“Yes. She’s fine. She’ll call you soon.”
The line goes dead and Thales is left staring at the phone, wondering what to make of their inconclusive verbal fencing, but his eyes turn to the undulations of the hills and he wonders what geologies, what vanished seas shaped them, and what stories are encoded in their forms, and in the wind moving through the grasses, and in the crumbling mounds of grey rock, and then, as the car rounds a bend, the city is revealed like a magic trick. The moonlight reflects palely on the loops of road incising the miles of hillside below him and in the far distance are the graded shadows of the mountains and out over the sea the lights of some new complex rise like a river of light, its heights lost in the fog, and now the car accelerates as it turns and it feels like the city is drawing him in.
34
Final Sword
It’s always morning, that flight, since they’re flying west, and fast, and it feels like everything is suspended, like they’re going to float there forever in one frozen, shining hour, but then, impossibly, gravity lessens as they start their descent. Through the crust of ice crystals on the window Kern sees a distant formation of black drone fighters, like birds rising over the water, or a swirling column of smoke, and then, at some signal, they abruptly disperse in all directions, taking g-force that would kill a pilot, the sonic booms reaching him as a succession of muffled basso thumps, rippling the surface of his plastic cup of water.
Now the plane is over land—snow-dusted farmland rushes by, rises toward him. The shock of touchdown, the shriek of air brakes, and then he’s walking off the plane onto another continent and blinking in the airport’s hard fluorescent light.
There’s a screen showing departures and arrivals, just like in SFO. Only fifteen minutes have elapsed on the clock, which seems at first like it must be a mistake, but then he remembers about time zones. He’d once read the memoir of Tesshu, a great swordsman of Japan, who said that when he was a boy an hour had passed like a year, but when he was an old man a year had passed like an hour, so the journey here was like youth, and if he ever goes back to California he’ll have to pay the price, so the only solution is to keep on heading west.
The other passengers hurry toward customs, but he sits and stares out the window at the blustering snow, the planes rising ponderously into the sky, and some of them must still have pilots because they have windows on the front that look like eyes squinting in the wind.
And if he can’t find Akemi, what then? The money she got him will sustain him for a while but he has no way of getting more, and the problem is so profound, so entirely unapproachable that his mind goes empty, and he sits there listening vacantly to announcements in Chinese. He wants to explore the airport, and orient himself, but his hand finds the phone is his pocket and he reminds himself he has a job to do.
When he gets to the front of the customs line he remembers the bloodstains on his pants, some from the man he fought and probably killed, the rest from the assassin who is dead beyond question. The customs agent waves him up; he’s middle-aged and Chinese with a drinker’s nose and lacks the brittle arrogance Kern expects in officials—in fact, he hardly seems to care at all, and after scrutinizing Kern’s passport for half a second, hands it back and sends him on his way. Automatic doors of opaque glass open and then he’s truly in a new country.
He uses his laptop to look up Final Sword and finds that today’s event is starting soon on the outskirts of the city.
A bank of yellow lockers by the wall. You’d never have that in the U.S.—someone would practically be obligated to put a bomb in one. He wakes the touch screen, feeds it a bill, agrees to a long contract in what’s probably Japanese. A locker pops open—he stashes his carryall, gets a tiny magnetic key.
Out the door into cold wind, filthy snow crunching underfoot—he’s never touched snow before, had expected it to be purer, somehow celestial.
There’s a line of green drone taxis. The dry heat of the taxi’s interior, the definitive slam of its door. The car says something, and then the same thing again, and he finally figures out it wants him to give it money.
*
The taxi moves noiselessly over the icy road past low boxy buildings that all look the same. Some seem to be stores, but he can’t tell what they’re selling. Trucks roar by, spraying the cab’s windows with black slush. He thinks of the Asia of media, the serenity of the temples, the neon ideography of Shinjuku at night.
He tries to make a mental map of the cab’s turns, in case he has to walk back, but loses track and ends up just watching the streets go by.
Finally the cab glides to a stop in an alley of loading docks and dumpsters. The cab says something in a pleasant baritone and the charges appear on a screen in yen, yuan and dollars; a panel slides back to reveal his change.
The door opens onto bitter cold and the faint reek of rotting garbage, and he intends just to go for a quick reconnoiter but as he steps out the cab says something that he realizes is “goodbye” as it closes its door and drives off. He bangs on its trunk, uselessly, watches its red taillights recede through swarming particles of snow.
A man in a black parka is watching him from a loading dock, standing in front of wide double doors. He’s Asian, his beard salted with ice, and his parka has the Final Sword logo, but even before these details have registered Kern somehow knows he’s in the life, and remembers that the Yakuza are running the show. Not even gangsters have guns in the Japanese territories, he recalls, which seems to dilute the risk, like violence is just a game here. Kern’s face aches with the cold, and his jacket lets in the wind, but he can’t help smiling at finding himself on this street, in this snow, this winter.
The doorman cocks an eyebrow and in almost impenetrably accented English asks, “Are you here for the fights?” His hair is an elaborate pile, stiff with ice and product, and underneath the parka he’s wearing an oversized checked suit. It seems to be a very specific look, though Kern has no idea what it means except that it boils down to cheap muscle.
“Yeah,” says Kern, somewhat deflated, having been looking forward to talking in code. “Can you sell me a ticket?” He’d looked up the prices, has enough in his hand for the cheapest seat.
“Prelims over,” the doorman says. “Tickets officially no longer for sale.” Kern is immediately trying to think where else he could look for Akemi, and how he’ll stay warm while he does it, but the yakuza says, “Just main event now. Want to see? Lot of seats in VIP area. Why not? You pay me now. Cash, okay?”