Less Than Human

by Maxine McArthur

  “Mari Kitami.”

  There she was. In the list of geography club members who couldn’t be found. The home address looked familiar—he’d seen it when he looked up the information on McGuire’s husband.

  “How should we go about looking for her?” Her voice was strained. “The police don’t seem very worried, but we are.”

  “You can report her as a missing person.”

  “Will that help find her?”

  No, it will do fuck-all, he wanted to say. If the kid wants to disappear, you can’t do anything. Even if it tears you and your family apart.

  “It means the police will be able to keep an eye out for her all over the country, in case she’s left Osaka.”

  More silence. She’s not stupid, he thought. She knows if the girl’s left Osaka they’ve got less chance of finding her. He pushed his notes on the Kawanishi Metalworks accident to one side. It seemed less urgent.

  “What can you tell me about these Silver Angels?” said McGuire finally. “I can’t find anything on your police information boards, and there’s not much online.”

  “I don’t know much, myself,” Ishihara heard himself say. “But I know someone who does. I’m going to see him. Would you like to come?”

  “Where?”

  “Be waiting at the taxi rank outside the Umeda subway east two exit. I’ll pick you up in half an hour.”

  “All right.” She closed the link.

  He cursed himself for a fool. Yes, he felt sorry for her and her family if the niece had got involved with a cult. But he shouldn’t involve McGuire. Mind you, the bastard priest would be more likely to talk with an attractive female present. An attractive foreign female … Ishihara almost looked forward to it.

  McGuire looked washed-out, her bright hair and dark-ringed eyes standing out against pale skin. She always seemed to wear the same kind of outfit—white shirt and comfortable-looking slacks, flat shoes, no jewelry. Today’s slacks were dull green.

  “Where are we going?” she said.

  “Northwest,” replied Ishihara shortly, all his attention concentrated on getting them out of the scrum of taxis and trucks around the station. The Seikai traffic reforms were supposed to solve congestion, not make it worse.

  When they reached the expressway he relaxed and put the car into autodrive.

  “I called you this morning,” said Ishihara. “About the Kawanishi Metalworks case.”

  She had to think for a moment. “The welder, you mean?”

  “Yeah. We received some information that could have a bearing on the case. Tell me, and think about this carefully, could that technician, Sakaki, have reprogrammed the robot to do what you saw?”

  “No.” Her answer was immediate and definite. “To access the robot’s basic programming, the programmer must input their own registration number and password. Sakaki wouldn’t have that information.”

  “You’re certain of that?”

  “Unless Sakaki has skills nobody is aware of, yes.”

  “Could he have taken off the hand piece to hit Mito, like Nakamura’s murderer at Zecom?”

  She snorted. “Not at all. At Kawanishi the entire arm showed stress. The Kawanishi robot moved out of sequence and hit Mito because he was standing too close. The Zecom robot could not physically have hit Nakamura if he fell in the way we found him.”

  So Sakaki was off the hook. His guilty act must be about his debts.

  They drove off the expressway, down into the narrow canyons of back streets festooned with electric lines and billboards, filled with cars and bicycles and people. A bit like ground-level Tokyo but with fewer Chinese, more Koreans and Russians. The car crawled, but if they walked, Ishihara would have to watch McGuire as well as his own back.

  McGuire stared wide-eyed at the street. “I’ve never been in this part of town,” she said. “It doesn’t look very safe.”

  “It isn’t.” Ishihara steered between a noodle delivery bike and three men either stealing or moving a tall vending machine.

  McGuire looked directly at him. “Thank you for bringing me along. Is this expert one of your”—she struggled with the word—“informants?”

  He kept his eyes on the street. “Not really, although he does give me information. He used to be a member of one of the late-twentieth-century New Religions.” He didn’t say Soum. The word created an instant reaction of distaste in most people’s minds.

  “He left them and went back to orthodox Buddhism.” Well, closer to orthodox Buddhism than to anything else. “He used to be affiliated with Daitoku-ji temple.”

