Tokyo Zero

by Marc Horne

  A rugged looking Master sits on the prow of a fishing boat heading through a storm into Tokyo harbor. Around him, sailors are being blown around like feathers, but he is unmoved. "Don't think about the wind… " he softly says. "You can be sure it is not thinking about you." The master closes his eyes and then the winds soften.

  The master is riding a white horse through the forest. The master comes over the hill, rainbows streaming from him and with his hands in the air : we cannot see his face… at this moment he has no face. The master is in a tent, laughing with both children and adults, playfully hefting a luger. A man with a turban leaves a small jeweled casket at the feet of the master. The master executes a kung fu move on a burly young man, throwing him to the floor with just one finger. The master is in meditation: cut to the eyes of the amazed crowd as they slowly, slowly rise.

  The master is outside his newly built temple, the people of Shibuya look on in awe. "Ignore the outside of my temple," he says to the masses "or you will never see the inside." The door to the temple opens. People rush to see inside as it closes behind him. They swear they saw the edge of a luminous galaxy like a carpet at his feet.

  A village of happy people with contraptions on their heads.

  3. (c)

  I wake up… I'm young. Ko Samsara is in my living room talking to my father. I creep out to watch them. I can't hear what they are saying. I expected Dad to be mad but he isn't . They shake hands and then Samsara slithers out of the room, leaving a visible trail.

  I wake up… Ko Samsara is levitating jut above my chest, but it feels like he is sitting on me. He is speaking in some strange language I cannot understand. I think it is Japanese backwards. No message from Satan for me. But many demons and gods may be trying. I wish I knew which one. He is very heavy, but floats. I resent doing his hard work for him.

  I enter the bedroom of Maruhashi. Black silk is furniture: at his whim it changes. He is waiting for me with a smile on his face and I dare not look down. I ask him where his bitch is. He points right at me. I hope he is saying she is inside my heart.

  Sometimes I am one of the crowd, out of my mind with joy that I have joined and become the destructive force. Sometimes I am a stranger walking through the crowd. If we could speak (we can't, I know) I would say… "Fade Away!" Finally I am both and horrifyingly the immense shadow that spreads from the horizon (very at home) could be the one that either of us worships. Cannot tell the difference just yet. Little time… a life or two.

  What is this on my head… .? It could be a hand with long fingernails. I decide to believe that. A short period of peace before I recognize its strength.

  I find a pamphlet from Samsara. It is written in my mother's voice.

  I wander around the glassy city. If I can verify that there are no humans here I will be satisfied. Half way through my patrol I get the unmistakable feeling I am hunting down children. I split in two and half of me does not find any children.

  Lots of dreams.

  Chapter 19

  1.

  Honda opened the door and I stepped through it. Several people left the room as I entered it, all slightly hunched in humility. Atop a small mound of pillows holding a relaxed lotus position was Ko Samsara, leader of the Path of Forgetting.

  His long hair flowed to his loose robes which were very similar to the cushions. The only point of contrast was the soft rice matting that covered the entire, large floor. This assessment of his space was my first assessment of him. Then my eye started to populate the space.

  His face was hairy, he seemed to have hair growing even on top of his flowing beard and that encroached his cheeks in a fade that stopped only at the eyes. His eyes were dark and small and seemed dusty from lack of use. His mouth was barely visible but seemed to have thick lips… some would say blubbery. Very much a guru, but the effusive Indian face one expected was not there. But he did have a face, a cold one that had a closed mouth and dusty eyes. He would write down the revelation of your life on a sticky note and someone else would hand it to you.

  His hands were pebbled with jewels that glistened some message or hint of some distant land. They spoke a wealth of geographical mastery rather than of the finer points of style. The hands were small and delicate and could carry out minute work. They lay flat on his lap.

  He formed a smile, apparently by tensing the muscles of his scalp and Honda, bowing deeply, shuffled into the room. I bowed too, and the uniform static of the tatami mats was all I could see. I observed the fineness of their grain as Honda introduced me in English.

