Number9Dream

by Unknown

  ‘No problem. What’s your modem?’

  I overdid it. ‘Uh . . . a very fast one indeed.’

  ‘Yes, sir, but which make?’

  ‘Uh, a Suga Modem. Saratoga Instruments.’

  He bluffs. ‘Verrrrrrrrry nice machines. Which uni are you at?’

  ‘Uh, Waseda.’

  I have used a magic word. He produces his card and bows low enough to lick my shoes. ‘Fujimoto – at your service. We do operate an academic discount scheme. Well. I’ll let you play – you just call me if I can assist.’

  ‘I will.’

  I pretend to read the specifications on a few machines, gather a sheaf of brochures, and choose a machine to sit at. I click on to the Internet, and find the e-mail address of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police home page. I write it on my hand. I glance around, hoping no hidden video cameras are watching. I load Suga’s disk. A hearty welcome to the mailman virus! Suga made his virus more user-friendly than he ever made himself. Do you want to enter your message to the masses via keyboard or load it from disk? I press D. Okay. Load your disk and hit ENTER. I eject the Suga disk, insert the Kozue Yamaya one, and press Enter. The virus program takes over. The drive buzzes and blinks. Okay. Now enter address of lucky recipient. I type in the police home page address off my hand. Hit ENTER to lick stamp! The cursor pulses, my finger hovers – the consequences of pressing this key swarm – click. Too late to change my mind now. Mailman is delivering your letter to primary addressee . . . Flash. Mailman is forwarding your letter to second generation addressees . . . Short pause. Third generation addressees . . . Long pause. Fourth generation, [yawn]. The screen clears. Mailman will continue to generation99. The message scrolls off-screen. Log off now/leave the crime scene/run like hell. Beep. Bye-bye. Bye-bye, Suga. I eject the Yamaya disk and put it into my shirt pocket. I am a plague-spreader. Only this plague might cure something. ‘Excuse me.’ An older salesman strides over. ‘What did you just download into our system, exactly?’ I grope for a plausible lie, but find nothing. ‘Uh, well. I was morally obliged to release information about a Yakuza network which steals people, cuts them up and, uh, sells the body parts. Using your computer seemed the safest way to go about exposing them. I hope that was okay?’ The salesman nods gravely, trying to figure out where I am on the harmless to knife-slashing spectrum of lunacy. ‘Glad we could help, sir.’ We thank each other, bow, and I let the escalator whisk me away. I retrieve my backpack from the helpdesk, unhassled, and walk out into the warm traffic fumes. I drop the two disks down the nearest storm drain. From a phone booth near Onizuka TransJapan I try calling Ai at home, then on her mobile, but nothing doing. Quarter to noon. I had better find Onizuka’s stepfather and introduce myself. I am so tired nothing seems real.

  Eight

  THE LANGUAGE OF MOUNTAINS IS RAIN

  I dribble my soccer ball along a busy shopping mall in downtown Tokyo. No flashy retailing hot spot, this – the shops are all in decline, selling pan-scrubbers in bulk, blouses of thirty summers ago, flimsy exercise aids. Light clots with jellyfish from ancient seas. How or when I won possession of the soccer ball, I cannot say, but here it is – a curse, not a blessing, because the enemy goalposts could be hidden anywhere in Japan. If I pick up the ball, the referee will cut off my hands with rusty shears. If I lose the ball to the enemy, I will be spat at by schoolchildren and bitten by dogs until the day I die. But players are chosen, they do not choose. I must find the enemy goalposts and blast the ball home. Familiar faces eddy by in the stream of shoppers – a Kagoshima music shopkeeper, my father’s secretary, Genji the barber, snipping with finger-scissors – but I know that one lapse in concentration is all an enemy player needs to rob the ball. The mall descends into a swampy fog and the air cools. Jellyfish fall from the air and die. I wade through their clear bodies, kneeing the ball along in draining slurps. I know the enemy are tracking me on radar units obtained from Nazi Germany, so why do they let me penetrate so deep into their territory? Here comes Claude Debussy, walking on the swamp-surface in snowshoes. ‘In possession, Monsieur Miyake? Fantastique!’ He stage-whispers: ‘I bring a classified message from your great-uncle. One of our team has turned traitor! Trust nobody, not even me!’

  ‘Buntaro?’

  ‘Machiko-san?’

