“What’s going on, Amon?” she asked. “What were you doing in that yard?”
“I… It was… the meeting… they…” Amon rocked anxiously in his seat with his head lowered. “M-my job… I…” His voice came out almost as a whimper.
“It’s okay,” Mayuko consoled him. “We can about it talk later.” Then after a pause, she gave him a sidelong glance of piercing distaste and said, “But can you turn off those awful videos?”
“Oh…” Amon felt the warmth of a blush in his cheeks when he looked down at the nectar-dripping orifices, ecstatic scowls, and intertwined flesh that flickered across his body. In the few hours since he sold his space, he had become so completely habituated to the raunchy audio that he’d forgotten it was even there. In the midst of all the vile images, Amon spotted himself on his left breast. He was thrusting a telephone pole fused to his crotch into an open manhole brimming with cottage cheese. As he’d always feared, XXXTrust was making good use of his likeness. (Beside this, a FillBot was penetrating the lubricated hole of a SpillBot with its hard rubbery protrusion.) “I-it… w-wasn’t my choice. I put up my space… f-for auto-auction… You see, and… this… This just… happened to be the highest bid.” He knew it sounded like an excuse, but the truth was the best he could come up with. The sad look he’d seen in her whirlpool eyes when she noticed he was in the Ginza club district appeared suddenly and vanished just as fast. Amon used Mayuko’s money to pay the severance fee to cancel his one year contract with XXXTrust. When the porno vanished, he was in his gray uniform, darkened with iridescent InfoRain.
Then Mayuko looked him up and down with a frown. “You’re wet,” she said. Already the red, yellow, and green plaid of the seat was beginning to blot with InfoRain and a small puddle had formed at his feet. “Should I take you to your apartment for a change of clothes?”
“No!” he said, shaking his head a bit too vigorously. “Thank you. I… I can’t go back there anymore. I vacated.”
“Vacated? To where?”
“Nowhere. I’m…” Amon cringed in shame, unable to finish the sentence. I’m homeless now.
She deepened her frown lines, apparently in thought. “In that case, let’s head to my place.”
“N-no good. They’ll… find us there too.”
“What are you talking about? Who!?”
“Sekido and the headhunter. They…” Amon found words failing him again.
“My new place should be fine. No one except you and Rick know where I live. I never even gave the address to my company when I left their dorm.”
“You don’t understand. These men are very free… They-they can afford… They could be watching you.”
“Do you think Sekido and this headhunter are so paranoid that they’d be spying on all your ex-girlfriends?”
Amon wanted to say that he didn’t have any other ex-girlfriends, but Mayuko went on before he could start.
“Don’t worry, I’m totally anonymous. You’re always seeing my naked face, but I look like a completely different person to everyone else. Watching me wouldn’t tell them anything. Or what? You think they can cut through the blinding and find me just like that?”
“Well, no…” He shook his head. If they could do that, he thought, they would have found me hours ago. “But…” Amon realized then that he had been forgetting to text. He considered typing his next message, but thought better of annoying her, even if it would reduce the strain on her funds. “I don’t think we should… go there. The chance… might be small that they know where you live, but… we’d still be taking a risk.”
“So what do you suggest?”
“I can…” He thought for a moment. “I can stay in a capsule.”
“A capsule? Do you really think I’d let you squeeze into one of those? If you’re set against staying at my place, why don’t we find a proper hotel?”
“A capsule would be… much cheaper for you. And if they find you with me—”
“Don’t be silly. I don’t mind spending a bit of money for a friend in need. And if you go to a capsule, we won’t be able to talk.”
“But I could still… FacePhone you.”
“Amon!” she cried, a glaze of unshed tears suddenly swirling atop her whirlpools. “Rick is gone! Gone! Okay?! And right after I heard that from you, you hung up on me. Now you’re telling me you want to go to a capsule alone? I thought Rick would always be close by, that I could just click and see through his eyes or talk with him whenever I wanted. Then all of a sudden I got cut off. Now I’m never going to see him again. What if the same thing happens to you? Forget it! I’m not letting you out of my sight. Not until I know what’s going on, okay?”
Mayuko’s voice was cracking, and as Amon looked at her expression of grief and distress, all his objections deflated instantly. It felt wrong to use her money unnecessarily and being with her would put her at risk. But now that she’d saved him, the least he could do was keep her company until things were a bit clearer. And although his ingrained impulses told him a solitary life was more frugal, he had to admit that the idea of having someone else around was kind of comforting. “Alright. Do you know somewhere we can stay?”
She broke their gaze and nodded. “There’s a weekly mansion in my neighborhood. I’ll put in a reservation now.”
When Mayuko clicked on the ignition, Amon said, “Could you hold on a second.” She nodded and Amon took her folded umbrella before getting out of the car. He sensed that this was an awkward moment, but he couldn’t wait any longer. Opening the umbrella, he walked to the corner of the parking lot, unzipped, and relieved himself for what felt like an eternity.
When Amon sat back in the wet seat, the car was already revved and Mayuko immediately pulled out of the parking lot. With her arms stretched forward on ergonomic rests, she steered by see-sawing her left hand side to side with her middle finger as the pivot, and adjusted acceleration by tapping her index finger. Heading back across the bridge over the valley, she turned left, ascended a winding ramp to the overpass looming above, and slotted into traffic.
They were whirring along the wet highway for not a moment when Amon let out a long quivering sigh. He still found himself worrying about the price out of habit, but now that he was in the cushy seat, away from the illiquid, the spammers, and the InfoRain, he had finally accepted that he wasn’t going to crash. Suddenly he found the shaking had subsided somewhat and sat up straight.
As though sensing Amon was calming down, Mayuko glanced at him and said, “So, Amon, tell me what happened?” Her whirlpools stared at him as she entrusted the steering temporarily to her driving app.
“Well… um… I…” Amon’s attempts to explain sputtered into silence, but he continued to meet her gaze.
“What?”
“I’m sorry. It’s just… when I look in those whirlpools, sometimes it’s like… I lose my train of thought and… especially right now… Now that I’m more relaxed, my tiredness is starting to creep up and I can’t keep my head straight.”
Mayuko didn’t show any signs she’d heard him but, before long, her whirlpools began to implode on themselves. Amon watched as the whites and irises were sucked inside the pupils as though going down a drain, swirling into some dimensionless point in the center, until all that remained was a dot that soon faded and disappeared, leaving her naked eyes. It seemed like forever since he’d seen them, even though the last time was just yesterday morning in Rick’s apartment. They seemed to break down the world beyond the windshield as she took over driving again, dissolving the road, the lights, the InfoRain into their component atoms of matter and meaning.