Number9Dream

by Unknown

  She takes it. Then she silently judges me.

  ‘You gave Daimon my message?’

  ‘I tried to tell you, I don’t know Daimon.’

  She shakes her head in frustration. ‘Why do you keep saying that? If Daimon didn’t send you, how did you know where to come?’

  ‘I got your address from the library.’

  She accepts this without me needing to explain the illegal part. ‘And so you returned my book from the kindness of your heart?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So what do you want now?’

  She shifts, and reflected amber light catches the side of her face. I understand why Daimon fell in love with her. I don’t understand anything else. ‘Do you really know who my father is?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘In Ueno park, you talked about my father as if you know him.’

  ‘He’s a regular at the club! Of course I know him.’

  I swallow. ‘What is his name?’

  She is half irritated, half confused. ‘Your father is Yuzu Daimon’s father.’

  Plan C buckles right down its crumple zone. ‘He told you that?’ Oh, it all falls into place now. ‘Plan’ was a fat name for a skinny little lie.

  ‘He signed you into Queen of Spades as his stepbrother. His father – your father – keeps a couple of mistresses at any one time, so you aren’t the first one.’

  I look away, hardly able to believe this. No, this is all too easy to believe.

  Miriam probes. ‘Was that all Daimon bullshit?’ My father rejoins the unknown millions. I don’t answer her. She sort of yowls. ‘That selfish, stupid jerk. Just to get back at me . . . Listen, Eiji Miyake. Look at me!’ She stubs out her cigarette. ‘Queen of Spades is not . . . an ordinary place. If you ever go back there, bad things could happen to you. Oh, hell. This could be very bad. By admitting you, Daimon . . . well, he broke a pretty major rule. Normally, male guests are blood relatives only. Listen to me. Do not go back there, and do not come back here, ever. Steer clear of Shibuya, in fact. This is fair warning. Understand?’

  No, I don’t really understand, but she closes the door anyway. It is the last moment of the day. The sunset would be beautiful, if I were in the mood. A dying SF movie sun sits on a Warner Cinema multiplex. I wonder what metro line takes you to that sort of sunset, and what station you need to get off at. I amble back the way I came and find a games centre. Inside are a whole row of full-sized 2084 machines, doing brisk business with schoolkids. Today has been a bad day. I change a thousand-yen note into hundred-yen coins.

  Photon fire bursts around me, and my final comrade falls. I get the prison guard in my sights and fricassé him. The last echo dies. Eerie silence. Is the shooting finally over? Eight stages since the red door. The metal walkway clanks as I walk over the pile of guards and fallen rebels. It is down to me. Here is the prison door. ‘Prisoner Ned Ludd. Crime: Cyber-Terrorism. Sentence: Life Incarceration. Security Access: Orange.’ Inside is my father, the man who will free humanity from the tyranny of OuterNet. The revolution to reverse reality starts now. I fire the ‘Open’ pad, and the door slides sideways. I enter the cell. Darkness. The door slides shut and the lights come on. OuterNet intelligence officers! With old-fashioned revolvers? I open fire, but my photon gun is dead. The whole cell is a dampening field. Somewhere I took the wrong turn. Somewhere I failed to read the sign. Before my eyes, my ‘Energy’ bar shrinks to .01. I cannot move. I cannot even stand. A man – I recognize him, he is the farmer from the soya farm during my waking hours – walks over, loosening his tie. ‘My name Agent K00996363E. The revelation is this, Player I8192727I. Ned Ludd is a project created by OuterNet to detect antiGame tendencies among players, and assess their potential danger to OuterNet. Your susceptibility to indoctrination by our provocateurs is evidence of defective wetprogramming. The very idea that ideology can ever defeat the image is itself insanity. OuterNet will reprocess your wetware, in accordance with Propagation of Game Law 972HIJ. This grieves me, I81, but it is for your own good.’ He brings his face up close. It is not hateful. It is tender and forgiving. ‘Game over.’

  Four

  RECLAIMED LAND

  So this is how I die, minutes after midnight on reclaimed land somewhere south of Tokyo bay. I sneeze, and the swelling in my right eye throbs and nearly ruptures. Sunday, 17th September. I cannot call my death unexpected. Not after the last twelve hours. Since Anju showed me what death was, I have glimpsed it waiting in trains, in elevators, on pharmacist’s shelves. Growing up, I saw it booming off the ocean rocks on Yakushima. Always at some distance. Now it has thrown off its disguise, as it does in nightmares. I am here, this is real. A waking nightmare from which I will never wake up. Splayed on my back, far from anyone who knows me, my life bar at zero. My body is racked and I am running a temperature as high as this bridge. The sky is spilling with stars, night flights and satellites. What a murky, gritty, pointless, unlikely, premature, snot-sprayed way to die it has been. One bad, sad gamble that was rigged from the beginning. Very nearly my last thought is that if this whole aimless story is to go on, God the vivisectionist is going to need a new monkey for his experiments. So many stars. What are they for?

