The Sudden Appearance of Hope

Chapter 44

What is perfection, what does “perfect” even mean?

Perfect: as good as can possibly be.

Free from fault or defect.

Searches on the internet, trawls through books, history.

Look for the words “perfect woman” and you find bodies. Diagrams, explaining that the perfect face belongs to an actress with smoky eyes; the perfect hair comes from a princess; the perfect waist is barely narrow enough to support the generous breasts that balance on it; legs disproportionately long, smile that says “take me”. Photoshopped features combining the faces of movie stars and models, pop idols and celebrities. Who is the perfect woman? According to the internet, she is a blonde white girl with bulimia; no other characteristics are specified.

And the perfect man? He has a wide range of interests, is polite and courteous at all times, handsome and sexually considerate, intelligent, preferably funny, has a high income and his own home, mortgage free.

A Möbius strip. Take a strip of paper, give it a half twist once, tape it together, creating a surface that is non-orientable, the top is always the bottom, the bottom is always the top. Discovered in 1858, but mathematically not fully defined in equation form until 2007, hard to model a thing that goes on for ever, a closed loop without end.

The silver, warmed by Filipa, now warm around my wrist. I run my fingers round it for ever.

What was Perfection?

Maybe Filipa was right. Maybe it was the end of the world.

I went looking for the 106 Club.

Surveillance is easy, when the world forgets you.

Watching the Pereyra-Conroy building from a parked hire car, I began to chart and catalogue the lives of the 106 Club members who lived inside, and no one stopped me.

A woman getting into a chauffeur-driven car to attend a party may notice the girl on the other side of the street and be surprised, but if she then forgets, surprise is as far as her feelings go.

A security guard, helping Rafe into his limousine, notices me as he closes the door, and considers me suspicious, but not yet a threat, not on the first observation. When he returns in the evening, he experiences the same thought process again, and again it is the first time he has seen me, and so again he does not raise an alarm.

I picked pockets, stole bags, broke into apartments. I cloned mobile phones, accessed email accounts, Facebook pages, Twitter feeds.

I shadowed men to work, women to parties, I stole their names, the names of their cleaners, their tailors, their drivers, their friends.

In the morning I ran, in the evening I visited temples, bars, clubs, lectures, plays, and in the intervening hours, I studied the 106 Club.

On the seventh day of observation, armed with foreknowledge gleaned from purloined mobile phones, I followed a party of four 106 men from the apartment to an invitation-only party in Azabu.

It advertised itself as “Sugarbabes and Sugarboys”, and access was determined by one of two things — by a declaration of an annual income of over $110,000 with financial documents to back up the statement, or by writing a personal application stating why you, the invitee, were so keen to meet your sugardaddy.

Hi! I wrote. My name’s Rachel Donovan, I’m 24 years old, and I love people. I love meeting people, I love caring for people, I love listening to their stories and jokes, I love learning about the jobs they have and the things they love. If I could spend my life just meeting people and seeing the world, that would be my heaven.

With this introduction, I attached a picture of myself in a revealing red dress, smiling, all teeth, for the camera.

I want to meet wealthy men, I explained, because they’ve just seen so much more than I have.

I want to meet wealthy men and women, I mused, because theft is an art, and you are my canvas.

I work out three times a week, and am a champion 10k runner. I think my best quality is my smile; it just seems to make people happy.

The invitation came back within hours. Digital records remember me, and my name was left on the clipboard by the door.

Sounds at a party. The crowd is vastly international; English is the default language. The waitresses are dressed as geisha girls, but no geisha would wear such shiny wigs or permit a thread of polyester in their glimmering robes.

“I tried dating, but my money became a problem; women didn’t know how to be around me once they found out how rich I was.”

“The key to my success? I knew I’d succeed. That’s all I needed.”

“I have to travel by helicopter now, because it’s not safe for someone like me to be in the streets.”

“People are complicated; money is simple.”

“This isn’t prostitution. Prostitution is illegal. This is a mutual agreement between potential partners with realistic expectations.”

“People — people and governments — try to punish people like us for being rich. Envy, that’s all it is. Why should I give up money that I earned, so someone else can live off the state? If they can’t pick themselves up, like I did, then I don’t see why I should give a damn.”

