Self-Reference Engine

by Toh EnJoe

  Self-Reference ENGINE

  © 2007 Toh EnJoe

  Originally published in Japan by Hayakawa Publishing Inc.

  English translation © 2013 VIZ Media, LLC

  Cover design by Sam Elzway

  All rights reserved.

  No portion of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the copyright holders.

  HAIKASORU

  Published by VIZ Media, LLC

  295 Bay Street

  San Francisco, CA 94133

  www.haikasoru.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Enjo, To, 1972–

  [Self-reference engine. English]

  Self-reference engine / Toh EnJoe ; translated by Terry Gallagher.

  pages cm

  Summary: “Science, surrealism, number theory, and more dead Sigmund Freuds than you can shake a stick at. Toh EnJoe’s prize-winning fiction is well-known in Japan for crossing the streams—from hardcore science fiction to bizarre surrealism—and has found an audience across the genre divide. Self-Reference ENGINE is a puzzle of a book, where vignette and story and philosophy combine to create a novel designed like a concept album”—Provided by publisher.

  ISBN 978-1-4215-4936-1 (pbk.)

  I. Gallagher, Terry, 1956– translator. II. Title.

  PL869.5.N55S4513 2013

  895.6'36–dc23

  2012050891

  The rights of the author of the work in this publication to be so identified have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Haikasoru eBook edition

  ISBN: 978-1-4215-6182-0

  P, but I don't believe that P.

  C O N T E N T S

  PART 1: NEARSIDE PART 2: FARSIDE

  Writing Self-Reference ENGINE

  01. Bullet 20. Return

  02. Box 19. Echo

  03. A to Z Theory 18. Disappear

  04. Ground 256 17. Infinity

  05. Event 16. Sacra

  06. Tome 15. Yedo

  07. Bobby Socks 14. Coming Soon

  08. Traveling 13. Japanese

  09. Freuds 12. Bomb

  10. Daemon 11. Contact

  PROLOGUE: WRITING

  A SET OF all possible character strings. All possible books would be contained in that.

  Most unfortunately though, there is no guarantee whatsoever you would be able to find within it the book you were hoping for. It could be you might find a string of characters saying, “This is the book you were hoping for.” Like right here, now. But of course, that is not the book you were hoping for.

  I haven’t seen her since then. I think she’s most likely dead. After all, it has been hundreds of years.

  But then again, I also think this.

  Noticing her as she gazes intently into the mirror, the room in disarray; it is clear that centuries have flowed by, or some such. And she, perhaps, has finished applying her makeup, and she is getting up and is going out to look for me.

  Her eyes show no sign of taking in the fact that the house has been completely changed, destroyed around her. The change was gradual, continuing, and even long ago she was not very good at things like that. As far as she is concerned, that is not the sort of thing one has to pay attention to. Not that she is aware, but it seems so obvious, she doesn’t need to care about it.

  Have we drowned, are we about to drown, are we already finished drowning, are we not yet drowning? We are in one of those situations. Of course, it could be that we will never drown. But think about it. I mean, even fish can drown.

  I remember her saying meanly, “If that’s the case, you must be the one from the past.”

  It is true of course. Everybody comes out of the past; it’s not that I’m some guy who comes from some particular past.

  Even when that is pointed out, though, she shows no sign of backing down.

  “It’s not as if I came out of some bizarro past,” she said. That’s how she and I met.

  Writing it down this way, it doesn’t seem like anything at all is about to happen, right? Between her and me, I mean. As if something could ever really happen. As if something continues to happen that might ever make something else happen.

  I am repeating myself, but I haven’t seen her since then. She promised me, with a sweet smile, that I would never see her again.

  For the short time we were together, we tried to talk about things that really meant something to us. Around that time there were a lot of things that were all mixed up, and it was not easy to sort out what was really real. There might be a pebble over there, and when you took your eyes off it it turned into a frog, and when you took your eyes off it again it turned into a horsefly. The horsefly that used to be a frog remembered it used to be a frog and stuck out its tongue to try to eat a fly, and then remembered it used to be a pebble and stopped and crashed to the ground.

  With all this going on, it’s really important to know what’s really real and what’s not.

  “Once upon a time, somewhere, there lived a boy and a girl.”

  “Once upon a time, somewhere, there lived boys and girls.”

  “Once upon a time, somewhere, there lived no boy and no girl.”

  “Once upon a time…lived.”

  “Lived.”

  “Once upon a time.”

  From beginning to end, we carried on this back-and-forth process. For example, in this dialogue, we were somehow finally mutually able to come up with this kind of compromise statement:

  “Once upon a time, somewhere, there lived a boy and a girl. There may have been lots of boys, and there may have been lots of girls. There may have been no boys at all, and there may have been no girls at all. There may even have been no one at all. At any rate there is little chance there were equal numbers of each. That is unless there had never been anybody at all anyway.”

