Cayce opens the first attachment.
“Parkaboy, you are outrageous.”
A multilayered confection, message within message, and all of it targeting Taki, or Taki as Parkaboy and Mushashi imagine him.
Keiko/Judy is simultaneously pubescent and aggressively womanly, her shapely yet slender legs spilling out of a tiny tartan schoolgirl kilt, to vanish, mid-calf, into shoved-down, bunched-up cotton kneesocks of an unusually heavy knit. Cayce’s cool-module, wherever it resides, has always proven remarkably good at registering the salient parameters of sexual fetishes she’s never encountered before, and doesn’t in the least respond to. She just knows now that these Big Sox are one of those, and probably culture-specific. There will be a magazine for Japanese guys into big socks, she’s sure of it. The big socks go into retro faux-Converse canvas, but with platform soles to balance the very sizable bulk of sock-scrunch around the ankles, giving Keiko/Judy a knees-down look recalling a baby Clydesdale.
Keiko/Judy has pigtails, huge dark eyes, free-sized sweatshirt making her breasts a mystery, and something so determinedly carnal in her expression that Cayce finds it unnerving. Bigend would recognize the image-toggle instantly, childlike innocence and hardboiled come-on alternating at some frequency beyond perception.
She goes back to Parkaboy’s e-mail.
Judy Tsuzuki, five-foot-eleven and about as Japanese as you are, aside from the DNA. Texas. Twenty-seven. Bartender in this place down the street from Musashi’s. What we did to up the wattage for Taki, aiming to maximize libidinal disturbance, we shot this long tall Judy then reduced her by at least a third, in Photoshop. Cut’n’pasted her into Musashi’s kid sister’s dorm room at Cal. Darryl did the costuming himself, and then we decided to try enlarging her eyes a few clicks. That made all the difference. Judy’s epicanthic folds are long gone, the way of the modest bust nature intended for her (actually we’ve got her wrapped up in an Ace bandage for the shot, but nothing too tight) and the resulting big round eyes are pure Anime Magic. This is the girl Taki’s been looking for all his life, even though nature’s never made one, and he’ll know that as soon as he lays eyes on this image. The other attachment . . .
She opens it. Something in felt-penned kanji, with multiple exclamation marks.
That’s Keiko’s inscription. You’ll need to get someone Japanese, preferably young and female, to write this on the printout for you. I’ll spare you the translation. As to hooking you up with Taki, I have been working on that while Musashi did the glamour photography. It’s coming along but I haven’t wanted to move too quickly as our boy seems a little erratic. Keiko has just sent him word that a friend of hers will be arriving in Tokyo and has a surprise for him. Will get back to you when I have his response. Are you there on business? I hear they actually eat raw fish.
She stands up, walks backward until her thighs bump the edge of the bed, throws up her arms, and falls back in snow-angel fashion, staring up at the white ceiling.
Why has she come here? Is there now some new and permanently non-undoable snarl in her trailing soul-tether?
She closes her eyes but it has nothing to do with sleep. It only makes her aware that they currently seem to be a size too large for their sockets.
THE doormen are carefully neutral as she leaves the Hyatt in 501’s and the Buzz Rickson’s, declining their offer of a car.
A few blocks on, she buys a black knit cap and a pair of Chinese sunglasses from an Israeli street vendor, shaking her head at his suggestion of a Rolex Daytona to complete the look. With the cap tugged low, hair tucked up into it, and the Rickson’s to zip up and slouch down in, she feels relatively gender-neutral.
Not that it doesn’t feel as safe here as she remembers it having felt before, but that in itself takes a little getting used to. Actually she’s heard that violent crime is up, but she’ll treat it as though it isn’t. Because she can’t stay up in her white box overhanging the city. Not now. She feels as though something more than her soul has been left behind, this time, and she needs to walk it off.
Win. She’d started to project Win on those white walls, and that won’t do. The image still ungrieved.
