Pattern Recognition

14. THE GAIJIN FACE OF BIKKLE

Electric twilight now, and some different flavor of hydrocarbons to greet her as she exits Shinjuku Station, wheeling her black carry-on behind her.

She's taken the JR Express in from Narita, knowing that this avoids bumper-to-bumper rush-hour freeway-creep and one of the world's dullest bus rides. Pamela Mainwaring's car would have been equally slow, and would have meant contact with Blue Ant personnel, something she hopes to keep to a bare minimum.

Having lost sight of Prion and his girlfriend shortly after deplaning, she hopes they're now stuck in the traffic she's managed to miss, whatever their purpose in coming here might be.

Looking up now into the manically animated forest of signs, she sees the Coca-Cola logo pulsing on a huge screen, high up on a building, followed by the slogan “NO REASON!” This vanishes, replaced by a news clip, dark-skinned men in bright robes. She blinks, imagining the towers burning there, framed amid image-flash and whirl.

The air is warm and slightly dank.

She hails a taxi, its rear door popping open for her in that mysterious Japanese way. She swings her carry-on onto the backseat and climbs in after it, settling herself on the spotless white cotton seat cover and almost forgetting not to pull the door shut after her.

The white-gloved driver closes it with the lever under his seat, then turns.

“Park Hyatt Tokyo.”

He nods.

They edge out into the dense, slow, remarkably quiet traffic.

She takes out her new phone and turns it on. The screen comes up in kanji. Almost immediately, it rings.

“Yes?”

“Cayce Pollard, please.”

“Speaking.”

“Welcome to Tokyo, Cayce. Jennifer Brossard, Blue Ant.” American. “Where are you?”

“Shinjuku, on my way to the hotel.”

“Do you need anything?”

“Sleep, I think.” It's more complicated than that, of course, soul-delay coming in from some novel angle here. She can't remember how she'd dealt with jet lag when she was last here, but that was ten years ago. Dancing and quite a lot of drinking, possibly. She'd been that much younger, and that had been in the heyday of the Bubble.

“You have our number.”

“Thank you.”

“Good night.”

“Good night.”

Alone again, suddenly, in the crepuscular calm of a Tokyo taxi.

She looks out the window, reluctantly admitting more of the alien but half-familiar marketing culture, the countless cues and clues proving too much for her now. She closes her eyes.

More white gloves at the Park Hyatt, her carry-on lifted out and placed atop a luggage cart, then draped with a sort of bulky silken fishnet, its edges weighted, a ritual gesture that puzzles her: some survival from a grander age of European hotels?

White gloves in the vast Hitachi elevator, pressing the button for the lobby. Eerily smooth ascent, the speed of it pulling blood from her head, past floors unmarked and uncounted, then the door opens silently on a large grove of live bamboo, growing from a rectangular pool the size of a squash court.

Through registration, imprinting the Blue Ant card, signing, then up, that many more floors again, perhaps fifty in all.

To this room, very large, with its large black furniture, where the bellman briefly shows her various amenities, then bows and is gone, no tip expected.

She blinks. A James Bond set, Brosnan rather than Connery.

She uses the remote as demonstrated, drapes drawing quietly aside to reveal a remarkably virtual-looking skyline, a floating jumble of electric Lego, studded with odd shapes you somehow wouldn't see elsewhere, as if you'd need special Tokyo add-ons to build this at home. Logos of corporations she doesn't even recognize: a strange luxury, and in itself almost worth the trip. She remembers this now from previous visits, and also the way certain labels are mysteriously recontextualized here: Whole seas of Burberry plaid have no effect on her, nor Mont Blanc nor even Gucci. Maybe this time it will even have started to work for Prada.

She thumbs the drapes closed and sets about the unpacking and hanging up and putting away of CPUs. When she's finished, there is no sign that the room is occupied, save for her black East German envelope and the black iBook bag, both resting now on the ecru expanse of the enormous bed.

She examines the instructions for the room's Internet connection, gets out the iBook and goes to hotmail.

Parkaboy, with two attachments.

She'd e-mailed him from Damien's telling him she was on her way here, but not under whose auspices. Parkaboy is one of the few F:F:Fers who she's certain would know exactly who Bigend is and what Blue Ant is about.

She'd asked him for his and Musashi's best advice on how to go about contacting Taki and obtaining the mystery number. This will almost certainly be that.

It's titled KEIKO. She opens it.

Cayce opens the first attachment.

“Parkaboy, you are outrageous.”

A multilayered confection, message within message, and all of it targeting Taki, or Taki as Parkaboy and Mushashi imagine him.

Keiko/Judy is simultaneously pubescent and aggressively womanly, her shapely yet slender legs spilling out of a tiny tartan schoolgirl kilt, to vanish, mid-calf, into shoved-down, bunched-up cotton kneesocks of an unusually heavy knit. Cayce's cool-module, wherever it resides, has always proven remarkably good at registering the salient parameters of sexual fetishes she's never encountered before, and doesn't in the least respond to. She just knows now that these Big Sox are one of those, and probably culture-specific. There will be a magazine for Japanese guys into big socks, she's sure of it. The big socks go into retro faux-Converse canvas, but with platform soles to balance the very sizable bulk of sock-scrunch around the ankles, giving Keiko/Judy a knees-down look recalling a baby Clydesdale.

