Number9dream

by David Mitchell

“Uh, for sure. When Ai gets back could you—”

  “I inherited my granny’s psychic powers. I knew it was you calling. Don’t you want to know who I am?”

  “Are you Ai’s shy, retiring roommate, by any chance?”

  “Hole in one! So. Is Ai dating a human being, or are you another psycho gremlin?”

  “Not exactly dating . . .” I take the bait. “‘Psycho gremlin’?”

  “Fact. Eighty percent of Ai’s admirers go on to successful careers in the horror movie industry. The last one was the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Webby, floppy, water-resistant, caught bluebottles with his tongue. Phoned at midnight and croaked until dawn. Drove a Volvo, wore blazers, gave out CDs of himself singing madrigals, and confided his fantasies—quite unsolicited—when Ai begged me to say she was out. He and Ai would marry at Tokyo Disneyland, tour Athens, Montreal, and Paris with their three sons, Delius, Sibelius, and Yoyo. One time his mother called—she wanted Ai’s parents’ number in Niigata so she could start marriage negotiations directly with the manufacturer. Ai and I had to concoct an ex-boxer boyfriend in prison who half-strangled Ai’s last admirer.”

  “I can promise, right now, my mother will never call you. But—”

  “Ever worked in a pizza kitchen, karate kid?”

  “A pizza kitchen? Why?”

  “Ai says you need a job as of tomorrow.”

  “True, but I never worked in a kitchen before.”

  “No worries. Chimpanzees could do the job. In fact, we have hired lots of hairy primates in the past. The hours are lousy—midnight to eight A.M.—the kitchen is hotter than the core of the sun but on the graveyard shift the money is good. Central location—the Nero’s opposite Jupiter Cafe, site of legendary headbutt. Plus, you get to work with me. Has Ai mentioned my name?”

  “Uh . . .”

  “Obviously I am the last thing on her mind. Sachiko Sera. As in ‘Que sera, sera, whatever li-lah, li-lah.’ Can you start tomorrow evening? Monday?”

  “I don’t want to talk you out of giving me a job I need so badly, Ms. Sera, but, uh, don’t you want to meet me first?”

  Sachiko Sera does a beyond-the-tomb voice. “Eiji Miyake, native son of Yakushima . . . I know everything about you . . .”

  “Mr. Miyake?” At Amadeus Tea Room, Butler stops drumming his fingers. Arched eyebrows: butlership is all in the eyebrows. “Please follow me. The Tsukiyamas are waiting for you.” Tsukiyamas? Could my grandfather have persuaded my father to come too? I search the faces. The place is busier than last week—a funeral party is meeting here, many of the customers are in black—and I have trouble trying to locate an elderly man and a middle-aged one who looks like me. So when Butler pulls a chair out at a table where a woman and a girl my age are seated, I assume he has made a mistake. His eyebrows tell me there is no mistake, so I gawk, while they assess me. “Will you require an additional cup, madam?” asks Butler. The woman dismisses him with a quarter-smile and a “Most certainly not.” The girl stares at me—a “Will the turd fit around the U-bend?” sort of stare—while my memory grapples with a similarity . . . Anju! A chubby, crinkle-cut, scowly Anju. We have the same feather eyebrows. “Eiji Miyake,” she says, and I nod as if it were a question. “I knew it was you because you have that ‘Do you like me?’ look you’d expect to see on an orphan. You are one sorry, shameless creep, Eiji Miyake.” All at once, I understand. She is my half-sister. My stepmother fingers the bronze torque around her neck—thick enough to halt an ax swing—and sighs. “Let us try to keep this meeting as brief and painless as possible. Sit down, Mr. Miyake.”

  I sit down. Amadeus Tea Room continues in the background, as if on a video screen. “Mrs. Tsukiyama”—I grope around for pleasantries— “thank you for your letter last month.”

  Fake surprise. “ ‘Thank you’? Irony is your opening move, Mr. Miyake?”

  “No.” I look around. “Uh . . . actually, I was expecting my grandfather . . .”

  “Yes, we know all about that. Your little rendezvous was recorded in his diary. Regrettably, my father-in-law is unable to attend.”

  “Oh . . . I see.” Have you locked him in a closet?

  Half-sister has a slappy voice. “Grandpapa passed away three days ago.”

  Slap.

  A waitress passes with a tray of raspberry cheesecake slices.

  Stepmother does not bother to conceal her disdain either. “I am frankly astonished that you failed to see how sick he was last Monday. Running around at your beck and call, plotting conspiracies. I only hope you are proud of yourself.”

