Void Star

by Zachary Mason

  Strangers stride by, heading off in all directions. The cops, bored, ignore him. A monitor shows the time and the gates of upcoming departures. Seven hours till he leaves. He wonders if phones work on planes, and, if not, if she’ll worry.

  * * *

  Ninety minutes till his flight for Thailand, and it strikes him that he speaks no Thai, has never been there, knows no one, that it’s thousands and thousands of miles away, farther than he’s traveled in his life.

  “Are you there?” he murmurs for the hundredth time, and is ashamed of the uncertainty in his voice, though it’s possible—probable, even—that she’s the one who needs him, that something bad has happened—she had, after all, been in some kind of prison, and he said he’d free her, in fact gave his word.

  He buys the cheapest laptop in the vending machines. When he takes it out of the little hatch he’s surprised by its lightness. As he powers it up he finds himself expecting the game to start, but of course it doesn’t, and in fact there’s nothing on the new machine but boring office programs.

  He opens a search engine but realizes that he doesn’t even know her name. He’d have asked if they’d met normally, or if, once they had met, it hadn’t felt like she was all around him.

  He searches for actresses in Los Angeles, but their number seems to be infinite, each of them, seemingly, with a vanity website, and there’s no way to find her among the multitudes.

  He searches on “Cromwell,” and quickly concludes that she was talking about James Cromwell, an industrialist from San Francisco. There are thousands of articles about him stretching back decades but they’re all investments made, art bought, money money blah blah blah. Did the ghost see the same articles, huddled in the bathroom of the glass house on the sea?

  No reference to a cartel hitman named Hiro, but it’s not like he’d advertise. Lots of ethnic Japanese in the cartels after the last diaspora.

  He searches on “director’s daughter sonia,” and finds that Sonia is probably Sonia Caipin, daughter of Henry Caipin, the director. She has blogs about fashion and photography and, as far as he can tell, hanging out in good hotels with not-quite-famous friends, though none of the blogs has been updated in a while. He’s elated to find a photo of a pretty girl looking wistful before a crumbling wall, but it turns out there are a lot of photos like that, ethereal beauty and disintegration apparently being Sonia’s thing. He looks up the day the LAPD disbanded, but for that day she just has photos of out-of-focus fireworks in deep blue empty skies. Cromwell seems more like an abstract force of economics than a real human being, but Sonia is believably a person, however remote from his experience, and it’s exciting to have found a piece of the ghost’s story in the world.

  She’d said her German boxer’s name was Johann. It turns out there are a lot of German boxers with that name, but only one, Johann Keil, has been in recent American films, direct-to-web ones with titles like Blood Eagle III and Pit-Fight Armageddon. A publicity still shows him bare-chested, arms crossed, a gun in either hand, and he seems to be trying to look sinister, a pose Kern knows and despises. The movie gossip sites have paparazzi shots from his premieres and at every premiere there’s a new girl on his arm, and Kern stops at the pictures for the premiere of Shatterfist—the girl with him is small, eurasian, remarkable-looking, her image seeming to float off the screen—and looking back he sees she was in one of Sonia’s photos.

  Her name is Akemi Aalto and the sound of it shocks him because he’s come to think of her as essentially unnamed. He finds a clip from a press conference where she smiles at the camera and in the ghost’s voice says she feels happiest when she’s being someone else.

  He finds her filmography but, better, there’s a gossip site with her press photos and paparazzi shots and in most of the latter she’s looking out of frame and her face is a pale mask, a neutral space that holds his eyes and seems like it could hold any emotion he chose to project. The photos stretch back seven months and the last one is time-stamped one day ago.

