第 17 页

She shuts down, closes the laptop, unhooks the phone, and repacks everything. The smoke is getting to her. She looks around. Every man there has obviously been staring, but immediately looks down or away.

She takes a last sip of sweet iced tea and swings down off the stool, Velcroing the Luggage Label back across her shoulder, picking up the Parco bag, and hitting the stairs to the street.

SOUL -delay plays tricks with subjective time, expanding or telescoping it at seeming random. That big beauty brain session in Shibuya, all that making her fanny fabulous, and the shopping in Parco after it, had seemed to take the full five hours it had taken, but the rest, drifting from one personal landmark to the next, by cab and on foot, seem now, in the Hello Kitty section of Kiddyland, to have collapsed into a single moment of undifferentiated Japanese Stuff.

And why, she wonders, gazing blankly at more Hello Kitty regalia than seems possible, do Japanese franchises like Hello Kitty not trigger interior landslide, panic attack, the need to invoke the duck in the face?

She doesn’t know. It just doesn’t. No more than does Kogepan, the clueless-looking homunculus, whose name, she vaguely recalls, means “burnt toast.” The Kogepan goods are arrayed beyond Hello Kitty, a franchise that has never quite found Hello Kitty’s global legs. One can buy Kogepan purses, fridge magnets, pens, lighters, hair brushes, staplers, pencil boxes, knapsacks, watches, figurines. Beyond Kogepan lies the franchise of that depressive-looking boneless panda and her cubs. And none of this stuff, purest no-content marketing, triggers Cayce in the least.

But something is making a strange and annoying sound, even above the low-level electronic uproar of Kiddyland, and eventually she realizes that it’s her phone.

“Hello?”

“Cayce? Parkaboy.” He sounds quite unlike he “sounds” on the screen, whatever that means. Older? Different.

“How are you?”

“Still awake,” he says.

“What time is it there?”

“What day, you mean,” he corrects her. “I’d rather not tell you. I might start to cry. But never mind. You’re on. He wants to meet you in a bar in Roppongi. I think it’s a bar. Says there’s no name in English, just red lanterns.”

“A nomiya.”

“This guy’s got me feeling like I live there, and I’m tired of it already. Darryl and I, we’re like those Mars Rover jockeys: virtual jet lag. Tokyo time and we’re trying to hold down paying jobs in two different time zones back here. So Taki’s sent Keiko a map, right? And I’ve sent it to you, and he says six thirty.”

“Will I recognize him?”

“What we’ve seen of him, he’s not Ryuichi Sakamoto. Mind you, that’s not what Keiko thinks. She’s practically told him she’ll fork over the booty as soon as she gets home.”

She winces. This aspect of what she’s up to here makes her extremely uncomfortable.

“But he’ll give me the number?”

“I think so. If he doesn’t, no pic of Keiko.”

“You, I mean she, told him that?” She likes this part of it even less.

“No, of course not. That’s a love-offering, something to hold him till she gets the booty back to Tokyo. But you’ve got to get that number. Make it clear.”

“How?”

“Play it by ear.”

“Thanks.”

“You want to get to the bottom of this little footage thing, don’t you?”

“You’re implacable.”

“So are you. It’s why we get along. I’m going to eat this whole bag of chocolate-covered espresso beans now, and sit here grinding my teeth flat until I hear from you.”

He hangs up.

She stares back at all those eyes: Hello Kitty and Kogepan and the boneless pandas.

17.

MAKING MAYHEM

Walking up Roppongi Dori from the ANA Hotel, where she’s had the cab drop her, into the shadow of the multi-tiered expressway that looks like the oldest thing in town. Tarkovsky, someone had once told her, had filmed parts of Solaris here, using the expressway as found Future City.

Now it’s been Blade Runnered by half a century of use and pollution, edges of concrete worn porous as coral. Dusk comes early, under here, and she spies signs of homeless encampment: plastic-wrapped blankets tucked back into an uncharacteristically littered scrim of struggling municipal shrubs. Vehicles blast past, overhead, a constant drumming of displaced air, particulates sifting invisibly.

Roppongi she remembers as not so nice a place, one of those inter-zones, a border town of sorts, epicenter of the Bubble’s cross-cultural sex trade. She’d gone here with crowds, to bars that were hot then but now likely weren’t, but always there’d been an edge of some meanness she hadn’t noticed elsewhere in town.

She pauses, aware of the plastic handle of the Parco bag. It’s been rubbing against her palm for hours. It feels wrong, for a meeting. Nothing in it but third-best skirt, tights, shrunken black Fruit. She slides it between two ragged bushes bonsai’d by the expressway’s shadow, leaving it there, and walks on.