  Wednesday afternoon, I go to the bank near Ueno station to pay for my ads in the personal columns. The bank is a ten-minute walk down Asakusa Avenue, so I borrow an orphaned bike – the company car of the lost property office. It is too decrepit for anybody to ever want to steal, but saves my lunch break nearly a quarter-of-an-hour walk down a busy road hot with fumes and the dying summer. No shade in Tokyo, and all the concrete stores the heat. I park the bike outside and go in – the bank is busy with lunch-time, and burbling with a million bank noises. Drones, telephones, computer printers, paper, automatic doors, murmurs, a bored baby. Using an ATM to pay for Plan D is cheaper as long as I don’t make a single mistake typing in the long string of digits, otherwise my money will go flying into the wrong account. I am taking my time. A virtual bank teller on the screen bows, hands clasped over her skirt. ‘Please wait. Transaction being processed.’ I wait, and read the stuff about lost cards and cheap credit. When I next look at the virtual bank teller she is saying something new. I gag on disbelief. ‘Father will see you shortly, Eiji Miyake.’ I treble-check – the message is still there. I look around. Somebody must own this practical joke. A bank teller stands at the head of the row of machines to help people in difficulty, and she sees the look on my face and hurries over. She has the same uniform and expression as her virtual co-worker. I just point dumbly at the screen. She traces her finger across the screen. ‘Yes, sir. The transaction is now processed. This is your card, and don’t forget to keep your receipt safe and sound.’

  ‘But look at the message!’

  She has a Minnie Mouse voice. ‘“Transaction completed. Please take your card and receipt.” No problem here, sir.’

  I look at the screen. She is right. ‘There was another message,’ I insist. I look around for a practical joker. ‘A message with my name on it.’

  Her smile tightens. ‘That would be most irregular, sir.’

  People in the queue are tuning in. I flap. ‘I know how irregular it is! Why else do you think I . . .’ A uniform in a yellow armband arrives on the scene. He is only a couple of years older than me but he is already Captain Smug, Samurai of Corporate Finance. ‘Thank you, Mrs Wakayama.’ He dismisses his underling. ‘I am the duty manager, sir. What seems to be the trouble?’

  ‘I just transferred some money—’

  ‘Did the machine malfunction in any way?’

  ‘A message flashed up on the screen. A personal message. For me.’

  ‘What leads you to conclude the message was for you, may I ask, sir?’

  ‘It had my name.’

  Captain Smug puts on this troubled frown from a training seminar. ‘What did this “message” say exactly, “sir”?’

  ‘It told me my father wanted to see me.’

  I feel housewives in the queue bristle with curiosit
y and turn to one another. Captain Smug does a passable imitation of a doctor humouring a lunatic. ‘I think it might be more than possible that our machine uses characters that may be somewhat tricky to read.’

  ‘I don’t work in a bank but I can read, thank you.’

  ‘But of course.’ Captain Smug eyes my work overalls. He scratches the back of his neck to show he is embarrassed. He glances at his watch to show I am embarrassing. ‘All I am saying is that either some misunderstanding has occurred here, or you just witnessed a phenonemon which has never before occurred in the history of Tokyo Bank, nor, so far as I am aware, in the history of Japanese banking.’

  I put my card back into my wallet and cycle back to Ueno station. I am so on edge all afternoon that Mrs Sasaki asks what the matter is. I lie about feeling feverish, so she gives me some medicine. During my tea break I use the ATM in the station which gives balance statements but which does not take payments. Nothing unusual happens. I search the faces of lost property customers for knowing glints. Nothing. I wonder if Suga did it. But Suga doesn’t know about my father. Nobody in Tokyo knows about my father. Except my father.

  Riding the submarine back to Kita Senju, I look around. Paranoia, but. No drone catches my eye, only a little girl. Walking back from the station, I catch myself looking in the road mirrors for stalkers. In the supermarket I buy a fifty-per-cent-off okonomiyaki and some milk for Cat. ‘Buntaro,’ I think while I queue. I got my capsule because a relative of my guitar teacher in Kagoshima knows a friend of Buntaro’s wife – could he have found out about my father? But what sort of video shop owner is powerful enough to use ATM screens as a personal telegram system? Some sort of unholy alliance between Suga and Buntaro? I get back to Shooting Star to find my suspect on the phone to his wife, running his hand through his thinning hair. They are talking about kindergartens for Kodai. He nods at me and makes a nagging goose with his hand. I watch a scene or two from a horror movie called You Go to My Head. A cop is on the trail of a psychic killer who discovers his victims’ darkest fear, and murders by trapping them in appropriate nightmares. ‘I know what you’re thinking, lad,’ Buntaro says, putting down the receiver. ‘Kodai isn’t even born yet. But these places have waiting lists longer than Grateful Dead guitar solos. Get into the right kindergarten, and the conveyor belt goes all the way up to the right university.’ He shakes his head, sighing. ‘Listen to me. Education Papa. How was your day? You look like you had your bone marrow sucked out.’ Buntaro offers me a cigarette and strikes himself off my list of suspects. Unlikely as it seems, the sole remaining candidate is now the likeliest: my father. What are we up to now? Plan E.

