A Lonely Resurrection

been clean when I left Tokyo, but the two-and-a-half-hour train ride had afforded me no new opportunities to check my back. That’s a long time for me, especially given my recent run-in with Kanezaki and company, and to ease my discomfort I took an appropriately circuitous route before catching a Tanimachi line train to Miyakojima, where I took the stairs of the A4 exit to the street.
    For no particular reason, I made a left around the police box at the Miyakojima Hon-dori intersection, maneuvering around the hundreds of commuter bicycles jammed in all directions around the exit. I could as easily have made a right, past the local high school and toward the Okawa River. One of the things that had attracted me to the high-rise in Belfa is that the complex is approachable from all directions.
    I took a left at Miyakojima Kita-dori, then a right against traffic down a one-way street, then another left. The move against traffic would impede anyone’s attempts at vehicular surveillance. And each turn gave me an opportunity to unobtrusively glance behind me while putting me on a narrower, quieter road then the last. Anyone hoping to follow me on foot would have to stay close or lose me. There were dozens of high-rises in the area, too, and the fact that I might have been going to any one of them was another factor that would have rendered ineffective anything other than close-range surveillance.
    In some ways, the neighborhood was the poster child for bad zoning. There were shiny glass-and-steel condominiums across from corrugated and I-beam parking garages. Single-family homes perched alongside recycling plants and foundries. A new multistory school turned its proud granite façade away from its neighbor, a dilapidated relic of a car repair shop, like an ungrateful child ashamed of an ailing parent.
    On the other hand, the residents didn’t seem to mind the shambles. On the contrary: everywhere were small signs of the pride the locals took in their dwellings. The monotonous macadam and corrugated metal were relieved by small riots of potted bamboo, lavender, and sunflowers. Here was a carefully arranged cairn of volcanic rocks, there, a display of dried coral. One house had concealed what would have been an ugly ferroconcrete wall with a lovingly tended garden of angel’s trumpet, sage, and lavender.
    I lived on the thirty-sixth floor of one of the twin high-rises in the Belfa complex, in a three-bedroom corner apartment. The place was larger than I needed and most of the rooms went unused, but I liked living on the top floor, with a view of the city, above it all. Also, at the time I’d rented it, I thought it would be to my advantage to take a place that didn’t fit the profile of what a lone man, recently disappeared and with minimal needs, would take for an apartment. In the end, of course, it hadn’t mattered.
    I tell myself I like to live in places like Belfa because parents are inherently watchful of strangers, and once they decide you belong they can form an unconscious but effective obstacle to an ambush. But I know there’s more to it than that. I don’t have a family and never will, and I’m probably drawn to such environments not just for operational reasons but for some other, more vicarious form of security, as well. There was a time when I didn’t seem to need such things, when I would have been amused and perhaps even vaguely disgusted at the notion of living like some sort of psychic vampire, a lingering revenant pressed up against one-way glass, looking with forlorn and futile eyes at the ordinary life fate had denied him.
    It changes your priorities. Hell, it changes your damn values.
    I used a payphone to access a voicemail account attached to a special phone in my apartment, a sound-activated unit with a sensitive speakerphone that functions like a transmitter. The unit silently dials a voicemail account if someone enters the apartment without knowing the code that disengages the phone, letting me know in advance and from a safe distance whether I’ve had any unexpected visitors. An identical setup had saved me in Tokyo from a Holtzer-inspired ambush, and I tend to stick with what works. I’d been checking the account daily from Tokyo without incident, and the mailbox was empty this time as well, so I knew my apartment had gone unmolested during my absence.
    From the payphone, I walked the short distance to the Belfa complex. A softball game was underway on the field to my right. Some