Number9Dream

by Unknown

  This makes sense. ‘Okay.’

  ‘Worry about the future from next week.’ Mrs Sasaki pours the tea. ‘In the meantime, rest. You don’t so much solve problems as live through them.’

  Green tea with barley grains. ‘Why are you and Buntaro helping me?’

  ‘“Who” matters more than “Why”. Eat.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘No matter, Eiji.’

  Later, the same day. The doorbell chimes and my heart coils up again. I put the manuscript down. Not Buntaro, not Mrs Sasaki, so who? I am up in the attic study, but I hear a key turned in the front door. I am learning the silences that fill this house, and I know what is in my head and what is not – there, the door swings open, feet in the entrance hall. The books are straining to hear, too. ‘Miyake! Relax! This is Yuzu Daimon! Come out, come out, wherever you are! Your landlord gave me the key.’ We meet on the stairs. ‘You look better than when I last saw you,’ I say. ‘Most road-kills look better than me last Friday,’ he replies. ‘But you look worse. Sheesh! They did that to your eye?’ His T-shirt reads Whoever dies with the most stuff wins. ‘I came to bring you my apology. I thought I could chop off my little finger.’

  ‘What would I do with your little finger?’

  ‘Whatever. Pickle it, keep it in an enamelled casket: ideal for picking your nose in polite society. What a conversation piece: “It formerly belonged to the notorious Yuzu Daimon, you know.”’

  ‘I’d rather use my own finger, thanks. And’ – I wave my hand, vaguely – ‘going back was my decision, not yours.’

  ‘Oh well, I bought you ten boxes of cigarettes to tide you over,’ he says. I see he is still unsure whether or not I want to murder him. ‘If I had to cut off a finger every time I needed to apologize, I’d be up to my shoulder blade by now. Marlboro. I remembered you smoked Marlboro in the pool hall on the fateful night. And your landlord thought you might like your guitar to keep you company, so I brought it over. I left it down in the entrance hall. How do you feel?’ How do I feel? Weird, but not angry. ‘Thanks,’ I say. He shrugs. ‘Well, considering . . .’ I shrug. ‘The garden is good for smoking.’

  Once I begin – from the point where I loaded him into the taxi – I cannot stop until the end – the point where Buntaro loaded me into his car. I can’t remember talking so long, ever. Daimon never interrupts, except to light our cigarettes and to get a beer from the fridge. I even tell him about my father and why I came to Tokyo in the first place. When I finally finish the sun has gone. ‘What amazes me,’ I say, ‘is that none of what happened has been reported. How can forty people get killed – not quietly, either, but action-movie deaths – and it not be reported?’

  Bees peruse swaying lavender. ‘Yakuza wars make the police look crap and the politicos look bent. Which, as everybody knows, is true. But by admitting it, the voters of Tokyo may be prompted to wonder why they bother paying taxes. So it gets kept off TV.’

  ‘But the newspapers?’

  ‘Journalists are fed reports of battles already won and lost higher up the mountainside. Original, story-sniffing journalists get blacklisted from news conferences, so newspapers can’t keep them on. Subtle, isn’t it?

  ‘Then why bother with the news at all?’

  ‘People want their comic books and bedtime stories. Look! A dragonfly! The old poet-monks used to know what week of what month it was, just by the colour and the sheen of dragonflies’ – whatd’yacall’em? – fuselages.’ He plays with his lighter. ‘Did you tell your landlord the uncensored version of what happened to you?’

  ‘I toned down the violence. I also left out the death threats to his wife, since the man who made them is . . . dead. I still don’t know what is right, and what will give him nightmares and paranoia.’

  Daimon nods. ‘Sometimes there isn’t a right thing to do, and the best you can hope for is the least worst. Do you dream about it?’

  ‘I don’t sleep much.’ I open a can of beer. ‘What are your plans?’

  ‘My dad thinks I should disappear for a while, and for once we agree. I’m going back to the States in the morning. With my wife.’

  I splurt out beer. ‘You’re married? Since when?’

  Daimon looks at his watch. ‘Five hours ago.’

  This is Daimon’s sincere smile. I only see it once, and only for a moment.

  ‘Miriam? Kang Hyo Yeoun?’

  The smile is put away. ‘Her real name is Min. Not many people know her real name, but we owe you. I gather she administered you her famous kick.’

  ‘I sewed them back on. Min? Her name never stays the same.’

  ‘It will from now on.’

  We clink cans. ‘Congratulations. Quick, uh, wedding.’

  ‘That is the point of clandestine marriage and elopement.’

