Number9dream

by David Mitchell

  The bumps of Mrs. Comb’s vacuum cleaning in her boudoir, directly above his hammock, awoke Pithecanthropus several hours later. The Venerable Bus’s journey had come to an end as the new day dawned. Without stirring, Pithecanthropus could tell they had parked somewhere hot from the aroma of dry-roasted locusts. He crawled out and got to his feet in an ocher desert of pebbles, boulders, and bones. The sun’s naked eyeball stared unblinkingly from a pink-dry sky. The desert wind stirred but did not cool the heat. Unswerving as an algebraic constant, the road ran to its vanishing point. Pithecanthropus flexed his mighty biceps, drummed his triple-barreled triceps, and bellowed his morning roar. Mrs. Comb shook the crumbs from the breakfast tablecloth, muttering, as she did every morning, “Must we put up with that ungodly racket every morning?” Goatwriter appeared on the steps and climbed down to the baked earth. “Good m-morning.” Pithecanthropus bowed shyly to Mrs. Comb and grunted a greeting and a question to Goatwriter. “I believe,” the latter replied, “that we have arrived in the Northern Territories, but of Terra Australis or M-mars I cannot be sure. If one consults Sir Joseph Banks’s magnum—”

  Goatwriter never finished his sentence because a maelstrom of feathers arose from nowhere, engulfed the Venerable Bus, and deprived the writer of the power of speech. Moogurning, phewlitting, macawbering, hallucinogenic birds, many unseen since the days when mythology was common gossip. Mrs. Comb dived for cover under the steps. Pithecanthropus lost his vision in the winged rhythms, and glimpsed his childhood in fossilized forests. Goatwriter was identifying and classifying: “Archaeopteryx . . . Thewlicker’s goose . . . Quetzalcoatlus . . . Greater hopeless auks . . . Nightjars at noon . . .” He closed his eyes and a druggy smile encircled his face. “Fragments . . . I hear fragments . . .” Time spun for a time, until the birds vanished thitherly as suddenly as hitherly. “Extra ordinary avifauna!” declared Goatwriter, once he had relocated his tongue. “Come out, Mrs. Comb, the coast is clear! D-do you know, I heard fragments of the truly untold tale? The birds were singing it to me! Excuse m-me, friends, but I m-must repair to m-my writing bureau without further d-delay!”

  I sit at the writing bureau with a fresh sheet of paper, and for a moment the page is perfect. The photograph of my father is open on the bureau too. How do you write a letter to a real live private detective? Dear Sir, you don’t know me, but—rejected. Dear Sir, I am the late Mr. Morino’s personal assistant, and I am writing to ask for a replacement —rejected. Dear Sir, my name is Eiji Miyake—you spied on me not so long ago for— rejected. I decide to be uncunning and brief. Sir: please send a copy of the ID file on Eiji Miyake to Box 333 Tokyo Evening Mail. Thank you. If it works, it works; if it fails, nothing I could say would have persuaded him anyway. I go back down to the garden and burn the three drafts—if Buntaro or Mrs. Sasaki found out, they would tell me I am insane for seeking out anyone connected with Morino, and of course they would be quite right. But surely, if the detective posed a threat we would know about it by now. He sifted through my capsule for Morino, so he knows where to find me. I put the note into an envelope, address and seal it. That was the easy part. Now I have to go out and post it.

  I pull my baseball cap down low, take the key from the hook by the door, and put my shoes on. I raise the latch on the main gate, and enter the real world. No brakes. No mysterious cars. Just a quiet, residential street, built down a sedate slope. All the houses are set back from the road behind high fences with automatic gates. Several have video cameras. Each property probably costs more than a whole village in Yakushima. I wonder if Ai Imajo lives in this sort of street, with that sort of bedroom window, behind that sort of hedge. I hear a girl laughing, and from out of an alley flies a junior high school kid on a bike with his girl standing on the rear wheel spindles. “What a gross story!” she repeats, over and over, laughing and flicking back her hair. “Gross!”

