by Susan Barker
In the train station is a video billboard, advertising some exotic destination with palm trees, a perfect shoreline lapped by surf. I join the queue for the ticket vendor. I am not through with Japan just yet.
23
WATANABE
I was thrown into the boot of the car and light vanished with a slam of the lid. The world shrank to the dimensions of the boot, and all I knew for the duration of the journey was motion sickness and the rough jarring of darkness. When the boot reopened Ace and Omi seized and delivered me to the night air.
‘Shit, he puked on himself.’
‘So he has. Disgusting.’
They dropped me like a thing covered in anthrax spores, then gave me a vigorous kicking. Cursing, Ace transferred my gastric juices from the back of his hand onto the sleeve of his jacket and kicked me again. Omi sparked a flame-thrower lighter and held it to his cigarette. We were on an embankment north of Umeda, in a land of warehouses and slums. Lights from a Pachinko parlour across the river scintillated on the water. Street-lamp reflections writhed on the current like liquid snakes. Our twin planet the moon hung in the pre-dawn sky. The sight of this lonely satellite induced a stab of longing. How I yearned to be up there, unmolested by yakuza henchmen and the Earth’s gravitational field.
One of them took something out of the car. A hammer and a rope. He threw them beside me on the embankment. A metal hailstorm of nails followed, chinking the concrete in their dozens.
‘Enough rope?’ growled Ace, the more dominant of the two.
‘Don’t need much to tie this one up. Look how small he is.’
River water churned and my stomach withered.
Ace shot his friend a sly look. ‘Watanabe,’ he said, mock-friendly. ‘We’re meant to put you in the river, but I tell you what, if you can hammer a nail all the way into the ground, we’ll let you go. What do you reckon?’
What did I reckon? I reckoned it a mean trick. But what choice did I have? The surf of blood crashing in my ears, I took up hammer and nail. On my knees, nail secured between finger and thumb, I poured all my strength into the first blow. As my tormentors shook themselves stupid with laughter the absurdity of my endeavour was clear to me. Without my hypersense I was unable to detect any weaknesses in the concrete. Relying on physical strength alone I was screwed.
At my non-progress, the taskmaster smacked his forehead in exasperation. ‘I can’t watch. He is too pathetic.’
‘Do you think he’ll stay underwater? Maybe we should tie him up in a sack with bricks.’
‘Go to Lawson’s and see about buying some bin liners,’ Ace ordered. ‘And pick me up something to eat too . . .’ He turned to me. ‘Oi! I wouldn’t stop hammering if I were you . . . Not if you want to live!’
Omi set off to Lawson’s. Ace began thumbing his mobile, and I hammered on.
As I hammered I thought happily of Mary and her future of liberation. But the happiness soon caved into bitterness as I remembered I would not share her newfound emancipation. I thought of my future corpse, bloated with the gases of decomposition, surfacing in the river. Did I fear death as I hunched over that nail, pitiful clanking sounds emanating from my hammer? Yes, I confess that I did. Even the knowledge that, in one short lifetime, I had outshone all of human civilization left me unconsoled. As my jailer thumbed his text, I agonized whether to sprint to freedom across the embankment, but then remembered that bullets are made to travel faster than men.
‘My dog can hammer better than you,’ Ace remarked.
The hammer slipped and flattened my thumb. Sucking at the smarting flesh, I noticed that dawn had begun to flood the sky.
‘Cool stunt you pulled,’ he said, ‘pretending you were from the Aum and all. But you know we got the police switchboard tapped, don’t you? Well . . . maybe it’ll come in handy in the next life . . .’ Ace then cleared his throat, a sound bearing likeness to the start-up cord on a chainsaw being pulled. ‘Say you were a girl,’ he said, ‘and you had to choose between me and Omi – the guy who’s just gone to Lawson’s – which one of us would you choose?’
Ace kept his scary prison-inmate eyes turned to the river. Which one of them would I choose? It was like being asked to pick the better of two apes. On what criteria do I judge? Which is least in need of rhinoplasty?
The desire not to get my head trampled on strongly swayed my decision. ‘You,’ I said.
‘Honest?’ he asked.
I nodded and Ace breathed a sigh into the vanishing night. The exchange made me feel dirty and cheap. Fury pulsed as I swung the hammer onto the nail. It sank into the concrete, by two millimetres.
