Number9dream

by David Mitchell

  This makes sense. “Okay.”

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

  “Please don’t think I’m not grateful, Mrs. Sasaki . . .” Green tea with barley grains. “But why are you and Buntaro being so kind to me?”

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

  “I don’t understand.”

  “No matter, Miyake-kun.”

  The market town was a razed maze of rubble and scree. The mosque on the hill had taken a direct hit and its windows were empty sockets. The cathedral smoldered without a roof, and the dome of the synagogue had fallen in. Streetcars lay toppled. Abandoned children waited quietly to die by the roadside. White jeeps from aid organizations drove around, one nearly running over Mrs. Comb. She came to an enormous statue that reigned over the kingdom of ruin. OUR BELOVED COMMANDER, read the plaque. In his shadow, a gaunt man sizzled worms over a fire. His family watched, their eyes empty of everything but a dreadful hunger. The commander was as plump as the father was skeletal, only the commander was made of bronze. “Excuse me,” asked Mrs. Comb, “but I’m looking for the marketplace.”

  “You’re standing in it.”

  Mrs. Comb realized he was being serious. “This waste ground?”

  “A car bomber struck last week. There is a war on.”

  “But surely people need to buy and sell food?”

  “What food? We are under siege, if you hadn’t noticed!”

  “A siege?”

  “They call them ‘sanctions’ these days.”

  “Fancy . . . and who is the war between?”

  “No idea.”

  “But surely you can tell, when the soldiers fight one another?”

  “The soldiers? Are you crazy? They might get hurt! They have a gentleman’s agreement—never fire at a uniform. The purpose of modern warfare is to slay as many civilians as possible.”

  “Fancy.” Mrs. Comb looked at the rubble-strewn marketplace and said something most unwise. “Looks like I won’t be selling any eggs here today, anyway.”

  “Eggs?”

  The word spilled across the gutted landscape. “Eggs!” Orphans crawled from drains. “Eggs!” Old women tapped their canes. “Eggs!” Blind pensioners appeared in doorless doorways, twisting their heads to hear better. “Eggs!” The crowd grew to a mob in a minute, encircling the statue. The gaunt man was shrieking, “They are mine! I found her first!” But nobody paid him any attention. Mrs. Comb was thoroughly disconcerted, and struggled to calm the oncoming frenzy. “Now, by gum, no need to—” The mob surged—a wall of snatching hands collapsed over Mrs. Comb, who squawked in terror as her eggs were pounded underfoot. In panic, she flapped and rose above the crowds, but she was no spring chicken and could only manage a few seconds airborne. As the only roosting site in reach was the handlebar mustache of the Beloved Commander, that was where she rested. The mob, at first, was struck dumb by Mrs. Comb’s ascension. A little kid bleated out the truth Mrs. Comb longed not to hear. “She ain’t no lady!”

  “I most certainly am a lady!” Mrs. Comb called down from her perch. “I’ll have you know my father ruled the roost!”

  “Ladies don’t fly! You’re a hen!”

  A new word devoured the hungry town. Not eggs, not even hen, but “Chicken! Chicken! Chicken!”

  Later the same day. The doorbell chimes and my heart coils up again. I put the manuscript down. Not Buntaro, not Mrs. Sasaki? I am up in the attic study, but I hear a key turned in the front door. An intruder with a skeleton key? I am not imagining it this time—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. “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. “Not hard,” he replies. “But you look even 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?” I sound sulky.

  “Whatever. Pickle it, keep it in an enameled casket: ideal for picking your nose in polite society. What a conversation piece: ‘It formerly belonged to the notorious international playboy 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 packs of cigarettes to tide you over,” he says. I see he is still unsure whether or not I want to lash out at 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. Marlboros. I remembered you smoked Marlboros 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. To my surprise, I even find myself telling 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?”

  “Yakuza wars make the police look useless and the politicos look corrupt. Which, as everybody knows, is true. But if the authorities admit it, the voters of Tokyo may be prompted to wonder why they bother paying taxes at all. So it gets kept off TV.”

  “But the newspapers?”

  “Their pet journalists are fed reports of battles already won and lost higher up the mountainside. Original, story-sniffing journalists get black-listed from news conferences, so newspapers can’t keep them. Subtle, isn’t it?”

  “Then why bother with the news at all?”

  “People want their comic strips and bedtime stories. Look . . . a dragonfly. The old poet-monks used to know what week of what month it was, just by the color and sheen of dragonflies’—howd’yacall’em?— fuselages.” Daimon plays with his lighter. “Did you tell your landlord the same full, uncut director’s version of the other night that you just told me?”

  “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. “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. A queen with sharp teeth from precolonial Korea, apparently. There is stuff about her I can’t tell you, but we figured we owe you her real name. 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 that you hated each other.”

  “Hate.” Daimon 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.”

  “But you think your marriage is . . . wise.”

  “I think it is one of the most unwise things I have ever done.”

  I do not understand. “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, or F, maybe. 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.

  Back on the balcony step I light another cigarette. The box of Marlboros is way too heavy. I look inside and find Yuzu Daimon’s platinum lighter. One side is inscribed: 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 for me to accept. I go back to the entrance hall and peer through the front door, but Daimon is gone. The sound of his sports car is swallowed by the streets. I work out the meaning with an English dictionary from the attic. Giving me this is more of an apology than cutting off a little finger. I wonder how many Aichi citizens ever made it back to their parents.