  The slope leads to a busy main road, lined with stores. All motion and noise, every vehicle a mission. I feel as though I am a ghost revisiting a place where I was never particularly happy. I pass a supermarket where mangos and papayas lie exquisitely ribboned. Kids play tag in the aisles. In the supermarket parking lot the men watch TV in their cars. A pregnant girl—my age—walks along, hands on her hump. Builders clamber along girders, a blowtorch hisses magnesium. I pass a kindergarten—children in color-coded hats run along paths of Brownian motion. What is Tokyo for? I haven’t decided. I feel uneasy trusting in my anonymity. Nobody stops and points; no traffic crashes; no birds fall out of the sky; no “Hey! Look! There’s that kid who witnessed thirty or more men get blown away by gangsters three or four nights ago!” Do soldiers feel this, when they get back from a war? The utter weirdness of utter normality. The post office is full of babies bawling and pensioners staring into inner distance. I wait my turn, looking at the “Have you seen this person?” posters of society’s number-one enemies, with the plastic-surgery faces they are fancied to have adopted. “Do not attempt to apprehend these criminals. They may be armed and dangerous.” The person behind nudges me. The assistant asks for the third or fourth time. “Yes, sir?”

  “Uh, I’d like to mail this, please.”

  I pay, she gives me my stamps and change, then addresses the customer behind me. It is true. What happened to me last Friday night is locked inside my head, and nothing shows on my face. I lick the stamps, stick them on, and balance the envelope on the lip of the box. Is this wise? I let the letter go, it falls with a papery slap. When did “wise” ever come into it? Onward, Plan G. I look up into the eye of a video camera. Outside, the air is heavier and gustier than it was, and swallows are diving low. Another video camera watches the supermarket parking lot. Yet another is mounted on the bridge to meditate on passing traffic. Who watches for what, and why? I hurry back.

  Evening brings rain in slow motion. I am up in the attic. The paper turned white to blue and now is nearly as gray as the ink, but I am content just to sit here and watch the watercourses trickle down the windowpanes. In Yakushima they boast about the rain. Uncle Pachinko says it rains thirty-five days per month. Here in Tokyo, when did it last rain? That summer storm, on the day of my stakeout. I was such a holy fool. What if my father really has no interest in even meeting me? What if he is a yakuza man too? Sometimes the watercourses follow the one before, other times they split off. Then my father owes it to me to tell me himself. His job—his way of life, even—is not the point. In the street outside, the cars of ordinary husbands swish by on their way to ordinary homes. A car cuts its engine outside, and my sense of peace drains away. I peer through the triangular window: Buntaro’s beat-up old Honda. Here comes my savior, leaping the flooding drain, covering his bald patch with a newspaper.

  Goatwriter sat at his writing bureau, watching the perfect sentences orbit inches above his head, waiting for him to pin them onto paper with his brush. Which was . . . where? Goatwriter looked for his brush. “Most odd,” he thought, “I quite clearly remember placing it on my blotter when I heard Pithecanthropus yawning . . .” He searched for it in the places it should be, then might be, and then could not possibly be. Only one conclusion remained. “Thief!” cried Goatwriter. “Thief! Thief!” Mrs. Comb was by his side in a semijiffy. “Let me explain once more, sir. Your snack paper goes in this tray, here, but your writings and whatnot go in—” Goatwriter shook his head. “No, Mrs. Comb! It is not my manuscript that has gone missing this time, but my writing brush! Yes, the selfsame brush Lady Shonagon used to write her pillow book, thirteen thousand crescent m-moons ago! The tongue of m-my imagination! The vocal cords of m-my inspiration, without which m-my career is over, m-moreover! I am doomed! The critics will d-de-re-un-in(con)struct me!” Pithecanthropus grunted a question. “The thief surely struck while the d-deployed birds d-decoyed our suspicions!” Mrs. Comb tightened her apron strings. “Never fear, sir, we found us a thief before and we’ll find us one again, shan’t us, you?” Pithecanthropus was so pleased to be addressed directly by Mrs. Comb that he grunted happily, in
stead of pointing out that tracking in a muddy margin was one thing, but following tracks across windy sand was an entirely different cauldron of newts.

  “As usual, Mrs. Comb”—Goatwriter forced himself to calm down— “you are right. Yes. Let us apply logic to these d-direst of straits. My writing brush is missing. Where does one find pens, quills, and implements of that kidney? At the ends of sentences. The ends of lines. We m-must focus our energies on locating lines.”

  “Only one line out here, sir.”

  “Which line would that be, pray, Mrs. Comb?”

  “Why, sir—the line running down the middle of the road.”

  Goatwriter clapped his hoofs. “Friends. Prepare for war.”