  “So he really is a priest?” she said.

  “Kind of a lay priest.”

  She was silent again, and Ishihara concentrated on driving. The road cleared as they passed the crowded area around the station.

  “Assistant Inspector?”

  “What?”

  “If Mari is being kept with this group against her will, what can we do to get her away from them?”

  She was looking directly at him again. Ishihara braked at traffic lights and met her eyes. Their round foreignness still shocked him.

  “If you have reason to think she’s being physically restrained from leaving,” he said, “you can request a Custody Officer from the local police station to go with you. You have a right to ask to see her, and she has to tell you in person if she doesn’t want to go with you.”

  “What if they coerced her into saying that?”

  “If you’ve got reason to believe they’re coercing her— and that’s why you take a disinterested witness—you can make a formal complaint, and the police may take out a warrant to investigate the situation.”

  She mulled that over.

  “What you can’t do,” he said, “is barge in without a warrant and demand the group give her back. We end up having to arrest you, not them.”

  “Has that happened before?”

  He nodded. It happened, even to experienced policemen who should know better. The stupidest thing he’d ever done. In a moment of desperation, he’d wasted his last chance to see Junta, if the boy had ever been there. By the time he returned legally, the whole group had gone.

  “Here we are.”

  Eleanor hesitated, then got out of the car. She’d be safe with Ishihara, surely. She hurried a couple of steps to catch up as he stalked away, keeping her eyes on his stooped back.

  They were parked in a narrow street shaded by two- and three-story buildings. Ishihara had stopped right next to the building wall, but still there was barely room for another car to pass. The gutters were black with dirt and concrete walls bled dark lines of pollution. Flaking blue plastic bins were chained in a line. Overhead, electricity lines buzzed faintly. It could have been a scene from the 1980s.

  Ishihara ducked inside a narrow entry. When Eleanor followed, she realized it was a path between buildings. She pinched her nostrils against the smell of mold and urine. The path opened up into a small courtyard, flanked by an old single-story block of flats sandwiched between the higher buildings in front, rear, and sides.

  Each flat was entered by a short path off the courtyard. The building must date from the 1970s at least, with dirt walls and wooden frame. Eleanor had lived in one of these places when she was a student in the 1990s. It had been an anachronism then. How could this one have survived for so long?

  “Stubborn landlady,” said Ishihara, seemingly reading her mind. “She left it in her will that all tenants had to freely agree to rebuild before the developers could do anything.”

  They passed the first doorway, which was surrounded by neat rows of potted plants. A flowery-lettered sign hung over the second doorway. CHURCH OF THE SERENE MIND.

  Ishihara rapped on the flimsy wooden door. The only plants near the second doorway were a couple of aloes thrusting their prickles outward as if trying to hook passersby. Nobody answered Ishihara’s knock, although a curtain in the window of the far flat twitched.

  Ishihara rapped again, louder this time. “Open up, pries
t,” he yelled.

  Another pause. Then the door opened to the length of a fifteen-centimeter chain.

  “What?” said a throaty, suspicious voice. The smell of incense wafted out the crack.

  “It’s me, Ishihara. You remember.”

  “Cop Ishihara?”

  “Yeah. Open up, I brought you a visitor.”

  The door shut, then opened again. In the dim interior a small man stood blinking at the sunlight. He wore a threadbare cotton kimono that had once been indigo, open over a gray undershirt.

  He glanced up at Ishihara, then peered at Eleanor. “Ooh, a gaijin-san. I’ve only got green tea, y’know.”

  “This is McGuire-san. McGuire-san, this is Gen. He’s a bastard priest.”

  The “bastard priest” cocked his head on one side and kept his eyes on Eleanor. “By that, he means both my parentage and my sect.”

  His gaze was quite impersonal, and Eleanor relaxed a little.

  Ishihara held up the plasbag he’d been dangling in one hand. “We brought snacks. Picked ’em up on the way.”

  That got him a gap-toothed grin. “Come in, then.”

