by Susan Barker
‘Gone all quiet now, haven’t you?’
I ignore her, hoping to bore her into retreat. I focus on the door of The Seven Wonders. No one has gone in or out for at least half an hour now.
‘You wanna go in across the road, don’t you,’ Tiger Girl says.
I look up in surprise. My desire must be stamped on my face. I nod.
‘It’s a private members’ club. Full of hoity-toity hostesses. Like, a million-yen membership,’ she says.
‘Yakuza,’ I add meaningfully.
Tiger Girl laughs. ‘Who isn’t round here?’
Without my hypersense I am unable to supply her with an accurate answer.
Tiger Girl smokes in silence for a while. Her ponytail is so tight it pulls her face taut, making it sleek and cat-like. ‘What was up with you earlier, when you were screaming and all that?’ she asks.
I look at her and try to formulate an answer. Is Tiger Girl someone I want to confide in? Whereas before I would have read her psi quotient, now I have only her human interface to go by – that which is on show for the rest of humankind: a tiger impersonator, with sticky-out ribs and a ponytail facelift. ‘Nothing,’ I say.
‘Nothing!’ she hoots. ‘I’d hate to see how you act when there is something the matter with you.’
I gaze stoically past her.
‘You know, it’s, like, two in morning. Don’t you have a home to go to?’
Two o’clock? I straighten up in alarm. How did so many hours sneak by without my noticing?
Tiger Girl’s cigarette has now smouldered right down to the butt. ‘You can come and sit in the Tiger Den if you like. You can sit at the bar. They ain’t gonna let you in across the road, not without membership.’
I look up at her. Is she joking? Her eyes narrow impatiently. Her hand rests on her hip in aggressive come-on. It must be a slow night.
‘Well, yes or no? I haven’t got all day.’
Behind her a BMW pulls up.
My heart leaps to attention. At my failure to reply, Tiger Girl utters a few choice words of insult and returns to her bar with a bad-tempered shake of her prosthetic tail. Like a wing beat the back doors of the BMW open in unison. From this acrylic-painted chariot Mary appears. This is the first time I have perceived Mary out of hyperspace. The three-dimensional Mary is a flat, cardboard cut-out of her fourth-dimensional incarnation. Nevertheless, I am deeply stirred by her. Her hair still streams like rivers of gold, her bijou eyes still sparkle. Mary possesses a beauty that would make itself known if it had only had one dimension to work with. The nefarious Yuji lurches out too, resembling an extra from Dawn of the Dead. I watch Mary follow him inside, my chest tight as a sumo wrestler’s embrace.
The door closes behind them and I stand up for the first time in eight hours, only to fall down again, disabled by leg cramp. The auspicious coming of Mary has been and gone. What comes next I do not know. I stand once more and stagger to The Seven Wonders, entering in time to see a shimmer of blond disappearing behind the Staff Only door. I stand at the bar, dead-ended. The corporate drones beneath the television screens are too drunk to notice my entrance, but one of the hostesses does. She glides over in her white kimono, pure as the driven snow. Her skin is pale as angel dust, her hair a black snake coiled round her head.
‘I know you,’ she says, with an infinitesimal squint of her piercingly violet eyes.
I have no recollection of our acquaintance. Were my hypersenses restored, I would know at once if she was mistaken or not. In the interim I just hope this means she’ll let me stick around without coughing up the million-yen membership fee.
‘You’re the kitchen boy from the hostess bar a few streets over.’ She smiles, her voice not exceeding a whisper. ‘Get out, kitchen boy. You can’t afford to be here. Get out before I get someone to break your arms.’
I slope round to the back door of The Seven Wonders, only to hear the bestial rumble of a yakuza poker game in the kitchen. So I go back to my alleyway and monitor the bar from there, gradually summoning the courage to sidle out from the shadows. Surely no one will break my arms in full view of the drag queens, and the doorman of Tuesday World . . . Who am I kidding? Black eyes and broken noses are all in a night’s entertainment for this crowd. I just have to risk it.
