David Mitchell: What You Do Not Know You Want

MY THREE A.M. NIGHTMARE DISPERSEDlike a disappointed audience as I tried to find the Coke machine. A woman passed, in her fifties maybe, cuddling, saying, “All I want out of life is a good night’s sleep.” Too woozy to reply, I just smiled back. The second person I met at that sweltering hour was a barefoot girl of eighteen or nineteen, kneeling before the Coke machine, extracting a can from its cumbersome mouth. Pixie-nosed, Oriental, wearing surfer’s clothes for pajamas, not an ounce of fat on her, bony as macaroni in fact. “You can’t sleep either, huh?” I asked. Apparently she hadn’t heard. I raised my voice. “So you can’t go to sleep either, huh? We should throw us a party for insomniacs.” The machine relinquished her 7Up but she still refused to acknowledge me. Her dead eyes bore through me. “Sure was a pleasure meeting you,” I thanked her retreating figure. Bitch. But particles of the girl remained in the air. These I breathed in. Musk, salt, lime.

Back in room 404 my sheets were chewy with sweat. Jesus Molten Christ, where was the Hawaiian ocean breeze tonight? A double dose of aspirin downed with whiskey and Coke—revolting—helped my mind cut its tight moorings. Each lush leaf on the lime trees lining the Ganges at Varanasi, you once told me, houses a soul for forty-nine days before the soul is reincarnated. Did you make that up? Remember the crows on the floating carcasses, eating their rafts? I thought about the Oriental girl, lying on her bed, sipping her 7Up . Her blanking out of me belittled—erased—me more than any verbal insult. Oriental? Who knows? Anyone in Hawaii could be from anywhere, no matter how they look. Who was she thinking about now? Me? Doubted it, but. Hotel rooms store up erotic charge, and men sleeping alone are its copper wires. Once upon a time she would have smiled, stroked her midriff, struck up a conversation. One thing might have led to It. Was she sleepwalking? Or is my voltage weakening now I’m thirty-six? Mirrors are my friends no longer. Nightingale picks through my golden locks for gray hairs. I must laugh along.

“Not this way! Not this way.” Jesus Jackhammer Christ, who fell out of that nightmare? A minute passed, two, five, thirty, but I heard nothing more. Hush now, I told my wild pulse, hush, it’s tomorrow morning already. I read Confessions of a Mask until Waikiki’s tourists, elevators, juicers, chambermaids, toilets, showers, bellboys, lifeguards, deliverymen and waitresses resumed their appointed function in this three-square-mile vacation machine. My Marc Jacob shirt, I decided, should send the right signal to the police. On my way out through reception I was surprised to see not the miserable werewolf who had checked me in, but the Oriental girl from the Coke machine, reading a Chinese paperback with a demon doll on the cover. “Good book?” I asked. “Stephen King,” she replied, glancing up, but making no reference to the previous night. “Chinese?” I asked, indicating the book. “Me? The book? Breakfast?” As you know, my interpersonal skills include both patience and charm, so I learned that Wei is from Hong Kong and has helped her uncle in the running of Hotel Aloha since his wife killed herself one year ago. “Sleeping pills,” Wei volunteered this detail. “Enough to kill an elephant.” “How tragic,” I responded. Uncle? If that hairy Caucasian belch really is her uncle then I really am Richard Nixon.

My attention drifted over the lost-property form like a balloonist surveying a strange city. Name, address, occupation. Occupation… how would “Dealer in esoteric memorabilia” sound? I nearly decided the form was a waste of time. Was that fat custodian of justice, picking his nose and wiping it under the seat of his chair, really going to get me nearer my holy grail? One Nozomu Eno at Runaway Korso and even Werewolf at Hotel Aloha were far likelier leads. In the end I wrote, “Trader,” figuring officialdom may as well be on my side as not. Truth needed to be cut to size, however. The “missing item” I registered, therefore, was “an ivory-handled ornamental bread knife (approx. 40 cm) last housed in a flute case.” That this knife was crafted by the Master Kakutani of Old Edo in 1868, I omitted to mention. That the Yukio Mishima had disemboweled himself with this very blade and attained his gory apotheosis on an otherwise nondescript November 25, 1970, I omitted to mention. That one month ago my business partner, Zachary Tanaka, was approached by one of the writer’s ex-lovers, now an alcoholic dentist in Tokyo with debts up to his cancerous throat, for quick cash and no grief from the Mishima estate in return for this knife plus certificate of authenticity sealed by Mishima himself— verified by ourselves—I omitted to mention. That one week ago Zachary Tanaka had flown to Honolulu, phoned me in Yerbas Buenas to confirm he had receipt of the knife, then jumped to his death from the roof of Hotel Aloha here in Waikiki, I omitted to mention. That the dagger had not been found and that an ultranationalist emperor worshiper in Kyoto had upped his offer to ¥25 million—what, five years of police pay?—I damn well omitted to mention. “Ivory-handled ornamental bread knife, huh?” snorted the cop. “Is that for slicing ornamental bread?”

Wei studied her admirable reflection in two mirrors held in exact positions. “If you look at your face from different places,” the girl explained, “you are reminded that we are not a Me, but an It who lives in a Me.” I showed her your photograph, the one I took of you by your glider. “Never seen him.” Wei shook her head. “Is he famous?” He is—was, I prompted—a Japanese-American named Zachary Tanaka who had stayed here two weeks ago. “So? Waikiki is Japan’s national playground. Even we have hundreds stay here, every year, all shapes, all sizes,” said Wei. Yeah, I said, but how many throw themselves from your roof? Wei did an oh face. “Uncle handled all of that. I slept through it, believe it or not. I sleep like a baby in this place. Ask Uncle about him.” Disappointing. Werewolf was a last resort. Hotel owners are hustlers, and if “Uncle” scented how valuable this artifact might be, and if it was in his possession, well, it may as well be guarded by lasers. So I just asked Wei what happened to Zachary Tanaka’s belongings. “The cops took everything,” stated Wei. “It was just clothes and pilot magazines, I heard.”

An hour in the creamy Hawaiian surf was an inviting prospect after a day of precinct offices. Were you on the bus to Koko Head, Vulture? Did you see that bullish ocean kicking up three-meter waves? Grace would say you were watching me lick up those spectacular rollers. For thirty pure minutes I achieved a state of grace with the sea. Everything I tried came off, but then, scanning the beach for admirers, I neglected a fundamental rule: Never rest idle with your back to the ocean. A godalmighty breaker crashed down on me, forcing me way under, where a churning riptide pulled me deeper. Stay calm, and normally the air in your lungs tells you which way is up, right? Not off Koko Head. No up, down, sound—save a dim roaring—and an inner voice lamenting, Drowning, you’re drowning, and my lungs collapsing and ABBA, amazingly, singing Supertrouper lights are gonna blind ya to scenes flashing by. Not scenes of my life but of clays after my death. Of my missing body, eaten by skipjack tuna. Of Wei or Werewolf reporting my absence to a nose-picking cop. Of Nightingale, assuming I’d bottled out of the wedding. I tell you of my dip with death, Vulture, to illustrate my conviction that ninetynine deaths in one hundred—accidents, disease, old age, you name it—are banal. There. My Big Thought. Only suicides can truly say, Yes, here is my reason for dying, crafted by my hand according to my logic.