Number9dream

by David Mitchell

  “That was supposed to be a Niigata accent?”

  “Uh, maybe.”

  “Pathetic.”

  “I, uh, have some explaining to do. My mother called me from Miyazaki.”

  “I know, I know, Sachiko woke me up to tell me this morning. I had the phone machine on sleep mode. Why didn’t you leave a message?”

  “Us yokels don’t understand these newfangled machines.”

  “Miyake the Brave. I was glad you threw your cigarettes away, by the way.”

  “You saw?”

  “I have eyes everywhere. Have you smoked since?”

  “No.”

  “Good boy. So, where are you now?”

  “Uh . . . being eaten alive by insects in a phone booth outside a truckers’ cafe called Okachan’s.”

  “There must be ten thousand truckers’ cafes called Okachan’s.”

  “This one is between . . . uh, nowhere and nowhere.”

  “Must be in Gifu Prefecture.”

  “Actually, I think you’re right. The last truck driver—Mr. Honda— dropped me off here, after radioing his friend—a man called Monkfish—to ask him to pick me up when he passes by on his way down to Fukuoka. But Okachan just told me Monkfish is going to be held up. Fistfight, hunchback gas station owner, that sort of stuff.”

  “Pray Monkfish wins unconcussed. Poor Miyake. Sounds like you’re stuck in a Nikkatsu trucker film.”

  “Not the fastest way to Miyazaki, but it is the cheapest. I have news.”

  “More news? Is it going to make me botch my toenail varnishing?”

  “For sure.”

  Ai senses I want to be serious. “Okay . . . ready.”

  “Yesterday was . . .” Where do I begin? “The weirdest day of my life. I know, people say that all the time, but it really was. I—” Should I tell her about the organ harvesters? No. Not yet, anyway, not for a long time. “I met him.”

  A short pause. “Who?”

  “My dad.”

  A long pause this time. “I’ll call you back. Give me the number.”

  “Eiji!” Bamboo shadows sway over the tatami mats and faded fusuma screens. I get up and walk through dental-floss cobwebs to the window. My grandmother must have moved to Ueno Park. Everyone has gone home. There is Anju, kneeling before an ancient, shipwrecked cedar. Yes, I scored the winning goal, and she is alive again, but her kite of sunlight is tangled in the most inaccessible branches. It shines dark gold. My sister is in despair. “Set it free, bro, please!” Delighted as I am to see her again, this puzzles me. “You’re better than me at climbing, sis, why don’t you set it free yourself?” Anju airs her recently acquired sigh. “Diabetes, remember?” Her legs are half bioborg—syringes, drips, instruments of torture. “Set it free for me, Eiji.” So I begin climbing. Cedars have reptilian bark. Sheep bleat in a far valley. Socks, dirty beyond hope. Dark winds bay, and crows come looking for beautiful necks to plunge their spiky beaks into. I am afraid the sunlit kite will rip and shred before I can get to it. Where in this sea of leaves can it be? I find my father on the top branch, trying to unknot his shoelaces. “You didn’t fool me, you know. I knew who you were all along.” This no longer matters to me, and I ask him if he has seen a kite. He gives his aching digits a rest. “Chasing kites is more important than looking after your own sister?” Suddenly I remember I have left Anju alone—how many days has it been?—in our grandmother’s house without food or water. Who will open her canned dinner? The house has decayed since my last visit. The lockless knob twirls uselessly. When I knock, the doorframe falls in. Cat shadows slide behind rafters. Inside my guitar case I hear Anju scrabbling—she cannot open the escape hatches, she is running out of air—I fumble, my fingernails come off, but the clasps are so rusted up—

