Tokyo Zero
Marc Horne
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2009 Marc Horne
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ONE
Japanese policemen’s guns are small and sort of puny. Except when they are shooting at you. Right now, they are shooting at me and my companion and we are running scared. The Policemen’s shots are a little tentative, like someone picking chewing gum out of their hair. In fairness to the police, I should mention that we are in Shinjuku station, the world’s busiest. Currently it is occupied by... oh, I don’t know... 2.5 Lichtensteins. I am on average four inches taller than those around me, and a crucial four inches to boot, so as I barge through the crowd, hurting everyone, I must remember to crouch. To help me remember this, I visualize two things: the cloth that hangs in front of every drinking establishment in this country and those photos of JFK’s autopsy that my father and I discussed over breakfast in 1977.
Running next to me, in full flush of his compact masculinity is Takeshi Honda, ex-military. Now, if I were a Takeshi Honda in a blue suit in these circumstances I would fall to the ground and upon standing be a sheep rather than a wolf and watch events through the TV glaze. However, Honda stays with me, pointing me here and there, grabbing aggressive costumed Japan Railways employees by the forehead and smashing them to pieces, reminding them that it is not the peaked hats of the police that make us run.
We skid past a “Let’s Kiosk!” and I have never felt more like accepting its invitation. Yeah, let’s kiosk... anything but this.
The man behind the kiosk cannot believe his eyes: the crowds have parted, firstly, and secondly a white man with his face covered in blood and a salaryman with a soul are racing straight at him. If she were not such a traitor (or if I were not) he would also see a most aggressively attractive woman neck-to-neck with us, probably openly armed. But she is gone and I don’t know if her beauty will aid or hinder her attempt to stay gone. When this is over, that will be interesting to find out. If I see her mug shot on TV or if I never see her again will be how I find out.
“Stop!” cry the cops in English, which I take personally. This makes me turn around. I see that things are over. Somehow they coordinated the station like an army to part and create a long shooting range. They are skidding around a little at their end of the range as they get into position. The floor of this station is in places one of the slickest surfaces known to man, polished by several million feet in predictable chaos daily. It is veined in a pattern that would tell the anthropological programs of my father’s future much about the recently dead human race. The three policemen are about to shoot, as soon as they can stand, and even if one accidentally takes out the Kiosk man who is cowering behind dried squid in front of us, that still leaves plenty of bullets for me.
The dried squid remind me of the enormous giant squid beneath the oceans, sacs of amazing pressure and death power and darkness who nonetheless have had no impact on my life.
The kiosk man drops.
TWO
The beginning is in at least four places.
1) Something unknown in my father’s life
2) My mother’s death at the hands of the Khmer Rouge.
3) When I got entangled with that girl, Claire
4) I somehow met the number two man in one of those Japanese death cults. But I choose to begin in the middle of things, or near the end of things. The crisis is when I will get started. —
I arrived at Narita Airport, Tokyo’s airport, on an exceptionally hot August day. I got off the British Airways jet, where they had not announced the temperature on the ground: presumably to prevent a panic amongst those like me who were braving the Tokyo summer for the first time. In retrospect the crew who “goodbyed” me out the door had the looks of parachute instructors rather than smartly dressed waitresses as they bundled me out the door.
So, suddenly I felt terrible. I felt like a victim that could be picked by anyone. I was suddenly weak and confused because of the heat and also unexpectedly illiterate. I followed a long line of people to a place where many things got stamped. It was the 1970s in Narita, but I could have sworn my watch said 2000. Maybe it was just 8 o’clock. What time was it anyway?
Stamped, pulling round in a bar with a $32 beer in front of me, I congratulated myself on my deep cover. For half an hour I had even fooled myself into thinking I was some harmless idiot, instead of a member of an international conspiracy.
I took in my surroundings a little: I was in the most Western of the discreetly hidden dining facilities at the airport. On arrival I had been brought to this table with no words and very few and subtle gestures. There was some magnetism employed, the waitress influenced me in. Everyone was smoking Marlboro or Lark, a local brand that mapped its county in the wrinkles of aging tough guy actors from here or from there. All of the American men had thick sideburns and glossy tan leather jackets. They were strangely quiet, by American standards. Did they feel out of place or too acutely in place? When you are too much in place, people don’t even have to look at you to know you and judge you.
Outside the planes continued to crash gently into the earth, harming nobody.
Narita Airport is, by the way, the dimmest airport in the civilized world. Other airports have some kind of slow x-ray going on with their harsh lighting but Narita is the smoking-room of the jet set. The basic color scheme is brown and black. The slick floors lead you off into many dim dead ends. There is a cleaner, or someone else to stare at you, at the end of each of these. The level of the floor there changes abruptly by a few feet every few feet. Cattle could never stampede through Narita Airport.
So, the man I was waiting for could well appear from nowhere. In addition, the description I had of him would be quite useful in Abu Dhabi but not in the Tokyo Tectoplex.
I thought it might be good to eat. I unfolded a large illustrated menu. 20 illustrations of the top of some steaming bowl of noodles and one of crab and chips. I took a few moments to try and distinguish something uniquely appetizing about at least one of the noodle bowls, but it was escaping me... white noise food.
Then he came into the room: Sato Yosuke. Killer. Ugly fucker.
