Vineland (20 page)

It was as much blessing as DL was likely to get. She asked for and was granted a few days to prepare. And had got to where she could stay away from other people's smokes, keep her hands off her pussy, and hypnotize herself to sleep when who should appear at the gate but Takeshi, looking for
her
, saving everybody the trouble.

Not that he hadn't been through some difficulties of his own, of course, beginning back in Tokyo with the swamp of primal fear he'd been fighting through since finding out what had happened, which hadn't taken him long. The morning after his adventure at Haru no Depaato he tried to call Minoru at his office in the antiterrorist subministry, but all he got was a lengthy runaround, including suggestions that the person no longer existed in the form Takeshi had known. After a while, no matter what extension he called, he was immediately put on hold and left there.

Takeshi went around all that day and the next feeling like a toxic dump. Symptoms of everything, particularly thoracic and abdominal ones, lanced through him. He quit ordering from room service because the sight of food now nauseated him. The final hammerstroke came when he got his suit back from the cleaners, the suit he'd worn to and from his encounter with DL, and found it full of holes, each five to ten centimeters across, in the front of the jacket and at the top of the pants, the edges ragged and black, as if burned and rotted through at the same time. He called the
dorai kuriiningu
, who were apologetic but unhelpful.

“Used perchloroethylene—like we do on everything! I was amazed—when all those holes started!”

“Started? Started what?”

“To get bigger! Only took a few seconds! Never saw anything like it!”

Sweating and aching, deeply apprehensive, Takeshi made an emergency appointment with one of the staff croakers at Wawazume Life & Non-Life, remembering to bring the afflicted suit with him. Dr. Oruni laid it out on an examining table and sent some automated scanning device over it while he and Takeshi watched a video screen in the next room, displaying the data in graph and print form. “These are all alarm points,” the doctor showing with a cursor the pattern of holes. “Some strange, corrosive energy—very negative! Have you been in a fight?”

Takeshi remembered what he'd been trying all day not to—the American girl—the way she'd stared, the terror and failure in her face just before she turned and fled. He told the doctor about their rendezvous in the Haru no Depaato while he ran Takeshi through an abbreviated physical, grunting darkly at everything he seemed to find. Nothing really showed up, though, till the urine scan. Doc Oruni pulled a bottle of Suntory Scotch out of a small refrigerator, found two paper cups, poured them 90% full, put his feet up on his desk, and dolefully surrendered to mystery. “There's no cancer, no cystitis, no stones. Proteins, ketones, all that—it's normal! But something very weird is happening to your bladder! It's like trauma, only—much slower!”

“We—can't be more specific?”

“Why, do you—think you can find this somewhere in some—actuarial table? And once you see the odds, and learn the name, it'll go away?”

“It—doesn't happen often,
ne?
”

“I've never seen it—only read articles, heard talk around the clubhouse—anecdotes. If you like, I'll send you to somebody who can give you details. . . .”

“Just whatever you can tell me, then?”

“Ever heard of the Vibrating Palm?”

“Yeah—been in there once or twice!”

“Not a bar, Fumimota-san. An assassination technique—with a built-in time delay! Invented centuries ago by the Malayan Chinese, adapted by our own ninja and yakuza. Today a number of systems are taught—same effect!”

“She did that to me?”
Effect?
“But I didn't feel anything.”

“
Dewa
—there's your good news! Allegedly, the lighter the touch—the longer you've got to live!”

“Well—how long?”

The doc chuckled for a while. “How light?”

Takeshi rode the elevator down alone, fully taken over, through the descent, by the fear of death. Now he could feel each of his suffering alarm points, count different struggling pulses, imagine his chi flow, in turbulence—blocked, darkly reversed, stained, lost—slowly destroying his insides. Any time he went to piss now would be an occasion for terror.

“My own sleaziness—has done me in!” It was too late even for remorse over the years squandered in barely maintaining what he now saw as a foolish, emotionally diseased life. He came reeling out of the elevator under the combined influence of speed, Scotch, and some new tranquilizer nobody knew anything about but which the detail man had left a huge barrel of samples of in the waiting room, with a sign urging passersby to take as many as they wished, so what some might have called his glibness no doubt had its origins in the realm of the chemical.