  ‘I got the impression you hated each other.’

  ‘Hate.’ Diamon examines his hands. ‘Love.’

  ‘Do your parents know?’

  ‘They’ve lived separately for ten years – always very respectably, of course. But they kind of forfeited their rights to advise me on . . .’ Daimon plays with his lighter. ‘. . . relationship matters.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you be with, uh, Min-san?’

  ‘Yes. I need to be leaving to pick up our air tickets. But before I go, will you show me the photograph of your father?’ I unfold it from my wallet. He studies it closely, but shakes his head. ‘Sorry, I never saw the guy. But listen, I’ll ask my dad if he can’t find out the contact details of the detective Morino was in the habit of using. Yakuza usually use the same one or two trusted people. I can’t promise – the police department at City Hall is in pandemonium, nobody knows who’s in bed with whom, and Tsuru is apparently back from Singapore, minus chunks of his memories and sanity, but maybe useful as a figurehead. But I can promise to try. After that you’ll be on your own, but at least you may have a lead to a Plan B.’

  ‘Plan G. Any lead is better than no lead.’

  We go to the entrance hall. Daimon puts on his sandals. ‘Well, then.’

  ‘Well, then. Enjoy your honeymoon.’

  ‘That is what I like about you, Miyake.’

  ‘What is?’

  He climbs into his Porsche, and gives me a quarter-wave.

  ‘Truss her!’ howled one section of the mob. ‘Baste her!’ howled another. ‘Roast her with spuds!’ How Mrs Comb wished Pithecanthropus would come running across the wrecked square and carry her away to safety. She wouldn’t have complained, even if she found a flea in his hair. ‘Chicken nuggets!’ screamed a line of toddlers. ‘Potato fries!’ A ladder appeared, and with a fresh seizure of fear Mrs Comb realized they were going to climb up the statue of the beloved commander and cart her off to the ovens. How could Goatwriter possibly cope without her? He would starve. That was when Mrs Comb remembered the book he had given her. ‘Hold your horses!’ she squawked. ‘And you’ll dine on something tastier than stringy old chicken!’

  The mob waited.

  Mrs Comb waved the holy book. ‘Stories!’

  A hoochy-koochy hooker honked. ‘Stories never filled my belly!’

  The ladder moved nearer. Mrs Comb gulped. ‘Maybe you never heard the right stories, then!’

  ‘Prove it!’ yelled a wolfman in ash and sackcloth. ‘Tell us a story, and see if they fill us up!’ Mrs Comb turned to page one, wishing Goatwriter’s handwriting wasn’t so spidery. ‘“Once upon a time a high-wire artist visited the waterfalls at Saturn to perform the greatest tightrope spectacle that was ever seen or, surely, ever will be seen. The long-awaited night arrived, and the artist set forth on his death-defying balancing act. Every ounce of concentration the artist possessed would be needed. Above his head spun many moons. Below his feet, the unending cataract of Saturn fell, fell, fell to the limitless ocean, too deep for sound. Halfway across this majestic silence, the high-wire artist was amazed to see a girl strolling across the wire towards him. Why describe this girl of his dreams? You already know what she looks
like. ‘Why are you here?’ asked the artist. ‘I came to ask if you believe in ghosts.’ The artist frowned. ‘Ghosts? Why, do you believe in ghosts?’ The girl of his dreams smiled, and replied, ‘But of course I do.’ And she skipped off the wire. Horror-struck, the artist followed her slow fall, but long before she hit the water she had dissolved into the moonlight—”’ A cobblestone missed Mrs Comb by an inch. ‘I’m still hungry!’ yelled the wolfman in ash and sackcloth. The ladder was propped up against the body of the beloved supreme commander. Tooth and nail, the mob fought to climb up. ‘Wait, wait, you’ll crack up laughing when you hear this one.’ Mrs Comb flapped, lost her place, turned to page nine. ‘“Father! Father! Why hast thou forsaken me?”’

  The noon sun browned, greyed, chilled and marooned.

  The mob fell silent – then nervous – and then hysterical.

  ‘Phantoms!’ screamed the crowd as one. ‘Run for the bomb shelters!’ The men, women and children drained away into cracks, crannies and culverts, until Mrs Comb was left alone with the beloved commander and the body of a black marketeer whose skull had been staved in by the hurled cobblestone. ‘Goodness gracious,’ said Mrs Comb.

  ‘Great balls of fire!’ said God, hovering up on his surfboard. ‘Ma’am.’

  ‘God?’

  ‘I believe you called?’

  ‘I did?’