I move through the room, skimming a credit card here, a phone there. This is the research stage. I don’t need to say very much; a hello, a goodbye, and then if I need to return to the target, hello again, goodbye again. But I want to talk, I need to talk, words silent on my tongue, so I say: “Oh my God, that’s so interesting, you’re so right,” because that’s what Rachel Donovan would say, and then I realise I hate the words, so I smile a different smile and say, “Actually, no, fuck you, fuck you and your arrogance, fuck you and your selfishness, fuck you for thinking that you deserve what you have, for thinking that because you know which little green numbers would get greener, because you knew how to play with abstract quantities and mathematical variants, you somehow deserve to rule the fucking world.”

Mouths drop, people move to summon the staff, to complain, there’s a woman here, there’s a woman in a red dress and we thought you vetted these people before they came, we thought you were selling us demure little children who were only interested in us for our money and knew how to pretend, what the fuck is this?

But I turn away, and push through the crowd, and feel like the queen of the universe, and by the time the man has found a manager to complain to, he’s forgotten what it was he was going to complain about.

Only briefly, only for a moment, do I remember that I am a thief, and that I lost the moral high ground a long time ago.

“Fuck you,” I repeat to myself. “Fuck that.”

Discipline in all things.

I am a machine.

I am my smile.

I am delight.

Okashi, delight, joy, enchantment. An old-fashioned word, much beloved of Sei Shōnagon, who found her delight in the little beauties of this life. A sprig of cherry blossom, delicately borne by a handsome boy. The icy cold of snow falling from a clear sky. I find all this wonderful, she wrote, and marvel that others do not.

I am okashi.

I stand on a balcony overlooking the street, a glass door separating me from the rest of the party. A few people have stepped outside too, away from the light nothing-music and the swirl of people in Dior, Hugo Boss, Chanel, Armani. I observe them haggle over the price, champagne flutes in hand, smiles never faltering. I count patent-leather shoes and gold wristwatches, tailored shirts and cashmere socks, and feel for a moment almost ashamed.

“I’m looking for someone who’ll be there,” says a man who introduces himself to me as Geoff — just Geoff. American accent, greying hair. “My work takes me places, but sometimes, when I come home, I just want to have a few days with someone who I can hang out with. We’ll go to the cinema, maybe the theatre, we’ll have supper together, and yes, I’d like the relationship to be sexual, but I don’t demand monogamy, she can lead her own life, do her own thing, I’ll put the money into her account in advance.”

“It’s a good deal,” whispered a woman in my ear after Geoff turned away, confused by my polite rejection. “It’s better than what most men want.”

A recollection of a similar system, an ancient idea. Danna. Patron to geisha in medieval Japan. Sometimes the relationship was sexual; sometimes artistic; sometimes an undefined, unspoken agreement between geisha and patron that it was considered uncouth to ever express. How little the world had changed.

“Do you have Perfection?” a woman asks another, their bodies turned as though they are contemplating the view, their eyes flickering constantly back to the room. I only half tune into their conversation, my eyes drifting shut, the wind cold against my skin.

“Yes, it’s just wonderful. How many…?”

“Two hundred and thirty-three thousand!”

“You look sensational on it.”

“I am, I am, I feel sensational, it’s just changed my life. You know, this is how I got into this party?”

“Seriously?”

“I hit two hundred and thirty thousand and there it was, just like that, the invitation in my inbox, a gift from Perfection — find the perfect man for the perfect woman. And so good, I mean, look at this place, so good, the men just so…”

“I know.”

“And have you seen him? I mean, I would just for the fuck, just for that body, but he owns like, one of the biggest tyre manufacturing companies in East Asia or something.”

“God, with a body like that…”

“Jesus!”

“Do you think he has Perfection too?”

I squeeze my eyes shut, let out a breath, count to ten, look for the three men I was meant to be tracking.

Okashi, okashi, I am okashi.

“I’m looking for the perfect woman,” explained one, a Brazilian man with a gold watch the size of my fist — bespoke, engraved, nightmare to fence even if I could be bothered stealing it. “I need her to have at least eight hundred thousand points on Perfection, and be willing to work to reach a million.”

“That’s very precise.”