  Shooting Star was abandoned years ago. Tatty posters hang by single pins. I bolt the door behind me – a wise precaution, I see, as enemy players unmask themselves and gather on the pavement. The derelict state of the shop is why the enemy chose to hide their goalposts in my capsule. I push the ball behind the counter, and face the problem of the stairway, which is nine times higher than I imagined it. I boot the ball up, but it rebounds back. Meanwhile the enemy batter-ram the window with a wooden statue of the god of laughter – the glass bends, but does not yet break. I grip the ball between my feet, and amphibian-wriggle my way up, step by step. I am nearly at the top when I hear glass smashing. If I wriggle any faster the ball will slip and bounce down to the enemy. The enemy roar – traffic news – the top step – the enemy boom upward – I jam the doorlatch with pool cues.

  My capsule is a gloomy warehouse, empty except for building rubble.

  Ahead is my glory – the enemy goal.

  Mr Ikeda screams in my ear: ‘What have you done?’

  I turn to face my father. ‘I came to score the goal.’

  ‘This is our goal, not the enemy goal! Traitor! You showed them the way!’

  The pool cues snap and splinter.

  An ogre shakes my knee with one hand and grips the steering wheel with the other. ‘You were dreaming, son. Mumbling, you were.’ He is a sad ogre. I gaze at my surroundings, clueless. Amulets from temples and shrines festoon the cab of a truck. Ogre’s pool-ball eyes aim in different directions. ‘Who knows what you were mumbling? Not me. You made no sense at all.’ All at once Eiji Miyake and the last seven weeks come back to me. ‘No sense in any language ever recorded, that is,’ continues Ogre, whose name is Honda, I think, but it is too late to check now. I feel a weird lightness. I met my father this morning. I feel loss, I feel victory, but most of all I feel free. And now, in a perfect reversal of the way I imagined things, I am headed to Miyazaki to see my mother for the first time in six years. At less than 5 kph. Four lanes of traffic, crawling at slug-speed. The dashboard clock blinks 16.47. I have been asleep for over three hours, but still have a hefty overdraft at the bank of sleep. If Suga’s mailman virus works the way he boasted, Kozue Yamaya’s file has already spread to every e-mail contact on every address book of every e-mail contact on every address book, etc., for ninety-nine generations. That adds up to . . . more computers than there are in Japan, I guess. Way, way beyond the ability of anyone to cover it up. It is out of my hands now, anyway. ‘Going nowhere fast past Hadano, we are,’ says Ogre. ‘Traffic news says a milk-rig overturned ten clicks downstream.’ Urban Tokyo has unfolded into zones and charted rice-fields. ‘On a fine day,’ says Ogre, ‘you can see Mount Fuji over to the right.’ Drizzle fills the known world. Rain stars go nova on the windscreen, wipered away every ninth beat. Radio burbles. Tyres hiss on the wet Tomei expressway. A minibus of kids from a school for disabled children overtakes on the inside. They wave. Ogre flashes his headlights and the kids go wild. Ogre chuckles. ‘Who knows what makes kids tick? Not me. Alien species, kids.’ Line after line of hothouses troop by. I feel I should stoke the conversation to pay for my fare, but when I start a sentence a yawn splits my face in two. ‘Do you have any kids?’

