Elimination Night - By Anonymous Page 0,65

balls,” I clarified. “At Soba Kitchen on Third and Melrose. Let’s go there. Oh, and yes, I like Japanese. Food, trains, people. Whatever.”

“Well, let’s do it.”

“Okay!”

Then an awkward pause as the issue of how exactly we’d get there arose. Boris spoke first: “I’d suggest we take your bicycle, but I’m not sure I could fit into that”—he pointed to the wicker basket—“besides, I was kinda planning on being alive later tonight. No offence or anything. I’m sure you don’t always fall off when you brake.”

“That was the first time, actually,” I protested.

“I totally believe that,” said Boris.

“So?”

Boris coughed. “Oh, right. My car. It’s over there. What were you saying about your e-mails?”

“Wasn’t important,” I shrugged, as we started to walk.

“It sounded important.”

“It wasn’t.”

Okay, so a word about Boris’s car. It had once been a fairly standard, Asian-manufactured sedan. No longer. Take the airfoil on the trunk, for example. It wouldn’t have looked out of place on a commercial jet. And that was among the less radical modifications, which included inch-high suspension, plastic bucket seats (“carbon fiber,” Boris clarified), and a paint color I’d describe as radioactive carrot.

“Sorry about… y’know,” mumbled Boris, as I attached my three-way racing harness, after searching without success for a normal seat belt. “It’s kind of a hobby.”

Boris, I now suspected, was some kind of major geek, albeit one who dressed against stereotype. And my theory was confirmed beyond any doubt when we got to the restaurant, which was just as I remembered, aside from one detail: The menu was in Japanese—with no translation. Now, this wouldn’t have been so much of a problem, if any of the waiters had spoken English. But they didn’t. Soba Kitchen is authentic like that. The best you can do as a non-Japanese speaker is point vaguely at the menu and hope they don’t bring you their house specialty, the Fugu (“river pig”)—which, if served with even a minor error in preparation, will kill you with a dose of tetrodotoxin, to which there is no antidote. (I’d once recommended the dish enthusiastically to Len.) “I forgot about the language thing,” I told Boris, by way of an apology. “Last time I came here was with my friend Adam. He’s Japanese. And Jewish, actually. Not as uncommon as you might think. I fell in love with the place when I tasted his balls.”

Boris looked up from his menu.

“How many more testicle-based jokes are you gonna make this evening, Sasha?”

“Depends how the conversation goes.”

Suddenly, Boris reached over the table. “Hey—gimme your phone for a second,” he said.

I gave it to him. He tapped on the screen a few times—he seemed to be entering a password—waited a few seconds, then handed it back to me. “There,” he said. “It’s an app that a friend of mine from MIT has been working on. It’s coming out next month. You’re gonna love playing with this. Hit that icon—the red one.”

I did as he said, and my phone switched to camera mode.

“Now take a picture of the menu.”

Cha-chick.

Boris smiled. “Hold on,” he said. “Seriously, this is so cool.”

A moment later, the phone played a little jingle. “Language detected,” said an automated voice.

“Check out the picture.” Boris was grinning.

I did as he said. The image was just as I expected: the restaurant logo not quite in focus; too much glare from the flash; my finger in the bottom left corner of the frame.

“And?” I said.

Boris raised his eyebrows and nodded at my phone. I looked at the picture again. What was so special about it? It was just the menu, with the descriptions of each… oh… my God… they were in English! The app had recognized each Japanese character, translated it, and doctored the image accordingly.

“That’s incredible,” I said. “I mean… I say ‘that’s incredible’ a lot. But this is actually incredible.”

“I know,” said Boris, leaning over to take a look. “It can understand all the major languages, and they’re adding more all the time. Soon they’ll be moving on to the really obscure African and Middle Eastern… whoa—what the bejesus is ‘river pig?’”

Before I had a chance to explain, seven text messages arrived simultaneously, causing the phone to almost shake itself apart with excitement. This wasn’t unusual, of course—Brock often sent me dozens of texts at once—but these messages hadn’t come from Brock. They’d come from a number I’d used only once before. Mitch had given it to me, during the sanity checks.

I tapped the screen to read:

“GET YOUR GINGER MINGE OVER HERE, BUNGALOW BILL.”

“MITCH SAYS