She opens it. Something in felt-penned kanji, with multiple exclamation marks.

That's Keiko's inscription. You'll need to get someone Japanese, preferably young and female, to write this on the printout for you. I'll spare you the translation. As to hooking you up with Taki, I have been working on that while Musashi did the glamour photography. It's coming along but I haven't wanted to move too quickly as our boy seems a little erratic. Keiko has just sent him word that a friend of hers will be arriving in Tokyo and has a surprise for him. Will get back to you when I have his response. Are you there on business? I hear they actually eat raw fish.

She stands up, walks backward until her thighs bump the edge of the bed, throws up her arms, and falls back in snow-angel fashion, staring up at the white ceiling.

Why has she come here? Is there now some new and permanently non-undoable snarl in her trailing soul-tether?

She closes her eyes but it has nothing to do with sleep. It only makes her aware that they currently seem to be a size too large for their sockets.

THE doormen are carefully neutral as she leaves the Hyatt in 501's and the Buzz Rickson's, declining their offer of a car.

A few blocks on, she buys a black knit cap and a pair of Chinese sunglasses from an Israeli street vendor, shaking her head at his suggestion of a Rolex Daytona to complete the look. With the cap tugged low, hair tucked up into it, and the Rickson's to zip up and slouch down in, she feels relatively gender-neutral.

Not that it doesn't feel as safe here as she remembers it having felt before, but that in itself takes a little getting used to. Actually she's heard that violent crime is up, but she'll treat it as though it isn't. Because she can't stay up in her white box overhanging the city. Not now. She feels as though something more than her soul has been left behind, this time, and she needs to walk it off.

Win. She'd started to project Win on those white walls, and that won't do. The image still ungrieved.

No. Putting her feet down firmly as she walks on. Walk like a man. I fought the law. Hands in pockets, the right clutching the sunglasses.

And the law won.

She passes one of those spookily efficient midnight road crews, who've set up self-illuminated traffic cones prettier than any lamp she's ever owned, and are slicing into asphalt with a water-cooled steel disk. Tokyo doesn't so much sleep as pause to allow crucial repairs to its infrastructure. She's never actually seen soil emerge from any incision they might make in the street, here; it's as though there is nothing beneath the pavement but a clean, uniformly dense substrate of pipes and wiring.

She walks on, more or less at random, responding to some half-forgotten sense of direction, until she finds herself nearing Kabukicho, the all-night zone they call Sleepless Castle, its streets bright as day, very few surfaces lacking at least one highly active source of illumination.

She's been here before, though never alone, and knows it to be the land of mahjong parlors, tiny bars with highly specialized clienteles, sex shops, video porn, and probably much else, but all of it managed with a Vegas-like sobriety of intent that makes her wonder how much fun any of it could really be, even for the committed enthusiast.

Nothing more serious is liable to happen to her here, she trusts, than being accosted by the proverbial drunken salaryman, none of whom have ever proven insistent, or indeed even seriously mobile.

The noise level, as she keeps walking, is becoming phenomenal, industrial, music, songs, Godzilla-volume sexual midway-pitches in Japanese.

Pretend it is the sea.

The individual buildings are remarkably narrow, their restless street-level facades seeming to form a single unbroken surface of neon carnival excess, but overhead are small neat signs, identically rectangular, arranged up the fronts of each one, naming the services or products to be had on each small upper floor.

BEAUTY BRAIN'S FABULOUS FANNY

That one stops her, midway up, in red italics on yellow. She's staring up at it when someone blunders into her, says something harsh in Japanese, and staggers on. Suddenly she realizes she's standing in the middle of the street outside a bellowing porno palace, a pair of bored-looking touts or security on either side of the open entrance. She gets an unwelcome glimpse of some decidedly foreign fucking, at once clinical and violent, on a big hi-def screen, and quickly moves on.

She keeps turning corners until it's dark enough to take the glasses off. The sea-roar somewhat diminished.

Here comes the wave. Her knees wobble.

They've got some serious jet lag here. Makes the London kind look like the morning after a restless night.

"Beauty brain," she says to the narrow, perfectly deserted street, "better get her fabulous fanny home."

But which way, exactly, is that?

She looks back, the way she came, down this narrow street, no distinction between sidewalk and roadway.

And hears the approaching whirr of a small engine.

A rider on a scooter appears at the junction with the previous street, a helmeted figure backlit by residual glare, and halts. The helmet turns, seeming to regard her, its visor is blank, mirrored.

Then the rider guns the little engine, wheels around, and is gone, with the finality of hallucination.

She stands staring at the empty intersection, lit, it now seems, like a stage.

Several turnings on, she finds her way again, steering by distant views of a Gap sign.

TELEVISION resolves the mystery of Billy Prion.

Trying to open the curtains for another look at the electric Lego, having showered and wrapped herself in a white terry robe, the universal remote activates the room's huge set instead. And there he is, in full BSE neo-punk drag, half his mouth dead and the other twisted in demented glee, proffering a small bottle of Bikkle, a yogurt-based Suntory soft drink that Cayce herself is somewhat partial to. A favorite of hers in the land of Pocari Sweat and Calpis Water.

It tastes as though ice cubes have melted in it, she remembers, and instantly wants some.

Billy Prion, then, she thinks as the ad ends, is currently the gaijin face of Bikkle, his complete lack of recent exposure in the Occident evidently posing no problem here at all.

When she figures out how to turn the television off, she leaves the curtains closed, and turns the room's lights off, one after another, manually.

Still wearing the robe, she curls up between the sheets of the big white bed and prays for the wave to come, and take her for as long as it can.

It comes, but somewhere in it is her father. And the figure on the scooter. Blank expanse of that chromed visor.

15. SINGULARITY

- /

Win Pollard went missing in New York City on the morning of September 11, 2001. The doorman at the Mayflower flagged an early cab for him, but couldn't remember a destination. A one-dollar tip from the man in the gray overcoat.

She can think about this now because the Japanese sunlight, with the robotic drapes fully open, seems to come from some different direction entirely.

Curled in a body-warm cave of cotton broadcloth and terry, the remote in her hand, she unforgets her father's absence.

Neither she nor her mother had known that Win was in town, and his reason or reasons for being there remain a mystery. He lived in Tennessee, on a disused farm purchased a decade earlier. He had been working on humane crowd-control barricades for stadium concerts. He was in the process, at the time of his disappearance, of obtaining a number of patents related to this work, and these, should they be granted, would now become part of his estate. The company he'd been working with was on Fifth Avenue, but his contacts there had been unaware of his presence in the city.