He wakes to the T-shirt on his eyes, murmuring voices, footsteps passing by. Remembering his circumstances, he wishes he could go back to sleep. He tries out the idea that he’ll be fine if he doesn’t move, but it’s day and he must already be conspicuous. The phone is still in his hand, the cable connecting it to the port in the wall. “You up?” he asks the ghost, but she doesn’t reply.
He swipes at the phone’s screen but it stays dark; in fact, it’s been dark for as long as he’s had it. “I’m going to unplug you, okay?” he says, and does. Through the earpiece he hears what might be wind, maybe the sea. He isn’t too bothered—she has to sleep sometime, whatever she said.
He crawls out of his nest, struck afresh by the bustle of the concourse, its scale. The sleeping bag rolls small and tight and fits into his new luggage. So that’s it, he thinks, looking at the vacated space under the bench, and walks away.
Strangers stride by, heading off in all directions. The cops, bored, ignore him. A monitor shows the time and the gates of upcoming departures. Seven hours till he leaves. He wonders if phones work on planes, and, if not, if she’ll worry.
* * *
Ninety minutes till his flight for Thailand, and it strikes him that he speaks no Thai, has never been there, knows no one, that it’s thousands and thousands of miles away, farther than he’s traveled in his life.
“Are you there?” he murmurs for the hundredth time, and is ashamed of the uncertainty in his voice, though it’s possible—probable, even—that she’s the one who needs him, that something bad has happened—she had, after all, been in some kind of prison, and he said he’d free her, in fact gave his word.
He buys the cheapest laptop in the vending machines. When he takes it out of the little hatch he’s surprised by its lightness. As he powers it up he finds himself expecting the game to start, but of course it doesn’t, and in fact there’s nothing on the new machine but boring office programs.
He opens a search engine but realizes that he doesn’t even know her name. He’d have asked if they’d met normally, or if, once they had met, it hadn’t felt like she was all around him.
He searches for actresses in Los Angeles, but their number seems to be infinite, each of them, seemingly, with a vanity website, and there’s no way to find her among the multitudes.
He searches on “Cromwell,” and quickly concludes that she was talking about James Cromwell, an industrialist from San Francisco. There are thousands of articles about him stretching back decades but they’re all investments made, art bought, money money blah blah blah. Did the ghost see the same articles, huddled in the bathroom of the glass house on the sea?
No reference to a cartel hitman named Hiro, but it’s not like he’d advertise. Lots of ethnic Japanese in the cartels after the last diaspora.
He searches on “director’s daughter sonia,” and finds that Sonia is probably Sonia Caipin, daughter of Henry Caipin, the director. She has blogs about fashion and photography and, as far as he can tell, hanging out in good hotels with not-quite-famous friends, though none of the blogs has been updated in a while. He’s elated to find a photo of a pretty girl looking wistful before a crumbling wall, but it turns out there are a lot of photos like that, ethereal beauty and disintegration apparently being Sonia’s thing. He looks up the day the LAPD disbanded, but for that day she just has photos of out-of-focus fireworks in deep blue empty skies. Cromwell seems more like an abstract force of economics than a real human being, but Sonia is believably a person, however remote from his experience, and it’s exciting to have found a piece of the ghost’s story in the world.
She’d said her German boxer’s name was Johann. It turns out there are a lot of German boxers with that name, but only one, Johann Keil, has been in recent American films, direct-to-web ones with titles like Blood Eagle III and Pit-Fight Armageddon. A publicity still shows him bare-chested, arms crossed, a gun in either hand, and he seems to be trying to look sinister, a pose Kern knows and despises. The movie gossip sites have paparazzi shots from his premieres and at every premiere there’s a new girl on his arm, and Kern stops at the pictures for the premiere of Shatterfist—the girl with him is small, eurasian, remarkable-looking, her image seeming to float off the screen—and looking back he sees she was in one of Sonia’s photos.
