“But there are representatives of the Crips here,” Hiro says, thinking very, very fast even by his standards, “and if your performance is well received, as I’m quite certain it will be, they will spread the word throughout their community.”
Sushi K rolls down the window. The decibel level quintuples in an instant. He stares at the crowd, five thousand potential market shares, young people with funkiness on their minds. They’ve never heard any music before that wasn’t perfect. It’s either studio-perfect digital sound from their CD players or performance-perfect fuzzgrunge from the best people in the business, the groups that have come to L.A. to make a name for themselves and have actually survived the gladiatorial combat environment of the clubs. Sushi K’s face lights up with a combination of joy and terror. Now he actually has to go up there and do it. In front of the seething biomass.
Hiro goes out and paves the way for him. That’s easy enough. Then he bails. He’s done his bit. No point in wasting time on this puny Sushi K thing when Raven is out there, representing a much larger source of income. So he wanders back out toward the periphery.
“Yo! Dude with the swords,” someone says.
Hiro turns around, sees a green-jacketed Enforcer motioning to him. It’s the short, powerful guy with the headset, the guy in charge of the security detail.
“Squeaky,” he says, extending his hand.
“Hiro,” Hiro says, shaking it, and handing over his business card. No particular reason to be coy with these guys. “What can I do for you, Squeaky?”
Squeaky reads the card. He has a kind of exaggerated politeness that is kind of like a military man. He’s calm, mature, role-modelesque, like a high school football coach. “You in charge of this thing?”
“To the extent anyone is.”
“Mr. Protagonist, we got a call a few minutes ago from a friend of yours named Y.T.”
“What’s wrong? Is she okay?”
“Oh, yes, sir, she’s just fine. But you know that bug you were talking to earlier?”
Hiro’s never heard the term “bug” used this way, but he reckons that Squeaky is referring to the gargoyle, Lagos.
“Yeah.”
“Well, there’s a situation involving that gentleman that Y.T. sort of tipped us off to. We thought you might want to have a look.”
“What’s going on?”
“Uh, why don’t you come with me. You know, some things are easier to show than to explain verbally.”
As Squeaky turns, Sushi K’s first rap song begins. His voice sounds tight and tense.
I’m Sushi K and I’m here to say
I like to rap in a different way
Look out Number One in every city
Sushi K rap has all most pretty
My special talking of remarkable words
Is not the stereotyped bucktooth nerd
My hair is big as a galaxy
Cause I attain greater technology
Hiro follows Squeaky away from the crowd, into the dimly lit area on the edge of the shantytown. Up above them on the overpass embankment, he can dimly make out phosphorescent shapes—green-jacketed Enforcers orbiting some strange attractor.
“Watch your steep,” Squeaky says as they begin to climb up the embankment. “It’s slippery in places.”
I like to rap about sweetened romance
My fond ambition is of your pants
So here is of special remarkable way
Of this fellow raps named Sushi K
The Nipponese talking phenomenon
Like samurai sword his sharpened tongue
Who raps the East Asia and the Pacific
Prosperity Sphere, to be specific
It’s a typical loose slope of dirt and stones that looks like it would wash away in the first rainfall. Sage and cactus and tumbleweeds here and there, all looking scraggly and half-dead from air pollution.
It’s hard to see anything clearly, because Sushi K is jumping around down below them on the stage, the brilliant orange rays of his sunburst hairdo are sweeping back and forth across the embankment at a speed that seems to be supersonic, washing grainy, gritty light over the weeds and the rocks and throwing everything into weird, discolored, high-contrast freeze frames.
Sarariman on subway listen
For Sushi K like nuclear fission
Fire-breathing lizard Gojiro
He my always big-time hero
His mutant rap burn down whole block
Start investing now Sushi K stock
It on Nikkei stock exchange
Waxes; other rappers wane
Best investment, make my day
Corporation Sushi K
Squeaky is walking straight uphill, paralleling a fresh motorcycle track that has cut deeply into the loose yellow soil. It consists of a deep, wide track with a narrower one that runs parallel, a couple of feet to the right.
The track gets deeper the farther up they go. Deeper and darker. It looks less and less like a motorcycle rut in loose dirt and more like a drainage ditch for some sinister black effluent.
Coming to America now
Rappers trying to start a row
Say “Stay in Japan, please, listen!
We can’t handle competition!”
U.S. rappers booing and hissin’
Ask for rap protectionism
They afraid of Sushi K
Cause their audience go away
He got chill financial backin’
Give those U.S. rappers a smackin’
Sushi K concert machine
Fast efficient super clean
Run like clockwork in a watch
Kick old rappers in the crotch
One of The Enforcers up the hill is carrying a flashlight. As he moves, it sweeps across the ground at a flat angle, briefly illuminating the ground like a searchlight. For an instant, the light shines into the motorcycle rut, and Hiro perceives that it has become a river of bright red, oxygenated blood.
He learn English total immersion
English/Japanese be mergin’
Into super combination
So can have fans in every nation
Hong Kong they speak English, too
Yearn of rappers just like you
Anglophones who live down under
Sooner later start to wonder
When they get they own rap star
Tired of rappers from afar