Number9Dream (33 page)

Pithecanthropus grunted in amazement. ‘ScatRat!’ gasped Goatwriter as he appeared on-screen with Queen Erichnid. He leered and harpstringed his whiskers. ‘Ya can refer 2 me as “Da Artist Formerly Known as ScatRat”.’ Mrs Comb huffed and clucked. ‘But how did you get here?’

‘Being marginalized was boring! I been trucking along in ya
ing rustbucket ever since ya caveman wrecked my scatpad. Dis morning, her divine majesty’ – a twenty-four-carat smile from the queen – ‘made me an offer no honest rat could refuse – I lure ya 2 her website, and she digitalizes me into da world’s #1 computer rat!’ Queen Erichnid tousled ScatRat’s ear and his tail quivered in ecstasy.

‘But why,’ – Goatwriter chewed his beard – ‘would you voluntarily renounce your solid state for the virtual?’

‘Why?
Why
! Da Internet is my rat-run, Goatee! I lightspeed down da cables I used 2
-up my teeth chewing! Lemme cut 2 da quick. Queen Erichnid has granted ya dis audience to make ya da same offer, Goatee.’ Queen Erichnid close-upped until her kaleidoscope eyes filled the screen. ‘Indeed, o Goatwriter. I am offering to download you to the side of the screen where the future awaits! Link up with the cyberagents, the e-bookshops! The paper book is dying!’ Her hair crackled static as her voice scaled operatic heights of passion. ‘Compose your stories in a virtual paradise! I will act as your cyberagent, and—’

‘Aye,’ pecked Mrs Comb, ‘the nub!’

‘Silence, hen! Goatwriter, digitalization will perfect you! Iron out that troublesome speech d-d-defect! Sentences at the speed of light instead of the speed of amputee m-m-marathon day!’

Goatwriter glared proudly. ‘My stammer distinguishes my true friends from the false, fawners, feigners and flatterers! I refuse!’

Queen Erichnid filed her nails. ‘How very positive of you. Then I’ll digitalize you anyway, ram-raid your virtual brain, synthesize every story you could ever make, and dump the leftover bytes along with your tedious companions Mr Id and Madame Ego.’ Queen Erichnid clasped her bosom. ‘O, the advances! The royalties! ScatRat! Bring the digitalizer on-line!’ The evil queen’s image receded to allow room for the awesome half-cannon/half-generator machine that ScatRat was lugging on-screen. ‘Prepare 4 downloading, Goatee!’

Goatwriter struggled to move, but the web of cables held him fast. ‘Where is the creative fulfilment in passing off another’s stories as your own?’

Queen Erichnid looked puzzled. ‘“Fulfilment”! Writing is not about “fulfilment!” Writing is about adoration! Glamour! Awards! When I was a mere human I was deluded by “fulfilment”. I learned the language of writers, o yes – I said “coda” and “conceit” instead of “ending” and “idea”; I said “tour de force” instead of “the good bit”; “cult classic!” instead of “this tosh’ll never sell!” Did it bring me fulfilment? No! It brought me obscurity and overdrafts! But by capturing your brain, Goatwriter, the literary cosmos will be my cocktail bar! O ScatRat! Get ready to fire!’

‘On ya word, Queen!’

Goatwriter lowered his horns. ‘You forget one thing, Your Majesty!’

‘Is that pose supposed to threaten me, o farmyard animal?’

‘The riddle clause of the Evil Queen Law!’ Goatwriter quoted. ‘“Any disagreements arising between evil queen and captive shall be settled by a riddle posed to the latter party by the former. Unless this riddle clause is properly executed it is illegal to store the captive in a retrieval system, transmit said captive in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, without prior permission of captive and captive’s publishers.” Clear as a whistling thistle.’

Queen Erichnid’s wintry eye filled the screen. ‘ScatRat. Say it is not so.’

ScatRat twanged a whisker. ‘Just an old formality, Majesty. Leave it 2 me. I’ll zip 2
[email protected]
and get da number one brain /***er! Relax! Chinfluff’s in da bag! He won’t stand a
s chance in a Bangkok
.’ Queen Erichnid closed her eyes in cyberorgasmic delectation. ‘Make it so! And then his stories’ – gassy colours popped and fused – ‘soul’ – she tossed back her head – ‘film rights and book deals in twenty-seven languages’ – her laughing mouth consumed the screen and plunged the website into bronchial black – ‘will be mine! Mine! Miiiiiiiiine!’

Pithecanthropus, meanwhile, had slipped out of the wired jungle – he knew about jungles – and was exploring the edges of the cavernous website – he knew about caverns, too. He noticed that all the cables twisted into the same giant plug. Above this plug spun a ventilator fan to cool the circuits, and on the grille of this fan, hidden in a rack of Philips screwdrivers, was Goatwriter’s beloved fountain pen. Through the grille Pithecanthropus could make out, using his night eyes, a ladder in a shaft beyond. He grunted thoughtfully, but slipped back to the screen when he heard ScatRat come on-screen again. The rat appeared in a glittering quizmaster jacket, clutching an envelope marked ‘$1 million riddles$’. ‘Got it, Ya Majesty! Da riddle of da millennium!’

‘Let us be quite clear,’ said Queen Erichnid. ‘When you fail to answer, your copyright reverts to me.’

‘When Sir answers right’ – Mrs Comb shook her tail feather – ‘we go free – with Sir’s fountain pen.’

‘O, such a vivid imagination’ – Queen Erichnid sneered – ‘for a scratty-clawed home-help. ScatRat! Let the riddling commence!’