  “Truss the chicken!” cried one section of the mob. “Cut off the drumsticks and roll ’em in herbs!” howled another. “Stuff her with breadcrumbs an’ roast her with spuds!” How Mrs. Comb wished Pithecanthropus would rescue her, even if her suspicion that his hair harbored lice and fleas proved correct in the process. A line of starving choirboys sang “Chicken nuggets!” as if their lives depended on their performance. A ladder appeared, and Mrs. Comb realized that soon her refuge would become a trap. How could Goatwriter possibly cope without her? His shirts would be crumpled, and in time he would starve, too. That was when Mrs. Comb remembered the book Goatwriter had given her. “Hold your horses!” she cried, “and you’ll sup on something more nourishing than stringy old poultry!”

  The mob paused.

  Mrs. Comb waved the holy book at them. “Stories!”

  “Stories never filled my belly,” someone called. The ladder moved nearer.

  “You never heard the right ones, is why! Listen!” Mrs. Comb turned to page one, wishing Goatwriter’s handwriting wasn’t so spidery. “ ‘A tightrope artist walked across a high wire. A silent cataract thundered below. Walking on the wire toward him came a girl with eyes as near as Saturn, who asked him: “Do you believe in ghosts?” The tightrope artist frowned, and replied, “I couldn’t say, miss. Do you believe in ghosts?” She said, “Of course,” and disappeared.’ ” A cobblestone missed Mrs. Comb by an inch. “I’m still hungry!” howled a wolfman in sackcloth, and the ladder was propped up against the knees of the Beloved Commander. “Wait,” gulped Mrs. Comb, “wait! Listen to one more!” She lost her place and turned to page nine. “ ‘Father! Father! Why hast thou forsaken me?’ ”

  The noon sun browned.

  A spectral hush fell to Earth.

  The mob grew silent—then nervous—and suddenly screamed with hysteria. “Phantoms!” Men, women, and children drained away down cracks and culverts. In half a minute Mrs. Comb was left alone on the Beloved Commander, surveying a marketplace empty but for rubble and the body of a black marketeer whose skull had been staved by a loose cobblestone. “Goodness gracious,” Mrs. Comb remarked.

  “Great balls of fire!” added God, levitating on his surfboard. “Ma’am.”

  “God?”

  “That is my name, salvation’s the game.”

  “I called you?”

  “This here neighborhood ain’t what it once was, ma’am. What say I give you a lift somewhere?”

  Mrs. Comb realized she was saved. “I’d thank you kindly if you’d take me back to the Venerable Bus. Nothing but a pack of cannibals in these parts, God, nothing but hairless savages.”

  “They are just hungry, ma’am, very hungry. Jump aboard and hold on tight.” Mrs. Comb tightened her headscarf and wondered why human beings despise what is beautiful and good, and seek to destroy the things they need the most. She could not understand it. She could not begin to understand.

  Another two or three days of nothing weather. I spend them the same way. 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 trash and the more obvious evidence of my presence, and go up to the attic to read. I feel safest up here. I read detective stories by Kogoro Akechi. I read Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto. I read The Makioka Sisters by Junichiro Tanizaki. I read a novel by Philip K. Dick about a parallel universe where Japan and Germany won the Second World War, in which an author writes a novel about a parallel universe where America and Britain won. I read No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai, which we were supposed to read at school but which I never did. Anju was the reader, 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 such as 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.” I hated those classes more than anything else at high school, which is saying a lot. Who is this “We” jerk-off anyway? I never met him, but the books and teachers made me feel as if there was something wrong with me if I disagreed with “We.” 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. Afterward 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 blackout paper to the triangular window, and play my guitar—very quietly, in case somebody hears—until Buntaro or Mrs. Sasaki comes. 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 push-ups and sit-ups, and take a shower. I still sleep downstairs on the sofa, where I stand a good chance of hearing intruders 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 knowingly 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 is 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 shrillest cell-ph
one conversation on a commuter submarine. I hear things I never normally notice. Fluids through my tubes, my joints as I climb the shelves, the vibrations of cars, crows and doors several streets away, a fly on 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 in Edogawabashi follows. I write the address 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 an overdramatic act, in a Ken Takakura movie sort of way, 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?”

  WITCH SHROUDS

  Pithecanthropus peered from his undercarriage hammock. The Venerable Bus was on its night journey. White lines sped from the blurry darkness ahead vanished toward the distant past. Pithecanthropus loved the lullaby swing of his hammock and the fingers of the headwind stroking his fur. A piebald rabbit, headlit and hypnotized, hurtled unharmed beneath the wheels, and its nose nearly touched Pithecanthropus’s proboscis. “Hot diggity!” thought the rabbit, finding itself alive after all. “The angel of death is one dingo-ugsome critter! Wait until I tell my relatives!” By and by, Pithecanthropus yawned and slid down inside his hammock again, settling in the sediment of wishbones, flat batteries, oily rags, and Stilton rind. His final thought was that it was not the Venerable Bus that moved over the Earth, but the Earth that spun beneath the vehicle’s four ancient, spinning, yet stationary wheels.