Number9dream

by David Mitchell

  Where mossy drapes hung so thickly that Goatwriter could hardly advance, his feet sploshed in a babbling brook. The tea-colored stream was clattery underhoof with dinner plates. Goatwriter lapped up a mouthful and immediately his head cleared and spirits revived. “A stream of consciousness!” he reJoyced. “I m-must be in the D-Darjeeling foothills.” As Goatwriter paddled upstream the moss thinned, lantern orchids lit the noon gloom, opal hummingbirds probed bleeding figs, and, far above, the forest canopy was chalk-dusted with daylight. It seemed to Goatwriter that they formed characters and words. “All m-my life,” he mused, “I searched for the truly untold tale in sealed caves, in lost books of learning. Could it be that, instead, profundity is concealed in the obvious? Does the truest originality hide itself within the d-dullest cliche?” The stream led him into a glade misty with sunlight. A swinging girl with flaxen hair sang a melody with no name and no end. Goatwriter recognized her soft voice: it was that of the whisperings, heard by the old goat nightly since midsummer. “You wish to find the truly untold tale?” She swung up.

  “Yes,” replied Goatwriter.

  “The untold tales hide in the highlands.” Ursa Minor rose above the horizon.

  “How m-might I find these highlands?” Orion descended to its sword.

  “Around the bend, to the sacred pool, up the wall, and over the wall.” The girl with the flaxen hair swung up. “Are you prepared to pay?”

  “I have been paying all m-my life.”

  “Ah, but Goatwriter—you have not paid everything yet.”

  “What can be left to pay, pray?”

  When the swing fell again it was empty.

  Goatwriter arrived at the sacred pool, and removed his glasses to wipe away the waterfall spray, but to his surprise he could see better without them. So he left them on the rock and pondered the peculiar pool. The waterfall did not fall from the precipice high above but ascended in a giddied, foaming, lurching—and silent—torrent. Up the sheer face of the rock, Goatwriter saw no path. For a moment, he considered turning back. Mrs. Comb would be distraught if he failed to return. He thought to himself: “I’m not a kid anymore. Pithecanthropus will take care of her. I am getting too old for symbolic quests.” The writer within the animal sighed, and jumped from the marble rock. The pool was as cold and sudden as death itself will doubtless be.

  Wednesday, September 20

  Tokyo

  Dear Eiji Miyake,

  I hope you will forgive the sudden and possibly intrusive nature of this letter. Quite possibly, moreover, you and its intended recipient are not the same person, which would cause considerable embarrassment. Nonetheless, I feel it is a risk worth taking. Permit me to explain.

  I am writing in response to an advertisement that appeared in the personal column of the Tokyo Evening Mail of September 14. The advertisement was brought to my attention only this morning by a visiting acquaintance. I should perhaps explain I am recovering from an operation to the valves in my heart. You appealed for any relatives of Eiji Miyake to respond. I believe I may be your paternal grandfather.

  Two decades ago my son sired a pair of illegitimate twins— a boy and a girl. He broke relations with their mother, a woman of lowly occupation, and, as far as I know, never saw his twins again. I do not know where the children were brought up, nor by whom—the mother’s people, one can only presume. The girl apparently drowned in her eleventh year, but the boy would now be twenty. I never knew their mother’s name, nor did I see a picture of my illegitimate grandchildren. Relations with my son have never been as cordial as one would wish, and since his marriage we have corresponded ever less. I did, however, discover the names of the twins he fathered: hence this letter. The girl’s name was Anju, and the boy’s name is Eiji, written not in the commonplace manner (the kanji for “intelligent” plus “two” or “govern”), but with highly unusual kanji for “incant” and “world.” I see your name is formed from the same kanji. Hence this letter.

  I shall be brief for the reason that the “evidence” of the kanji remains inconclusive. A face-to-face meeting, I believe, will clarify this ambiguity. If we are related, I believe points of physical resemblance will be self-evident. I shall be at Amadeus Coffee Shop, on the ninth floor of the Righa Royal Hotel (opposite Harajuku Station), on Monday, September 25, at a table reserved in my name. Please present yourself at 10 A.M., with any evidence, documentary or otherwise, of your parentage that you may possess.

