She doesn't feel tired, though, or lagged, mirrored-out, or anything at all. Whatever else is going on, she seems to have graduated to a more serious league of soul-displacement. Wherever her serotonin levels are, right now, it's like she lives there.
- /
The night security man at her hotel looks like a younger, slightly less approachable version of Beat Takeshi, the Japanese actor whose existential gangster films have been the favorites of two former boyfriends. Ferociously upright and tightly buttoned into an immaculate black blazer, he leads her into the elevator and up to her room.
She's told them at the desk that she's left her key in the room, and so is accompanied there by this stern man, who produces his own key, a real metal one, sturdily chained to his belt, and unlocks her door. He opens it for her, turns on the lights, and gestures her in.
"Thankyou. Just a moment, please, while I find my key." Actually it's in the pocket of her Rickson's, ready to be palmed when needed, but she checks the bathroom, the closet, glances behind the black furniture, then notices a large gray carrier bag, with the Blue Ant logo on the side, at the foot of her bed. She kneels to look under the bed, discovers that it isn't the kind you can look under, and comes up, still kneeling, with the key, a plastic mag-strip card, in her hand. "I've found it. Thank you very much."
He bows and goes, closing the door behind him. She locks and chains it. Just to be sure, she manages to scoot the large black armchair close enough that the door can be only partially opened. This hurts her neck. She resists the urge to curl up, there, and become unconscious. Instead she goes back to the bed and looks in the Blue Ant bag. It contains, carefully folded in black tissue, an unworn black Rickson's MA-1. The morning seems a very long time ago.
She becomes aware of the smell of Tiger Balm from her own Rick-son's. She stuffs the new one back into its bag, removes the Luggage Label bag, and undresses.
In the bathroom mirror, clinically illuminated, her forehead looks only lightly bruised. The remains of the fabulous fanny job, she thinks, have come to resemble the first attempts of a trainee mortician. She unwraps a bar of soap, reminds herself not to use the hotel's shampoo, which will have the wrong pH for gaijin hair, remembers to carefully copy Taki's number from her palm onto a Park Hyatt notepad, and shuts herself in the glass-walled shower, which is approximately the size of Boone's girlfriend's kitchen in Hongo.
Feeling much cleaner, if no less exhausted, she wraps herself in a terry robe and checks the room-service menu, deciding on a small pizza and a side of mashed potatoes. Non-Japanese comfort food.
The pizza turns out to be very good, though very Japanese, but the potatoes are amazing, a Rickson's-like super-simulacrum of a Western classic. She's also ordered two bottles of Bikkle, opening her second as she finishes the potatoes.
She needs to check her e-mail. She needs to phone Pamela Main-waring about getting out of here as soon as possible. And really she should phone Parkaboy.
She slugs back her Bikkle and plugs her iBook into the room's dataport.
One e-mail. As it pops up in her in-box she sees that it's from Parkaboy.
Wondrous Strange
She opens it. There is an attachment titled WS.jpg.
No rest for the wicked. After e-mailing us, or rather Keiko, from two separate cafes, as soon as Taki got home he sent the attached.
She clicks on the jpeg.
A map. A broken T scribed with city streets and strings of numbers. It reminds her of a steak's T-bone, the upright tapering raggedly, the left cross-arm truncated. Within its outline are avenues, squares, circles, a long rectangle suggesting a park. The background is pale blue, the T-bone gray, the lines black, the numbers red.
