is melted out of position. My tongue is a pumice stone. Saliva, collected in my tongue-root gully, drools out on to my pillow. At my table, Ai chops carrots and apples. For a moment I think – I married Ai, and she is making dinner for our nine children – but then I smell the apple. Nutmeg too. Cat is licking her paws and watches me. Buntaro lets Ai up, she knocks, I am too deeply asleep to wake up, Buntaro confirms I am definitely up here, Ai peers in, sees me, goes out and buys food for a salad. Life is sheer bliss when it wants to be. Ai must trust me, to be alone with me in my capsule while I am dressed – or not dressed – how I am. Being trusted makes me trustworthy. Carrot and apple go together great. She is chopping walnuts – I never much cared for walnuts until this moment – and raisins, and sprinkles them over lettuce. She is wearing old jeans and a faded yellow T-shirt lighter than her skin, and her hair is up. Here is that mythical neck. She scrapes peelings into the garbage bag. She wears thick black-framed glasses that suit her in a quirky sort of way. Ai never, ever tries to impress, and that impresses me so much. She has a pirate silver earring. ‘Hey, Kyushu Cannibal,’ she says – I realize all this time she knew I was watching her – and chords inside me change from A flat to loose-string D minor. ‘Why do you keep letters in your freezebox?’
‘Watch out,’ says Ai, ‘I think there may be fish in these bones.’
‘It tastes great.’
‘Do you live entirely on pot noodles?’
‘I vary my diet with pizza, courtesy of Nero. Mind if I finish the salad?’
‘Do, before you die of scurvy. You never told me about your view.’
‘That is no view. Yakushima has views.’
‘It beats the view me and Sachiko have now. We used to overlook a low-security prison exercise yard. That was quite nice. I used to leave the windows open and play Chopin waltzes back to back. But then I returned from class one day to find a vertical rotary carpark had sprung up since breakfast. Now we have a view of concrete six inches away. We want to move, but paying a deposit would wipe us out. Even honest estate agents, if that isn’t an oxymoron, skin you alive. Plus, it’s nice to know that if a fire broke out we could climb out of the window and abseil to safety by breathing in and out slowly.’
The telephone riiiiiiiiings. I answer: ‘Hello?’
‘Miyake!’
‘Suga? Where are you?’
‘Downstairs. Mr Ogiso tells me you have company – but would you mind if I come up?’
I do, to be honest. ‘Sure’.
When Suga enters my capsule I gape. He has had a body transplant. His eczema has vanished. He has a contoured haircut that must have cost ten thousand yen. He is wearing the suit of a Milanese diamond robber, and has the hip rectangular glasses of an electric-folk-singer. ‘Are you going for an interview?’ I ask. Suga ignores me and bows shyly at Ai. ‘Hi, I’m Masanobu Suga. Are you Miyake’s Korean girlfriend?’
Ai bites the head off a celery stick and looks at me quizzically.
‘No,’ I garble ‘Suga, this is Miss Imajo.’
Ai munches. ‘Suga the Snorer?’
Now Suga looks confused. ‘I – er – Miyake?’
‘Uh . . . Some other time.’
‘There won’t be another time for a long time – I came to say goodbye.’
‘Leaving Tokyo?’ I chuck a cushion down for him. ‘Near or far?’
Suga slips out of his sandals and sits down. ‘Saratoga.’
‘Which prefecture is that in?’
Ai has heard of it. ‘Saratoga, western Texas?’
‘Heart of the desert.’
‘Beautiful,’ Ai munches, ‘but wild.’
I find a sort of clean cup. ‘Why are you going to a desert?’
‘I’m not allowed to tell anyone exactly why.’
I pour his tea. ‘Why not?’
‘I’m not allowed to tell anyone that, either.’
‘Is any of this to do with your Holy Grail?’
‘After I left here last week, I went to my office and I got my brain back in gear. So offensively obvious. Write a search program, smuggle it into the file field, and get it to scan through the nine billion files to see if a real Holy Grail site had been hidden anywhere, right. My first attempt backfired. In megabyte terms it was like trying to squeeze China through the Sumida tunnel. The Pentagon immune system recognizes the program as an alien body, zaps