  I trust you appreciate the sensitive nature of this matter, and will understand my reluctance to provide you with contact details at this time. Should you be another Eiji Miyake with identical kanji, please accept my sincerest apologies for raising your hopes unnecessarily. Should you be the same Eiji Miyake who I earnestly hope you are, we have many matters to discuss.

  Yours faithfully,

  Takara Tsukiyama

  I feel clean and clear and happy. My grandfather wrote a letter to me. Imagine, meeting my grandfather as well as my father. “We have many matters to discuss”! Here I was, despairing at the impossibility of it all, when contacting my father really was as straightforward as I always hoped. Monday—only two days away! My grandfather writes with an educated, authoritative language—surely he holds more sway over family politics than my paranoid stepmother. I make myself a green tea and take it into the garden to smoke a Kent, Buntaro’s brand of choice now that all the Marlboros are gone. Tsukiyama—cool name—is written with the kanji for “moon” and “mountain.” The garden is all beauty, rightness, and life. I wish Monday could start in fifteen minutes. What is the real time? I go back in and check the clock that Mrs. Sasaki brought me midweek. Still three hours until Buntaro gets here. My absentee host in her seashell frame catches my eye. “So, your luck has turned, at last. Call Ai Imajo. It was her idea to place the personal ad, remember? Go on. Shyness at the break of day is attractive in a way, but shyness buried in its shell will never serve you very well.”

  “Was that supposed to rhyme?”

  “Stop changing the subject! You are worse than your sister sometimes. Go out and find a telephone.”

  Supermarket row is no different since my last visit, but I am. The world is an ordered flowchart of subplots, after all. Look at all these cars— driving past and never colliding. The order is difficult to see, but it is here, under the chaos. So, I lived through twelve hellish hours—so? People live through twelve hellish years and live to tell the tale. Life goes on. Luckily for us. I find a phone booth under the emergency stairs in a Uniqlo. As cell phones take over the world these old-fashioned booths will become as rare as gaslights. I pick up the receiver—but I am suddenly frozen by the dread that all the conversations I have had with her in my imagination will now, right now, be proved to be the self-delusions of a boy from a muddy island so backward we still—as my trendy Money cousins joke—buy brides with barrels of daikon pickles. I replace the receiver. You coward, Miyake! I decide to get a haircut before I talk with Ai. You spineless worm, Miyake! I walk up the steps to Genji the Barber’s. It has one of those red, white, and blue stripy poles—Anju despaired of ever getting me to understand where the stripes unwound from and wound to. It was crystal clear to her. Genji’s shop is a poky joint, wintry with air-con—I am the only customer—and was last painted when Japan surrendered. A silent TV shows horse racing. Softporn magazines are piled high. The air is so thick with hairspray and tonic fumes that if you lit a match the whole building would probably go up in a fireball. Genji himself is an old man sprouting nasal hair, sweeping the floor with shaky hands. “C’mon in, son, c’mon in.” He gestures toward the empty chair. I sit down and he flourishes a tablecloth over my shoulders. In the mirror my head seems amputated from the rest of me. I flinch as I remember Valhalla bowling alley. Genji switches on his electric clippers, but nothing happens so he whacks the thing against the counter. It buzzes into life, and he begins a stand-up comedy routine about a luckless customer who came in the other day. I stop listening somewhere after the customer sneezed and
his glass eyeball shot out with such force that it broke his boss’s nose. Genji must repeat these tired gags ninety times a day, refining them slightly each time. Or not. Certainly he does not notice that my attention has floated away. I begin rehearsing various opening lines I can use to impress Ai Imajo. I form the thought that reality is an unedited script performed once; that the truly untold tale is life itself. This seems extremely profound for about ninety seconds. Genji holds a mirror behind my head and I see myself from a new angle. “How d’you like it, son? Bit o’ fresh air around the ears, eh?” I look as if I have been violently expelled from a monastery. “Thanks,” I say, and ask for plenty of hundred-yen coins for the telephone.

  Meanwhile, back in the forest of moss, Pithecanthropus scratched his head and grunted doubtfully. Mrs. Comb perched on a fungi-feathered tree stump. “It must be way past Sir’s mid-morning snack now . . . if only he’d said he’d be off gallivanting, I would have rustled him up something . . .”

