
Although Amon had been in Tokyo for as long as he could remember, he recognized nothing on the winding course the man was leading him along, turning down side street after side street into obscure corners of the metropolis. This area, the fringes of Tonan Ward, was unfamiliar to him, and he couldn’t see any of the regular skyline landmarks, like GATA Tower or the headquarters of The Twelve And One. Just unmarked streets, bleak skyscrapers, unkempt pedestrians and weathered cars melting past one after another.
Since Amon had not caught a whiff of the river for some time, he suspected they were moving away from it. Although the man had already said they were taking a detour, this nonetheless made him anxious and Amon occasionally found himself twitching his index finger unconsciously to open his navi as they walked. At the same time, he couldn’t help flicking his gaze repeatedly to one of the bottom corners of his visual field, either to check the clock on the left or his AT readout on the right, both of which he recognized weren’t there but couldn’t resist the urge to look at.
The stress and disorientation of not knowing the time made the empty space where his clock should have been too attractive to ignore. While he guessed it was day because the sky was still too bright to look at, he could determine nothing more precise and had no sense of how long anything took. Had they been walking for minutes or hours? Were they proceeding quickly or slowly? They seemed to move fast relative to the other pedestrians and cars, but Amon found their speed difficult to gauge. Sometimes a motorbike seemed to carve through traffic in slow motion, as though the gelatinous air hindered its progress. At other times a hobbling granny seemed to rip along the curb, like a lopsided comet. Clearly his mind was adjusting to the naked world, but there was still a long way to go.
Amon’s AT readout, on the other hand, drew him in with the promise of purpose. Without knowing the cost of following this man, of putting one foot in front of the other, or of any other action, Amon couldn’t tell whether what he did was important. And his eyes responded to this uncertainty by darting again and again to the information source that had always dispelled it.
Eventually, after Amon had given in to these compulsions dozens of times and they had taken more turns along small side streets than he could keep count of, the man stopped on a street lined with residential condos. Standing on a patch of sidewalk, he stared up at one of them, a building of around ten stories. While his legs remained still for a time, his hands shifted restlessly from pocket to pocket, transferring various things from one location on his person to another. They moved quickly and often palmed the smaller items, preventing Amon from seeing what they were, though he still managed to identify a few: a tiny wrench, a metal plate, an elasticked bundle of chips, a tangle of wires, an antenna, a soldering iron, bare speakers … The man would transfer something from his left shoulder to his left thigh, something in his paunch to the back of his shoulders, from his hip to his forearm …
He continued this pocket inventory shuffling for about a minute, staring up at the building with a frown as though pondering some fraught subject, until suddenly he stopped and cut straight down an alley between the building and the one to its left. Amon followed him to a small empty parking lot on the other side, where verandas were stacked up the rear wall.
“Stay here,” said the man and began to gallop full speed towards the building. Half a meter short of the wall, he leapt and grabbed the floor of a second-story veranda. For a split second his rotund form dangled there, swinging slightly, until he did a pull up, bringing his chin level with the floor. He then swung his body to the right, put his right leg onto the floor as he grabbed one of the rails with his left hand, lifted his right hand from the floor to grip another rail, drew his left foot up onto the floor, and pulled himself to his feet on the edge outside the railing. Amon watched in rapt astonishment as the man performed this entire stunt smoothly and rhythmically, as though he had done it countless times before.
Withou
t pausing, the man stepped on top of the horizontal handrail, withdrew a plastic bottle from a pocket around his lower back, raised it over his head, and slipped it between the vertical poles of the third-floor rail, where it remained standing on the floor of the veranda above. He then stepped back onto the floor on the outer side of the rail, gripped the poles, crouched down with his body arcing outwards from the waist, and finally hang-dropped back to the ground where he landed on his feet with a hard thud.
He did everything with such practiced ease he hardly made a sound otherwise. Nevertheless someone seemed to have noticed, for the door to the third-floor balcony opened and a boy stepped out. Wearing shorts and a golf shirt, he looked to be about eleven or twelve, his skin lustrous and clear, his cheeks slightly freckled and flushed with youth. Even at this distance, Amon instantly noticed the boy’s resemblance to the man, with the same wide flat nose, big sharp eyes, and frizzy hair, though the boy was far from obese; his short, skinny frame appearing fragile up high above the ground.