‘Hey, where’s the bin liners?’ Ace shouted when Omi got back.
‘They’d sold out. But I got food. And look: this month’s issue of Tentacled Invaders.’
Omi emptied his haul of cigarettes and snacks onto the floor. As I hit the nail deeper into the ground, they sat and breakfasted on potato crisps and the chewing gum from their baseball cards. The sun rose and they idly smoked and studied a pornographic comic depicting women having sexual relations with tentacled robots. All the while the nail neared its destination. When it got there I was too exhausted to be anything but underwhelmed. I stopped hammering and waited for my accomplishment to be noticed. The dialogue that took place when it was went something like this.
‘Hey, look.’
‘No way! He’s done it!’
‘Well, not quite . . .’
‘Yeah, I see what you mean. Hey, let me see that hammer a second, Watanabe . . .’ Bang. ‘. . . That’s more like it.’
‘Perfect. But you’ve helped him. Helping him is cheating.’
‘So it is. Better sink him, then.’
They secured my arms behind my back and tied my ankles together. Rope-burn ate at my wrists and ankles, and before long my hands and feet were sensationless as phantom limbs. They debated whether to unload a bullet into my cranium, but fortunately decided it unnecessary. They lifted me to the embankment’s edge and began to swing me back and forth, building up launch momentum. Earth and sky changed places as the grey parallax of horizon rushed by. Most people would have screamed; one last howl for mercy, or to scorch the air with the last breath of existence. Not me. Six years of beatings at the hands of the Kaku twins had schooled me well in the art of silent suffering. I clenched my eyes tightly shut.
‘On the count of three?’
‘OK. So long, Watanabe. Thanks for earlier . . .’
‘What are you thanking him for?’
‘_____’
‘One, two, three . . .’
I hung in mid-air for a moment, before the river rushed up to meet me, a cold wall slamming into me, towing me under. My eyes sprang open in panic as I went down, a human dead weight. Stirred by terror, murky darkness gyred round me. Gone was the nurturing caress of the troposphere; my veins were now icy with the embalming fluid of river water. I bucked and flayed against the rope at my wrists and ankles, my exertions leeching precious oxygen. My knees and crown hit the mud of the riverbed, then I rose back up, thrashing like a fish on the end of a hook. Oxygen deprivation began to take its toll, my lungs in paroxysms, screaming fit to rupture. The river swam red before my eyes, as though its belly had been slit open, spilling guts and blood. I couldn’t hold out any more. I was ready to dash my skull against a rock to end the agony. Little over a minute had passed underwater before I did what I knew would kill me. I inhaled.
A backdraft of fire rushed into my sinuses and lungs. I thrashed wildly, inhaling again, and then again. And amid all the pain numbness began to seep into my skull, like the cold trickle of anaesthetic in those last moments of consciousness in the operating theatre. Dark apathy washed over me until everything became calm and still. My last thought was: So this is it. But I was wrong.
I had not been drowned long when it happened. The big bang of human consciousness, blasting me beyond the limits of perception. A sky lit by a thousand suns ousted the dark void, raining molten droplets into the water. A
zodiacal light came and illuminated the monads of creation. Psyche speeding with joy, I cast my gaze inwards, into my bloodstream, and read my carbon-dioxide levels. As my unconscious body was borne along by the river, my vital organs languished in a state of respiratory acidosis. The Death Clock was ticking. One hundred and three seconds remained before I would be forced to pronounce myself clinically dead. Life after death was no consolation. Who wants to be an omniscient ghost, his corpse rotting in a watery grave? My powers had been restored for a higher purpose.
My hypergaze penetrated the knots that bound my wrists and ankles, deconstructing them into post-Euclidean geometric forms. Just as a two-dimensional prison cannot make a prisoner of a three-dimensional being, knots are meaningless in a realm that violates the laws of everyday geometry. By shifting into a spatial position exempt from the laws of three space, I could escape.
My pulse was deathly faint, but there was just enough adenosine triphosphate left in my blood to execute the manoeuvre. Summoning all my psycho-kinetic strength, I stimulated the requisite motor neurones. Electrical signals firing, muscle filaments began to slide and contract. My fingers twitched like those of an incubating foetus as my hypermind guided their transposition, right down to a biomolecular level. The sleeping Houdini slipped his shackles. So subtle were the kinematics that to an everyday observer I would have appeared motionless, my escape nothing short of miraculous. Only I know the truth behind this mystic parlour trick.