He had a haircut that everyone would describe differently when describing it to the police some months later. For my part, I would compare it to a helmet made from a lacquered tree trunk. Then beneath it was something like Roy Orbison just as the obituaries came out. The enormous dark glasses looked like a disguise, but may have been a concession to the shallow aesthetic judgments of society. In addition he was wearing a “Carlos the Jackal” style safari jacket.
I had briefly met Carlos the Jackal in my youth. He was passing through London for the first of one of his interminable arse related operations and my father’s good friend was taking care of it. I was 9 at the time and had not yet fully worked out what was driving Dad. It was three years after Mum had died and the only thing you could really say about Dad at that time was that he had too many friends and too many of them were famous for too much of something. The friend in question here was famous for the extremity of his views on children’s human rights. He basically felt that the words human and child had strong internal contradictions. He was the brother computer scientist Dr Cranwell Blythe and hence uncle of Claire Blythe, whom I would fall in love with and learn much from.
So my father headed down to London and had to take me with him. I was sleeping in a small room from too early till too late the next day as the talking went on.
I briefly met the Jackal (my Father had not been above entertaining me with this name on the train down) as he was leaving the next day. His fat face was lined with pain, but I should say ‘grooved’, and he didn’t say much but he did tell me that my father was crazy.
Sato sat down at my table. In the twenty seconds preceding his arrival, he had caught my eye by walking toward my table while looking fixedly out of the window. My first assumption, a blind man about to present a very real problem, lasted only a split second because Sato was carrying a sports newspaper under his arm. It was the kind of sports magazine whose main selling point is a carefully doctored naked woman on the front cover. There are many other ways for blind people to get their sumo results. I decided that my table was solid enough to take a hit and that that was preferable to talking, shouting etc. Expecting a bump I was surprised when it all ended in a slide and with a party of two happily seated.
“Sato-san desu ka?” I queried. I had studied Japanese for a couple of months, but most of the discussions I had with people in Japan took place in English, you may be pleased to hear.
“Mr. Williams... how was your flight?”
I assumed that he was giving me a false name as a precaution. I felt bad for calling him Mr. Sato. Then he suddenly came out and told me that Sato is the third most common name in Japan. After he said that, a smile crept across his face like a wound on the belly of a TV samurai (although at the time I would have drawn another, less accurate, analogy as I had hardly watched any Japanese TV. That would come during the underground months.)
I felt at a distinct disadvantage. He either had read my mind or had a repertoire of cool tricks that he had acquired the hard way. I gave him a slow look that tried to say “Don’t mess about: I’m a pro too.”
But was he even a pro? Something about him sat wrong. He wasn’t making his joke to test me, it was just that he had seen humor in the moment. I could tell because he didn’t have a follow up ready. We sat in silence for long seconds.
“How long are we going to wait here?” I asked.
“Hmm... not so long. No one is watching us... too badly. I would like you to catch the Keisei Express to Kanamachi and when you get there buy the least delicious snack you can find from the platform man.”
“OK. Do you want to leave first?”
“Yes, we will meet again.”
And then he didn’t stand up. And just as I was wondering if I was making a fool of myself he smirked again and walked away.
I contemplated a second beer, but decided to just leave. Sato had irritated me into a state of mind where I wanted to be active. I get like that a lot, and it usually leads to more trouble than my characteristic passivity.
As I left the bar, after somehow managing to effortlessly pay for things, I felt strong nostalgia. It was partially the way it had reminded me of twenty years ago but it was also a newborn nostalgia that you feel when you leave a safe place that will never be safe for you again. Because, let’s face it, there was a good chance I would never be able to relax in an airport again when all the damage had been done.
I made my way toward the place where the small train icons were headed. Light seemed to be increasing, although from where it was hard to tell. I was approaching the clinical space of the Japanese train system which interweaves all of Tokyo like calcified veins and is unaffected by the wildly varying degrees of modernity around it.
Someone was talking really loud. And it was in a mocking singsong that seemed suited to sitting on top of someone and shoving dirt in their mouth. I had to take a glance. Surprisingly, it was Sato who was making the noise and some dramatic hand gestures to a bunch of people who were deeply wishing not to be his audience. And the strangest thing was that he was standing in front of two policemen. They were wearing side arms and no doubt had a two-man judo strategy for most eventualities, but instead they looked on amused. I could only assume that this was some kind of cover for me, that unexpected developments were afoot and I increased my speed to the space just before suspicion and I went underground.
THREE
I got on the train; a long, silver, grooved lunchbox of a train with bold stripes. I was lugging a small but heavy suitcase full of books and shoes (I planned to buy most other stuff locally.) Around me were various Japanese people who had, a short while ago, been Japanese Tourists. They were equipped with varying degrees of booty and swarthy tans and looked tired and almost on the verge of speaking loudly. Their luggage was, as ever, a thing to behold: wheels, of course, but also limb-like attachments and convenient handles sprouting wherever a human hand lightly glanced them. In the end, few of them spoke. They steamed away memories of Indochina or Paris as we waited for the train to get going. If it didn’t get moving soon they would begin to feel ashamed of the fishing hats they had chosen to keep on, and I, for my part, might well be arrested and lightly tortured.
The doors closed.
