Mona Lisa Overdrive

The ghost was her father’s parting gift, presented by a black-clad secretary in a
departure lounge at Narita.

For the first two hours of the flight to London it lay forgotten in her purse, a smooth
dark oblong, one side impressed with the ubiquitous Maas-Neotek logo, the other gently
curved to fit the user’s palm.

She sat up very straight in her seat in the first-class cabin, her features composed
in a small cold mask modeled after her dead mother’s most characteristic expression.
The surrounding seats were empty; her father had purchased the space. She refused
the meal the nervous steward offered. The vacant seats frightened him, evidence of
her father’s wealth and power. The man hesitated, then bowed and withdrew. Very briefly,
she allowed the mask her mother’s smile.

Ghosts, she thought later, somewhere over Germany, staring at the upholstery of the
seat beside her. How well her father treated his ghosts.

There were ghosts beyond the window, too, ghosts in the stratosphere of Europe’s winter,
partial images that
began to form if she let her eyes drift out of focus. Her mother in Ueno Park, face
fragile in September sunlight. “The cranes, Kumi! Look at the cranes!” And Kumiko
looked across Shinobazu Pond and saw nothing, no cranes at all, only a few hopping
black dots that surely were crows. The water was smooth as silk, the color of lead,
and pale holograms flickered indistinctly above a distant line of archery stalls.
But Kumiko would see the cranes later, many times, in dreams; they were origami, angular
things folded from sheets of neon, bright stiff birds sailing the moonscape of her
mother’s madness.…

Remembering her father, the black robe open across a tattooed storm of dragons, slumped
behind the vast ebony field of his desk, his eyes flat and bright, like the eyes of
a painted doll. “Your mother is dead. Do you understand?” And all around her the planes
of shadow in his study, the angular darkness. His hand coming forward, into the lamp’s
circle of light, unsteadily, to point at her, the robe’s cuff sliding back to reveal
a golden Rolex and more dragons, their manes swirling into waves, pricked out strong
and dark around his wrist, pointing. Pointing at her. “Do you understand?” She hadn’t
answered, but had run instead, down to a secret place she knew, the warren of the
smallest of the cleaning machines. They ticked around her all night, scanning her
every few minutes with pink bursts of laser light, until her father came to find her,
and, smelling of whiskey and Dunhill cigarettes, carried her to her room on the apartment’s
third floor.

Remembering the weeks that followed, numb days spent most often in the black-suited
company of one secretary or another, cautious men with automatic smiles and tightly
furled umbrellas. One of these, the youngest and least cautious, had treated her,
on a crowded Ginza sidewalk, in the shadow of the Hattori clock, to an impromptu kendo
demonstration, weaving expertly between startled shop girls and wide-eyed tourists,
the black umbrella blurring harmlessly through the art’s formal, ancient arcs. And
Kumiko had smiled then, her own smile, breaking the funeral mask, and for this her
guilt was driven instantly, more deeply and still more sharply, into that place in
her heart where she knew her shame and her unworthiness. But most often the secretaries
took her shopping, through one vast Ginza department store after another, and in and
out of dozens of Shinjuku boutiques recommended by a blue plastic Michelin guide that
spoke a stuffy tourist’s Japanese. She purchased only very ugly things, ugly and very
expensive things, and the secretaries marched stolidly beside her, the glossy bags
in their hard hands. Each afternoon, returning to her father’s apartment, the bags
were deposited neatly in her bedroom, where they remained, unopened and untouched,
until the maids removed them.

And in the seventh week, on the eve of her thirteenth birthday, it was arranged that
Kumiko would go to London.

“You will be a guest in the house of my
kobun
,” her father said.

“But I do not wish to go,” she said, and showed him her mother’s smile.

“You must,” he said, and turned away. “There are difficulties,” he said to the shadowed
study. “You will be in no danger, in London.”

“And when shall I return?”

But her father didn’t answer. She bowed and left his study, still wearing her mother’s
smile.

The ghost woke to Kumiko’s touch as they began their descent into Heathrow. The fifty-first
generation of Maas-Neotek biochips conjured up an indistinct figure on the seat beside
her, a boy out of some faded hunting print, legs crossed casually in tan breeches
and riding boots. “Hullo,” the ghost said.