No. Putting her feet down firmly as she walks on. Walk like a man. I fought the law. Hands in pockets, the right clutching the sunglasses.
And the law won.
She passes one of those spookily efficient midnight road crews, who’ve set up self-illuminated traffic cones prettier than any lamp she’s ever owned, and are slicing into asphalt with a water-cooled steel disk. Tokyo doesn’t so much sleep as pause to allow crucial repairs to its infrastructure. She’s never actually seen soil emerge from any incision they might make in the street, here; it’s as though there is nothing beneath the pavement but a clean, uniformly dense substrate of pipes and wiring.
She walks on, more or less at random, responding to some half-forgotten sense of direction, until she finds herself nearing Kabukicho, the all-night zone they call Sleepless Castle, its streets bright as day, very few surfaces lacking at least one highly active source of illumination.
She’s been here before, though never alone, and knows it to be the land of mahjong parlors, tiny bars with highly specialized clienteles, sex shops, video porn, and probably much else, but all of it managed with a Vegas-like sobriety of intent that makes her wonder how much fun any of it could really be, even for the committed enthusiast.
Nothing more serious is liable to happen to her here, she trusts, than being accosted by the proverbial drunken salaryman, none of whom have ever proven insistent, or indeed even seriously mobile.
The noise level, as she keeps walking, is becoming phenomenal, industrial: music, songs, Godzilla-volume sexual midway-pitches in Japanese.
Pretend it is the sea.
The individual buildings are remarkably narrow, their restless street-level facades seeming to form a single unbroken surface of neon carnival excess, but overhead are small neat signs, identically rectangular, arranged up the fronts of each one, naming the services or products to be had on each small upper floor.
BEAUTY BRAIN’S FABULOUS FANNY
That one stops her, midway up, in red italics on yellow. She’s staring up at it when someone blunders into her, says something harsh in Japanese, and staggers on. Suddenly she realizes she’s standing in the middle of the street outside a bellowing porno palace, a pair of bored-looking touts or security on either side of the open entrance. She gets an unwelcome glimpse of some decidedly foreign fucking, at once clinical and violent, on a big hi-def screen, and quickly moves on.
She keeps turning corners until it’s dark enough to take the glasses off. The sea-roar somewhat diminished.
Here comes the wave. Her knees wobble.
They’ve got some serious jet lag here. Makes the London kind look like the morning after a restless night.
“Beauty brain,” she says to the narrow, perfectly deserted street, “better get her fabulous fanny home.”
But which way, exactly, is that?
She looks back, the way she came, down this narrow street, no distinction between sidewalk and roadway.
And hears the approaching whirr of a small engine.
A rider on a scooter appears at the junction with the previous street, a helmeted figure backlit by residual glare, and halts. The helmet turns, seeming to regard her, its visor is blank, mirrored.
Then the rider guns the little engine, wheels around, and is gone, with the finality of hallucination.
She stands staring at the empty intersection, lit, it now seems, like a stage.
Several turnings on, she finds her way again, steering by distant views of a Gap sign.
TELEVISION resolves the mystery of Billy Prion.
Trying to open the curtains for another look at the electric Lego, having showered and wrapped herself in a white terry robe, the universal remote activates the room’s huge set instead. And there he is, in full BSE neo-punk drag, half his mouth dead and the other twisted in demented glee, proffering a
small bottle of Bikkle, a yogurt-based Suntory soft drink that Cayce herself is somewhat partial to. A favorite of hers in the land of Pocari Sweat and Calpis Water.
It tastes as though ice cubes have melted in it, she remembers, and instantly wants some.
Billy Prion, then, she thinks as the ad ends, is currently the gaijin face of Bikkle, his complete lack of recent exposure in the occident evidently posing no problem here at all.
When she figures out how to turn the television off, she leaves the curtains closed, and turns the room’s lights off, one after another, manually.
Still wearing the robe, she curls up between the sheets of the big white bed and prays for the wave to come, and take her for as long as it can.