  “Then I woke up,” cackled Monkfish, “and it was all a dream.” Croaky laughter, one, two, three. I had meant to ask him about his nickname, but one look at his face and there is really no need. His eyes have migrated to either temple and he has the rubberiest lips I have ever seen on anyone, ever. I mean it. I make a groaning, lip-smacking postsnooze noise, and mumble, “Weird dream.” We are traveling down the Meishin Expressway through a hyperspace of rain. A road sign flies by at light speed—OTSU EXIT 9 KM. The dashboard clock glows 21:09. “What was it about?” I try to reassemble the jigsaw, but the pieces have blown away in the last few seconds. “Dunno . . . about my guitar, and my sister.” Monkfish wipes his brow on his mesh undershirt. His rig is more modern than Ogre’s, but everything is more ingrained with dirt. Uncle Tarmac says vehicles always resemble their owners, and likes advising my female cousins to judge whether boyfriends will make decent husbands or not by observing how they treat or mistreat their cars. “Dreams are funny things,” says Monkfish. “I suppose Honda told you his sleepwalking story? Yeah? Knew it. He tells everyone. Load of bullshit. Just a spooky excuse for never getting laid. If you were a lady—just if, right, just if, I’m not saying nothing else, right—just if you were a lady, would you lay Honda? Pa! ’Course not. Dreams. I read up on dreams. Tell you something. Nobody knows what dreams are. Not really. Scientists say they do, but they don’t. Gave a lift to a student last month. Psychology. Interesting guy. Not stuck up or anything. He said dreams are made by your hippocampus. Hippocampus, it was. It shuffles through memories in the left side of your brain. Left or right? Couldn’t rightly say. Let’s say left. So you have all these random memories. Then the right side of your brain dreams up a story to link all these memories together. Abracadabra. That’s your dream.” Monkfish does not expect me to reply—I guess he would be having this same conversation with his dangling Zizzi Hikaru doll if I were not here. KYOTO EXIT 18 KM. “I say to this student guy, I say: ‘Same as a long-distance trucking job. Different customers. You got your locations. You plan your route.’ He says, ‘Yeah. Or scriptwriting.’ ” A hairy fly strolls across the inside of the windshield. I guess Monkfish is keeping the hairy fly awake too. “Ever tell you my dream story? No? Want to hear it? Tell you what, I’ll tell it to you now. No time like the present. We all have a dream story. You heard Honda’s. This is mine. I was your age. Head over heels in love. Or mentally ill. Same difference. Whatever. Girl by the name of Kirara. She was one of those pampered daughters-in-a-box. We went to the same swimming club. Quite a body I had in those days. Shaved my pecs. Not like now. Gone to pot, now, I have. Whatever. Kirara’s daddy was the mastermind of some right-wing group. What was it?” Monkfish frowns, trying to remember. “The Emperor Party?” I suggest. “Nope, I remember now. The Ministry of Education. Which meant Kirara was way, way above the likes of me. My old man was a bricklayer. Died when I was fifteen. Not soon enough, the miserable old alkie. That’s another story. This is a few years later. I was at junior college, doing auto mechanics. Kirara was at husband-netting college, doing languages and cooking. I was obsessed with Kirara. I copied out a love poem from a library book, and gave it to her one day after swimming. Swimming clubs are great. You get to see the goods before you buy. I digress. I started walking Kirara home. There was an underpass. I got a kiss! Well, hey! I have a goaty appeal to the fairer sex. Often remarked upon, that is. Kirara fell for my charms too. I borrowed my brother’s car. We counted the stars. I counted her birth-marks. Never knew bliss like that. Never will again. Whatever. But then her daddy got wind of me. Checked me out, realized from my address that I was not prince material for his princess. Told Kirara to drop me. Kirara compared my credit rating to her daddy’s and dropped me like a scabby corpse. Stopped going to the swimming club. Went to a million-yen-a-year health club pool instead. Now, for Kirara, I was just a dish of peanuts to nibble with her entree. For me, Kirara was the entire menu at the Viking feast of love. I was gutted. Distraught. Insane. I sent her more poems. Kirara ignored them. I stopped eating. Drinking. Sleeping. I sent her flowers. Never heard a thing. Decided to prove my devotion by killing myself. Stupid? Yes. Young? Same difference. My mom’s brother had—still has, far as I know—a cabin in the Sea of Trees. Know t
hat? Not a Tokyo kid, are you? I can tell by the funny way you speak. The Sea of Trees is at the foot of Mount Fuji. Where all the suicides go. Anyway. I wrote a goodbye letter to Kirara, saying where I had hanged myself, and why. ‘That’ll show her I loved her!’ I thought. Posted the letter. Registered. Took the first train out the next morning. Imagined the tragedy of it all. Got off at a deserted country station and started hiking. The weather was moody and changeable, but not me. I was never so sure. I was going to die for Kirara. Found my uncle’s cabin. Nobody around. Nice quiet glade. Guess what I see next, up in the air?”

  “Uh . . . a bird?”

  “No. I saw Kirara.”

  “What?”

