David Mitchell: What You Do Not Know You Want

A second breaker tumbled my puny ass farther up the sucking beach. Jesus Half-dead Christ, a gallon of Pacific or more I barfed up, then crawled to the high-water mark and lay prostrate and eyed the murderous surf. Funny, none of the other copper-skinned surfers had even noticed I’d almost died. A geriatric jogger passed at slower-than-walking speed, grinning at me without teeth or sanity. Finally I heaved myself over to my gear, then waited for the bus back to Waikiki. Another fundamental rule: Don’t be caught on American soil without a car. My second reason for telling you all this is to explain the eat-now-for-tomorrow-we-die frame of mind of this week. If my cruelty to others is casual, I only follow the world’s lead. And look, I’m paying for it now, aren’t I? Oh, it’s a fucking butcher’s shop down here.

Nightingale called me from L.A., where she’s spent the week modeling for a chain of cosmetic surgeons to check for the n th time about Not Having u Veil. Sure, honey, I crooned, veils are too Barbie doll. Nightingale went stony on me, so I agreed with whatever guff the bounteous moo spouted next, so of course that added condescension to my list of sins against womankind. Premenstrual sadism, I hope. The shinier the apples of attraction, Vulture, the wormier their maggots of repulsion. Afterward, I shaved, aftershaved with a Hugo Boss scent—an expensive mistake—put on my Paul Smith suit, waxed my hair and was leaving when I saw these words doodled on the phone pad:

long live the emperor i don’t think they even heard me

You will recognize Yukio Mishima’s final words, but I needed a minute to trace them to their source. That my unconscious mind had not only digested his last utterance whole, but excreted it during an earwigging from Nightingale is further proof that our brains are dark globes lit by very distant stars.

Werewolf acted pissed that I’d assumed he’d know of Runaway Horses. “Bars spring up and die like weeds around here,” he said. “Find it in a phone book.” I asked him for a phone book. “Ain’t got one. So sorry.” All hail the service economy. Were his cracked eyeballs the last ones to see you? I was tempted to pluck them out to look for you, nickel-sized and inverted, impressed there. On Olohana Street I paid a Tin Man mime artist a dollar to direct me up to the intersection with Kunhio Avenue and down a flight of steps. Runaway Horses might have been any gaijin -friendly basement bar in Tokyo with a clientele three-quarters Japanese, one-quarter Western. I asked the barman if he had Sapporo beer. “Sure I do,” he replied, opening one for me. I said, “Nozomu-san, I’m Vulture’s associate.” My clever opener shot my foot off. “That settles it!” growled the barman, “I’m changing the name tomorrow, new sign, everything, and screw ‘Runaway Horses, Established 1998.’ I am not Nozomu Eno. I am Shingo Ogawa , okay? I own this bar now. Eno skipped town a week ago. Yes, gambling debts. No, I don’t know what stone he’s hiding under. No, I’m not his friend, I don’t know his friends, and no, his debts are nothing to do with me.” The man went on in this vein at length, but I’d glazed over. That your last known lover disappears at the same time that this singular artifact vanishes into thin air pointed to an obvious conclusion. I persuaded Shingo Ogawa—just—to write down my details, in case Nozomu showed up. Then, casually, I mentioned an ivory-handled ornamental bread knife left here by another friend. Shingo Ogawa clenched his jaw. “Nothing like that here,” he said, but I got a list of other Japanese bars you might have hung out at. One, I recognized from your last e-mail.

Bar Wardrobe, slotted above Waikiki Hula Karaoke Palace, was well named: cramped, dark, hot, varnished. Two inhabitants dwelt within. One lay slumped in a pool of mahogany light, as if shot ten seconds ago. His companion was semiobscured by gloom. Was this Bar Wardrobe? I asked, just to ask something. Her nod said, Stupid question. When would the barman be back? She blew smoke over the snorer to indicate, That’s him. Great. How could I get a drink? She shrugged. Well, how had she gotten hers? This time she deigned to answer verbally, “I have an arrangement with the management.” So I clipped a $10 bill to the till and helped myself to a Kilmagoon and soda. No sign behind the bar of a battered flute case or a pre-Meiji-period knife. The woman lit a match whose flare-up lit a face younger than her voice. Hooked nose, defiant lips, Hawaiian blood or maybe Filipina, I guessed. Birthmark like a wine stain but my right hand brushed my left to confirm my engagement ring was in my soap bag at the hotel. Blemishes fasten memories. Don’t you look at me that way, Vulture; when did you ever turn down a little entertainment? “You are a model,” I began, “am I right? It takes one to—” She cut in. “Wanna hear funny joke!” Okay, I said. “Okay. Tall blond American marine walks into a bar in Manila, where he chooses a cute native girl. So lucky she feels! She, a trainee hairdresser in her first month in Manila, already on her way to luxury apartment in Beverly Hills or Honolulu. Not like cousins in sweatshops or worse. No way, not her. River of dollars, many drinks. You can’t get pregnant your first few times, the marine laughs, later, on her back, then her front. A medical fact, he says. Sure, a warning goes off, but she’s too drunk now to fight—stop me if you know this joke, okay?—and he does call her next weekend, and the next, and the next. ‘My boyfriend this, my boyfriend that,’ she says to make the other hairdressers jealous. Three months the doctor gives her the news. You guess it yet! Pregnant as Queen Turtle. Funny, hey? Her boyfriend tells her their baby will be a beautiful Filipino-American son, okay, no problem, they move to California, okay. She weeps with joy. Good man, good father, not like her father, the fat sweaty incest pig. He promises to phone next night from base. Guess what? No call. Two weeks later an officer at the base tells her she isn’t the first girl to be duped by an American saying, ‘Hey, babe, I’m a marine, stick with me.’ She has no one to discuss pregnancy to, so she begs and borrows and spends everything on a private clinic. Keep it secret. The operation is a five-star fuckup. Half her womb gets sucked out too. She can’t stand for six months. Blood all the time. Well, this joke’s over almost. Years later the same girl, she lives in Honolulu. She does hair for rich wives. Hears their chatter about husbands, about affairs, about babies. Some days she wants cut their wrists, some days hers, some days the wrists of this world. So. Whatever line you’re to begin, don’t. All of them I heard already, okay?”

“Do I look like a fucking marine?” I shut the door.

“What did you do to the door ? Monday night in room 404 was no more restful than Sunday. “What did you do to the door?” Hearing someone jibber at whatever stalks their dreams unnerves the lemon yellow shit out of me. Wallpaper and paste is what separates our waking selves from those jibbering night stalkers. I padded down to the Coke machine at the end of the corridor, hoping to encounter Wei. All I met were black moths. Back in my room i took it round of aspirin, stripped, and watched my body in the mirror to see too, was an It inhabiting a Me. The jury was out. I took the elevator up to the roof to try to see your last view, but the tiny access stairs were locked by the shiny new padlock. The replacement for the one you’d cur through. So I had to make do with sitting on the steps. Back in my room I read a story from Death in Midsummer called “Patriotism,” where a military husband and wife commit seppuku together. Sex in death and death in sex. You loved it too; you’d underlined your favorite passages. I smoked a spliff but couldn’t stop crying. Sadness is fertile and thorny and takes root in any soil.