He pulls his windbreaker tighter. He’d found it wadded in the forward compartment. It keeps out most of the wet and none of the cold.
His old cell bleats as it finds a new network, though he sees nothing in the fog.
“They’re close,” Akemi whispers in his ear. “Connect to the network. Hurry. I’ll give you the password. Please no mistakes.”
He taps in the digits of the password as she recites them. The network is duly acquired. He waits, but nothing happens.
Akemi exhales. “It worked,” she says.
“How do you know?”
“Because we’re still here. If it hadn’t worked, we might have had time to hear the missiles launch.”
At first he thinks they’re waves, so smooth is their emergence from the fog. There are about ten of them. Very dark, the ships, their lines more organic than industrial.
“That one,” Akemi says. “Head for the biggest.”
He maneuvers the boat alongside the hull’s smooth expanse, taking pains not to bump it. The noise of his motor violates the silence. Halfway along the ship’s length there are rungs set into its surface—he brings the boat ahead of the ladder, shoulders his duffel and kills the motor for the last time. He stands, arms out for balance, the boat aimless under his feet. As the ladder slides by, he jumps.
As his hands find the rain-slick rungs he looks down to see the boat peeling away, as though of its own accord, and thinks of it drifting for days, or for years, and wonders where it’s going. By the time he’s climbed onto the deck the boat has vanished in the fog.
The ship’s form is streamlined and vaguely cetacean, an effect aided by its black ceramic hull. There are no railings, no doors, no evident way into its interior. Hemispheres the size of beach balls protrude at random from the deck—missile pods? sensors?—and he’s reminded of the gardens they have in Japan that are just sand and rocks, but he doesn’t think those are quite so geometric or so uniformly black.
There’s a sort of shallow cavity toward the back of the ship. He can just squeeze himself in, which at least gets him out of the wind. He clasps his arms to his chest, using the duffel for a pillow.
“Now what?” he asks Akemi, but she isn’t talking.
*
He’d meant just to close his eyes for a moment, but when he wakes it’s night.
He stalks the deck, stretching his legs and shadowboxing. The only lights are the stars and his phone’s weak glow. He catches himself scanning the horizon for the boat.
His old phone picks up a dense fog of encrypted transmissions, presumably the ships discussing whatever it is that fleets of autonomous seacraft have to talk about. He imagines their silent voices washing over him, this endless conversation in the dark.
58
Touch Nothing
Even at midnight it’s long drive from Tokyo-Narita into the city, and no evident way to shut down the cab’s screens or their ceaseless waves of clamoring ads. Snowflakes land on the windshield, their structure visible for a moment, then dissolved in the glass’s heat.
She retreats into the memory of an evening in Baja California, the sliver of beach before the desiccated mountains, how she’d felt that she was flying as the blood-warm waves lifted her up, let her down, passed on toward shore. The continental shelf is close to land there; she’d dived down and touched sand, and then, swimming a little farther out, dived down and down and touched nothing. Just darkness, below, and she’d been terrified, as though she were falling into an inverted sky, but she’d swallowed her panic and made herself stay there and tread water, and then her weight shifts as the cab corners and she’s back in the present looking up at the looming mass and scattered lights of the Imperial Tokyo Hotel.
She steps from the cab into bitter cold, thinks of the reversal of the Pacific currents, the climatological irony of the rim islands getting colder. A bellman in a sort of Ruritanian officer’s uniform reaches for the bag she bought in Athens; she dislikes being waited on, but his deep reserve demands no response so she lets him take it.
The hotel doors close behind her, enclosing her in the sound of the place, a somehow benign distillation of distant conversations. The interior is Moorish, the limestone walls and pillars carved with abstract geometric patterns.
The blazered desk clerk welcomes her in rather formal American English. Having made no reservation, she wonders what cue of dress or bearing gave away her nationality—she’d have thought she passed for any stripe of European. She feels a stab of guilt as she remembers that there was a first Imperial, built on the same site, leveled by the U.S. in the second World War.
“I have privacy concerns,” she tells him.
He regards her with acute, birdlike attention.
“And concerns about safety,” she admits, reluctant to self-dramatize.
“Very good, madame,” he says. “Perhaps our secured floors would be suitable?”
“How secured?”
“Highly secured. The most security-conscious parties have found them acceptable. The president of North Korea, at this very desk, said he felt peace of mind here.”
“Well, with a recommendation like that. Let’s do it.”
“There are, of course, no electronic records of our guests on the secured floors,” the clerk says, and opens a lockbox to retrieve a massive paper ledger.
*
Absolute silence in her room. At first it’s unsettling. She listens in vain for air-conditioning, footsteps, the hum of machines.
She’s never spent so much on a hotel room. She’ll think of it as a bunker high in the sky from which she can look down on the lights of Tokyo, its snowstorms.
Her phone rings—the number is Swiss—the bank, as expected. “Ms. Sunden?” asks a German voice, and when she assents says, “This is Klaus Dietrich, vice president of security at Crédit Nuage Cantonale. I’m calling in response to your email. First of all, I’d like to say that I’m extremely sorry that your account has been compromised. This is our first significant breach, and we take it very seriously. According to the letter of the law, it’s your job to keep your account information safe, but I’m happy to say the board has made an exception—we are refunding the stolen monies, and I’ve annotated your account so that facial recognition will be required for all future withdrawals. Moreover, I will, if you like, send you such information as we have about the thief.”