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decision, and it brimmed with spirit. Cerdan stares at Sky Spider, but finally he nods in assent. “I understand,” he says.
    Waves of something like sadness wash over me. Two or three particularly persistent ghosts reach out. But Cerdan quickly interposes himself. It is over in an instant. A left hook flashes, and before you know it, the ghosts are down on the carpet, moaning.
    “Old man, you are very lucky,” Cerdan says caustically to me in my befuddlement. “Marcel Cerdan was middleweight champion, with a record of 119 wins and four losses. Just see what he can do!”
    He adds, self-mockingly, “He died in 1949, in an Air France accident . As long as he remains here, though, times are good!” Cerdan’s support encourages me.
    Damn straight.
    Who cares if I cannot play the cello? That is simply an inescapable fact. If Sky Spider forgets how to play the violin, I can always teach him again. The living should live in reality.
    I take the young man’s hand, and walk the path that Cerdan opens for me.
    He has long, soft fingers. Surely that is how he earned the name Sky Spider.
    The remaining passengers fall silent, respecting our wish. Sky Spider removes the clothes he received from the ghosts, puts on a coat of mine, and climbs into the cello case.
    Neveu begins to play a song of parting.
    I give Sky Spider an awkward hug, tell him I will see him again soon, and close the case. The future is unknown. We may not even be able to get past immigration. But there will be no turning back.
    I am decided, and I take the first step.
    The Ship of Dreams, where flows the music of a future that never comes.
    Or, the superhuman daydream of a moment when music itself became visible.

You can get anything you want in Little Toke. Steve insisted that his cousin’s best friend fucked a sex robot in one of those capsule hotels at his bachelor party, said it was like fucking in space. I’ve never seen a sex robot or slept in a capsule hotel; Steve and I mostly stick to a handful of drugs, the electro-green drinks at Decker’s and the flesh-live geishas with purple hair and schoolgirl uniforms and nude mesh panties. And sushi. Best goddamn sushi I ever put my mouth on. Last time we were at Bento Friday, I swore the eel I had was still alive when I dunked it in soy sauce and crammed it into my face.
    The handful of narrow streets that make up Little Tokyo grew up just off Washington Square Park, back when Anime Crash and Tower Records were destination shopping for otaku boys and nerd girls in Hello Kitty T-shirts to paw through basement racks of LaserDiscs and clamshell VHS cases. When both of those shut down, a conveyor sushi joint went in, then a bubble tea house, a Jas-Mart and a new comic shop, and then the whole rest of the mess. Someone put in a pachinko parlor, I shit you not. The three-block radius is a neon hellscape if you’re sober, but luckily, that wasn’t ever a problem for me and Steve.
    We started with sake bombs at the Tokyo Tavern, where they were five for twenty bucks. It was an NYU freshman bar for sure; they never checked IDs and all the girls wore bad hair extensions and tube dresses that stuck tight in all the wrong places. They might blow you in the alley, sure, but it would be a sloppy, faux-porno job and they’d either start crying or throw up before they finished. No, for the girls we went to Decker’s.

    Decker’s was packed like it always was on Friday nights. The DJ was blasting BabyMetal from the LED-lined plexi walls of his booth and our shot girl, a sweet little thing in a pink blazer with epaulets and microscopic shorts, bent over to flick on the green light of our table before sliding us two electro-shots. Steve put a fifty on the table and she smiled that practiced schoolgirl smile, pulled a small vial from inside her jacket and dropped two small tablets into our drinks. Steve grinned at me, lifted his glass, and we drank.

    We left around midnight with sushi on our minds; Bento Friday was 24