The Naked World

by Eli K. P. William

  So he was disappointed when he finally caught the two of them in the library and Book replied, “I cannot answer that question.”

  “Oh. O-okay. I’m sorry to bother you then, I guess.”

  “You are not bothering me,” said Book. He was sorting a pile of massive tomes on a table in the lounge while Little Book stood just behind him watching. “Xenocyst has been compelled by agreement with the venture charities to eliminate all academic education programs. If I were to answer you in the present circumstances, then I would be violating our protocol.”

  “Ah. Well no problem then.” For the first time, Amon realized that there was a huge omission in the Xenocyst infrastructure: schools. There were places to eat, sleep, void, give birth, recuperate, even a block of buildings carefully conjoined to form a sort of architectural gymnasium for physical training. Nearly every essential human activity was covered, but there was nowhere for higher learning, excepting the library perhaps if that even counted and Amon believed it didn’t. “That seems like a strange rule for the venture charities to make. Why would they insist on that?”

  “For precisely the same reason, I cannot answer that question.”

  “Is there someone else I can ask about it then? It’s—I’m very confused, you know. Sometimes it’s hard for me to sleep …”

  “Anyone to whom you inquire who comports themselves in accordance with our policies will be required to provide a similar response.” Tap-tap-ta-tapatapatap … “What we recommend instead, as we recommended to you previously for alternative reasons, is that you utilize our collection. No restrictions have been imposed upon self-study.”

  Amon glanced at the book-filled shelves and then back at the two Books. He had no intention whatsoever of reading, but under their urging stares he felt it would be disrespectful to ignore their advice after he had sought it out and they had kindly given it. So he thanked them with a bow and stepped towards one of the aisles.

  In the lounge at the front of the library, men and women slouched over books around a central table, sat along the walls, or crouched on the open floor while many others actively browsed the shelves. Amon hadn’t been expecting the library to even be open so late—why waste resources keeping such an inessential facility running after hours?—but it seemed to be the busiest area in the entire building.

  Although he was skeptical that reading would be in any way beneficial to him, he didn’t want to be rude to Book, and so began looping back and forth down the aisles, passing repeatedly through the sitting nexus where he’d undergone numerous interviews. Though he’d been able to read the English phrase on the bags, he was somehow still unable to parse the Japanese titles on the spines and shelf after shelf of inscrutable runes slid past. He was wondering how long he should keep up this act, pretending to be interested in what seemed to him a stodgy, boring place that housed useless junk and enabled an utterly pointless hobby, when a single title that seemed to make sense jumped suddenly out of the incomprehensible.

  It was three rows from the top at about chest height, and Amon did a double take before he could properly read the title—The Woman in the Dunes—though the author’s name was too blurry for him to make out. He paused for a moment, staring at the spine in befuddlement—this lone strip of signal amidst endless rows and columns of noise—before hesitantly picking it up. It was a bunko edition, just the right size to hold in the palm of your hand, and without even looking at the cover he flipped it open. He was greeted by words as scrambled as the titles, and as he scanned through page after page of text of which he could not read a single line, he began to feel dizzy. Immediately, he put the book back in its slot and headed straight for the exit.

  A sort of queasy dissonance lingered with him as he climbed his way back to the elevator, like an out-of-tune minor chord that jangled with the shadows around him. This emotional disharmony clashed with the dread still seething beneath his skin so that he lay on the damp futon all night, kept awake by pangs of anguish in his spine and chest. Now his restlessness had left him, to be replaced by a sort of ennui. For when the morning came, getting up was a struggle, and when work was over, he went straight back to the elevator, where he lay about staring blankly at the ceiling, sleepless.

  The feeling stuck with him day after day, night after night, and it became progressively harder to get up each morning. Soon his hallucinations returned—the jingles and laugh tracks, the service announcement survival marathons and mixed martial art beauty creams—now humming with a sort of diabolic vibration that made him want to throw up. He managed to push the enigmatic phrase from his mind, but found thoughts of those he had sent here filling the cognitive vacuum. He imagined a bloodthirsty gang of them swarming him while he worked outside, or creeping into the elevator to throttle him while he slept. Sometimes in the dark, he remembered their screams one by one, ten thousand distinct voices decrying the pain he had caused, and goosebumps prickled his skin all over.

  By about the seventh day he still managed to rise from his floor, but the long plunge off the end of steps and ledges he encountered on his construction course seemed to beckon, the erasure of choices appearing so much more attractive than any other choice he might make. The forest dream had not visited him once since he’d crossed the Sanzu River, nor had any other dream, and the air seemed to fill with a sort of sandpaper heaviness so that each breath weighed him down while scraping him away from the inside. Everything he sought seemed destined for failure: his job gone, Mayuko lost, the answers forever out of reach. For what did a lowly bankdead in the pit of all humanity, brain-damaged and incompetent, hope to achieve? Did he seriously think he might get out of the District of Dreams and make a difference when he had to use every ounce of energy just to stay alive, just to climb across a wasteland and labor away for a few morsels before climbing his way back again?