Out of the shadow and up the hill, into actual evening and Roppongi proper. Checking the napkin map copied earlier from laptop screen. Parkaboy had forwarded Taki’s segment of a Tokyo map. X marks the spot. One of the little streets behind the main drag. She remembers these as being either glossy or shabby, depending on the business done there.

Shabby, it turns out, after a twenty-minute wander, orienting to the napkin, and at one point spotting Henry Africa’s in the distance, that ex-pat bar she remembers, though that’s not where she’s heading.

Where she’s heading, she now sees, scoping it sidewise as she reconnoiters past, is one of those apparently nameless little red-lantern pub-analogs they have here, places where tourists generally don’t drink. Set into ground-floor walls in back lanes like this one. Their bare-bones decor or lack of it reminding her of a certain kind of functionally alcoholic corner lounge in lower Manhattan, now nearing extinction as the city’s ley lines shifted further still, initially in response to a decade’s Disneyfication and now to a deeper whammy.

She glimpses, past a dingy noren in an open doorway, empty chrome stools of the soda-fountain spin-around kind, but very low, fronting an equally low bar. Their red upholstery split and bulging. Patched, like her jacket, with peeling tape.

She sighs, squares her shoulders, turns around, and ducks past the noren, into an ancient, complexly layered, and somehow not unpleasant odor of fried sardines, beer, and cigarettes.

No trouble recognizing Taki. He’s the sole customer. Rising and bowing, tomato-faced with reflexive embarrassment, to greet her.

“You must be Taki. I’m Cayce Pollard. Keiko’s friend from California.”

He blinks earnestly, through dandruff-dusted lenses, and bobs there, uncertain whether he should resume his seat. She pulls out the chair opposite him, removes her bag and the Rickson’s, hangs them across the back, and seats herself.

Taki sits down. He has an open bottle of beer in front of him. He blinks, saying nothing.

She’d gone back and looked at Parkaboy’s initial explanation of Taki again, after she’d sketched the map on a napkin:

Taki, as he prefers we call him, claims to orbit a certain otaku-coven in Tokyo, a group that knows itself as “Mystic,” though its members never refer to it that way in public, nor indeed refer to it at all. It is these Mystic wonks, according to Taki, who have cracked the watermark on #78. This segment, according to Taki, is marked with a number of some kind, which he claims to have seen, and know.

What she’s confronted with here, she decides, is an extreme example of Japanese geek culture. Taki is probably the kind of guy who knows everything there is to know about one particular Soviet military vehicle, or whose apartment is lined with unopened plastic models.

He seems to be breathing through his mouth.

Catching the eye of the barman, she points to a poster advertising Asahi Lite and nods.

“Keiko’s told me a lot about you,” she says, trying to get into character, but this only seems to make him more uncomfortable. “But I don’t think she’s told me what it is that you do.”

Taki says nothing.

Parkaboy’s faith, that Taki has enough English to handle the transaction, may be unfounded.

And here she is, halfway around the world, trying to swap a piece of custom-made pornography for a number that might mean nothing at all.

He sits there, mouth-breathing, and Cayce is wishing she were anywhere else, anywhere at all.

He’s in his mid-twenties, she guesses, and slightly overweight. He has a short, nondescript haircut that manages to stick up at several odd angles. Cheap-looking black-framed glasses. His blue button-down shirt and colorless checked sport coat look as though they’ve been laundered but never ironed.

He isn’t, as Parkaboy has indicated, the best-looking guy she’s recently had a drink with. Though that, come to think of it, would be Bigend. She winces.

“I do?” Responding perhaps to the wince.

“Your job?”

The barman places her beer on the table.

“Game,” Taki manages. “I design game. For mobile phone.”

She smiles, she hopes encouragingly, and sips her Asahi Lite. She’s feeling more guilty by the minute. Taki—she hasn’t gotten his last name and probably never will—has big dark semicircles of anxiety sweat under the arms of his button-down shirt. His lips are wet and probably tend to spray slightly when he speaks. If he were any more agonized to be here, he’d probably just curl up and die.

She wishes she hadn’t had all this fabulous fanny stuff done, and bought these clothes. It hadn’t been for him, but really she hadn’t imagined she’d be dealing with anyone with this evident a social deficit. Maybe if she were looking plainer he wouldn’t be as spooked. Or maybe he would.

“That’s interesting,” she lies. “Keiko told me you know a lot, about computers and things.”

Now it’s his turn to wince, as if struck, and knocks back the remainder of his beer. “Things? Keiko? Says?”

“Yes. Do you know ‘the footage’?”

“Web movie.” He looks even more desperate now. The heavy glasses, lubricated with perspiration, slide inexorably down his nose. She resists an urge to reach over and push them back up.

