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  He did some sit-ups, push-ups, a bit of shadow-boxing and ran on the treadmill, until the sweat was streaming from every pore of his body and until everything inside him was screaming and he had visions of cardiac arrest – a knife to the chest, a stagger, a fall to the green floor below, a blue face, a few convulsions, foaming from the mouth, and his end, noticed a few hours later by a screaming cleaning lady who would sweep him under the carpet and answer the cop’s questions with an unperturbed shrugging of the shoulders.

  He took a cold shower. Got dressed. He was ready for… outside. In his cowhide shoes, fashionably faded trousers and a bright red shirt draped over his torso, he darted out of the flat, into the lift, through the reception area, greeted the doorman with a slight nod of the head and stormed into the street.

  He sank into the shock of bodies, and the sheer amount of awareness humbled him for a moment. From up high everything looked much more manageable. Here, on the ground, everyone’s pocket was a potential threat, and the most you could hope for from a walk was for everyone to keep their desires to themselves. Fates were sealed within a single block. For the outsider, it was easy to decode the tiffs and kisses, but for those involved, meaning disintegrated. Gestures and gazes converged into a network of urban urgency. Pavements were full of litter that was then kicked into the road and into the gutter that ran along the edges and flowed into the sewer system. Right there in front of everybody, people were shedding their skins, and Evan was grateful that his visual spectrum didn’t colour red the dusty particles of hair, bacterial drops of saliva and bits of fallen nails. Seeing all of it at once would have made him vomit. Maybe he’d just inhaled a snowflake of dandruff. Maybe he was standing in a cloud of gas that someone had just squeezed out of their arse with a wrinkly kiss. If it were up to him, he’d disinfect, disinfect, disinfect with lime, with alcohol…

  The more people there are, the more impossible cleanliness becomes. The streets of Edo were not uniform. Some gave off a hint of steel, clear lines, and the people in them stared straight ahead. In other streets, cracked with paving stones eroded by the rain, where the roots of belated trees lifted the concrete and the façades revealed clashes between amateur architects, incompleteness insisted and people shouted over each other. Wafting from the kiosks was the smell of hot dogs, from the toilets the smell of acetone. It was income that divided these streets. The rich had wrangled their reality into reasonable order, while the poor bargained away in confusion. No one has a choice.

  The birds that had survived climate change, airport hunters and radioactive clouds had been killed off. The insects went forth and multiplied; flypaper trailed from every street-light, from every tree. Rectangles fluttering in the wind. Evan swatted at flies. He’d heard stories about larvae breeding inside human bodies and he was horrified. The medical intervention was routine and painless but it didn’t dispel the sense of filthiness. It’s as if some junkie had broken into your place and rifled through your underwear drawer. It was impossible to be truly clean, afterwards.

  The wind was drying the sweat that had collected in the folds of his skin. Still, it was a beautiful day. He saw some truly beautiful faces, shy girls, hiding behind glasses, behind frescoes of make-up, under hats and dishevelled hair. His gaze didn’t drift to legs, bottoms or breasts. Faces were what he was after. Broad noses, narrow lips, low foreheads, high cheekbones. Beauty. And even the guttural calls of the men hawking newspapers, handbags, watches, did not disturb the idyll. The urban basis for the life of the masses. From the piles of rubbish, a foul odour. The entrances to the underground, those dark staircase-throats spewing stale air. The asphalt was heating up to a rolling boil, emitting a tepid warmth. A gust of wind whisked everything off to one side, leaving behind molecules of meals, roses and fear from beyond. Tattoos were drying on skin, remote teeth showed soundless laughter. The city was croaking along uncaringly in the early afternoon.