Keiko/Judy has pigtails, huge dark eyes, free-sized sweatshirt making her breasts a mystery, and something so determinedly carnal in her expression that Cayce finds it unnerving. Bigend would recognize the image-toggle instantly, childlike innocence and hardboiled come-on alternating at some frequency beyond perception.

She goes back to Parkaboy's e-mail.

The other attachment…

She opens it. Something in felt-penned kanji, with multiple exclamation marks.

She stands up, walks backward until her thighs bump the edge of the bed, throws up her arms, and falls back in snow-angel fashion, staring up at the white ceiling.

Why has she come here? Is there now some new and permanently nonundoable snarl in her trailing soul-tether?

She closes her eyes but it has nothing to do with sleep. It only makes her aware that they currently seem to be a size too large for their sockets.

THE doormen are carefully neutral as she leaves the Hyatt in 501's and the Buzz Rickson's, declining their offer of a car.

A few blocks on, she buys a black knit cap and a pair of Chinese sunglasses from an Israeli street vendor, shaking her head at his suggestion of a Rolex Daytona to complete the look. With the cap tugged low, hair tucked up into it, and the Rickson's to zip up and slouch down in, she feels relatively gender-neutral.

Not that it doesn't feel as safe here as she remembers it having felt before, but that in itself takes a little getting used to. Actually she's heard that violent crime is up, but she'll treat it as though it isn't. Because she can't stay up in her white box overhanging the city. Not now. She feels as though something more than her soul has been left behind, this time, and she needs to walk it off.

Win. She'd started to project Win on those white walls, and that won't do. The image still ungrieved.

No. Putting her feet down firmly as she walks on. Walk like a man. I fought the law. Hands in pockets, the right clutching the sunglasses. And the law won.

She passes one of those spookily efficient midnight road crews, who've set up self-illuminated traffic cones prettier than any lamp she's ever owned, and are slicing into asphalt with a water-cooled steel disk. Tokyo doesn't so much sleep as pause to allow crucial repairs to its infrastructure. She's never actually seen soil emerge from any incision they might make in the street, here; it's as though there is nothing beneath the pavement but a clean, uniformly dense substrate of pipes and wiring.

She walks on, more or less at random, responding to some half-forgotten sense of direction, until she finds herself nearing Kabukicho, the all-night zone they call Sleepless Castle, its streets bright as day, very few surfaces lacking at least one highly active source of illumination.

She's been here before, though never alone, and knows it to be the land of mahjong parlors, tiny bars with highly specialized clienteles, sex shops, video porn, and probably much else, but all of it managed with a Vegas-like sobriety of intent that makes her wonder how much fun any of it could really be, even for the committed enthusiast.

Nothing more serious is liable to happen to her here, she trusts, than being accosted by the proverbial drunken salaryman, none of whom have ever proven insistent, or indeed even seriously mobile.

The noise level, as she keeps walking, is becoming phenomenal, industrial: music, songs, Godzilla-volume sexual midway-pitches in Japanese.

Pretend it is the sea.

The individual buildings are remarkably narrow, their restless street-level facades seeming to form a single unbroken surface of neon carnival excess, but overhead are small neat signs, identically rectangular, arranged up the fronts of each one, naming the services or products to be had on each small upper floor.

BEAUTY BRAIN'S FABULOUS FANNY

That one stops her, midway up, in red italics on yellow. She's staring up at it when someone blunders into her, says something harsh in Japanese, and staggers on. Suddenly she realizes she's standing in the middle of the street outside a bellowing porno palace, a pair of bored-looking touts or security on either side of the open entrance. She gets an unwelcome glimpse of some decidedly foreign fucking, at once clinical and violent, on a big hi-def screen, and quickly moves on.

She keeps turning corners until it's dark enough to take the glasses off. The sea-roar somewhat diminished.

Here comes the wave. Her knees wobble.

They've got some serious jet lag here. Makes the London kind look like the morning after a restless night.

“Beauty brain,” she says to the narrow, perfectly deserted street, “better get her fabulous fanny home.”

But which way, exactly, is that?

She looks back, the way she came, down this narrow street, no distinction between sidewalk and roadway.

And hears the approaching whirr of a small engine.

A rider on a scooter appears at the junction with the previous street, a helmeted figure backlit by residual glare, and halts. The helmet turns, seeming to regard her, its visor is blank, mirrored.

Then the rider guns the little engine, wheels around, and is gone, with the finality of hallucination.

She stands staring at the empty intersection, lit, it now seems, like a stage.

Several turnings on, she finds her way again, steering by distant views of a Gap sign.

TELEVISION resolves the mystery of Billy Prion.

Trying to open the curtains for another look at the electric Lego, having showered and wrapped herself in a white terry robe, the universal remote activates the room's huge set instead. And there he is, in full BSE neo-punk drag, half his mouth dead and the other twisted in demented glee, proffering a small bottle of Bikkle, a yogurt-based Suntory soft drink that Cayce herself is somewhat partial to. A favorite of hers in the land of Pocari Sweat and Calpis Water.

It tastes as though ice cubes have melted in it, she remembers, and instantly wants some.

Billy Prion, then, she thinks as the ad ends, is currently the gaijin face of Bikkle, his complete lack of recent exposure in the occident evidently posing no problem here at all.

When she figures out how to turn the television off, she leaves the curtains closed, and turns the room's lights off, one after another, manually.

Still wearing the robe, she curls up between the sheets of the big white bed and prays for the wave to come, and take her for as long as it can.

It comes, but somewhere in it is her father. And the figure on the scooter. Blank expanse of that chromed visor.