Slum Online (14 page)

The street fight, the chase through Sanchōme. There wasn’t any doubt. I had finally found Ganker Jack.

Tonight’s score: 0 wins, 0 losses.

CHAPTER 8

A LISTLESS BREEZE BLEW THROUGH SHINJUKU over the sickening heat of sunlit asphalt. Tall buildings walled in the city like the sides of some giant wine bottle. The thick air was the cloudy dregs of the wine clinging to the back of my neck.

I walked along Ome Highway toward school. It was 9:42
AM
. I checked the bulletin board before heading to my logic class. In the room, I threaded my way between the downturned heads of students diligently taking notes and sat down in the dim seat by the wall, seven rows from the front.

“You’re late.” Fumiko cast a withering glance in my direction from the corner of her eye.

“Sorry.” I fought back a yawn. “What color today?”

“Orange. You’re really slacking off, you know that?” she added before melting back into the note-scribbling masses.

Another yawn rose in my throat, but with Herculean effort, I suppressed it. I hadn’t gotten nearly enough sleep over the past few days. I rested my cheek on the cool desktop.

The sound FX of a dawn redwood rustling in the wind.

The sound FX of a truck trundling along Ome Highway.

The sound FX of Fumiko’s eraser attacking her paper.

The world was filled with sound FX. But just then, I didn’t have the energy to care. Even without earbuds, the noise washing over me remained distant.

I took an orange attendance card out of my pencil case and shut my eyes.

“You feeling okay?”

My eyes opened at the sound of Fumiko’s voice. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

“You were out cold.”

I lifted my head and looked around the room. The only people left were a handful of chatting students, Fumiko, and me. Of Uemura the Elder, there was no sign. The sea of gently bobbing heads had vanished without a trace.

“Did the bell ring?”

“About ten minutes ago.”

“I must not have heard it.”

“Obviously.”

“But I always hear it…” I rubbed my eyes. No matter how tired I was, I always woke at the first chirp from my digital clock. The sound of my dad flushing the toilet in the morning would wake me up. I had to close the shutters on my window to keep out the noise from the busy street in front of our house, or that would wake me up too.

“You’ve been playing that game again.”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t see what’s so fun about it.” There was something peculiar in her voice.

I ran my fingers through my hair. It was still warm from the nap. “It’s not about having fun.”

“Then what is it about?”

“Blocking out the noise.”

“That again.” She raised her eyebrows and let out a long, deep sigh. “Better hurry or we’ll be late for the next class.”

Fumiko dragged me by the bag strap to our political economy class. The air in the halls was cool. Sunlight bathed the campus. We sat in the same seats we always did, seven rows from the front. The familiar bell sound FX signaled the start of class, and Fumiko took her glasses out of their plastic case with Pavlovian timing. I was drifting, only halfway in the real world. There was a haze in my head that wouldn’t clear.

The next day I managed a little time for myself between classes, so I went out into Shinjuku. For most people, Shinjuku was a place they came to accomplish some particular task. Some came in search of material things, or entertainment, or pleasure, and others came to provide them. The pimps and recruiters looking for girls to star in cheap adult videos were always busy. The only people without anything to do were college students like me and Fumiko, and the homeless.

Fumiko would probably get upset at being grouped with me. After all, she had her blue cat of happiness to look for.

From the outside looking in, I didn’t have the vaguest notion whether she was shopping or looking for that cat. Like most women, she preferred being in nice, pretty places. If the cat she was looking for really was a ghost, it seemed unlikely to turn up in the accessories department of the Takashimaya Times Square department store, but she insisted otherwise. She gave the homeless man outside a wide berth. He was standing by the entrance to one of the many tunnels that crisscrossed beneath the city streets. Admittedly, by June most homeless gave off a fairly aromatic bouquet. Harmless as they were, I could hardly blame Fumiko for wanting to avoid them, but if you asked me where I thought we were more likely to turn up leads on the cat, the squalid back streets seemed more promising.

People who lived in RL didn’t stand around waiting to spill their innermost secrets to you the moment you walked up, so I was only marking off the areas—not the people—on my map as “checked.” As I ticked off one graph paper box after another, it occurred to me that the heroes in all those role-playing games must be extremely sociable. The emphasis of the games was always on the challenge of vanquishing some great evil, but maybe what really made a hero was his uncanny ability to glean information from the local villagers. The villagers in RL tended to scurry off to their jobs and whatnot without a word. Not that I was much of a hero. I was probably closer to being an NPC—call me Villager A.

That day I spied a villager in front of the arcade near Shinjuku Koma Theater who looked as though she might have some morsel of information. She wasn’t made-up. Her reddish brown hair was disheveled. The shawl—or was it a cloak?—draped over her shoulders streamed lazily behind her in the damp air. The bat lady. She was buying canned coffee from a vending machine. Two cans.

Passing through the sliding glass doors, I followed her into the arcade. As I walked inside, a slightly cooler but still humid mass of air poured over me, its fragrance a blend of molding carpet, plastic rubbed smooth, and rusted coins. Removing my earbuds, I moved deeper into the arcade. A tsunami of game music and sound FX so violent I could almost see the sound waves crashed over my body and broke against my eardrums.