Her name is Akemi Aalto and the sound of it shocks him because he’s come to think of her as essentially unnamed. He finds a clip from a press conference where she smiles at the camera and in the ghost’s voice says she feels happiest when she’s being someone else.
He finds her filmography but, better, there’s a gossip site with her press photos and paparazzi shots and in most of the latter she’s looking out of frame and her face is a pale mask, a neutral space that holds his eyes and seems like it could hold any emotion he chose to project. The photos stretch back seven months and the last one is time-stamped one day ago.
In it she’s peering out from the dark interior of a limo from behind a guy who must be either a professional athlete or a successful gangster with his flashy suit and bulging triceps and a watch like a lump of raw gold. He looks Japanese and according to the caption his name is Tadao Yamaoka, and he seems familiar, which, Kern finds, is because he’s a kendo fighter ranked seventh in the world standings for Final Sword, a live-steel sword-fighting promotion out of Japan run more or less openly by the Yakuza. Kern sort of followed Final Sword for a while but they’re serious about protecting their intellectual property and it’s hard to get fights less than a few years old. He’d made watching them an exercise in controlling his queasiness—he’d seen more than one match end in decapitation. Final Sword makes a selling point of its fatality rate—more than half the fights end in at least one death—and it’s demi-illegality, though for something so underground it moves a lot of licensed merchandise and ads.
Attached to the picture is an article that says that Tadao is in Taipei for a fight. There’s the usual speculation about his chances against his opponent, a decorated Italian foil fencer—Tadao has won all of his six fights, and the Italian all of his three, but on the other hand the losers in Final Sword usually either die or are injured into retirement. And how long, the article wonders, has he been seeing this stunning LA ingenue? It’s evident that the article considers Tadao’s star the brighter and Kern finds he’s indignant on Akemi’s behalf.
He looks up Taipei, finds it’s a city on Taiwan, which is an island that belongs to Japan. There are mountains on Taiwan, but the ghost—Akemi—and Tadao seem to have just flown in. He wonders if Tadao helped her escape her prison, and she isn’t talking to him because she doesn’t need him anymore. He scrutinizes the photo, as though it will reveal a clue, and at first there’s nothing, but then he starts to think that he can see her despair, however hard she’s trying to hide it, and that tips it.
* * *
“Direct to Taipei, leaving in thirty minutes, no bags to check,” the gate agent confirms. “You’ll have to run, but you can make it.”
He’d been dreading having to explain himself but she seems really not to care, and he wonders if this is her professionalism, but of course she doesn’t care, really no one in the world does, and this makes him feel a lightness, almost a giddiness, like his life lacks real weight.
“You sure you’re not there?” he says. “Because there’s no going back.”
“Actually, sir,” says the gate agent, “this ticket is full fare, as is the ticket for Bangkok that you bought last night, so you can use them whenever you like.”
* * *
He wakes as the plane banks, peers out at the azure seas and low streamers of pink cloud, a lurid country out of dreams. The wing seems to warp before his eyes, getting longer and thinner, and at first he thinks he’s hallucinating, but realizes he’s heard of that, they can do that now—the phrase “shape-shifting meta-materials,” overheard somewhere, rises in his mind.
The sleeping passengers look absurdly vulnerable with their eye masks and neck rests, their mouths hanging open. He’d meant to stay awake—a hit seems improbable here, but a shame to make it this far and die through inattention—but the boredom and the stale air and droning engines wore him down.
He’s acutely aware that in a few hours the plane will land and he’ll be standing there in the airport, the second of the day and the second of his life, clutching his bag, wondering what to do. Restless, he does a search on Tadao on the seat-back computer, finds he’s a fixture of the Vancouver nightclub scene, which is death for a fighter, and the end of his career must be coming soon, which is disappointing—at that level you’d think there’d be a purity, that he’d be an ascetic, totally dedicated to the way of the sword, but maybe that’s just something out of stories.