Time drags excruciatingly. The neck of the hour glass has narrowed so only one grain of sand can escape at a time. Civilizations fall and rainforests are bulldozed in the time that lapses between each rarefied beat of my heart. Behind the upstairs windows of The Seven Wonders nothing stirs. Waiting is agony. What the hell are they doing in there? Stripped of omniscience, I fall prey to grisly imaginings. I am persecuted by visions of samurai swords, of Mary’s blood spilt on the carpet. So vivid is my imagination that I fetch up some battery acid from my stomach and spit it on the street. Another ten minutes and I will go in. I will storm the place. Even if it means the sacrifice of both arms. I cannot stand by and let this happen.
Ten minutes and ten minutes more. The drag queens outside Diamonds Are Forever are falsetto-laughing their heads off at something. The one in the tattered ball gown keeps lifting his hands up and staring into his palms, ferociously bug-eyed. When I look over, they laugh harder and I see that he is doing an impersonation of me. I must be flexing compulsively without even realizing it. Their laughter does not offend me. They know nothing. I would like to see how old Ball Gown would cope if he lost his post-human ability the evening his astral true-love called on the local yakuza boss.
The door of the hostess bar opens to the drum roll of my heart. Out into the Street of True Love stumbles Yuji. Alone.
He is ashen and haunted, aged by a decade in forty minutes. His bruised eyes flicker instinctively in my direction. Gone is the alpha male with the superior gloat. Yuji is vanquished and broken, the weedy kid kicked to the back of the lunch queue. He turns away, his quick step betraying his urgency.
It occurs to me what I must do. There is a phone box round the corner. I run to it and hit the button for the operator. The operator end rings. And rings and rings. The receiver slips in my fear-lubricated hand.
‘Good evening. This is your operator Makita. How may I help you?’
I am momentarily thrown by my inability to trace the disembodied voice back to its biological source. I remember what is at stake and recover myself. ‘I have planted explosives in the Street of True Love, Shinsaibashi. They will blow up very soon, so you had better evacuate the whole street. Now.’
‘_____’
‘I hail from a dangerous doomsday cult.’
Makita the operator giggles nervously. ‘Just a moment. I’m putting you through to the police.’
There is a click and then more ringing.
After the third ring: ‘Hello. Police.’
‘Hello. This is an anonymous tip-off. In ten minutes explosives will detonate in the Street of True Love, Shinsaibashi. The area needs to be evacuated.’
The mouthpiece is covered and I hear the sound of muffled urgency. The receiver is passed along to a different person. ‘OK. We need you to be more specific. Where is the bomb? What kind of explosive is it?’
I gulp back some air. ‘It is not a bomb. It’s a nerve gas.’
Now it is the policeman’s turn to inhale deeply. ‘Where?’
‘I cannot say. My cult master will punish me. Just evacuate the street.’
I hang up before they can trace the call and return to the alleyway to wait.
The nearest precinct is only a couple of streets away. I am not even halfway up the fire escape when the patrol cars arrive. Sirens wail in sonic blitzkrieg and flashing emergency lights douche the cobblestones with blue. The queens canter about in excitement as brakes screech and policemen spring out. The policemen come equipped with hard hats, white surgical masks and day-glo batons. They disperse among the bars, shouting through their masks for everyone to vacate the premises quickly and calmly. Blinking salarymen begin to spill out onto the street to be waved along by day-glo batons. One man emer
ges from a basement brothel, buttoning his shirt over a chest slick with massage oil, hopping about as he jams a foot back into a loafer.
A megaphone lisping with static commands the crowd: ‘Vacate the premises immediately. Repeat: vacate the premises immediately. Please remain calm. There are ambulances waiting should anyone require medical assistance.’
From the top of the fire escape I watch a policeman lift a paralytic salaryman over his shoulder and carry him towards an ambulance. The salaryman is deposited on a stretcher and pounced on by three waiting medical attendants, who clamp an oxygen mask on him and shine lights in his eye. The policeman returns to the fray, adjusting the cotton armour of his surgical mask.
‘Everybody out. Please remain calm. Please leave all belongings behind.’
Two barmen in bow-ties and waistcoats try to evacuate the Pink Panther at the same time, only to get wedged in a shoulder jam at the door. Pummelling fists assist them from behind until they fall streetwards and are stampeded into the cobblestones.