The boy stepped over to the edge of the veranda and stood before the bottle. Then, glancing furtively over his shoulder to the open door, he picked it up before slowly scanning the parking lot with a peculiar look of sadness and excitement. His gaze drifted about, passing obliviously over Amon and the man as if they were no more opaque than the air. Failing to locate whoever had brought the bottle, the boy looked behind him again as if to check that he wasn’t being watched from inside and twisted off the top. He raised the rim above his chin and began to pour it between his parted lips. At that moment, although his mouth was busy receiving the fluid, Amon could see the boy smile and flutter his eyelids as though he were viewing a video. Amon immediately recognized the well-known adverpromo the kid was reenacting and, though the bottle was unlabeled, knew he was drinking Cloud9 Nectar. He could almost see the golden mist pouring into his mouth and the approaching nimbus cloud that would carry him into the sky. Amon glanced over at the man and saw his hard, impenetrable visage broken. In the cracks was a heart-rending expression—his eyes glazed doleful yet proud—as he stared at the boy relishing the soft drink.
When the boy had downed about a third of it, he swept the parking lot one more time, his eyes gliding over them again without seeing. Then he tossed the bottle into the parking lot, where it bounced twice and spun under a car, the momentum of its final bound stifled into a burst of ricochets by the bottom until it came to a rest. He then went back inside, and once the door shut behind him, the man began retracing his steps into the alley, his face seamless and unreadable once more as Amon followed him off.
Watching the man walk just ahead of him, Amon thought he could detect something different about his bearing since before entering the parking lot. Though it might have been Amon’s distorted sense of time, he seemed to be moving at a more relaxed pace, as Amon no longer had any trouble keeping up. There also seemed to be a subtle shift in his gait that made it somehow more ponderous, more absorbed, and his head was slightly bowed, as though he were lost in thought. Meanwhile, whenever they stopped at an intersection, his hands would launch into an agitated flurry of pocketing and reorganizing, now and then coming up with a packet of smoked squid, peanuts, chocolate, or some other snack, which he promptly tore open and poured into his mouth. Although the man’s face no longer betrayed his emotions, Amon thought he could detect a new air of sadness about him as well. Surely these changes were related to his encounter with that boy. With his son? Most likely it was because of this relationship that he’d chosen to live outside the bankdeath camps and forego the generous supplies of the venture charities, not to mention the company of his fellow bankdead. His indirect gaze and curt manner of speech suggested that he wasn’t used to fraternizing, and Amon doubted there were many other bankdead on this side of the river—if any at all. Most likely he had no friends here, though his apparent aversion to conversation suggested he wasn’t exactly dying for someone to talk to. But if they were father and son, why did the man have to interact with him so surreptitiously? Instead of lurking in the parking lot, why not just go up and say hi?
Amon wasn’t expecting answers from the man after his previous questions had been brushed off or ignored. All the same, when they approached a railroad intersecting the street they were walking along and the gate came down, forcing them to wait for the train to pass behind a group of pedestrians, Amon said, “Um. Sir.”
The train creaked and groaned laboriously as it passed, and Amon supposed that it lacked the sound dampeners usually added to public vehicles so riders would think they were better maintained. The man turned around and looked at him with his off-aim gaze. “That boy …”
Amon gave up on what he was going to say as the man gave a slight frown, his eyes glistening with painful memories. They stood there almost looking at each other for an uncomfortably long moment, until the man shook his head.
“He likes Cloud9 Nectar,” the man said, turning away from Amon to face the gate. “It’s his favorite drink.” And Amon stood there staring at his back, reluctant to pry any further, until the tail of the train went by, the gate lifted, and they crossed the tracks with the gathered crowd.
