Idoru

10. Whiskey Clone

Eddie’s club was way up in something like an office building. Chia didn’t think there were music clubs on the upper floors of buildings like that in Seattle, but she wasn’t sure. She’d fallen asleep in the Graceland, and only woke up as Eddie was driving into a garage entrance, and then up into something vaguely like a Ferris wheel, or the cylinder of an old-fashioned revolver, except the bullets were cars. She watched out the windows as it swung them up and over, to stop at the top, where Eddie drove forward into a parking garage that might’ve been anywhere, except the cars were all big and black, though none as big as the Graceland.

“Come on up with us and freshen up, honey,” Maryalice said. “You look wrecked.”

“I have to port,” Chia said. “Find my friend I’m staying with…”

“Easy enough,” Maryalice said, sliding across the velour and opening the door. Eddie got out the driver’s side, taking the bag with the Nissan County sticker with him. He still didn’t look very happy. Chia took her bag with her and followed Maryalice. They all got into an elevator. Eddie pressed his palm against a hand-shaped outline on the wall and said something in Japanese. The elevator said something back, then the door closed and they were going up. Fast, it felt like, but they just kept going.

Being in the elevator didn’t seem to be improving Eddie’s mood.

He had to stand right up close to Maryalice, and Chia could see a little muscle working, in the hinge of his jaw, as he looked at her. Maryalice just looked right back at him.

“You oughta lighten up,” Maryalice said. “It’s done.”

The little muscle went into overdrive. “That was not the deal,” he said, finally. “That was not the arrangement,”

Maryalice lifted an eyebrow. “You used to appreciate a little innovation.”

Eddie glanced from Maryalice to Chia, then, quick, back to Maryalice. “You call that an innovation?”

“You used to have a sense of humor, too,” Maryalice said, as the elevator stopped and the door slid open. Eddie glared, then stepped out, Chia and Maryalice following. “Never mind him,” Maryalice said. “Just how he gets, sometimes.”

Chia wasn’t sure what she’d expected, but this definitely wasn’t it. A messy room jammed with shipping cartons, and a bank of security monitors. The low ceiling was made of those fibery tiles that were hung on little metal rails; about half of them were missing, with wires and cables looping down from dusty-looking shadow. There were a couple of small desk lamps, one of them illuminating a stack of used instant-noodle containers and a black coffee mug filled with white plastic spoons. A Japanese man in a black meshback that said “Whiskey Clone” across the front was sitting in a swivel chair in front of the monitors, pouring himself a hot drink out of a big thermos with pink flowers on the side.

“Yo, Calvin,” Maryalice said, or that was what it sounded like.

“Hey,” the man said.

“Calvin’s from Tacoma,” Maryalice said, as Chia watched Eddie, still carrying the suitcase, march straight through the room, through a door, and out of sight.

“Boss looks happy,” the man said, sounding no more Japanese than Maryalice. He took a sip from his thermos cup.

“Yeah,” Maryalice said, “He’s so glad to see me, he’s beside himself.”

“This too will pass.” Another sip. Looking at Chia from beneath the bill of the meshback. The letters in “Whiskey Clone” were the kind they’d use in a mall when they wanted you to think a place was traditional.

“This is Chia,” Maryalice said. “Met her in SeaTac,” and Chia noticed that she hadn’t said she’d met her on the plane. Which made her remember that business with the DNA sampling and the hair-extensions.

“Glad to hear it’s still there,” the man said. “Means there’s some way back out of this batshit.”

“Now, Calvin,” Maryalice said, “you know you love Tokyo.”

“Sure. Had a place in Redmond had a bathroom the size of the whole apartment I got here, and it wasn’t even a big bathroom. I mean, it had a shower. No tub or anything.”

Chia looked at the screens behind him. Lots of people there, but she couldn’t tell what they were doing.

“Looks like a good night,” Maryalice said, surveying the screens.

