Number9dream

by David Mitchell

  “My stepdad runs a trucking business. I called him. Said one of his drivers’ll get you to Osaka, then fix you up with a rig for Fukuoka.” Onizuka never jokes, and he hasn’t started now. He hands me a slip of paper. “Map, address, phone number. Be there by noon.”

  I’m too surprised—too grateful—to say anything.

  Onizuka drives off even before I properly thank him.

  “You want to visit your mother in Miyazaki, but you can’t be sure when you’ll be back,” Buntaro announces before I can utter a word. My landlord folds his Okinawa Property Weekly. “As if I could say no, kid! My own mother would murder me. Yes, my wife will take care of the cat. Like old times. Your rent is covered until the end of October, and your deposit can take care of November, unless you need me to return it, in which case I’ll pay it into your bank account, box your stuff, and put it into storage. Call me from Miyazaki when you know what your plans are. Shooting Star isn’t going anywhere. My wife has made you a lunch box.” He rubs his gold tooth, and I realize that this tooth is Buntaro’s lucky amulet. “Go on then, kid,” he says. “Pack!” My capsule is exactly as I left it twenty hours ago. Socks, yogurt cartons, scrunched pillows. Weird. Cat is out, but Cockroach waits on the window ledge. I get the death spray, creep up on it, and—Cockroach is motionless. Daydreaming? I prod him with a sheet of junk mail. Cockroach is a dead husk.

  Onizuka TransJapan Ltd. is near Takashimadaira Station out on the Toei Mita Line. Through the gates is a walled yard with a loading bay and three medium-size trucks. It is still eleven. I walk back toward the station, where a giant electronics store is opening. Inside is cold as predawn February. Two identical receptionists at the help desk chime “Good morning” in such angelic harmony that I am unsure which to speak to. “Uh, on which floor are the computers, please?”

  “Basement, third level,” answers Miss Left.

  “Mind if I leave my backpack with you?”

  “No problem at all, sir,” answers Miss Right.

  I float on the down escalator. Souls of shoppers float with me. Everywhere is draped with tinselly maple leaves to proclaim the coming of autumn. Miniature TVs, spherical stereos, intelligent microwaves, digital cameras, cell phones, ionizing freezers, dehumidifying heaters, hot rugs, massage chairs, heated dish racks, 256-color printers. The escalator announcement warns me not to stand on the yellow lines, to assist children and old people at all times, and to enjoy quality shopping. Goods sit on their shelves, watching us browse—anglers on a riverbank. Not a single window. In the computer section I am accosted by a tame Suga in a clip-on tie. His skin has a shrink-wrap gleam. I wonder if they have Vitamin B–emitting fluorescent lights down here to compensate for the total absence of natural light. “You look like a man with his mind made up, sir!”

  “Yes, I’m thinking of upgrading one of my PCs.”

  “Well, I promise we can spoil you for choice. What’s your budget?”

  “Uh . . . I’ve got a research grant to burn through. My modem’s from the twenty-fifth century, now all I need is the hardware to match it.”

  “No problem. What’s your modem?”

  I overdid it. “Uh . . . a very fast one indeed.”

  “Yes, sir, but which make?”

  “Uh, a Suga modem. Saratoga Instruments.”

  He bluffs. “Verrrrrrrrry nice machines. Which university are you at?”

  “Uh, Waseda.”

  I have used a magic word. His face shines; he produces his card and bows low enough to lick my shoes. “Fujimoto—at your service. We do operate an academic discount scheme. Well. I’ll let you play—you just call me if I can assist.”

  “I will.”