  This makes no sense. “I didn’t meet him last Monday.”

  “Liar!” slaps Half-sister. “Liar! Mother already told you—we have his appointment diary! Guess whose name we found for a meeting here one week ago!” I want to wrap her mouth in carpet tape.

  “But my grandfather was still in the hospital last Monday.” Stepmother does a head-resting-on-hands pose. “Your lies are embarrassing, Mr. Miyake. We know my father-in-law left his hospice last Monday to meet you! He didn’t ask for permission from the duty nurse, because he wouldn’t have received it. He was far too sick.”

  “I am not lying! My grandfather was too sick to come, so he sent his friend.”

  “What friend?”

  “Admiral Raizo.”

  Stepmother and Half-sister look at each other. Half-sister snickers a jerky laugh and Stepmother smiles so that her mouth shrinks to a lipsticked tip. Those lips kiss my father. “Then you did meet Grandpapa,” slaps Half-sister, “but you were too dumb to recognize him!” My temper takes the strain. I look at Stepmother for an explanation. “My father-inlaw’s last practical joke.”

  “Why would my grandfather pretend to be this Admiral Raizo?”

  Half-sister thumps the table. “He is not your ‘grandfather’!” I ignore her. Stepmother’s eyes glint with war. “Did he give you any documents to sign?”

  “Why,” I repeat, “would my grandfather pretend to be somebody else?”

  “Did,” she repeats, “he give you any documents to sign?”

  This is going nowhere. I put my hands behind my head, lean back, and study the ceiling while I try to calm down. “Yes, my friend,” observes Mozart, “you have a problem here. But it is your problem. Not mine.” I badly want to smoke. “Mrs. Tsukiyama, is this bad blood necessary?”

  “‘Bad blood,’ ” mutters Half-sister. “Nice expression.”

  “What do I have to do to prove to you that all I want is to meet my father?”

  Stepmother tilts her head. “Do calm down, Mr. Miyake—”

  This makes me boil over. “No, Mrs. Tsukiyama, I am tired of calming down! I do not—”

  “Mr. Miyake, you are making a—”

  “Shut up and listen to me! I do not want your money! I do not want favors! And blackmail! How did you come up with the theory I wanted to blackmail you? I am so, so, so tired of scrubbing around this city trying to find my own father! You want to despise me, fine, I can live with that. Just let me meet him—just once—and if he tells me himself that he never wants to see me again, okay, I will vanish from your lives and start my own, properly. That is it. That is all. Is this too much to ask?”

  I am so drained.

  Half-sister is unsure of herself.

  Stepmother has finally put away her unbearable sneer.

  I think I got them to listen. And half the customers in Amadeus Tea Room.

  “Actually, yes.” Stepmother pours herself and her pouty, piggy daughter weak tea from an inoffensive no-drip teapot. “It is too much to ask. Let us concede that I accept you mean my family no malice, Mr. Miyake. Let us even concede that I feel some sympathy for your position. The basic situation still stands unchanged.”

  “The basic situation.”

  “There is no nice way to say it. My husband does not wish to meet you. I will say it again, for emphasis. My husband does not wish to meet you. You seem to believe in a dark conspiracy keeping you away from him—this is simply not true
. We are not here to confuse your trail. We are here at the behest of my husband to ask you, please, to leave him in peace. He has paid for your upkeep not to maintain hopes of a future reunion, but to buy his right to privacy. Is this too much to ask?”

  I want to cry. “Why won’t he just tell me this himself?”

  “In a word”—Stepmother sips her tea—“shame.”

  I have no defense lined up for this.

  Stepmother says it again. “He is ashamed of you.”

  “But how can he be ashamed of somebody he refuses to meet?”

  “My husband isn’t ashamed of who you are. He doesn’t really care who you are. He is ashamed of what you are. An illegitimate reminder of the worst mistake of his life.”

  At the far side a customer abruptly stands up, sliding his chair behind him.

  “You are causing pain for him, for us, for yourself. Please stop.”

  The waitress walks into the chair. Teacups and raspberry cheese-cakes slide off her tray, and fine bone china chimes to pieces in a ripple of “Ooooooooo”s. Stepmother and Half-sister watch with me. Butler paraglides over to supervise the cleanup operation. Apologies, counter-apologies, assurances, orders, carpet sponges, dustpans. Sixty seconds later no evidence remains of the great crisis. “Okay,” I say.

  Half-sister slides her cup away. “Okay what?”