  Then one night, as he was plodding his way back to his room, Amon felt a breeze blowing from above that reminded him of something, though he wasn’t sure what. It was a cool end-of-summer breeze carrying a sad hint of fall, and he stopped to let it stroke his skin in the steaming air, knowing somehow that he’d felt one just like it long ago.

  The breeze touched him intermittently, channeled down a stairpath crevice from above to the rooftop where he stood, and he tried to connect the sensation to a fragment of his past. But every time he sensed the moment drawing closer the breeze ceased, forcing him to start the reminiscing all over when it returned. Minutes passed and soon the feeling of having a memory approach and yet always remain just out of reach became unbearable. So he began to climb in the direction of the wind, searching for higher ground where its mnemonic power blew more steadily.

  He had passed this stairpath many times but had never once taken it because it always seemed too crowded. That night was no exception, as he was bumped and jostled by those going steadily up and down. The path first took him to the end of a crevice where it began to slant sharply and then spiral around several shafts, transitioning into zigzagging tall alleys and winding tunnels, the breeze growing stronger and more persistent with each step as he hiked higher than ever before.

  Amon was beginning to wonder where so many people were going at this hour, when he stepped out onto a packed rooftop, glanced up, and immediately caught his breath. There, high above, was the night sky. A mere thin slice of stars in a crack in the roofscape canopy to be sure, but all the more powerful for Amon because it was his first sighting. During his banklife, the clear night sky had been obscured by InfoStars configuring themselves hypnotically into MegaGlom logos, and after his bankdeath his vision had been too damaged. Then he had been locked up in the elevator, and when he was allowed to walk around alone he was always overshadowed by the leaning, looming structures or the clouds overhead. Now he was seeing the naked stars—unadulterated, untainted, unveiled but for the faintest haze of smog—and stood shoulder to shoulder with the other denizens, gazing upwards so intently it seemed like hours before he realized they were all doing the same.

>   Considering only its appearance, the night sky didn’t seem like much—just a bunch of twinkling lights really. The digital light of Free Tokyo had had more color, more variation in shape and tone, fizzling and blazing in dazzling patterns. But even with the blinking satellites scrolling relentlessly by, there was no denying that it touched him in a special way. Although the stars were indistinguishable from the InfoStars graphically, there was something imperceptibly different about them, the wonder he felt in his bones banishing all doubt as though it rang the pith of his inner unknown like a bell. He hardly noticed the bodies shifting around him as people came and went, chattering voices kept low by the celestial reverence they all instinctively shared, and it wasn’t until he was finally trudging drowsily to his elevator, well into the midnight hours, that he sensed his dread was gone and slept soundly for the first time in nearly two weeks.

  For a while, the dissonance that one title, Woman in the Dunes, had left in Amon had driven him away from the library and part of him blamed the Books for giving him bad advice. Opening its covers had failed to increase his knowledge and had only seemed to succeed in triggering the worst of his malaise. But like one’s first taste of a strong cheese or beer, his initial aversion to reading grew subtly and imperceptibly into a curious desire to experience it again. As strange as it was for him to admit, part of what lay behind this fresh impulse was an emotion he’d rarely felt before: nostalgia. He found himself actually missing the nosties of Jinbocho and the Tezuka, where he had lived for seven years. Before he might have been ashamed of this feeling, as when Rick called him a filthy nostie in Shinbashi, but Barrow’s defense of nostieism that night in Tsukuda had had time to percolate into him, and those days seemed to be long gone. This was a new world, a naked world, and the prejudices of the old one no longer applied.

  So inevitably Amon returned to the library and soon found himself there whenever it rained after work or he was too tired for wandering. Sitting with his back nestled in a dim corner, surrounded by the dusty caramel-like smell and shuffling sound of other readers and browsers, Amon would knit his brow at the garbled pages for hours and hope they would resolve into legible symbols. It was a tedious, unrewarding effort, but something told him to persevere as though by succeeding at reading this one book he might open the door to all the others and step into the house of clarity they seemed to promise.

  “I am here to inform you,” said Book, approaching Amon one night while he was crouching in among the stacks, pouring over the novel, “that the council has granted us permission to make an exception in your case.”

  “An exception?” said Amon, looking up from the page. “To what?”

  “We reported your combination of difficulties with reading and eagerness to learn. After lengthy debate, the councilors concluded that it would be prudent to provide you with a series of orientation sessions prior to your first expedition to Delivery.”

  “Oh. Okay. What sort of orientation?” Amon stood up, closed the book, and returned it to its slot on the shelf.

  “I am utilizing this term ‘orientation’ as a euphemism in case someone were to misunderstand it.” Book turned his head slowly from side to side and swept his gaze around the room, and Amon understood that he was worried about being overheard.

  “Thank you,” said Amon with a bow, unsure exactly what all the secrecy was about but grateful for an opportunity to make sense of his situation.

  “There is no cause for gratitude as we are simply facilitating the council’s verdict.” The two Books stared at Amon, their eyes twitching as though studying him carefully. “Do not forget that you are still on trial and that failure to memorize and comprehend the orientation content could serve as a factor in your expulsion.”

