Tea From an Empty Cup (2 page)

The Japanese guy smiled with half his mouth. ‘Everybody knows who you are. You’ve told everyone often enough about it. But even if you really did it –’

‘
I got witnesses!
’

Across the room, the person who had brought the tea paused in the act of resetting the fractals on one of the tabletops and stared at them with open and unabashed curiosity.

‘And I wasn’t that doped, either,’ the white guy added sulkily. ‘Tiny dose. Not even enough to convict me for possession.’

‘Hey,
I
don’t care if you were doped. This ain’t the Olympics. And who doesn’t have witnesses?’ said the Japanese guy, smiling at the waiter genially. ‘Big brother’s watching, little brother’s watching, big sister’s tapping the phone, little sister’s stalking your ass – or they all got bots to do it, which is pretty much like the same thing. You can’t do
anything
without an audience. Guy like you’ud probably kill himself if he
didn’t
have an audience. Sure, they all saw you go through the out door. And even if you really did it, you were doped and you only did it once.
I
think that’s all you
can
do it. Once. Only once.
I
think that no matter what, you
still
got to strip down and take it the old-fashioned way – by hand. Or your wife.’

‘So what are you, a fuckin’ priest of, what’s it called, Shintu? Hindo?’

‘Our priests don’t have to be celibate. I’m not saying I don’t have anything I want
out here
when the mood hits me. I’m saying you’re too
out here
to have stuff any other way.’

The white guy rolled his eyes. ‘Oh, and I suppose
your
body isn’t
out here
’

‘No, it isn’t,’ snapped the Japanese guy. ‘That’s the trouble with you people. Your body’s not really
out here
. Your body’s
in here
.’ He leaned forward over the table and tapped his head. ‘Your whole body is in here, and nowhere else. Your neck gets broken, the whole thing’s useless – but you can go
in here
and find it all again. You can get part of it cut off and taken away, but that part will still be
in here
.’

‘Oh, everybody’s heard about
that
stuff,’ said the white guy. ‘My mother used to talk about this ghost tooth she had like amputees got ghost limbs –’

‘
Aitsu wa kusomitai!
Now he’s tellin’ me about his mother’s fuckin’ ghost
tooth
,’ the Japanese guy told the startled waiter, who had moved on to adjust another tabletop.

‘How come we aren’t getting any fractal shit?’ The white guy rubbed the table surface as if friction might get the patterns started.

‘Fractal shit.’ The Japanese guy shook his head. ‘I don’t know what I’m wasting my time with you for, you won’t get it.
None
of you whites’ll get it, not the ones like you. You people, you lost your souls a long time ago, you sold them for a good parking space. You know every time a white person is born, a new franchise opens at the mall?’

‘Yeah?’ said the white guy evenly. ‘Well, every time some jerk-off cuts up a credit card, a sushi bar goes out of business.’

The Japanese guy blinked. ‘Now, that’s probably true.’ He took the gel cap out of his sleeve pocket and held it out to the white guy again. ‘So. You want it?’

The white guy picked it up off his palm and held it between two fingers. After a moment, he put it down. ‘Not enough.’

‘Not enough,’ the Japanese guy echoed.

‘Not enough.’

‘You’re saying it’s not enough?’

‘It’s not.’

The Japanese guy shook his head. ‘So what’s missing? The password’s in there. You put on your hard-hat – hell, I’m even throwing in my lucky hotsuit – you tune in, you give the password and –’

‘And there I am in Japanese Disneyland for, what – all of ten minutes?’ The white guy made a face. ‘Forget it. You can have this, you and the rest of the whores.’

‘Now,
that
I can’t help you with,’ the Japanese guy said sadly. He stared down at his hands on the table so intently, the white guy leaned forward to see if there was something going on, if he were somehow getting fractals on his side of the table while his own side remained blank. ‘That’s between you and your gods. I can give you the tools, the entrée, call it how you like. But I can’t give you the attention span, and I can’t correct for shortsightedness. You believe you’ll get a ten-minute entertainment, that’s
exactly
what you’ll get. But if you’re ready to go all the way to the red zone and then push past
that
– well, who knows? You just might find the out door again and this time you might just go all the way through it and out the other side. How’d you do it in the first place, by believing it was impossible?’

The white guy licked his thin, pale lips. ‘It doesn’t
sound
like enough. In the end, it’s all just story time.’

