“That sounds nice,” his wife said tactfully.
Next morning, Tsuyoshi slept late. He was self-employed, so he kept his own hours. Tsuyoshi was a video format upgrader by trade. He transferred old videos from obsolete formats into the new high-grade storage media. Doing this properly took a craftsman’s eye. Word of Tsuyoshi’s skills had gotten out on the network, so he had as much work as he could handle.
At ten A.M., the mailman arrived. Tsuyoshi abandoned his breakfast of raw egg and miso soup, and signed for a shipment of flaking, twentieth-century analog television tapes. The mail also brought a fresh overnight shipment of strawberries, and a homemade jar of pickles.
“Pickles!” his wife enthused. “People are so nice to you when you’re pregnant.”
“Any idea who sent us that?”
“Just someone on the network.”
“Great.”
Tsuyoshi booted his mediator, cleaned his superconducting heads and examined the old tapes. Home videos from the 1980s. Someone’s grandmother as a child, presumably. There had been a lot of flaking and loss of polarity in the old recording medium.
Tsuyoshi got to work with his desktop fractal detail generator, the image stabilizer, and the interlace algorithms. When he was done, Tsuyoshi’s new digital copies would look much sharper, cleaner, and better composed than the original primitive videotape.
Tsuyoshi enjoyed his work. Quite often he came across bits and pieces of videotape that were of archival interest. He would pass the images on to the net. The really big network databases, with their armies of search engines, indexers, and catalogues, had some very arcane interests. The net machines would never pay for data, because the global information networks were noncommercial. But the net machines were very polite, and had excellent net etiquette. They returned a favor for a favor, and since they were machines with excellent, enormous memories, they never forgot a good deed.
Tsuyoshi and his wife had a lunch of ramen with naruto, and she left to go shopping. A shipment arrived by overseas package service. Cute baby clothes from Darwin, Australia. They were in his wife’s favorite color, sunshine yellow.
Tsuyoshi finished transferring the first tape to a new crystal disk. Time for a break. He left his apartment, took the elevator and went out to the comer coffeeshop. He ordered a double iced mocha cappuccino and paid with a chargecard.
His pokkecon rang. Tsuyoshi took it from his belt and answered it. “Get one to go,” the machine told him.
“Okay,” said Tsuyoshi, and hung up. He bought a second coffee, put a lid on it and left the shop.
A man in a business suit was sitting on a park bench near the entrance of Tsuyoshi’s building. The man’s suit was good, but it looked as if he’d slept in it. He was holding his head in his hands and rocking gently back and forth. He was unshaven and his eyes were red-rimmed.
The pokkecon rang again. “The coffee’s for him?” Tsuyoshi said.
“Yes,” said the pokkecon. “He needs it.”
Tsuyoshi walked up to the lost businessman. The man looked up, flinching warily, as if he were about to be kicked. “What is it?” he said.
“Here,” Tsuyoshi said, handing him the cup. “Double iced mocha cappuccino.”
The man opened the cup, and smelled it. He looked up in disbelief. “This is my favorite kind of coffee . . . Who are you?”
Tsuyoshi lifted his arm and offered a hand signal, his fingers clenched like a cat’s paw. The man showed no recognition of the gesture.
Tsuyoshi shrugged, and smiled. “It doesn’t matter. Sometimes a man really needs a coffee. Now you have a coffee. That’s all.”
“Well . . . ” The man cautiously sipped his cup, and suddenly smiled. “It’s really great. Thanks!”
“You’re welcome.” Tsuyoshi went home.
His wife arrived from shopping. She had bought new shoes. The pregnancy was making her feet swell. She sat carefully on the couch and sighed.
“Orthopedic shoes are expensive,” she said, looking at the yellow pumps. “I hope you don’t think they look ugly.”
“On you, they look really cute,” Tsuyoshi said wisely. He had first met his wife at a video store. She had just used her credit card to buy a disk of primitive black-and-white American anime of the 1950s. The pokkecon had urged him to go up and speak to her on the subject of Felix the Cat. Felix was an early television cartoon star and one of Tsuyoshi’s personal favorites.
Tsuyoshi would have been too shy to approach an attractive woman on his own, but no one was a stranger to the net. This fact gave him the confidence to speak to her. Tsuyoshi had soon discovered that the girl was delighted to discuss her deep fondness for cute, antique, animated cats. They’d had lunch together. They’d had a date the next week. They had spent Christmas Eve together in a love hotel. They had a lot in common.
She had come into his life through a little act of grace, a little gift from Felix the Cat’s magic bag of tricks. Tsuyoshi had never gotten over feeling grateful for this. Now that he was married and becoming a father, Tsuyoshi Shimizu could feel himself becoming solidly fixed in life. He had a man’s role to play now. He knew who he was, and he knew where he stood. Life was good to him.
“You need a haircut, dear,” his wife told him.
“Sure.”
His wife pulled a gift box out of her shopping bag. “Can you go to the Hotel Daruma, and get your hair cut, and deliver this box for me?”
“What is it?” Tsuyoshi said.
Tsuyoshi’s wife opened the little wooden gift box. A maneki neko was nestled inside white foam padding. The smiling ceramic cat held one paw upraised, beckoning for good fortune.
“Don’t you have enough of those yet?” he said. “You even have maneki neko underwear.”
“It’s not for my collection. It’s a gift for someone at the Hotel Daruma.”
“Oh.”
“Some foreign woman gave me this box at the shoestore. She looked American. She couldn’t speak Japanese. She had really nice shoes, though . . . ”
“If the network gave you that little cat, then you’re the one who should take care of that obligation, dear.”
“But dear,” she sighed, “my feet hurt so much, and you could do with a haircut anyway, and I have to cook supper, and besides, it’s not really a nice maneki neko, it’s just cheap tourist souvenir junk. Can’t you do it?”
“Oh, all right,” Tsuyoshi told her. “Just forward your pokkecon prompts onto my machine, and I’ll see what I can do for us.”
She smiled. “I knew you would do it. You’re really so good to me.”
Tsuyoshi left with the little box. He wasn’t unhappy to do the errand, as it wasn’t always easy to manage his pregnant wife’s volatile moods in their small six-tatami apartment. The local neighborhood was good, but he was hoping to find bigger accommodations before the child was born. Maybe a place with a little studio, where he could expand the scope of his work. It was very hard to find decent housing in Tokyo, but word was out on the net. Friends he didn’t even know were working every day to help him. If he kept up with the net’s obligations, he had every confidence that some day something nice would turn up.
Tsuyoshi went into the local pachinko parlor, where he won half a liter of beer and a train chargecard. He drank the beer, took the new train card and wedged himself into the train. He got out at the Ebisu station, and turned on his pokkecon Tokyo street map to guide his steps. He walked past places called Chocolate Soup, and Freshness Physique, and The Aladdin Mai-Tai Panico Trattoria.
He entered the Hotel Daruma and went to the hotel barber shop, which was called the Daruma Planet Look. “May I help you?” said the receptionist.
“I’m thinking, a shave and a trim,” Tsuyoshi said.
“Do you have an appointment with us?”
“Sorry, no.” Tsuyoshi offered a hand gesture.
The woman gestured back, a jerky series of cryptic finger movements. Tsuyoshi didn’t recognize any of the gestures. She wasn’t from his part of the network.
