She considers opening the latest from her mother, but decides it might be too much, after that waking reverie. It often is.
Downstairs, in the business center, an exquisite girl in something like the Miyake version of an office lady uniform inkjets the Keiko image on a stiff sheet of superglossy eight-and-a-half by eleven.
The image embarrasses Cayce, but the pretty OL exhibits no reaction at all. Emboldened, Cayce has her print out Darryl’s kanji as well, requests a thick black marker, and asks the girl to copy it, inscribing the photograph for her.
“We need it for a shoot,” she lies by way of explanation. Unnecessarily, because the girl considers whatever it says there, calmly judges the available space on the photo, and executes a very lively looking version, complete with exclamation marks. Then she pauses, the marker still poised.
“Yes?” Cayce asks.
“Pardon me, but would be good with Happy Face?”
“Please.”
The girl quickly adds a Happy Face, caps the marker, hands the photograph to Cayce with both hands, and bows.
“Thank you very much.”
“You are welcome.” Bowing again.
Walking past the bamboo grove in the sky-high lobby she catches a glimpse of her hair in a mirrored wall.
Speed-dials Jennifer Brossard.
“It’s Cayce. I need my hair cut.”
“When?”
“Now.”
“Got a pen?”
Twenty minutes later, in Shibuya, she’s settling in to a hot-rocks massage that she hasn’t asked for, in a twilit room on the fifteenth floor of a cylindrical building that vaguely resembles part of a Wurlitzer jukebox. None of these women speak English but she’s decided just to go with the program, whatever it is, and count on getting her hair cut at some point in the process.
Which she does, in great and alien luxury, for the better part of four hours, though it proves to involve a kelp wrap, a deep facial, manifold tweezings and pluckings, a manicure, a pedicure, lower-leg wax, and close-call avoidance of a bikini job.
When she tries to pay with the Blue Ant card, they giggle and wave it away. She tries again and one of them points to the card’s Blue Ant logo. Either Blue Ant has an account, she decides, or they do Blue Ant’s models and this is a freebie.
Walking back out into Shibuya sunlight, she feels simultaneously lighter and less intelligent, as though she’s left more than a few brain cells back there with the other scruff. She’s wearing more makeup than she’d usually apply in a month, but it’s been brushed on by Zen-calm professionals, swaying to some kind of Japanese Enya-equivalent.
The first mirror she sees herself in stops her. Her hair, she has to admit, is really something, some paradoxical state between sleek and tousled. Anime hair, rendered hi-rez.
The rest of the image isn’t working, though. The standard CPUs can’t stand up to this sushi-chef level of cosmetic presentation.
She opens and closes her mouth, afraid to lick her lips. She has their repair kit in with the laptop, probably hundreds of dollars’ worth of that other kind of Mac product, but she knows she’ll never get it on again like this.
But there, just down the block, is one or another branch of Parco, any of which houses enough micro-boutiques to make Fred Segal on Melrose look like an outlet store in Montana.
Less than an hour later she emerges from Parco wearing the tape-patched Rickson’s, a black knit skirt, black cotton sweater, black Fogal tights that she suspects cost half a month’s rent on her place in New York, and a black pair of obscurely retro French suede boots that definitely did. She has the CPUs she was wearing folded into a big Parco carrier bag, and the laptop in a graphite-colored, hip-hugging piece of ergonomic body luggage, with a single wide strap that passes diagonally between her breasts and lends the sweater a little help, that way.
Conversion to CPU status has been conferred with the aid of a seam ripper from the notions section of a branch of Muji, located on the eighth floor, leaving all the labels behind. All but the very small label on the hip bag, which simply says LUGGAGE LABEL. She might even be able to live with that. She’ll have to see.
All of this on Bigend’s card. She’s not sure how she feels about that, but she supposes she’ll find out.
There’s a coffee place directly across the street, a two-story Starbucks clone in which everyone seems to be chain-smoking. She buys a glass of iced tea, blinks at tiny individual containers of liquid sugar and lemon juice (why didn’t we think of that?), and makes her way to the second floor, where fewer people are smoking.
