Number9dream

by David Mitchell

  “Oh, sir, this is the limit!” Mrs. Comb tore open the morning curtains. “Why will you never wrap up proper when you go about in the wee hours? If your rheumatism plays up again, Muggins here’ll be the one who’ll have to do your lugging and fetching, you mark my words!”

  Goatwriter unglued his eyelids. “Unquiet slumbers, Mrs. Comb.”

  “Then up and about with you, sir. Your breakfast is done. Zanzibar kippers, grilled to your fancy.” The housekeeper looked at the landscape. “A right dreary spot we parked in last night, and no mistake.”

  Goatwriter found his pince-nez and peered out. The Venerable Bus had rolled to a cold shoulder of moorland. “Inky landscape, paper-pulp sky. We find ourselves in the m-margins, m-my d-dear Mrs. Comb.”

  “Drabby name for a right drabby place.”

  “The soil hereabouts is so acidic that all colors wilt. Years ago I heard that a m-marginal d-duke stationed a daffodil plantation, but the yellow bleached away. Even evergreens never greened.”

  “Aye, well, sir. Your kippers’ll be turning cold.”

  Goatwriter frowned. “Strange to say, Mrs. Comb, but of appetite I am bereft. A splash of tea will suffice. Might I ask you to place the fish on a dish for me to eat by and by? Now, where are the pages that I wrote last night?” Goatwriter looked on his writing bureau. “Where can they be?” Goatwriter looked beneath and behind his bureau. “How vexatious!” Exhausting all the places his ms. could be, he began searching in places it couldn’t be. “Curious? No, catastrophic! I wrote invaluable fragments of a truly untold tale!”

  Despite decades of service, Mrs. Comb was cross about the spurned kippers. “I daresay you had another writing dream, sir, like the time you dreamed you wrote Les Misérables. You very nearly took Victor Hugo to court for flagellism.”

  The door banged open and the margin wind sprang in, disordering the loose and the fluttery. A fearsome prehistoric creature filled the doorframe. His torso was hairy and mud-spattered. He grunted in the language of clay and bone. Mrs. Comb glared. “Don’t you dare clomp your mucky mudluggers on my clean carpet!”

  “A good m-morning to you, too, Pithecanthropus.” Goatwriter’s missing pages were temporarily forgotten. “What have you found there, m-my d-dear fellow?” Pithecanthropus grinned bashfully and opened his cupped palms toward Mrs. Comb. A white, fragile flower drooped from a clod of earth. “A Snowdonian snowdrop!” exclaimed Goatwriter. “Blooming in September! How rare!”

  Mrs. Comb was less impressed. “I’ll thank you for taking your mucky weeds elsewhere! Such a muckster I never beheld!” She began scrubbing the kipper pan. “Shut the door on your way out! Do you want me and Sir to catch our deaths?”

  Pithecanthropus grunted dejectedly and did as bid. Goatwriter felt sorry for his best friend, but he knew better than to come between Mrs. Comb and the perennial object of her scorn.

  So I wake up staring at another unfamiliar ceiling. I slip straight into my amnesia game. This is where I am numb and I want to stay numb. I used to play this after Anju went, when my nine-year round of “Eiji is visiting this month” began. Uncles’ spare rooms, rice-husk futons, and cousins who held the ultimate warhead in any argument—“Well, if you don’t like it here, go back to your grandmother’s house!” Anyway, the object of the amnesia game is to remain in cozy ignorance of where I have woken up for as long as possible. I count to ten but I am still clueless. I am getting too good at this game. I examine the evidence. My muscles are strained and sore. I slept on a ballooning sofa in a pale living room. Forget-me-not curtains cover a big bay window. I have a mouth ulcer. Bang! goes the memory bomb. Heads in the bowling alley, a cigar-lit Morino, the Mongolian on a bridge to thin air. My nose and throat are in the corked-up stages of a bad cold: my body takes care of itself despite its idiot brain. How long have I been asleep? Who fed Cat last night? A box of Lark cigarettes is on the table. There are only three left, but I smoke one after the other, lighting them with free matches from a bar called Mitty’s. I am too warm. I slept in my clothes, so my various crevices are stewing. I should open the window, but moving would set into motion all the unthinkable consequences. For as long as I lie here, no new crisis can begin, and the distance between me and the deaths of thirty, forty men lengthens. How many people ever witness slaughter, real slaughter, outside of war zones? I groan. I cannot unsee what I saw. It will be national news. International news, most probably. TV will be channel-to-channel Yakuza Wars for the next six months. I groan again. Forensic teams will be crawling over the battlefield with tweezers. The Serious Crime Squad will be interviewing Xanadu shoppers. A girl employed at an already infamous pachinko parlor will have told reporters about a very suspicious character pretending to be the manager’s son, moments before poor Mr. Ozaki himself was thrown through the security-floor security window. Police artists will listen, nod, and make charcoal sketches. Oh, shit. What do I do? What will the unseen Mr. Tsuru want done to me? What has become of Mama-san and the Queen of Spades? I have no plan. Worse, I have no cigarettes. I have no tissues to blow my nose. I listen hard, and I hear . . . absolutely nothing.

