What You Do Not Know You Want

by David Mitchell

  Friday morning exposed a chink in my week’s armored bad luck. Werewolf was perched on a hillock of angling equipment in reception, threading a fishing line. “Off fishing?” I asked, just as a galaxy-class SUV pulled up outside. Werewolf muttered, “No, it’s my line—dancing morning,” and left Wei at reception. Opportunity stuck its thumb up my ass. From a call box I got hold of Dwight Silverwind, telling him the hour of repayment was at hand, then sidled back to Hotel Aloha to watch where Wei put the key. When the call came her face went from complacency to worry in twenty seconds. Dwight can still work his magic, the fraudulent old prick. Pive minutes later Wei went rushing out, carrying a document wallet and leaving reception guarded by Barney the dinosaur whose Back at… toy clock promised me a whole hour. One retrieved key and one deep metaphorical breath later I was in the back office, stashed with clutter from more prosperous days for Hotel Aloha. Trespasser, fretted Fear, trespasser. trespasser. Strung beads clatted as I passed into a lounge and kitchenette maintained with the minimum effort. The furnishings were bargain bin circa 1975. Fire escapes zigzagged the walls of the inner concrete courtyard. This rectangle of concrete must be where you fell. Here. Right here. Someone stepped over my grave. On the wall, a framed photograph held a poodle-cuddling woman in long-faded Hawaiian sunshine, perhaps at Lahaina. Mrs. Werewolf, deceased, I presume. No evidence of children, past or present. The bedroom housed an unmade bed and a dressing table hidden under bales of Angler’s Weekly and Playboy. Well, Vulture, I searched in a cupboard of hammers, saws, chisels, power tools and screws in labeled boxes but no seppuku dagger or flute case; a bestiary of purple teddies, lime rabbits and lovey-eyed dalmatians; an empty fish tank, under mattresses, between folded towels, amid dead shoes and albums of fishing trips, inside an umbrella stand and casserole dishes. Hurrry, nagged Fear, hurry, harry. Possible footsteps from reception kept worrying me. How long had Wei been gone.’ How long before she smelled wild goose? Should I take every key I could find and search the entire hotel? Oh, impossible, a squad of spies would need a week. Then the reception bell chimed and a wheezy voice called through, “Frank? You at home?” I froze. The outer office door creaked. Dildo! shrieked Fear, You left it ajar!

  “Frankie!”

  I crouched down looking for a hiding place. “What you doing to yourself in there’ It’ll make you go blind. Ain’t that why you bought Miss Slitty?” I scuttled under the table and beseeched the god of farce to do me this one favor but banged my head on a leg. “Frankie?” I heard heavy breathing. I saw his legs lumber by, close enough to touch. A bottle was opened, a glass filled. A magazine opened. A chuckle. “Thanks, Frankie, don’t mind if I do.” If he sat down now, he’d have a clear sight of me crouching here. My knee was killing me. Sixty seconds scraped by. Sixty more passed by before I suspected he might have gone.

  Wei was in a royal bitch of a mood when I got back from lunch. “Those Immigration fatheads! Just after you left this morning, I get a call saying there’s an inconsistency has been found with my green card extension, so present yourself immediately and ask for Oily Schmidt. No, no, it won’t wait, immediately means now, so off I run and guess what happens when after fifty goddamn minutes my number finally flashes up’ There is no Schmidt in Immigration! A Sampson, a Silvestri, a Stein, but no Schmidt. No one knows a thing about why I had to go there! Fatheads!” American bureaucracy for you, I sympathized, then steered the subject to the nocturnal disturbances on the fourth floor. Wei just frowned. “What shouting? I sleep like a baby in this place.” Then what about her trip to the Coke machine the other night? Wei just gave me an Are you crazy? look. “I sleep like a baby in this place.”

  Nightingale called to check exactly when my plane got back to Yerbas Buenas, and to ask what I’d like for my welcome-back dinner. For an eternity of three or five seconds I contemplated telling her to marry someone who loves her back. “Peppered steak.” I came to my senses, realizing there are several reasons why this information might be useful, one of whom might be Czech. “Your mozzarella salad, and you, my angel.” Jesus Gold-digging Christ, I thought to myself climbing into the shower, what a catch I am. Brutal truth was, if Yukio Mishima’s dagger failed to materialize, I have nowhere to fall but Nightingale’s money. If she knew that, she’d call the wedding off. “I don’t do cheap,” she says. I can’t afford to see her go. I don’t do cheap, either. Fears of financial insecurity wrecked my shower. But What I saw on the bathroom mirror as I climbed out, finger-written in letters not yet steamed over, turned my warm skin cold:

