Back in her own little boat, she accepts a lukewarm white washcloth from the flight attendant's tongs.
Why are they here, on this flight, Prion and the Velcro Kitty girl?
She remembers her father's views on paranoia.
Win, the Cold War security expert, ever watchful, had treated paranoia as though it were something to be domesticated and trained. Like someone who'd learned how best to cope with chronic illness, he never allowed himself to think of his paranoia as an aspect of self. It was there, constantly and intimately, and he relied on it professionally, but he wouldn't allow it to spread, become jungle. He cultivated it on its own special plot, and checked it daily for news it might bring: hunches, lat-eralisms, frank anomalies.
Is Prion's presence on this plane a frank anomaly?
Only, she decides, if she thinks of herself as the center, the focal point of something she doesn't, can't, understand. That had always been Win's first line of defense, within himself: to recognize that he was only a part of something larger. Paranoia, he said, was fundamentally egocentric, and every conspiracy theory served in some way to aggrandize the believer.
But he was also fond of saying, at other times, that even paranoid schizophrenics have enemies.
The danger, she supposes, is a species of apophenia.
The damp white cloth has grown cold in her hand.
She places it on the armrest and closes her eyes.
- /
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 cotfon seat cover and almost forgetting not to pull the door shut after her1.
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,
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.