“Just fair,” he said. “Fair to middling.”

“Quit talking like that,” Maryalice said. “You’ll have me doing it.”

Calvin grinned. “But you’re a good old girl, aren’t you, Mary-alice?”

“Please,” Chia said, “may I use a dataport?”

“There’s one in Eddie’s office,” Maryalice said. “But he’s probably on the phone now. Why don’t you go in the washroom there,” indicating another door, closed, “and have a wash. You’re looking a little blurry. Then Eddie’ll be done and you can call your friend.”

The washroom had an old steel sink and a very new, very complicated-looking toilet with at least a dozen buttons on top of the tank. These were labeled in Japanese. The polymer seat squirmed slightly, taking her weight, and she almost jumped up again. It’s okay, she reassured herself, just foreign technology. When she was done, she chose one of the controls at random, producing a superfine spray of warm, perfumed water that made her gasp and jump back.

She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, then stood well to the side and tried another button. This one seemed to do the trick: the toilet flushed with a jetstream sound that reminded him of being on the plane.

As she washed her hands, and then her face, at the reassuringly ordinary sink, using pale blue liquid soap from a pump-top dispenser shaped like a one-eyed dinosaur, she heard the flushing stop and another sound begin. She looked back and saw a ring of purplish light oscillating, somewhere below the toilet seat. UV, she supposed, sterilizing it.

There was a poster of the Dukes of Nuke ’Em taped on the wall, this hideous ’roidhead metal band. They were sweaty and blank-eyed, grinning, and the drummer was missing his front teeth. The lettering was in Japanese. She wondered why anyone in Japan would be into that, because groups like the Dukes were all about hating anything that wasn’t their idea of American. But Kelsey, who’d been to Japan lots, with her father, had said that you couldn’t tell what the Japanese would make of anything.

There wasn’t anything here to dry your hands on. She got a t-shirt out of her bag and used that, although it didn’t work very well. As she was kneeling to stuff the shirt back in, she noticed a corner of something she didn’t recognize, but then Calvin cracked the door behind her.

“Excuse me,” he said.

“It’s okay,” Chia said, zipping the bag shut.

“It’s not,” he said, looking back over his shoulder, then back at her. “You really meet Maryalice at SeaTac?”

“On the plane,” Chia said.

“You’re not part of it?”

Chia stood up, which made her feel kind of dizzy. “Part of what?”

He looked at her from beneath the brim of the black cap. “Then you really ought to get out of here. I mean right now.”

“Why?” Chia asked, although it didn’t strike her as a bad idea at all.

“Nothing you want to know anything about.” There was a crash, somewhere behind him. He winced. “It’s okay. She’s just throwing things.They haven’t gotten serious yet. Come on,”and he grabbed her bag by the shoulder strap and lifted it up. He was moving fast now, and she had to hustle to keep up with him. Out past the closed door of Eddie’s office, past the bank of screens (where she thought she saw people line-dancing in cowboy hats, but she was never sure).

Calvin slapped his hand on the sensor-plate on the elevator door. “Take you to the garage,” he said, as the sound of breaking glass came from Eddie’s office. “Hang a left, about twenty feet, there’s another elevator. Skip the lobby; we got cameras there. Bottom button gets you the subway. Get on a train.” He passed her her bag.

“Which one?” Chia asked.

Maryalice screamed. Like something really, really hurt.

“Doesn’t matter,” Calvin said, and quickly said something in Japanese to the elevator. The elevator answered, but he was already gone, the door closing, and then she was descending, her bag seeming to lighten slightly in her arms.

Eddie’s Graceland was still there when the door slid open, a hulking wedge beside those other black can. She found the second elevator Calvin had told her to take, its door scratched and dented. It had regular buttons, and it didn’t talk, and it took her down to malls bright as day, crowds moving through them, to escalators and platforms and mag-levs and the eternal logos tethered overhead.

She was in Tokyo at last,