TUCSON, ARIZONA
23.30 ⚡️ Yay Sol V, your Holograb has sent! ⚡️
Hey again, Jonny, or would Dad be too weird, ha ha? .... Look, I’ve called a lot of people Dad over the years and they’ve all been total assholes .... But you’re not – I can tell – you seem lovely, by the way. .... I can’t wait to meet you! .... I feel like I might finally start to know myself, y’know? .... Well anyway, I’m not much like Janet – ha ha – that much is clear .... She’s still a bit batshit, in case you were wondering .... So I must be like you, no? .... Do you think we look alike? .... Same nose, I guess. Now I know who to thank for that! .... Joking .... So, I guess I’ll see you next week .... Thanks for saying I can stay! Your place looks awesome .... Such perfect timing, can’t believe I’ll be there for my birthday .... Can’t think of anywhere I’d rather turn thirty, or anyone I’d rather be with .... Tokyo, here I come! .... Goddamnit, I’m less excitable in real life, I promise you. .... Ok, gotta go now .... Bye! .... Bye, Dad!
TOKYO, JAPAN
Jonny Quiss’s apartment seems too small for his ample frame, the furniture too low, the walls too close. Kit must shrink against those walls for Jonny to pass him. Jonny seems underwhelmed and in fact pretty furious about Sol’s friend being here too. Why hadn’t she mentioned it, Kit wonders.
In the former shock of neon that is Shibuya, central Tokyo, the towers that remain since the earthquake look weary and worn around the edges, an ageing that these modern buildings do not wear well. It is eerily quiet in here and the rooms are forbiddingly bare, as if Jonny is the sole occupant of the forty two-bedroomed apartments; they have not yet heard or run into any other inhabitants at all, the elevator doesn’t work and even the concierge in the lobby is no longer in evidence, though the desk remains.
This ghost block is not so tall as some of its neighbours, but squat and wide, a mere five storeys. The cracks are showing though, and even on the walk from the regenerated Shibuya subway station, Kit has seen similar structures that are half rubble. Around the station itself and the hectic Scramble Crossing are newly restored ad-screens looming, leering, screaming. This is what you see on the news: Tokyo restored. But the shiny footage conceals as much; the place is half-wrecked still.
Sol sleeps on a futon unfurled on a tatami mat in the tiny second bedroom, no bigger than the futon itself; Kit sleeps on the floor – this is clearly to be his role in life – in the kitchen that is also the sitting room. ‘Sorry, buddy, no more mats,’ Jonny stated with evident enjoyment on the first evening, before directing Kit to a convenience store to feed himself; Jonny had only been expecting one guest, he explained for the seventh time, therefore he had only bought sufficient pot noodles for two.
It’s Saturday night and Jonny Quiss has taken them (Kit had to insist on coming too) to a nearby izakaya, a Japanese pub, a den dug into the ground. They have removed their shoes to enter the nook of dark wood, the air thick with fumes of smoke and sake, and are seated in a shadowy booth separated from the rest of the bar by columns of teak and ornate latticework. A wooden table top divides Kit from Sol and Jonny, the floor beneath it lowered, a pit for jeaned legs. He watches Sol curl up to sit cross-legged on the flat cushion next to Daddy. At some point Jonny’s arm creeps around Sol’s waist. Every so often Kit sees his fingers twitch up, or down, and he feels a little electric shock of outrage. Sol seems completely unperturbed, and if anything nestles into him a bit more.
At the heavy wooden bar, three suited salarymen loll forward, fast asleep and statue still, as if time has stopped; imprisoned and immortalised them.
Jonny resumes his campaign to get Sol pissed. ‘You were named after my favourite Mexican beer, darlin’ – it’d be a crime not to.’
Kit tries to catch her eye but she’s not biting. She seems to be enchanted by the city, high on the sheer noise outside the deathly silence of the residential block.
As he sits opposite Jonny’s expansive flesh, Kit reflects yet again on the obscene flattery of his Holograb. At Sol’s post-rehab halfway house, reunited at last with her virtual reality device, she had shown him an animated shot of Jonny’s Holograb. The man was reclining suavely against some brightly coloured cushions, softly lit by something resembling a chandelier. It’s not how Kit would have pictured a marine abroad. He had agreed though that the two had a slight nasal resemblance, the same strong jaw and cheek bones and slanting brown eyes, features which sometimes seem too large in Sol’s slight frame. His avatar’s hair was greying where hers is dark brown, and swept back with a slight wave to it where hers is set in spiny disarray, like a sea urchin. But any likeness at all is hard to see now, other than perhaps a slight upward tilt of defiant jaw.
He could have doctored his hologram to match hers, Kit supposes. He’d certainly enhanced his living quarters.