  Except for the reek of incense and the prominent altar on one wall, inside the flat was very similar to Eleanor’s memories of her student days. Dark, because both side walls had no windows, and with the musty smell of unaired tatami. At least it was cooler than outside. There was another smell, too, that reminded her of sushi.

  Ishihara, too, sniffed rudely before sitting on the proffered cushion.

  From the kitchen on the other side of the patched shoji door, Gen chuckled. “You came on my bath-cleaning day. It’s vinegar.”

  Eleanor knelt formally on the other side of the square table. It was the only item of furniture in the middle of the room. A low bookcase stood beside the altar. She couldn’t read most of the kanji on the spines, although jammed in between the difficult-looking titles were a few comics.

  Presumably Gen had so few belongings they could be stuffed with his futon into the cupboard, behind the sliding doors papered with a faded water pattern. Tears in the paper had been repaired over the years with a patchwork of picture postcards.

  “Here you go.” Gen shoved the shoji impolitely aside with one foot and put a teapot and three cups on the table. He took the plasbag from Ishihara and opened it with “mmm”s of delight.

  “My favorite, kusa-mochi.”

  “I know,” said Ishihara. “You remind me every time I come.”

  “You haven’t come for a while.”

  Eleanor was conscious of Gen’s small, bright eyes flicking over her face and hands. She tried not to stare back, but curiosity won. A puckered, bulbous nose dominated his wrinkled face. The unevenness of his face contrasted strangely with the smooth, shaven surface of his scalp. She couldn’t tell how old he was—any age between forty and seventy.

  “Tell us about the Silver Angels,” said Ishihara.

  Gen finished pouring the tea without a sign that he’d heard. He put one cup in front of Ishihara and one in front of Eleanor.

  “Why them? They’re not a religion.” Gen blew gently on his tea as he spoke.

  “Never mind why. We want to know more about them,” Ishihara said.

  “If the mighty Religious Affairs Department doesn’t know who they are and what they’re doing, how should I?”

  “He bears a grudge because we had to investigate him once,” Ishihara explained to Eleanor. He recrossed his legs into a more informal pose and picked up his tea. “We know what they’re doing. You can explain why.”

  Gen blew on his tea again and sipped it thoughtfully. Ishihara slurped his.

  Eleanor burned her tongue on her tea. She didn’t think Mari and her friends would have anything to do with Buddhism. To them, it would be associated with the dead; with constricting clothes and enforced silence; with priests around whose visits the year was organized and to pay whom everyone went a little short; with sickly sweet incense—with a world that was nearly gone.

  “The Angels,” said Gen slowly, “call themselves the Third Children. Nobody knows about them. Yet.”

  There was a short silence, filled with his last word. Somewhere nearby a vacuum cleaner droned. The room didn’t seem cool anymore. It was hot and still.

  “Somebody knows about them.” Ishihara’s voice grated harshly in the quiet. “And four of those are dead.”

  Eleanor’s hand shook tea onto the vinyl table surface. If it had been Mari …

  “They tried to connect themselves to computers. At least, that’s what it looked like,” Ishihara said.

  “I know someone in the group,” said Gen. Before Ishihara could speak, he added, “And no, I will not tell you who. He is a minor member only.”

  Ishihara settled back, frowning, but said nothing.

  “They have one guru. He calls himself Adam.”

  “We know that,” grunted Ishihara.

  “Adam controls several main disciples who give themselves angel names. Samael, Iroel, Gagiel, Melan.”

  His precise, un-English pronunciation gave the archaic names a curious solemnity.

  “You can get all this off the Net if you know where to look,” he added, breaking the spell. “Adam preaches … do you want the long version?” Gen cocked a nearly hairless eyebrow at Ishihara.

  “No, thanks.”

  Gen rolled his eyes and included Eleanor in his long-suffering look. She felt obscurely pleased.

  “Adam preaches a kind of asceticism. He advocates merging the human soul with technology to achieve denial of the body in an attempt to deny desire. Desire being the root of all suffering,” Gen added in an aside to Eleanor.