It comes, but somewhere in it is her father. And the figure on the scooter. Blank expanse of that chromed visor.
15.
SINGULARITY
Win Pollard went missing in New York City on the morning of September 11, 2001. The doorman at the Mayflower flagged an early cab for him, but couldn’t remember a destination. A one-dollar tip from the man in the gray overcoat.
She can think about this now because the Japanese sunlight, with the robotic drapes fully open, seems to come from some different direction entirely.
Curled in a body-warm cave of cotton broadcloth and terry, the remote in her hand, she unforgets her father’s absence.
Neither she nor her mother had known that Win was in town, and his reason or reasons for being there remain a mystery. He lived in Tennessee, on a disused farm purchased a decade earlier. He had been working on humane crowd-control barricades for stadium concerts. He was in the process, at the time of his disappearance, of obtaining a number of patents related to this work, and these, should they be granted, would now become part of his estate. The company he’d been working with was on Fifth Avenue, but his contacts there had been unaware of his presence in the city.
He had never been known to stay at the Mayflower, but had arrived there the night before, having made reservations via the web. He had gone immediately to his room, and as far as could be known had remained there. He had ordered a tuna sandwich and a Tuborg from room service. He had made no calls.
Since there was no known reason for his having been in New York, that particular morning, there was no reason to assume that he would have been in the vicinity of the World Trade Center. But Cynthia, Cayce’s mother, guided by voices, had been certain from the start that he had been a victim. Later, when it was revealed that the CIA had maintained some sort of branch office in one of the smaller, adjacent buildings, she had become convinced that Win had gone there to visit an old friend or former associate.
Cayce herself had been in SoHo that morning, at the time of the impact of the first plane, and had witnessed a micro-event that seemed in retrospect to have announced, however privately and secretly, that the world itself had at that very instant taken a duck in the face.
She had watched a single petal fall, from a dead rose, in the tiny display window of an eccentric Spring Street dealer in antiques.
She was loitering here, prior to a nine-o’clock breakfast meeting at the SoHo Grand, fifteen minutes yet to kill and the weather excellent. Staring blankly and probably rather contentedly at three rusted cast-iron toy banks, each a different height but all representing the Empire State Building. She had just heard a plane, incredibly loud and, she’d assumed, low. She thought she’d glimpsed something, over West Broadway, but then it had been gone. They must be making a film.
The dead roses, arranged in an off-white Fiestaware vase, appeared to have been there for several months. They would have been white, when fresh, but now looked like parchment. This was a mysterious window, with a black-painted plywood backdrop revealing nothing of the establishment behind it. She had never been in to see what else was there, but the objects in the window seemed to change in accordance with some peculiar poetry of their own, and she was in the habit, usually, of pausing to look, when she passed this way.
The fall of the petal, and somewhere a crash, taken perhaps as some impact of large trucks, one of those unexplained events in the sonic backdrop of lower Manhattan. Leaving her sole witness to this minute fall.
Perhaps there is a siren then, or sirens, but there are always sirens, in New York.
As she walks toward West Broadway and the hotel, she hears more sirens.
Crossing West Broadway she sees that a crowd is forming. People are stopping, turning to look south. Pointing. Toward smoke, against blue sky.
There is a fire, high up in the World Trade Center.
Walking more quickly now, in the direction of Canal, she passes people kneeling beside a woman who seems to have fainted.
The towers in her line of sight. Anomaly of smoke. Sirens.
Still focused on her meeting with a German outerwear manufacturer’s star designer, she enters the SoHo Grand and quickly climbs stairs made from something like faux bridge girder. Nine o’clock exactly. There is an odd, sub-aquatic quality to the light in the lobby. She feels as though she is dreaming.
There is a fire in the World Trade Center.
She finds a house phone and asks for her designer. He answers in German, hoarse, excited. He doesn’t seem to remember that they are having breakfast.