  In it she’s peering out from the dark interior of a limo from behind a guy who must be either a professional athlete or a successful gangster with his flashy suit and bulging triceps and a watch like a lump of raw gold. He looks Japanese and according to the caption his name is Tadao Yamaoka, and he seems familiar, which, Kern finds, is because he’s a kendo fighter ranked seventh in the world standings for Final Sword, a live-steel sword-fighting promotion out of Japan run more or less openly by the Yakuza. Kern sort of followed Final Sword for a while but they’re serious about protecting their intellectual property and it’s hard to get fights less than a few years old. He’d made watching them an exercise in controlling his queasiness—he’d seen more than one match end in decapitation. Final Sword makes a selling point of its fatality rate—more than half the fights end in at least one death—and it’s demi-illegality, though for something so underground it moves a lot of licensed merchandise and ads.

  Attached to the picture is an article that says that Tadao is in Taipei for a fight. There’s the usual speculation about his chances against his opponent, a decorated Italian foil fencer—Tadao has won all of his six fights, and the Italian all of his three, but on the other hand the losers in Final Sword usually either die or are injured into retirement. And how long, the article wonders, has he been seeing this stunning LA ingenue? It’s evident that the article considers Tadao’s star the brighter and Kern finds he’s indignant on Akemi’s behalf.

  He looks up Taipei, finds it’s a city on Taiwan, which is an island that belongs to Japan. There are mountains on Taiwan, but the ghost—Akemi—and Tadao seem to have just flown in. He wonders if Tadao helped her escape her prison, and she isn’t talking to him because she doesn’t need him anymore. He scrutinizes the photo, as though it will reveal a clue, and at first there’s nothing, but then he starts to think that he can see her despair, however hard she’s trying to hide it, and that tips it.

  * * *

  “Direct to Taipei, leaving in thirty minutes, no bags to check,” the gate agent confirms. “You’ll have to run, but you can make it.”

  He’d been dreading having to explain himself but she seems really not to care, and he wonders if this is her professionalism, but of course she doesn’t care, really no one in the world does, and this makes him feel a lightness, almost a giddiness, like his life lacks real weight.

  “You sure you’re not there?” he says. “Because there’s no going back.”

  “Actually, sir,” says the gate agent, “this ticket is full fare, as is the ticket for Bangkok that you bought last night, so you can use them whenever you like.”

  * * *

  He wakes as the plane banks, peers out at the azure seas and low streamers of pink cloud, a lurid country out of dreams. The wing seems to warp before his eyes, getting longer and thinner, and at first he thinks he’s hallucinating, but realizes he’s heard of that, they can do that now—the phrase “shape-shifting meta-materials,” overheard somewhere, rises in his mind.

  The sleeping passengers look absurdly vulnerable with their eye masks and neck rests, their mouths hanging open. He’d meant to stay awake—a hit seems improbable here, but a shame to make it this far and die through inattention—but the boredom and the stale air and droning engines wore him down.

  He’s acutely aware that in a few hours the plane will land and he’ll be standing there in the airport, the second of the day and the second of his life, clutching his bag, wondering what to do. Restless, he does a search on Tadao on the seat-back computer, finds he’s a fixture of the Vancouver nightclub scene, which is death for a fighter, and the end of his career must be coming soon, which is disappointing—at that level you’d think there’d be a purity, that he’d be an ascetic, totally dedicated to the way of the sword, but maybe that’s just something out of stories.

  33

  Encoded in Form

  As the town car coasts down through the switchbacks in the dark hills Thales tries to make a phone call from the car’s
computer. Some indefinite number of calls have already failed and he’s accepted that they always will and now he’s absently fast-scrolling through the contacts list, placing doomed calls without looking, and as he does wonders who decided the family could make do with such useless electronics.

  He expects to once again hear the dull bleat that means another failure but instead he hears a ringing, and looking down at the car’s screen he sees he’s dialed the surgeon, and feels a twinge of social distress—it’s hardly etiquette to call this late, absent a medical emergency.

  “Thales,” says the surgeon, perfectly composed and somewhat distant even at this hour.

  “I’m surprised I got through.”

  “What’s the problem? Have you been losing yourself in the mathematics?”

  Thales thinks of the madwoman, his gaps in memory, his mother’s absence. A degree of amnesia is to be expected, given his injuries, but when he first came to LA he could remember Brazil, he thinks—it’s only since his collapse in the tunnel by the beach that it’s disappeared, and if the surgeon can edit his memories then is this forgetting by design, and what does the surgeon not want him to remember?