‘Hey you! Get down from there.’
A white-masked officer of the law waves his day-glo baton at me. I mime climbing down, which seems to do the trick. He turns and gives an almighty baton-shaking to a girl trying to sneak back inside the Tiger Den to retrieve whatever she has left behind. Dozens swarm the street in a surreal exodus that is part costume parade, part adjourned business meeting. I glimpse a blonde amid the mob and am queasy with hope. But it is only a girl in a Marilyn Monroe wig.
The customers vacating The Seven Wonders are the only ones to heed the megaphone instructions not to panic. Kimono-clad angels guide them, soothing with intimate whisperings. One of the last to leave is Yamagawa-san, a shadow of a bemused smile on his lips. His henchmen follow, snarling into their mobiles and hawking spit onto the floor. No sign of Mary. She must be trapped inside against her will, listening in terror to the call to evacuate. I need to get to her.
Before long every bar and club has been purged of its inhabitants. Everyone has been herded up at the end of the street where the patrol cars and stand-by ambulances are. Orange hazard tape is stretched out to seal the street off at both ends. Soon even the policemen, satisfied that the evacuation has been a success, duck beneath the tape to safety. The Street of True Love is now cordoned off from the rest of Osaka.
Perhaps it is the alcohol-enhanced dopamine levels, but everyone relaxes, as if the caution tape and traffic cones create an official safety zone. The evacuees switch to spectator mode, necks craned to peer down the empty street, somehow confident that the chemical agent will not dare to cross the threshold of the orange tape. They don’t know how lucky they are that this whole thing is a hoax.
I hurl myself down the fire escape as phase two of Operation Chemical Attack gets under way. A truck pulls into the street and out climb four men in butyl-rubber boiler suits, their faces obscured by hulking gas masks. An awed hush descends upon the crowd. The quartet of men have armbands on their orange boiler suits that say: TOXIC PATROL SQUAD. They each have a chemical probe, which they swing about like metal detectors as they proceed towards the bars. The bizarre science-fiction aura they lend the proceedings has a curious psychosomatic effect on a girl in the crowd, who faints. No sooner have they loaded her onto the stretcher than another one keels over. I can tell this is going to swell to epidemic proportions.
The Toxic Patrol Squad progress slowly, moving their chemical divining rods about with scientific thoroughness. When each squad member is poised at the entrance to a bar or club I duck my head down and dive bomb from the alley over to The Seven Wonders. An excited tumult rises in the crowd. A number of police batons rise up, brandishing themselves at me in a mise-en-scène of day-glo outrage. I crash through the door into the abandoned bar.
The bar is a Marie Celeste of abandoned whisky glasses and pushed-back chairs, the video screens playing out to an empty audience. I make a bee-line for the Staff Only door and take the stairs behind it two at a time. At the top, three doors confront me. The first door opens into a conference room with a long table surrounded by chairs. The second door opens into a bathroom with a jacuzzi and sauna. The third door is locked, and becomes the focus of my attentions. I shoulder-slam it, launching my entire body weight, again and again. While I am hard at work dislocating my shoulder a chemical probe sweeps up the stairs towards me, green lights blinking. Attached to the end of the probe is one of the Toxic Patrol Squad, an apocalyptic vision in his boiler suit and aardvark gas mask. He watches me, respiring noisily through his charcoal chemical filter.
‘There is a girl in there,’ I pant, clutching my damaged shoulder.
I stand back and he opens the door with a powerful rubber-soled kick. The room is pitch black, and in its centre is Mary, slumped in a chair, like the recipient of some lethal injection. Polychromatic light falls from a video fish tank, tinting the pale face of my languid beauty. My chest heaves and I start towards her. A butyl-rubber hand clamps down on my shoulder and pulls me back. Signalling for me to stay where I am, the Toxic Patrol man goes to Mary in search of a pulse.
A shudder rips through me as I realize what must have happened. Mary must have finally transcended. Unable to comprehend the enormity of what lay beyond, her mind must have shut down. If only I had been there. I could have helped her through the trauma that I have endured myself. I could have been her one-man welcoming committee, gently initiating her into the pantheon of hyperspace. But I had failed.