  d

  d y

  d y i

  d y i n

  d y i n g

  d y i n g i

  d y i n g i n

  d y i n g i n h

  d y i n g i n h e

  d y i n g i n h e r

  d y i n g i n h e r e

  Who? When? Dripping, I wrapped a towel around me, unlocked the door and looked down the buzzing corridor. Who, me? said the Coke machine. The elevator was climbing from 1F upward, not 4F down. Werewolf? Too subtle. Who else has a key? Wei? A joke? A threat? Who? A skeleton key? A cleaner? Another guest with a muddled-up key? The nocturnal shouter? But why that message? Back in the bathroom, the mirror letters were fading. Had they really been so clear? Isn’t it more likely that room 404’s previous occupant had drawn them on? Quarter-convinced by this, I dressed and wandered out for some air, for want of any other plan. Wei, far from hiding a triumphant smirk, was watching Will and Grace on a mini TV. Ten A.M. I wanted to speak to someone who knows me. Nightingale? Women attribute emotional calls to a guilty Conscience. Jesus Null-and-void Christ, I miss you, Vulture. I found myself on a bridge over the Lunalilo Freeway, watching the lights in Pearl Harbor. Depression turns Outdoors indoors. Dying in here.

  Werewolf was at reception by the time I’d eaten and wandered back to Hotel Aloha. The scarlet carnation in the semen-cloudy vase had rotted to tampon maroon. My last-but-[onc ’light], so I had little to lose by getting out your photo and telling Werewolf I had a couple of questions. My hairy hotelier squinted. “So that Jap’s why you’re hanging around like a wedged turd. Well, ain’t got nothing to say about him, ’cept I wish to sweet God he’d ended his misery in someone else’s hotel. The paperwork he cost me! The favors I had to call in to hush it up.” My request that Werewolf hand over those possessions which he’d “forgotten” to give to the police produced a row of browned fangs. “What’re you saying?” Theft from a suicide is still theft is what I’m saying; that I knew about the knife; that I wanted it back. Werewolf chose a lookey here, asshole voice. “If I had anything belonging to that faggoty half Jap”—he flicked your photo and I fought an urge to ram a pencil up his nostril and through his brain—“I’d probably drop it down the nearest sewer.” I held his gaze but explained that your relatives would pay a reasonable sum for the knife’s safe return. It has no monetary value, but it was a family heirloom. Werewolf went all oh? “A ‘family heirloom’? Well, bless my bleeding heart, that changes everything. Then I’d definitely drop it down the nearest sewer. Will you tell Faggoty Jap’s relatives that from me, during this dark and difficult time?”

  The pyramid of mirror letters in 404 had faded away. Logic administered bromides: staying in a hotel where you died just two weeks ago, searching for another suicide’s blade, wedding just around the comer… little wonder I was this wired up. I hadn’t—haven’t—gotten over what you did. Disbelief was my first reaction. You’d just closed a deal worth as much as Princess Diana’s damaged diamond Rolex, second hand forever twitching on 8:17. More than the telegraph pole James Dean drove into. Mishima’s knife would make us both wealthy for two or three years. You were the newest member of a balloonist’s syndicate. Please, not a suicide. But the policewoman talked me through the coroner’s verdict: the message on your mirror, going down going down going down, confirmed as yours by the state graphologist, to your prints on the wire cutter used to access the roof, ten other proofs, left little room for doubt. Nervous collapse? Compound
ed by your Mishima complex? But no. Doubt grows into counterfact in the tiniest crack.

  “Give it back!” Percussive, savage, desperate. My limbs were sticky from sleeping in clothes. The shouter had been quiet for a few nights. I thought he’d left. “Give it back!” I called back, “Who are you? Are you okay?” No answer. I listened, I listened, I listened. I got up, crept outside and pressed my ear against 403. Silence. Against 405. Silence. Lights off in both rooms. On not quite a whim, I crept up to Wei’s room and pressed my ear against her room. Her breathing? Or my own? Why did I feel that sense of being watched? Hotel Aloha has no CCTV. A black moth hinged its wings. Uneasy, I went back to my room and turned on the TV with the sound right down.

