He finds her filmography but, better, there’s a gossip site with her press photos and paparazzi shots and in most of the latter she’s looking out of frame and her face is a pale mask, a neutral space that holds his eyes and seems like it could hold any emotion he chose to project. The photos stretch back seven months and the last one is time-stamped one day ago.
In it she’s peering out from the dark interior of a limo from behind a guy who must be either a professional athlete or a successful gangster with his flashy suit and bulging triceps and a watch like a lump of raw gold. He looks Japanese and according to the caption his name is Tadao Yamaoka, and he seems familiar, which, Kern finds, is because he’s a kendo fighter ranked seventh in the world standings for Final Sword, a live-steel sword-fighting promotion out of Japan run more or less openly by the Yakuza. Kern sort of followed Final Sword for a while but they’re serious about protecting their intellectual property and it’s hard to get fights less than a few years old. He’d made watching them an exercise in controlling his queasiness—he’d seen more than one match end in decapitation. Final Sword makes a selling point of its fatality rate—more than half the fights end in at least one death—and it’s demi-illegality, though for something so underground it moves a lot of licensed merchandise and ads.
Attached to the picture is an article that says that Tadao is in Taipei for a fight. There’s the usual speculation about his chances against his opponent, a decorated Italian foil fencer—Tadao has won all of his six fights, and the Italian all of his three, but on the other hand the losers in Final Sword usually either die or are injured into retirement. And how long, the article wonders, has he been seeing this stunning LA ingenue? It’s evident that the article considers Tadao’s star the brighter and Kern finds he’s indignant on Akemi’s behalf.
He looks up Taipei, finds it’s a city on Taiwan, which is an island that belongs to Japan. There are mountains on Taiwan, but the ghost—Akemi—and Tadao seem to have just flown in. He wonders if Tadao helped her escape her prison, and she isn’t talking to him because she doesn’t need him anymore. He scrutinizes the photo, as though it will reveal a clue, and at first there’s nothing, but then he starts to think that he can see her despair, however hard she’s trying to hide it, and that tips it.
*
“Direct to Taipei, leaving in thirty minutes, no bags to check,” the gate agent confirms. “You’ll have to run, but you can make it.”
He’d been dreading having to explain himself but she seems really not to care, and he wonders if this is her professionalism, but of course she doesn’t care, really no one in the world does, and this makes him feel a lightness, almost a giddiness, like his life lacks real weight.
“You sure you’re not there?” he says. “Because there’s no going back.”
“Actually, sir,” says the gate agent, “this ticket is full fare, as is the ticket for Bangkok that you bought last night, so you can use them whenever you like.”
*
He wakes as the plane banks, peers out at the azure seas and low streamers of pink cloud, a lurid country out of dreams. The wing seems to warp before his eyes, getting longer and thinner, and at first he thinks he’s hallucinating, but realizes he’s heard of that, they can do that now—the phrase “shape-shifting meta-materials,” overheard somewhere, rises in his mind.
The sleeping passengers look absurdly vulnerable with their eye masks and neck rests, their mouths hanging open. He’d meant to stay awake—a hit seems improbable here, but a shame to make it this far and die through inattention—but the boredom and the stale air and droning engines wore him down.
He’s acutely aware that in a few hours the plane will land and he’ll be standing there in the airport, the second of the day and the second of his life, clutching his bag, wondering what to do. Restless, he does a search on Tadao on the seat-back computer, finds he’s a fixture of the Vancouver nightclub scene, which is death for a fighter, and the end of his career must be coming soon, which is disappointing—at that level you’d think there’d be a purity, that he’d be an ascetic, totally dedicated to the way of the sword, but maybe that’s just something out of stories.
33
Encoded in Form
As the town car coasts down through the switchbacks in the dark hills Thales tries to make a phone call from the car’s computer. Some indefinite number of calls have already failed and he’s accepted that they always will and now he’s absently fast-scrolling through the contacts list, placing doomed calls without looking, and as he does wonders who decided the family could make do with such useless electronics.
He expects to once again hear the dull bleat that means another failure but instead he hears a ringing, and looking down at the car’s screen he sees he’s dialed the surgeon, and feels a twinge of social distress—it’s hardly etiquette to call this late, absent a medical emergency.
“Thales,” says the surgeon, perfectly composed and somewhat distant even at this hour.
“I’m surprised I got through.”
“What’s the problem? Have you been losing yourself in the mathematics?”
Thales thinks of the madwoman, his gaps in memory, his mother’s absence. A degree of amnesia is to be expected, given his injuries, but when he first came to LA he could remember Brazil, he thinks—it’s only since his collapse in the tunnel by the beach that it’s disappeared, and if the surgeon can edit his memories then is this forgetting by design, and what does the surgeon not want him to remember?
“When I collapsed, what was happening to me?” he asks, not wanting to approach the issue too directly.
“Why do you ask?”
“I’d just like to know what’s going on in my life.”
“It was a natural part of the progression of your injury. It’s useless to dwell on it.”
“So there was no … additional damage?” He wonders if he used to be different—he’s heard of brain injury causing changes in personality.
“Do you feel that something’s strange, or that you’re missing part of your memory?”
He feels a fleeting impulse to be honest with his doctor but despite its superficial innocence the question is so perfectly apropos that Thales’ skin crawls and he says, “What? No. I feel fine,” simulating naivete, surprising himself with the conviction of his performance. “Why do you ask?”
“I’ll see you soon. Call me if you have any problems.”
Before the surgeon can ring off Thales says, “Have you spoken with my mother recently?”