Several patrons were already inside. One sat at a strip mahjong game. Win a game and you got to see a famous porn star in all her glory. Another sat at an electronic card game examining a hand of digital cards. Both were dressed in suit and tie. The man playing the card game had tossed his bright red tie over his shoulder and was staring intently at the screen. From time to time he would mop sweat from his brow with a handkerchief, check the cards in his digital hand, and then mop his brow again.

The bat lady wasn’t playing games. She was sitting with her legs crossed beside a machine at the back of the arcade. The same machine that had gotten me into a back alley fight with a couple of guys I’d never seen before in my life because Fumiko wanted revenge. It was the latest iteration of the
Versus Town
arcade game.

Someone else was playing the game. I passed behind the man playing the card game and looked at the screen out of the corner of my eye. He wasn’t very good, and that was putting it nicely. To put it less nicely, watching him maneuver was the visual equivalent of fingernails on a chalkboard.

A row of hundred-yen coins sat lined up on the face of the machine. The guy was getting a new game over screen every minute or two, but it didn’t stop him from dropping in the next coin and trying again. The bat lady didn’t seem to be in a hurry to take over for him.

She noticed me and waved me over. I walked closer.

The man sitting at the machine was old. His gray hairs far outnumbered the black. He was neatly dressed and groomed, and he didn’t look like someone who would be in an arcade at this hour—or any hour—of the day. He spoke above the din.

“Hey, Lui.”

“Yes, sir?”

“I pushed the red button, but he didn’t punch.”

“You have to push the green button first. You want to press the green button once, then the red one twice, and then the blue one twice.”

“I thought the green button was for blocking.”

“That’s right, but you also use it to cancel a move you already started. Since you buffered a throw break on the back of your last attack, you needed to cancel everything to clear your commands and start over.” She knew her stuff, but it was all going right over the old man’s head. “Here, let me show you.”

The bat lady the old man had called Lui took his place at the controls. An eagle claw appeared in the middle of the screen. When the computer-controlled character attacked, Lui pressed the green button once, the red button twice, and then the blue button twice. Her hands moved quickly, but not so much that it was unclear what she was doing. Had she input the commands any slower, the combo wouldn’t have registered. The move was exquisitely timed. The old man gave an involuntary cry of admiration.

Her style of play seemed strangely familiar.

Girl gamers were a rare breed. The vast majority of us were guys. This was especially true in
Versus Town
, a game which was very unforgiving. There were plenty of female characters, sure, but 99 percent of them were being played by men. They didn’t do it to pretend to be women; it was nothing that Freudian. It was a question of what you preferred staring at all day. Besides, even if they looked like women, the moment they opened their mouths they wouldn’t be fooling anybody.

Bedlam erupted whenever people found out that a female character was actually being played by a girl. There were always one or two players too socially challenged to handle direct contact with members of the opposite sex, and the others would have to step in and throw virtual buckets of cold water on them. It wasn’t that the men who played online games formed some sort of anti-stalker brigade, but when the male to female ratio was that out of whack to begin with, special measures to maintain the social order rose of their own accord. Women like Lui who played online games often pretended to be men to avoid the whole issue.

The old man had taken up the controls again. I spoke to Lui in a low voice.

“What’s going on? Why did you call him ‘sir’?”

“He’s the president of a big company. Or used to be, anyway. He’s one of our regulars. Started coming by about two years ago. The only thing he can get his grandson to do with him is play video games.”

“You play
VT
.” It wasn’t a question.

There was a long pause before she said, “Alas, I am sworn to secrecy.” She winked at me. Not a lot of people talked like that, but I could think of one person who did.

“You gotta be kidding.”

Lui shrugged indifferently. I started to ask her another question, but she raised her index finger and pressed it gently against her lips. “Best not to mix realities. What’s real is real.

What’s not is not. Right?”

The old man finished playing. He was breathing so hard you’d have thought he’d just run a marathon. “I don’t understand,”

he panted. “What do kids see in these games?”

“It’s a place where they can rebel, sir. A place where they’re not separated into adults and children, rich and poor. You must remember what that was like.”

“A video game rebellion,” he muttered to himself.

“Social revolution, the internal violence of the student movement,” Lui said. “When you get down to it, they didn’t result in any real change. It’s all make-believe. But finding people you can share a common language with? That’s real.”

“Hmm. Never thought of it that way.” There was a hint of awe in his voice.

Staring into the screen, his eyes transformed from those of an old toothless dog into a bird of prey. The game he’d seen as nothing more than a way of getting his grandson’s attention had suddenly taken on a new meaning, one to which he could relate. He removed his bifocals from his breast pocket and leaned in to read the basic moves written on the control panel with newfound enthusiasm.

I leaned over to Lui and whispered, “Rebellion? Social revolution?”

“I was interpreting. All the explanations in the world won’t do any good if he doesn’t understand them.”

“Wow. I’m impressed.”

“It’s something you learn to do in my line of work. You have to be able to talk your way into someone’s trust when you’re making a pitch.” Her voice rang with pride. “Not the sort of thing you learn from a textbook.”