“You . . . know Keiko?” He winces again, getting it out.

She feels like applauding. “Yes! She’s wonderful! She asked me to bring you something.” She’s suddenly experiencing full-on London-Tokyo soul-displacement, less a wave than the implosion of an entire universe. She imagines climbing over the bar, past the barman with his pockmarked, oddly convex face, and down behind it, where she might curl up behind a scrim of bottles and attain a state of absolute stasis, for weeks perhaps.

Taki fumbles in his sport coat’s side pocket, coming up with a crumpled pack of Casters. Offers her one.

“No, thank you.”

“Keiko sends?” He puts a Caster between his lips and leaves it there, unlit.

“A photograph.” She’s glad she can’t see her own smile; it must be ghastly.

“Give me Keiko photo!” The Caster, having been plucked from his mouth for this, is returned. It trembles.

“Taki, Keiko tells me that you’ve discovered something. A number. Hidden in the footage. Is this true?”

His eyes narrow. Not a wince but suspicion, or so she reads it. “You are footage lady?”

“Yes.”

“Keiko like footage?”

Now she’s into improv, as she can’t remember what Parkaboy and Musashi have been telling him.

“Keiko is very kind. Very kind to me. She likes to help me with my hobby.”

“You like Keiko very much?”

“Yes!” Nodding and smiling.

“You like . . . Anne-of-Green-Gable?”

Cayce starts to open her mouth but nothing comes out.

“My sister like Anne-of-Green-Gable, but Keiko . . . does not know Anne-of-Green-Gable.” The Caster is dead still now, and the eyes behind the dandruff-flecked lenses seem calculating. Have Parkaboy and Musashi blown it, somehow, in their attempt to generate a believable Japanese girl-persona? If Keiko were real, would she necessarily have to like Anne of Green Gables? And anything Cayce might ever have known about the Anne of Green Gables cult in Japan has just gone up in a puff of synaptic mist.

Then Taki smiles, for the first time, and removes the Caster. “Keiko modern girl.” He nods. “Body-con!”

“Yes! Very! Very modern.” Body-con, she knows, means body-conscious: Japanese for buff.

The Caster, its tan faux-cork filter glittering wetly, goes back between his lips. He roots through his pockets in turn, produces a Hello Kitty! lighter, and lights his cigarette. Not a plastic disposable but a chromed Zippo, or clone thereof. Cayce feels as though the lighter has followed her here from Kiddyland, a spy for the Hello Kitty! group mind. She smells benzene. He puts it away. “Number . . . very hard.”

“Keiko told me that you were very clever, to find the number.”

He nods. Seems pleased perhaps. Smokes. Taps ash into an Asahi ashtray. There’s a small, cheap-looking television behind the bar, just at the periphery of Cayce’s vision. It’s made of transparent plastic and shaped something like a football helmet. On its six-inch screen she sees a screaming human face attempting to thrust itself through a sheet of very thin latex, then a quick clip of the South Tower collapsing, then four green melons, perfectly round, rolling along on a flat white surface.

“Keiko told me that you would give me the number.” Forcing the smile again. “Keiko says you are very kind.”

Taki’s face darkens. She hopes it’s a deeper level of embarrassment kicking in, or something to do with that specific alcohol-processing enzyme the Japanese lack, and not anger. He suddenly whips a Palm from his inside jacket pocket and pokes its infrared slit at her.

He wants to beam her the number.

“I don’t have one,” she tells him.

He frowns, fumbles out a fat, retro-looking pen. She’s ready for this, slipping him the napkin she’d drawn her Roppongi map on. He frowns, scrolls on his Palm, then copies a number on the edge of the folded napkin.

She watches as he copies three groups of four numbers each, the pen’s felt tip blurring in the coarse weave of the paper. Upside down: 8304 6805 2235. Like a FedEx waybill number.

She takes it as he closes his pen.

She quickly reaches down into the Luggage Label bag, which she’s surreptitiously unzipped against just this eventuality, and comes up with the envelope containing the Judy image. “She wants you to have this,” she tells him.

She’s afraid he’ll tear it, as he fumbles the envelope open. His hands are trembling. But then he gets it out, has a look, and she sees his eyes are wet with tears.

She can’t handle this at all.

“Excuse me, Taki,” gesturing in what she hopes will be the direction of the toilet, “I’ll be right back.” She leaves her Rickson’s and the laptop bag hanging on her chair and gets up. She still has the napkin in her hand. Sign language with the barman gets her down a tiny hallway and into the least salubrious Japanese toilet she’s seen in a while, one of those concrete hole-in-the-floor jobs from the old days. It reeks of disinfectant and, she supposes, urine, but it has a door she can get between herself and Taki.