He stared at me like I was an idiot. “A man can’t be perfect until he has a wife,” he explained. “Marriage is the union of two hearts, two bodies, two souls. Whoever she is, she has to be perfect too.”

“And how do you measure that perfection?” I asked. “Will your app tell you?”

“Of course it will,” he replied. “That’s how I’ll know.”

I stole his watch.

Something of a spite had settled over my soul.

On my ninth day, I followed Mrs Goto.

Apartment 718, forty-three years old, divorcee of two years’ standing, currently re-engaged to Mr Moti of apartment 261 — the perfect man, for the perfect woman. How I was learning to loathe those words.

Her driver took her towards the Meiji Royal Gardens, but she showed no interest in this royal spread of land, in its arching bridges and hanging trees, crafted so that every step changes the vista that you might behold; instead she buzzed at an anonymous white door to an anonymous white building, which closed with a pneumatic hiss behind her.

Anonymous reinforced doors always engage a thief’s curiosity. At seven p.m. I stole the security pass from a guard going off-shift, and at two a.m. I broke in by climbing the rubbish chute from the rear car park, his swipe card in my pocket and internet-purchased lockpicks in my bag.

Private medicine. Easy to identify: public medicine doesn’t have as many potted plants or espresso machines. Sofas are not padded leather, carpets are not thick and clean, departments are not laid out with little brass plates, no one is happy to see you.

I had imagined plastic surgery. (“So much happier with my body,” whispered one man on 430,500 points who I shared sake with. “Even with exercise and good eating, I just didn’t look like the way men look in the movies until I got Perfection.”)

You didn’t get to 1×10⁶ points in Perfection without some sort of surgery, I had concluded. Even the most beautiful, even the most astoundingly naturally beautiful, had something tweaked, tucked or smoothed. Perfection seemed to be an inhuman quality.

Yet, walking through the treatment centre, past doors labelled with the names of professors and doctors, departments and facilities, I saw no sign of surgical operating theatres or recovery rooms. I moved at the speed of someone who shouldn’t be remarked upon, and trusted to my condition to protect me from comment should I encounter any of the cleaning staff or night guards.

Counselling, coaching, detox therapy, physical therapy, dietary therapy — the doors rolled by, and I didn’t understand what they were doing here, or why they mattered. At a door marked “spectrocraniotomy” I stopped, and with my stolen security pass, let myself inside.

A white room: white floors, white walls. A large red couch in the middle, stainless-steel column supporting adjustable parts. Lights, wires, inactive machines, acronyms and characters in katakana and hirogana. A skullcap attached to a central hub of machines. A pair of goggles plugged into network cabling. A server hidden behind one cupboard wall, top of the line, ninety thousand US dollars just for the basic hardware. A flick of a switch, and the goggles produced light, images flashing across the lenses too fast to follow.

A cardboard box of brochures told me more than my thin grasp of neuroscience. In English and Japanese it read:

Pictures.

Perfect women in the chair, skullcap on their heads. Earbuds pushed in, connected to a sound I couldn’t hear. Nose clips, a sensor stuck to the tongue, or perhaps not a sensor, perhaps something else, a thing creating sensations, senses. Clips on the fingers, a needle in the arm, drugs and electricity.

Perfect men in perfect white shirts, the sun at their backs, beaming proudly.

Perfect families playing with their perfect children on perfect beaches by sapphire seas.

Testimonials from clients.

I used to have to pretend that I was someone I wasn’t, and whenever life went my way, I would think that I hadn’t earned it. The treatments helped me see the world in a new way. I am worth so much more than I ever thought.

And below, a picture of a woman in a silk suit, arms folded, shoulders back, head high.

What is my life worth? asked the caption, as the city spread out beneath her through great panes of glass. My life is perfect now, and I make the world better by simply being.

The door to the room opened; a cleaner all in blue.

Surprise on her face, then immediately suspicion. If the world remembered me, this would be a low point, a failure, for here I am, undeniably doing wrong, and in the moment of uncertainty I feel guilt flash across my features, before I lock my smile in place. Giving my description to the police in ethnically not-so-diverse Tokyo would be easy, but I am nothing, I am the slight start in your chest which you later will put down to hiccups, I am the fear that faded as quickly as it came, I am

(worthless?)

practically forgotten already, as I push past her and run for the door.