| Number9dream. David Mitchell |
| 1 | It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams.' Don Delillo, Americana One PANOPTICON It is a simple matter. I know your name, and you knew mine, once upon a time: Eiji Miyake. Yes, that Eiji Miyake. We are both busy people, Ms Kato, so why not cut the small talk? I am in Tokyo to find my father. You know his name and you know his address. And you are going to give me both. |
| 2 | Right now.phones. She-drones hitch up sagging voices to sound more feminine. Coffee, seafood sandwiches, detergent, steam. I have an across-the-street view of the PanOpticon's main entrance. Quite a sight, this zirconium gothic skyscraper. Its upper floors are hidden by clouds. Under its tight-fitting lid Tokyo steams –34C with 86% humidity. A big Panasonic display says so. Tokyo is so close up you cannot always see it. |
| 3 | No distances. Everything is over your head – dentists, kindergartens, dance studios. Even the roads and walkways are up on murky stilts. Venice with the water drained away. Reflected airplanes climb over mirrored buildings. I always thought Kagoshima was huge, but you could lose it down a side alley in Shinjuku. I light a cigarette – Kool, the brand chosen by a biker ahead of me in the queue – and watch the traffic and passers-by on the intersection between Omekaido Avenue and Kita Street. |
| 4 | Pin-striped drones, a lip-pierced hairdresser, midday drunks, child-laden housewives. Not a single person is standing still. Rivers, snowstorms, traffic, bytes, generations, a thousand faces per minute. Yakushima is a thousand minutes per face. All of these people with their box simpler if you would just drop by here for a sandwich and a coffee. I will recognize you, introduce myself, and persuade you that natural justice is on my side. |
| 5 | How do daydreams translate into reality? I sigh. Not very well, not every often. I will have to storm your fortress in order to get what I want. Not good. A building as huge as the PanOpticon probably has other exits, and its own restaurants. You are probably an empress by now with slaves to fetch your meals. Who says you even eat lunch? Maybe a human heart for breakfast tides you over until suppertime. |
| 6 | I entomb my Kool in the remains turned away from me, but she has the most perfect neck in all creation. Dowager is telling Donkey about her hairdresser's latest failed marriage. When his wife fails to measure up to his fantasies, he throws her overboard.' The waitress with the perfect neck is serving a life sentence at the sink. Are Dowager and Donkey cold-shouldering her, or is she cold-shouldering them? |
| 7 | Level by level, the PanOpticon disappears – the clouds are down to the eighteenth floor. The fog descends farther when I look away. I calculate the number of days I have been alive on a paper serviette – 7,290, one, I'm going into the PanOpticon. I admit I'm nervous. Nervous is cool. A recruitment officer for the Self-Defence Forces came to my high school last year, and said that no fighting unit wants people who are immune to fear – soldiers who don't feel fear get their platoon killed in the first five minutes on the battlefield. |
| 8 | A good soldier controls and uses his fear to sharpen his senses. One more coffee? No. One more Kool, to sharpen my senses. The clock touches half-past one – my deadline died. My ashtray is brimming over. I shake my cigarette box – down to my last one. The clouds are down to the PanOpticon's ninth floor. Akiko Kato gazes through her air-conned office suite window into fog. Can she sense me, as I sense her? |
| 9 | Can she tell that today is one of those mers arrive, order, drink and eat up, and leave within minutes. Decades' worth. But Lao Tzu stays put. The waitresses must imagine my girlfriend has stood me up, or else I am a psycho waiting to stalk them home. A muzak version of Imagine' comes on and John Lennon wakes up in his tomb, appalled. It is vile beyond belief. Even the traitors who recorded this horror hated it. |
| 10 | Two pregnant women enter and order iced lemon teas. Lao Tzu coughs a cough of no return, and dabs phlegm off his vidboy screen with his shirtsleeve. I drag smoke down deep and trickle it out through my nostrils. What Tokyo needs is a good flooding to clean it up. Mandolineering gondoliers punting down Ginza. Mind you,' continues Dowager to Donkey, his wives are such grasping, mincing little creatures, they deserve everything they get. |
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