Idoru

20. Monkey Boxing

Between stations there was a gray shudder beyond the windows of the silent train. Not as of surfaces rushing past, but as if particulate matter were being vibrated there at some crucial rate, just prior to the emergence of a new order of being.

Chia and Masahiko had found two seats, between a trio of plaid-skirted schoolgirls and a businessman who was reading a fat Japanese comic. There was a woman on the cover with her breasts bound up like balls of twine, but conically, the nipples protruding like the popping eyes of a cartoon victim. Chia noticed that the artist had devoted much more time to drawing the twine, exactly how it was wrapped and knotted, than to drawing the breasts themselves. The woman had sweat running down her face and was trying to back away from someone or something cut off by the edge of the cover.

Masahiko undid the top two buttons of his tunic and withdrew a six-inch square of something black and rigid, no thicker than a pane of glass. He brushed it purposefully with the fingers of his right hand, beaded lines of colored light appearing at his touch. Though these were fainter here, washed out by the train’s directionless fluorescents, Chia recognized the square as the control-face of the computer she’d seen in his room.

He studied the display, stroked it again, and frowned at the result. “Someone pays attention to my address,” he said, “and to Mitsukos.”

“The restaurant?”

“Our user addresses.”

“What kind of attention?”

“I do not know. We are not linked.”

–Except by me.

“Tell me about Sandbenders,” Masahiko said, putting the control-face away and buttoning his tunic.

“It started with a woman who was an interface designer,” Chia said, glad to change the subject. “Her husband was a jeweller, and he’d died of that nerve-attenuation thing, before they saw how to fix it. But he’d been a big green, too, and he hated the way consumer electronics were made, a couple of little chips and boards inside these plastic shells. The shells were just point-of-purchase eye-candy, he said, made to wind up in the landfill if nobody recycled it, and usually nobody did. So, before he got sick, he used to tear up her hardware, the designer’s, and put the real parts into cases he’d make in his shop. Say he’d make a solid bronze case for a minidisk unit, ebony inlays, carve the control surfaces out of fossil ivory, turquoise, rock crystal. It weighed more, sure, but it turned out a lot of people liked that, like they had their music or their memory, whatever, in something that felt like it was there… And people liked touching all that stuff: metal, a smooth stone… And once you had the case, when the manufacturer brought out a new model, well, if the electronics were any better, you just pulled the old ones out and put the new ones in your case. So you still had the same object, just with better functions.”

Masahiko’s eyes were closed, and he seemed to be nodding slightly, though perhaps only with the motion of the train.

“And it turned out some people liked that, too, liked it a lot. He started getting commissions to make these things. One of the first was for a keyboard, and the keys were cut from the keys of an old piano, with the numbers and letters in silver. But then he got sick…”

Masahiko’s eyes opened, and she saw that not only had he been listening, but that he was impatient for more.

“So after he was dead, the software designer started thinking about all that, and how she wanted to do something that took what he’d been doing into something else. So she cashed out her stock in all the companies she’d worked for, and she bought some land on the coast, in Oregon—”

And the train pulled into Shinjuku, and everyone stood up, heading for the doors, the businessman closing his breast-bondage comic and tucking it beneath his arm.

Chia was leaning back to look at the strangest building she’d ever seen. It was shaped like the old-fashioned idea of a robot, a simplified human figure, its legs and upraised arms made of transparent plastic over a framework of metal. Its torso appeared to be of brick, in red, yellow and blue, arranged in simple patterns. Escalators, stairways, and looping slides twisted through the hollow limbs, and puffs of white smoke emerged at regular intervals from the rectangular mouth of the thing’s enormous face. Beyond it the sky all gray and pressing down.

“Tetsujin Building,” Masahiko said. “Monkey Boxing was not there.”

“What is it?”

“Osaka Tin Toy Institute,” he said. “Monkey Boxing this way.” He was consulting the swarming squiggles on his control-face. He pointed along the street, past a fast-food franchise called California Reich, its trademark a stylized stainless-steel palm tree against one of those twisted-cross things like the meshbacks had drawn on their hands in her class on European history. Which had pissed the teacher off totally, but Chia couldn’t remember them drawing any palm trees. Then two of them had gotten into a fight over which way you were supposed to draw the twisted parts on the cross, pointing left or pointing right, and one of them had zapped the other with a stungun, the kind they were always making out of those disposable flashcameras, and the teacher had to call the police.

