It's not Shizuka, not anyone on my contact list. I don't recognize the number. I don't pick up. I return to my book, and make it through another page before it rings again, exactly five minutes later.
I wait a good minute this time. Just me and the vibrating cell phone. I let it vibrate and then not earlier, not later, I pick up a moment before the line switches to voicemail. My voicemail is an automated message that I hadn't bothered to customize, so that the smart crisp-sounding lady could do the work for me. So that my voice or name would not be associated with my number, and my number would acquire no identity.
There are too many numbers in life to begin with. As soon as we're born, the hour, minute, seconds, day, month, year, recorded as numbers, memorized, filed, photocopied, told stories about, written over and over again for the rest of our lives. It's the beginning of existence: a birth certificate is registered, identification numbers are issued as a part of citizenship, a part of belonging, sealed in government documents, locked away behind closed drawers and doors and vaults, retrieved in violation of the law, perhaps retrieved in violation of Etiquette - and the end of existence: certificate of cause of death, death registry, obituaries, read at funerals and memorials, engraved on tombstones and updated on documents, maybe in textbooks and websites. It creates the uniform passage of time, and applies its influence on one's lifestyle and maturity, day to day, year to year. It represents the amount of cholesterol, diabetic glucose levels, blood pressure, temperature of fever, body mass index, strength of eyesight, size of breasts. It's the permission to drive, to attend school, to participate in communities, to be owned by a company, to purchase and sell, to procure money and see its growth or decline, to demonstrate availability of resources, fluctuation of businesses, markets, industries, economies, the rise or fall of nations. They are longitudes and latitudes, addresses and postal codes, apartment units and hotel rooms. It gauges temperature, weight and value, height and depth, distance and speed. It counts the pages of a book and the level of intellect or emotional quotient. It depicts population density, the total summation of the human race and humanity. Without it, there is no standard, no method of illustration, no universal understanding. No System.
Somehow it gives us meaning. It gives life meaning. It's the human attempt to give everything meaning. In the process, giving meaning to numbers creates and bends us to the will of system. Yet numbers carry no meaning in itself. In the same way, in my attempt, I have strived to supply no meaning to my phone number, and no meaning to the caller. But I pick up the phone.
"Hello?" I say. I breathe, squint my eyes, clutch the phone.
My voice is loud in the climax of the night. There are no lights but the one above me like a spotlight on a stage. It's not enough. Darkness presses in on all sides to listen. I can almost make out ghastly wisps and humanoid effigies in the shadows, wavering, ever morphing, advancing and retreating, testing their tendrils, their footing against the sole fixture above my head.
There's no reply on the other end. Not even static from the receiver, or breathing. Not even the shift of fabric or a change in grip. The silence is deadweight.
"Hello?" I say again, almost to myself.
After giving another full minute of silence, I end the call. I set the phone down carefully and watch it, as if it might get up and walk off on its own, right off the table.
A drunk? A malfunctioning device? Perhaps a prank call? But none of these possibilities feel right. I might aspire to spend the rest of the night - or morning - inventing new scenarios, but there won't be any that are satisfactory. The heaviness of the call, the frequency of the vibration, the colossal silence. They serve to deliver one meaning. It could be the psychosis that seizes me, its effects deepening day by day - yet, I have an inexplicable certainty that it is an intentional call, an intentional silence, an intentional warning. Almost as if Shizuka is here, whispering in my ear. "Look at the poster."
I sip from my cup of tea and pick up my book. But I watch the murky ink of shadows from the corner of my eye, daring them to make a move.
*
I tell her we should go on a date the next day and I can see her trying to keep her face straight, but her lips curve, tremble and struggle against a grin. At last, she gives in, breaks apart like the sun through cloud cover and she starts to laugh. "You could have been smoother."
"I don't like to beat around the bush."
She sips from her beer.
"What happened to tall caramel chai tea, 120 degrees, soy, extra whip?"
"Coffee and tea for the mornings, beer for the evenings."
"Have you always done that?"
"No, only after I met you."
I look at her quizzically. "Why?"
