Pattern Recognition

16. GOING MOBILE

There had been a smell, in the weeks after, like hot oven cleaner, catching at the back of the throat. Had it ever gone entirely away?

She concentrates on her breakfast, eggs poached to perfection and toast sliced from a loaf of slightly alien dimensions. The two slices of bacon are crisp and very flat, as though they've been ironed. High-end Japanese hotels interpret Western breakfasts the way the Rickson's makers interpret the MA-1.

She pauses, fork halfway from plate, looking toward the closet where she'd hung her jacket the night before.

Blue Ant Tokyo has been charged with helping her in any way it can.

When she's finished eating, cleaning her plate with the final corner of the last slice of toast, she pours a second cup of coffee and looks up the local Blue Ant number on her laptop. She dials it on her cell and hears someone say, “Mushi mushi,” which makes her smile. She asks for Jennifer Brossard, and tells her, no preface other than hello, that she needs a black MA-1 flying jacket reproduction by Buzz Rickson's, in the Japanese equivalent of an American men's size 38.

“Anything else?”

“They're impossible to find. People order them a year in advance.”

“Is that all you need?”

“Yes, thanks.”

“Shall we send it to the hotel?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

“Bye, then.” Jennifer Brossard clicks off.

Cayce hits End and stares briefly out at blue sky and oddly shaped towers.

Her requests don't have to make any sense, she gathers, which is interesting.

When the psychosomatic oven cleaner starts to stage a comeback, it's time to do more things, preferably purposeful things, to unremember. She showers, dresses, e-mails Parkaboy.

She checks the number of her phone and types it in.

She's spoken with Parkaboy twice before, and both times it's been odd, in the way that initial telephone conversations with people you've gotten to know well on the Net, yet have never met, are odd.

She considers opening the latest from her mother, but decides it might be too much, after that waking reverie. It often is.

Downstairs, in the business center, an exquisite girl in something like the Miyake version of an office lady uniform inkjets the Keiko image on a stiff sheet of superglossy eight-and-a-half by eleven.

The image embarrasses Cayce, but the pretty OL exhibits no reaction at all. Emboldened, Cayce has her print out Darryl's kanji as well, requests a thick black marker, and asks the girl to copy it, inscribing the photograph for her.

“We need it for a shoot,” she lies by way of explanation. Unnecessarily, because the girl considers whatever it says there, calmly judges the available space on the photo, and executes a very lively looking version, complete with exclamation marks. Then she pauses, the marker still poised.

“Yes?” Cayce asks.

“Pardon me, but would be good with Happy Face?”

“Please.”

The girl quickly adds a Happy Face, caps the marker, hands the photograph to Cayce with both hands, and bows.

“Thank you very much.”

“You are welcome.” Bowing again.

Walking past the bamboo grove in the sky-high lobby she catches a glimpse of her hair in a mirrored wall.

Speed-dials Jennifer Brossard.

“It's Cayce. I need my hair cut.”

“When?”

“Now.”

“Got a pen?”

Twenty minutes later, in Shibuya, she's settling in to a hot-rocks massage that she hasn't asked for, in a twilit room on the fifteenth floor of a cylindrical building that vaguely resembles part of a Wurlitzer jukebox. None of these women speak English but she's decided just to go with the program, whatever it is, and count on getting her hair cut at some point in the process.

Which she does, in great and alien luxury, for the better part of four hours, though it proves to involve a kelp wrap, a deep facial, manifold tweezings and pluckings, a manicure, a pedicure, lower-leg wax, and close-call avoidance of a bikini job.

When she tries to pay with the Blue Ant card, they giggle and wave it away. She tries again and one of them points to the card's Blue Ant logo. Either Blue Ant has an account, she decides, or they do Blue Ant's models and this is a freebie.

Walking back out into Shibuya sunlight, she feels simultaneously lighter and less intelligent, as though she's left more than a few brain cells back there with the other scruff. She's wearing more makeup than she'd usually apply in a month, but it's been brushed on by Zen-calm professionals, swaying to some kind of Japanese Enya-equivalent.

The first mirror she sees herself in stops her. Her hair, she has to admit, is really something, some paradoxical state between sleek and tousled. Anime hair, rendered hi-rez.

The rest of the image isn't working, though. The standard CPUs can't stand up to this sushi-chef level of cosmetic presentation.

She opens and closes her mouth, afraid to lick her lips. She has their repair kit in with the laptop, probably hundreds of dollars' worth of that other kind of Mac product, but she knows she'll never get it on again like this.

But there, just down the block, is one or another branch of Parco, any of which houses enough micro-boutiques to make Fred Segal on Melrose look like an outlet store in Montana.

Less than an hour later she emerges from Parco wearing the tape-patched Rickson's, a black knit skirt, black cotton sweater, black Fogal tights that she suspects cost half a month's rent on her place in New York, and a black pair of obscurely retro French suede boots that definitely did. She has the CPUs she was wearing folded into a big Parco carrier bag, and the laptop in a graphite-colored, hip-hugging piece of ergonomic body luggage, with a single wide strap that passes diagonally between her breasts and lends the sweater a little help, that way.

