Ghostwritten by David Mitchell Page B

decision which will alter the shape of your life on the basis of a relationship! You may as well take out a mortgage on a house made of sponge cake. Remember that.” And she was gone.
    I thought about what she had said as I put on a Chet Baker disc. A trumpet with nowhere urgent to be and all day to get there. And his voice, zennish murmurings in the soft void.
My funny valentine, you don’t know what love is, I get along without you very well
.
    The phone rang. A hysterical Takeshi. Drunk again.
    “Don’t let them in! Don’t let that mad cow in!”
    “Who?”
    “Her! Her and her backstabbing-scumbag-bloodsucking lawyer, who
should
be representing
me!
They’re going after my testicles with a meat cleaver! Don’t let them look at the stock—
don’t
let them look at the accounts—it’s illegal—and hide the limited edition original Louis Armstrong. And the gold disc of “Maiden Voyage.” Stick it down your boxer shorts or something—and—”
    “Takeshi!”
    “What?”
    “It’s a bit late, I’m afraid.”
    “What?”
    “They’ve already been. Just to look around for a few seconds, so the lawyer could see the place. They didn’t look at the accounts, they didn’t evaluate anything.”
    “Oh. Great. Just great. Great. What an
utter
, pigging mess.That woman is mad cow disease on two legs.… And what legs they are.…” He hung up.
    The sunlight hummed and was soft. Shadows of twigs and branches swayed ever so slightly against the back wall. I thought of a time many years ago when two or three of Mama-san’s girls had taken me boating on a lake. One of my earliest memories.
    Your place does keep you sane, but can also keep you lonely.
    What was I going to do? I rolled up my shirt and looked on my forearm. There was a snake which Tomoyo had drawn on with a blue pen yesterday afternoon. I asked her, why a
snake?
She’d laughed at me like she was in on a joke that I wasn’t in on.
    Two thoughts walked into my place.
    The first thought said that we hadn’t slept together because sex would have closed an entrance behind us and opened an exit ahead of us.
    The second thought told me quite clearly what to do.
    Maybe Takeshi’s wife was right—maybe it is unsafe to base an important decision on your feelings for a person. Takeshi says the same thing often enough. Every bonk, he says, quadruples in price by the morning after. But who are Takeshi or his wife to lecture anybody? If not love, then what?
    I looked at the time. Three o’clock. She was how many thousand kilometers and one time zone away. I could leave some money to cover the cost of the call.
    “Good timing,” Tomoyo answered, like I was calling from the cigarette machine around the corner. “I’m unpacking.”
    “Missing me?”
    “A tiny little bit, maybe.”
    “Liar! You don’t sound surprised to hear me.” I could hear the smile in her voice. “I’m not. When are you coming?”
    And so we talked about what flight I could catch, where we would go, how she would level things with her father, what I could do to avoid eating into my meager savings too much. I felt as near to Paradise as I have ever been.

HONG KONG
    THE MOON, THE moon, in the after …
    There’s a mechanism in my alarm clock connected to a switch in my head that sends a message to my arm which extends itself and commands my thumb to punch the OFF button a moment before the thing beeps me awake. Every morning, without fail, no matter how much whisky I drank the night before or what time I finally got to bed. I’ve forgotten.
    Fuck. That was a horrible, horrible dream. I can’t remember all the details, and I don’t think I want to. The office was being raided. Huw Llewellyn had stormed in, with the Chinese police and my old scoutmaster whose Volvo I once shat on, they were all on rollerblades, and in my haste to erase the suddenly numerous files relating to Account 1390931 I kept mistyping my password. K-A-T-Y-F-R-B , no, K-T-Y , no, K-A-T-Y-F-O-R-B-W —no, and