  I pretend to read the specifications on a few machines, gather a sheaf of brochures, and choose a machine to sit at. I click onto the internet, and find the e-mail address of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police. I write it on my hand. I glance around, hoping no hidden video cameras are watching. I load Suga’s disk. A hearty welcome to the Mailman virus! Suga made his virus more user-friendly than he ever made himself. Do you want to enter your message to the masses via keyboard or load it from disk? I press D. Okay. Load your disk and hit ENTER. I eject the Suga disk, insert the Kozue Yamaya one, and press ENTER. The virus program takes over. The drive buzzes and blinks. Okay. Now enter address of lucky recipient. I type in the police address from my hand. Hit ENTER to lick stamp! The cursor pulses, my finger hovers—the consequences of pressing this key swarm—click. Too late to change my mind now. Mailman is delivering your letter to primary addressee . . . Flash. Mailman is forwarding your letter to second-generation addressees . . . Short pause. Third-generation addressees . . . Long pause. Fourth-generation . . . (Yawn.) The screen clears. Mailman will continue to generation 99. The message scrolls offscreen. Log off now/leave the crime scene/run like hell. Beep. Bye-bye. Bye-bye, Suga. I eject the Yamaya disk and put it into my shirt pocket. I am a plague spreader. Only this plague might cure something. “Hey! You! Yes, you!” An older salesman strides over. I think about running, but then every security guard would assume I was a shoplifter. The salesman blocks off my escape route, anyway. “I saw you! What did you just put into our computer?” I grope for a plausible lie but fail completely. “Well, uh, a dead woman placed me under a moral obligation to, uh, release information about a nameless yakuza network that steals people, cuts them up, and, uh, sells the body parts to the highest bidders. I was afraid that if I used a computer in a private apartment or somewhere, they might be able to trace it back, so using the computer here seemed to be the safest way. I hope that was okay? It didn’t do any harm to your equipment.” The salesman thinks this over, wondering where I am on the basically harmless to moon-barking spectrum of lunacy. Finally his face softens. “In that case, sir, I’m very glad we could help. Perhaps you could let me know beforehand, next time, or even use a terminal at the public library.” I promise to do so, and we thank each other, bow deeply, and I let the escalator whisk me away. I retrieve my backpack from the help desk and walk out into the warm traffic fumes. I drop the two disks down the nearest storm drain. From a phone booth near Onizuka TransJapan I try calling Ai at home, then on her cell phone, but nothing doing. Quarter to noon. I had better find Onizuka’s stepfather and introduce myself. I am so tired nothing seems real.

  eight

  The Language of Mountains Is Rain

  Balletjellyfish waft down from the roof of the shopping mall. Watch their faerie lights for too long and you lose yourself. They form a clear, gelatinous sludge that slurps shin-high. Walking is wading and progress is slow, but I have to push deeper into enemy territory by nightfall. Claude Debussy hisses from a doorway, twirling his pedophile mustache: “The enemy have learned their lessons from the Battle of Midway. They have radar. They know you are here.” Genji the barber asks me to vote for him, but he is hardly a viable candidate, dripping in jellyfish juice. Shooting Star was abandoned years ago. Tatty “Forthcoming Releases” posters hang from rusty pins. I push the door open. “Buntaro? Machiko?” Inside it looks as if an earthquake hit. “It did.” The young man inside sitting behind the counter smiles. “I’m only looking after the place for a few days.” I feel a surge of unease— “Machiko—is she okay? The baby, I mean?” The young man smiles as if I am making a joke several degrees of wit higher than I am, in fact, capable of. I realize I am talking to Kodai. So I pretend I was joking, too, and mumble something about how fast he has grown. “Dad’s scared of aftershocks,” Kodai explains. “Well. I expect you’ll be wanting to get upstairs. They are waiting.” I remember I am late, but cannot quite recall what I am late for. I climb up to my capsule. Weird, I never noticed how my capsule is in fact my old school gym where we played five-a-side soccer when it rained. Debris is everywhere. Here is the goal. My team and the enemy line the box, waiting for me to take the crucial penalty shot. Nakamori and Nakamura are here. I know that if I score this goal all the damage will be undone. The booming bell will draw its chime back into itself and the god of thunder
will sleep on. Anju will swim to the whalestone and back again, and be at Wheatie’s when I return with my man-of-the-match trophy. I see the goalkeeper making a date with a cheerleader. I run up to the ball and boot it. The ball scuds and wobbles toward the goal line, slowing down. Desperately, I follow it—“No second kick allowed!” warns my stepmother—and crawl on my hands and knees, blowing the ball over the gravel. The track winds up the valley through the Neck. My right knee is shaking. “What are you d-doing, child?” asks Goatwriter. “You scored m-miles ago. D-d-didn’t you notice?” I did? When? Is this hope I am feeling?