  “When I collapsed, what was happening to me?” he asks, not wanting to approach the issue too directly.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I’d just like to know what’s going on in my life.”

  “It was a natural part of the progression of your injury. It’s useless to dwell on it.”

  “So there was no … additional damage?” He wonders if he used to be different—he’s heard of brain injury causing changes in personality.

  “Do you feel that something’s strange, or that you’re missing part of your memory?”

  He feels a fleeting impulse to be honest with his doctor but despite its superficial innocence the question is so perfectly apropos that Thales’ skin crawls and he says, “What? No. I feel fine,” simulating naivete, surprising himself with the conviction of his performance. “Why do you ask?”

  “I’ll see you soon. Call me if you have any problems.”

  Before the surgeon can ring off Thales says, “Have you spoken with my mother recently?”

  “Yes. She’s fine. She’ll call you soon.”

  The line goes dead and Thales is left staring at the phone, wondering what to make of their inconclusive verbal fencing, but his eyes turn to the undulations of the hills and he wonders what geologies, what vanished seas shaped them, and what stories are encoded in their forms, and in the wind moving through the grasses, and in the crumbling mounds of grey rock, and then, as the car rounds a bend, the city is revealed like a magic trick. The moonlight reflects palely on the loops of road incising the miles of hillside below him and in the far distance are the graded shadows of the mountains and out over the sea the lights of some new complex rise like a river of light, its heights lost in the fog, and now the car accelerates as it turns and it feels like the city is drawing him in.

  34

  Final Sword

  It’s always morning, that flight, since they’re flying west, and fast, and it feels like everything is suspended, like they’re going to float there forever in one frozen, shining hour, but then, impossibly, gravity lessens as they start their descent. Through the crust of ice crystals on the window Kern sees a distant formation of black drone fighters, like birds rising over the water, or a swirling column of smoke, and then, at some signal, they abruptly disperse in all directions, taking g-force that would kill a pilot, the sonic booms reaching him as a succession of muffled basso thumps, rippling the surface of his plastic cup of water.

  Now the plane is over land—snow-dusted farmland rushes by, rises toward him. The shock of touchdown, the shriek of air brakes, and then he’s walking off the plane onto another continent and blinking in the airport’s hard fluorescent light.

  There’s a screen showing departures and arrivals, just like in SFO. Only fifteen minutes have elapsed on the clock, which seems at first like it must be a mistake, but then he remembers about time zones. He’d once read the memoir of Tesshu, a great swordsman of Japan, who said that when he was a boy an hour had passed like a year, but when he was an old man a year had passed like an hour, so the journey here was like youth, and if he ever goes back to California he’ll have to pay the price, so the only solution is to keep on heading west.

  The other passengers hurry toward customs, but he sits and stares out the window at the blustering snow, the planes rising ponderously into the sky, and some of them must still have pilots because they have windows on the front that look like eyes squinting in the wind.

  And if he can’t find Akemi, what then? The money she got him will sustain him for a while but he has no way of getting more, and the problem is so profound, so entirely unapproachable that his mind goes empty, and he sits there listening vacantly to announcements in Chinese. He wants to explore the airport, and orient himself, but his hand finds the phone is his pocket and he reminds himself he has a job to do.

  When he gets to the front of the customs line he remembers the bloodstains on his pants, some from the man he fought and probably killed, the rest from the assassin who is dead beyond question. The customs agent waves him up; he’s middle-aged and Chinese with a drinker’s nose and lacks the brittle arrogance Kern expects in officials—in fact, he hardly seems to care at all, and after scrutinizing Kern’s passport for half a second, hands it back and sends him on his way. Automatic doors of opaque glass open and then he’s truly in a new country.

  He uses his laptop to look up Final Sword and finds that today’s event is starting soon on the outskirts of the city.