  Ishihara helped himself to another kusa-mochi, but his body was tense with concentration.

  “So he is Buddhist?” Eleanor said, confused. Wasn’t Nirvana the goal of Buddhists?

  “They use Buddhism, but basically they despise things of the body. You know, blood, spit, shit, wrinkles, dirt.” Gen smiled at her as if to soften the bluntness of his words. “They flush these things away or hide them. It’s shameful even to speak of them. They use the excuse that the body gets in the way of transcendence.”

  Eleanor remembered a moment of horrible embarrassment as a child, when she had invited one of her Japanese friends over to play. The child’s mother had whispered obviously that foreign houses are too dirty, invite her over to our place.

  “Adam scares his followers with talk of a plague that will wipe out the human race. Only those with inorganic bodies will survive. That’s why they try to connect themselves to machines.” Gen looked at Eleanor shrewdly. “They like machines because machines are clean.”

  “Not if you’re a maintenance engineer,” she said.

  Ishihara chuckled.

  “Machines do not decay,” Gen said. “The Angels fear dirt and sickness because it reminds them that they are mortal.” He picked up another kusa-mochi and examined it. “They fear death, that’s all.” He popped the sweet into his mouth with relish.

  “We all fear death,” grunted Ishihara. “But we all die sometime.”

  “Yes, and these children don’t understand that the present is our only defense against the fear of death,” said Gen, licking the sugar dust from his fingers. “They’ve never learned to live in the present. All their lives they’ve been told to study for the future, and their parents did the same.”

  “Look where it got them,” said Ishihara.

  “Exactly. The children see their parents and think, not me. They worked so hard for the future, but in the end, all the future holds is death. Only the present holds life.”

  Eleanor felt sick. She had an awful vision of Mari lying like Nakamura in a pool of blood. All the future holds is death.

  “’Scuse me,” Eleanor muttered. She stood up, wobbling. Her leg had gone to sleep. “Need to go outside.”

  She stumbled through a tiny kitchen, down a step, into a corridor lined with bundles of old newspapers tied with string. She’d come the wron
g way. But no, here was a wooden sliding door that rattled when she slid it open onto outside air.

  A couple of meters away, a crumbling concrete fence stood between the flats and the side of the next-door apartment block. The tall building shut out sun and view, but in the tiny courtyard she could breathe easier than inside.

  Ornamental bamboo bulged the sides of a faded blue bucket used as a pot. Beside it sat a large, reddish stone surrounded by dandelions and other weeds. And dirt, raked in a spiral pattern. This brown dirt wasn’t as effective as the white sand of Ryoanji temple, but the principle was the same. You followed the lines with your eyes and didn’t have to think about anything. Rather, you followed the lines with your eyes until you successfully thought of nothing.

  “Do you like my garden?” said Gen’s voice at her shoulder. “I’m particularly fond of the rock. I stole it from the construction site one night when they were filling in our local river.” He sighed. “That river was there since before Osaka became a town. No good will come of all this.” He waved his hand upward and outward, indicating everything beyond the concrete blocks.

  “The garden is restful,” said Eleanor, and meant it. She felt better. “What can I … if my niece is with the Angels, how can we persuade her to come home?”

  He looked at her, then let his gaze drift out to the rock. “I can’t imagine that a child of her generation will feel it’s her duty. I suppose you will have to persuade her that she’ll be happier at home.”

  If Mari had been happy at school or at home, would she have joined the Angels in the first place?

  “It is indeed a challenge,” said Gen, as if she’d spoken aloud. “She has been taught that happiness means possessing many things and having a good time. Then she discovers that this is not so. In her confusion she turns to someone who offers her a different way to happiness. This involves becoming part of a close group, of trusting others—perhaps with her life—and of doing new things.”

  “But …” Eleanor found she had nothing to say.

  “I don’t have to ask you which one she would choose.”

  Ishihara’s footsteps sounded heavy on the kitchen tiles. “Nice try with the rake.” He looked over Eleanor’s head. “Be better with another rock, though.”