Free Distrust That Particular Flavor by William Gibson Page B

mud.
    Professor Fumio Kayo of the Kyoto University of Education first encountered these enigmatic, glistening spheres in a nursery school in Kyoto in 1999.
    The
dorodango
, balls of mud compressed with the hands and painstakingly formed into perfect spheres, became the object of considerable media attention.
    THE SILENT young men who must sometimes appear, blinking, in the unaccustomed glare of a Tokyo 7-Eleven at three in the morning, stocking up on white foam bowls of instant ramen, in their unlaundered, curiously outmoded clothing, are themselves engaged in the creation of
dorodango
, their chosen material: existence itself.

    ABOUT THREE INCHES in diameter, the surface of a completed
dorodango
glistens with an illusion of depth not unlike that seen in traditional Japanese pottery glazes. A
dorodango
becomes its maker's greatest treasure.
    Kayo has invented a scale for recording a
dorodango
's luster, with the shiniest rating a 5. It took him two hundred attempts and analysis with an electron microscope to duplicate the children's results and produce an adequately lustrous
dorodango
.
    The genesis of the making of
hikaru dorodango
remains an absolute mystery.
    THE FLOORS of Tokyu Hands are haunted for me now with the mysterious, all-encompassing presence of the
hikaru dorodango
, an artifact of such utter simplicity and perfection that it seems it must be either the first object or the last, something that either instigated the Big Bang or awaits the final precipitous descent into universal silence. At the very end of things waits the
hikaru dorodango
, a perfect three-inch sphere of mud. At its heart: the unthinkable.
    The secret of Tokyu Hands is that everything on offer there inclines, ultimately, to the status, if not the perfection, of
hikaru dorodango
. The brogues, shined lovingly enough, for long enough, with those meticulously imported shoe-care products, must ultimately become a universe unto themselves, a conceptual sphere of lustrous and infinite depth.
    Just as a life, lived silently enough, in sufficient solitude, becomes a different sort of sphere, no less perfect.
    Writing for the Tate's own magazine somehow provided an unusual sense of security, almost of privacy. With the result that I wish this were a novel, somehow.

I FIRST READ Jorge Luis Borges's
Labyrinths
in an armchair upholstered with a smooth lettuce-green brocade, patterned with leaves that were themselves not unlike lettuce, though they were also rather like clouds, or perhaps rabbits. I regarded that chair as an environment in and of itself, having known it since earlier childhood. It was the only relatively safe place in a room I regarded as ominously formal and adult, a room dominated by large pieces of dark furniture belonging to my mother's family. One of these was an unnaturally tall desk, topped with a bookcase closed with two long and solid doors, reputed, though dimly, to have once belonged to the Revolutionary hero Francis Marion. Its lower drawers smelled terrifyingly and chemically of Time, and within them, furled, lay elaborately printed scrolls listing the county's dead in the Great War.
    I now know that I believed, without quite wanting to admit it to myself, that that desk was haunted.
    I initially discovered Borges in one of the more liberal-minded anthologies of science fiction, which had included his story "The Circular Ruins." That sufficiently intrigued me that I sought out
Labyrinths
, which I imagine would have been fairly difficult for me to find, though I no longer recall those difficulties.
    I do, however, remember the sensation, both complex and eerily simple, induced by my first reading of "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," while seated in that green chair.
    Had the concept of software been available to me, I imagine I would have felt as though I were installing something that exponentially increased what one day would be called bandwidth, though bandwidth of what, exactly, I remain unable to say. This sublime and