Private medicine. Easy to identify: public medicine doesn’t have as many potted plants or espresso machines. Sofas are not padded leather, carpets are not thick and clean, departments are not laid out with little brass plates, no one is happy to see you.
I had imagined plastic surgery. (“So much happier with my body,” whispered one man on 430,500 points who I shared sake with. “Even with exercise and good eating, I just didn’t look like the way men look in the movies until I got Perfection.”)
You didn’t get to 1×106 points in Perfection without some sort of surgery, I had concluded. Even the most beautiful, even the most astoundingly naturally beautiful, had something tweaked, tucked or smoothed. Perfection seemed to be an inhuman quality.
Yet, walking through the treatment centre, past doors labelled with the names of professors and doctors, departments and facilities, I saw no sign of surgical operating theatres or recovery rooms. I moved at the speed of someone who shouldn’t be remarked upon, and trusted to my condition to protect me from comment should I encounter any of the cleaning staff or night guards.
Counselling, coaching, detox therapy, physical therapy, dietary therapy — the doors rolled by, and I didn’t understand what they were doing here, or why they mattered. At a door marked “spectrocraniotomy” I stopped, and with my stolen security pass, let myself inside.
A white room: white floors, white walls. A large red couch in the middle, stainless-steel column supporting adjustable parts. Lights, wires, inactive machines, acronyms and characters in katakana and hirogana. A skullcap attached to a central hub of machines. A pair of goggles plugged into network cabling. A server hidden behind one cupboard wall, top of the line, ninety thousand US dollars just for the basic hardware. A flick of a switch, and the goggles produced light, images flashing across the lenses too fast to follow.
A cardboard box of brochures told me more than my thin grasp of neuroscience. In English and Japanese it read:
Exclusive to the 106, the treatments provided by our clinic will help you find the perfect you within. Confidence, self-esteem, optimism, ambition, and dedication — if you’ve come this far, they all lie within you, and with our revolutionary new service we can help you find the strength to be the person you want to be.
Pictures.
Perfect women in the chair, skullcap on their heads. Earbuds pushed in, connected to a sound I couldn’t hear. Nose clips, a sensor stuck to the tongue, or perhaps not a sensor, perhaps something else, a thing creating sensations, senses. Clips on the fingers, a needle in the arm, drugs and electricity.
Perfect men in perfect white shirts, the sun at their backs, beaming proudly.
Perfect families playing with their perfect children on perfect beaches by sapphire seas.
Testimonials from clients.
I used to have to pretend that I was someone I wasn’t, and whenever life went my way, I would think that I hadn’t earned it. The treatments helped me see the world in a new way. I am worth so much more than I ever thought.
And below, a picture of a woman in a silk suit, arms folded, shoulders back, head high.
What is my life worth? asked the caption, as the city spread out beneath her through great panes of glass. My life is perfect now, and I make the world better by simply being.
The door to the room opened; a cleaner all in blue.
Surprise on her face, then immediately suspicion. If the world remembered me, this would be a low point, a failure, for here I am, undeniably doing wrong, and in the moment of uncertainty I feel guilt flash across my features, before I lock my smile in place. Giving my description to the police in ethnically not-so-diverse Tokyo would be easy, but I am nothing, I am the slight start in your chest which you later will put down to hiccups, I am the fear that faded as quickly as it came, I am
(worthless?)
practically forgotten already, as I push past her and run for the door.
Chapter 45
A suspicion growing, which now I acted on.
By stealing the identity of a journalist from the San Francisco Chronicle who looked perhaps a tiny little bit like myself, I got a meeting with a junior housing minister. He bowed as I entered, and I bowed lower, and we exchanged cards with both hands. As well as his normal card, he produced another, which transpired to be a dozen or so incredibly thin cards, each made of pressed platinum, his name engraved in gold.
“I donate them to the temples,” he explained, as I turned one between my fingers, feeling the sharpness of the edge. There must have been something of the thief in my face, for he quickly pulled it back, slipping these precious objects back into their hiding place. “It is both a financial gift, and a means of ensuring my name is remembered.”
I locked my smile in the attack position, and looked the minister up and down, adding up the value of his suit, his bespoke leather shoes, his watch — a beautiful piece, the face changing gently as the hands moved, the moon to conquer the retreating sun. In the 1500s, watches had been filled with symbols of Death: Death beating on the bell, creeping from his cave; Death waiting at the end of every dangerous hour. How time had changed.
My mind, wandering, again; there is a human in the room, there is company, he can see me, he can see me, focus on that.
Questions — the easy ones first, gently prepared. How long in his job? New challenges in housing? Changing demographics. Over-population in urban areas? Loss of rural communities? Planning laws. Tenant protection. Market imbalance. The 106 Apartments.
“Ah, yes, a beautiful piece of design, no?”
Beautiful indeed, and was I right in thinking that he was personally involved in the project?
“Not personally, not involved, but yes, I helped give it clearance.”
But wasn’t there a building standing there already?
“Unsafe building, terribly old, the residents living in unsanitary conditions, terrible, really, terrible.”
Low-income families evicted from their homes, sent away from the city and—
“That is the worst way of seeing it!” he interrupted, suddenly sharp, suddenly hostile. Strange how fast the switch may happen. In a society where good manners are king, the breakdown of such formalised structures rapidly reveals a need to not only save face, but to save face by chewing off the face of your adversary.
I do not need him hostile, so I bob in my seat, smile humbly, bat my eyelids, throw out a few harmless questions — new initiatives, lessons learned, wisdom acquired — and only at the very very end, as I stand up to leave, snapping my satchel shut around my entirely redundant notes, do I ask, quiet, conspiratoriaclass="underline"
“Do you have Perfection?”
His eyes dart up from the leather top of the desk where they had rested, to study my face. “Seven hundred and ninety-four thousand, five hundred,” I murmur, gentle as you like.
“Nine hundred and eighty-one thousand, four hundred,” he breathes, eyes now fixed on my face. “It’s changed my life. I thought I was worthless, now I know I can do whatever I want.”
“That’s how I feel.”
“I am a better person, now.”
“Me too.”
He leant forward, and I bent in to join him, so close I could feel his breath against my neck, feel him enjoy it, the heat rising in his skin, stayed still, didn’t flinch, didn’t curl away. “I got two hundred and fifty thousand points the day the 106 project went through. ‘You have made the perfect decision,’ it said. ‘You are building the perfect life.’ It is the perfect home.”
I smiled and nodded, and said nothing in reply.