  On Thursday lunch-time I go back to the same branch of the same bank to try out the ATM again. The same woman is on duty – she avoids eye contact the moment she recognizes me. I insert my card, type in my PIN, and the virtual bank teller bows. Look! ‘What dark room has no exits, but only entrances into rooms darker than the one before? Father waits for your answer.’ I search for meaning – is this some sort of warning? I look around for Minnie Mouse, but Captain Smug has been lying in wait for me. ‘Another inexplicable message, sir?’

  ‘If this isn’t an inexplicable message’ – you sarcastic bastard; I rap the screen with my knuckles – ‘then give me another name for it.’

  ‘Oh dear, sir, not exactly Bill Gates, are we? Perhaps the message was telling you that you lack the funds necessary to complete your transaction?’ Of course, the screen has returned to normal: my pitiful bank balance. I look around – is somebody watching? Erasing the message when a witness comes up? How? ‘I know this looks weird,’ I begin, not sure how to continue. Captain Smug just raises his eyebrows. ‘But somebody is using your ATM to mess your customers around.’ Captain Smug waits for me to go on. ‘Shouldn’t that worry you?’ Captain Smug folds his arms and tilts his head at an I-went-to-a-top-Tokyo-university angle. I storm off without another word. I cycle back to the lost property office, as suspicious of parked cars and half-open windows as yesterday. My father was influential enough to have his name left off my and Anju’s birth certificates, but surely this is in another league. I spend the rest of the afternoon attaching labels to forgotten umbrellas, and weeding out the ones we have held for twenty-eight days for destruction. Might my stepmother be somehow trying to intimidate me? If it is my father, why is he playing these pranks instead of just calling me? Nothing makes sense.

  Friday is pay-day for us probationary employees recruited in the middle of the year. The bank is packed – I have to wait several minutes to get to a machine. Captain Smug hovers in the wings. I pull my baseball cap down low. A woman with ostrich feathers in her hat keeps sneezing over me, and groaning. I insert my card and ask for 14,000 yen. The virtual bank teller smiles, bows, and asks me to wait. So far so normal. ‘Father warns you that your breathing space is all used up.’ I am expecting this: from under the visor of my cap I study the queue of impatient people. Who? No clue, no idea. The machine shuttles my money. The virtual bank teller bows again. ‘Father is coming for you.’ Come on, then! What else do you think I am in the city for? I drum the the virtual teller with the bases of my fists. ‘You aren’t from Tokyo, are you, sir?’ Captain Smug is at my shoulder. ‘I can tell because our Tokyo customers usually have the manners to refrain from assaulting our machines.’ ‘Look at this! Look!’ I show him the screen and curse. What did I expect? ‘Please take your money and remove your card.’ It beeps. I know if I say anything to Captain Smug, or even look at the guy, I will be seized by an urgent desire to make him hurt, and I don’t think my cranium could take another head-butt less than seven days since the last. I ignore his vexed sigh, take my money, card and receipt, and walk around the bank lobby for a while, trying to meet stares. Queues, marble floors, number chimes. Nobody looks at anyone in banks. Then I notice Captain Smug talking to a security man, and glancing in my direction. I slink off.

  Between the bank and Ueno is the seediest noodle shop in all of Tokyo. As Tokyo has the seediest noodle shops in Japan, this is probably the seediest noodle shop in the world. It is too seedy even to have a name or a definite colour. Suga told me about it – it is as cheap as it should be and you can drink as much iced water as you want, and they have comic book collections going back twenty years. I park my bike in the alley around the side, smell burnt tar through the fan outlet, and walk in through the strings of beads. Inside is murky and fly-blown. Four builders sit around four greasy bowls in silence. The cook is an old man who died several days ago. The single round light is dappled with the bodies of dead insects, and the walls are decorated with spatters and dribbles of grease. A TV runs an old black-and-white Yakuza movie, but nobody watches it. A gangster is chucked into a concrete mixer. Fans turn their heads, this way and that. With a shudder, the cook reanimates his corpse and sits up. ‘What can I do for you, son?’ I order a tempura-egg-onion soba, and take a stool at the counter. Today, the message said. This time tomorrow I will know everything – whether this Plan E is the true lead, or whether it is yet another dud. I must keep a lid firmly on my hopes. My hopes boil over. Who else could it be, but my father? My noodles come. I sprinkle on some chilli pepper and watch it spread among the jellyfish of grease. Tasted better, tasted worse.

