and the audience files out. I stay and watch the credits. The key grips, the animal trainers, the caterers. A new audience files in. I re-watch the movie until my brain starts to melt. After the balloon man, I wandered wherever the crowds looked thickest. I cursed myself for not leaving Tokyo after Morino. I should have known. In the cinema foyer I call Ai and quickly hang up when she answers. I get on a Yamanote circle line submarine, and sit with the drones. I wish I was a common drone. The stations roll by, and by, and by, and repeat themselves. I am too full of fear-pollution to ever sleep again.
A conductor gently shakes me awake. ‘You gone around six times, kid, I thought I should wake you up.’ His eyes are kind and I envy his son.
‘Is it night or are we underground?’
‘Quarter to eleven, Thursday the fifth. Know what year we are in?’
‘Yeah, I know that.’
‘You should get home while the trains are still running.’
I wish. ‘I have to get to work.’
‘What are you, a grave-robber?’
‘Nothing so exotic . . . Thanks for waking me up.’
‘Any time.’
The conductor moves down the compartment. Above the seats opposite, behind the swaying hand-rings, is an ad for an Internet advertising company. An apple tree grows from a computer chip, and from its computer chips fruit grow more apple trees, and from these apple trees grow more computer chips. The forest grows out of the frame and invades the advertising spaces either side. I was unaware that any part of my brain was thinking about the Kozue Yamaya disk, but an enormous idea occurs to me. I am wide, wide awake.
My mind is not here, but I never need my mind in Nero’s. When I arrive on the last stroke of Thursday, I get a weird look from Sachiko – she knows about my argument with Ai – but it is hard to care. I think about the twenty-four-hours-ago Eiji Miyake, chicken-cooping up and down these same three-by-one square metres of Tokyo giving birth to his pizzas. Lucky, blind, cursed idiot. I wish I could warn him. I knock back a genki drink to ward off sleeplessness and start work on the backed-up orders. ‘You got a nine of diamonds for me, man?’ asks Doi when he returns. I forgot it. ‘No. Tomorrow.’ Doi congratulates himself. ‘Magic is the manipulation of coincidence, man. In this life, coincidences are the only thing you can count on.’ I wash my hands and face. Every time the door buzzes, I am afraid it could be a Tsuru thug. Every time the telephone rings, I am afraid Sachiko or Tomomi will appear in the hatch and hand the receiver through, saying: ‘A call for you, Miyake. No name.’ Doi is super-talkative tonight – he tells me how he got dismissed from his last job. He was a night-watchman in a multistorey cemetery where the ashes of the dead are stored in hives of tiny locker-shrines. He was fired for substituting his own music for the tapes of Buddhist funerary mantras. ‘I figured, man, if I were stuck in a box for all eternity, which would I prefer? Priests making opening-seriously-larger-than-expected-phone-bill moans, or the golden age of rock’n’roll? No contest! I could feel the vibes in the place change, man, whenever I put on my Grateful Dead tapes.’ Doi slashes his throat with his forefinger. I hear Doi without really listening to him. His pizza comes through for delivery. I box it and off he goes. The radio plays ‘I Heard It on the Grapevine’ – a sweaty, scheming song. Sachiko opens the hatch – ‘You have a mystery caller on line three!’
‘Ai?’
‘Nooo . . .’
‘Who?’
‘She said it was a personal call.’ Sachiko leans through to the kitchen wall phone, presses a button and hands me the receiver.
‘Hello?’
The caller does not respond.
Fear makes my voice sharp. ‘I don’t owe you anything now!’
‘Is two a. m. good morning or good night, Eiji? I’m not very sure.’ A middle-aged woman, not Mama-san. She is as nervous as I am, I think.
‘Look, would you just tell me who you are?’
‘Me, Eiji, your mother.’
I lean against the counter.
Tomomi is studying me through the crack in the hatch. I close it.
‘This is, uh, a surprise.’
‘Did you get my letters? My brother said he forwarded them on to you. He said you’re living in Tokyo now.’
‘Yeah.’
Yeah, I got your letters. But therapy that closes wounds in you just opens wounds in