Traversing the naked streets at a more leisurely pace, Amon was now able to take in the surround more carefully, his focus no longer clouded by thirst and haste (though he was still hungry). Stripped of the InfoFlux, the metropolis had stopped crying for him to spend, for him to act, for him to believe, for him to enjoy. It was simply there, these great, gungy slabs of worn concrete, metal, plastic, and glass, not seducing or offering, cajoling or guilting. But what does it want me to do? was the question that remained poised on the surface of every wall and road and sidewalk and window that came into Amon’s field of sight. A place that asked nothing of him, that failed to constantly stoke his desire, seemed like sheer waste—bleak, purposeless, impersonal—in clear violation of the most basic principles of marketecture. Because what were cities for if not to fuel the economy with their every fiber and atom? The sense of lack seemed to soak through his pores, ladening his blood with the pointlessness of his existence. Perhaps this osmosis of apathy had been happening all along, but the promoracket had deafened him to the hiss of its ceaseless seeping. So long as the cracks in the sidewalk were not so deep that someone tripped, the windows so old they actually broke, the doors so rusted they wouldn’t open, no one would notice and the charade could go on.
Watching the pedestrians between which the man moved, Amon could see that they existed in the other city, the Tokyo Amon had always known rather than the one he now confronted. They talked to themselves, laughed to themselves, cried to themselves, argued with themselves, twitching their fingers and shouting out commands. Most unsettling of all were their eyes. Unable to see what Amon was seeing, they weren’t looking at his spectacle but an invisible one, like mystic sages or madmen. Unable to hear what Amon was hearing, they weren’t tuned to his soundscape but a silent one, like bats or schizophrenics. Their feet seemed to be aware of the hard ground they walked upon, but every other part of their bodies was oblivious to their location, not needing to touch anything around them as every vehicle or shop door opened automatically and every lobby elevator Amon saw through the front windows came to meet them. And they were just as removed from each other, avoiding physical contact whenever possible to maintain their comfort zone and save money, all conversation snippets blurted out by passersby addressed to someone far away or to no one at all, like an archipelago of islands floating together high up in the clouds.
Amon recognized that he was at a disadvantage here without ImmaNet access, as many happenings were simply incomprehensible to him—a woman blowing a kiss to a partner not there; an old man gazing with apparent wonder into a dusty, crumbled demolition site; the crowd of streetwalkers diverted around some invisible obstacle on a crosswalk; the tide of bodies shifting to secret signals. Nonetheless, it seemed tragic to him that only the wealthy could afford to see what he could, and even then only momentarily. Few would ever gu
ess how filthy and neglected was the space in which they made their abode. Sometimes they looked simply ridiculous to him, like when a line of grown adults skipped along the sidewalk together. Apparently they were playing a game where they stepped on chains of related images to summon advertisements and earn rebates as Amon often had on his way to work. Surely he would have appeared just as silly to anyone who saw beneath the overlay as he now could. And considering how he might have looked to the bankdead when he was a Free Citizen led him to another thought that had been gestating in his mind since encountering the boy: How did he look to Free Citizens now that he was bankdead?
His reflection on storefront windows followed along beside him, but with the dirt on the glass and his ailing vision, it appeared merely as a gray, misty wraith of a man, faint and insubstantial. So he did a series of gestures to cast his perspective outside his body and look at himself, feeling a twinge of frustration in his gut when Teleport Surprise didn’t open. With his manifestation apps gone, his once mobile viewpoint was shackled permanently to his eyes. But he did his best to resign himself to this fact. From now on, he would just have to look at himself from inside himself, and he raised his hands in front of his chest to inspect them as he walked, turning them over several times to check how they might have changed. They looked veinier than he remembered, the fortune lines more deeply etched, and there were a few moles he’d never seen before. Covering his wrists were the sleeves of his jacket and he glanced down at his uniform to find the gray all uneven, the fabric shiny and coarse, his fake leather shoes scuffed. He was no longer a Liquidator and the shabby state of his attire seemed to bespeak the sham of still dressing like one. Though he no longer felt allegiance to the Liquidation Ministry or to GATA, he suddenly found himself ashamed to be wearing it, desecrating this suit with his bankdead flesh, and the feeling only intensified when he imagined how ugly his exposed face must look without digimake to the men and women on the street. If their faces were anything to go by, his shame was well warranted.
The Naked World Page 5