Jet lag has both Kit and Sol in its claws. It was the first time he’d flown anywhere, and one of the last planes the sky would see. The flight west from LA to Tokyo had taken them back across time through a thousand- coloured dawn to darkness, a glowing red Sun just beginning to rise. For eight hours they hovered in this uncanny light, ever one step ahead of a Sun on the verge of rising, a world between worlds. Kit felt as if aviation itself were reversing its path, humanity folding its creations back into itself, like a mother gathering up her children as she prepares for the end. At one point between wake and sleep, he realised that the Sun might not rise at all this time. He found his hand was touching Sol’s arm, the comfort of her sleeping skin, and she had angled herself towards him in flower-like response.
They were lucky to fly at all. The ten day return tickets had been bought in a final virtual spurt of additional flights, before a halt was called to that too. All commercial flights had been instantly booked up until the 1 January, the cut-off date, so companies had been releasing extras with rampant abandon, drafting in thousands of extra flights every day from every airport at every conceivable price. Scammers too, and the black market. People were divided – protestors on the street calling for the flight ban to be immediate, for consumers to boycott those on offer. Others saw it as their last chance: last chance to see a dreamed-of place, last chance to leave here, last chance to live there – though most countries had upped their visa requirements and were daily deporting as many as they could before the world sent up its borders. Split families and loved ones were particularly urgent passengers, second only to those fleeing the countries most threatened by climate change. But the latter weren’t fooling anybody and they didn’t get so far. This was not an invitation to rearrange the global population, but a measure to curb its feverish migration.
Kit and Sol only landed in Tokyo yesterday. Kit’s first night had been a long and wakeful one on the kitchen floor, listening to the unnerving creak of the tower block, feeling almost as if it were swaying in the winds. In the course of that night Kit had filtered Jonny’s answers to his many and varied questions, and he’d deduced that this was most definitely the wrong Jonny Quiss, if that was even his name at all.
‘He didn’t even know which part of the States you’re from! Or your mother’s name . . .’ he’d added definitively to the list of charges laid at Sol’s tiny and perfect feet that morning.
‘People forget things.’ She sniffed. ‘He’s been in Japan for a long time. And children don’t always look like their parents, do they? In any case, there’s something about his eyebrows that’s very me.’
When Quiss surfaced, Kit inspected these eyebrows and agreed that they were indeed curiously slender and manicured for a dude.
Sol started smiling at him again. Jonny orders sake and three cups. Sol, who had protested half-heartedly about the beer, murmurs approvingly. ‘What?’ she says, finally allowing her eye to be caught by Kit. ‘I went to rehab for opiates, not booze.’
‘Yeah, give the girl a break,’ says Jonny, lighting a cigarette and pushing the blue Mevius packet over to Sol. He looks like he has spent a lot of time in places such as this over the years.
The men at the bar suddenly reanimate and order more drinks. One stands up, starts to sing something with enthusiasm, and falls over. As the robotic barman zooms to help him out, past the red lanterns of the entrance, the machine first extracts his wallet, and therein, the cash he has spent here. Japan is one of the only cash societies left on Earth, strangely given their almost total reliance on the virtual in every other respect. The man stumbles into the street, no longer in the care of the establishment, and Kit has a premonition – or is it a memory – of Sol at that stage of inebriation, a danger to herself and others. The time she found an unlocked car on Fourth Avenue returns to him: teenage Sol careered, unlicensed, through the centre of Tucson until a flower shop window stopped her rampage. She should have been in rehab for booze.
Jonny extends a fleshy forearm to fill Sol’s cup with sake and then smacks the table buzzer with force. There’s a quietness here, a respectfulness in the way people behave with one another. Jonny, as he places an order with the scurrying robotic waiter, serves to highlight this sense of quiet respect by contrast with his own noise. There’s a loudness to him in casual action that seems to take up much more space than even the trio of drunk Tokyoites.
Not once have they been interrupted by a waiter, nor has Kit been able to detect the tip-seeking behaviour so essential to his own survival in Tucson. But then, why would robots require tips? Suits him.
Kit watches Sol with the old longing, and he watches Jonny talking to Sol; the man is bent at such a degree as to block Kit from even peripheral vision. He’s holding forth about his upbringing in Miami as Sol’s shining face looks ever more intrigued.
‘So, Jonny, when did the marines bring you to Tucson?’ Kit tries a new line of questioning.
‘I was just passing through, Ket. Met Sol’s mother and decided to stop passing.’ Some octopus tempura lands on the dark wood between them and Jonny dives at it with chopsticks. ‘Octopus,’ he declares through a mouthful of it, ‘is one of the few things left in the Sea that can cope with all the shit in it.’ He laughs uproariously.
Kit persists. ‘So then the Marine Corps sent you to the Pacific?’ ‘This guy’s hilarious.’ Jonny nuzzles into Sol’s echinate hair as more survivor specimens are delivered to their table: pickled jellyfish, noodle- wrapped squid, beetles seduced by something sweet and sticky.