Unfettered, my limbs spread-eagled, dispersing my weight so the upthrust of the water molecules could lift me to the surface. The current deposited me face down on a sandy bank. My pulse murmured faintly. My diaphragm contracted and I choked up some river water.
My hyper-being sky-rocketed over my barely sentient body and let out a whoop that echoed over the city. Down below, the nation yawned, shuffled feet into slippers, or rolled over and went back to sleep. I sought out Mary and swooped down on the hospital bed where she sat, still stunned by her first encounter with the higher reality. I corkscrewed round her in a ghostly vortex of an embrace, wishing her courage and joy, searing away her loneliness, telling her to hold tight for me. I flew back to where my body lay, and forgave the river its attempted manslaughter. The polluted river rampaged on, rushing over the sunken necropolis of broken bikes, shopping trolleys and other non-biodegradable relics of our civilization.
Further down the embankment three pensioners in canvas hats stood skewering maggots onto fishing hooks. One of them, Kumamoto, a retired traffic warden, gave a cry as he caught sight of the limp, washed-up body on the sand. Hollering like schoolboys, the three fishermen threw down their rods and bait and ran towards me, endorphins surging in macabre excitement. They halted at the embankment edge and peered down at me, at the soaked T-shirt clinging to my back, debating my mortal status in stage whispers. Sighting me first gave Kumamoto a sense of responsibility towards my drowned carcass. Carefully, he lowered his ageing body onto the sand and bent over me. Then he lifted my wrist, placing his fingers two centimetres shy of my pulse point. ‘Dead,’ he intoned solemnly to the two above him. Kumamoto shook his head sadly and lowered my arm. Fortunately, climbing back up the embankment proved more troublesome for Kumamoto than climbing down. He lost his leverage, slipped and reeled back a step, stamping the rubber sole of his galosh onto my splayed fingers. Face down, I coughed river water up my windpipe. The three fishermen let out cries of surprise.
On the ambulance roof the siren sang in shrill soprano, a transonic air raid on the morning streets, mutating in Doppler shift. Inside, I lay shrouded in a silver-foil wrap, cold-blooded as a reptile, my eyelids bloodless membranes. One-handed, the paramedic compressed my oxygenation mask, resenting me for having the bloody-mindedness to drown fifteen minutes before the end of his shift. To the grouchy paramedic my life hung in the balance, though it was plain to me that his primitive resuscitatory technique would revive me. I heard the lusty battle cry of my immune system fighting back, of neutrophils engulfing river bacteria. Hypothermia had made my body vulnerable to pneumonia, but it would be nothing some bronchodilators couldn’t manage. By sending some extra-sensory pulsars into his brain, I advised the paramedic that a squirt of antibacterial spray would bring down my lung inflammation a notch.
Bored by the biological minutiae of my recovery, I swept above the ambulance, leaving the shrill agitation of the siren to circumnavigate the city. Metaphysical compulsion drew me to Shinsaibashi like electric charge to a lightning rod. I descended on the Street of True Love; quiet now, its neon signs were bled dry of voltage and its vile habitués had been sent scuttling back beneath their rocks by the risen sun. I stole through the walls and ceilings of The Seven Wonders, to the stairway that Hiro climbed. His neurological state was clear to me straight away. It was identical to the condition of his psyche when he had flushed Yuji out of hiding. He twitched under the artillery of synapses firing out of control, his skin damp with nervous perspiration. At the office door Hiro steeled himself for what was to come. His knuckles struck the door before he could back out.
‘Come in! . . . Ah! Hiro, good morning. Come to join us for breakfast?’
In the darkness of Yamagawa-san’s headquarters, five men sat round a low table drinking Ebisu beer and eating rice with grilled beef and spring onion. Though Hiro had broken the rules by turning up without authorization, Yamagawa smiled (the guileful smile of a crocodile surfacing in the glade, but a smile nonetheless). Without disrupting the hungry to and fro of chopsticks from rice to mouth, the thugs looked up at Hiro. He in turn regarded them, registering every detail with the ultra-lucidity of fear. On the screen hanging behind them a Noh play shifted pixels, a virtual demon and priest dancing to the slow, hypnotic beat of drums.
‘Why so mute?’ Yamagawa-san asked. ‘Been gargling with hydrochloric mouthwash again? Trying to fix your tonsils to match your face?’