“Ninth floor, Wet Leaves Fortune Building,” he said. He set off down the crowded pavement. Chia followed, wondering how long jet lag lasted, and how you were supposed to separate it from just being tired.

Maybe what she was feeling now was what her civics program at her last school had called culture shock. She felt like everything, every little detail of Tokyo, was just different enough to create a kind of pressure, something that built up against her eyes, as though they’d grown tired of having to notice all the differences: a little sidewalk tree that was dressed up in a sort of woven basketwork jacket, the neon-avocado color of a payphone, a serious-looking girl with round glasses and a gray sweatshirt that said “Free Vagina.” She’d been keeping her eyes extra-wide to take all these things in, like they’d be processed eventually, but now her eyes were tired and the differences were starting to back up. At the same time, she felt that if she squinted, maybe, just the right way, she could make all this turn back into Seattle, some downtown part she’d walked through with her mother. Homesick. The strap of her bag digging into her shoulder each time her left foot came down.

Masahiko turned a corner. There didn’t seem to be alleys in Tokyo, not in the sense that there were smaller streets behind the big streets, the places where they put out the garbage, and there weren’t any stores. There were smaller streets, and smaller ones behind those, but you couldn’t guess what you’d find there: a shoe-repair place, an expensive-looking hair salon, a chocolate-maker, a magazine stand where she noticed a copy of that same creepy comic with the woman all wrapped up like that.

Another corner and they were back on what she took to be a main street. Cars here, anyway. She watched one turn into a street-level opening and vanish. Her scalp prickled. What if that were the way up to Eddie’s club, that Whiskey Clone? That was right around here, wasn’t it? How big was this Shinjuku place, anyway? What if the Graceland pulled up beside her? What if Eddie and Maryalice were out looking (hr her?

They were passing the opening the car had disappeared into. She looked in and saw that it was a kind of gas station. “Where is it?” she asked.

“Wet Leaves Fortune,” he said, pointing up.

Tall and narrow, square signs jutting out at the corners of each floor. It looked like almost all the others, but she thought Eddie’s had been bigger. “How do we get up there?”

He led her into a kind of lobby, a ground-floor arcade lined with tiny stall-like shops. Too many lights, mirrors, things for sale, all blurring together. Into a cramped elevator that smelled of stale smoke. He said something in Japanese and the door closed. The elevator sang them a little song to tinkling music. Masahiko looked irritated.

At the ninth floor the door opened on a dust-covered man with a black headband sagging over his eyes. He looked at Chia. “If you’re the one from the magazine,” he said, “you’re three days early.” He pulled the headband off and wiped his face with it. Chia wasn’t sure if he was Japanese or not, or what age he might be. His eyes were brown, spectacularly bloodshot under deep brows, and his black hair, pulled straight back and secured by the band, was streaked with gray.

Behind him there was a constant banging and confusion, men yelling in Japanese. Someone pushing a high-sided orange plastic cart crammed with folded, plaster-flecked cables, shards of plastic painted with gold gilt and Chinese red. Part of a suspended ceiling let go with a twanging of wires, crashed to the floor. More cries.

“I’m looking for Monkey Boxing,” Chia said.

“Darling,” the man said, “you’re a bit late.” He wore a black paper coverall, its sleeves torn off at the elbows, revealing arms tracked with blobby blue lines and circles, some kind of faux-primitive decoration. He wiped his eyes and squinted at her. “You aren’t from the magazine in London?”

“No,” Chia said.

“No,” he agreed. “You seem a bit young even for them.”

“This is Monkey Boxing?”

Another section of ceiling came down. The dusty man squinted at her. “Where did you say you were from?”

“Seattle.”

“You heard about Monkey Boxing in Seattle?”

“Yes…”

He smiled wanly. “That’s fun: heard about it in Seattle. You’re on the club scene yourself, dear?”