  "This is our English friend, Mr Blake. Forgive my impertinence in telling you that which you know, o dreamer of new time.

  A chuckle began and it formed an undertone to the next few minutes of speech from Samsara "Old friend, we could never speak if that held you back… it is pleasant to converse in the words of the world when action in the world is planned. Please keep me on your planet that I may serve you.

  "Mr Blake… how go the preparations."

  Out of a sense of defiance I kept my mouth closed and thought "We are waiting to get a good chemist to put together the carrier gas for us and then I will start the biochem work."

  A few seconds passed and I heard a war movie submarine sonar ping deep in my brain. I opened my mouth in surprise. It echoed from the space where I could feel my short term memories.

  I looked up at Samsara. His eyes had been cleaned and black they shone. I repeated my thought aloud and his lips seemed to move in sync with mine. The smell of incense was suddenly overpowering. Honda was not there.

  "Excellent… let us talk… ask me a question… "

  I remembered the advice of my father "Never ask an enemy a question : simply act." It was advice much ignored and modified during our various actions, such as my year in Germany when we did a lot of spying and interrogating (no torture), but at the core it was true. Any question is an act of trust and weakness, and reveals as much as it gives… information must be conserved. Blake's law.

  So my question was a donation from my heart, not my mind.

  "Who is the girl I met at Maruhashi's office?"

  Samsara raised his eyebrows and the rumble of the chuckle underpinned his speech like throat-singing : he held the two sounds simultaneously and amazingly as he spoke.

  "She will bring trouble to all. Maruhashi's spy. She believes in nothing. She is excited by both my apocalypse and his. She is quite the weapon. Her name is Mayumi. Maruhashi wants me to give her to you. To your cell, I mean. She can kill but also not kill. You will need that. I see you and she, eyes locked in the train station, about to part. Unfortunately when I swam through time I did not care about love, so I don't know your hearts."

  I think his lips did not move. I strongly think so.

  Several hours later. Maybe. Lights different in the room. No source and, of course, no destination. Circles, very natural, rings mainly purple. I see a pile of cushions and walk and sink to it. I am probably drugged. A clear thing in my mind is the blue cylinder with its waves… Pocari Sweat. The waves make the cylinder spin like a message in a can. The message was premade, in this case by a Pocari of some kind, or else the top would be open. Can't reseal those things … unlike the bottles. Wait… it was opened, by Honda who gave it to me. No, that was weeks ago… unless he gave me one today. Either two cans and times or just one and one. So two.

  Ah… drugged, I hope.

  "Let me explain the end of the world to you"

  We laughed at the coincidence… we both said this at the same time. "You first!" I added.

  "The end of the world is not the end of life."

  "Agreed… sorry, your turn."

  "Killing our enemies is bad only because not everyone is our enemy. Death is coming to this planet like the weather. We have gone to a critical point but we didn't even notice. In my circuit of time I saw Japan in ruins… random ruins. The Nemesis had no challenger. Focusing the death makes sense.. survival can be a resource. So many 'evil' acts will be revealed as good
in the wake of the Nemesis. The real sin is letting the wrong people die."

  "How soon… ?"

  "You know better than I do.

  "I sense a strange love in you. Love as a whole you are weak on. I try and find the contours of this woman you love, but they are all your own… your mirror."

  He was talking about Claire, not Mayumi. Oh, assuming he was psychic.

  "We were brought up together… have the same interests. But she is beautiful and I am not. You should be able to tell that."

  "I have little interest in beauty. All forms are beautiful over time.

  "Will you betray me, Mr Blake?"

  "I cannot betray you Samsara-san." I replied with a smile. I was as good as telling him that I had no loyalty to betray. Because it had become evident to me, and I am not ruling out my drugged-up state, that Samsara knew what we were up to and he didn't care.