She settles at a Scandinavian-looking counter of pale wood that runs the length of a window overlooking the street and the entrance to Parco, and unpacks the laptop, phone, and manuals. She’s not one of those people who won’t ever read the manual, although she’ll skip it if she can. Ten minutes of concerted attention has F:F:F on the screen, wireless fully effected, so she sweetens her lemon tea and checks out the action. She knows this stage, after a new segment turns up: Everyone’s had a chance to view it repeatedly, and brainstorm, and now the more personal, more deeply felt interpretations are emerging.
She looks down into the street, where odd-sized vehicles break the flow of spotless but otherwise non-foreign-looking cars (so many cars everywhere being Japanese) and sees a silver scooter go past, its driver wearing a matching silver helmet with a mirrored visor and what she recognizes as an M-1951 U.S. Army fishtail parka, an embroidered red-white-and-blue RAF roundel on its back, like a target. Flashing back to that morning in Soho, the window of the mod shop, before her Blue Ant meeting.
It’s somehow her nature, she thinks, to pick out this one detail, this errant meme: a British military symbol re-purposed by postwar style-warriors, and recontextualized again, here, via cross-cultural echo. But the rider has it right: the ’51 fishtail is the one.
She checks her mail. Parkaboy.
I hear, o Mistress Muji.
This startles her, just having been there, but then she remembers that Parkaboy knows she likes Muji because nothing there ever has a logo. She’s told him about the logo problem.
Where are you exactly? Near as I can make out, Taki’s day job is in Shinjuku. He proposes to meet you in Roppongi, early evening. I’ve told him you are going to convey Keiko’s regards, and give him something she’s sent specially for him. You are a teacher, though not one of hers, a recent friend, and have been helping her with her English. And, of course, a footagehead, which he knows, as Keiko is a footagehead too. Keiko has implied that your getting the number could, in some unspecified way, help her academically. He knows you don’t speak Japanese, but claims to have enough English for an encounter of this sort. Whoo. I say whoo because we have been working very hard, Darryl and I, being Keiko. I think we have gotten it across that he really should give you that number, if he wants to encourage further interaction with her. Am assuming you will be up for that, even tho there on biz, but keep that cell on. I’ll call you as soon as we have a time and place, and e-mail a map that Taki says he’s going to e-mail Keiko.
She shuts down, closes the laptop, unhooks the phone, and repacks everything. The smoke is getting to her. She looks around. Every man there has obviously been staring, but immediately looks down or away.
She takes a last sip of sweet iced tea and swings down off the stool, Velcroing the Luggage Label back across her shoulder, picking up the Parco bag, and hitting the stairs to the street.
SOUL -delay plays tricks with subjective time, expanding or telescoping it at seeming random. That big beauty brain session in Shibuya, all that making her fanny fabulous, and the shopping in Parco after it, had seemed to take the full five hours it had taken, but the rest, drifting from one personal landmark to the next, by cab and on foot, seem now, in the Hello Kitty section of Kiddyland, to have collapsed into a single moment of undifferentiated Japanese Stuff.
And why, she wonders, gazing blankly at more Hello Kitty regalia than seems possible, do Japanese franchises like
Hello Kitty not trigger interior landslide, panic attack, the need to invoke the duck in the face?
She doesn’t know. It just doesn’t. No more than does Kogepan, the clueless-looking homunculus, whose name, she vaguely recalls, means “burnt toast.” The Kogepan goods are arrayed beyond Hello Kitty, a franchise that has never quite found Hello Kitty’s global legs. One can buy Kogepan purses, fridge magnets, pens, lighters, hair brushes, staplers, pencil boxes, knapsacks, watches, figurines. Beyond Kogepan lies the franchise of that depressive-looking boneless panda and her cubs. And none of this stuff, purest no-content marketing, triggers Cayce in the least.
But something is making a strange and annoying sound, even above the low-level electronic uproar of Kiddyland, and eventually she realizes that it’s her phone.
“Hello?”
“Cayce? Parkaboy.” He sounds quite unlike he “sounds” on the screen, whatever that means. Older? Different.