  I address the woman my father chose to marry. “Okay, you win.” She did not expect this. Neither did I. She searches my face for a catch. There is none. “My father—just by never getting in touch himself— made his, uh, position clear a long time ago. I . . . I . . . dunno, I never wanted to believe it. But tell him”—an apricot carnation sits in a glass tear vase—“hello. Hello and goodbye.”

  Stepmother keeps her gaze steady.

  I stand up to go.

  “Did you get that from Grandpapa?” Half-sister has a way of prodding your ribs with words. She nods at the kaiten journal, wrapped in its black cloth. “Because if so, it is the legal property of the Tsukiyamas.”

  I look at this anti-Anju. “No.” If she had asked nicely, I would have handed it over. “This is my lunch box. I have to go to work. It was really nice to meet you both. Thank you for your time.” I take the journal and walk out of Amadeus Tea Room without looking back. Butler summons an elevator and bows—not so ironically that I could complain, but ironically enough to mock me—as the doors close. Who cares? I have the elevator to myself—the Muzak is “Top of the World” by the Carpenters, a tune that makes my teeth throb, but I am too drained to hate anything now. I think about the decision I just took. I am stunned by it. I watch the floor numbers descend. Do I mean it? My father never wants to meet me . . . So my search for him is . . . not valid? Finished? My meaning is canceled? I guess, yes, I do mean it. “First floor” says the elevator. The doors open and a crowd of very busy people surges in. I have to fight my way out before the doors close.

  seven

  Cards

  Sachiko Sera, my third boss in four weeks, was not exaggerating: the Nero’s kitchen is hot as hell and a monkey could do my pizza-by-numbers job. The kitchen is a rat run—it measures five paces by one, with a sort of cage at one end with lockers and chairs where the delivery bikers wait. Sachiko and Tomomi take the orders by telephone or from walk-in customers, and pass the orders through the hatch from the front counter. I dress the crusts in the correct toppings by matching the pizza name to the giant chart that takes up an entire wall, coded with colored icons for the benefit of monkeys who never learned to read. So, for example, in the big circle marked “Chicago Gunfight” are little pictures of tomato, meatballs, sausage, chili, red and yellow peppers, cheese; “Hawaii Honeymoon” is tomato, pineapple, tuna, coconut; “Neromaniac” is pepperoni, sour cream, capers, olives, and jumbo shrimp. Then you have the crust types: thick, crusty, herb, mozzarella-filled. The toppings live in a cave-size fridge—each container lid has a picture of the contents. Once the pizzas are dressed, you slide them into a two-lane gas-fired inferno. Rollers convey the pizzas through its geothermic innards at about ten centimeters per minute, although if the orders are piling up you can reach in with a pair of forceps and give the pizza a premature birth. “Timing is the trick,” says Sachiko, tying back her hair. “Ideally, the pizza lands in its box—tape the order slip to the lid thusly—the same moment the biker lands from his last delivery.” It is sort of fun, and the orders never stop, not even at one or two A.M., so unlike at Ueno lost property or Shooting Star I never have much time to get bored. Our customers include students, card sharks, businessmen working through the night—Shinjuku is a nocturnal jungle. I drink liters of water, sweat liters of water, and never need to piss once. There is an exhaust fan as loud as an engine room and a tinny radio that only picks up one local station trapped in the 1980s. There is a gunk-smattered world map to tantalize us slaves of the inferno with thoughts of all the countries in the world—and their many-tinted women—where we are not free to go. A clock drags the minutes past. Sachiko is how I imagined her on the telephone—loopy, organized, stable. Tomomi is an evil hag who has been at Nero’s since Commodore Perry sailed into old Edo Bay and has no intention of upsetting her cozy life by ever getting promoted. She chats with her friends on the phone, flirts with privileged bikers, selects arts courses she will never actually apply for, and drops heavy hints about the affair she had with the owner of Nero’s x years ago and the damage she could inflict on his marriage if her pleasant equilibrium were ever threatened. Her laugh is a loud, glittery fake. The delivery bikers come and go week by week—mostly they are students—but tonight they are Onizuka and Doi. Onizuka has a lip spike, custard yellow hair, and wears a death’s-head biker’s jacket instead of the Nero’s Pizza uniform. When Sachiko introduces us, he says this: “Last guy before you, he fucked up the orders. Customers gave me shit. Don’t you fuck up the orders.” He comes from Tohoku and still has a northern accent as thick as crude oil—this worries me, in case I mistake a mortal threat for a weather remark. Doi is ancient, over forty, walks with a limp, and has a Jesus-being-crucified expression. Suffering, spaced-out screensaver eyes, not much hair on his head but loads on his chin. “Don’t let Onizuka get you down, man,” he tells me. “The man is mellow. Saw to my motor for free, man. Smoke pot?” When I say no, he shakes his head sadly. “Youth of today, man, you misspend the prime of your life, you’ll repent at your leisure, man. Got friends who know how to party? Premium quality, discreet service.” Tomomi enters the cage—she is a gifted eavesdropper. “Discreet? As discreet as a mile-wide UFO playing the Mission: Impossible music over the Imperial Palace.” At three A.M. Sachiko brings me a mug of the thickest coffee known to chemistry—thick enough to stand pencils in, I mean it—which makes my body forget how tired it is. Onizuka waits in the staff cube at the end of my rat run, but never says another word to me. Twice I smoke a John Player Special outside the storefront. I have a prime view of PanOpticon. Antiaircraft lights blink on and off from dusk until dawn. Very Gotham City. Both times the inferno summons me back before I can finish the cigarette. While I am waiting for a Health Club—asparagus, sour cream, olives, potato wedges, garlic—to emerge from the inferno, Doi leans over the hatch. “You know how hungry I am, Miyake?”