  Sleeping in my clothes was a mistake, but I was afraid to undress in case I was woken up by the sound of the front door behind jimmied and I needed to bolt. I am still afraid. This is worse than waiting for an earthquake. If I feel an earthquake I know what to do—dive under a table and whimper. But what do I do if I hear an intruder searching for me? Hide? Where? I do not even know how many floors this house has. I get up: first stop, toilet. Japanese-squat style, with a bowl of bitter herbs. The kitchen is terra-cotta and spotless—judging from the flourthumbed recipe books, the owner loves cooking. Each cooking implement hangs from its own hook. There is a cleaning cupboard as tall as me, but it is too obvious a hiding place to be of much use. Through the window I see an empty carport and a strip of front garden. Roses, weeds, and a bird table. A high privet hedge shuts off the house from the outside world. I have no recollection of what lies on the other side. The living room is Japanese—tatami matting, a Buddhist altar with photographs of the recent and long dead, an alcove for flower arrangements and a hanging scroll with kanji that would give me a headache if I tried to read them. There is no TV, no stereo, and no telephone—just a receiverless fax machine on top of an ample bookshelf. The books are old, illustrated collections of tales. The Moon Princess, Urashima Taro, Gon the Fox. This house seems too orderly for kids, although it is not a particularly old building. I open the curtains an inch. The back garden is somebody’s pride and joy. The pond is bigger than my grandmother’s—I can see carp lurking in the green. Late dragonflies skim over the duck-weed. A stone lantern sits on an island. Pots of lavender, and a high bamboo grove, thick enough to hide in. Birds nest in an orange mailbox nailed to a silver birch. You could watch this garden for hours. It unfolds itself if you stare long enough. No wonder there is no TV. I go upstairs. The carpet is snowy and lush under my bare feet. A lavish bathroom with sea-horse taps. A master bedroom—the decor suggests a middle-aged couple. The smaller bedroom is used only for guests. Well. No hiding places here. You have to be nine years old to find good hiding places in the average house. Anju won by hiding in the washing machine one time. I assume my tour is complete, but notice a slatted closet door at the end of the landing. Its knob twirls uselessly, but it swings open anyway. Its shelves are not shelves but steep stairs. A knotted rope hangs down to help you haul yourself up. On the third step my head hits the ceiling, which shifts. I push, and a crack of daylight opens as the plywood trapdoor swings up. It seems I have found my hiding place. I emerge into a library-study with the highest book-population density I have seen in my life. Book walls, book towers, book avenues, book side-streets. Book spillages, book rubble. Paperback books, hardcover books, atlases, manuals, almanacs. Nine lifetimes of books. Enough books to build an igloo to hide in, and then to hide the igloo. The room is sentient with books. Mirrors double and cube the books. A Great Wall of China quantity of books. Enough books to make me wonder if I a
m a book too. Light comes in through a high triangular window. A sort of wickerwork lightshade hangs down. Apart from the bookcases and sagging shelves, the only item of furniture is an old-fashioned writing bureau with square holes to lose papers and bills in. My grandmother had the same sort. Still does, I guess. On the writing bureau are two piles of paper—one is white and blank as starched shirts, and the other is manuscript laid in a special lacquer tray. I cannot help myself. I sit down and begin reading page one.

