“I am Masahiko.” No translator. He wore a dark, oversized tunic, vaguely military, buttoned to its high, banded collar, loose around his neck. Old gray sweatpants bagging at the knees. Grubby-looking white paper slippers.
“Mitsuko made tea,” indicating the tray, the stoneware pot, two
cups. “But you were pcrted.”
“Is she here?” Chia pushed the thing back down into her bag.
“She went out,” Masahiko said. “May I look at your computer?”
“Computer?” Chia stood, confused.
“It is Sandbenders, yes?”
She poured some of the tea, which was still steaming. “Sure. You want tea?”
“No,” Masahiko said. “I drink coffee only.” He squatted on the
tatami, beside the low table, and ran an admiring fingertip along the
edge of the Sandbenders’ cast aluminum. “Beautiful. I have seen a small disk player by the same maker. It is a cult, yes?”
“A commune. Tribal people. In Oregon.”
The boy’s black hair was long and glossy and smoothly brushed, but Chia saw there was a bit of noodle caught in it, the thin, kinky kind that came in instant ramen bowls.
“I’m sorry I was ported when Mitsuko came back. She’ll think I was rude.”
“You are from Seattle.” Not a question.
‘You’re her brother?’
“Yes. Why are you here?” His eyes large and dark, his face long and pale.
“Your sister and I are both into Lo/Rez.”
“You have come because he wants to marry Rei Toei?”
Hot tea dribbled down Chia’s chin. “She told you that?”
“Yes,” Masahiko said. “In Walled City, some people worked on her design.” He was lost in his study of her Sandbenders, turning it over in his hands. His fingers were long and pale, the nails badly chewed.
“Where’s that?”
“Netside,’ he said, flipping the weight of his hair back, over one shoulder.
‘What do they say about her?~’
“Original concept. Almost radical.’ He stroked the keys. “This is very beautiful
“You learned English here?”
“In Walled City.”
Chia tried another sip of tea, then put the cup down. “You have any coffee?”
“In my room,” he said.
Masahiko’s room, at the bottom of a short flight of concrete stairs, to the rear of the restaurant’s kitchen, had probably been a storage 122 William Gibson closet. It was a boy-nightmare, the sort of environment Chia knew from the brothers of friends, its floor and ledgelike bed long vanished beneath unwashed clothes, ramen-wrappers, Japanese magazines with wrinkled covers. A tower of empty foam ramen bowls in one corner, their hologram labels winking from beyond a single cone of halogen. A desk or table forming a second, higher ledge, cut from some recycled material that looked as though it had been laminated from shredded juice cartons. His computer there, a featureless black cube. A shallower shelf of the juice-carton board supported a pale blue microwave, unopened ramen bowls, and half a dozen tiny steel cans of coffee.
One of these, freshly microwaved, was hot in Chia’s hand. The coffee was strong, sugary, thickly creamed. She sat beside him on the lumpy bed ledge, a padded jacket wadded up behind her for a cushion.
It smelled faintly of boy, of ramen, and of coffee. Though he seemed very clean, now that she was this close, and she had a vague idea that Japanese people generally were. Didn’t they love to bathe? The thought made her want a shower.
“1 like this very much.” Reaching to touch the Sandbenders again, which he’d brought from upstairs and placed on the work surface, in front of his black cube, sweeping aside a litter of plastic spoons, pens, nameless bits of metal and plastic.
“I-low do you see to work yours?” Gesturing toward his computer with the miniature can of coffee.
He said something in Japanese. Worms and dots of pastel neon lit the faces of the cube, crawling and pulsing, then died.
The walls, from floor to ceiling, were thickly covered with successive layers of posters, handbills, graphics files. The wall directly in front of her, above and behind the black computer, was hung with a large scarf, a square of some silky material screened with a map or diagram in red and black and yellow. Hundreds of irregular blocks or rooms, units of some kind, pressing in around a central vacancy, an uneven vertical rectangle, black.