  A man crashed through the thick vegetation, tripped, and sprawled at their feet. Pithecanthropus bounded over to protect Mrs. Comb, but the man seemed to offer no threat. He climbed to his feet, brushed leaf mold off the leather elbow pads on his tweed jacket, and adjusted his Band-Aid-repaired horn-rimmed glasses. He registered no surprise at encountering a sentient hen and a long-extinct ancestor of Homo sapiens in this primeval forest. “Have they passed this way?”

  Mrs. Comb was not impressed. “Have who passed this way?”

  “The word hounds, of course.”

  “Not those slavering great beasts we saw in the margins?”

  “That would be them!” He pressed a finger to his lips and stared at Pithecanthropus. “Hear anything?” Pithecanthropus grunted a “No.” The writer slid a thorn from his crown. “You see, many years ago I wrote a novel. I never imagined anybody would want to publish it, but I took their money, and the more I wished every copy would turn to dust, the more the lamentable thing sold. Oh, its errors, its posturing, its arrogance! I offered to sell my soul to Lucifer in return for having the entire run eradicated, but the duplicitous devil never got back to me. The words I unloosed in that accursed book have dogged me ever since.” Mrs. Comb preened her feathers. “Why not retire, then?” The writer shrugged: “I tried! I hid in schools of thought, in mixed metaphors, in the airport lounges of unrecognized states, but sooner or later I always hear a distant baying and I know my words are on my trail.” Abruptly, his face changed from doleful weariness to acute suspicion. “What are you doing here?” Mrs. Comb folded her wings. “My employer took it into his head to come gallivanting—have you seen him? Horns, a beard, hooves?” The writer shook his head. “Only writers, lunatics, or the Devil himself ever stray this deep into the forest of their own accord. Shhhhhhhhh!” The writer’s eyes glazed with dread. “A baying! Don’t you hear that baying?” Pithecanthropus grunted softly and shook his head. “Liars!” hissed the writer, and his eyes changed. “Liars! You’re in league with the word hounds! I know your little game! They’re in the trees! They’re coming!” With that, the unhappy man crashed off through the undergrowth. Pithecanthropus grunted curiously. “Aye,” agreed Mrs. Comb, “as bonkers as a balmy balaclava. But look . . . what’s through this hole in the moss he made.” A tea-tinted stream without sound.

  “Hurry up, slowcoach!” Mrs. Comb fluttered from rock to rock, while Pithecanthropus had to wade against the current of consciousness. So it was that Mrs. Comb reached the sacred pool first. A second later she noticed Goatwriter’s spectacles lying on the marble rock. Third, she saw the body of her best and dearest floating in the water. “Sir! Sir! Whatever’s to do!” She flew forth across the pool without noticing the upward waterfall. On her fifth flap she reached Goatwriter’s head. Pithecanthropus’s sixth sense told him the sacred pool was death, and roared a warning—but no sound carried, and he could only watch in despair as his beloved slipped, dipped a tip of her wing, and slapped lifeless into the water alongside Goatwriter. In seven bounds Pithecanthropus was atop the marble rock, where his body tore with eight howls of mute grief. He pounded the rock until his fists bled. And suddenly, our early ancestor was calm. He picked the sticky burrs from his hair, and climbed the rock face until the overhang browed. He counted to nine, which was as high as Goatwriter could teach him, and dived for the spot between the floating bodies. A beautiful dive, a perfect ten. No thought bothered his head as Pithecanthropus entered the sacred pool. Serenity was never a word he would have comprehended, but perfect serenity was what he felt.

  “Good afternoon, Jupiter Cafe. Nagamimi here.”

  Donkey. I think. “Uh, hello. Can I speak to Miss Imajo, please?”

  “Sorry, but she isn’t working today, see.”

  “Oh. Could you tell me when her next shift is, then, please?”

  “Sorry, but I can’t do that.”

  “Oh. For, uh, security reasons?”

  Donkey hee-haws. “No, not that. Miss Imajo’s last shift was Sunday, see.”

  “Oh . . .”

  “She’s a music student, and her college term is starting again, so she had to quit her part-time job here to concentrate on her studies, see.”

  “I see. I was hoping to get in touch with her. I’m just a friend.”

  “Yeah, I can understand that, if you’re her friend and all . . .”

