Number9Dream (17 page)

‘Sir?’

‘You are not the mousseboy who served me so
amply
at Jeremiah the Bullfrog’s, are you?’

Lie, quick! ‘Uh, true. I’m his brother. He got sick. But he didn’t want to let down the crew, so he sent me instead.’ Not bad.

‘How sup
rem
ely sacri
fic
ial.’ Master advances. Not good.

The door touches my back. ‘My pleasure,’ I say. Do I hear banging?

‘
My
pleasure.
Mine
, I tell you. Touch it. Mousse is springy.’

I see my face in the black glass of his mask wondering what the mousseboy is supposed to do exactly. ‘You are the best in the business, Master.’ Sudden commotion is loose in the kitchen. No way around him to the yard door. Master pants. I smell liver pâté on his breath. ‘Tweak it. Mousse is delicate. Slice it. Oh yes. Mousse is soft. So soft. Sniff it. Mousse will yield. Oh yes. Mousse
will
yield.’ Four fat fingers swim towards my face.

A shout.
‘Oy!
’

‘Irksome. Irksome.’ Master lifts up a tiny curtain next to my head that covers a peep-hole. His mouth stiffens. He picks up his cleaver, knocks me aside, flings the door open, and barges through. ‘Whorehouse vermin!’ he screams. ‘You have been warned!’ I glimpse Mr Sumo throwing assistant chefs over counters. ‘You have been warned!’ shouts Master. ‘You have been warned what happens to pimps from the dark side who bring herpes and syphilis on to my spotless ship!’ He hurls his cleaver. No point hanging around to examine the damage – I am out through the door, running up the steps, leaping over the plastic garbage bags, scattering through the crows, sprinting across the back yard, down a side street, and I don’t stop zigzagging and checking behind me until seven-thirty.

At seven-forty I suddenly know where I am. Omekaido Avenue. That zirconium skyscraper is PanOpticon. I walk a little farther towards Shinjuku and get to the intersection with Kita Street. Jupiter Café. The morning is already shallow-frying. I check my money. If walk back to Ueno, I can afford my submarine back to Kita Senju and buy a light breakfast. So light it would blow away if I sneezed.

Jupiter Café is air-conned soggy cool. I buy coffee and a pineapple muffin, sit at my window seat and examine my ghostly reflection in the window: a twenty-year-old Eiji Miyake, hair matted with sweat, smelling of dope and shrimpish sex, and sporting – I see to my horror – a lovebite the size of Africa over my Adam’s apple. My complexion has completed its metamorphosis from Kyushu tan to drone-paste. The waitress with the most perfect neck isn’t working this morning – if she saw me in this condition, I would give a howl, age nine centuries and desiccate into a mound of dandruff and fingernails. The only other customer is a woman studying a fashion magazine with a toolbox of make-up. I vow never to mentally stroke another woman again, ever. I savour my pineapple muffin and watch the media screen on the NHK building. Missile launchers recoil, cities on fire. A new Nokia cellphone. Foreign affairs minister announces putative WW2 Nanking excesses are left-wing plots to destroy patriotism. Zizzi Hikaru washes her hair in Pearl River shampoo. Fly-draped skeletons stalk an African city. Nintendo proudly presents
Universal Soldiers
. The kid who hijacked a coach and slit three throats says he did it to stand out. I watch the passing traffic, until I hear a hacking cough. I never noticed Lao Tzu appear. He takes out a pack of Parliament cigarettes, but has lost his lighter. ‘Hello again, Captain.’ I lend him my lighter. ‘Morning.’ He notices my lovebite, but says nothing. In front of him is a flip-up video game screen, book-sized but designed in the twenty-third century. ‘Brand-new vidboy3 – ten thou by ten thou res, four gigabytes, wraparound sonics, Socrates artifical intelligence chip. Software was only launched last week:
Virtua Sapiens
. A present from my daughter-in-law.’ Lao Tzu shifts on his stool. ‘On doctor’s orders, to stave off senility.’ I slide the ashtray between us. ‘That’s nice of her.’ Lao Tzu flicks ash. ‘You call getting my cretin son to sell off my rice-fields to a supermarket owner
nice
? So much for filial duty! I let the brat have the land to stop the tax wolves attacking when I die and
this
’ – he prods the machine – ‘is how I get repaid. I got to go shake the hose – you get leaky at my age. Care for a test drive while I’m gone?’ He slides his vidboy3 over the counter towards me, and wanders off to the bathroom. I take off my baseball cap, plug myself in and press RUN. The screen clears.

Well, excuseme. Please hold still for three seconds while I digitalize your face
. An eye icon blinks and a microlens built into the screen frame blinks red.
Okay
now hold extra still while I register your retina
. One wall, a floor and a ceiling appear. A whirlpool carpet bitmaps the floor. Pin-stripes unroll up the walls. A window appears, with a view of plum blossoms tossing in a spring storm. Curtains of rain blur the glass. I even hear the raindrops, ever so faint. The room is gloomy. A lamp appears on the left and glows cosy yellow. A see-through sofa appears under the window. The sofa is inked in with zigzags. And in the centre of the sofa appears my father, right foot folded on left knee, which looks cool but cannot be comfortable. The program has given him my nose and mouth, but made him jowlier and thinned his hair. His eyes are those of a mad scientist on the eve of world domination. His wrinkles are symmetrical. He is wearing a black dressing gown – he sort of glows, as if he got out of the bath five minutes ago. My father leans over to screen right, where a wine-bucket appears – he slides the bottle out and reads the label. ‘Chablis, 1993.’ A crisp, clear, even voice, perfect for weather forecasting. He pours himself a glass, makes a great show of savouring the bouquet, and sort of snorts it through his lips. He winks. An enamel smile flashes. ‘Welcome home, son. Refresh my memory, will you – how long has it been?’