  "There are just three things you need to know, he said. "Firstly, you are my enemy… not my Judas. There are two possible worlds. One is mine, in which knowledge floods from the dawn of man to unite at the top of the pyramid. The other is yours where knowledge is transformed into existence and existence ends. Yours is evil and wrong. Mine is evil and right.

  "Secondly, I am a prisoner of time… when it is time to act my knowledge is stripped from me. In my 665 orbits of time I noticed that nature was careless, inconsistent. The universe is different every time. This is the final cycle… . I know I must stop you … . but I cannot. Maruhashi may well find out about you, though, and shoot you through and through. He is good to keep around… my Judas

  "Thirdly, all of your beliefs … I sense… depend on something unreal. Someone unreal. Remember how very close to not caring you are.

  "Do you still want to explain the end of the world to me."

  "Yeah… the answer is 'There's no such thing.'"

  2.

  Also while I was in Japan, I went to this amazing party. It was just a couple of days after my metaphysical episode, which I was feeling pretty embarrassed about by that time.

  I did not believe that Samsara had traveled through time or was a mind reader. The big question facing me was whether I had imagined chunks of that conversation, had reconstructed it like a dream or had been acting the whole thing out aloud and spilling some secrets.

  They would kill me if they knew that I planned to hijack their act of terror. That would be when my question was finally answered… when I was killed. How infuriating.

  So when Honda came into my room, late at night, it was an awful moment. Just framed in the door, dim violet light behind him. This is how the animals feel… or how the humans who wake up and find someone has recategorized them as an animal feel.

  "Blake-San… I forgot to tell you something."

  I sat up in my bed and tried to sit wholly in his shadow. I don't know why.

  And yeah, he invited me to this party.

  ++++

  Benny didn't want to go. I think he was upset by my visit to the Master. His master's laser beam eyes had failed to disintegrate me, so he had to accept me. It was clear that he wanted to kill or beat me. He had the look. He couldn't stop looking at me. He never looked at me with rage.

  Everyone else turned out for the event which was being held by Maruhashi on his yacht. It was a fund raiser for the Path, to which numerous semi-believers were invited. The Master… er… Samsara was not going to attend, but would send his astral form over the yacht at a propitious time.

  Also there would be a video.

  A dinner jacket arrived for me, wrapped as densely as an onion in a single sheet of near transparent tissue paper that I thought would be the size of the apartment when I finally unfolded it, but which in fact I could not find anywhere once I had finally uncovered the suit.

  When I put it on, it fit so well that I just knew that Honda had come in and measured me one night.

  All of the terrorists gathered in the gray room. We were mostly looking OK.

  Junko was wearing a bluebottle green cocktail dress that flashed a little as she moved around. It seemed thwarted by her disproportionate hips… had no answer for them.

  Otherwise she was looking ok, if glum and begrudgingly made up.

  Strangely I made a joke to Yosuke about how I didn't want to be anywhere near him when his cummerbund snapped and I made Honda translate it.

  Apparently something had changed between me and my little group. I couldn't pin it down… it must be a process.

  Honda, of course, looked like James Bond. "Are you taking a gun with you?" I asked. He replied by smiling and saying that he hoped I would not be doing so.

  So I asked him again and he said yes.

  A limo pulled up outside the high school where we had gathered in our heavy raincoats. The rainy season was close, so we didn't attract undue attention traveling separately anyway.

  You have probably heard about how Japanese Taxi doors open automatically to admit their passengers. That was still impressing me even after nearly a month in Japan. So when the Limo pulled up, somehow larger than any street I had ever seen in Koiwa, I was wondering what kind of set-up they would have to outdo that. I was not disappointed. The limo stopped, four small men emerged from the car in waiters' outfits and held all of the doors open for us while also stopping traffic. After they had assisted us all into the car, which was carved from pure leather inside, they remained on the street as we all pulled away, our seats pleasingly warm, their bows profound.

  European classical music played quietly in the background.

  "Honda… I forgot… are you all racists?" I asked

  "No no, the master discriminates only against non-believers," he replied while pouring me a glass of cognac.