  That was our first meeting, she and I, and of course it meant we would never see each other again. I was making my way in the direction she had come from, and she was headed in the direction I had come from, and this is a somewhat important point; you must realize this walking had to be, for some reason, in just one direction.

  At the end of the end of all this great to-do, time itself freezes, universally, and some clock somewhere should say that a whole lot of time has passed.

  I would like you to imagine countless threads, strung through space. I am walking along one of those threads from this end. She is walking along some other thread from some other end.

  It is actually quite difficult to explain what I mean by that. I’m not sure I understand it completely myself.

  But at that time there was a (slightly embarrassing) way for us to know about the direction we were each traveling in, and we each used it. But just that.

  I am not sure just who the criminal who froze time was.

  The dominant theory is that the cause was the result of some plan in which some force was triggered, in which all kinds of things were involved: machinery, engines, scientists, some people who weren’t even there. Personally, though, I like the theory that it was a crime of time itself.

  One day a bunch of time threads were going along in a bundle, stretching out in any direction at all, all together, all thinking it was kind of tedious. All things in time were vexed about this. And since practically everything is, in fact, bundled up in time, they were finding it hard to put up with being subjected to this arbitrariness.

  The repeated pattern: restoration plan, persuasion, earnest entreaty, prayer. As indicated, each of these in turn tended to cause the situation to deteriorate, and the idea was that at the point when time
itself became confused, the result was some complete entanglement, with all participants left completely unable to move, as though part of some sort of ridiculously and utterly perverse sex act.

  If I ever meet the guy who thought up this idea I think I’d like to split his head in two.

  And then, a few hundred more years passed. In other words, what I mean is, I just ran through a few hundred years bound up in the frozen net of time.

  That is, somehow or other, I arrived at a point that was a few hundred years either in the future or the past.

  I cannot say one way or the other whether she had also made such a sprint. But it is a well-known phenomenon that girls often have no trouble passing time without such physical exertions.

  That is why I am running again today. You might want to ask why.

  One. One day, time caused an insurrection.

  Two. We were moving in some unknown direction, allowed only to proceed toward some predetermined day after tomorrow.

  The end result was clear.

  Whether that result is just or not is something far beyond my ability to determine. In other words, it is like this:

  If the lines of time are so entangled with one another that they are one ball of yarn, ignoring both past and future, one of those threads won’t mind if we were simply to connect with the instant of its beginning.

  The instant when time abandoned the standard, straight-ahead march.

  Of course, there is absolutely no guarantee that the path I am running along leads to that instant. That instant may exist at some point that may be completely unreachable, even if one were to follow countless threads through unlimited mysteries. It would take an infinite spider web stretched across infinite space to have enough space between the threads for this.

  But, what if, what if, in that one-in-a-billion chance, I were to find that instant? It is obvious what I would have to do. I would have to scream at Time: “Stop thinking all this stupid nonsense; shut up and move along as you were!”

  And then when everything was back as it had been, I would finally be able to go out and look for her once more. Or else maybe she would be looking for me, as if in a dream.

  What is she doing? That is the thought that spreads out, pure white before me, apropos of nothing.

  01. BULLET

  WE ARE ALWAYS getting knocked around. That way. This way.

  Pushed this way, flying off that way. When we bump into something, we are sent flying. At least, that’s what I believe. The only way we can stand right where we are is because we are subject to forces coming at us from all directions, willy-nilly. And the reason our bodies don’t buckle under all this pressure is something I learned in school a long time ago. It’s because inside our bodies are all kinds of things trying to push their way out. At the bottom of the gravity well, the layer of atmosphere above us does not stave our heads in, and that is the reason.

  Of course, there is also an actual reason why I have come to believe this. Of course, we had been that way for a long time without ever thinking we even needed some kind of a reason, still able to believe in something, till at some point we got to now, where most things seem to have had no reason for a long time, and I think this must actually be something quite special.

  Rita is a completely unmanageable young girl. None of us knows what to do with her. Things are especially bad when she is in the backyard. She casually pulls the revolver from her belt and…Bang! Not that she is aiming my way or anything; she just fires away without a target. Her house is surrounded by rusty steel plates, and of course anything that can be broken is broken. The only things left unbroken are things that can’t be broken, and they just sit there.

  It is a half mile to the nearest neighbor’s. All the locals know about her habits, and they steer clear of her place, because she is from someplace else. People from someplace else have no place here.

  So, no problem, right? think Rita’s family members, but they are the only ones who think so. The situation is both very obvious and very problematical.

  Because she is shooting all the time, she is really good at it. There are many boys in the neighborhood—men actually—who torment Rita and have holes in their pants, very close to their testicles, as a result. No one could figure out how Rita knew just where those men’s testicles were, when they hardly even knew themselves.

