The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (76 page)

Sometimes I think that the reason I’m sitting here making wigs like this every day is because I kissed your mark that time. It’s because I did that that I made up my mind to leave that place, to get as far away as I could from you. I know I might be hurting you by saying this, but I think it’s true. Still, though, it’s because of that that I was finally able to find the place where I belong. So, in a sense, I am grateful to you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. I don’t suppose it’s much fun to have somebody be “in a sense” grateful to you, though, is it?

So now I feel like I’ve said just about everything I have to say to you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. It’s almost four o’clock in the morning. I have to get up at seven-thirty, so maybe I’ll be able to sleep three hours and a little bit. I hope I can get to sleep right away. Anyhow, I’m going to end this letter here. Goodbye, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. Please say a little prayer so I can get to sleep
.

“There’s a computer in that house, isn’t there, Mr. Okada? I don’t know who’s using it, though,” said Ushikawa.

It was nine o’clock at night, and I was sitting at the kitchen table, with the phone to my ear.

“There is,” I said, and left it at that.

Ushikawa made a sniffling sound. “I know that much from my usual snooping,” he said. “Of course, I’m not saying anything one way or another about the fact that you’ve got a computer there. Nowadays, anybody doing any kind of brainwork has to have a computer. There’s nothing weird about it.

“To make a long story short, though, the idea kind of hit me that it might be good if I could contact you through the computer. So I looked into it, but damn, it’s a hell of a lot more complicated than I imagined. Just calling up on an ordinary phone line wouldn’t make the connection. Plus, you need a special password for access. No password, and the door doesn’t budge. That did it for me.”

I kept silent.

“Now, don’t get me wrong, Mr. Okada. I’m not trying to crawl inside your computer and fool around in there. I don’t have anything like that in mind. With all the security you’ve got in place, I couldn’t pull data out
even if I wanted to. No, that was never an issue. All I have in mind is trying to set up a conversation between you and Ms. Kumiko. I promised you I’d do that, remember, that I’d do what I could to help you and her talk to each other directly. It’s been a long time since she left your house, and it’s a bad idea to leave things hanging like this. The way it stands now, your life is probably just going to get weirder and weirder. It’s always best for people to talk to each other face-to-face, to open themselves up. Otherwise, misunderstandings are bound to arise, and misunderstandings make people unhappy.… Anyhow, that’s how I tried to appeal to Ms. Kumiko. I did everything I could.

“But I just couldn’t get her to agree. She insisted she wouldn’t talk to you directly—not even on the phone (since a face-to-face meeting was out of the question).
Not even on the phone!
I was ready to give up. I tried every trick in the book, but her mind was made up. Like a rock.”

Ushikawa paused for me to react, but I said nothing.

“Still, I couldn’t just take her at her word and back off. Dr. Wataya would really give it to me if I started acting like that. The other person can be a rock or a wall, but I’ll find that one tiny point of compromise. That’s our job: finding that point of compromise. If they won’t sell you the refrigerator, make them sell you some ice. So I racked my brains trying to find some way to pull this off. Let me tell you, that’s what makes us human—coming up with a million different ideas. So all of a sudden, a good one popped up in my foggy brain, like a star showing through a break in the clouds. ‘That’s it!’ I told myself. ‘Why not have a conversation on computer screens?’ You know: put words on the screen with a keyboard.
You
can do that, can’t you, Mr. Okada?”

I had used a computer when I worked in the law firm, researching precedents, looking up personal data for clients, and communicating with E-mail. Kumiko had also used computers at work. The health food magazine she edited had computer files on recipes and nutritional analyses.

“It wouldn’t work on just any old computer,” continued Ushikawa, “but with our machine and yours, you ought to be able to communicate at a pretty fast pace. Ms. Kumiko says she’s willing to talk with you that way. It was as much as I could get her to bend. Trading messages real time, it would
almost
be like talking to each other. That’s the one last point of compromise I could come up with. Squeezing wisdom out of a monkey. What do you say? You may not be too crazy about the idea, but I literally put my brains on the rack for that one. Let me tell you, it’s tiring work thinking that hard with brains you don’t even have!”

I silently shifted the receiver to my left hand.

“Hello? Mr. Okada? Are you listening?”

“I’m listening,” I said.

“All right, then: the one thing I need from you is the password to access your computer. Then I can set up a conversation between you and Ms. Kumiko. What do you say?”

“I’d say there are some practical problems standing in the way.”

“Oh? And what might those be?”

“Well, first of all, how can I be sure the other person is Kumiko? When you’re talking on the computer screen, you can’t see other people’s faces or hear their voices. Someone else could be sitting at the keyboard, pretending to be Kumiko.”

“I see what you mean,” said Ushikawa, seemingly impressed. “I never thought of that. But I’m sure there must be some way around it. Not to flatter you, but it’s good to view things with skepticism, to have your doubts. ‘I doubt, therefore I am.’ All right, then: how about this? You start out by asking a question that only Ms. Kumiko would know the answer to. If the other person can come up with the answer, it must be Kumiko. I mean, you lived together as man and wife for several years; there must be a few things that only the two of you would know.”

