Idoru

  “I'm looking for Monkey Boxing,” Chia said.

  “Darling,” the man said, “you're a bit late.” He wore a black paper coverall, its sleeves torn off at the elbows, revealing arms tracked with blobby blue lines and circles, some kind of faux-primitive decoration. He wiped his eyes and squinted at her. “You aren't from the magazine in London?”

  “No,” Chia said.

  “No,” he agreed. “You seem a bit young even for them.”

  “This is Monkey Boxing?”

  Another section of ceiling came down. The dusty man squinted at her. “Where did you say you were from?”

  “Seattle.”

  “You heard about Monkey Boxing in Seattle?”

  “Yes…”

  He smiled wanly. “That's fun: heard about it in Seattle… You're on the club scene yourself, dear?”

  “I'm Chia McKenzie—”

  “Jun. I'm called Jun, dear. Owner, designer, DJ. But you're too late. Sorry. All that's left of Monkey Boxing's going out in these gomi-carts. Landfill now. Like every other broken dream. Had a lovely run while it lasted, better part of three months. You heard about our Shaolin Temple theme? That whole warrior-monk thing?” He sighed extravagantly. “It was heaven. Every instant of it. The Oki-nawan bartenders shaved their heads, after the first three nights, and started to wear the orange robes. I surpassed myself, in the booth. It was a vision, you understand? But that's the nature of the floating world isn't it? We are in the water trade, after all, and one tries to be philosophical. But who is your friend here? I like his hair…”

  “Masahiko Mimura,” Chia said.

  “I like that black-clad boho butch bedsit thing,” the man said. "Mishima and Dietrich on the same halfshell, if it's done right.”

  Masahiko frowned.

  “If Monkey Boxing is gone,” Chia said, “what will you do now?”

  Jun retied his headband. He looked less pleased. “Another club, but I won't be designing. They'll say I've sold out. Suppose I have. I'll still be managing the space, very nice salary and an apartment along with it, but the concept…” He shrugged.

  “Were you here the night Rez told them he wanted to marry the idoru?”

  His brow creased, behind the headband. “I had to sign agreements,” he said. “You aren't from the magazine?”

  “No.”

  “If he hadn't come in that night, I suppose we might still be up and running. And really he wasn't the sort of thing we'd tried to be about. We'd had Maria Paz, just after she'd split up with her boyfriend, the public relations monster, and the press were thick as flies. She's huge here, did you know that? And we'd had Blue Ahmed from Chrome Koran and the press scarcely noticed. Rez and his friends, though, press was not a problem. Sent in this big minder who looked as though he'd been using his face as a chopping block. Came up to me and said Rez had heard about the place and was about to drop in with a few friends, and could we arrange a table with a bit of privacy…. Well, really, I had to think: Rez who? Then it clicked, of course, and I said fine, absolutely, and we put three tables together in the back, and even borrowed a purple cordon from the gumi boys in the hostess place upstairs.”

  “And he came? Rez?”

  “Absolutely. An hour later, there he is. Smiling, shaking hands, signing things if you asked him to, though there wasn't too burning a demand, actually. Four women with him, two other men if you didn't count the minder. Very nice black suit. Yohji. Bit the worse for wear. Rez, I mean. Been out to dinner, it looked like. Had a few drinks with it. Certain amount of laughter, if you follow me.” He turned and said something to one of the workmen, who wore shoes like two-toed black leather socks.

  Chia, who had no idea what Monkey Boxing had actually been about, imagined Rez at a table with some other people, behind a purple rope, and in the foreground a crowd of Japanese people doing whatever Japanese people did at a club like that. Dancing?

  “Then our boy gets up, he's going to the toilet. The big minder makes as if he's getting up to go too, but our boy waves him back. Big laugh from the table, big minder not too happy. Two of the women start to get up, like they're going with him; he'll have none of it, waves 'em back, more laughter. Not that anyone else was paying him that much attention. I was going into the booth in five minutes, with a set of extremely raw North African; had to judge the crowd, get on it with them, know just when to drop it in. But there he went, right through them, and only one or two even noticed, and they didn't stop dancing.”