  Mrs. Comb was tiring and perspiring under her parasol, and worried that her next egg would be laid already hard-boiled. Pithecanthropus panted heavily. The road cooked holes in his soles. Goatwriter saw mirages of intransitive verbs freeze and melt. Pools of lead bubbled in the sand. Time relapsed and collapsed. Goatwriter dabbed his brow with his Paisley kerchief and verified that what he saw was truly true. “Aha! Friends, take heart! The white lines are veering from the road— my writing brush cannot now be far!” Mrs. Comb insisted that they stop for a predesert prickly pear dessert. Somewhat refreshed, they followed the lines into a labyrinth of boulders and crags. Reptiles dry-fried themselves on volcanic rocks. Pithecanthropus grew uneasy—something, he was sure, was watching them. He grunted nothing for fear of upsetting Mrs. Comb. “I say,” said Goatwriter, at the head of the expedition. “We seem to be . . . here . . .” The three drew level at the lip of a smooth, white, steep, wide crater with a black hole in its center. “Extraordinary,” gasped Goatwriter, “to stumble across radiotelescope technology in this benighted desert . . .”

  “You can call it a radiotellythingummyjig if you want to, sir, but I recognize a lavatory bowl when I see one. Must take a month o’ Whitmondays to polish, or—”

  “Keeeeeeraaaaaaaaawwwk!” For the second time that morning Mrs. Comb was interrupted by a nonexistent bird, but this one was a far nastier piece of work—an evil-eyed saw-toothed pterodactyl with a wing-span that eclipsed the sun. Goatwriter’s rear was speared clear down the crater—his hoofs were unable to gain traction on the ceramic surface. Mrs. Comb swooped down on an intercept course, but, unable to pull out of her beak dive, disappeared down the black hole a moment after Goatwriter. Pithecanthropus was not afraid of anything prehistoric, or posthistoric for that matter, but when he thought of his only friend and Mrs. Comb alone in the darkness beneath his feet, his cranium throbbed with anxiety. Without another thought he tobogganed toward the bottomless blackness.

  The early man’s long fall was broken by tangles and meshes. Far above, a pinhole let in a ray of light. Pithecanthropus grunted. “Yes,” replied Goatwriter in wobbly tones, “m-my M-Miltonic d-descent was parried by a potpourri of porous packing. Mrs. Comb? Are you within earshot?” His housekeeper clucked. “It’ll take more than a tumble to knock my stuffing out, sir. But whatever is this cobwebby muck strung up everywhere? Where can we have landed, I wonder?”

  A wall of light opened up and an aristocratic voice rang out. “Welcome to my palatial website, O Goatwriter!” A woman appeared, wearing a Technicolor crown and a power suit. “We have been expecting you.” Her hair was sunshine and her lips shiny, but she seemed two-dimensional because she was. The wall was a giant screen that lit a chamber strewn with electrical cables. “My name is Queen Shrouds.” Her royal smile was atomic.

  “I am unfamiliar”—Goatwriter squinted—“with Your M-Majesty’s empire.”

  “The future is my empire.”

  “Oh, aye?” clucked Mrs. Comb. “You and whose army?”

  Queen Shrouds shone brighter. “My army is the media.”

  “Right grand, doubtless, but we are looking for a stolen writing brush and we have firm suspicions that it found its way down this hole.”

  “Indeed.” Queen Shrouds deigned to glance at Mrs. Comb. “I had it stolen.”

  “Grand way for a queen to act,” cooed Mrs. Comb. “We call the likes of you ‘thief’ where I come from!”

  “Her Majesty neva stole it Herself, ya scraggy drumstix!” rang a rodent retort. “I lifted ya pen from under ya noses when Her Maj digitized da birdstorm!”

  Pithecanthropus grunted in amazement. “ScatRat!” gasped Goatwriter. The felon appeared on-screen, leering and harpstringing his whiskers. “But how d-did you arrive—whence?—wherefore?—”

  “Being marginalized was a drag! I been trucking along in ya rust-bucket ever since da caveman trashed my ScatPad, until dis morning when Her Maj Queen Shrouds made me an offer no honest rat could refuse—I lure ya to her website, an’ She uploads me. I am da world number-one CyberRat.”

  Goatwriter chewed his beard. “Why would you voluntarily renounce your solid state for the virtual?”

  “Da whole internet is my rat run now, Beardy! I lightspeed down da cables I used to bust up ma teeth chewin’! Lettuce cut to da quick, Goatee. Queen Shrouds has granted ya dis audience two make ya da same offer.”