  Goatwriter worked in the Venerable Bus, trying to reconstruct the fragments of the tale that had whispered before the dawn. Mrs. Comb mangled sheets and time extracted the minutes from hours. Goatwriter finally arose to check the correct spelling of zwitterion in his dictionary. He got sidetracked by gustviter, and returned with the dictionary to his writing bureau, where he was lured further from his original quest by durzi and theopneust. Drowsiness laid Goatwriter down, and the winds blew over the margins from the east.

  When Goatwriter awoke from his long sleep he was alone. There was no paper on the writing bureau. He looked around. Nothing. For a moment he hoped he was still dreaming. The pages he had worked so hard at reconstructing that very morning had disappeared! Mrs. Comb, he knew, never touched his writing bureau, nor would Pithecanthropus. And since the same fate had befallen the pages Goatwriter had composed during the early hours, only one explanation remained, however shocking: “Thief!” cried Goatwriter. “Thief! Thief!”

  Mrs. Comb rushed in, scattering pegs. “Sir! What’s the to-do?”

  “Burglarized, Mrs. Comb! While I lay sleeping!”

  Pithecanthropus burst in clenching a wrench, grunting nastily.

  “My reconstructed truly untold tale has been purloined!”

  “But how could it be, sir? I saw nothing as I hung out the washing.”

  Pithecanthropus sniffed, and grunted uneasily. He led Mrs. Comb and Goatwriter to the stern of the Venerable Bus and sniffed the tire-track mud. He pointed at a set of tiny tracks, and grunted conspiratorially. Mrs. Comb gasped. “An unwashed rodent?” verified Goatwriter. “Bigger than a mouse? Aha! We m-may conclude, thusly, that the thief is a d-dirty little rat! We m-must apprehend this scallywag and teach him a thing or two about copyright law! My d-dear Pithecanthropus—lead the way!”

  The early man read the ground with brow furrowed. An anvil cloud lugged itself overhead. The rodent tracks led off the beaten track, down the path not taken, through a sleepy hollow and over a tarn of brackish bilgewater. Mrs. Comb saw him first on the lip of the dike. “Whatever next by ’eck!” A scarecrow, nailed to a T, in a very sorry state. His eyes and ears were pecked away, and wispy hay bled from a wound in his side whenever the wind bothered to blow. Goatwriter had encountered numerous scarecrows in folktales, and knew the protocol. “Ahem. Frightfully sorry to disturb your meditations, Scarecrow . . .”

  Scarecrow raised his head so, so slowly.

  “. . . but have you seen a d-dirty little rat scurry by, carrying pages of a stolen m-manuscript?”

  Scarecrow’s mouth twitched. “This day . . .”

  “Splendid!” replied Goatwriter. “Which way was the vile varmint headed?”

  “This day . . . we shall sit . . . with my father . . . in Paradise . . .”

  At that exact moment, two hellhounds hurdled the dike, sank their slavering fangs into poor Scarecrow, tore him off his T and savaged him to windblown tatters. Goatwriter was knocked backward by a loose paw. Pithecanthropus swept Mrs. Comb off her feet and into his arms for her own safety. All that remained of Scarecrow were rags nailed to the wood. Goatwriter, lying by the edge of the bilgewater, tried to recall what to do and what not to do with rabid dogs—play dead? Look them in the eye? Outrun an old-world fruit bat out of Hades?

  “That’ll learn ’im,” growled the top dog, “to give the plot away.”

  “Wot about these three?” sniffed the underdog.

  Goatwriter felt the heat of their breath. “Good doggies . . .”

  “Talks like a writer,” bristled the underdog. “Smells like one. Is one.”

  “No time, no time,” barked the top dog. “Our maker is getting away!”

  “Lemme practice on Beardy first,” pleaded the underdog.

  Pithecanthropus readied himself to defend his friend, but the hellhounds turned and bounded away over the blank margins until they were but blots on the wizened horizon. “Well!” exclaimed Mrs. Comb. She then recalled that she was nesting in the arms of an extinct biped. “Put me down this very instant, you muckster!”