  “Understood. I’ll do my best. So … when do we get started?”

  “We plan to have you oriented by the time of your co-habitator’s first supply expedition next week, as you will be required to accompany the crew. Provided, however, that you can accommodate in your schedule a visit to us each evening after your regular duties.”

  “Of course. But co-habitator? Is someone moving into the elevator with me?”

  Book shook his head and Little Book began to tap. “Allow us to inform you also at this time, on behalf of the council, that after the Delivery expedition, you will be required to submit your roombud to our common supply pool and will be assigned to a disposable room. It is there that you will be co-habitating with another individual.”

  “I see,” said Amon, who was delighted to hear he’d be moving out of the elevator, but wasn’t sure how he felt about sharing his room as he’d lived alone for his entire adult life. “Do you know who my roommate is going to be?”

  “I am not familiar with whom you will be co-habitating, personally. However, I can inform you that the council selected an individual who is crashdead like yourself.” Tap-tatapa-ta-taptap. “Xenocyst prides itself on the egalitarian integration of our members, irrespective of which world they were born in or where they are positioned within the camp hierarchy. Nonetheless, we prefer to pair crashdead in the early stages of acclimatization and expect that you will assist with your roommate’s training.”

  A pang of guilt and fear struck Amon anew, as he wondered whether it might be one of his targets. But not wanting to seem paranoid, he kept his worries to himself, and simply thanked the Books again, prompting them to walk out of the aisle without a word.

  After his first stargazing experience, Amon never felt the memory-laden breeze again. And finding himself too busy and tired to climb that same stairpath after work for the following few days, he continued visiting the library instead. Yet he noticed that the sky was visible along his routine course much more than he had first realized. When some task brought him up high now and then, the overlapping shafts would sometimes open up in just the right way to expose a sliver in the distance above. Or if he was lucky there would be a sprinkle of sky, multiple little tears in the roofscape visible from a single spot. Often these small openings were shrouded in flakes and a smog-like mist, or filled with the careening black arc of crows, the only place Amon ever saw them. But beyond these obstructions, inside the jagged openings in the slumscape, the sky was invariably there behind everything in the world. And he realized that it had always been there, behind the InfoSky, revealing itself occasionally when the swirling surge of videos and images would die down for a moment, like the view through a curtain blowing in the wind. He simply hadn’t noticed, as these ephemeral glimpses were rare and had never seemed worth attending to until now, any more than a blank screen.

  He was surprised by how often he could see the moon. It traced a very particular trajectory in the sky and yet was frequently aligned with his elevated viewing spots. He soon learned that Xenocyst had been intentionally designed this way, the whole slumscape reconstructed in accordance with the seasons to allow in a healthy amount of sun to the upper levels during the day and to make the moon visible at night. Since few had calendars, this allowed the residents to keep track of the passage of time and connect with something that Amon was only just beginning to understand.

  Once he felt a spike of light glance down upon him while he worked and followed it upwards, only to find a strange absence awaiting his gaze, a visual lacuna that was neither black nor white nor any color floating in a crack in the toy-block overhang from which the bright heat shining around him radiated. Then he had to look away, the sun still too much for his eyes and mind to handle. He was reminded of how little he knew, how many questions lay unanswered. Who was Hippo? Vertical? Ty? The two Books? What were they doing in Xenocyst and what was this community all about? Then there was Delivery, with its strange slogan and the OpScis … Gradually he was learning about different facets of the District of Dreams, but this solar anomaly seemed to lay bare his ignorance and filled him with a sort of jittery curiosity that nothing in his bounded routine could satiate.

  In certain frames of mind, when he looked up at a particular shred of sky, sapped of
all promotainment, he found it dismally barren and banal—just something to keep the eye busy while working or performing some other task, like the wallpaper in the Liquidation Ministry office. And without his forecast apps he found the weather annoyingly unpredictable, unable to see what the incessant changes of the sky could be for. The haze covered its azure in the daytime without any personalization to his preferences or biometrics. The clouds formed and drifted off one after the other, without concern for his actions or his wants. The blue lightened and darkened and deepened without anyone losing or earning a single yen. It just changed according to its own inscrutable principles, completely irrelevant to human existence. Sometimes its pointlessness seemed so grave that Amon hated the sky and wanted nothing more than to somehow get it under his heel, to piss the pigment of his obsessions and neuroses all over it. But he couldn’t forget the power of the stars that night and found his eyes drawn upwards at every opportunity, hoping for a reprise from the quotidian grind, however brief and incomplete it might be.

  9

  THE ROAD TO DELIVERY

  1

  As Amon gathered with a crowd early one morning at the intersection of many rooftop alleys to head for Delivery, he was suddenly attacked from behind.

  Strong arms wrapped around his chest and pinned his arms to his sides. Instinctively, he began to writhe against his assailant, wriggling violently and pushing outwards to break the hold. Book had told him that he would be introduced to his crashdead roommate here, and Amon felt that his fears had come true, that one of his targets had recognized him and come seeking vengeance.