David Mitchell: What You Do Not Know You Want

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Who? When? Dripping, I wrapped a towel around me, unlocked the door and looked down the buzzing corridor. Who, me? said the Coke machine. The elevator was climbing from 1F upward, not 4F down. Werewolf? Too subtle. Who else has a key? Wei? A joke? A threat? Who? A skeleton key? A cleaner? Another guest with a muddled-up key? The nocturnal shouter? But why that message? Back in the bathroom, the mirror letters were fading. Had they really been so clear? Isn’t it more likely that room 404’s previous occupant had drawn them on? Quarter-convinced by this, I dressed and wandered out for some air, for want of any other plan. Wei, far from hiding a triumphant smirk, was watching Will and Grace on a mini TV. Ten A.M. I wanted to speak to someone who knows me. Nightingale? Women attribute emotional calls to a guilty Conscience. Jesus Null-and-void Christ, I miss you, Vulture. I found myself on a bridge over the Lunalilo Freeway, watching the lights in Pearl Harbor. Depression turns Outdoors indoors. Dying in here.

Werewolf was at reception by the time I’d eaten and wandered back to Hotel Aloha. The scarlet carnation in the semen-cloudy vase had rotted to tampon maroon. My last-but-[ onc ’light ], so I had little to lose by getting out your photo and telling Werewolf I had a couple of questions. My hairy hotelier squinted. “So that Jap’s why you’re hanging around like a wedged turd. Well, ain’t got nothing to say about him , ’cept I wish to sweet God he’d ended his misery in someone else’s hotel. The paperwork he cost me! The favors I had to call in to hush it up.” My request that Werewolf hand over those possessions which he’d “forgotten” to give to the police produced a row of browned fangs. “What’re you saying?” Theft from a suicide is still theft is what I’m saying; that I knew about the knife; that I wanted it back. Werewolf chose a lookey here, asshole voice. “ If I had anything belonging to that faggoty half Jap”—he flicked your photo and I fought an urge to ram a pencil up his nostril and through his brain—“I’d probably drop it down the nearest sewer.” I held his gaze but explained that your relatives would pay a reasonable sum for the knife’s safe return. It has no monetary value, but it was a family heirloom. Werewolf went all oh? “A ‘family heirloom’? Well, bless my bleeding heart, that changes everything. Then I’d definitely drop it down the nearest sewer. Will you tell Faggoty Jap’s relatives that from me, during this dark and difficult time?”

The pyramid of mirror letters in 404 had faded away. Logic administered bromides: staying in a hotel where you died just two weeks ago, searching for another suicide’s blade, wedding just around the comer… little wonder I was this wired up. I hadn’t—haven’t—gotten over what you did. Disbelief was my first reaction. You’d just closed a deal worth as much as Princess Diana’s damaged diamond Rolex, second hand forever twitching on 8:17. More than the telegraph pole James Dean drove into. Mishima’s knife would make us both wealthy for two or three years. You were the newest member of a balloonist’s syndicate. Please, not a suicide. But the policewoman talked me through the coroner’s verdict: the message on your mirror, going down going down going down, confirmed as yours by the state graphologist, to your prints on the wire cutter used to access the roof, ten other proofs, left little room for doubt. Nervous collapse? Compounded by your Mishima complex? But no. Doubt grows into counterfact in the tiniest crack.

“Give it back!” Percussive, savage, desperate. My limbs were sticky from sleeping in clothes. The shouter had been quiet for a few nights. I thought he’d left. “ Give it back!” I called back, “Who are you? Are you okay?” No answer. I listened, I listened, I listened. I got up, crept outside and pressed my ear against 403. Silence. Against 405. Silence. Lights off in both rooms. On not quite a whim, I crept up to Wei’s room and pressed my ear against her room. Her breathing? Or my own? Why did I feel that sense of being watched? Hotel Aloha has no CCTV. A black moth hinged its wings. Uneasy, I went back to my room and turned on the TV with the sound right down.

Saturday evening’s Runaway Horses was fuggy with laughter, booming reggae and Asian-American youth in bloom. In my last clean Gucci shirt I took the very last seat at the bar and Shingo slid me my nearly last Sapporo in Waikiki. This time tomorrow, I’d be back in Yerbas Buenas with a business to try to rebuild. The Yukio Mishima Knife Book would be a bad passage in a disastrous chapter, but the main narrative would go on. A woman right by me cleared her throat and said, “I never thought you were marine. You’re too stick-insect. They’d throw you out.” Well, thank you very much, I smiled at the Filipina from Bar Wardrobe. She stepped over my irony. “I drank too many the other day, okay? Spoke too many too. What you learned, shush, is secret, please.” Therapeutic to spill your guts occasionally, I assured her, and promised I’d never repeat a word. But my silence could be bought only by her name. Grace, she told me, and Grace took my Sapporo Black so I ordered another. Some loud Aussies across the bar shot me looks: rebuttees, I guessed. “So you live on Oahu?, asked Grace. “You a businessman or a tourist or what?” I surrendered to the seductive quasi-truth and told her I run a special business, one that never advertises, which obtains singular artifacts that are otherwise unobtainable. Grace was sharp. She asked how we got clients. Introduction only, I told her, unable to resist giving her a business card. She read, “‘What You Do Not Know You Want.’ That all?” I nodded, and told her I was on Oahu trying to locate a historic weapon for a wealthy client. Grace was fascinated. “Is all legal, your business?” I told her, “If we exercise discretion, the question doesn’t apply.” My codealer, I explained, had apparently entrusted this item to the exowner of Runaway Horses… Who,” Grace filled in the blank, “is Runaway Barman now. Is hilarious joke, yes?” Hilarious, yes.

“Death isn’t some faraway land, okay, at the end of time,” Grace insisted several bottles later. I had no inkling how we got onto the subject. “Death is the white lines down the highway, okay, in your cutlery drawer, okay, in bottles in bathroom cabinets, inside cells of your body. Death, hey, we’re made of the stuff. Death is the pond; we the living are the fish. So to answer your question, yes, of course, the dead are everywhere, and yes, they watch us. Like TV. When we interest them.” Women love being asked if they are clairvoyant, so I did so. “Men [ uluuy.r ] ask that,” frowned Grace, “but intuition is just seeing and listening, is not being blind because it does not agree with culture or fashion or desires. Intuition is not mystical.” Believing that the dead swarm around the living sounded pretty mystical to me, I suggested, if not morbid. “Buying and selling suicide weapons of your Japanese writer is not morbid?” Yes, Vulture, loose lips sink ships, but I haven’t wanted a woman as much as I wanted Grace since you-know-when. “Such a knife will only attract devil’s eye, no? Is obvious!” I said, Would she consider continuing our discussion in a less public venue? “Okay, sure, I consider.” But when I got back from the bathroom, Jesus Mary Poppins Christ, her bar stool was straining under a German as big as a grizzly. Gone, shrugged Shingo. Sorry. I ordered a last beer to show those smirking Australians but dealt the bur a series of vicious toe pokes and hoped that Grace intuited each one.