  Evan was feeling pretty hungry. MUD was within walking distance, which was good because your taxi driver could turn out to be a serial killer, and if you took public transport. other people’s bodies bounced off you like running shoes in a washing machine. True, bumping shoulders, sinister glances, slowcoaches, racing pizza delivery boys and hysterical prostitutes throwing themselves at you could also make the experience odious for pedestrians, but at least it was safe. It meant by far the least amount of physical contact. At the crossing a cyclist had fallen under a tram. The people in the cars honked nervously and drummed their fingers on their steering wheels. The rescue helicopter got there quickly, but too late. The cyclist died, hidden behind rusty tram wheels. They hosed the blood away. Before the traffic started up again, Evan was able to cross the street without having to take the overpass where mothers with sickly sons hanging from their laps begged for alms. Sometimes they tugged at your trousers.

  She grew up in a hurry, with him. After meeting her, he’d chained her to his life out of physical necessity. She was so young, so taut, so svelte. She’d grown into her skin, and her tummy was tight as a drumhead, her buttocks frozen butter in a transparent balloon. It hadn’t been hard. All he’d had to do was show a little interest. Make an approach. Be there. Speak in generalities and then speak to her. Approach her more directly. Touch her. Whisper in her ear, in hers alone. It hadn’t been hard. Bodies respond to attention and relationships grow all by themselves, as long as you let them. Then the clothes come off the bodies and the bodies force themselves into one.

  Probably on account of its youth, he regarded her personality as almost amorphous, with a bas-relief and patches of emptiness in places where one would have expected some kind of similarity. They were caught up in a single thing, but then with amazement (and a little reluctance) he noticed how quickly he had carved her into a person. The empty spaces became ornate mosaics of character and the bas-reliefs warped into chasms of emotion, peaks of expectation. Soon she had demanded everything else in addition to insatiable lust. And she fully deserved it, probably. They loved each other.

  It was in the MUD restaurant that the serial killer Michiko Kan had sliced and quartered the CEO of the now-defunct SeAsia bank. A gold plaque above the entrance and a banker’s hand in a jar of formaldehyde now commemorated that event. The restaurant’s owner had purchased the hand from Tatov-Grobov Inc., the Dry Russian distributor that had also seen to DNA analysis and provided a certificate of authenticity. The price had not been publicly revealed, but no doubt it was high. Biographers have concluded that this was Michiko Kan’s third murder (before that, he had murdered a neighbour and his own mother-in-law, though the biographies disagree on which of them was the first victim), which had propelled him to superstar status. He lived up to his reputation with further notorious killings all over the country, and with his seppuku he had set a record that remains unbroken. Puritanical experts don’t count suicides, so according to them Michiko’s 249 murders mean that he shares top spot with Saunada Elis, a Persian murderess who terrorized Japan years ago and whose death, though unconfirmed, remains highly probable.

  Evan had read a monograph on serial killers on the plane over to Edo. When he saw the shrivelled hand in the glass for the first time, he cracked up. MUD had built its entire corporate image around it. The black marble décor lent the ritual of eating a seal of gravity, a slightly morbid awareness of vanity and what it truly means to tear pleasure from the claws of death. If it weren’t for the congregation of influential people, he probably wouldn’t be coming here. After all, he had mixed feelings about death. Unfortunately, there was no other place nearby that let him feel so validated. Also, they had the best pancakes in town. He entered the chilled, slightly damp reception whose appearance, if not its purpose, was reminiscent of a tomb. A pair of metal fans stared at him. His shirt peeled itself away from his skin. He put his hand over his hair. The trophy on the table made him laugh. The hostess behind the table also laughed.

  ‘Hello and welcome, Mr Z—’

  ‘Hi.’

  He’d never seen her be
fore, but she knew him. Even though he was aware that the magnetic rays by the entrance had scanned the contents of his wallet, sketched a profile of him, run all of his data through the d1Za.ir algorithm and told the hostess how to act to make him feel just right, he nevertheless liked to imagine that she also recognized him as a director. That was the problem of creating for the elite – it didn’t do much for your street cred.

  ‘Your sponsor is already waiting at your table. Right this way, please.’