What Ushikawa was saying made sense. “That would probably work,” I said, “but I don’t know the password. I’ve never touched that machine.”

•

Nutmeg had told me that Cinnamon had customized every inch of the computer’s system. He had compiled his own complex database and protected it from outside access with a secret code and other ingenious devices. Fingers on the keyboard, Cinnamon was absolute ruler over this three-dimensional subterranean labyrinth. He knew every one of its intertwined passages and could leap from one to another with the stroke of a key. For an uninformed invader (which is to say, anyone but Cinnamon) to grope his way through the labyrinth, past the alarms and traps, to where important data lay, would have taken months, according to Nutmeg. Not that the computer installed in the Residence was especially big: it was the same class of machine as the one in the Akasaka office. Both were hard-wired to the mainframe they had at home, though. There Cinnamon no doubt stored their client data and did their complex double bookkeeping, but I imagined that he kept something more in there than the secrets connected with the work that he and Nutmeg had done over the years.

What led me to believe this, was the depth of the commitment to his machine that Cinnamon displayed on occasion when he was in our special Residence. He normally stayed shut up in the small office he had there, but every now and then he would leave the door ajar, and I was able to observe him at work—not without a certain guilty sense of invading someone’s privacy. He and his computer seemed to be moving together in an almost erotic union. After a burst of strokes on the keyboard, he would gaze at the screen, his mouth twisted in apparent dissatisfaction or curled with the suggestion of a smile. Sometimes he seemed deep in thought as he touched one key, then another, then another; and sometimes he ran his fingers over the keys with all the energy of a pianist playing a Liszt étude. As he engaged in silent conversation with his machine, he seemed to be peering through the screen of his monitor into another world, with which he shared a special intimacy. I couldn’t help but feel that reality resided for him not so much in the earthly world but in his subterranean labyrinth. Perhaps in that world Cinnamon had a clear, ringing voice, with which he spoke eloquently and laughed and cried aloud.

•

“Can’t I access your computer from the one here?” I asked Ushikawa. “Then you wouldn’t need a password.”

“No, that wouldn’t work. Your transmissions might reach here, but transmissions from here wouldn’t reach there. The problem is the password—the open sesame. Without that, there’s nothing we can do. The door won’t open for the wolf, no matter how hard he tries to disguise his voice. He can knock and say, ‘Hi, it’s me, your friend Rabbit,’ but if he hasn’t got the password, he gets turned away at the door. We’re talking about an iron maiden here.”

Ushikawa struck a match at his end and lit a cigarette. I pictured his snaggled yellow teeth and drooping mouth.

“It’s a three-character alphanumeric password. You have ten seconds to input it after the prompt shows. Get it wrong three times, and access is denied, plus the alarm goes off. Not that there are any sirens that ring or anything, but the wolf leaves his footprints, so you know he was there. Clever, huh? If you calculate all possible permutations and combinations of twenty-six letters and ten numbers, it’s practically infinite. You just have to know the password, or there’s nothing you can do.”

I thought this over for a time without replying.

“Any good ideas, Mr. Okada?”

After the client was driven away in the back seat of the Mercedes the following afternoon, I walked into Cinnamon’s small office, sat down in front of his computer, and flipped the switch. The cool blue light of the monitor came on with a simple message:

Enter password within ten seconds
.

I input the three-letter word that I had prepared:

zoo

The computer beeped once and displayed an error message:

Incorrect password
.

Enter password within ten seconds
.

The ten seconds started counting down on the screen. I changed to upper case and input the same letters:

ZOO

Again I was refused access:

Incorrect password
.

Enter correct password within ten seconds
.

If incorrect password is input once more
,
access will automatically be denied
.

Again the ten seconds began counting down on the screen. This time I made only the Z uppercase. It was my last chance.

Zoo

Instead of an error message, a menu screen opened, with the instruction:

Choose one of the following programs
.

I released a long, slow breath, then began scrolling through the long list of programs until I came to communications software. Highlighting this, I pressed the mouse button.

Choose one of the following programs
.

I chose “Chat Mode” and clicked the mouse.

Enter password within ten seconds
.

This was an important junction for Cinnamon to lock out access to his computer. And if the junction was important, the password itself ought to be important. I typed in:

SUB

The screen read:

Incorrect password
.

Input correct password within ten seconds
.

The countdown began: 10, 9, 8 …

I tried the combination of upper- and lowercase letters that had worked the first time:

Sub

A prompt flashed on the screen:

Input telephone number
.

I folded my arms and let my eyes take in this new message. Not bad. I had succeeded in opening two doors in Cinnamon’s labyrinth. No, not bad at all. “Zoo” and “Sub” would do it. I clicked on “Exit” and returned to the main menu, then chose “Shutdown,” which brought up the following options:

Record procedures in Operations File? Y/N (Y)

As instructed by Ushikawa, I chose “No” to avoid leaving a record of the procedures I had just executed.

The screen quietly died. I wiped the sweat from my forehead. After checking to be certain that I had left the keyboard and mouse exactly as I had found them, I moved away from the now cold monitor.