‘Hey, the myths don’t give themselves up that easy, you know. We got to work hard for them. The problem with you pale-asses is, you never really learn to live beyond your senses. When you go in, you got to have all going on
for
you. We use a hotsuit and a hard-hat to get the fire going. You guys use it
instead
of the fire. See? You’re all like that. Except maybe the Catholic Italians. The full ethnics raised in the faith, those troopers can fly without a plane.’

‘Orthodox Russians got it all over them,’ the white guy said. ‘And Caribes got it all over everyone. Voodoo –’

‘Yeah, well, Caribes aren’t pale-asses.’

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. Look, why don’t you just give me a hint about how I’m supposed to prolong the experience. Am I supposed to say, “Hey, wait a minute,” to the Dread Heavenly Female?’

‘You got my ID, all my accounts. You can make your own contacts easy.’

The white guy wrinkled his nose. ‘And where does that leave you?’

‘Don’t tell me you’re worried for my welfare? How un-Gatsby-esque of you.’

‘Very funny –’

‘All right, how nonwhite, then.’

‘Now,
look
, willya? We’ve known each other a long time, and I let you get away with a lot of that white stereotyping shit because most of the time it’s pretty funny. But I’m tired of getting beat over the head with crimes committed by some fuckin’
urgly
I never met and never got the benefits from, especially when you start sounding like you mean it. You wanna see my Japanese-couple-looking-for-an-apartment routine? I do it for Australians, they think it’s a fuckin’ hoot. It’s the one where the landlord finds out the couple have moved into his bathroom and they can’t stop talking about how
spacious
it is –’

The waiter, who was now at the next table, let out a half-strangled laugh and then tried to disguise it as a cough. They both stared at him for a moment before the white guy turned back to the Japanese guy and gave him a triumphant look.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘You see how you can get laughs with material other than the old shit about thud-stupid, blotchy white guys trying to pave over Brazil, using mahogany toothpicks, and stuffing themselves with roasted harp seal and chicken-fried peanut-butter-and-bacon sandwiches. There’s a whole bunch of white people never got to live like that and wouldn’t want to. Believe it or not, my parents didn’t push me out on the street when I was eight, they actually raised me till I left school.’

The Japanese guy pressed his lips together hard for a moment. ‘Wow, you didn’t have to walk the streets till you were twelve? You probably didn’t make much.’

‘Oh, very funny.
Very
funny. In case you really don’t know your history, Thailand was where they had the kiddie-sex holiday tour business all sewed up.’

The Japanese guy’s eyes were flat. ‘Japan was very far away from Thailand.’

‘Yeah, and Japan’s not even really
there
anymore, so it’s easy to make all kinds of claims.
And
denials. Isn’t it.’

‘Get to the point.’

‘Okay. The point: I’m sick and tired of the insensitive white asshole jokes, okay? Give it a rest.’

The Japanese guy shrugged. ‘Fine. Sorry. Didn’t know you had a problem with it.’

‘Well, now you do.’ The white guy folded his arms. ‘Where was I?’

‘I was saying how you were getting all my accounts and passwords and you suddenly wanted to know where that left me.’ The Japanese guy smiled with half his mouth again. ‘You were concerned for my welfare in a way I found, uh, uncharac – ah –’ He gave another shrug. ‘You were concerned.’

‘Yeah, of course. I don’t want to go down on some kinda weird fraud charge. You know, some night I’m on-line having a few laughs with Ms. Dreadful Heaven and suddenly, I fail the authentication because you decide to show up, too.’ He finished his tea in a gulp. ‘You get my date with Dready, I get canned for bootlegging.’

The Japanese guy started to laugh and then let it trail off. ‘Oh, yeah, I hadn’t thought of that.’

‘Well, shit, you oughta.’

‘I was being facetious, you insensitive white asshole. It wouldn’t happen.’

‘Who says, you insensitive yellow asshole?’

‘
I
says. Because I’d be turning over the whole package to you. You get everything, including the stuff it took me years to layer on. All yours. All of it.’

The white guy opened his mouth to say something and then stopped. His eyes narrowed and he tilted his head first to one side and then the other, scrutinizing.

‘
What?
’ The Japanese guy drew back a little.

‘Why?’

