Number9dream

  The deserted lobby swarms with psychedelic carpet. Where are all the customers? If this place showed Disney or movies people have heard of, it would be packed. I fail to notice the step, trip, and nearly twist my ankle. The walls are decorated in mildewed glitz and the air is heavy with neglect. A sorry chandelier glows brownly. The woman in the ticket office puts her needlepoint embroidery down with obvious annoyance. “Yes?”

  “This is, the, uh, Ganymede Cinema?”

  “No, this is the battleship Yamato. What do you want?”

  “I’m a customer.”

  “Well, how nice for you.”

  “The, uh, movie. What is it about?”

  She feeds a scarlet thread through a needle’s eye. “Can you see a sign on my desk that says ‘Plot Synopses Sold Here’?”

  “I only—”

  “Can you see a sign on my desk that says ‘Plot Synopses Sold Here’?”

  “No.”

  “Think really hard. Why is there no such sign?”

  Normally, I would just leave, but I know Akiko Kato is in the auditorium. Meeting her here is perfect: “Excuse me, but you wouldn’t by any chance be . . .” So I say, meekly enough considering, “One ticket, please.”

  “Thousand yen.”

  “Is that the cheapest ticket?”

  She does not even deign to answer. I get a note out of my wallet and say goodbye to my budget for the day. She hands me a square of perforated silver paper the size of a chewing gum wrapper, which is exactly what it is. I follow a sign reading: SCREEN THIS WAY. MANAGEMENT IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ACCIDENTS IN THE STAIRWELL. The steep stairs descend in short flights at right angles to the stairs ahead and the stairs behind. Posters of previous presentations line the sweaty walls, but I cannot recognize a single one: Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid. I expect each stairway to be the last, but it never is. Is it getting warmer? Fahrenheit 451. In the event of fire, customers are kindly requested to crispen without undue panic. The Life and Times of John Shade. I smell bitter almonds. Suddenly there are no more stairs, but a woman with the bruised shaven skull of a chemotherapy patient. When I meet her eyes, I experience a jolt: her sockets are void. I clear my throat. “Hand it over,” she says, barely moving her lips, as if she is learning ventriloquism.

  “I beg your, uh, pardon?”

  “Your ticket. My accursed sister sold you a ticket.”

  “Oh . . . here. I’ll put it in your left—”

  So much for consideration for the blind. Her right hand darts out and she rips the ticket in two. “Popcorn.”

  “I’ll, uh, give the popcorn a miss, thank you.”

  “What is wrong with my popcorn?”

  “Nothing . . . I just don’t feel like any popcorn.”

  “So you are refusing to admit that you dislike popcorn?”

  “I had a big lunch.”

  “I hate it when you lie to me.”

  “You must be mistaking me for somebody else.”

  She shakes her head. “Mistakes never make it this far down.” “Okay, if it makes you happier, I’ll buy some popcorn.”

  “There isn’t any.”

  I’m missing something. “Why did you offer to sell me some?”

  “Your imagination has gotten the better of you.”

  This is getting irritating. Then I have a thought. “Did the last lady buy any popcorn? She would have arrived here less than a minute ago.”

  “If you have eyes to see, see, and stop wasting my time.” She stands aside and holds open the curtain. The steep cinema auditorium has a population of exactly three. In the front row I recognize Akiko Kato’s head and shoulders. A tall man sits beside her. In the center aisle an elderly form sits twisted in a wheelchair, apparently dead. His head is unhinged backwards, his jaw gapes, and he is motionless. I follow his gaze upward to the night sky painted on the ceiling, but its constellations are none that Anju and I ever learned in our astronomy class. I creep down the far aisle, hoping to stay unobserved by Akiko Kato and her companion. I have an urge to eavesdrop before I introduce myself. Plus, if I approach her from the front I cannot pretend to accidentally recognize her. A loud bang goes off from the projectionist’s room—either a shotgun or an inexpertly opened bag of potato chips—and I drop down below a row of seats. After some seconds, I reemerge. Neither of them turned around, I think. The lights fall fast as an equatorial sunset—not that I would know—and the curtain squeaks up on a rectangle of flickering light. An ad for a driving school starts without warning, complete with the YMCA song. The ad is much older than me, or the school accepts only drivers who are of the 1970s persuasion. Next comes an ad for a plastic surgeon called Apollo Shigenobu. He grafts permanent grins onto women whose husbands, the surgeon promises, won’t recognize them—or your money back! His nurses and customers join hands and sing about facial correction. I enjoyed the “Coming Soon” trailers at the cinema in Kagoshima because it saved the expense of watching the film, but in the Ganymede Cinema there are none. A titanium voice announces the movie: PanOpticon, by an unpronounceable director, winner of a film festival in a city I could not locate. No titles, no music. Straight in.