  ‘This neighbourhood ain’t what is used to be, ma’am. What say I give you a lift someplace else?’

  Mrs Comb clucked with relief. ‘Oh, God! You arrived in the nick of time! Nowt but cannibals in these parts, nowt but cannibals! If it isn’t too much of an imposition, I’d thank you kindly to take me back to the venerable coach.’

  ‘Climb aboard, ma’am.’ God moved his surfboard alongside the handlebar moustache of the beloved commander. ‘And hold on tight!’ Mrs Comb tightened her headscarf, and watched the hungry town unroll below her. Why did humans despise what was beautiful and good? Why did they destroy the things they needed the most? Mrs Comb could not understand human beings. She really could not understand.

  Back on the balcony step I light another cigarette. The box of Marlboro is way too heavy. I look inside. Yuzu Daimon’s platinum lighter. One side is inscribed in English, so I get a dictionary to work out what the words mean: To General MacArthur on occasion of seventy-first birthday, January 1951, from Aichi Citizens Repatriation Committee – Earnest Beseech to Assist Countrymen Captured USSR. So the lighter really was the real thing! It must be worth . . . what? A lot. Way too much. I go back to the entrance hall and peer through the front door, but Daimon is gone. The sound of a sports car – maybe Daimon’s, maybe not – is swallowed by the afternoon neighbourhood. This is more than a little finger. Sort of sad, too. I wonder how many Aichi citizens ever made it home.

  QUEEN ERICHNID’S WEB

  Pithecanthropus peered out of his undercarriage hammock. The venerable coach was on its juddery night journey. White lines and cat’s-eyes sped from blurry darkness ahead like salmon in a river of hyperspace. Pithecanthropus loved the lullaby swing of the hammock as the coach banked, and the headwind combing his hair. A piebald rabbit, headlit, hypnotized and huddled, hurtled unharmed between the wheels – its nose nearly touched Pithecanthropus’s. ‘Hot diggetty!’ thought the rabbit, finding itself alive after all. ‘The angel of death is one ugly critter! Wait until I tell my relatives!’ By and by, Pithecanthropus yawned, and slid back down his hammock, settling in the sediment of broken wishbones, flat batteries, oily rags, and Stilton rind. His final thought was that it wasn’t the venerable coach which moved over the earth, it was the earth which spun beneath its ancient stationary wheels.

  The vacuum cleaner of Mrs Comb in her boudoir directly above bumped Pithecanthropus out of his morning dreams, and he awoke a happy early man. The venerable coach had come to a standstill. Even in the undercarriage, Pithecanthropus could tell they were parked somewhere hotter than a Sahara saxophone sextet. After munching on dry-roasted locusts, he crawled out, and stood up in an arid ochre desert of pebbles, boulders and bleached behemoth bones. The naked eyeball of the sun stared unblinkingly from a sky pinkish with dry heat. A desert wind did nothing to cool the world it wandered through. The road ran as straight as a mathematical constant to the vanishing point. A quorum of quandom quokkas thumped off as Pithecanthropus flexed his powerful biceps, drummed his treble-barrelled chest and howled a mighty roar. The coach door opened and Mrs Comb shook the crumbs from the breakfast tablecloth. ‘What an ungodly racket!’ Goatwriter climbed down the steps and sniffed the desert air. ‘Good morning.’

  Pithecanthropus grunted a greeting and a question.

  ‘I believe,’ Goatwriter replied, ‘we are in the Northern Territories, but of Australia or M-mars I cannot be sure. If one consults—’

  Goatwriter never finished his sentence because a miraculous maelstrom of birds rose from nowhere and filled the air around the venerable coach – moogurning, phewlitting, macawbering, endizzying birds, many unseen since the days when mythology was common gossip. ‘Archaeopteryx!’ exclaimed Goatwriter. ‘Thewlicker’s goose! Quetzalcoatlus! Greater Hopeless Auks! Nightjars at noon! Listen! Listen to the tune! Fragments! I hear fragments!’ Goatwriter closed his eyes and a druggy smile graced his face. Pithecanthropus gazed too, remembering childhood days in fossilized forests. Mrs Comb had dived for cover beneath the venerable coach. The birds vanished thitherly as suddenly as hitherly. ‘Extraordinary avifauna!’ declared Goatwriter. ‘You can come out now, Mrs Comb! Do you know, I heard fragments of a truly untold tale! The birds were singing it! Excuse me, friends, I m-must return to m-my writing bureau this very instant!’