  The candles in the skulls lining the walls cast ominous shadows over the room. The murkiness and a bite of yellow light danced over the patrons, stooped in conspiracies, and staged ambiguous sketches on mists of cigar smoke. Whispers and hushed laughter. The rustling of leather. Evan’s shoulders tensed up. His red shirt had brought a hint of blood inside, drawing flared nostrils. Glints from the glasses’ frames and the gold teeth between snarling lips flashed in his eyes. He did not feel relaxed.

  Gordon smiled at him from across the room. He raised a cautious hand in half-greeting, and then looked slightly to the side so he wouldn’t have to maintain eye contact while Evan made his way over to him. These interpersonal vacuums were always a little unsettling.

  ‘Are you in the mood for something spontaneous?’ the hostess asked Evan, as he took his seat.

  ‘Surprise me,’ he replied, and curled up the left corner of his lips. He was haughtily convinced this gesture made him look more accessible. She left with a slight bow.

  Perched above Gordon’s round face was a bald patch from which rose a chicken-wing-shaped curl of blond hair. Usually this curl was forced to lie down with the rest of his hair at the crown of his head, but today for some unknown reason it was allowed to strut on its own. It bothered Evan. He could have wet his fingers with saliva and spun the curl into a thin thread – it might have fallen then, or it might be best just to cut it off right now…

  ‘So, why did I have to go through the whole newspaper today?’

  ‘Geez, Evan, you really are something,’ exhaled Gordon, leaning back and patting his tummy before folding his arms. ‘You get right to it, no greeting, no Hi, Gordon, how are you, Gordon, is everything all right with you, Gordon. Right to it, what’s that about? You’d think you were talking to the postman, not a friend…’

  Evan rested his elbows on the table and held his forearms parallel to each other. He snorted and turned his head to the right. An old man was leisurely stroking a young woman. The man’s fingers overflowed with precious stones.

  ‘Sorry, Gordon. How are you?’

  ‘Ah, I’m well,’ he said, staring into his fingernails. ‘I’m well. And you, Evan?’

  ‘Also well, never better. So?’

  ‘So what?’ asked Gordon, pursing his lips into a pale pink O.

  ‘Do you have something for me?’

  All at once Gordon turned serious and leant forward, still with his arms folded. He looked wobbly, ready to tip over at any moment. He moved so close that Evan lost sight of the curl and was able to focus on Gordon’s blue eyes which, under his insipid brows, were sunk deep into his skull.

  ‘It’s a crisis, Evan!’ he whispered. ‘What’s going on right now, it’s a crisis, a veritable crisis. They know everything! They sniff out everything! It’s hard, hard for me to do anything, and if they catch me…’

  Evan snorted again, but looked to the left. In the swing doors to the kitchen stood a man with long black hair and a beard, staring straight ahead, into the wall.

  ‘Just tell me how much it will cost.’

  ‘Five to ten years in the clink, I believe, without parole, without probation!’

  Greedy people are lavish only when they’re whinging.

  ‘Gordon, please, spare me. Tell me the price.’

  A black-clad waiter placed the glasses on the table and poured wine into them, white for Gordon, red for Evan. They nodded their thanks.

  They grabbed their glasses by the stems, toasted limply and imbibed. Gordon looked around, scattered, bit his lip and acted like someone was about to make an attempt on his life. Evan’s gaze once again drifted to that gently fluttering curl.

  ‘Well, let me put it like this,’ he circled his lips with his fingers and merged his hands into a single fleshy lump. ‘All of a sudden I – because like you I’m a foreigner, Evan, so we’re in the same boat – all of a sudden I have to pay twice as much for half as much, so I see no other possibility but to tell you the same thing.’

  Evan gave a thunderous laugh, earning himself a few threatening looks from the other patrons. He acknowledged his transgression and issued an eye-rolled apology into the void.

  ‘Twice as much,’ he said judiciously, as if he wanted to make sure he’d heard right, ‘for half as much.’

  Gordon nodded and shrugged his shoulders at the same time, well, what can you do? The woman to the right began to coo under the pressure of the bejewelled fingers, the man on the left with the long black hair took a phone from his pocket and waved it furiously about. The waiter brought the food: a plate of pancakes for Evan and the bloodiest of steaks for Gordon.