We entered a tunnel and when we came out there were unworked rice fields all around, quietly taking care of themselves. The air was very cool on the train and a gentle breeze ruffled the comic book ads (for Young Jump) that hung like war pennants from the ceiling.
The sky was obviously rich in water because light came to us through a billion microscopic gates that marked it. Also, each of my pores carried a tiny drop of dew.
We passed through a few small cities, like Narita City with its amazing concrete temple. Its ancient design inevitably transports one to a distant future where concrete is revered for its organic qualities, human spirit, emotional resonance. Quite a future: and one we were working on.
There is also a windmill by the tracks and no doubt quite a story behind it. The story probably begins with a small child in the wreckage of post WWII Japan endlessly staring at a picture book at a picture of a building he doesn’t even try to understand. He just wants it to exist. He wants to see the wood flaring through the sun like bird wings and, in the rainy season, blast the wind and rain back in their faces and play on. And so it happens, and so he dies, but so the building keeps waving at us and I bet you it makes more windmills happen.
I had these thoughts whenever I saw buildings standing alone, too much like lost people. Man kept on making these lost monster-size children, and not caring much about the fact that the buildings then Make Things Happen. Even today too few people care about that… the data we make and what it makes of us. Playing baseball in the sun there is always a spy satellite that knows the score of the game, at some level. Burying a friend, some spreadsheet counts the souls. If you want to be some crazy shaman, you can read the bones and tea leaves of the objects we nudge-bump-and-stack, the photos we burn ourselves on, the doors we leave open, the doors we close. At one point, you were a crazy shaman if you could draw a picture of a cow on a wall, bear in mind.
Suddenly we hit Tokyo. Technically speaking it wasn’t Tokyo, in the same way that the neck and the throat are not the same thing: if you hadn’t been told, the point of transition might not occur to you.
I was impressed. The rich concentration of things that people had made (and people that people had made) was intensified by speed. A block of identically designed cubes came to life like a zoetrope machine when the train’s speed hit it: the tiny dirt and detail and mutation of life supplied the difference needed for animation. People had broken the design without even meaning to and the eye in the right place saw the human dance.
The city presented to the train line was dotted by futons hanging on balconies to get some fresh air. I knew this was largely ritual, so didn’t even contemplate how grimy these people would have to be for it to be an effective cleaning technique in a city like this. In between the buildings I would peek at a bright street or building, often encrusted with thousands of tiny dancing light bulbs. It was daytime, so the lights were having little effect on people: they were just going where they were going... both lights and people. Larger lights, neon, signs, were largely dormant. They were the road signs of a truly human network: sex, food, god, English conversation... turn right fifth floor.
I turned from the window and I felt underwater or neck-high in sand. When I managed to complete the turn, I saw varying degrees of a hundred very close but sheltered faces. We were all traveling together.
— After nearly an hour the voice of the announcer said, “Kanamachhhhhhhh......”
My mind had been listening to train wheels clatter the same word out repeatedly, so I was ready. I wriggled out of the train and on to a nearly empty platform. The station was slightly elevated and fenced off, but very close to the roads and houses and people. There was an enormous painted movie poster that showed either Kevin Costner or Harrison Ford leaping through an enormous fireball. This ambiguity was something that I felt Hollywood should look into. The movie appeared to be called “Rub Bomb”
Then I saw my first Let’s Kiosk: a small cheerful box full of telephone-book-thick manga and impossibly glossy ‘female’ magazines and snacks and drinks. I walked toward it, aware that I was being observed. The only people on the platform were a small bunch of tiny schoolboys in uniforms with enormous leather bags and a couple of old women. So I decided that the man in the Kiosk was my contact.
I cast my eye over the snacks on display. M&M’s, some chips, a cluster of dried squid. The squid were obviously the least appetizing to a Westerner, so I would choose them to signal that I was.
There were several types of squid, but I chose the ones that seemed softest and least crunchy. For good measure I ordered three packs.
Nothing much happened and half an hour later, after pushing the snacks to the bottom of my suitcase where they might never be found, I got back on the train and continued to the correct station (the schoolboys were very helpful) where I bought one packet of “oishiisquido” and was met by a man in a navy blue suit called Takeshi Honda. — We transferred trains twice to get to our final destination, Koiwa. Honda helped me carry my bag: insisted on it.
I noticed that he looked a little different from other Japanese men in their thirties. His skin was tan and smooth, like someone who exercises outside a lot, but not like some weather-beaten sailor. I also noticed that the mask of his suit was occasionally threatened by bustling muscles. He actually had a muscular head, once you observed it, most noticeably two powerful muscles set perpendicular to the line of his mouth that looked well positioned to drive his long slabs of tooth through rope, planks and any other minor restraint. His face was relaxed and long; his manner was confident and ready for a minor challenge such as a punch in the stomach or a request for an explanation of his apocalyptic beliefs.
For he was a member of “The Path of Forgetting”, the obviously dangerous Japanese Buddhist sect who felt the end of the world in every moment and that was why he was helping me with my suitcase.
FOUR
Honda was quiet on the whole, and didn’t look at me much. I expect he didn’t want to draw too much attention to us. But before we left Koiwa station, he asked me if I wanted a Pocari Sweat. “It has high levels of isotonic elements such as Niacin: it’s a real pick-me-up,” he explained. “Isotonic elements sound good to me,” I replied.