  Another two or three days of nothing weather go by. This is how I spend them. I get up late, smoke in the garden, and make some tea and toast. I watch my black eye dapple lighter. I clean up the living room and the kitchen, hide my rubbish, and go up to the attic to read. I feel safest up there. I am turning into a reading machine. I read detective stories by Kogoro Akechi. I read Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto, and hate it, without being sure why. I read The Makioka Sisters by Junichiro Tanizaki, and love it. I read a weird novel by Philip Dick about a parallel universe where Japan and Germany won the Second World war, in which an author writes a weird novel about a parallel universe where America and England won. I read No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai, but the hero feels so sorry for himself that I want him to jump in the sea long before he does. Anju used to read, never me. Looking back, I was jealous of her books for the hours she gave them. And at high school we had those Japanese classes designed to maim the fun of reading, with all those questions like Indicate the word most appropriately describing the emotion we experience when we read the following: “The mournful cries of the seagulls were borne over the waves as my father set sail for the final time.” a] nostalgic. b ] poignant. c] wistful. d] esoteric. e] heartful. ‘We.’ Who is this ‘We’ jerk-off anyway? I never met him. This morning I am reading a French novel called Le Grand Meaulnes. I am fat on books. For snacks between meals I read the Goatwriter stories by Mrs Sasaki’s sister. There are dozens of them. Mrs Sasaki says her sister wrote them for her nephew, Buntaro, when he was a little boy – Buntaro had a childhood? Weird. Now she writes them to warm up in the morning. Reading is hungry work. When I feel like lunch I go down to the kitchen and eat some food from the fridge, and an apple or banana. Afterwards I trawl the pond for fallen leaves with a big net and feed the fish. Then I go back up to the attic to read some more until it gets dark. I tape black-out paper to the triangular window, and play my guitar until Buntaro or Mrs Sasaki come. We eat together and chat – nobody has come looking for me at either Shooting Star or Ueno. So far. After supper, I lock, bolt and chain the door, do a load of push-ups and sit-ups, and take a shower. I still sleep downstairs on the sofa, where I stand a good chance of hearing an intruder before they get to me. I carry on reading until the early hours, and finally fall asleep. My dreams are shallow, floating dreams – zoom lenses, parked cars, people who smile knowi
ngly at me . . .

  I can smell again. I never noticed smells so much as now. I remap the house, this time in smells. The living room is polish, tatami, incense. The kitchen cooking oil, stainless steel, hard currants. The main bedroom is linen, jasmine, varnish. The garden is leaf juice, pond life and smoke tufts. This house is so quiet! The slightest noise is as impossible to ignore as the squawkiest mobile phone conversation on the metro trains. I hear things I never normally notice. Fluids mulching through my tubes, my joints clunking as I climb the shelves, the vibrations of cars. Crows and doors several streets away, a fly head-butting a windowpane, a futon being beaten.

  The fax machine beeps. I put down Le Grand Meaulnes, go downstairs and find the fax lying on the floor. MIYAKE. MORINO’S DETECTIVE WILL RECEIVE MAIL SENT TO ADDRESS BELOW. BE CAUTIOUS. DO NOT GIVE ADDRESS UNTIL SURE OK. WE BOARD FLIGHT 30 MINS. HOPE YOU FIND THE MAN. A post office box number in Edogawabashi follows. I write it down on a cigarette box flap, hide it in my wallet, and set the fax alight in an ashtray with General Douglas MacArthur’s lighter. This is overdramatic, but I like flames. I glance up at the photo of Mrs Sasaki’s sister. The wine in her glass is cool and scents the air. ‘So,’ she says, ‘what happens in the next chapter?’

  Goatwriter sat down at his writing bureau. Luscious sentences swirled inches above his head, waiting for him to pin them on to paper. Goatwriter looked for his pen. Most odd, he thought, I recall quite clearly placing it here, on my blotter, when I heard Pithecanthropus perform his antemeridian grunt . . . He looked in all the places it should be, and then all the places it might be, and lastly all the places it couldn’t possibly be. This left only one conclusion. ‘Thief!’ cried Goatwriter. ‘Thief! Thief!’ Pithecanthropus and Mrs Comb rushed in – she knew exactly what to do. ‘Not again sir. Let me explain – your snack paper goes in here, and your writings and whatnot—’ Goatwriter shook his head, numbly. ‘No, Mrs Comb! My manuscript is not m-missing, but my fountain pen! The tongue of my imagination! The selfsame pen Lady Shonagon wrote her pillow book with over thirteen thousand crescent moons ago! The birds nought but a didactic tactic, a decoy deployed while the thief struck!’