“How are you?”
“Still awake,” he says.
“What time is it there?”
“What day, you mean,” he corrects her. “I’d rather not tell you. I might start to cry. But never mind. You’re on. He wants to meet you in a bar in Roppongi. I think it’s a bar. Says there’s no name in English, just red lanterns.”
“A nomiya.”
“This guy’s got me feeling like I live there, and I’m tired of it already. Darryl and I, we’re like those Mars Rover jockeys: virtual jet lag. Tokyo time and we’re trying to hold down paying jobs in two different time zones back here. So Taki’s sent Keiko a map, right? And I’ve sent it to you, and he says six thirty.”
“Will I recognize him?”
“What we’ve seen of him, he’s not Ryuichi Sakamoto. Mind you, that’s not what Keiko thinks. She’s practically told him she’ll fork over the booty as soon as she gets home.”
She winces. This aspect of what she’s up to here makes her extremely uncomfortable.
“But he’ll give me the number?”
“I think so. If he doesn’t, no pic of Keiko.”
“You, I mean she, told him that?” She likes this part of it even less.
“No, of course not. That’s a love-offering, something to hold him till she gets the booty back to Tokyo. But you’ve got to get that number. Make it clear.”
“How?”
“Play it by ear.”
“Thanks.”
“You want to get to the bottom of this little footage thing, don’t you?”
“You’re implacable.”
“So are you. It’s why we get along. I’m going to eat this whole bag of chocolate-covered espresso beans now, and sit here grinding my teeth flat until I hear from you.”
He hangs up.
She stares back at all those eyes: Hello Kitty and Kogepan and the boneless pandas.
17.
MAKING MAYHEM
Walking up Roppongi Dori from the ANA Hotel, where she’s had the cab drop her, into the shadow of the multi-tiered expressway that looks like the oldest thing in town. Tarkovsky, someone had once told her, had filmed parts of Solaris here, using the expressway as found Future City.
Now it’s been Blade Runnered by half a century of use and pollution, edges of concrete worn porous as coral. Dusk comes early, under here, and she spies signs of homeless encampment: plastic-wrapped blankets tucked back into an uncharacteristically littered scrim of struggling municipal shrubs. Vehicles blast past, overhead, a constant drumming of displaced air, particulates sifting invisibly.
Roppongi she remembers as not so nice a place, one of those inter-zones, a border town of sorts, epicenter of the Bubble’s cross-cultural sex trade. She’d gone here with crowds, to bars that were hot then but now likely weren’t, but always there’d been an edge of some meanness she hadn’t noticed elsewhere in town.
She pauses, aware of the plastic handle of the Parco bag. It’s been rubbing against her palm for hours. It feels wrong, for a meeting. Nothing in it but third-best skirt, tights, shrunken black Fruit. She slides it between two ragged bushes bonsai’d by the expressway’s shadow, leaving it there, and walks on.
Out of the shadow and up the hill, into actual evening and Roppongi proper. Checking the napkin map copied earlier from laptop screen. Parkaboy had forwarded Taki’s segment of a Tokyo map. X marks the spot. One of the little streets behind the main drag. She remembers these as being either glossy or shabby, depending on the business done there.
Shabby, it turns out, after a twenty-minute wander, orienting to the napkin, and at one point spotting Henry Africa’s in the distance, that ex-pat bar she remembers, though that’s not where she’s heading.
Where she’s heading, she now sees, scoping it sidewise as she reconnoiters past, is one of those apparently nameless little red-lantern pub-analogs they have here, places where tourists generally don’t drink. Set into ground-floor walls in back lanes like this one. Their bare-bones decor or lack of it reminding her of a certain kind of functionally alcoholic corner lounge in lower Manhattan, now nearing extinction as the city’s ley lines shifted further still, initially in response to a decade’s Disneyfication and now to a deeper whammy.
She glimpses, past a dingy noren in an open doorway, empty chrome stools of the soda-fountain spin-around kind, but very low, fronting an equally low bar. Their red upholstery split and bulging. Patched, like her jacket, with peeling tape.