Conversion to CPU status has been conferred with the aid of a seam ripper from the notions section of a branch of Muji, located on the eighth floor, leaving all the labels behind. All but the very small label on the hip bag, which simply says LUGGAGE LABEL. She might even be able to live with that. She'll have to see.

All of this on Bigend's card. She's not sure how she feels about that, but she supposes she'll find out.

There's a coffee place directly across the street, a two-story Star-bucks clone in which everyone seems to be chain-smoking. She buys a glass of iced tea, blinks at tiny individual containers of liquid sugar and lemon juice (why didn't we think of that?), and makes her way to the second floor, where fewer people are smoking.

She settles at a Scandinavian-looking counter of pale wood that runs the length of a window overlooking the street and the entrance to Parco, and unpacks the laptop, phone, and manuals. She's not one of those people who won't ever read the manual, although she'll skip it if she can. Ten minutes of concerted attention has F:F:F on the screen, wireless fully effected, so she sweetens her lemon tea and checks out the action. She knows this stage, after a new segment turns up: Everyone's had a chance to view it repeatedly, and brainstorm, and now the more personal, more deeply felt interpretations are emerging.

She looks down into the street, where odd-sized vehicles break the flow of spotless but otherwise non-foreign-looking cars (so many cars everywhere being Japanese) and sees a silver scooter go past, its driver wearing a matching silver helmet with a mirrored visor and what she recognizes as an M-1951 U.S. Army fishtail parka, an embroidered red-white-and-blue RAF roundel on its back, like a target. Flashing back to that morning in Soho, the window of the mod shop, before her Blue Ant meeting.

It's somehow her nature, she thinks, to pick out this one detail, this errant meme: a British military symbol re-purposed by postwar style-warriors, and recontextualized again, here, via cross-cultural echo. But the rider has it right: the '51 fishtail is the one.

She checks her mail. Parkaboy.

This startles her, just having been there, but then she remembers that Parkaboy knows she likes Muji because nothing there ever has a logo. She's told him about the logo problem.

She shuts down, closes the laptop, unhooks the phone, and repacks everything. The smoke is getting to her. She looks around. Every man there has obviously been staring, but immediately looks down or away.

She takes a last sip of sweet iced tea and swings down off the stool, Velcroing the Luggage Label back across her shoulder, picking up the Parco bag, and hitting the stairs to the street.

SOUL-delay plays tricks with subjective time, expanding or telescoping it at seeming random. That big beauty brain session in Shibuya, all that making her fanny fabulous, and the shopping in Parco after it, had seemed to take the full five hours it had taken, but the rest, drifting from one personal landmark to the next, by cab and on foot, seem now, in the Hello Kitty section of Kiddyland, to have collapsed into a single moment of undifferentiated Japanese Stuff.

And why, she wonders, gazing blankly at more Hello Kitty regalia than seems possible, do Japanese franchises like Hello Kitty not trigger interior landslide, panic attack, the need to invoke the duck in the face?

She doesn't know. It just doesn't. No more than does Kogepan, the clueless-looking homunculus, whose name, she vaguely recalls, means “burnt toast.” The Kogepan goods are arrayed beyond Hello Kitty, a franchise that has never quite found Hello Kitty's global legs. One can buy Kogepan purses, fridge magnets, pens, lighters, hair brushes, staplers, pencil boxes, knapsacks, watches, figurines. Beyond Kogepan lies the franchise of that depressive-looking boneless panda and her cubs. And none of this stuff, purest no-content marketing, triggers Cayce in the least.

But something is making a strange and annoying sound, even above the low-level electronic uproar of Kiddyland, and eventually she realizes that it's her phone.

“Hello?”

“Cayce? Parkaboy.” He sounds quite unlike he “sounds” on the screen, whatever that means. Older? Different.

“How are you?”

“Still awake,” he says.

“What time is it there?”

“What day, you mean,” he corrects her. “I'd rather not tell you. I might start to cry. But never mind. You're on. He wants to meet you in a bar in Roppongi. I think it's a bar. Says there's no name in English, just red lanterns.”

“A nomiya.”

“This guy's got me feeling like I live there, and I'm tired of it already. Darryl and I, we're like those Mars Rover jockeys: virtual jet lag. Tokyo time and we're trying to hold down paying jobs in two different time zones back here. So Taki's sent Keiko a map, right? And I've sent it to you, and he says six thirty”

“Will I recognize him?”

“What we've seen of him, he's not Ryuichi Sakamoto. Mind you, that's not what Keiko thinks. She's practically told him she'll fork over the booty as soon as she gets home.”

She winces. This aspect of what she's up to here makes her extremely uncomfortable.

“But he'll give me the number?”

“I think so. If he doesn't, no pic of Keiko.”

“You, I mean she, told him that?” She likes this part of it even less.

“No, of course not. That's a love-offering, something to hold him till she gets the booty back to Tokyo. But you've got to get that number. Make it clear.”

“How?”

“Play it by ear.”

“Thanks.”

“You want to get to the bottom of this little footage thing, don't you?”

“You're implacable.”

“So are you. It's why we get along. I'm going to eat this whole bag of chocolate-covered espresso beans now, and sit here grinding my teeth flat until I hear from you.”

He hangs up.

She stares back at all those eyes: Hello Kitty and Kogepan and the boneless pandas.