  ‘I was never any hotshot at maths,’ said Evan. He stabbed a pancake with his fork and pushed it to the edge of the plate. It left a trail of chocolate. ‘You’re saying that if, before, one baggie was ten asias,’ he circled the pancake with his knife, not touching it, ‘half a baggie is now twenty asias,’ he cut it down the middle and separated the halves, ‘and if half a baggie is twenty asias,’ he ran his knife along one half, ‘then a whole baggie is now forty asias.’ He pushed the halves together again and frowned.

  ‘Basically, it’s four times more expensive,’ said Gordon quietly, as if embarrassed. He cut into his steak, drawing myoglobin. Evan stabbed half a pancake onto his fork, raised it to his mouth, opened wide and stuffed it in.

  The pan was sizzling with vexing questions. Tiny droplets of oil were flying into the air, and when they landed on the skin they unleashed their full potential and did their best to inflict burns – if they were just a little bigger they could inflict some real damage.

  ‘What if we had a kid?’

  She cracked an egg into the bowl. Evan was sitting on the balcony and intentionally ignored the question. He was staring at someone coming out of the adjacent skyscraper (it was too far away for him to see whether it was a man or a woman, he needed glasses but he shied away from them because they make a man look old), staring at how, on the street, way down below, the person was labouring to carry, pull and push a large cardboard box in the direction of the bins, each advancement producing a loud, shattering noise. The box was probably full of empty wine bottles, broken window panes or test tubes.

  ‘But I don’t want to give birth.’

  She sifted flour into the bowl.

  ‘We could adopt one.’

  She sprinkled in some salt and swivelled the pan from side to side. The oil hissed angrily. The person stopped to rest near the bins.

  ‘Or steal one.’

  She whisked the batter.

  ‘Evan, what do you say, would you steal a child for me?’

  A couple walked arm in arm past the person who was taking a little rest. Perhaps they exchanged a few words.

  ‘We’d go to the supermarket and lie in wait, scope out the families there. We could do that for a few weeks to gauge the potential kidnappees out there, ha! We’d know which mothers have had enough of their annoying kids, which fathers would rather run away to Australia, which children have no hope of growing up even halfway normal. Watch long enough and you pick up on these things. Sometimes it’s clear right from the start. But what if everyone was like that? What if everyone was just desperate, every family was ruining childhood. Would we be the same?’

  The windows switched on and off. There was no pattern to the lights, try as you might to find one. The person sat down on the box and lit a cigarette.

  ‘If they were all potential kidnappees, then I’d have to loosen the criteria. I’d have to see which shopping carts contained
nothing but sugar-coated crap, and which ones indicated at least an attempt to live healthily, I mean, physically. Who at least halfway cared about their children. You can tell right away. If the cart contains two pounds of potatoes, cheap pieces of meat and a rotting turnip, then they’re in the midst of an existential crisis or just lacking in imagination. Either case, bad for the kids. We’d know how to take better care of them.’

  She balanced the bowl over the pan. Poured in a jet of batter that formed a perfect circle.

  ‘Or if we adopted a little black child? That would be all right.’

  The edges of the pancakes crept upwards in the heat. The person below put out the cigarette and got ready to lift, hands under the box.

  ‘Do you think he’d stick out at school? Have we come far enough that nobody would find it strange, that he’d be accepted as a regular person?’

  She grabbed the handle of the pan and flipped the batter that was gradually morphing into a proper pancake. With a visibly extreme effort the person below quickly, just barely, lifted the box almost to the edge, almost, and then froze. He couldn’t go on, but he didn’t want to let go, since he wouldn’t be able to do it a second time. People walked past and looked away.

  ‘He’d be something special, our little black boy. We’d teach him not to feel inferior, and everything would be just fine. Everything stems from us, don’t you think? The girls would find him interesting, he’d be happy, I’m sure of it.’

  Evan got up suddenly and leant his hands against the railing.