  Among the girls in the area, there is a legend—that many believe to be true—that Rita once shot a cockroach that had nested for years behind her uncle’s testicles, but we all know that no such creature could live in such a place. If it could, we would all be secretly keeping pet scarab beetles or praying mantises there where we could play with them.

  “There is a reason why Rita is so crazy,” James said once, giving me a five-dollar coin. “In her head,” he says, pointing to his own temple. “There’s a bullet buried in there.” And having said that, his body shook a little, as if he had just finished micturating.

  I responded that there was nobody alive with a bullet lodged in their head, to which he responded that’s exactly what’s so fantastic about it, turning red in the face.

  I believe James to be the smartest guy in this neighborhood, or maybe even the smartest guy in North America, but for two weeks now he has had the world’s worst crush on Rita. Now, even I know you can’t get apples from oranges, but this guy is the worst. If you could extract the smarts there wouldn’t be anything left of him. But he was still the smartest guy for two hundred miles around, no doubt about it.

  “So what if she does have a bullet in her head?” I asked. “Some-time it must have got there somehow. How else could it be?”

  Jay looked at me with a bored expression on his face.

  “It’s been there since she was born,” he said seriously. I couldn’t be sure if he was teasing me or what, so I just patted him on the shoulder. Jay turned and got hold of me, wrapped his right arm around my middle, and threw me down. I offered no resistance and tumbled to the grass, landing spread-eagled.

  “Huh?” I said.

  “Huh what?” he said back. And repeating this scintillating dialogue, back and forth, we got into it, just repeating “Huh” at each other, heatedly. Jay was just trying to get his “hypothesis” across.

  “Your ‘hypothesis’?!” I yelled back. “From now on anybody who uses a word like ‘hypothesis’ to me, I’m just going to call you ‘Mess,’ cause your name ‘James’ is really ‘Jay-Mess’! And then I will call you ‘Messed-Up’!”

  As I sat there being reborn as a “mess-up” machine, Jay sat down next to me and wrapped his arms around his knees and told me how much he liked Rita. He had told me the same thing just the day before, and if I may say so, he had also said it just two minutes before that. He had probably said it a thousand times since he started feeling that way, but I didn’t mind. A thousand times in two weeks might be too much though.

  “If my hypothesis is correct, though…” he just kept repeating.

  “Knock it off already about your hypothesis,” I grumbled as I got up. I never heard of a hypothesis that ever convinced a girl to do anything. Jay was too smart to ever hit on a girl. Some hypothesis, huh?

  “If my hypothesis is correct…” he said again, proudly.

  With nothing better to do than stand there and listen, I realized Jay seemed to be sobbing.

  Hmmm, people who go on about their hypotheses, it seems, really have some pretty extraordinary capacities. James was the kind of guy who wouldn’t ordinarily shed a tear even if hornets stung him on the butt. Although I do have a tendency to exaggerate.

  “Rita,” Jay would say, “is shooting her bullets at the day after tomorrow.” He said it like he was sure of it.

  That’s the way it is. No target, that’s just the way it is.

  “Of course that’s not what I meant,” Jay would say without even looking this way. “Rita’s just having a shooting match with somebody in the future,” he went on.

  That inference, or delusion, that he drew did not particularly m
ove me. Let me put this plainly: I don’t understand.

  “Well, first, let us assume…” Jay said in preface. “Rita has a bullet in her head. William Smith Clark has testified to this.”

  I didn’t put much faith in that old Civil War doctor, who ended up as a statue in Japan, forever pointing to some far horizon, as if trying to instruct his lost sheep. Come to think of it, I don’t think doctors are very trustworthy at all.

  “Next, let us assume that bullet has been in Rita’s head ever since she was born. I heard that from her aunt, so I’m sure it’s true.

  “There can only be one conclusion!” Jay said, jumping to his feet. I don’t know why, but he was pointing at the sky.

  I said, “When Rita was still in her mother’s womb, her mother was shot!”

  Jay cut a gallant figure, but I would have to dash some cold water on him. He held that pose for some time, and I watched as the arm pointing high in the sky gradually bent back toward the ground.

  “Maybe so,” he said.

  Jay made a complicated face as he thought. There was a right way to enter a house. Most people think it is proper etiquette to open the door before entering. I’m pretty sure it’s not too smart to open the door after entering. Even scarier if it’s bullets we’re talking about.

  “What other possible way could there be?” I asked Jay.

  Adding insult to injury, with a lonely look on his face, Jay said, “Someone in the future shot Rita. For better or worse, that bullet lodged in her skull. But from the recoil, Rita is, even now, being pushed backward in time, back into her mother’s belly.”

  Hmmm, I thought, waving at Jay to go on if he wished to continue in this vein.

  “Here’s what I think. From the very start, Rita came from some direction or other. But then for some reason, somebody shot at her from the future, and now her path has been turned back in the direction of the past. And that is why, in reaction to that, she is now heading back in time, back in the direction of her mother’s tummy.”