She’s swaddled in Philip’s scarf, sweater and overcoat. Wherever he is, he must be cold. She’s aware of nearby routers, phones, pacemakers, cars. The node seems to have gone offline. Her head hurts. She sits up, rubs her eyes, turns her wireless off.
A text from Philip, now twenty minutes old, reads, Can’t wake you getting help. She looks around, foolishly, as though he’ll just be coming back.
Tempting to lie there and just think about what happened but she’s getting too hot and finds she’s hungry.
Her legs and shoulders are oddly stiff—had Thales said something about a seizure? Laboriously, she climbs the stairs toward the street, marveling at their solidity, how they’re just there, not a part of some coded illusion. There’s a desiccated moth on the step before her eyes, random particles of grime, a random mesh of uninterpretable scratches, evidence of history whose story is gone, and this kind of evidence is accumulating all the time, means little, has nothing to do with her.
Out on the street the snow has stopped and it seems warmer. She feels like she’s emerged from death’s kingdom into summer. A young mother in sunglasses pushes a stroller past a crowd of conservatively suited company men and the buildings frame an expanse of sky where a flight of starlings surge into the air under the rushing clouds, and she feels self-conscious, like an upscale bag lady with her staring bewilderment and two sweaters and Philip’s size-large coat, but perhaps because it’s Japan no one seems to notice.
She turns her face to the weak sun and walks off purposefully, like she knows where she’s going. Blocks pass, and she takes turns at random. Her legs don’t quite seem to be working, but it’s good to be in motion. Something strange on her upper lip—she picks at it, finds a thick crust of dried blood, which she wipes vigorously away. Light-headed, she feels like laughing or falling asleep.
She’s standing in front of a humming vending machine, kanji dancing anticly across its screen—she could read them, but is tired of doing tricks with memory, and in any case there are pictures of black coffee, cappuccino, café au lait, which are probably what she needs, and she stands there, feeling empty, trying to focus enough to make a decision.
Across the street is a cafe called Miyakoshiya, a franchise she’s seen before, and through the tall windows she sees people in line, all giving each other exactly the right amount of personal space, and though it’s as everyday and banal as could be it’s so rich in human meaning she wants to cry, and she leaves the vending machine, goes into the cafe, takes her place in line, her heart racing at the prospect of negotiating a simple transaction with another person.
In front of her in line is a schoolgirl in a uniform, a few pounds overweight, texting ardently, wholly self-consciousness, and a woman in an Asano suit and touch-me-not sunglasses who radiates calm, and a fortyish man whose rumpled button-down and air of intelligence somehow suggest the successfully self-employed. Their gazes rise, touch on her—a tall, spacey gaijin woman dressed for some severer winter—and move on.
Five minutes later she’s sitting at a tiny table on the patio by the sidewalk, sipping her very hot, very black americano. She has a sesame cookie filled with what must be red bean paste on a small celadon plate. She should text Philip—he must be frantic—it’s basic decency—but she’s enervated to the point that taking out her phone seems insuperably hard, and she can’t bring herself to do more than watch the cars, the drones, the planes passing in the sky.
She gave most of her money to Parthenon, which means the Mayo is a wash. So much for that! The consequences will be dire, eventually, but not for a while, and for now she can feel the sun on her face, and the patio’s heat lamp, and closes her eyes. She’s seen the world, and the world beyond the world, and it’s time to be still.
With a start, she recalls how she’d blackmailed the mathematician, and that something is still owed. Go to any comments section of the London Times and post the name of the girl who left youth’s city when it was time, the letter had said. She remembers Singapore, how it felt when she knew it was time to go, seeing the towers of that city recede for the last time. She rouses herself, and goes to the London Times website on her phone, chooses an article at random—something about relaxed gun control laws—and adds a comment which reads, “Irina Sunden.”
She’s composing a text to Philip when a bike messenger stops in front of her and leans against the railing. Grimy, sweat-stained particolored biking gear, hipster beard, a complicated street bike that seems to be held together with tape. He says something she can’t understand in what she belatedly realizes is English, but his accent is impenetrable. She sighs inwardly, lets Japanese rise up in her memory, and in that language says, “Pardon me?” at which he looks relieved.
“Excuse me. Miss Irina Sunden? Please accept this delivery,” he says, rummaging in his bag, handing her a unmarked cardboard cylinder as long as her forearm. According to the waybill, the sender is AGK PharmaSynthesis, which she’s never heard of. “I have been instructed to put this package into your hands, and to suggest that you open it immediately. I’m very sorry, but I don’t know anything else. Thank you—please excuse me—goodbye!”
Christmas in Tokyo, she thinks, turning the package in her hands. Within, something sloshes. As she’s ripping open the cylinder her phone rings. Number blocked, but she takes the call.
Thales says, “There’s one more thing.”
*
The sky is darkening and the streets all look the same, as they have for hours, and it seems to Philip that he’s trapped in an endless present of unvarying urban texture. It’s getting colder, but he bought a jacket off the back of a teenager for several times its value, and the walking helps. His initial flash of panic when he found her missing from the server farm seems like a distant memory.
On another street that looks like all the other streets he tries yet again to call her, and yet again she doesn’t pick up; he’s about to hang up but something’s different this time and he realizes he can hear her phone’s ringtone not twenty feet away.
Her phone is on an abandoned outdoor table at a franchised sidewalk cafe, and beside it are an empty coffee cup ringed with grounds and a plate dotted with sesame seeds. At first he’s euphoric, because this still life tells a story in which she’s just now walked away, because otherwise someone would have grabbed her phone, but when he touches the coffee cup it’s cold as ice. “Will no one steal in this fucking country?” he demands of the air. A skate kid stops, stares at him, skates on.