  Outside in the glare, the bike is missing. A black Cadillac takes up the side alley, the sort that the FBI use for presidential missions. The passenger door inches open and a lizard pokes his head out – short, spiky, white hair, eyes too far apart that can do 270-degree vision. ‘Looking for anything?’ I turn my baseball cap around to shade my eyes. Lizard leans on the Cadillac roof. He is about my age. A dragon tail disappears up one arm of his short-sleeved snakeskin shirt, and a dragon head twists out of the other.

  ‘My bike.’

  Lizard says something to somebody in the Cadillac. The driver’s door opens, and a man in sunglasses with a Frankenstein scar down the side of his face gets out, walks around the back of the Cadillac and picks up a mangle of metal. He brings it around to me
and hands it to me. ‘Is this your bike?’ His forearms are more thickly muscled than my legs and his knuckles are chunky with gold. He is so big he blocks out the sun. In shock, I hold the metal for a moment before dropping it.

  ‘It was, yeah.’

  Lizard tuts. ‘People are such mindless vandals, ain’t they?’ Frankenstein shunts my ex-bike aside with his foot. ‘Get in.’ He jerks his thumb at the Cadillac. ‘Father sent us to pick you up.’

  ‘You came from my father?’

  Frankenstein and Lizard find this funny. ‘Who else?’

  ‘And did my father tell you to trash my bike?’

  Lizard hoicks and spits. ‘Get in the car, yer lippy cock-wart, or I’ll break both yer fucking arms right here, right now.’ Traffic drags its heat and din to the next red light. What choice do I have?

  The Cadillac purrs over the Sumida river bridge on air cushions. The tinted windows retune the bright afternoon, and the air-con chills the inside to fridge-beer temperature. I get goose bumps. Frankenstein drives, Lizard is in the back with me, sprawled pop star fashion. I could almost enjoy the ride if I weren’t being abducted by Yakuza and if I weren’t going to lose my job. Maybe I could find a phone and call Mrs Sasaki to say . . . what? The last thing I want to do is lie to her. Mrs Sasaki is okay. I tell myself these things are trifles – my father has sent for me. This is it. Why am I unable to get excited? Northside Tokyo slides by, block after block after block. Better to be a car than a human. Highways, flyovers, slip roads. A petrochemical plant runs pipes for kilometres, lined by those corkscrewing conifers. A massive car plant. Acre upon acre of white body shells. So my father is some kind of Yakuza man. Makes sense, sort of. Money, power and influence. The white lines and billowing trees and industrial chimneys are dreamlike. The dashboard clock reads 13:23. Mrs Sasaki will be wondering why I am late. ‘Any chance I could make a phone call?’ Lizard gives me the finger. I push my luck – ‘All I—’ but Frankenstein turns around and says, ‘Shut the fuck up, Miyake! I cannot stand whinging children.’ My father gives me no status. I should stop guessing, sit back and wait. We pass through a toll-gate. Frankenstein moves into top gear and the Cadillac eats the expressway up: 13:41. The buildings get more residential, and densely pyloned mountains shuffle this way. On the right the sea pencils in the horizon. Lizard yawns and lights a cigarette. He smokes Hope. ‘Travelling in style, or what?’ says Frankenstein, not to me. ‘Know how much one of these babies costs?’ Lizard toys with a death-head ring. ‘Fuck of a lot.’ Frankenstein wets his lips. ‘Quarter of a million dollars.’ Lizard: ‘What’s that in real money?’ Frankenstein thinks. ‘Twenty-two million yen.’ Lizard looks at me. ‘Hear that, Miyake? If yer pass yer entry exams, slave in an office all yer life, save your bonuses, get reincarnated nine times, yer’ll be able to zip around in a Cadillac too.’ I stare ahead. ‘Miyake! I’m talking to yer!’ ‘Sorry. I thought I had to shut the fuck up.’ Lizard whistles and a switchblade knife hisses open. ‘Watch yer lippyliplip’ – the knife flashes at my wrist; the blade slices through the casing of my wristwatch and scrapes through its innards – ‘fuckhead.’ The knife is spinning back in his fingers. Lizard’s eyes flare, daring me to open my mouth. He wins his dare and laughs this scratchy, staccato laugh.