  A door bangs downstairs and the manuscript zooms out of focus. I stop breathing. Somebody is here. Somebody is here for me. Buntaro would have called out by now. So soon? How did they find me? My survival instinct, battered into submission by Morino, asserts itself now. The intruders are searching the living room, the kitchen, the garden, cranny by nook. They will have seen the socks I left on the sofa. My cigarettes. I replaced the plywood trapdoor and pulled up the rope, but did I close the slatted door on the landing? I can hand myself over and hope for mercy. Bad idea. Yakuza do not do mercy. Hide here, under books. But if I cause a bookslide, they will hear it and know I am here. Is there anything up here that could serve as a weapon? I listen for footsteps on the shelves—nothing. Either the intruders are working in silence, or I am only dealing with one. My default strategy is this: hold a three-ton, three-volume set of A Critical Review of the Japanese “I” Novel above the trapdoor—when it opens wide enough, lob them through and knock the guy backward. Pray he is a lone operator, jump down, land on him—if he has a gun I am in trouble—bust his ribs, and run for it. I wait. And wait. Concentrate. I wait. Am I sure I heard the bang? I left the back window open an inch—suppose it was just the wind. Concentrate! I wait. Nobody. My arms are aching. I cannot stand this. “Hello?”

  The flurry of violence never comes.

  Scared by a story I told myself. I am in a bad way.

  Later in the afternoon, I go back down. In the spare bedroom closet I find some sheets and towels, and arrange them on the step-shelves behind the slatted door, so hopefully the intruder will think it is a linen closet rather than stairs to sanctuary. I gather up any sign of my residency, and stuff it into a plastic bag under the sink. I must clean up any traces of myself, as I make them. I should be hungry—when did I last eat?—but my stomach seems to be missing. I need a cigarette, but no way am I venturing outside. Coffee would be fine, but I can only find green tea, so I make a pot. I blow my nose—my hearing comes back, but snots up again—open the bay window, and drink my tea on the step. In the pond carp appear and disappear. Whirligigs bend but never puncture the liquid sky. A ruby-throated bird listens for earthworms. I watch ants. Cicadas muzzzmezzzmezzzmezzzmezzzmuzzzzzzzzz. Nowhere in the house is a single clock, or even a calendar. There is a sundial in the garden but the day is too hazy for a clear shadow. It feels three o’clock–ish, but I could be wrong. The breeze shuffles and flicks through the bamboo leaves. A column of midges hovers above the pond. I sip my tea. My tongue cannot taste a thing. Look at me. Five weeks ago I was on the morning ferry to Kagoshima, with a lunchbox from Aunt Orange. I was sure I would find my father before the week was up. Look at who—what—I found instead. What a disaster, what an aftermath! The summer is lost, and other things, too. The fax machine beeps. I jump and spill my tea. A message feeds through from Buntaro, telling me he’ll be over around six, if the traffic lets up. When is six o’clock relative to now? Hours need other hours to make any sense at all. Hanging on the wall above the fax machine is a shell-framed photograph of an old man and woman, maybe in their fifties. I guess they own this house. They are sitting at a cafe table in the shade on a bright day. He is about to break into laughter at whatever she has just said. She is reading my reaction to see if I genuinely enjoyed her story, or if I am just being polite. Weird. Her face is familiar. Familiar, and impossible to lie to. “True,” she seems to say to me, “but see if you can piece the puzzle together yourself.” We watch each other for a while,
then I go back to her garden where the dragonflies live out their whole lives.

  “And you are quite sure, m-my d-dear fellow,” prompted Goatwriter, “that the tracks end in this m-mulch m-mound of Stiltonic stench?” Pithecanthropus grunted a yes, waded into the pyramid of cans, pans, mottled bottles, spud skins, linchpins, and “Vote for Me” leaflets, and picked up some fresh garbage. “Kipper bones!” squawked Mrs. Comb. “Then one m-must suppose,” concluded Goatwriter, “we have hunted our quarry to its hovel.”