  “How hungry are you, Doi?”

  “I am hungry enough to cut off my thumb and chew it.”

  “Really hungry, then.”

  “Pass me that knife, will you?”

  I make a “Do I have to?” face.

  “Pass me the knife, man, this is a hunger crisis.”

  “Be careful with that knife. Razor sharp.”

  “Why else would I want it, man?” Doi places his left thumb on my chopping board, places the blade over it, and thumps the handle with his right fist. The blade slices clean through the knuckle. Blood spills over the counter—Doi reins in his breath. “There, that wasn’t so bad! He picks up his thumb with his right hand and dangles it in his mouth. Plop. I gargle dry air. Doi munches slowly, deciding if he likes the taste
. “Gristly, man, but not bad.” Doi spits out his thumb bone, sucked shiny and white. I drop whatever it was I was holding. Sachiko appears in the hatch—I point, and glug. “Doi!” scolds Sachiko. “You prima donna! You can’t resist a captive audience, can you? Sorry, Miyake, I should have warned you about Doi’s little hobby: magic school.” Doi mimes a kung-fu retaliatory shuffle. “The Sacred Academy of Illusionists ain’t no ‘hobby,’ chieftainess. One day there’ll be lines outside the Budokan to see me perform.” He waggles his two attached thumbs at me. “You can tell from his eyes, that Shiyake is one cat in sore need of the magic arts.” “Miyake,” corrects Sachiko. “Him, too,” says Doi. I do not know how to respond—I am just relieved that the blood was tomato juice. At five A.M. morning comes in for landing. Sachiko asks me to prepare some mini-salads for the next shift, so I wash some lettuce and cherry tomatoes. The pizza orders thicken again—who eats pizzas for breakfast?—and before I know it Sachiko is back, doing a high-court voice. “Eiji Miyake, by the powers vested in me by Emperor Nero, and in view of your satisfactory behavior, I declare your life sentence suspended for the period of sixteen hours. You will present yourself at this correctional institution at midnight, for a further eight hours’ hard labor.” I frown. “Huh?” Sachiko points at the clock—“Eight o’clock. Surely you have a home to go to?” The front door slides open. Sachiko glances around, and looks back at me with an “aha!” look. “The prisoner has a visitor waiting outside the gates.”

  Ai says anywhere except Jupiter Cafe, so we walk toward Shinjuku to find a breakfast place. Talking is a bit awkward—we have not actually met since the day in Jupiter Cafe, even though we must have spent over twenty-four hours on the telephone last week. “If it was any more humid than this,” I venture, “it would be raining.” Ai tilts her face skyward. “Y’know, it is raining.” She caught a bus back from Niigata yesterday evening, and looks travel-worn. I am sweaty and disheveled. “So how did it go with your father?” Ai hums. “Going back was a futile exercise. I knew it would be . . .” she begins. I make the right noises at the right times, but as usual when people discuss parental problems, I feel as if I am being told about a medical condition in an organ I lack. Still, I am booming with pleasure that Ai came to meet me for breakfast, and I have to work at not looking too happy. We pass a tiny shrine—Ai breaks off to look at the trees, torii gate, straw ropes, and twists of paper. A Jizo statue sits behind an orange, a bottle of Suntory whiskey, and a vase of chrysanthemums. An old man is having a good long pray. I wonder why. I must be an island gossip at heart too. “Are musicians superstitious?” I ask.