Back at the hotel he found a ticket to SFX tonight on the red-eye, with a note from Two-Ton Carmine expressing sympathy for his recent inconvenience and the hope that once in San Francisco he would communicate with the enclosed phone number. What difference did it make? Takeshi shrugged. He packed a carry-on bag with two weeks' supply of amphetamines, a change of underwear, and an extra shirt and grabbed the hotel bus out to Narita.

The hours on the airplane were among the worst of his life. He drank steadily and, when he remembered to, popped green time-release capsules of dextroamphetamine plus amobarbital. He took some time to read through the stuffer for the tranquilizers he'd picked up at the doc's. Oh, ho, ho! Look at all these contraindications! Every variety of shit that was seething around already in his system, as a matter of fact, was prohibited. “Well!” out loud, “
that
being the case—” he ordered another drink and swallowed some more tranquilizers. His seatmate, a serious-looking
gaijin
businessman with a hand-held computer game that had up till now claimed his attention, looked over at Takeshi and then continued staring for a while. “You aren't committing suicide, are you?”

Takeshi grinned energetically. “Suicide? Nah! Uh-uh, buddy, just—trying to relax! I mean—don't you just hate flying? Huh? when you start thinking—about
all the possibilities. . . .
”

The young man, even though in a window seat, did his best to edge away. Takeshi went on, “Here, you want to try one of these? Huh? they—they're really
good.
Evoex, ever heard of them? Something new!”

“There's a hidden camera somewhere, right? This is a commercial?” The question rang almost prayerfully in these surroundings, the moonlit childhood-picture-book clouds out the rounded toy windows, the lambent fall of electric light on faces and documents, the affectless music in the earphones, the possibly otherworldly origins of Takeshi's madness. . . .

“You'd be—real interested in this!” Takeshi began, “maybe even—tell me what you think I should do—because frankly, I'm at my wit's end!” proceeding then to rattle out the whole story, sparing no medical detail. The suit-wearing juvenile was more than willing to listen to anything, as long as it delayed the moment, easily imagined, when Takeshi would produce a weapon and begin to run amok in the aisles.

When Takeshi paused at last, the American tried to be sympathetic. “What can you expect? A woman.”

“No, no! Somebody thought I was—somebody else.”

“Hmm. Maybe you thought
she
was somebody else.”

Takeshi grew instantly paranoid, assuming, for some reason, that the young man was talking about his ex-wife, the film actress Michiko Yomama, currently starring as a light-comical obstetrician in the television series “Babies of Wackiness,” a Japanese import currently and inexplicably blowing away all its U.S. ratings competition. If there was any connection between that homicidal hooker in the Haru no Depaato and Michiko, with her fragile smiles and gifts of disappearance, Takeshi couldn't see it. They'd been married, as a matter of fact, during a classical sixties acid trip, in which it became beyond clear to them both that in some other world they had been well acquainted. In this one, however, they only seemed programmed for unhappiness. One would find the other across a room and both would gaze awhile, sick with betrayal, remembering the deep and beautiful certainty beyond words, wondering why they should only have had a glimpse and where it might be now. After a few years, he moved out of the house. She moved to Los Angeles. The kids by now were safely established in different corporations. Takeshi and Michiko still kept up a slender sympathetic link—now and then, passing through L.A., he dropped in. “No,” he replied to his seatmate's speculation, “at the time—I was only thinking about the fucking!”

The other man tightened his lips, frowning. “Mm-hmm.” He returned to his computer game, something called “Nukey,” which included elements of sex and detonation, though the cheapness of its early sound chips reduced orgasm to a thin rising whine, broken into segments as if for breath, and made the presumably nuclear explosions, no more than symbolized here by feeble bursts of white noise, even less satisfying.