  "Isn't all this a bit… decadent?" I asked.

  "Purity is in the mind. It is good to enjoy the fruits of failed society. After the Destruction people will feel more intensely and pleasure will be easier to come by… in the meantime… I think these soldiers deserve a break!!!"

  He raised his glass to our comrades and they both smiled. Looking after the hostages had been taking up most of Junko's time (an aside, a thought somewhere in my head, Benny would casually torture the family tonight. Much of their pain would be paying for my snide humor. It was so hard to exist among people… so hard.)

  It's a long drive. I have known shorter seasons. The drive should have its own name, like the seasons do. We are heading to Tokyo Bay. Honda constantly narrates the trip, the sights. Things like the largest branch of the Sumitomo bank, a government building where an aborted coup d'Žat was plotted, a temple made of aluminum, devoted to progress.

  The other two speak in brief fax-speed conversations in their native tongue. Honda has his hand on the air-con controller twiddling it constantly. Like an expert plate spinner he keeps Yosuke's B.O. under control.

  The interior of this fine vehicle feels like my home. I drink champagne. My weakness is astounding : I have only been entrusted with this mission because I am his son. I have been wondering what Samsara meant about the substance of my beliefs. My mother's death is real. Maybe she is alive… it's just a big trick. Maybe Samsara has her locked up somewhere. A special refrigerator for truffles! Nice.

  +++++

  We stepped out of the car and in the damp sky was a thick violet light. The river spilled slightly into the space above us. Deeper in the glow was a cluster of bright lights and chatter and there was a brass band playing something repetitive. Up the gangplank several women in yellow gowns and their companions were boarding a big boat. As we got nearer we saw a huge rainbow colored bridge in the distance. Junko liked the bridge, but was hushed by the other two. They just didn't like her.

  For some reason the bridge did not provoke the typical reverie in me. I did not consider what the bridge meant and whether it would still fit in when we were all gone.

  Not to the point of being able to draw a conclusion anyway.

  We all arrived on the deck and dozens of elegant people were already in place. M
usic had never made them sway, all their dancing was diagrammed over a hundred years ago, but the boat and waves made it look that way.

  My group split up to observe what was happening at various places. Many costumed cult followers were moving around with hors d'oeuvres and when you took a quail lip vol au vent they said to you "Truth is so rare in this world" or one of the other soft slogans of the Path, approved for the semi-receptive.

  I found Maruhashi, in tweed, leaning against a railing talking to a middle-aged businessmen who looked like his watch would have a millisecond hand. He drank as though he knew he had made a terrible mistake. The liquor went in with a thrust to bypass all taste and feeling and directly enter the brain.

  "Technology we know, But Truth is not in the wires, it is in the blood" said Maruhashi (in Japanese… his clear voice retaught me all my lessons)

  "Who are my masters?, men who measure money with, just money itself!!!" replied the businessman and maybe a wave or maybe the force of his impending conversion nearly threw him over the rails into the speckled water that rushed below us as we headed under Rainbow Bridge and toward the sea. I grabbed an hors d'oeuvre and walked along the length of the deck. Overhead, the clouds seemed to be getting organized, and from them that could only seem like a conspiracy.

  No one on this ship was wearing an electric skull cap to vibrate their minds to another dimension. Nor were they fashioning guns in a small factory in an ugly place. And they were neither torturing or being tortured. Or dancing.

  I saw a good-looking middle-aged Japanese woman tearing open her purse in a frenzy, being gently calmed…

  It was a little windy and so I headed to the upstairs (I'm sure there is a nautical word for that) lounge area. My white face caught a few glances and at least one man seemed to stiffen with excitement. I was clearly a specialist in - well … they wouldn't think germ-warfare - maybe yoga … or Tae-Bo.

  "I'm Alex Chilton… a pilates instructor," I said to a tall thin woman who was looking lost in the corner. She didn't understand