Track eleven tells me everything I need to know. The truth. This is no hotel. This is no “room”.
On a Slow Boat to China.
That explains the vibrations—the buzz of the bed. But it isn’t the bed. It’s everything. The whole… vessel.
I’m on a slow boat.
I get out of bed. I know what I’m looking for. Where is it? I take half a step towards the desk. Brush away the heaps of dust. It kind of looks like snow. Something’s speeding up now. Getting faster. Time? I start digging. It has to be here somewhere. That slip of paper.
Found it. My ticket to ride.
The words are a blur. Can’t make them out.
Time is moving dangerously fast now.
Where am I going? Where’s this slow boat taking me? Hope… I still have hope. That I’m getting out of here. But I have no idea where I am—no idea where I’m going—and isn’t that the same as having no way out? The floor rumbles, speaks to me: You’re not going anywhere. The room has shape now. The shape of a cabin. Better hurry.
The rumbling doesn’t stop. It’s hypnotizing. This isn’t the first and you know it’s not the last. There’s nothing you can do, nowhere you can go.
Then I hear another voice. You’re wrong, she says.
Softly.
The window’s boarded up. It won’t let the outside in. The door is no good. The knob is dead. Got to get to the bottom of this. Or do you wanna be a fossil? You wanna turn to dust—trapped in this cabin? No fucking way.
I sail with my mind.
Like riding a dragon. Like in that movie, when the hero flies to the end of the world. To keep the world from ending. The scene plays back in my head.
Back to the bathroom. I step inside. Look at the mirror. It’s still cloudy. I wipe it clean with the bottom of my fist to find myself looking back at me. Is that really me? A question like the last judgement. Yes, I answer.
Yes. This is my life.
And I won’t run.
From my chronicle of failures.
In that moment, I slip through the wall—through the mirror.
Into the real “dream”.
And I don’t wake up.
CHRONICLE
—2000—
We read the human genome. Mar. 31: Mt. Usu in Hokkaido erupted—after the region had been evacuated. It was the first time volcanic activity had been predicted beforehand. The leaders of North and South Korea had their first tête-à-tête in fifty-five years. Aug. 12: an atomic submarine sank in the Barents. The entire crew—118 souls—perished. Milošević’s dictatorship fell. Naoko Takahashi won gold in Sydney. The 20th century came to an end.
Right on time. There’s a knock at the door. But you can’t come in if you don’t know the password. Millimetres behind the door, I whisper the prompt: “Chiang”.
From the other side of the door: “Kai-shek”.
Permission granted. I unlock the triple-bolt and let my comrade in. It’s Fumio Narazaki.
“Pretty little mess you got here. How about cleaning up every year or so?”
“I clean all the time—like, every other month.”
“And another thing,” Fumio Narazaki says, “do we need really need a password? It’s not like we’re samurai from the Edo period or something… Hey, where is everybody?” He looks around the room.
“Hate to break it to you…” I make a sour face. “It’s just us. The others are busy with their real jobs…”
“Seriously? It’s just us?”
“Sucks lemons, I know.”
“Shit,” Fumio Narazaki says, “my boss asked me to stay late, too. But I told him to take his overtime and stuff it. I came because you said this was the ‘case to end all cases’.”
“Oh, it is. It’s huge.”
“How huge?”
I point him towards the open notebook in the middle of the war zone that I call my room. Narazaki and I lean in—our heads almost hit—and we re-enter The Incidents of Coincidence. Just like we have since we were kids.
Case one: Private Residence. Arakicho, Yotsuya. An office worker on the way home from a ramen joint broke into her ex-lover’s apartment and killed him. The victim’s wife also sustained serious injuries. The suspect filled their mouths with large quantities of dried seaweed. Her confession: “He was never going to leave her… so I had to do something to shut his lying mouth for good.”
Case two: An office complex in Ryogoku’s third district. A taxi driver deep in debt killed three loan sharks. His weapon: a couple of chanko pots.
Case three: Numabukuro. On Asahi Avenue. A boy (sixteen years old) stabbed a housewife with a thirty-centimetre hunting blade purchased on the Internet. Over ten hours later, authorities learn that the victim was the suspect’s biological mother.
“Same as ever—the world’s totally unhinged…” Fumio Narazaki sighs. “I know snowballing interest can be a real nightmare, but to end the lives of a few loan sharks with ceramic pots…”
“There’s more, though. Check this out…”
I show him photos from the three crime scenes. I’ve circled items in red.
“Something hidden?”
“What do you think?”
“…”
“See that Starbucks cup on the ground? Caramel macchiato, according to the investigation. That’s the key to this bloody tale of ramen and revenge. The cup was the killer’s—she was sipping that macchiato moments before committing murder. It’s a fact. A fact that the authorities and the media have completely neglected.”
“Interesting.”
“Unusual, right?”
“Ramen and Starbucks? Highly unusual.”
“Next scene. Ryogoku. Shards everywhere, and… here.”
Fumio Narazaki eyeballs the photograph for a few seconds.
“A tall, right?”
“Precisely. Café latte.”
“And it was the driver’s drink?”
“These sharks don’t drink coffee. It’s been corroborated.”
“All right. What about Numabukuro? Got it… Next to the pool of blood. Let me guess. Café mocha?”
“Bingo.”
“Tall again, I see.”
Fumio Narazaki snarls.
Now for the hard question. What led these three Starbucks drinkers to commit murder? What’s the connection? First hypothesis: “Some kind of complex?” Maybe, maybe not. In no time, our conversation turns away from the three crime scenes. Back to the café that links them all.
“OK, OK—what about Starbucks?” I ask. “Guilty?”
“Wait, what’s the charge?”
“Crimes against Tokyo, I guess.”