  An ogre shakes my right knee with his left hand. His right grips the steering wheel. “Hey! You’re dreaming, son. Mumbling, you were.” I take in my new surroundings. The cab of a truck, festooned with amulets from shrines the length and breadth of Japan. Traffic crawls into the gray middle distance. The driver is a sad ogre. His pool-ball eyes look in different directions and his face ends at his lower lip. “Mumbling, you were,” he repeats, “but what you were mumbling about, I got no idea.” In a microsecond all the information that constitutes Eiji Miyake and the last twenty-four hours—and the last seven weeks—downloads. I think the ogre said his name was Honda, but it would be rude to check now. I wonder how I can trick him into repeating his name. Fine rain flies, and every ten seconds or so the wipers drag themselves across the big windshield. I feel a weird lightness. What was I dreaming about? I met Kodai, already grown—I must tell Buntaro and Machiko how cool he looked—but what else was there? I met my father this morning. So. The postfather epoch of Eiji Miyake’s life is under way. I feel both anti-climactic loss and a sort of triumph. And now, in a perfect reversal of my semilaid plans, I am headed to Miyazaki, back to Kyushu to see my mother. At about five kilometers per hour in four lanes of traffic. So how come I feel so hopeful? The dashboard clock blinks 16:47. I have been asleep for over three hours. I feel gritty and stretched, but have paid back a chunk of my overdraft at the Miyake Bank of Sleep. I locate some gum in my shirt pocket—BlackBlack gum, my favorite since I quit smoking—and offer Ogre a stick. “No, son. Never touch the stuff.” I unglue the paper from the gum and start chewing. I am forgetting something else, something important. The Mailman virus! If Suga’s boast was truthful, Kozue Yamaya’s file has already spread to every contact on every address book of every contact on every address book . . . et cetera . . . for ninety-nine generations. That adds up to . . . more computers than there are in Japan, I guess. I imagine the program hurtling outward, the same way shock waves expand from the epicenter of a detonated atom bomb. Will antivirus software stop it? No idea. Suga would have made his Mailman as dogged and devious as himself, I guess. Will it take nanoseconds or hours to run through all ninety-nine generations? No idea, again. But any high-level cover-up should now be impossible, surely. Too many people will find it in their inboxes tomorrow. I guess. Anyway, it is all out of my hands. “Going nowhere at the speed of light, we are,” murmurs Ogre. “Traffic news said a rig overturned, ’bout ten clicks downstream from here. Milk rig, it was. Driver taken to the hospital, ’nother driver suffering shock, but nobody killed. Could’ve been worse.” Rented-by-the-square-meter Tokyo has turned into zones of rice fields, houses, industrial units. The landscape itself looks like its map. “On a fine day,” says Ogre, “you can see Mount Fuji over there, you can.” Rain stars go nova on the glass, and Ogre speeds up the wipers. They squelch. The radio burbles away. Tires hiss on the wet Tomei Expressway. A minibus of kids from a school for the disabled passes on the inside. A pair in the back row wave. Ogre flashes his headlights and the whole bus goes wild. I wave too. I still cannot say why I feel so at peace with the world. I am suspicious of this feeling—when it leaves you feel hollower than before. Ogre is chuckling. “Who knows what makes kids tick? Not me. Alien species, kids are nowadays, if you ask me.” Row upon row of polyethylene hothouses troop past. I feel I should stoke the conversation to pay for my fare, but when I begin a sentence a yawn splits my face in two. So I ask Ogre if he has any kids himself.