I decided that even if he came back with a can of Pocari Piss I would just drink it and not ask what a Pocari was.
Koiwa station platform was a good hundred feet above street level. In fact, beneath us was the beginning of a four mile long department store. So I could see a lot of what Koiwa was. In front of the south entrance to the station was a small plaza, and several arcades split off from it. The Plaza showed signs of being a political speaking place as there were posters of boring looking people scattered around it. There were two tall buildings on the south side. One was very close to the station and I judged it to be one of those capsule hotels that had fascinated the Western media in the eighties. It looked somewhat run-down, as if that fascination were the only reason it was still around. The other, more distant, building looked newer, more curved, and had some colorful artwork that I couldn’t appreciate as yet.
On the north side were a big supermarket called Ito Yokado, more shopping streets and, in the distance, the bruise-colored Edo river.
The rails throbbed like electric heating elements. No doubt in the summer people incinerated themselves on the rails, flashing away before the train even touched them. It might be beautiful: the yellow train of the Sobu line bursting through a small pink cloud.
Honda returned with a can that looked like a slim blue Coca-Cola. I opened it up and downed the slightly milky, slightly salty, damn good soft drink while Honda looked on with a note of worry on his face that disappeared when I wiped my hand across my mouth and said, “aahhhh!”
He then gestured to move down the stairs and we were soon out of the station. The Pocari was making it bearable: I estimated that I had twenty minutes walking in me before I had to tear my shirt off and burst a water melon on my head.
Slowly and softly, Honda began to talk as we walked down a covered street full of small shops, mainly fruit and veg.
“This is Koiwa, on the eastern perimeter of Tokyo Prefecture. It is part of old Down Town... very old-style.”
I couldn’t see the old style, unless twenty years after the firebombings constituted old. Maybe it did. Tokyo was destroyed in cycles and, as Honda and I were particularly aware, it was currently overdue.
“We will be staying here as our country facility has been under heavy surveillance recently. Our headquarters here is positioned near a fish market and between several karaoke bars, including a Korean bar and a Chinese bar, so we have good cover for smells and sounds.”
“Excellent,” I noted. With no irony, such was my dedication at that time.
I noticed, as we passed another store that sold large roots floating in liquid, that my presence was causing none of the hem-grabbing attention I had expected. Honda explained to me that there were several large chain English Conversation schools in the area, and that people who looked like me were common here. That is why they had suggested I wear a microfibre shirt and “edgy” tie on the flight over. I saw myself on a smudgy mirror in the fish store and could well imagine standing with ink stains on my fingers explaining the word ‘surveillance’ to appreciative hordes.
We turned right at the biggest fruit and veg store, the one that spilled onto the sidewalk like a father spilling from his armchair, confident of no opposition. We were at the foot of the other building I had noted from the station. It didn’t make full sense: was it a bathhouse, a movie theater, a kabuki theater, a brothel, a corporate headquarters, a karaoke bar, a restaurant or what? Outside the door was a large sign of a man with a large dragon tattooed on his back trapped inside a “No!” sign.
Within a minute we were at our destination, a small coffee shop that in England would specialize in greasy chip sarnies. It was on the ground floor of a three story, gray tiled building that was too slouched to be new but too ugly to be old. Next to the coffee shop was a slim steel door that I hadn’t even noticed at first.
“The shop is ours too... the people who run it are... mutant?”
I peeked through the window to look at them. They seemed no more mutant than the rest of us: a particularly aggressive midsized mammal with a brain that couldn’t rest (even when it should) and that shivered in the night when the other intelligences ran their inventory on us.
So I just nodded and followed Honda up a narrow staircase. I didn’t notice the sign above the door that announced the building as a telesex shop so I won’t get into it just yet.
—
I mentioned already that my mother died in Cambodia. This was my first trip to Asia and although I wasn’t fool enough to confuse Phnom Penh and Tokyo, memories were being juggled around by smells. Smells are bullies and able to vault all divisions of the mind. So as I followed Honda up the steps, I was at least partially back in the week of crying and throwing things, falling over and dragging things with you. The week of staring through, then at, then through windows (but never at the reflections that the windows were making.)
I think I only started doing those things after Father had been doing them for a while. The telegram made no sense to me. It said she had been killed in Cambodia but not how. I had heard of people being killed by cars or the flu, but not by being in a country. I asked my father what had happened and he could only answer “Everyone is dying out there... and worse. Someone is making them live through their sickest dreams. Someone is pulling down the crazy dreams that only people have and bringing them here where things are supposed to be just real.”
This was far from the last I would hear on this topic.
FIVE
A flimsy door divided us from them. Once I was inside, the same door divided a different us from a different them. That was true in all senses. That was the truth that defined my life in Japan: the flimsy door.
We had stepped into a large communal living room. The only windows in the room were two excessively elevated slots that grudgingly opened about an inch. They were streaming the bare minimum of light into the room right now. If there was a trade union of windows, these ones were in it.
The walls bore a uniform grayness; they had a texture that was close to random. They were different than the things humans used to make. All of the somewhat remarkable people I was about to meet were framed by these walls, and supported by a carpet that was as a gray carpet in a gray room but still didn’t quite look right.