“Come please up,” in English. Then: “There has been a plane.” Then something urgent, strangled, in German. He hangs up.
A plan? Change of? He is on the eighth floor. Does he want to have breakfast in his room?
As the elevator doors close behind her, she closes her eyes and sees the dry petal, falling. The loneliness of objects. Their secret lives. Like seeing something move in a Cornell box.
The designer’s door opens as she raises her hand to knock. He is pale, young, unshaven. Glasses with heavy black frames. She sees that he is in his stocking feet, his freshly laundered shirt buttoned in the wrong holes. His fly is open and he is staring at her as though at something he has never seen before. The television is on, CNN, volume up, and as she steps past him, uninvited but feeling the need to do something, she sees, on the screen beneath the unused leatherette ice bucket, the impact of the second plane.
And looks up, to the window that frames the towers. And what she will retain is that the exploding fuel burns with a tinge of green that she will never hear or see described.
Cayce and the German designer will watch the towers burn, and eventually fall, and though she will know she must have seen people jumping, falling, there will be no memory of it.
It will be like watching one of her own dreams on television. Some vast and deeply personal insult to any ordinary notion of interiority.
An experience outside of culture.
SHE finds the right button on the remote and the drapes track open. She crawls out of her white cave, the terry robe hanging wrinkled around her, and goes to the window.
Blue sky. A clearer blue than she remembers in Tokyo. They use unleaded fuel, now.
She looks down into the woods surrounding the Imperial Palace and sees the few visible sections of rooftop that Bigend’s travel girl promised.
There must be paths through those woods, paths of a quite unimaginable charm, which she will never see.
She tries to judge her degree of soul-delay but feels nothing at all.
She is alone here, with only the background hum of air-conditioning.
She reaches for the phone and orders breakfast.
16.
GOING MOBILE
There had been a smell, in the weeks after, like hot oven cleaner, catching at the back of the throat. Had it ever gone entirely away?
She concentrates on her breakfast, eggs poached to perfection and toast sliced from a loaf of slightly alien dimensions. The two slices of bacon are crisp and very flat, as though they’ve been ironed. High-end Japanese hotels interpret Western breakfasts the way the Rickson’s makers interpret the MA-1.
She pauses, fork halfway from plate, looking toward the closet where she’d hung her jacket
the night before.
Blue Ant Tokyo has been charged with helping her in any way it can.
When she’s finished eating, cleaning her plate with the final corner of the last slice of toast, she pours a second cup of coffee and looks up the local Blue Ant number on her laptop. She dials it on her cell and hears someone say, “Mushi mushi,” which makes her smile. She asks for Jennifer Brossard, and tells her, no preface other than hello, that she needs a black MA-1 flying jacket reproduction by Buzz Rickson’s, in the Japanese equivalent of an American men’s size 38.
“Anything else?”
“They’re impossible to find. People order them a year in advance.”
“Is that all you need?”
“Yes, thanks.”
“Shall we send it to the hotel?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
“Bye, then.” Jennifer Brossard clicks off.
Cayce hits End and stares briefly out at blue sky and oddly shaped towers.
Her requests don’t have to make any sense, she gathers, which is interesting.
When the psychosomatic oven cleaner starts to stage a comeback, it’s time to do more things, preferably purposeful things, to unremember. She showers, dresses, e-mails Parkaboy.
Mushi mushi. I hope you’ve gotten Judy out of that elastic bandage. She makes a great Keiko. I’ll have that printed out and personally inscribed, and after that it’s up to you. Got a laptop that goes cellular, though I haven’t figured how to do that yet. But I’m taking it with me today and I will. I’ll be checking my mail, and here’s the number of my cell here, if you need to go to voice.
She checks the number of her phone and types it in.
All I can do now is wait for you to hook me up with Taki.
She’s spoken with Parkaboy twice before, and both times it’s been odd, in the way that initial telephone conversations with people you’ve gotten to know well on the Net, yet have never met, are odd.