  Ogre takes his time answering. “Nah, not me. No kids. Me and marriage, marriage and me, it was not to be. Loads of truckers have wives in every port. At least, according to truckers.” I can tell Ogre has a tale, but it would be rude to probe. “Cigarette?” He offers me a box of Cabins, and I get as far as taking one out before I remember. “Sorry, I promised a friend I would give it up.” I light Ogre’s, and try to smoke my craving instead of its object. “Important things to keep, promises,” mutters Ogre. “If a man keeps his promises or not, that is what that man is worth. You with me?” I nod. Traffic nudges, stops and starts. Ogre inhales, rests his elbows on the big-as-a-hoop steering wheel, and inhales. “I was your age too, once, believe it or not, I was. Got a job at Showa-Shell driving their gianormous oil tankers. How gianormous? So gianormous that the freight division had its own one-month training program, it did. Those babies are not your regular boxes-on-wheels, get the picture? So me and twelve other trainees, we stayed in dorms outside Yamagata. Ex-barracks, they were. Bleak spot, even in March, it was. Sleet and frost and icicles, there was. One long corridor, we were put in, twelve guys, with a partition for a bit of privacy.” Ogre taps ash into the tray. I pry a minute dagger of crusted sleep from the corner of my eye. “Now, I never sleepwalked in my life. Not never, I didn’t. But on my third night in Yamagata, I started. Not just walking, neither. I did stuff. Stuff tied in with what I was dreaming about, you with me? So, say I dream a dream about walking ’round Kure—my hometown, is Kure— then I sleepwalk up and down the corridor saying, ‘Afternoon. Nice spot of weather we’re having,’ to all the other trainees in their beds. Or say I dream of being Picasso or someone: in the morning we wake up and find I’ve drawn stuff on the mirrors with toothpaste and stuff. At first, I thought they were winding me up, the other trainees, I mean. But they weren’t. It was me who was doing it, all right. They took a picture to prove it. Spooky picture, that was, I can tell you. By the third night, it was a bit of a laugh. I cleaned up my own mess. It was, ‘Well, what’s Honda going to get up to tonight?’ You with me? After a week we were used to it, we were. They never woke me up. Everyone knows you never wake up a sleepwalker, not never, you don’t.” We sidle past the minibus of kids again. They press their faces against the glass and do chimpanzees. I wave again, but I think of submariners dying, and Ogre Honda does not notice them this time. The radio whips and spikes. Ogre tries to retune it, but gives up and switches it off. “On the ninth night, I remember, I was dreaming of strolling around a shady market in China. Hot day, it was, a hot noon. Next moment, I find myself pinned to the ground, four guys kneeling on my arms, grappling with my fingers. I’m not a small man, I’m not, and I wallop my attacker with my right fist. Well, lucky thing I missed, it was. I was holding a cleaver. “Honda!” they shouted. “Honda!” Stolen the cleaver from the canteen in my sleep, I had. One of those lethal fuck-off blades. Type that butchers chop up frozen cows with, it was.” The traffic slows further as four lanes merge into two. Ambulance lights pulse in the soggy dusk. A silver container truck lies on one side. Its cabin is crushed. Cones, and traffic controllers with glowing batons and reflective vests. Two firemen are hosing the road. Ogre strokes an amulet from Ise. “Rock solid, you believe the world is, see? Then you open your eyes and find it’s all melted away, it has.” The truck—or rig, as I am learning to call it—squeezes through the traffic cones, and finally we speed up. Ogre is looking for something—I wonder if the story is over. “Light me another cigarette, son? Thanks. My dream. That night. Baking hot day in China, it was, like I said. In the market I came to the watermelon stalls. Row of them. Big, green, juicy, chilled watermelons, they had. My mom whispers in my ear: ‘Watch out for the Chinamen, they’ll try to sell you rotten fruit, the rogues!’And she puts the cleaver in my hand, she did. I walked from fruit to fruit, tapping each watermelon with the edge of my blade, I did, judging if it was ripe or rotten by the feel of the blade. First decent fruit I got to, I would—
wham!—whack it in half, eat it up, there and then, I would.” Ogre climbs through the gears. “That’s what woke the trainees up, me tapping their heads. Medication stops the sleepwalking, and the dreaming. I take a pill in the morning to keep me awake until I take a pill at night to knock me out. Out cold, I am, when I get to sleep. But to stay in the union I have to have it on my license. Them big rigs were out. A wife? Kids? Too afraid of what I might do if I dream of wringing out washing, or swatting cockroaches, or shelling peanuts. Not a small man, see?” Ogre inhales all the life from his cigarette in one go. “Just be careful what you dream, son, see? Be very careful.”

  “Medical researchers call it the Ai Imajo Effect.” Her voice is clear as a bell. She could be in the next room. “The brightest minds in psychology have given this strange enigma the best research years of their lives, but mainstream science is still baffled. Why, oh why, whenever I fix a meal for a man, does he jump on the first truck out of Tokyo?”

  I was not expecting humor. “I did try calling this morning.”

  “It would be useful to blame my mood swings on my old pal diabetes, but to be fair I have to blame my mood swings on my old pal me. Sorry for being such a bitch last time.”

  “No way, Ai, I was completely—”

  “Shut up. It was my fault.”

  “Shut up yourself. It was my fault.”

  “You will hear my apology, Miyake, or our blossoming friendship is off.”

  “But—”

  “Shut—”

  “But—”

  “Up!”

  “Look—”

  “Silence! Shut up! Okay?”

  She is scary sometimes, even when she is being funny. “Okay.”

  “So I’m sorry for mouthing off about you and your mother, okay?”

  “Okay, okay.”

  Pause. “So you’re saying it was all my fault now, are you, you belligerent Yakushima yokel?” I have never heard her do a Kagoshima accent before. She does it with uncanny talent, the same way she does most things. I retaliate, feebly: “Us Niigata peasant farmers have no idea how to behave in polite society, see.”