There were three people in the room and they would be part of my team for the next several months. What I liked most about my meeting with them was that they all sighed when I came in the room because they knew that they had to take care of me and because of the fact that I existed. And people who wanted to kill and to die and who had already taken the apocalypse into themselves still thought like this... that was what impressed me.
The first one to catch my eye was the fat one: Yosuke Kawabata, In addition to being fat he was a little hairy, a little tall, and somewhat speckled with objects of varying vintage and lifespan and color that made his facial movements seem daring, a little dangerous (especially if you were dressed in something nice when he made them.)
He had been alone when it had happened. He had taken the small alto sax that he had worked rather hard for down under the bridge near the river to play his haunting noises.
He had never even considered playing the sax back in the paper-thin apartment building that his parents lived in with him.
That would be like shitting in the living room.
He walked the five minutes to the enormous train bridge that brutally ignored the fairly wide and fast flowing river. He took his place, the least damp, least ratted, and pulled out his sax to make the noises of the various emergency services.
He began by just amplifying his breath and all the random trends that passed through his fairly random mind. Toots and hollers like those of a large game bird. Then he remembered this thing he had heard of: music, and tried to approximate that. Joggers passed by him with an almost perceptible relief in their step when they saw him: glad that no one was being hurt up there in the shadowy nook under the bridge.
Then, across the water, he saw something. It haunted the step of an old man dressed in a kimono. The old man looked over his shoulder all the time. Yosuke’s eye was fixed on the old man. The old man made a gesture in the air, like shooing away a bird. Then he fell to the ground with a scream. Yosuke knew that it would take at least fifteen minutes for him to get across the river and help the man, so he just sat and watched. When his watch got to about thirteen minutes and the old man was still alive, it became necessary to stop looking at his watch.
Several hours later, after the body had been removed, Yosuke went home. He left his sax at the bottom of the river. He would no longer dedicate his life to making, but to searching. He was determined to see what the old man had seen but to live and tell the world. That would be his performance. He would teach the world the nature of final things. And, sarcasm aside, his sax playing just wouldn’t cut it.
Next in the room was a thin girl with a boyish haircut that spoke of enforced cleansing. Her eyes were unusually deep set for a Japanese person. She looked at me out of the corner of her eye, even though doing so involved twisting her body slightly.
Honda introduced us: she was Junko Watanabe. I was dragging my bag in and bowing. There was no air conditioning in the room, the house, the street, except that big building, but it was cooler now. I was among my people.
For her, the moment of apocalypse came when she was at university. She was walking down the street to a class with a group of girls who looked a lot like she did and one who didn’t. They were making was the sound of talking talking about talking.
The one girl was discussing her future. Her name was Remi, after the brandy because her parents wanted her to have an international name. It was almost pronounced Lemmy, the leader of the metal group Mötörhead, big in Northern Europe.
“I’ll be a stewardess. I’ll outsmile all of them, but I’ll be tough too because safety is our number one priority and because that’s what they want anyway... a firm hand.”
Remi began to bounce in the sun. Her calves, which would take the immaculate sheaths of her space stockings like a suntan, sprang her through a tiny sphere... the remisphere.
All human life takes place within the earthpeel, the skin. Remi bounces within even less, the dew, the mold. She plans to ride at eight miles high and that’s it. That’s all the most beautiful (did we mention she is so beautiful) can do.
Of course she is stupid and the mind of the great physicists can soar in and out of the Event Horizons. But still Junko is troubled...
She is at home now, alone, in the dark, getting less naked, dressing in the dark as she cools and feels a little disgust at herself. She walks to the window. Outside there is the melancholy call of the roast potato seller. He sings
oimo, oimoooo
oishiiiiiiiii
jagaiimoo
and when you look through the window of the van that carries the furnace you see a small family of small people inside living off the song. The potatoes alone couldn’t do it. Seen it once, the song holds you forever. The secret charity of Japan: the guilt potatoes.
And so that song comes in through the window and it is full of something, of real-time, on-the-fly regret for each moment that smacks the potato man in the face. Tonight it is much too much for Junko. It is a reminder that life is going to be hard.
She starts to read a book, a pamphlet by a man called Ko Samsara. One look at his face, bearded and rounded and obscured, is enough to convince her that he is worth listening to: he could only have been published by people who believed in him as much as the happy young musician who pressed the pamphlet on her outside Shibuya station a week ago.
He simply explained the essential nonexistence of the world, the demonic nature of the people-like forces that had been frustrating her. He explained how the world, as a created thing, couldn’t really complain about destruction - which was just as well, since destruction at a very malicious and painful level was fairly imminent.
She decided to believe him, decided to forget the deciding and then was his and went to seek him out.
Finally the third new friend in the room: “Benny” Odajima. He was the only violent looking one in the room, even including Honda (who had actually killed people.) The violence manifested itself in his face and eyes. He had a very rough, scarred complexion like it had been much scratched and gouged over the years and even now seemed freshly shocked and thoroughly pissed off. But his eyes were as cool and flat as a sheet of glass shimmering off a cool stream of water. And that was so obviously a lie that you knew he was making plans.
For him it had begun while he was working as a scientist for the government nuclear project. For years he had studied very hard to learn all about the structure of atoms and how they worked together quietly and predictably to form a universe. He had managed to deal with quantum uncertainty quite smoothly... accepting that there is a bottom end to our absolute knowledge but we are big enough not to worry too much about that.