‘Why
what?
’

‘Why are you being so generous?’ The white guy put his elbows on the table. ‘What’s the take-up here? This is like one of those going-out-of-business sales, everything must go. You going out of business?’

The Japanese guy shrugged. ‘You can’t appreciate a deal when someone offers it to you, you got more problems than I do.’

‘I don’t know about
that
.’ The white kid stared from under his brows. ‘
I
think maybe
you
got more problems than anyone and you’re trying to dump them in a hurry. Who’s gonna kick in my door looking for you?’

‘No one,’ the Japanese kid said confidently.

‘Uh-huh. Not even, oh, some dreadlocked heavenly female?’

The Japanese guy laughed. ‘Only if you program it that way.’

The white guy laughed with him and started to get up. ‘Well? You gonna tell me to wait a minute, hold on? Something?’

‘Nope.’

‘Why not?’

The Japanese guy’s smile was wistful. ‘I’m tired. I’m a lover, not a salesman. I’m just gonna take this to someone more spiritual, someone who can appreciate what I’m offering and wants some good value. I’m looking to go into business for myself and I’m trying to raise some start-up. You’re in the mood to decline, it’s all right. Other people’s money spends as well as yours.’

‘Yeah?’ The white guy sat down again.

‘Yeah. I got a lot going for me. I got connections, I got favors to call in, I got the right attitude. I’m just poor is all.’

‘How can you be poor workin’ for who you work for?’

‘I just
am
,’ snapped the Japanese guy. ‘The money’s good but the expenses are high, and there’s no employee retirement plan,
okay
?’

The white guy squinted as if everything they had talked about were on the table in front of him, and he would have been able to see it if his eyesight had been better. ‘Suppose I buy
some
of it.’

The Japanese guy made a pained face. ‘It’s a fuckin’
package
, you can’t buy
some
of a fuckin’
package
. That’s like trying to buy
some
of a house. You get a living room, a couple of walls, half a kitchen, no plumbing, no roof – come
on
.’

The white guy sighed. ‘Okay, okay, you win. But just talk to me a minute here: there’s the myths, and there’s the directions to the real Tokyo, right?’

The Japanese guy made a funny kind of nodding motion with his head, jerking his chin up first and then down, as if he were trying to nod without nodding.

‘Right. So how am I supposed to find that?’

‘Now, there’s the key to the whole problem with you pale-asses. You don’t want to do
anything
without a hint book and a crib sheet. Tell you what, I’ll just find someone who really means business and have them send you a description of the whole thing on a postcard from the Ginza.’

‘Wait, wait,
wait
. I don’t think it’s so unfair to be askin’ for a little tiny
hint
. I’m not Japanese, after all.’

‘You keep thinking that way, you’re never gonna get into Tokyo. They’re gonna see you comin’ and send you to Chinatown with the rest of the tourists. With my package, you really
will
be Japanese.’

‘Fine, I’ll take it. Give it here.’

The Japanese guy shoved the pouch and the gel cap over to him. He stared at it and then looked up skeptically.

‘What now,’ sighed the Japanese guy, sounding put-upon.

‘That’s
not
the whole package and don’t try to tell me it is,’ the white kid said, pointing at the gel cap. ‘
Nobody
can chem up everything, not even the Japanese.’

‘The rest is on-line. Take the gel cap, it puts this marker in your fluids. That’s the passkey.’

‘Oh,
beautiful
.’ The white guy was disgusted. ‘I got to bleed for this.’

‘Not if you’re a secretor. You a secretor?’

The white guy shrugged. ‘I don’t get asked that question a whole lot.’

‘Most people are. You could be one of the few who aren’t, so I guess you’ll have to bleed after all, just in case. But just one time and the suit’ll take care of it for you. It’s a small price to pay.’

The white guy’s face emptied of all expression. ‘“What doth it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul?”’

‘Huh?’ The Japanese guy blinked at him. ‘I guess you measure that by how big a world you have to gain and what kind of soul you have to lose.’ Now he looked alarmed. ‘What brought that on? Don’t tell me you’re deep.’

‘If I am, it’s a surprise to me, too,’ said the white guy, troubled. ‘I dunno what that was. All of a sudden, I was … I don’t know. I got a premonition, and it wasn’t just a feeling. It was more like a vision. Or
almost
a vision. But it wasn’t
my
vision.’