  “Kirara. My Kirara. With a noose around her neck. She had gotten the same idea. Couldn’t be with me, so she killed herself. To prove her love. For me. Give her old man the finger. Did I think, ‘Oh, my darling, let us be united in death!’? Did I hell. Not with her feet doing the clockwise-anticlockwise biz. Bloated neck. Shitted thighs. Crows and maggots already at work. I was terrified. I thought I had a moral duty to hang myself, too, only I didn’t want to anymore. Not after I’d seen what it looked like. Death is never beautiful. Never. Lots of other things, but beautiful? Never.”

  “What did you do next?”

  “Woke up groaning. I was still on the early train out to Mount Fuji. Talk about an eye opener! Got off at the next station. Caught the first train going back to Tokyo. Got home. Mom and her boyfriend were still in bed. Brother came in with the dog, handed me a letter. My suicide note. Kirara had written ‘Return to Sender’ on it. That was that.” Monkfish changes lanes to let another rig pass. The driver waves across, and Monkfish grins. “Kajiwaki! An oily dick if I ever knew one! Crafty sod still owes me fifty thousand yen.” The speedometer says 100 kph, but I get the illusion we are standing still. The rig pulls forward and we enter a tunnel of echoes and air. “Saw Kirara one more time. Years later. Swear it was her. I was on my honeymoon. Narita Airport. Saw her buying perfume in duty-free. Fat-cat husband. Gold jangly things. Brat in a stroller. Guess what flashed through my head? Go on. Guess.”

  “You were glad you hadn’t hanged yourself?”

  “No. Go on. Guess again.”

  “Uh . . . jealousy?”

  “Nothing. Nothing flashed through my head. I was ready to hang myself for her, but I never even loved her. Only thought I did. But that ‘thought I loved her’ was stronger than my grip on life. Took a dream to scare me back to my senses. At Narita Airport that time, I said nothing. I just watched her. She signed for the designer crap she’d bought. Husband’s gold card, no doubt. Then she walked off to her departure lounge to get on her plane. My wife, she asked if something was wrong. ‘No,’ I told her. ‘Everything is all right, love.’ We had a lovely honeymoon. Dreams tell you stuff. You should listen to them.”