Satisfied that life pulses through her arteries, the Toxic Patrol man lifts Mary into his arms. ‘Wrap your T-shirt over your mouth and nose . . .’ he husks through his breathing apparatus ‘. . . and follow me.’
The heroic Toxic Patrol man strides out with the rescued foreigner in his arms, her blond tresses streaming as he carries her to safety. The local media snap like crazy. I follow behind with my baseball cap yanked down and my T-shirt lifted to cover my lower face. In the crowd I spot a white kimono, who spots me back and shoots poison at me with her piercingly violet eyes. At least Yamagawa-san is nowhere in sight. Toxic Patrol man hands Mary over to the paramedics, who place her on a stretcher and suction an oxygen pump to her face. Toxic Patrol man salutes the adoring crowd before heading back into the danger zone to save a few more lives. The stretcher is lifted into the back of an ambulance.
‘Wait,’ I say. ‘Where are you taking her?’
A doctor in a white coat materializes as they close up the ambulance. ‘Osaka General Infirmary,’ he says. ‘Can you take a deep breath for me? Are you experiencing any difficulty breathing?’
I shake my head, then change my mind and nod, with an asthmatic wheeze thrown in for good measure. I could do with the free ambulance ride to hospital. I need to be there when Mary comes round. If she begins to transcend again she will need someone there to explain things to her, even if that person is a member of the dimensionally enslaved. Despair crushes my chest. All these weeks I have been waiting for Mary to join the new dawn of human enlightenment, only to lose my powers the very day she gains hers. Oh, the cosmic injustice!
Dr White Coat looks at me, concerned. ‘This ambulance is full. But you look as though you could do with a respirator. Try to breathe deeply until the next one comes.’
The ambulance with Mary in it starts up, wailing its ode to life and death as it pulls away.
‘Are your pupils contracted?’ asks the doctor.
I nod, hoping this will bump me up the ambulance-ride priority list.
As the doctor jots this down on his clipboard a policeman in a black overcoat cuts in. ‘Detective Honda,’ he says with a flash of his badge. ‘May I have a minute with your patient? I have a very important matter I want to discuss with him.’
The doctor nods and moves away. I give Detective Honda a mute, dazed stare, hoping he will assume post-traumatic shock.
‘Listen,’ Detective Honda says in a low voice. ‘I’m going to be straight with you here. I know you made that hoax call. We could get you pulled in on a number of charges for
what you did. Look at all the resources you’ve wasted here, all the panic you’ve caused.’
Detective Honda gives me a hard stare. Every last drop of blood drains from my face.
‘But let’s forget that for now. Help me out with my investigation and I’ll get you off the hook for your little stunt, so don’t look so frightened. I just need you to fill me in on a few things. Like how did you know that foreign girl was locked in that room? How much do you know about Yamagawa-san and his . . . activities?’ Detective Honda looks about with a suspicious squint. ‘We need to talk somewhere private. C’mon, we’re going back to the precinct . . .’ He raises his head. ‘Hey, Mori,’ he shouts to one of the masked policemen, ‘I’m taking this one here back to the station. Tell everybody it’s safe to go back inside the bars now.’
Detective Honda steers me by the elbow through the crowd, which has swelled considerably, the flashing emergency lights drawing the late-night drinkers from neighbouring streets. The medical attendants have their work cut out noting down the phantom symptoms amassed by the evacuees. I hear complaints of cramps, palpitations, nausea, cold sweats, visual impairment and hyperventilation. All this from one prank phone call. More ambulances arrive and an NHK news crew tumble out of the back of a network van. As we weave out of the chaos, Detective Honda’s grip tightens on my elbow.
We reach his car and Detective Honda takes his keys from his overcoat pocket and shoots an infra-red beam at the central locking system. We climb into the leather-scented interior, which is littered with empty aluminium coffee cans.
‘Some very serious allegations have been made about Yamagawa-san,’ says Detective Honda, clicking shut his seat belt. ‘He has been connected to incidents of abduction, trafficking of drugs and prostitutes, illegal gambling, construction . . . I have been investigating him for two years now. Can’t pin him down on anything. That’s why we need a statement from you confirming that the girl was locked in the room.’