  ‘No kids, not me. Me and marriage, never in the stars. Many truckers have girls in every port. Say they do, anyway. But me?’ Ogre has a story, but it would be rude to probe. ‘Cigarette?’ Ogre offers me a box of Cabin, and I am about to light up when I remember. ‘Sorry, I promised a friend I’d give up.’ So I light Ogre’s and try to smoke my craving. Traffic nudges. Ogre inhales, leans over the giant steering wheel, and taps ash. ‘Was your age, once, believe it or not. Got a job at Showa-Shell driving ginormous tankers. How ginormous? Ginormous.
Freight division had its own on-site training programme – those babies are not your regular engine boxes, you get me? Dormitories were ex-barracks, outside Yamagata. Bleak spot, it was, sleet and frost even in March. Fourteen guys, all sharing one long corridor, small partitions for privacy, get the picture?’ I rub my eyes. We overtake the kids in their minibus. They press their faces against the glass and do zoo faces. I think of drowning men in submarines. ‘Now, I never sleepwalked in my life. Ever. Until my first night in Yamagata. Not just walking – doing things. So, say I dream of walking around my home town: I sleepwalk down the corridor saying, “Afternoon. Nice weather. Afternoon.” If I dream of being a famous artist, then we wake up to find toothpaste smeared on the mirrors. Harmless, it was. I always cleaned up my mess. A laugh, us trainees thought. They never woke me up – everyone knows the rule, “Never wake a sleepwalker”, although nobody really knows why.’ The radio whips and spikes. Ogre tries to retune it. ‘I learned why – the worst sixty seconds of my life. One moment, I am strolling around a shady market on a hot day in China. The next moment, two guys are sitting on me, shouting – two others are grabbing a hand each – two others grappling my fingers loose. What was I holding? A cleaver. Taken it from the canteen, I had. Lethal, fuck-off cleaver, the sort you chop up frozen carcasses with. Walked from partition to partition, waking up my co-trainees by tapping them on the side of their heads.’ On the road ahead, ambulance lights pulse in the slow dusk. A silver container truck lies on its side. Its cabin is crushed and shredded. A car is being winched on to a pick-up. Traffic controllers wave three lanes into one. They have glowing batons and fluorescent flak jackets. Others hose the road. Ogre strokes an amulet. ‘Rock solid, you believe the world is. Then everything jolts and shocks, and it all melts away.’ Traffic crawls through a coned bottleneck, and Ogre gropes for his box of Cabin. ‘Got a lighter?’ I light one for him, wondering if the story is over. ‘My dream. Baking hot day in China, it was. I was parched. I came across a watermelon market. Sweet snow watermelons. Would have sold my soul for one, I would. My mother whispered in my ear: “Be careful, son! They’ll try to sell you rotten fruit!” Something half buried in the dust catches my eye – a dagger, the sort archaeologists dig up. Walked from stall to stall, tapping watermelons with its blade. From the sound quality, I judged if the flesh was rotten or firm. I knew: the first good fruit I came to, I would whack in half, and eat it, there and then.’ We clear the bottleneck and Ogre begins to climb through the gears. ‘Medication stops the sleepwalking. Out cold, I am. But it goes on my licence, so union jobs and hazardous cargo are out. And a wife? And kids? Too afraid of what I might do to them one night, if it starts up again. So you see . . .’ Ogre inhales all life from his cigarette. ‘Be very careful what you dream.’

  ‘Scientists call it the Ai Imajo Effect.’ Her voice is so clear she could be in the next room. ‘The brightest minds in psychology have given this mystery their best shot, but results are still inconclusive. Why, oh why, whenever I fix a meal for a man, does he jump on the next truck out of Tokyo?’

  I was not expecting a joke. ‘I tried calling this morning.’

  ‘It would be handy to blame my mood swings on my old friend diabetes, but really I have to blame my old friend me.’

  ‘No way, Ai, I was—’

  ‘Shut up. No. It was my fault.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Accept my apology or the friendship is off. Me – of all people – lecturing you on how to behave towards your mother.’

  ‘You were right. My mother called me from Miyazaki. Last night.’

  ‘Sachiko said. Good, but being right is no excuse for being preachy. Anyway. I’m on my piano stool, varnishing my toenails. So where are you, absconder?’

  ‘Being eaten alive by mosquitoes outside a trucker’s café called Okachan’s.’

  ‘There are ten thousand trucker’s cafés called Okachan’s.’

  ‘This one is between, uh, nowhere and . . . nowhere.’

  ‘Must be Gifu.’

  ‘I think it is, actually. One truck driver dropped me off here, after calling his mate – called Monkfish – to pick me up when he passes by on his way to Fukuoka. Before me, he has a fist-fight with a crooked gas station attendant who made improper suggestions about his wife.’

  ‘Pray he wins unconcussed. Poor Miyake – stuck in a Nikkatsu trucker film.’

  ‘This is not the fastest way to Kyushu, but it is the cheapest. I have news.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Put your nail varnish down. I don’t want you to stain your piano stool.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘For the last nine years I grew up in the quietest village on the quietest island in the quietest prefecture in Japan. Nothing happened. Kids say that everywhere, but on Yakushima it really is true. Since I saw you last, everything that never happened, happened. It was the weirdest day I ever lived through. And when I tell you who I met this morning—’

  ‘It sounds as if I should call you back. Give me the number.’