"I don't know. Things change when it seems right. You drink beer with your friends."
"Sapporo."
"Yes, Sapporo, not Asahi, not Hitachino, no Kirin, no Echigo," she says.
Her gaze meets mine and in that moment, the world drips into a hushed tone of sepia. Though the lamp is on, like an age-old tradition that we could not discard, on the coffee table sits a candle, its flame small and still, a hovering sprite, to draw us together. The candle keeps us company.
"I don't actually like the taste." I drink from my can of beer. I make a face to prove the point.
She watches me with interest. "But drinking beer with me here is different wouldn't you say?"
"Oh, is it?"
"You enjoy my company," she says.
"Don't read too deeply into my mind."
She scrunches her nose, "too late."
I try to get more comfortable on the pillow I'm sitting on. It's a different one she pulled out from some closet today; it's woven with an archaic-looking image of an open hand and a fish. I sit on the left of the table, she is sitting on my right. Kurt Cobain watches over us.
"You don't mind?"
"I've seen and heard many things, Maeda-san."
"Like what?"
"Imagine someone graphically, visually, dissecting her ex-boyfriend - butcher's knife, surgical scissors, fruit peeler, blood, bones and all, piece by piece. There was one person who actually did something like that. Wasn't arrested, the police couldn't find the culprit. I saw them on the street near Omotesando Hills."
"That doesn't sound too fun."
"It was fun for them. I could see and hear their glee, their joy at the victim's demise."
I ask if there's more.
"There are many men, all kinds of men, young and old, the rich and the poor, who would strip me naked in their minds and do all kinds of horrendous things. I'd be able to see exactly where they take me. Love hotels, back alleys, cars, public restrooms, grubby apartments. I could feel their dirty hands all over me if I didn't leave the area."
I sit in silence. "I'm sorry."
"At least you haven't yet."
"Please don't give me the idea."
Her expression is dark and dim. Like she is remembering something particularly unpleasant. Then she looks up.
"Many contemplate suicide, caught in indecision - how they should approach it: to swallow all the pills in the house and douse themselves in alcohol, or shut the doors and windows and put on the gas stove; leaping off the school roof or running in front of a car. Put their head in the oven like Plath. Sometimes it's just simply wanting to die but wishing someone would stop them; or just severe depression that's so full of despair and pain. It hurts me, a lot."
"Like hearing me thinking the first time?"
"I did pass out from your spike in Free Energy, it was like a sudden explosion, a shockwave of sorts, if you were to picture it perhaps. But emotional destruction is like a dead weight, forcing me onto my knees, a noose around my neck. That kind of sensation."
"Have you collapsed onto your knees before?"
"Yes. Many times. But less as I grew up, and desensitized myself."
"In a way, you don't have emotional capability like me?"
"You could put it that way. Though, probably more than you," she laughs.
"I'm sorry."
"Why are you apologizing?"
"If there are any times where I should have emotional responses, or," I pause, "well, nevermind."
We stare at the flame. The candle is ever burning smaller.
"So where should we go for a date?" I ask.
"We need to try more drastic things; it seems like They have stopped bothering. Perhaps They will act when we begin to break Etiquette, but what we're doing has become in a way, its own norm."
"A repetition of non-repetition."
"Well, it seems that way, that they aren't noticing any more, but certainly, it isn't that way. We need to see and know as a definite, first-hand, of what the System is doing in response, even if it becomes more dangerous."
"And you haven't been able to see or hear exactly what's going on."
"The System and its Images don't really have any thought processes or connect with the Collective directly. The System in itself is a concept I haven't encountered yet, I'm not sure if it physically exists. It's whatever is on the other end of the current that Processes humans and reinforces the idea of Etiquette with such power that it suppresses all instinctive primitive human desires and emotions."
She drinks from her beer. I do the same. The beer is cold and bitter in my throat. Hard to swallow like a rock.
"Do you wish to find out?"
She studies me for a while. Then she says yes.
So I ask if she'd like to take a ride on the Cosmo Clock 21 with me.
She tells me she would love to.
-
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