  Saturday evening’s Runaway Horses was fuggy with laughter, booming reggae and Asian-American youth in bloom. In my last clean Gucci shirt I took the very last seat at the bar and Shingo slid me my nearly last Sapporo in Waikiki. This time tomorrow, I’d be back in Yerbas Buenas with a business to try to rebuild. The Yukio Mishima Knife Book would be a bad passage in a disastrous chapter, but the main narrative would go on. A woman right by me cleared her throat and said, “I never thought you were marine. You’re too stick-insect. They’d throw you out.” Well, thank you very much, I smiled at the Filipina from Bar Wardrobe. She stepped over my irony. “I drank too many the other day, okay? Spoke too many too. What you learned, shush, is secret, please.” Therapeutic to spill your guts occasionally, I assured her, and promised I’d never repeat a word. But my silence could be bought only by her name. Grace, she told me, and Grace took my Sapporo Black so I ordered another. Some loud Aussies across the bar shot me looks: rebuttees, I guessed. “So you live on Oahu?, asked Grace. “You a businessman or a tourist or what?” I surrendered to the seductive quasi-truth and told her I run a special business, one that never advertises, which obtains singular artifacts that are otherwise unobtainable. Grace was sharp. She asked how we got clients. Introduction only, I told her, unable to resist giving her a business card. She read, “‘What You Do Not Know You Want.’ That all?” I nodded, and told her I was on Oahu trying to locate a historic weapon for a wealthy client. Grace was fascinated. “Is all legal, your business?” I told her, “If we exercise discretion, the question doesn’t apply.” My codealer, I explained, had apparently entrusted this item to the exowner of Runaway Horses… Who,” Grace filled in the blank, “is Runaway Barman now. Is hilarious joke, yes?” Hilarious, yes.

  “Death isn’t some faraway land, okay, at the end of time,” Grace insisted several bottles later. I had no inkling how we got onto the subject. “Death is the white lines down the highway, okay, in your cutlery drawer, okay, in bottles in bathroom cabinets, inside cells of your body. Death, hey, we’re made of the stuff. Death is the pond; we the living are the fish. So to answer your question, yes, of course, the dead are everywhere, and yes, they watch us. Like TV. When we interest them.” Women love being asked if they are clairvoyant, so I did so. “Men [uluuy.r] ask that,” frowned Grace, “but intuition is just seeing and listening, is not being blind because it does not agree with culture or fashion or desires. Intuition is not mystical.” Believing that the dead swarm around the living sounded pretty mystical to me, I suggested, if not morbid. “Buying and selling suicide weapons of your Japanese writer is not morbid?” Yes, Vulture, loose lips sink ships, but I haven’t wanted a woman as much as I wanted Grace since you-know-when. “Such a knife will only attract devil’s eye, no? Is obvious!” I said, Would she consider continuing our discussion in a less public venue? “Okay, sure, I consider.” But when I got back from the bathroom, Jesus Mary Poppins Christ, her bar stool was straining under a German as big as a grizzly. Gone, shrugged Shingo. Sorry. I ordered a last beer to show those smirking Australians but dealt the bur a series of vicious toe pokes and hoped that Grace intuited each one.

  Wei was drawing her self-portrait from a mirror and munching coffee-crusted macadamia nuts. “No, you can’t have the picture,” she said, handing me a piece of paper with a string of digits on it. “A woman called. Five minutes ago.” The number was unfamiliar. “Not your Nightingale who sings every evening,” Wei said, making me wonder if she listened in, “another.” Hadn’t the caller left a name? Wei shook her head. “Didn’t you ask what she wanted?” Wei snorted like a sly pony and for one second I wanted to crack all her bony bones like biscuits in bags and see her sly smile then. Back outside, I tapped in the mystery number. Grace answered. She’d made me look pretty stupid in Runaway Horses, I told her. “You recover okay. Listen, I made one-two phone calls. If you still want that knife, I know someone can maybe help.” Of course I still wanted that knife. Grace was coming to Hotel Aloha now. Through the glass, Wei watched me, fingers twizzling her braided hairband. I knew that look. Female jealousy is rich cream.

  “Quicker to walk than to find cab.” Grace led me at a brisk clip down poorly lit backstreets. She swatted away my requests for information, saying only that I was free to turn back anytime I wanted. None of the weak stars were familiar from my childhood astronomy. Was I being led into a trap like that time in Cambodia’ Perhaps, perhaps. Through a doorway half-blocked with rusting junk we climbed five concrete flights, lit by lamps swarming with black moths. No view but other housing blocks and washing strung across balconies. Grace stopped before a nameless door. Monkeywrench marks scarred the frame. To my astonishment she kissed me on the lips. Not erotically, not brashly, not shyly. Surely not pityingly? “What was that for?” Grace pressed the bell and ran back down the stairwell. Jesus Bodysnatched Christ—but before I could call out, a Japanese guy had stepped through into the milked moonlight, uttering my name, with your crucifix—it had to be, there’s only one—on his hairless torso. Was I in room 404, dreaming this, or stuck in one of Dwight’s fag-queen home movies? Certainly the youth was coffee-advert handsome, ponytailed, judo trousers, but he was stitched and patched from a very recent, pretty serious beating. “So you’re here.” His English was as American as it was Japanese. “Shingo told me you’d been into Runaway Horses. I, like… meant to call you”—he gingerly indicated his bruises—“but my creditors, like… changed the terms of repayment.” His name came to me and I said it: Nozomu. Nozomu asked how I’d found him. Police sirens wailed from the dark mass under Diamond Head. Grace showed me here, I answered, gesturing at the stairwell, but even her footsteps had vanished. Nozomu frowned. “What Grace?” Grace the Filipina, Grace from Bar Wardrobe and Runaway Horses. Nozomu spat over the railing. “Shingo better not be giving my address to, like… no one. But you better come in, now you’re here.” I followed him into a poky apartment smelling of men, soy sauce and local marijuana. “I’ve only got, like… cold beer, but sit down anyway. I know what it is you come for. Don’t worry. You’re welcome to it.”