“I’m Chia McKenzie—”

“Jun. I’m called Jun, dear. Owner, designer, DJ. But you’re too late. Sorry. All that’s left of Monkey Boxing’s going out in these gomi-carts. Landfill now. Like every other broken dream. Had a lovely run while it lasted, better part of three months. You heard about our Shaolin Temple theme? That whole warrior-monk thing?” He sighed extravagantly. “It was heaven. Every instant of it. The Okinawan bartenders shaved their heads, after the first three nights, and started to wear the orange robes. I surpassed myself, in the booth. It was a vision, you understand? But that’s the nature of the floating world, isn’t it? We arein the water trade, after all, and one tries to be philosophical. But who is your friend here? I like his hair…”

“Masahiko Mimura,” Chia said.

“I likethat black-clad boho butch bedsit thing,” the man said. “Mishima and Dietrich on the same halfshell, if it’s done right.”

Masahiko frowned.

“If Monkey Boxing is gone,” Chia said, “what will you do now?”

Jun retied his headband. He looked less pleased. “Another club, but I won’t be designing. They’ll say I’ve sold out. Suppose I have. I’ll still be managing the space, very nice salary and an apartment along with it, but the concept…” He shrugged.

“Were you here the night Rez told them he wanted to marry the idoru?”

His brow creased, behind the headband. “I had to sign agreements,” he said, “You aren’tfrom the magazine?”

“No.”

“If he hadn’t come in that night, I suppose we might still be up and running. And really he wasn’t the sort of thing we’d tried to be about. We’d had Maria Paz, just after she’d split up with her boyfriend, the public relations monster, and the press were thick as flies. She’s huge here, did you know that? And we’d had Blue Ahmed from Chrome Koran and the press scarcely noticed. Rez and his friends, though, press was nota problem. Sent in this big minder who looked as though he’d been using his face as a chopping block. Came up to me and said Rez had heard about the place and was about to drop in with a few friends, and could we arrange a table with a bit of privacy… Well, really, I had to think: Rez who? Then it clicked, of course, and I said fine, absolutely, and we put three tables together in the back, and even borrowed a purple cordon from the gumi boys in the hostess place upstairs.”

“And he came? Rez?”

“Absolutely. An hour later, there he is. Smiling, shaking hands, signing things if you asked him to, though there wasn’t too burning a demand, actually. Four women with him, two other men if you didn’t count the minder. Very nice black suit. Yohji. Bit the worse for wear. Rez, I mean. Been out to dinner, it looked like. Had a few drinks with it. Certain amount of laughter, if you follow me.” He turned and said something to one of the workmen, who wore shoes like two-toed black leather socks.

Chia, who had no idea what Monkey Boxing had actually been about, imagined Rez at a table with some other people, behind a purple rope, and in the foreground a crowd of Japanese people doing whatever Japanese people did at a club like that. Dancing?

“Then our boy gets up, he’s going to the toilet. The big minder makes as if he’s getting up to go too, but our boy waves him back. Big laugh from the table, big minder not too happy. Two of the women start to get up, like they’regoing with him; he’ll have none of it, waves ’em back, morelaughter. Not that anyone else was paying him that much attention, I was going into the booth in five minutes, with a set of extremelyraw North African; had to judge the crowd, get on it with them, know just when to drop it in. But there he went, right through them, and only one or two even noticed, and they didn’t stop dancing.”

What kind of club was it, where nobody would stop dancing for Rez?

“So I was thinking about my set, the order of it, and suddenly he’s right in front of me. Big grin. Eyes funny, though I wouldn’t swear it was anything he’d done in the toilet—if you know what I mean.”

Chia nodded her head. What didhe mean?

“And would I mind, he said, hand on my shoulder, if he just spoke briefly to the crowd? Said he’d been thinking about something for a long time, and now he’d made up his mind and he wanted to tell people. And the big minder just materializedthere, wanting to know was there any problem? None at all, Rez says, giving my shoulder a squeeze, but he was just going to have a word with the crowd.”

Chia looked at Jun’s shoulders, wondering which one had been squeezed by Rez’s actual hand. “So he did,” Jun said.

“But what did he say?” Chia asked.

“A load of bollocks, dear. Evolution and technology and passion; man’s need to find beauty in the emerging order; his own burning need to get his end in with some software dolly wank toy. Balls. Utter.” He pushed his headband up with his thumb, but it fell back. “And becausehe did that, opened his mouth up in my club, Lo slash bloody Rez boughtmy club. Bought me as well, and I’ve signed agreementsthat I won’t talk to anyof you about anyof that. And now if you and your charming friend will excuse me, darling, I have work to do.”