The Japanese have always been imaginative and brilliant chefs, Kit had read on the way out in the digital valedictory magazine, and nowhere can this be seen more plainly than in their culinary response to the near- extinction of fish. A lethal combination of over-fishing, acidification of the oceans and climate change has reduced their number to an endangered few thousand. Seeing the abundance of tentacled sea creatures in this izakaya, Kit wonders how these can be safe to eat. Maybe they’re farmed in freshwater or something.
He stabs a lacquered beetle with a toothpick and gingerly bites down, cracking the sticky carapace between his teeth and allowing the sweet, juicy innards to fill his mouth.
‘What’s it like, Kit?’ Sol smiles at him; he feels his heart walls falter slightly.
‘Kind of like a sugared shrimp.’ It’s really not that bad. Growing up it would have been weird and repulsive to eat the kissing bugs and robber flies of the desert. The fear of the spider in an earhole, the scorpion in a shoe. Us and them. People used to say the future would involve eating insects, but so many of these too are under threat now, farmed for consumption yet failing anyway.
From his side of the table he can see two chefs working with studied patience behind the bar, one attending wholly to the turning of two single skewers of asparagus and shitake mushroom. Robots are not up to this job, apparently.
Kit swings his legs out of the table pit and speaks to the robot waiter in the halting Japanese he learnt on his Virrea, immersed in a virtual Tokyo that looked very different from this real one. The programme simulates first language acquisition; it allowed Kit to be a baby crawling around his new environment, making sense of it by naming objects and feelings, having to speak to survive – unnecessary really, now that translation pieces are so much more sophisticated (they’ve each bought the full set – eye, ear and tongue) but he wanted to try. The un-dumb waiter replies in perfect American, before whizzing in the direction of the bathroom and beeping an order at the door, which slides open. Within, Kit finds several pairs of red slippers and more robot creatures vying for his attention. I just want to have a piss in peace, he thinks.
When he comes out, squirted in unreasonable places by jets of water and hot air, he sees Sol nuzzling up to Jonny Quiss in a way that is distinctly unfilial. He hears her saying something about the memories you form before you are three; what she remembers of him, her father, before he left.
Kit feels the need for fresh air. Standing in the street, wearing the rubber slippers placed by the door for just such an occurrence, fervid water batters him from the skies, as if his bathroom experience has been a mere amuse bouche for the weather beyond. The world is used to tropical storms now; it’s hard to remember a time when they made front page news. Still, a change from the drought he left in Tucson.
They’ll be back there soon enough, now Sol has found her father. Or at least someone claiming to be so – and maybe that’s as good as the real thing in Sol’s mind, someone prepared to stand up and claim her as their own. He inhales the rain, wishes he had some weed.
An urban fox slinks past, carrying its brush like a flame in the wet street. All wild animals are something of a rarity these days yet they keep presenting themselves to him. This one, not even shrinking from the rain, seems to be unnaturally large. Its fiery tail in particular is enormous and bushy, as if concealing many tails within that one’s marvellous flourish. He feels a compulsion to follow it, in spite of the downpour bouncing large drops off the shining streets. But as he steps out of the doorframe, the fox, startled, runs off, blaze of red fur taking a sharp left down the next alley.
He jumps; a hand on his shoulder. Sol, out of nowhere, is behind him. ‘Let’s go,’ she says, taking his hand in hers like she did when they were children. It makes him shiver.
‘What has happened in there with that fat fuck? ‘Are you alright?’ She doesn’t answer. The rain eases as fast as it started to come down. Sol leads him away from the izakaya, along the road and then left down the alleyway where the fox disappeared. The effects of the earthquake can still be seen here. Buildings lie in disarray, unloved and abandoned.
‘Where are we going?’ Kit asks her, aware of his heartbeat in strange places.
Again Sol ignores him. She looks flushed and somehow electric, larger than herself, as she might in a dream, or a fantasy.
His feet feel flat and unfleet, and he realises he is still wearing the rubber slippers.
Kit sees various signs outside the houses, lurid in pink and green, lying on their sides. They say:
REST (2h) ¥3,500~ STAY ¥8,000~
and he thinks these must be love hotels that no one has yet thought to restore. He had heard that even before the earthquake, buildings lay abandoned throughout Japan. People would explore these dilapidated ruins – old hospitals, theme parks, schools, hotels that had fallen into disrepair with the economic crash – and share their photographs. Japan has always been on the frontline in the war with nature, historically and in the last decade of deepening crisis. Kit supposes that the earthquake has brought more economic struggles, more modern ruins. But you wouldn’t know it if you weren’t right here.
None of the neon is alive. The street is barely lit but for the sudden Moon ripping through grey-sodden skies, huge and full.
Sol stops. The light of the Moon catches the silver of a cage, a picture of a cat pinned to the wall above. But the door is open and the cat of this love hotel has run free at some point. Behind it, a building: the door is hanging from its hinges and nature has started to reclaim it, a crop of moss spreading upwards through the dead neon.
Sol looks back at Kit and he follows her. He will always follow her.