  Nozomu dug out a battered flute case from a closet of ratty towels, then shoved the moraine of surfing magazines and fast-food wreckage off the coffee table with his foot. “Vulture went to your seller’s hotel, the Holiday Inn or somewhere. He brought it to my bar after closing. Never seen him so, like… high. Not even when he was high. When Vulture told me what it was, I was like… ‘Yukio Mishima’s suicide knife? Like, sure.’ But Vulture showed me the Kakutani mark and I was like… ‘Whaah.’ Hou awesome!”’ Nozomu unclipped the case and I assumed my professional calm. Twelve inches of gunmetal gray, blade tapering to a fang, shaft housed in an age-yellowed ivory handle. Just a piece of pre-Meiji ironmongery, but not. Events—grandiosely, “History”—imbue objects with a frequency just beyond the human ear, just. This frequency is our livelihood. The sunglasses shading Oppenheimer’s eyes from the first H-bomb test in 1944; the shiny 3mm bullet that liberated Ernest Hemingway from Ernest Hemingway; and yes, Yukio Mishima’s knife, radioactive with what it had done. I picked the weapon up—its lightness surprised me—and checked for the tiny characters “Kakutani” inscribed on its nub. There, the real thing, just as its certificate of authenticity promised. I very nearly laughed. “Vulture went back to his hote
l to get some Big Island weed to, like… celebrate. But morning came and still no Vulture. I was like… ‘He’ll be back in day or two. For this little beaut at least.”’ Nozomu meant the knife. “But I tell you, since he left it with me I got, like… an evil streak of luck. Every table I sat at, every game, every casino, hands of cards, good cards, strong cards, turned to shit. King Midas in reverse, right? My creditors cut my, like… lifeline, I lost my bar, oh, yeah, my motorbike got stolen the day after my insurance is finish. My fortune-teller, like, a guru really, told me today, like… ‘an impure metal’ in my life was, like, the source. Pretty, like… obvious, huh’” I grunted in sympathy. Your beautiful fool—still ignorant of why you never returned?—had no idea that he was about to hand me enough impure metal to buy his bar, everything in it and everyone in it. “So it’s no, like… bullshit? This dagger really killed Yukio Mishima?” The icy beer burned my fingers. “Well,” I began, “Mishima did open up his abdomen with this blade, yes, but it takes hours to die from a single cut. To force one’s innards out, a further cut is required, from crotch up to sternum. You’ll appreciate, the subject rarely has the strength for this jumonji-giri, so tradition dictates that he—or she—appoint a kaishakunin to cut off the subject’s head with a full-length samurai sword after the first cut. Mishima’s appointee was a kid of twenty-five, Hissho Morita, a colonel in his private army of adoring boys. But with jieitai troops kicking down the door, helicopters thundering overhead and a tied-up general having a pulmonary seizure in the corner, Morita blew it and hacked at Mishima’s shoulder blade instead. Morita missed three times, before a third compatriot, Furukoga, grubbed the sword and beheaded Mishima with one clean blow. So strictly,” I finished up, “this knife is the shorter accomplice in Mishima’s death, but the one with brains.” TV laughter broke through the mosquito screen. I wanted to leave. There was no point giving Nozomu a sales pitch or the Mishima myth. “Why did Mishima do it? I heard it was, like… ’cos he didn’t like how Japan was, like… Americanizing. But what difference could he make if he was, like… dead?” Millions of words have been shoveled into the grave of that very question, I replied, before parroting your theory: Yukio Mishima feared senility more than dying. By 1970 he felt his literary and physical prowess was sliding, so he exchanged his life for a piece of theater shocking enough, entertaining enough, to guarantee an immortality his literary canon could not. “Must have hurt like fuck,” Nozomu muttered. “At least his death was for something,” I said, replacing the knife in the flute case and getting to my feet. Nozomu asked where you are now. Werewolf did hush you up welt. El Salvador, I lied to your last boyfriend. I’d seen you off from the airport here in Honolulu on Sunday. Nozomu repeated, “El Salvador,” like an orphan sighing, “When my father was alive…”