But something else was bothering him now that he worked at the research center, working out the best way to harness the atoms. He had this feeling that they were lying to him, that there was something inside the atom that they didn’t want him to see. He began to smuggle data out in his battered old briefcase and he lined the walls of his small apartment with it and then the ceiling too. He looked at the data for a pattern, trying to intuit everything... not really doing any calculating. He began to get a feel for what was in there but he was still very far from being able to name it.
Then he started to experiment, letting things get hotter than they should, turning certain key knobs further than they had ever been intended to go. He did this at night at first and by the end he was doing it whenever he pleased, because safety limits in his business were defined as the point when the villagers see the smoke coming from the chimney. He had never really believed that, and finding it out really didn’t help his state of mind.
So the hotter the atoms got the more data he got. Until one day he became convinced of it... the evidence was irrefutable... little men were inside the atoms. It could be proven by a complicated mathematical process that he had to invent essentially from scratch.
He realized that science would take him no further, and was resolved to leave this in the hands of a professional mystic. He read around a little and found the works of Ko Samsara and was impressed by the clarity of his vision... he would see the unseen. For a few months after quitting his job he went through a bad period of depression that terminated in his beating a prostitute almost to death. Ko Samsara had to help him with that and so he was more than happy to reciprocate by entering Samsara’s inner circle.
I had entered that circle. My reasons were more complicated. I had always been meant to do it, and was happy just to be there.
SIX
I woke up in the middle of the night. Why?
Well, I’ve mentioned the heat enough that you know it was there, sitting like a vulture on my chest as my eyes opened. Also, I was on a wood floor on a futon about two inches thick, so all of my bones were getting to know the outside world much better than they had before.
Also it was no time at all, my body clock was in free float. SO a burp or an inch could have thrown me out of the castle of sleep. And finally, all the people around me, who I had never met before, were committed without scruple to the primacy of death. That knowledge will turn the scuttle of a cockroach into a stuka dive.
When I woke up the light of the world was four long rectangles, like glowing scarves of two very friendly priests. In moments I saw the bars on the windows.
I took a deep breath and then I was on the bars, couldn’t keep my hands off them.
When I felt them give a little, like I could maybe tear them down, I could let go and remember that I had happily lain down before those bars to sleep as I had happily chosen to come to Japan, and Japan was the reason for the heat and that I should lie down. The moon berated me. I went back to the thin futon on the harsh floor to sweat and worry about whether I could breathe in my sleep when I was not there to force each gasp of the awful soup in and out.
I began to have second thoughts about the operation: it seemed a little whimsical, and not fully described by Dad’s master plan as it had gradually been revealed to me over the years.
The first real inkling of the plan came when I was about 7. Dad was ironing. Dad looked a lot like Muammar El Qadafi back in those days. You cannot really imaging Qadafi ironing but you must try.
I was reading a comic describing the adventures of Judge Dread: a violent policeman of the future who had a law book extrapolated from the norms of western society until almost all offenses against human propriety were punishable by death. As he lived in a city of a hundred million people in the middle of a nuclear wasteland, this seemed acceptable. But even then I had my doubts, as the society was affluent and advanced enough that all crime seemed to have minimal consequences. How do you steal a hundred creds, y’know? Just make a hundred more. You made a new face last week and about a month ago there were talking monkeys in the city.
Anyway, Dredd was through with his killings for the week. There was a fact page describing various statistics about Dredd, and I was poring over it. Judge Dredd was thirty-three. I had heard that Jesus Christ maxed out at thirty-three. I asked my dad how old he was and he said...“I’m thirty-three.”
I told him about that Dredd was the same age, and I described his role in Mega City 1.“So they had a nuclear war?” he asked and I told him that they had.
“And they all still live in a city and they do the same sort of things we do? Do they still hunt each other down and find weak people and kill them.”
I mentioned that they did, and further outlined that those whose genes were damaged by the radiation were expelled from the city, and that they had recently suppressed a robot slave rebellion.
“Bloody typical,” he said. “Mankind blasts the planet to near extinction and of it gains new enemies and new sub-humans to hate. Does this story seem true to you?”
“Really true?”
“Not really true but truly true.”
“I don’t know...”
“It’s basically true. Man has been killing in the same style for as long as he could. He has to be changed.”
“Who can change him?”
“Why don’t we?”
“I don’t get it.”
“You know Jesus Christ”
“He was thirty-three too.”
“Yes, and he had a mind that was different from ours. He could see that something big was coming and that we should move out of the way.”
I imagined Judge Dredd’s enormous killdozer.
“We should wait until you are older, but I just want you to think that man doesn’t always have to be here and the same like the cockroaches.”
“OK”
Dad talked about the cockroaches a lot as I was growing up. His hatred of them seemed disproportionate to their total lack of impact on our daily life. I never saw a real cockroach until I was sixteen. What he seemed to hate most was that they never changed.
But one day, a mellow day with an evening that seemed curved to have no limit and where you could relax to death, he muttered under his breath. “They’re not so bad... they just remind me of something.” and I knew he was talking about the roaches.
He wanted the long evening to end it seemed, because he would not let it take his mind. In his head he was rehearsing a conversation with people who would not let it end.
