The Sudden Appearance of Hope

Chapter 43

A night-time walk through Tokyo. The electric district, almost brighter than the day, manga manga everywhere; girls with huge spoon eyes waving their neon arms above the doors, tiny pale-faced creatures in school uniform on the covers of the comics in the window; men with swords and spiky hair fighting great monsters, families of blue-eyed cats, descendants of Hiroshige’s red-ribboned cat as it plays with a string, picked out in bright, wet inks.

Bars with girls dressed in French waitress uniforms, cartoonish, black puffed sleeves and little white aprons. Teahouses where the matrons wore soft silk robes and bowed to the visiting guests — not a geisha house, not like the houses of Kyoto, the geisha were something else entirely, but a pleasant, tatami-matted alternative where the tea was hot and there was a corner for the visitors to charge their mobile phones.

Fish tanks in the windows of the restaurants, full of live, prowling monsters. A fugu chef demonstrating the range of knives he uses in the dissection of his poisonous dish — not the dissection process itself, which requires three years of training — but the delicate tools for pulling out liver, ovaries, slicing away strips of flesh, cleaning, grating, peeling, scrubbing.

“Poison: tetrodotoxin,” and it takes a moment for me to realise that it is Filipa who is speaking, not me. “Contained mostly in the liver, ovaries and the eyes. Acts in a similar manner to sarin. No known antidote. Paralyses muscles, leaving patient conscious but asphyxiating. A thousand times more potent than cyanide. Cure—”

“Respiratory and circulatory support — artificially maintaining life — until the poison is metabolised by the body and excreted away,” I concluded, and she beamed, and wrapped her arm into mine and said:

“Did you learn that in anthropology?”

“There’s many cultures where people eat poisonous mushrooms, frogs, fish and herbs to achieve a heightened state. A thousand years ago, LSD would be sanctified.”

She grinned, a genuine flicker of delight, and as we walked together through the hot night-time streets, her security never far behind, she said:

“‘Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars and see yourself running in them.’”

“‘Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not a truth.’”

She laughed — a surprisingly childish sound, and immediately pushed her hands over her mouth to silence the unlooked-for sound. Removing them slowly, she said at last, “I was made to read the Meditations at school, and hated them.”

“But you quote from them now?”

“Something stuck from the exam. You?”

“I read it a few years ago.”

“Anthropology?”

“Long flight, I think.”

“Marcus Aurelius,” she mused, “born April AD 121, died…”

“AD 180, Vienna — Vindabona, yes?”

“Succeeded by Commodus…”

“… a disaster emperor…”

“Assassinated 192, maybe in the bath but the sources are dubious, the statues cast down; the senate declared him posthumously an enemy of the state…”

“A gladiator, loved to fight.”

“The beginning of the end, Gibbon said. The bit of that book where the history got interesting,” she replied, and stopped, so suddenly that I nearly stumbled over her grip on my arm, an anchor holding my body in place even as my feet tried to walk on by. “It isn’t… perfect… to have knowledge,” she stammered, the joy stripped away. “Perfect people aren’t knowledgeable, they aren’t… wise. That’s what my brother says. Knowledge is for show-offs and people who don’t get out of the house enough, we’ve got Google, Wikipedia. Knowledge is a place where sexy should be. Clever is sexy, the sociopath genius, the smartest man in the room, but that’s clever that doesn’t need to work, that’s not investing in knowledge, spending time at work, that’s just… being brilliant. Being brilliant is sexy, not working hard. Sexy sells. That’s what Rafe always says: sexy sells.”

The two of us, frozen in the middle of the street, arm in arm. Men stared as they walked by, heads turning though their bodies kept on moving, necks swivelling to gawp, wondering at our story. She was crying, silently, holding my arm, crying. I let her cry a while, held her close, felt her snot and tears on my shoulder, wanted to cry myself, why is that, when I hear a child cry on the train it makes me sad, see a stranger weep and feel tears come to my eyes, a weakness, perhaps, a place where emotion hasn’t become accustomed to the extremities of feeling.

“Filipa,” I breathed, as she pulled away, rubbing at her face with her sleeve. “What is Perfection?”

“It’s the end of the world,” she replied. “It’s the end of everything.”

I opened my mouth to say something, to ask, anything, offer, anything, but one of her security men stepped close, a tissue held in one hand, a mobile phone in the other, murmured, “Ms Pereyra, are you okay?”

His accent was American, his eyes didn’t meet mine. She ignored the tissue, kept pulling at her face with her sleeve, and he said again, “You okay, ma’am?”

“Yes,” she replied. “I’m fine.”

“They’re missing you at the party.”

My eyebrows wanted to rise in scorn, but I was professional, I was a thief, and this man was an enemy entering my domain.

She nodded, sniffed, smiled at the man, sniffed again, then smiled at me. “Sorry,” she mumbled. And again, “Sorry. You are… if it were up to me, I would… but my brother is very… I hope your paper goes well.”

“Thank you.”

A pause, nodding at nothing much, security waiting, phone on, connected to someone unseen. Filipa nodded again, half turned, then turned back, and pulled a bracelet from her wrist. It was silver, a thin band turned into a seamless Möbius strip. She held my right hand in her left, pushed the bracelet over my fingers, nodded with satisfaction at the shape of it around my wrist, said, “Thank you for a lovely evening.”

I opened my mouth to say no, it wasn’t… that wasn’t… but thought again, wondered what the words were that would be best for now, and said simply, “Thank you.”

She looked at me, and I looked at her, and she smiled, and let the security man lead her away.