  A bank of yellow lockers by the wall. You’d never have that in the U.S.—someone would practically be obligated to put a bomb in one. He wakes the touch screen, feeds it a bill, agrees to a long contract in what’s probably Japanese. A locker pops open—he stashes his carryall, gets a tiny magnetic key.

  Out the door into cold wind, filthy snow crunching underfoot—he’s never touched snow before, had expected it to be purer, somehow celestial.

  There’s a line of green drone taxis. The dry heat of the taxi’s interior, the definitive slam of its door. The car says something, and then the same thing again, and he finally figures out it wants him to give it money.

  * * *

  The taxi moves noiselessly over the icy road past low boxy buildings that all look the same. Some seem to be stores, but he can’t tell what they’re selling. Trucks roar by, spraying the cab’s windows with black slush. He thinks of the Asia of media, the serenity of the temples, the neon ideography of Shinjuku at night.

  He tries to make a mental map of the cab’s turns, in case he has to walk back, but loses track and ends up just watching the streets go by.

  Finally the cab glides to a stop in an alley of loading docks and dumpsters. The cab says something in a pleasant baritone and the charges appear on a screen in yen, yuan and dollars; a panel slides back to reveal his change.

  The door opens onto bitter cold and the faint reek of rotting garbage, and he intends just to go for a quick reconnoiter but as he steps out the cab says something that he realizes is “goodbye” as it closes its door and drives off. He bangs on its trunk, uselessly, watches its red taillights recede through swarming particles of snow.

  A man in a black parka is watching him from a loading dock, standing in front of wide double doors. He’s Asian, his beard salted with ice, and his parka has the Final Sword logo, but even before these details have registered Kern somehow knows he’s in the life, and remembers that the Yakuza are running the show. Not even gangsters have guns in the Japanese territories, he recalls, which seems to dilute the risk, like violence is just a game here. Kern’s face aches with the cold, and his jacket lets in the wind, but he can’t help smiling at finding himself on this street, in this snow, this winter.

  The doorman cocks an eyebrow and in almost impenetrably accented English asks, “Are you here for the fights?” His hair is an elaborate pile,
stiff with ice and product, and underneath the parka he’s wearing an oversized checked suit. It seems to be a very specific look, though Kern has no idea what it means except that it boils down to cheap muscle.

  “Yeah,” says Kern, somewhat deflated, having been looking forward to talking in code. “Can you sell me a ticket?” He’d looked up the prices, has enough in his hand for the cheapest seat.

  “Prelims over,” the doorman says. “Tickets officially no longer for sale.” Kern is immediately trying to think where else he could look for Akemi, and how he’ll stay warm while he does it, but the yakuza says, “Just main event now. Want to see? Lot of seats in VIP area. Why not? You pay me now. Cash, okay?”

  The doorman pockets Kern’s money without counting it, hands him a ticket embossed with a silvery holographic samurai, sends him in.

  A narrow, dimly lit concrete stairway leads down into a welcome heat and the muted pulse of Russian heavy metal. At the bottom a door opens onto a black abyss full of roaring music, but as his eyes adjust he sees the steep slope of tiered seats, lit only by the fairy light of countless phones, and now a glow from the massive screens mounted over the steel cage at the nadir of the arena.

  The music stops and a fierce old Japanese man appears on the screens in what even Kern can see is a good suit, but under the tailoring he, like the doorman, is a plain old crim. He’s sitting behind a big desk in what looks like a lawyer’s office; Kern is too busy picking his way down the stairs to read many of the subtitles but the gist is that Final Sword embodies the traditional values of Japan.

  His seat is on the aisle four rows from the bottom and even for just one fight it seems like good value for money. The bloodstains on the cage floor remind him of his pants. Almost everyone is Asian and looks rich and they’re all absorbed in their phones; in the seat in front of him is a white man with cropped salt-and-pepper hair, so close that Kern can smell his boozy cologne and can’t help seeing that he’s looking at a betting website offering odds on the winning technique, things like head cut, wrist cut, throat shot, disarm and, worryingly, messy.