  What kind of club was it, where nobody would stop dancing for Rez?

  “So I was thinking about my set, the order of it, and suddenly he's right in front of me. Big grin. Eyes funny, though I wouldn't swear it was anything he'd done in the toilet—if you know what I mean.”

  Chia nodded her head. What did he mean?

  “And would I mind, he said, hand on my shoulder, if he just spoke briefly to the crowd? Said he'd been thinking about something for a long time, and now he'd made up his mind and he wanted to tell people. And the big minder just materialized there, wanting to know was there any problem? None at all, Rez says, giving my shoulder a squeeze, but he was just going to have a word with the crowd.”

  Chia looked at Jun's shoulders, wondering which one had been squeezed by Rez's actual hand. “So he did,” Jun said.

  “But what did he say?” Chia asked.

  “A load of bollocks, dear. Evolution and technology and passion; man's need to find beauty in the emerging order; his own burning need to get his end in with some software dolly wank toy. Balls. Utter. He pushed his headband up with his thumb, but it fell back. “And because he did that, opened his mouth up in my club, Lo slash bloody Rez bought my club. Bought me as well, and I've signed agreements that I won't talk to any of you about any of that. And now if you and your charming friend will excuse me, darling, I have work to do.”

  21. Standover Man

  There was a man on stilts at the intersection nearest the hotel. He wore a hooded white paper suit, a gas mask, and a pair of rectangular sign-boards. Messages scrolled down the boards in Japanese as he shifted his weight to maintain balance. Streams of pedestrian traffic flowed around and past him.

  “What's that?” Laney asked, indicating the man on stilts.

  “A sect,” Arleigh McCrae said. “‘New Logic.’ They say the world will end when the combined weight of all the human nervous tissue on the planet reaches a specific figure.”

  A very long multi-digit number went scrolling down.

  “Is that it?” Laney asked.

  “No,” she said, “that's their latest estimate of the current total weight.” She'd gone back to her room for the black coat she now wore, leaving Laney to change into clean socks, underwear, a blue shirt. He didn't have a tie, so he'd buttoned the shirt at the collar and put his jacket back on. He'd wondered if everyone who worked for Lo/Rez stayed in that same hotel.

  Laney saw the man's eyes through the transparent visor as they passed. A look of grim patience. The stilts were the kind workers wore to put up ceilings, articulated alloy sprung with steel. “What's supposed to happen when there's enough nervous tissue?”

  “A new order of being. They don't talk about it. Rez was interested in them, apparently. He tried to arrange an audience with the founder.”

  “And?”

  “The founder declined. He said that Rez made his living through the manipulation of human nervous tissue, and that that made him untouchable.”

  “Rez was unhappy?”

  “Not according to Blackwell. Blackwell said it seemed to cheer him up a little.”

  “He's not cheerful, ordinarily?” Laney sidestepped to avoid a bicycle someone was wheeling in the opposite direction.

  “Let's say that the things that bother Rez aren't the things that bother most people.”

  Laney noticed a dark green van edging along beside them. Its wraparound windows were mirrored, its neon license plates framed with animated tubes of mini-Vegas twinklers. “I think we're being followed,?
?? he said.

  “We'd better be. I wanted the kind with the weird chrome curb-feelers that make them look like silverfish, but I had to settle for custom license-plate trim. Where you go, it goes. And parking, around here, is probably more of a challenge than anything you'll be expected to do tonight. Now,” she said, “down here.”

  Steep, narrow stairs, walled with an alarming pink mosaic of glistening tonsil-like nodules. Laney hesitated, then saw a sign, the letters made up of hundreds of tiny pastel oblongs: LE CHICLE. Stepping down, he lost sight of the van.

  A chewing-gum theme-bar, he thought, and then: I'm getting too used to this. But he still avoided touching the wall of chewed gum as he followed her down.

  Into powdery pinks and grays, but these impersonating the unchewed product, wall-wide slabs of it, hung with archaic signage from the nation of his birth. Screen-printed steel. Framed and ancient cardboard, cunningly lit. Icons of gum. Bazooka Joe featured centrally, a figure unknown to Laney but surely no more displaced.