  In a monochrome wintry city an omnibus nudges its way through nervous crowds. A middle-aged passenger watches the snow, wartime newspaper vendors, policemen beating a black marketeer to bruised mush. Beyond a burnt skeletal bridge, the omnibus shudders to a halt and the man asks the driver for directions. By way of reply he receives a nod at the enormous sky-obscuring wall. The man walks over the frozen slush and follows the base of this wall, past craters, gutted machines, and wild dogs. A hairy lunatic talks to a fire in circular ruins. Finally the man comes to a low wooden door, where he must stoop to knock. He waits. He knocks again. Nothing. Then he notices a tin can hanging from a length of string—the string vanishes into the masonry of the giant wall. “Is anybody there?” The language is hisses and crackles but the subtitles are Japanese. “I am Doctor Polonski. Warden Bentham is expecting me. Is anybody there?” The doctor puts the can to his ear and hears drowning submariners. The wooden door opens, apparently by itself, and the doctor enters, nearly tripping over the very short man on the other side. “Toadling at your service, Doctor.” The croaky dwarf unbows, and jangles the keys on his belt. “This way, if you will.” Snow underfoot is gravelly. Incantations whirl, fade, and rise again. The two walk through a maze of uninhabited cages. “This is where we keep the invisible men,” says Toadling, with a straight face. Guards are playing cards. “Your destination, Doctor,” says Toadling, rapping on a door and pushing it open. “The warden will see you without delay.”

  Doctor Polonski finds himself in a scruffy office. Distaste shows through his professional demeanor for a moment: Warden Bentham is decrepit and drunk. “Doctor.” The warden rubs his eyes. “How good of you to come. Take a seat. Do.”

  “Thank you.” Doctor Polonski treads gingerly from floorboard to floorboard, half of which have been removed, to the only free chair in the room, one designed for a nine-year-old. Warden Bentham indicates a peanut in a tall glass of liquid. “I am penning a treatise on the behavior of various bar snacks in brandy soda.”

  “Indeed?”

  The warden clicks a stopwatch and indicates a cluster of bottles on a shelf. “What’s your poison, Doc?”

  “Not while I’m on duty. Thank you.”

  The warden shrugs and empties the last drop of brandy into an eggcup. He drops the bottle between the floorboards and cups his hands to his ears. Several seconds later come a distant tinkle and scream. “Down the hatch, Doc.” Warden Bentham then drains his eggcup. “Dear Doc, permit me to cut to the quack. The quick, I mean, the quick. The heart of the matter. Our own Doctor Koenig was blown up by a land mine on Christmas Eve. His post has remained vacant ever since. I am so frustrated by our War Cabinet—Oh, we had such high hopes for our reform institute. Our plan, you know, was to watch our inmates as lovingly as the fathers most of them never had, and set them free from the cages in their heads by em
powering their imaginations. Such vision, we had! All we get sent are looters and politicals. Why, I myself—”

  “Warden,” interrupts Doctor Polonski. “The heart of the matter?”

  Warden Bentham nods, leans forward, and whispers: “The Voorman Issue.”

  Polonski shifts on his tiny chair, carefully. He is afraid of joining the brandy bottle in the abyss below. “Voorman? He is a prisoner here?”

  “Indeed, Doctor, indeed.”

  “And why is Voorman an issue?”

  “He believes he is God.”

  The doctor looks interested for the first time. “God.”

  “Each to his own, I know, but he has persuaded the prison population his delusion is the truth. We isolated him, but to no avail. The chanting you may have heard earlier? The psalm of Voorman, for the morning mass. I fear disturbances, Doctor Polonski. Revolts. Riots. I want you to examine the man. Ascertain whether his madness is an act, or whether his tapirs truly run amok. If a psychiatrist of your stature decides he is clinically insane, I can parcel him off to a military asylum and we can all go home for tea and cupcakes.”

  Doctor Polonski considers. “Of what crime was Voorman convicted?”

  The warden shrugs. “No idea.”

  “No idea?”

  “We burned all the files last winter for fuel.”

  “You burned the files?”

  “During the cold snap, yes.”

  “But . . . how do you know when to release the prisoners?”

  “Release?” The warden scans the labels on his remaining bottles. “The prisoners? Doctor, if you weren’t already a shrink I’d ask you, ‘Are you out of your mind?’! How could I feed my children if I let our prisoners go?”

  Akiko Kato glances behind her—I duck down. At the end of the row a rat stands on its hind legs in the silvery screenlight. It twitches its nose at me before climbing into the upholstery of an unsprung seat. “Well, Ms. Kato,” begins her companion in an imperious voice, “I only hope you have summoned me from my committee for an emergency as urgent as you claimed.”

  “An apparition appeared in Tokyo yesterday, Minister.”

  “A ghost story. Please tell me there is more.”

  “The ghost was your son, Minister. Eiji Miyake is here.”

  My father says nothing for the longest time.

  And I . . . uh, I . . .

  “Eiji is alive?”

  “Very much alive, Minister. He is a vengeful spirit. He is looking for you.”

  “What does he want? Money?”