SEVEN
So, I was hungry. It had crept up on me because I had been basically inert: breathing and listening had somehow disposed of a sizable portion of whatever the hell that was they gave me on the plane. Am I alone in suspecting that the airlines have genetically engineered species of chicken that have red peppers sprouting from them like tumors and tomato juice for blood and that they shotgun them and heat them up for us?
Probably.
So I was hungry and it turned out that there was no food in the house. Honda smacked me on the back and with a wry smile told me that he had a place in mind.
We stepped out into the morning street, which an old woman, somewhat ambitiously, had decided to wash. Underneath the realm of the eye, a slow toxic snow was falling all the time. Honda led me, always a few steps ahead. The streets of Koiwa showed me little new: repetitions of empty streets with breezeblock walls and then commercial streets with unambitious stores still partially wrapped in plastic. We walked past a lot of food places, many of them putting out delicious smells and a sound that hit you like the sound of someone settling into their favorite chair or slipping on a fine pair of shoes: one of them was even a McDonald’s. We didn’t go into any of them. He had a plan, it soon became obvious.
My hunger finally surfaced and broke through my skin and its tentacles began to reach around me to anything once-living that was not in my taboo set. I kept it together and kept following.
We bowed under a door hanging and we were inside a stainless steel environment inhabited by two men in blue and white pajamas with hair like undergrowth that started cooking up some noodles and making me a cup of coffee without a word being spoken. As I sat down, I looked to Honda and I didn’t mind letting him know with my eyes that this meant a lot to me. He answered, as silently as I, that he simply hoped I enjoyed my meal.
One of the cooks pulled an enormous serving of steaming noodles out of the large gray pan. What he did next immobilized my brain. He ran the noodles under very cold tap water until he was absolutely sure that they were dead. He then grabbed a big sprinkle of seaweed and made sure that not a noodle was untouched by nature’s fragrant gift.
Then it was not coffee and he sprinkled it all over the noodles. And with the flick of a wrist an unseen egg dropped its rawness on it all. And I ate them quietly and they chilled my teeth, and Honda was obviously trying not to be noticed as he anxiously followed my gulps. He wasn’t very good at it.
Honda picked up the tab.
“We have a big day in front of us!” he said with enthusiasm, making me expect a fishing trip.
“So soon?”
“So soon, so good,” he said and it was only when I was writing out my secret report that I noticed he had made some new English.
“Can we talk here?” I asked as I looked at the two men, who in turn were looking at the glass in their one large window.
“No names and we should be OK.”
“Which of the people I met is the chemist?”
A long pause.
“You are the chemist.”
I made my pause as short as possible.” Not really.”
Honda looked down at his fingertips for a long time and I almost expected a chop to my throat.
“How so?”
“I know how to put the final mix together... but I don’t think we can buy the ingredients we need on the streets. I need someone who can make those ingredients for us.”
“We know many chemists.”
“Well good!”
“It will take a week or two. We have some work for you to do in the meantime.”
I felt a chill going down my spine. I was about to be asked something outside my plan. It would probably be dangerous.
“Something dangerous...?”
“Relatively... no.”
—
The cab, yellow immaculate, glided to a halt and the door popped open untouched by any human hand and the cool air from the inside hissed out and then that hot air came in and the cab driver mopped his bald head with his floppy cap and as we left sprayed us with last minute directions, anti-directions.
We were awfully close to the American Embassy considering that Honda had failed to clarify his earlier hints. The embassy was well hidden by hundreds of meters of wall and ivy and it was also very flattened out and skulking among hills. I got the feeling it was a front or a misdirection. The Americans couldn’t really occupy such a place: it wasn’t fitting. But maybe it was just some postcolonial thing.
In the end we did nothing related to the embassy. We walked a few blocks: I don’t know exactly why the taxi didn’t take us all the way. It was either a token spy move, or the taxi was actually incapable of taking us there. Taxi drivers in Tokyo only go where they know and the streets have no names. Yes, like the song but lacking the liberating sensation Bono feels.
We walked around a corner and a strange thing happened. The city angled away: the tall glassy banks, that I knew were so close, disappeared and we were next to a flattened construction zone with an escalator in the middle of it, going underground. We walked past it and then down a slight hill then we turned left and found ourselves in front of a modest two-story building that had certain swimming pool features, such as green blue coloring and a wall constructed of glass bricks.
“Why are we here,” I asked softly.
Honda lit a cigarette.” We need to talk to one of our friends. He is a backer. He wants to meet you.”
Excited, I tried to open the door. It was locked. What was I thinking? Rich people lock their doors, even in Japan. A few seconds later, a very attractive young woman opened the door.
Young, thin, dressed in a smart grey suit. Not happy to see us: her perfect face bore no scars or marks but seemed a mask for something. I was surprised to find that she was looking me in the eye. She had very delicate brown eye makeup that made her seem to glow. I tried to end the eye lock, because I could have been clubbed to death and not noticed. Honda put a hand on my shoulder and moved me inside and she saw us into an elevator and disappeared.