  “Come here often?” Laney asked, as they took stools with bulbous cushions in a particularly lurid bubble-gum pink. The bar was laminated with thousands of rectangular chewing-gum wrappers.

  “Yes,” she said, “but mainly because it's unpopular. And it's nonsmoking, which is still kind of special here.”

  “What's ‘Black Black’?” Laney asked, looking at a framed poster depicting a stylized 1940s automobile hurtling through the faint suggestion of city streets. Aside from “Black Black,” it was lettered in a sort of Art Deco Japanese.

  “Gum. You can still buy it,” she said. “The cab drivers all chew it. Lots of caffeine.”

  “In gum?”

  “They sell pick-me-ups here full of liquid nicotine.”

  “I think I'll have a beer instead.”

  When the waitress, in tiny silver shorts and a prehensile pink angora top, had taken their orders, Arleigh opened her purse and removed a notebook. “These are linear topographies of some of the structures you accessed earlier today.” She passed Laney the notebook. “They're in a format called Realtree 7.2.”

  Laney clicked through a series of images: abstract geometrics arranged in vanishing linear perspective. “I don't know how to read them,” he said.

  She poured her sake. “You really were trained by DatAmerica?”

  “I was trained by a bunch of Frenchmen who liked to play tennis.”

  “Realtree's from DatAmerica. The best quantitative analysis software they've got.” She closed the notebook, put it back in her purse.

  Laney poured his beer. “Ever hear of something called TIDAL?”

  “‘Tidal’?”

  “Acronym. Maybe.”

  “No.” She lifted the china cup and blew, like a child cooling tea.

  “It was another DatAmerica tool, or the start of one. I don't think it reached the market. But that was how I learned to find the nodal points.”

  “Okay,” she said. “What are the nodal points?”

  Laney looked at the bubbles on the surface of his beer. “It's like seeing things in clouds,” Laney said. “Except the things you see are really there.”

  She put her sake down. “Yamazaki promised me you weren't crazy.”

  “It's not crazy. It's something to do with how I process low-level, broad-spectrum input. Something to do with pattern-recognition.”

  “And Slitscan hired you on the basis of that?”

  “They hired me when I demonstrated that it works. But I can't do that with the kind of data you showed me today.”

  “Why not?”

  Laney raised his beer. “Because it's like trying to have a drink with a bank. It's not a person. It doesn't drink. There's no place for it to sit.” He drank. “Rez doesn't generate patterns I can read, because everything he does is at one remove. It's like looking in an annual report for the personal habits of the chairman of the board. It's not going to be there. From the outside, it just looks like that Realtree stuff. If I enter a specific area, I don't get any sense of how the data there relates to the rest of it, see? It's got to be relational.” He drummed his fingers on the laminated gum wrappers. “Somewhere in Ireland. Guesthouse with a beach view. Nobody there. Records of how it was kept stocked: stuff for the bathroom, toothpaste, shaving foam…”

  “I've been there,” she said. “That's on an estate he bought from an older musician, an Irishman. It's beautiful. Like Italy, in a way.”

  You think he'll take this idoru back there, when they get hitched?”

  “Nobody has any idea what he's talking about when he says he wants to ‘marry’ her.”

  “Then an apartment in Stockholm. Huge. Great big stoves in each room, made of glazed ceramic bricks.”

  “I don't know that one. He has places all over, and some of them are kept very quiet. There's another country place in the south of France, a house in London, apartments in New York, Paris, Barcelona…. I was working out of the Catalan office, reformatting all their stuff and Spain's as well, when this idoru thing hit. I've been here ever since.”

  “But you know him? You knew him before?”

  “He's the navel of the world I work in, Laney. That has a way of making people unknowable.”

  “What about Lo?”

  “Quiet. Very. Bright. Very.” She frowned at her sake. “I don't think any of it's ever really gotten to Lo. He seems to regard their entire career as some freak event unrelated to anything else.”

  “Including his partner deciding to marry a software agent?”