Yamagawa belched. The thugs snorted into their bowls. Hiro decided to scrap the farewell speech he had rehearsed and move directly onto phase two. Stony-faced, he reached into his suit, into the holster hooked over his shirt, and pulled out an HK MP 5K standard 15-rounds magazine. The breakfast party barely had time to register what was happening before Hiro slid the bolt back and squeezed the trigger. Cartridge after cartridge fired down the barrel, spent shells cascading to the floor. The air thickened with deafening gunfire and blood-curdling screams. Screams it took no more than 9.2 seconds to silence for all eternity. Crockery shattered in geysers of white rice. Bullets punctured organs so they exploded like water balloons, exit wounds splattering the walls with haemoglobin. The sub-machine-gun tore countless new orifices into each man, spraying the virtual Noh play with bloody precipitation. Hiro swung the nozzle left and right, grimly shuddering from the recoil. Life had departed from the bodies of his oppressors long before he could bring himself to stop. Only when he lowered the gun did he realize the extent of the carnage. Heads were thrown back and chests torn open. Hands held up in ineffectual protest had been blown clean away. Not one of them was identifiable as the individual he had once been. Ear-drums ringing with HK MP 5K reverberations, Hiro slid back the safety bolt and tucked his gun inside his jacket. He walked over to the desk, pulled open the top drawer and extracted a bundle of notes worth 1.4 million yen. Pocketing the money, he took one last look at the blood bucket of evisceration that had been Yamagawa-san, then turned towards the door. Leaving the remains of his former boss and colleagues slumped beneath the eerie glow of the Noh dance, Hiro stepped out of the room.
In the aftermath he was devoid of victory or triumph. Hiro had been the agent of a will far greater than his own, called upon to redress a cosmic imbalance far beyond his understanding. I was in no mood for rejoicing either. I telescopically contracted my hypersense and returned to the ambulance. Grim witness to justice served, I collapsed into an exhausted sleep.
Antibiotics trickle into my arm and a cardiac monitor reassures passing nurses that I am not yet in need of a trolley ride to the morgue. It pai
ns me to see myself this way, pale and insensible on a hospital bed. I look barely alive, but an auto-biopsy of my deoxygenated tissues tells me I am bound to pull through. My hyperdestiny dictates that I live, and the elixirs of life continue to irrigate my veins.
They could not destroy me. They will never destroy me. For I am the hidden ideological agenda of the universe; the most extraordinary thing to happen to man since he crawled out of the primordial slime. How can they destroy he who is scripted into the cosmic blueprint? Our human destiny is written in my atoms, encrypted in my DNA. It has weathered the carnage of natural selection, millennium after blood-spattered millennium, to bring us to this new dawn of evolution. Hear my laughter ring. For the universe is a conscious force. And it is not indifferent to my fate.
I lie feverish, a ghost of a boy. I lie inert until a shimmering bioluminescence enters the room, and I spiral into being, a phoenix reborn. A girl made from stardust comes to my bedside and her cool hand descends upon my brow. Her touch expels life force as my forehead is caressed . . . How long I have waited for this.
Now we will transcend together into the future Garden of Eden, where we will live in peace, free of misery and sin. The sticks and stones of the ordinary world will no longer harm us, and all our scars will fade.
I do not have the strength to open my eyes, but Mary knows I am watching her. She takes my hand and smiles. She smiles and, hand in hand, we rise, shedding the former reality like dead skin as we transcend. To a realm of perfect happiness, and perfect love.
24
MR SATO
I
I woke this morning on the floor of the Finance Department. Daylight cast bright aureoles round the lowered blinds, and vibrations from the offices below travelled through my back. I lay dazed and still for a moment until a lively cry of ‘Good morning’ bouncing down the corridor nudged my dim sentience into panic. I quickly sat up and looked about myself. Never have I seen the office in such a state of emergency; every filing cabinet drawer hanging open, the floor unseen for ransacked files. The hands of the clock pointed to quarter past eight. Only a miracle would enable me to tidy everything away before the arrival of my colleagues. In my twenty-hour investigative frenzy over two thousand files, dating back to June 1992, had been exhumed. I had a dim recollection of deciding at two o’clock in the morning to abort my mission and tidy up, but, certain the truth was only a mere spreadsheet away, I pressed on. Until exhaustion terminated the investigation on my behalf.