  “So, might you have her telephone number? On a form or in her record?”

  “Miss Imajo was only here for a month, see.” Donkey hums as she thinks. “We don’t keep files and stuff like that here, see, ’cause of space. Even our cloakroom, it’s got less room than one of those boxes that magicians put swords through. It isn’t fair. At the Yoyogi branch, see, they have this cloakroom big enough to—”

  “Thanks anyway, Miss Nagamimi, but . . .”

  “Wait! Wait! Miss Imajo did leave me her number, but only if someone called Eiji Miyake phoned.”

  I stop myself kicking the wall because it will hurt. “My name is Eiji Miyake.”

  “Really?” Donkey hee-haws.

  “Really.”

  “Well, really! Isn’t that a funny coincidence?”

  “Isn’t it just.”

  “Miss Imajo said, only if somebody called Eiji Miyake calls. And you call, and your name is Eiji Miyake! I remember you, you know. You hit that nasty man with your head. Did it hurt? It must have hurt. When I—”

  “Miss Nagamimi, give me Miss Imajo’s number. Now.”

  “Right, hang on a moment, where did I put it, I wonder?”

  Ai Imajo’s number is ten digits long. I get to the ninth before a paralysis reaches my hand. What if my call embarrasses her? What if she thinks I’m some slimeball who wants to hassle her every night? What if her boyfriend answers? Her father? What if she answers? What do I say? I look around Uniqlo. Shoppers, sweaters, space. My index finger presses the final digit. The number connects. A telephone in a distant apartment begins to ring. Somebody is getting up, maybe pausing the video, maybe putting down their chopsticks, cursing this interruption—

  “Hello?” Her.

  “Uh . . .” I try to speak but a sort of dry, spastic noise comes out.

  “Hello?”

  I should have planned this better.

  “Hello? Do I get to know who you are?”

  My voice comes back all on its own. “Hello, is this Ai Imajo?” Stupid question. I know this is Ai Imajo. “I, uh, my, uh . . .”

  She sounds sort of pleased. “My knight in shining armor.”

  “How do you know?”

  “A mysterious midnight vision warned me you would call.”

  “Really?”

  “I recognized your voice, genius! How did you get my number?”

  I blush. “Miss Nagamimi at Jupiter Cafe told me. Eventually. If this isn’t a convenient time to call, I can, uh . . .”

  “This is perfectly convenient. I tried to track you down at the Ueno lost-property office, where you said you worked, but they told me you suddenly left town.”

 
“Yeah, uh, Mrs. Sasaki told me.”

  “Was it to do with your relative?”

  “Sort of. I mean, no. In a way, yes.”

  “Well, that’s that sorted out, anyway. Where did you disappear to at Xanadu the other weekend?”

  “I figured lots of, uh, organizer people would want to talk with you.”

  “Exactly! I needed your headbutt to ward them off. How is your head, by the way? No lasting brain damage?”

  “No, my brain is normal, thanks. Sort of normal.” Ai Imajo finds this funny. We both begin talking at the same moment. “After you,” I say.

  “No, after you,” she says.

  “I, uh”—the electric chair must be more pleasant than this— “wonder if, I mean I completely understand if not, you know”—never commit your army without a clear path of retreat—“but if, uh, it’s okay for me to, uh . . .”

  “To . . . ?”

  “Call you.”

  A pause.

  “Help me. This call is to ask if it is okay to call, right?”

  I really should have planned this better.

  Walking was a joy since Goatwriter sloughed off his body, and its rheumatism, in the sacred pool. The bamboo swayed sideways to let him pass, and whippoorwills wavered quarter-quavers. He paused to admire the view—highlands, lowlands, rainforests, slums, palaces, islands, plains, the nine corners of the compass. Peace rained. Up ahead, he saw a house in a meadow. It was a strange building to encounter in the Lap-sang Souchong Plateau. A piebald rabbit disappeared amid a rhomboid rhubarb riot. Beneath the gable was an open triangular window. Whisperings swarmed through the air. Goatwriter took the path to the front door. Its lockless knob twirled uselessly, the door swung open, and Goatwriter climbed the stairs to the attic. The air grew lighter step by step. “Good afternoon,” said the writing bureau. “About time,” said the brush of Lady Shonagon.