ScatRat slit the envelope open with his thorny fang. Drum-rolling cued from hidden speakers: ‘What is da most mathematical animal?’

‘By heck.’ Mrs Comb folded her wings. ‘What kind of daft quiz is this?’

ScatRat flobbed nobby gob. It dribbled down the screen. ‘Ya got 1 min, fetacheesepacker!’ A sixty-second stopwatch appeared on-screen. ‘From – now!’ Countdown music began. Goatwriter chewed his beard. ‘The most mathematical animal . . . Well, the case for humans is shattered by a minute of their television . . . Dolphins win the brain weight/body weight ratio discourse . . . However, no cleverer Euclidian geometrician exists than the bolas spider . . . yet the scallop’s knowledge of Cartesian oval lenses is unsurpassed in the kingdom of fauna . . .’ ScatRat chuckled. ‘Ya got thirty seconds!’ Queen Erichnid clapped with glee and danced a rampant rumba with her rodent rogue. ‘I can taste those publishing lunches! Hear the rapture of
New Yorker
reviewers!’ Worried, Mrs Comb searched her handbag for an inspirational snack, but all she found was an old chestnut. Pithecanthropus chose that moment to tap Mrs Comb’s wing and slip Goatwriter’s fountain pen into her handbag. In the glare of the screen Mrs Comb’s sharp eyes spotted a creature from her direst nightmare jumping between Pithecanthropus’s eyebrows. ‘Fleas!’ she shrieked. ‘I knew it! All along! Fleas!’

‘Yes, by jimminy, yes!’ clopped Goatwriter. ‘Of course! The most mathematical animal is the flea!’

Queen Erichnid’s rumba halted. ScatRat’s leer fell away. ‘Ya gotta say why or it don’t count!’

Goatwriter cleared his throat. ‘“Fleas subtract from happiness, divide attention, add to miseries and multiply alarmingly.”’

ScatRat gazed up at his screen idol. ‘Some ya win, Ya Majesty, and some ya—’

Queen Erichnid muted ScatRat with a double click. You failed me, you corrupted, bugged,
cybervermin
! Only one punishment fits this crime!’ ScatRat’s ‘nooo-ooo-ooo . . .’ dwindled to zero as the queen dragged him into the recycle bin. The queen’s ire grew dire. ‘As for
you
, o Bearded One, if you think some legal-eagle
babble
prevents me from seizing’ – her eyes narrowed with wintry menace while megabytes crackled – ‘the object of my desires, then even for a writer you are
cretinous
beyond
belief
! Stand by – for digitalization!’ She primed the on-screen digitalizer. ‘Five – four—’

‘Sir!’ Mrs Comb fluttered but was still meshed fast. ‘Sir!’

Goatwriter strained against his cable harness. ‘Deuced dastardly diabola!’

Queen Erichnid’s teeth sparkled with silicon. ‘Three – two—’

Pithecanthropus pulled out the plug.

The screen died, and the website vanished as if it had never existed, which in a sense it hadn’t, for Goatwriter, Pithecanthropus and Mrs Comb found themselves sitting in the sun-blasted desert, too astonished to utter a syllable.

17th September

A ski resort town in the Nagano Mountains

Eiji,

If you tried to contact me after I sprung myself from the clinic in Miyazaki, it was sweet of you, but I couldn’t stay there any longer. Anywhere on Kyushu is too close to Yakushima for comfort. (If you didn’t, I don’t blame you for a moment. I didn’t really expect you to.) I may have problems but the patients there were so scary I figured I’d take my chances back in the big bad world. (At least they give you knives and forks out here.) Burn the last letter I wrote. Burn it, please. I won’t ask you for a single thing but I’m asking you to do this. The only thing Dr Suzuki taught me is that there comes a point in your life, and when you pass this point you can’t change. You are what you are, for better or worse, and that is that. I shouldn’t have told you about the stairs incident. You must hate me. I would. Sometimes I honestly do. Hate myself, I mean. Be careful of counsellors, therapists, head doctors. They poke around, and take things to bits without thinking about how they’ll put it all back together. Burn the letter. Letters like that shouldn’t exist. (Especially on Yakushima.) Burn it.

So here I am in Nagano. What sunsets they make in these mountains! The hotel is at the foot of Mount Hakuba and the view from my room is swallowed up by the mountain. It needs a different word to describe it every day. You should visit Nagano, someday. In the Edo period all the missionaries from the capital used to ‘summer’ up here, to escape from the heat. I suppose we have the missionaries to thank for naming these mountains ‘the Japan Alps’. Why do people always have to compare things with abroad? (Like Kagoshima, the Naples of Japan, that always sets my teeth on edge.) Nobody knows what the locals used to call the mountains before anyone knew the Alps, or even Europe, was out there. (Am I the only one who thinks this is depressing?) I’m staying as a non-paying guest in a small hotel opened by someone I knew from my days in Tokyo, years and years ago, after I left you in the care of your grandmother. He is a big-shot hotelier now, quite respectable, except for two very expensive divorces, which I’m sure he deserves. (He changed before he reached that critical point where your life is set in concrete.) He wanted me to help scout for a location for a new hotel he wants to build from scratch, but he doesn’t know how much I drink yet, or he’s persuading himself he can ‘save’ me. His favourite two words are ‘project’ and ‘venture’, which seem to mean the same thing. The snows are due in early November (only six weeks away. Another year on its last legs). If I have spent the good-old-days currency I have with my friend by winter, I may go in search of warmer climes. (Old Chinese proverb: guests are like fish – after three days they begin to stink.) I hear Monte Carlo is pleasant for ‘wintering’. I hear Prince Charles of England may be available.