  The queen close-upped. Her kaleidoscopic eyes loomed large. “Indeed, O Goatwriter. On this side of the screen awaits the future! Paper is dead, have you not heard?” Her voice scaled operatic heights. “You shall compose your untold tales in a virtual heaven, and I, as your cyberagent—”

  “Aye,” pecked Mrs. Comb, “the nub!”

  “Silence, hen! Goatwriter, digitize yourself to my loving embrace, and we shall iron out that troublesome speech dddddddddefect! Imagine, you uttering sentences at the speed of charged particles instead of an amputee marathon!”

  Goatwriter glared. “Your imagery is tasteless. My stammer discerns my true friends from the false. I refuse!”

  Queen Shrouds filed her nails. “Luddites, Luddites ev’rywhere, nor any stop to think. Then I shall digitize you anyway, RAM-raid your virtual brain, synthesize every story you could ever compose, and delete the leftover bytes with those of your tedious companions Mr. Id and Madame Ego. ScatRat! Bring the digitizer online!” The evil queen’s face receded to allow space for the awesome cannon contraption ScatRat was lugging on-screen. Goatwriter struggled, but the web of cables held him fast. “Where is the fulfillment in stealing stories from another’s pen?” The queen looked genuinely puzzled. “‘Fulfillment’? Writing is not about ‘fulfillment.’ Writing is about adoration! Glamour! Awards! When I was a mere human I learned the language of writers, oh yes. I said ‘conceit’ instead of ‘idea’; I said ‘tour de force’ instead of ‘quite good’; I said ‘cult classic!’ instead of ‘this trash will never sell!’ Did it bring me fulfillment? No, it brought me overdrafts and obscurity! But by capturing your imagination in my motherboard, O Goateed One, the literary cosmos will be my cocktail bar! ScatRat! Get ready to fire!”

  “Sir,” flapped Mrs. Comb, “do something!”

  Goatwriter lowered his horns. “You are forgetting one thing.”

  Queen Shrouds dismissed him. “On the count of three, ScatRat! One, two—”

  “I will be heard! Under the riddle clause of the Evil Queen Law,” Goatwriter quoted from memory, “ ‘d-disagreements arising between evil queens and captives shall be settled by a riddle posed to the latter party by the former. Unless said riddle is executed it is illegal to store captive in any form by any m-means, electronic, m-mechanical, photocopying, recording, without prior permission of captive and captive’s publishers.’ ”

  STOP COUNTDOWN flashed on and off. The wintry iris and laser pupil of Queen Shrouds filled the screen. “O ScatRat. Say it is not so. Do.” ScatRat could be heard twanging a whisker. “Just an old formality, Yer Maj! Leave it to ya evva-so-’umble. I’ll zip two insolvableriddles@evilqueens.sup.org an’ get da numero uno brainshredda! Relax! Feta cheese is in da bag!” The queen frowned, and uttered, “Make it so!” She closed her eyes in cyberdelectation. “And then his soul,” gassy colors popped and fused, “stories,” she tossed back her head, “and book deals in n
inety-nine languages will be mine! Mine!” Her laughing mouth plunged the website into bucking bronchial blackness. “Miiiiiiiiine!”

  I finish my noodles first, so I broach the subject. “Buntaro, I need to talk about money.” Buntaro fishes for tempura batter. “What money?” Exactly. “Rent for next month. I dunno how to tell you this, but . . . I don’t have it. Not now that the money from Ueno will stop. I know this is a lot to ask, but could you take it out of my deposit?” Buntaro looks worried— about me, or the elusive tempura? I go on. “I am really ashamed, after everything you and Mrs. Sasaki have done for me. But you should know now, so, if, I dunno, if you wanted to give me my marching orders, I mean I would understand, really . . .”

  “Got you!” Buntaro holds up the shrimp between his chopsticks and delicately nibbles its head off. “The wife had a better idea, kid. She wants a vacation before she gets too pregnant for the airlines to let her fly. You know, we got to thinking how long it has been since we took a week off together. Guess how long?” I shake my head. “Never! Literally, never. Before I took over Shooting Star we were always too broke, and since then—well, a video store can never sleep. When I work, she rests; when she works, I rest. Nine years have gone by like that. She phoned around a few hotels in Okinawa this morning—off-season, loads of cheap deals. So, our proposal is this: you look after the store next week, and that can take care of rent for October.”