By the time he landed at San Francisco International, Takeshi had been up for three days, during which he had also not bathed or shaved. He looked at his face-stubble in a men's-room mirror. As long as I don't sleep, he decided, I won't shave. He paused at the sink, swaying a little. That must mean, he pursued the thought, that as soon as I fall asleep, I'll start shaving! Noticing a number of curious looks, he glided out again into the airport lobby, a centimeter or two above the actual floor surface, remembering just in time to zip his fly.

At the phone number in Carmine's note turned out to be Carmine himself. “Hey, Fumimota-san!”

Takeshi had started to shiver. A young woman with regular features, wearing a draped white gown, appeared out of the airport crowds, leaned her forearm on Takeshi's shoulder, whispered, “Watch the paranoia, please!” and disappeared again. “I went to the doctor. What else can you tell me?”

DL's name, and that of her intended target. “Hot antidrug celebrity right now, was on a Donahue, had a full page in
Vogue
, but he can't help you none, and he wouldn't if he could.”

“What about her, then?”

“Your odds get better. Story we have is, she did it, she can undo it.” Takeshi could hear small plastic percussions as Carmine, with fingers used to more ancient and less magical tasks, punched up the latest on DL Chastain, which he shared with Takeshi, along with directions up to the Ninjette Retreat. “Any problems, let us know, and sorry again about the mixup. Sayonara.”

“Ciao.”
Mixup?
He rented a car and checked into one of the airport motels, put on the air-conditioner and the Tube, hit the Search button on the remote, and lay watching the channels crank by, two seconds apiece, till at last on some high-numbered independent channel whom should he find, looking exceptionally good, but his ex-wife, Michiko, in a nightclub interior, apparently out on a date with a baby about a year old in a tuxedo, who was crawling around on top of their table, upsetting drinks, dumping ashtrays, squealing with pleasure, and drawing public attention. It was a “Babies of Wackiness” rerun, one he hadn't seen. He was only just able to watch it through. By the second commercial break he could feel a great bodylong wave of sorrow beginning to approach, to grow, to shake him apart. All that mostly sleepless night there would be tears in Takeshi's ears, snot in his mustache, and sinuses aching like love gone astray, though set next to the fact that he was technically dead, these were pretty minor.

Next day, feeling mysteriously better, he was back on the case, visiting widely separated Bay Area pharmacies with forged prescriptions for speed, purchasing a ukulele and the liver-and-blue suit he was wearing when Prairie met him, studying the road map like a racing form till he'd handicapped the alternate routes and imagined changes of plans associated with each, before at last turning eastward and beginning his ascent to the Retreat of the Kunoichi Attentives, an all-day hard-edged video game, one level of difficulty to the next, as the land rose and the night advanced. Enough of this, like travel in outer space, can begin to what they call “do things” to a man. By the time he arrived at the Retreat, high on that fateful California ridge, he was no longer in his right mind, and the object of more attention than he usually liked. All around the courtyard in the crescent shadows he thought he heard small-arms safeties being taken off. Even unarmed, any of these kunoichi was tough enough of a cookie to distribute him from here to Gardena with a minimum of effort. What stopped his forward progress for a second was the sight of DL, hair incandescent, gelid green eyes set on full power, head-on. Try to keep in mind, he memoed himself, this is the woman—who murdered you the other day! But he got a hardon instead and managed to forget everything except that night at the Depaato of Spring, the distant long-legged American girl astride him, riding him as she would a beast, hair backlit, face kept to itself, in shadow—playing his body meridians with the points of dark-lacquered fingernails . . . killing him in the process! Terrific! The thought should have discouraged his erection but, strangely, didn't.

“You forget, everybody!” he cried insouciantly, “I'm already dead!” as there in the perilous open, regarded no doubt over the sights of Uzis set on full automatic, under the stilled beaks of mountainside birds, Takeshi reached into his bag to produce only the ukulele, gals, no problem, and strum a four-bar intro before singing, as certification he was harmless,

 

Just Like a William Powell

 

Oh it's like layin' bricks, without a trowel,

Like havin' a luau, with no fish 'n' poi,

When you're just like, a William Powell,