  ‘Eiji!’ She perches on the high windowsill, hugging her knees. Bamboo shadows sway and shoo on the tatami and faded fusuma. ‘Eiji! Come quickly!’ I get up and walk to the window. Dental-floss cobwebs. From the window of my grandmother’s house I see Ueno park, but everyone has gone home. But there is Anju, kneeling before an ancient shipwreck of a cedar. I climb out. Anju’s kite of sunlight is tangled in the highest branches. It shines dark gold. Anju is in despair. ‘Look! My kite is caught!’ I kneel down with her – seeing her in tears is unbearable – and try to cheer her up. ‘Why don’t you set it free? You’re fantastic at climbing trees!’ Anju airs her recently acquired sigh. ‘Diabetes, genius, remember?’ She points down – her legs are a pin-cushion of syringes, drips and torture instruments. ‘Set it free for me, Eiji.’ So I begin climbing – my fingers claw at the reptile bark. Sheep bray in a far valley. I find a pair of my discarded socks, dirty beyond redemption. After a lifetime dark rises, winds swirl, crows come looking for soft places. I am afraid the sunlit kite will rip and shred before I can get to it. Where in this storm of leaves can it be? Minutes later I find him on the top branch. A man still without a face. ‘Why are you climbing my tree?’ he asks. ‘I was looking for my sister’s kite,’ I explain. He frowns. ‘Chasing kites is more important than taking care of your own sister?’ Suddenly I realize I have left Anju alone – for how many days? – in our grandmother’s house without thinking about food or water. Who will open her canned dinner? My concern is heightened when I see how tumbledown the place is now – shrubs grow out of the eaves, and one harsh winter would topple the house. Has it really been nine years? The lockless knob twizzles uselessly – when I knock the entire door frame falls inward. Cat shadows slide behind rafters. In my capsule is my guitar case. And in the guitar case is Anju. She cannot open the escape hatches from the inside, and she is running out of air – I hear her knocking helplessly, I scramble, scrabble, but the locks are so rusty—

  ‘And I woke up and it was all a dream!’ Monkfish glows in the dashboard lights, all skin and string vest. Croaked laughter, one two three. He has the rubberiest lips any human being had, ever. I am in another truck crossing rainy hyperspace. A road sign flies by at light speed – Meishin expressway O tsu exit 9 km. The dashboard clock glows 21.09. ‘Funny things, dreams,’ says Monkfish. ‘Did Honda tell you his sleepwalking story? Load of crap. Fact is, ladies find him repulsive. Plain and simple. Dreams. I read up on ’em. Nobody really knows what dreams are. Your scientists, they disagree. One camp says your hippocampus shuffles through memories in your brain’s left side. Then your brain’s right side cobbles together tall stories to link the images.’ Monkfish does not expect me to say anything back – he would be having this conversation with the Zizzi Hikaru doll if I were not here. Kyoto exit 18 km. ‘More like scriptwriting than dreaming. Whatever.’ A hairy fly strolls across the windscreen. ‘Ever tell you my dream story? We all have one. I was your age. I was in love. Or maybe mentally ill. Sam
e difference. Whatever. She – Kirara, her name was – was one of those pampered daughters-in-a-box. We went to the same swimming club. I had quite a body in my day. Daddy was the fascist mastermind of some evil organization. What was it? Oh yeah, the Ministry of Education. Which put Kirara way above my class. Made no difference. I was obsessed. I copied out a love poem from a book at school. I got a kiss! I still have this goaty appeal to the fairer sex, and Kirara succumbed. We started going out in my cousin’s car for sessions at the reservoir. Counted the stars. Counted her birthmarks. Never knew bliss like that, never will again. But then her father got wind of our dalliance. I was not prince material for her princess. Whatever. One word from Daddy and she dropped me like a scabby corpse. Even changed swimming club. For Kirara, I was just an entrée to be nibbled, but to me, she was the entire menu at the restaurant of love. Well, I was distraught. Insane. I sent her more poems. Kirara ignored them. I stopped sleeping, eating, thinking. I decided to prove my devotion by killing myself. I planned to hike out to the Sea of Trees at the foot of Mount Fuji and overdose on sleeping pills. Hardly original, I know, but I was eighteen and my uncle had a forest cabin out there. The morning I left, I posted a letter to Kirara saying that as I couldn’t live without her love I had no choice but to die, and describing where I would perform the deed – not much point dying for love if nobody notices, is there? Took the first train out, got off at a quiet country station and started hiking. The weather grew uncertain, but me, never. I was never so sure about a decision in my life. I found my uncle’s cabin, and walked past it until I came to a glade. This was the place, I decided. And guess what I see, up in the air.’

  ‘Uh . . . a bird?’

  ‘Kirara! My beloved with a noose around her neck! Feet doing the clockwise-anti-clockwise biz. What a sight! Bloated, shitted, crows and maggots already at work.’