  More tunnels, valley bridges, service stations. The truck judders down the Chugoku Expressway toward a still-distant dawn. Monkfish lets me sleep. He has a tape of opera highlights that plays nonstop. He said he hates classical music, but opera keeps him awake. Grime and sweat have glued my butt to the inside of my jeans. I think of how many weeks this journey would have taken wandering poets in earlier centuries. I can hang on two or three more hours. Half-rain in quarter-light. Shapes get their names back, and names their shapes. An island in an estuary, more an ambitious sandbank. Herons fishing on flood defenses. Lavender bulldozers leveling hills that are in the way. Bricked-up tunnels. A beer-crate depot. I imagine my mother waking up, looking at the ceiling. Is she thinking, “I wonder where Eiji is now? I wonder what time he’ll get here?” I still do not completely understand how this visit is happening, how I just invited myself like I did. I was still angry with her when I asked if we could meet, so why did I say it? Sort of rude of me to corner her like that. But when she gave me her address, she seemed genuinely happy. It was in her voice. That, and I think she was nervous I was playing a sick trick on her. But this is no trick. As soon as I had invited myself, I felt it was right. I was happy she was happy. I cannot remember ever making her happy. OKAYAMA EXIT. Smoke unravels from factory stacks. Monkfish sings “tra-la-la”s to an aria the same way Yoko Ono does on “I’m Your Angel” on the Double Fantasy album. Vehicles rule the highways, not their drivers, I decide. Trucks change drivers as easily as men dump hostess girls. Those visits my mom used to make to Yakushima were excruciating. Between the time she left us with Wheatie and the day Anju drowned she would turn up about once a year, usually for a single afternoon. FUKUYAMA EXIT. Flame licks the corner of a mist field. Land cleared of trees in a week, asphalted in an afternoon, and forgotten ever since some committee of Mr. Aoyamas somewhere was disbanded. Weeds and saplings grow back. Pollen and spores are tougher than you think, given rain and years. Lines and wires sag and tauten from pole to pole. Wheatie refused to see her after a certain point—that must have been after the ring-tempura incident. Our grandmother brews bitterness for personal consumption later. We are good at sulking, us Miyakes, this much I do know: we could sulk for Japan. Sulking, and its deadlier mature equivalents. Anju and I would be taken to Uncle Pachinko’s old house in Miyanoura—the main port—the night before. We wore our school uniforms, even though it was Sunday. Aunt Pachinko took us to the barber’s the night before. Everybody knew our mother was coming, of course. She took a taxi from the wharf, even though it would have taken her less than ten minutes to walk. She would be shown into the best room, and return my aunt’s small talk with a savage attention to pointless detail. HIROSHIMA EXIT. Monkfish switches off the wipers. A big sign on a mountainside advertises a bank that crashed many months ago. I remember the president of the company, weeping in front of the TV cameras as a penance. It made me sick to see the old fart do that: “Forget the bonuses I snuck away abroad, everyone, look at how real my tears are!” I am sure the tears were genuine: no more bonuses. Maybe my grandfather was right. Maybe the old and young are different species, and that is how the world marches on, for better or worse, who knows? But always marching on. Mountains march back years to the Sea of Japan. The view reminds me of the map/progress screen between stages of a kung-fu video game. Monkfish’s rig passes through uncolored-in suburbs of rerun cities. Uncle Tarmac told me years, and beers, later that Uncle Pachinko had forced our mother to visit, as a condition of the allowance he sent her. I guess he meant well, but it was wrong to bribe or force people to be together, even—especially—a mother. She asked us questions. Anju and I answered them. Always the same ones, ducking hazardous topics: What subjects do you like best? Really? How about the subjects you like least? I see. Soccer? Nice. Any other hobbies? An interview with an anonymous orphanage inspector would have had more glimmers of fondness. Packing me off to an orphanage would have brought such shame on the family, though, nobody ever discussed it. TOKUYAMA EXIT. This is a familiar place-name. This is where Subaru Tsukiyama, my great-uncle, spent his final weeks in Japan. He could not begin to recognize Yamaguchi Prefecture today. A golf range has been hacked out of a mountain, shrouded in green netting. Early rising microgolfers swing, and tiny white pellets inscribe arcs. I reremember the Mailman virus for some reason, and resolve to reforget it, but I think about it for a while. Police officers e-mail bureaucrats, bureaucrats e-mail journalists, journalists e-mail politicians. Most results of most actions are invisible to the prime doer. Calm down, Miyake, I tell myself, but I cannot calm down. I say it again in Ai’s voice, “Calm down, Miyake,” and this time it works. A dirty rag of bleached blue sky—the rainy-day forecast is forgotten, the instantaneous way a distracted child forgets she was crying. Anju would have been a lot chattier with Mom, I think, if I had not shot her such fierce looks for being nice. I throttled moments that could have turned into memories to keep Mom warm, even now. That was wrong of me. Our mother chain-smoked. Every image I have of those memories is dim with cigarette smoke. We never asked questions. Aunt Pachinko served those gaudy sweets that old people imagine kids to like, and stoked the stalling conversation
with recipe discussions, and our mother played along to kill more minutes as humanely as possible. Even island gossip was shaky ground—it reminded everyone that our mother had once lived on Yakushima, and, by extension, should be there now. All we knew about Mom’s life, we overheard later. At night, behind partitions, through thin walls. Finally, our mother would take the early evening jetfoil back to Kagoshima, and everyone would breathe a sigh of relief. She didn’t kiss us. It would have been too . . . too too. YAMAGUCHI EXIT. A tree—I wish I knew tree names—seems to dance by itself on a ridge. The mountains level out into a rockier tableland. Our mother did not come to Yakushima for Anju’s funeral. Far more than dumping us there in the first place, that entered her name on the Island Book of Infamy. Gossip, the island blood-sport, reported that my mother had flown to Guam for “work” the day before Anju went missing, and had left no contact number. Other, even less sympathetic stories did the rounds. I don’t know when or how she found out. Uncle Tarmac, I assume. I don’t think I cared by then. The last time we met I was fourteen or fifteen. This time we were in Kagoshima, at Uncle Yen’s. My mother was too ashamed, or wise, to set foot on Yakushima again. She wore dark glasses. Her hair was short and her jewelry not flashy but obviously expensive. I shambled into the room, Homo adolescentus. “You’ve grown, Eiji,” was her crisp opening gambit. “You haven’t,” was my witty reply. “Yes,” said Uncle Yen hurriedly, “Eiji’s rocketed up over the last six months. Like a giraffe! And his music teacher says he’s a guitar natural! Such a pity you didn’t bring your guitar, Eiji. You could have played a tune or something for your mother.” The rocketing giraffe scowled at the bridge of his visitor’s glasses. “ ‘Mother’? I don’t have one of those, Uncle. She died before Anju died. I do have a father, somewhere, but no mother. You know that, Uncle.”