She sighs, squares her shoulders, turns around, and ducks past the noren, into an ancient, complexly layered, and somehow not unpleasant odor of fried sardines, beer, and cigarettes.
No trouble recognizing Taki. He’s the sole customer. Rising and bowing, tomato-faced with reflexive embarrassment, to greet her.
“You must be Taki. I’m Cayce Pollard. Keiko’s friend from California.”
He blinks earnestly, through dandruff-dusted lenses, and bobs there, uncertain whether he should resume his seat. She pulls out the chair opposite him, removes her bag and the Rickson’s, hangs them across the back, and seats herself.
Taki sits down. He has an open bottle of beer in front of him. He blinks, saying nothing.
She’d gone back and looked at Parkaboy’s initial explanation of Taki again, after she’d sketched the map on a napkin:
Taki, as he prefers we call him, claims to orbit a certain otaku-coven in Tokyo, a group that knows itself as “Mystic,” though its members never refer to it that way in public, nor indeed refer to it at all. It is these Mystic wonks, according to Taki, who have cracked the watermark on #78. This segment, according to Taki, is marked with a number of some kind, which he claims to have seen, and know.
What she’s confronted with here, she decides, is an extreme example of Japanese geek culture. Taki is probably the kind of guy who knows everything there is to know about one particular Soviet military vehicle, or whose apartment is lined with unopened plastic models.
He seems to be breathing through his mouth.
Catching the eye of the barman, she points to a poster advertising Asahi Lite and nods.
“Keiko’s told me a lot about you,” she says, trying to get into character, but this only seems to make him more uncomfortable. “But I don’t think she’s told me what it is that you do.”
Taki says nothing.
Parkaboy’s faith, that Taki has enough English to handle the transaction, may be unfounded.
And here she is, halfway around the world, trying to swap a piece of custom-made pornography for a number that might mean nothing at all.
He sits there, mouth-breathing, and Cayce is wishing she were anywhere else, anywhere at all.
He’s in his mid-twenties, she guesses, and slightly overweight. He has a short, nondescript haircut that manages to stick up at several odd angles. Cheap-looking black-framed glasses. His blue button-down shirt and colorless checked sport coat look as though they’ve been laundered but never ironed.
He isn’t, as Parkaboy has indicated, the best-looking guy she’s recently had a drink with. Though that, come to th
ink of it, would be Bigend. She winces.
“I do?” Responding perhaps to the wince.
“Your job?”
The barman places her beer on the table.
“Game,” Taki manages. “I design game. For mobile phone.”
She smiles, she hopes encouragingly, and sips her Asahi Lite. She’s feeling more guilty by the minute. Taki—she hasn’t gotten his last name and probably never will—has big dark semicircles of anxiety sweat under the arms of his button-down shirt. His lips are wet and probably tend to spray slightly when he speaks. If he were any more agonized to be here, he’d probably just curl up and die.
She wishes she hadn’t had all this fabulous fanny stuff done, and bought these clothes. It hadn’t been for him, but really she hadn’t imagined she’d be dealing with anyone with this evident a social deficit. Maybe if she were looking plainer he wouldn’t be as spooked. Or maybe he would.
“That’s interesting,” she lies. “Keiko told me you know a lot, about computers and things.”
Now it’s his turn to wince, as if struck, and knocks back the remainder of his beer. “Things? Keiko? Says?”
“Yes. Do you know ‘the footage’?”
“Web movie.” He looks even more desperate now. The heavy glasses, lubricated with perspiration, slide inexorably down his nose. She resists an urge to reach over and push them back up.
“You . . . know Keiko?” He winces again, getting it out.
She feels like applauding. “Yes! She’s wonderful! She asked me to bring you something.” She’s suddenly experiencing full-on London-Tokyo soul-displacement, less a wave than the implosion of an entire universe. She imagines climbing over the bar, past the barman with his pockmarked, oddly convex face, and down behind it, where she might curl up behind a scrim of bottles and attain a state of absolute stasis, for weeks perhaps.