  No! I nearly cry out. No, I will wait while Akiko Kato unwinds more rope I can use to hang her later on. Soon.

  “Not money, Minister. Blood. There is no easy way to tell you all this . . .” She makes it sound very easy indeed. “Your son is a crack addict. Salivating psychosis on two legs. He has spent his teens in and out of juvenile detention centers. I have here an e-mail swearing he will kill you for his stolen childhood.”

  My father reads the paper Kato unfolds. His voice is weak. “Surely—”

  “And not only you, Minister. Here. He says he wants to make you watch the destruction of your family. To make up for what happened to his sister.”

  Voorman sits cross-legged on a wire bed-frame. He is straitjacketed. The cell is a palace of filth. “So, Mr. Voorman . . .” A column of flies hovers above an iron bucket. Doctor Polonski paces over chunks of fallen ceiling. “How long have you believed yourself to be God?”

  Voorman has a magnetic voice. “Let me ask you the same question.”

  “I do not believe I am God.” The doctor steps on something crunchy.

  “But you believe you are a psychiatrist.”

  “Correct.” The doctor scrapes a still-twitching cockroach onto a half-brick. “I have been a psychiatrist since I graduated from medical college, obtained my license, and began practicing my profession.”

  “I have been God since I began practicing my profession.”

  The doctor leans against a desk to take notes. “Tell me a little about what your profession involves. On a day-to-day basis.”

  “Postcreation maintenance, mostly, Doctor.”

  “Of?”

  “Of the universe you inhabit. It is only nine days old, so you can imagine the wrinkles that still need ironing out.”

  The lead of Polonski’s pencil breaks. “A considerable body of evidence suggests that the universe is older than nine days.”

  “I know. I created the evidence myself.”

  The doctor fishes in his pocket for a new pencil stub. “I am forty-five years of age, Mr. Voorman. How do you account for my memories of my childhood?”

  “I created your memories when I created you.”

  “So everything around us was born in your imagination?”

  “Precisely. You, this prison, gooseberries, the Horsehead Nebula. And the fossils. The creationists are right, I’m afraid, although they are wildly liberal in their estimates.”

  “That must add up to a considerable workload.”

  “A workload greater than your pitiful hippocampus—no offense— could conceive. The worst part is, if I stop imagining every last atom it will all go poof! Solipsist, Doctor, only has one l.” Polonski frowns and changes the angle of his notebook. Voorman sighs. “I know you are skeptical, Doctor. I made you that way. Perhaps I can propose an experiment to verify my claims?”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “Pure objective realism. Belgium.”

  “Belgium?”

  “I doubt anyone will miss it. Do you?”

  My father is motionless. He has a full head of hair—I will never need to worry about baldness. So, my father is a politician. This explains a lot. I hug myself in the darkness. Now I am over the initial shock, today is turning delicious. Soon I will announce my presence, and Akiko Kato will be exposed as a lying viper. Her cell phone trills—she gets it from her handbag, snaps “Not now!” at the caller, and folds it away. “Look, Minister. The general election is three weeks from tomorrow. Your face is going to be on every candidate board in the city, and on television two or three times a day. This is not the time for you to keep a low profile. If your son discovers your identity, your life will be in peril.”

  “If I could only meet Eiji, just once, and reason with—”

  “He has a criminal record as long as your wife’s fur rack. And suppose he is deterred from attacking you physically—just imagine the damage he could wreak if the media got wind of this. ‘Abandoned Ministerial Love-Child Swears, “I want to kill my father!” ’ No, Minister, we must practice damage limitation now.”

  My father sighs in the flickering dark. “What do you suggest?”

  “Liquidation, of course.”

  My father quarter-turns. My nose! “Surely . . . not violence?”

  Akiko Kato chooses her words with the utmost care. “I foresaw this day. Plans are in place. Accidents happen easily in Tokyo, and I know people who know other people who specialize in fortuitously timed accidents. Of course, their services do not come cheaply, but precision and discretion never do.”

  I wait for my father’s reply.

  The Polonskis live in a third-floor apartment in an old townhouse. Their dining room overlooks the bleak courtyard. Mrs. Polonski has not slept properly since the bombings began. A convoy of tanks rumbles past. Mrs. Polonski slices iron bread with a blunt knife. “Are you still fretting about that Boorman prisoner?”

  “Voorman. Yes.”

  “That warden should be ashamed of himself. Piling more work on you, at a time like this. All the paperwork will land on your desk, too, of course.”

  The doctor tilts the bowl of his spoon and watches a shred of cabbage. “Oh, I’m not worried about the work. He is one of the most intriguing cases I have ever had, to be honest. I have never met such extreme megalomania in such a passive-aggressive. He is so soft-spoken.”

  “Is he mad, do you suppose?”

  “Well, he promised to make Belgium disappear by this
evening.”

  “That does not sound so passive.” Mrs. Polonski tips the rest of the broth into her bowl. “Belgium is another prisoner, I take it?”

  Polonski chews his bread absently. “Belgium.”