“I just saw Cromwell, I think,” Thales says. “I think it was from your memories.”
Her face closes, and he wishes he hadn’t spoken, as, without wanting to, he remembers how it felt when Cromwell appraised her, his evident slight contempt, his coalescing focus, the underlying pity. She’d been extraordinarily high, but could still see he thought he had no peer, yet was deeply concerned to be a gentleman, which meant he was a patsy, or at least gave her some room. He needed to see a posh good girl, someone worth saving, so she started channeling her friend Sonia, who was essentially a loser cunt failure with a has-been for a daddy, but had charming manners; shaking his hand, she undertook the assumption she’d be valued and respected.
Her thoughts veer to the tricks she’d turned for food money, about which she’s never told a soul, how it felt to knock on strangers’ doors in good hotels, the men’s discomfited formality, how it hadn’t been so bad—she’d never been prissy, and sometimes it was interesting, because, paying for it, they’d ask for what they really wanted.
He envies her the untidiness of her humanity, regrets the slightness of his own experience and how neutrally he sees the world. Made of two weeks of memory, he is the thinnest of beings.
What does he really want?
The light is fading, the swell getting steeper.
61
Hole in the Wall
Irina wakes in bed alone, hears Philip in the shower.
There’s a silver coffee service on the table. On the salver is a handwritten note in English from the hotel’s director of security informing her that both coffee and service have been controlled from the first stages of their manufacture, and that an in-house mass-spectroscopic analysis of the coffee—attached—has found no toxicity or unexpected compounds. Her heart warms toward the hotel and its policies.
She feels exhausted, thinks of going back to bed, realizes that what she actually wants to do is hide. She downs her coffee, pours another cup.
The water goes off in the bathroom as she looks up the node on a map on the room’s TV. It’s about a mile away, in some drab industrial building. Cabs keep records; they might as well walk. She looks out the window at the falling snow.
*
The sidewalks are slick with ice and the two of them hold each other for balance, which makes for an uncomfortably dependent image. They follow a printed map, like tourists from the last century.
The row of high-end hotels becomes just another Tokyo street. Her breathing is faster than she’d like but she can’t slow it. Strangers flow by, and for once she takes no interest, doesn’t try to deconstruct their cues of dress and manner—the street might as well be a stage set, the people extras.
Snow is falling so thickly it’s like walking through a cloud. Drones zip by overhead, more than she remembers from her last time in Japan. Cordon or no, if one of them is Cromwell’s, and recognizes her, then, however profound Japan’s xenophobia, and however strict its ban on guns, she is, in that moment, done.
“OPEN” blinks into red neon life in English and Japanese in the window of a restaurant below the level of the street. She grabs Philip’s hand and pulls him down the stairs.
Hole in the wall, she thinks. Narrow, three tables and a counter. Smells of steam, fish, soy, tea. The counterman says something. She sits at the far end with her back to the wall.
Green tea before her. Philip looking concerned. Her hands are shaking. The table’s cheap plastic veneer is filmed with cleaning fluid. Philip is intent on the lozenges of yellow egg behind the counter’s glass; she looks three seconds into the past, sees him start pretending not to notice her disturbance.
“I don’t…” she says, then stops.
Philip regards her, bright, friendly, purely helpful.
“Too many drones,” she says.
“Oh. I think I can take care of that.”
“How?”
“The Yakuza.”
“Really? I know you like to poke around in dark corners, but you’re so … scrupulous.”
“True, but I still have contacts in the Yakuza. Well, not in, it’s more like friends of friends. It’s not that big a deal—they’re not Cosa Nostra or the Downtown Aztec Kings. They’re … socially integrated. They have business cards, and websites without euphemism. It’s just a part of how things get done.”
“I won’t see you indebted.”
“Eh,” says Philip. “I have leverage. My company has patents on the best race-car engines in the world, and the Mitsui keiretsu wants to get into the high-end sports-car market. It therefore behooves them to keep me happy. They’re a major industrial player, so of course there are ties of reciprocity with the Yak…” He makes a gesture conveying a resigned acceptance of the inevitable entanglement of industry and organized crime, then takes out his phone and taps out a message.
“Sake?” he asks, looking up.
“Early.”
“Not in California.”
“I need to be fully present.”
And calm, she feels him not say.
“Maybe a small one,” she says.
She makes herself drink the sake slowly. Her eyes stray to the prisms of tuna behind the counter, their colors somewhere between ruby, eggplant and blood. She once saw a tuna in an aquarium, its body molten silver, its face like a totem of pelagic sleep.
She might float out of her skin.
“And, done,” Philip says, glancing back at his phone.
“At what cost?”
“No cost.”
“Oh, that must be how obligation works here.”
“It might dilute our profits by some fraction of a percent. I don’t care. It’s worth it, if only to impress you with my superpowers, for once.”
“Not so super.”
“Quite adequately super. There’s no one like you. It seems so improbable that we’re not just friends but old ones and I get to see you now and then. Anyone, literally anyone else, and I’d say they’re attempting too much, but you? You might win. Unless you feel like you’re not up for it, in which case we bail and I help you disappear.”
She can hardly quit with half a mile to go. “I’m still game,” she makes herself say. “Flatterer.”
He looks over his shoulder, says, “It looks like our window is opening.”
She looks outside. Goes to the window to get a better view. More drones than ever in the air. Most are red and black, of a single, beetle-like design, and grappling with the other drones—it looks like insects mating—and pulling them from the air.
She opens the door, admitting cold air and tinny chanting.
“This is madness,” she says.
“Well,” he says, “it’s tolerated.”
“What are they saying?”
“I believe it’s a counter-protest to the protests against Japan’s annexation of the new mainland territories. A standard vehicle of far-right expression. It was already scheduled, but they moved it up for me.”
The non-fascist drones are fleeing. She wonders if these assaults are common enough to be covered in their programming.