  “Lo told me a story once, about a job he'd had. He worked for a soup vendor in Hong Kong, a wagon on the sidewalk. He said the wagon had been in business for over fifty years, and their secret was that they'd never cleaned the kettle. In fact, they'd never stopped cooking the soup. It was the same seafood soup they'd been selling for fifty years, but it was never the same, because they added fresh ingredients every day, depending on what was available. He said that was what his career as musician felt like, and he liked that about it. Blackwell says if Rez were more like Lo, he'd still be in prison.”

  “Why?”

  “Blackwell was serving a nine-year sentence, in an Australian maximum-security prison, when Rez talked his way in. To give a concert. Just Rez. Lo and the others thought it was too dangerous. They'd been warned that it could turn into a hostage-taking situation. The prison authorities refused to take any responsibility, and they wanted it in writing. Rez signed anything they put in front of him. His security people resigned on the spot. He went in with two guitars, a wireless mike, and a very basic amplification system. During the concert, a riot broke out. Apparently it was orchestrated by a group of Italian prisoners from Melbourne. Five of them took Rez into the prison laundry, which they'd chosen because it was windowless and easily defended. They informed Rez they were going to kill him if they couldn't negotiate their release in exchange for his. They discussed cutting off at least one of his fingers to demonstrate that they meant business. Or possibly some more intimate part, though that may simply have been to make him more anxious. Which it did.” She signaled the pink angora waitress for more sake. “Blackwell, who'd evidently been extremely irritated at the interruption of the concert, which he'd been enjoying enormously, appeared in the laundry approximately forty minutes after Rez was taken prisoner. Neither Rez nor the Italians saw him arrive, and the Italians definitely hadn't been expecting him.” She paused. “He killed three of them, with a tomahawk. Put the end of it into their heads: one, two, three, Rez says, like that. No fuss whatever.”

  “A tomahawk?”

  “Sort of narrow-bladed hatchet, with a spike opposite the blade. Extends the reach, imparts terrific force, and with practice can be thrown with considerable accuracy. Blackwell swears by it. The other two fled, although they both seem to have died in the aftermath of the riot. Personally, I'm sure Blackwell or his ‘mates’ killed them, because he was never charged with the murder of the other three. The sole surviving witness was Rez, whom Blackwell escorted to
the barricade the guards had erected in the exercise yard.” Her sake arrived. “It took Rez's lawyers three months to get Blackwell's sentence reversed on a technicality. They've been together ever since.”

  “What was Blackwell in for?”

  “Murder,” she said. “Do you know what a standover man is?”

  “No.”

  “It's a peculiarly Australian concept. I'm tempted to think it could only have grown out of a culture comprised initially of convicts, but my Australian friends don't buy that. The standover man is a loner, a predator who preys on other, more prosperous criminals, often extremely dangerous ones. He captures them and ‘stands over’ them. To extort money.”

  “What's that mean?”

  “He tortures them until they tell him where their money is. And

  these are often fairly serious operators, with people paid to take care of them, specifically to prevent this sort of thing…”

  “Tortures them?”

  “‘Toe-cutter’ is a related term. When they tell him what he needs to know, he kills them.”

  And Blackwell was suddenly and noiselessly and simply there, very black, and matte, in an enormous waxed-cotton drover's coat. Behind him the faded American advertising and the grays and pinks of gum. His fretted scalp concealed by the waxed-cotton crown of a broad black hat.

  “Arleigh, dear, you wouldn't take the name in vain, would you?”

  But he smiled at her.

  “I'm explaining your earlier career to Mr. Laney, Blackwell. I'd only just gotten up to the massage parlor, and now you've ruined it.”

  “Never mind. Dinner's been moved up, at the request of his Rozzer. I'm here to take you. Change of venue as well. Hope you don't mind.”

  “Where?” Arleigh asked, as if not yet prepared to move.

  “The Western World,” said Blackwell.

  “And me in my good shoes,” she said.

  22. Gomi Boy

  The trains more crowded now, standing room only, everyone pressed in tight, and somehow the eye-contact rules were different here, but she wasn't sure how. Her bag with the Sandbenders was jammed up against Masahiko's back. He was looking at the control-face again, holding it up the way a commuter would hold a strategically folded newspaper.