It had been a while since I had had any kind of relationship with a woman... other than my lifelong-distance love affair with Claire Blythe. That was a strange one, and a dominating factor in my life. It was why I was here, really, because she had brought me back to Dad after our big schism. I thought about us both in the slow seconds of the elevator. I wished that at least one of us had a normal life instead of being two moons locked in a convoluted dance. I decided to check my email on my custom Palm when I got back to ‘HQ’: an encrypted love letter might be waiting. It would be encrypted on two levels: first, mathematically and second that it would apparently contain no words of love or passion... just dry descriptions of hate crimes in Bucharest. The computer would handle the first, I the second.
The elevator doors opened to some amazing decor. Italian and Japanese styles had been meshed so successfully that Martian style had been created there was a complete culture behind the way the leather curved around the black skeletons of wood and beneath the carpet that phased in and out, putting softness only where it was needed.
There was a faint music and footsteps emerged from it. What a fucking incredible suit! A man arrived inside it.
He was Japanese, tan and fit in his mid forties, with a round face and wide thin mouth that said, “yes, yes, I am aware of that.” He wore his obligatory large facial moles with real aplomb. They made me think of elegant cigarette holders.
He shook Honda’s hand rather than bowing. Honda responded: this was clearly something the rich fellow did all the time, even when foreigners weren’t around. He must be cosmopolitan.
They speedily exchanged a few words in mumbled Japanese. Then Honda introduced me to Toshiro Mariachi, construction magnate.
In his urbane manner, including clippings from The Times (of London), Maruhashi introduced me to the world of the dashing property developer who was returning English-style housing to London and European panache to Tokyo and Osaka.
We three seated ourselves on a trio of Italian minisofas that belonged together like certain subatomic particles do. As we had toured the spacious room, three cups of green tea had been prepared and they rippled obediently on slave tables near our perfect seats.
“So enough about us, what about you Mr. Blake?”
Where to begin? Hold back too much and provoke suspicion. Tell too much and possibly induce panic. The correct line is in our affinities... our need to mess with the people of the city.
“I’m sure you know all but the most boring details. I am a... traveler who facilitates certain operations that fit in with certain goals that my family and I hold to be important. And we also have certain values, certain expectations of the world that we know your revered founder is dedicated towards. In particular we are dissatisfied with the world as it is being carried out everywhere today.
“Outside of my work in this area there is little to know about me other than that I enjoy S. C.U. B.A. diving”
I contemplated the effect my final sentence was having on the two as we all looked down into our swirling tea. I thought it had struck just the right note and put an end to all discussion about me.
We will never know because a loud banging was followed by a gust of wind and before I knew it a man in a torn and wet shirt hurdled across the sturdy oak and meteorite table in front of me and crashed through a tall statue toward the door.
A few seconds later I was following Honda out of the door at full speed. It wasn’t just that I was following or even running.
I had to catch that man to learn more about what the Cult was doing to people. Clearly they had been doing something to him.
We hit the streets and he was about forty feet ahead of us, running with all of his energy, burning everything. We began to run too. It was two o’clock on a side street and so no one got in our way. Honda’s and my feet pounded down for a few seconds out of sync and sounding like the first rain but after that as steady as the long wet day. The man ahead of us hurdled a car and cut across the street, shaving a taxi and blasting twenty extra feet of running at us. Honda exhaled in anger and inhaled in determination. We were that close.
We pushed and, untortured, steadily gained on the man. To his credit he never looked back. He made his own pace and path. He was older, late thirties. There was no doubt that we would catch him unless he had a trick, hopefully involving a helicopter, lined up.
We were on a narrow and unusually long street, streaked in violet that looked like speed. I increased my pace as I saw his legs begin to shake and a ring of perspiration flew from me and I could feel it hanging in the air, not a thing yet separate from me.
He tried to dash a display of sports watches to the ground to confound me, but it was firmly dashproofed and all he did was lose his balance and his next twenty steps had twenty different directions, the last of which being down, down, down.
Barely bothering to slow down and with a violence fairly untypical of me I launched a kick into the belly that had just rolled into my view and then hopped over his body as he groaned. Turning, I threw myself onto him and got him in a headlock.
“Stop,” said Honda, fairly quietly and I did.
He bent over the man and slowly helped him to his feet talking in an apologetic tone clearly explaining that some horrible misunderstanding had taken place. For his part the man who ran seemed to be apologizing for causing any trouble in the first place.
The three of us slowly retraced the steps that we had blazed a few moments earlier. The two continued to chatter quietly, which led me to hang back, adrenaline withdrawal kicking in, feeling stupid. I felt stupid because I had kicked him and because I didn‘t know who he was and because I couldn’t read or understand a fucking word within several thousand miles.
Just then a small boy (not at school) said, “Harro!” to me and I replied “Hello” to him.
We arrived back at Maruhashi’s office where two large men with facial hair took the runner’s arms like nurses and took him back through a barely noticeable pale blue door. I could see behind the door for a second. A wooden chair and a large video screen and a sink. The door closed with a faint hiss.
“Thank you for your effort, but Mr. Goto is a friend of ours,” said Honda and Maruhashi nodded agreement.
“His education continues. I am surprised he ran out like that but I think it was more like an extreme lust for fresh air than anything else. All human lusts become extreme in that room,” said Maruhashi.
“And then are gone,” added Honda and they nodded again. I nodded too this time in an earnest recognition that I did actually have something in common with the cult and was not just faking this whole thing. Their radical cosmology and eschatology were faint novelties but their attitude to what we call Human Nature was close to me and to my group.