His eyebrows shoot up. ‘Such a long time? Time flies like an arrow! What a lot of news we have to catch up. But you and I will get on like a house on fire. So tell me about school, son.’

He sips his wine, slooshing it around his tongue, and runs a hand back through his hair. ‘Is that so, son?’ He leans towards the screen between us. The resolution is amazing – I flinch back. ‘So you must be at university, right? Is that a cafeteria I see in the background?’

My father reclines, and lounges a lazy arm over the back of the sofa. ‘Is that so, son? That strikes me as a pity. Education is a wonderful thing. So how do you spend your time exactly?’

His eyebrows shoot up. ‘Is that a fact, son? Tell me. Are you a successful rock star, with fame and fortune, or are you one of the unwashed millions still waiting for your lucky break to come along?’

He winks and flashes and enamel smile. ‘I know meeting your old man after all this time is tough, son, but honesty is always the best policy. If you are such a big noise in the entertainment world, how come I never heard of you from
Time
magazine?’

He knocks back the rest of his wine. ‘It isn’t that I don’t believe you, son, but could you tell me your alias? I want to boast about my rock star son to my buddies – and bank manager!’

My father slaps his knee. ‘The real John Lennon was assassinated by Mark Chapman in 1980, therefore I know you are pulling my leg!’

He comes over all serious, and puts down his glass. ‘Time for a father and son heart-to-heart, is it? We don’t have to be afraid of our feelings any more. Tell me what’s on your mind.’

‘Your father, son!’

My father refills his glass. Lightning fuses the sky, the plum blossom scratches the window pane, and the purple on grey is transformed to black on titanium white. I guess the program needs more time to respond to unlikely or general questions. My father chuckles and places his feet together. ‘Well, son, that is one big question. Where would you like me to begin?’

My father rests his left foot on his right knee. ‘Let me see. I’m Japanese, fifty next birthday. By profession I am an actor. My hobbies are snorkelling and wine appreciation. But fear not – all these details will come to light as our relationship unfolds, and I trust you’ll be visiting again soon! I would like to introduce you to a special person. What do you say?’

The screen scrolls to the right, past the wine bucket. A woman – in her late thirties? – sits on the floor, smoking, humming snatches of ‘Norwegian Wood’ between drags. She is wrapped in a man’s shirt, and black leggings hug her shapely legs. Long hair flows down to her waist. She has my eyes. ‘Hi, Eiji.’ Her voice is tender and pleased to see me. ‘Can you guess whom I might be?’

She smiles at my father and puts out her cigarette. ‘I see you have your father’s sense of humour. I’m your mother.’

The program processes this unexpected input while the storm head-butts the window. My mum lights another cigarette. ‘Well, we had a few fences to mend, I admit. But now we get on like a house on fire.’

‘That hurts, Eiji.’ My virtual mother turns away and sobs alarmingly like my real one, a sort of dry, hidden quaking. I am typing in an apology, but my father responds first. He speaks in a slow and threatening thespian lilt. ‘This is a home, young man, not a hotel! If you can’t keep a civil tongue in your head, you know where the door is!’ What a pair of virtual parents the program generated for me! They are thinking, what a virtual son reality generated for us. The plum blossoms suffer wear and tear in the unseasonal weather.

‘Hello? Wakey! Anybody home?’ A man in Jupiter Café shouts so loudly he drowns out the sound of the virtual rainstorm. ‘Wrong change, girlie!’ I unplug myself and turn around to see what the fuss is about. A grizzly drone in a stained shirt snarls at the girl with the most perfect neck in creation – when did she get here? She stares back, surprised but unfazed. Donkey is washing dishes, staying out of trouble, while my girl struggles to be polite with this human hog. ‘You only gave me a five-thousand-yen note, sir.’

‘Listen to me, girlie! I gave you a ten-thousand-yen note! Not five! Ten!’

‘Sir, I am quite sure—’

He rears up on his two hind legs. ‘You accusing me of lying, girlie?’

‘No, sir, but I am saying you are mistaken.’

‘You a feminist? Short-changing ’cos you’re frigid?’

The queue of customers ruffles uneasily, but nobody says anything.

‘Sir, I—’

‘I gave you a ten-thousand, you abortion bucket! Correct change!
Now!
’

She pings open the till. ‘Sir, there isn’t even a ten-thousand note in here.’

Hog slavers and twitches his tusks. ‘So! You steal from the till as well!’

Maybe I am still semi-stoned from the hash, or maybe
Virtua Sapiens
reshuffled my sense of reality, but I find myself walking over and tapping the guy on his shoulder. He turns around. His mouth is one bent sneer. Hog is larger than I thought, but it is too late to back out so I attack first and hardest. I douse his face with coffee and head-butt his nose, really,
really
hard. Christmas lights flicker in my eyes – Hog backs off, leaking a bubbly ‘Aaaaaaaaa’ noise. Blood trickles from his nose through his fingers. I steady myself and my hand gropes for something to brandish. The pain in my forehead crushes my voice jagged. ‘Get out
right now
or I’ll
smash
your
fricking teeth
into
tiny fricking splinters
with’ – I look at what I’m holding – ‘this ashtray!’ I must look deranged enough to mean business – after wheezing about police and assault in a beaky voice, Hog retreats. The customers look on. Lao Tzu pats my shoulder. ‘Neat work, Captain.’ Donkey comes over to her co-worker, all concern. ‘Are you okay? I didn’t know what was going on . . .’ The waitress with the perfect neck slams shut the till, and glares at me. ‘I could have handled him.’