Tokyo Zero

by Marc Horne

  We become frequencies of a gray band with a fleshy stripe at the top. You have seen the movies… stop motion. Stop motion in the place that doesn't stop moving. I'm so tired.

  It is true that we can break each other's hearts and even go so far as to kill each other. And that each moment is precious. But all good things must come to an end. A lovely afternoon is not invalidated by a slow cancer's birth. We all go to sleep.

  It is true that we hated too much to even get a place in some conservation park. There was too much hate. We have never seen a million people march into the neighboring country except to kill them. I know that we can't get our shit together with food, but wouldn't that just make random killing? Static.

  Law stops that. And then stockpiles hatred… requires genocide.

  I am making no excuses… except that I live my life like a Pirandello character… I am historian of my own future. It is quiet in the library.

  It is not quiet in the station. My gang are scattered all over. I am with Honda. He wears a polyester blue suit, I wear a short-sleeved purple number. I look young, I bet. I wander confused looking at all the signs. All of the signs come from the way bones crack in flames (ultimately.) That was back in China a long time ago. It is a long day. I wander and really I am heading to a lavatory. They are never quiet, but I can look in all the crannies. The Japanese people assume I am looking for something we have in Iowa. I find excellent places for gas grenades and the gentleman in blue records them.

  Coming out of the toilet and nothing has changed. The end of the rush hour was noticeable. Space opened up and we were all shoppers or students. We were the luxury end, the surplus. We could do what we wanted and it did feel good. I have no disdain for the people in between the rush hours, despite that the basis of their time is 'the death of the third world.' I don't have an obsession with that. The third world could have been anywhere where the weather was bad. I perhaps think the future machine pushed us too fast. I know it didn't. It was not inevitable. We were lucky. You know what I believe don't you? That mankind is carrying an artificial intelligence that will outstrip us all and if we build a world where the food and the weather doesn't matter it will think and feel like a god and it was all worth it. That is the central point of all my life. I will kill people for it. But we have another plan, actually.

  We all travel back to Koiwa. We have found what we wanted to find. We know the way the station breathes and the best places to put the gas. We all get seats on the way back and everyone but Honda is asleep at some point. It is getting dark and the train stops so many times that you feel like you have met everyone there is to meet.

  Back in Koiwa I don't feel like going home and I tell them all I want to play Pachinko, the vertical pinball game that you play with a thousand balls. It is probably significant that Americans have a game where a single big ball has its life preserved indefinitely and the Japanese play one where you pour a hundred through a maze.

  I actually do go and play Pachinko with little success. But it is nice to sit in the middle of such overwhelming meaningless noise. Once you get over the initial shock of its volume, it is like the waves or a river. Next to me an unshaven, sweat drenched salaryman is doing well at the game. He is all hunched over and smokes with vigor as his hand twiddles the Pachinko knob. He smiles every now and then. Everyone in the room is having some kind of emotional experience. I wonder if this is how Shinjuku station feels when everyone gets on the right train.

  My yakuza friend enters the Pachinko hall. Not drunk, I make no attempt to catch his eye. However, the white man in the purple shirt does not need to try.

  We walk down the street.

  "Do you like Japanese girls?" he asks. We walk under the bridge and away from my house to an area with alleyways full of tiny bars.

  "I only know two." I make a weak smile.

  "Well do you like the two girls?"

  "One is… well, ugly and very strange and… dangerous. So no. The other one… well yeah, I'm probably going to marry her."

  He laughs and I would like to but it would be too fake. He pats me on the back : " You need to meet some girls that are cute but not for marrying. I'll introduce you."

  We bend down beneath the door-hanging and enter a very dark bar that is totally empty. It is all black and deep purple. The walls are decorated with paintings of black panthers and bare-breasted Polynesian girls, gagging for it. It is a strange sub-violet place that Tetsuo has brought us to.

  He lights a match and everything shimmies a little but one of the portraits, one under the counter, keeps moving. A black shape emerges, and it is possibly a human in black, squeezing out backwards.

  A four-foot tall woman stands before us, with two steaming cocktails. I look around and Tetsuo is pleased to have impressed me.

  She was very pleased to see us. Her face was placid, but content. We took the bizarre cocktails from her and downed them. They tasted metallic.

  After the cocktails I played the sequence of recent events through my mind and found that they worked equally well both backwards and forwards.

  Tetsuo made a few polite grunts and a secret door (mansize) opened behind a palm tree painting. We entered. The stairway was unusually light and comfortable, like a newly built house… still beige.

  "This is one of our clubs… it's not really secret, just private."

  At the top of the stairs I saw Japanese privacy. Intense white light showed everything, but everyone was in their own box… screened by perfect white paper. Everyone was together alone. There were about ten Japanese rooms with sliding doors sharing one corridor that was policed by a Geisha who doubtless could have majored in Air Traffic Control.

  She leapt up from her kneeling position when Tetsuo arrived and made for his ear. His brow contracted tighter and tighter as she spoke, almost as if she had found a loose thread hanging from his ear and unwisely decided to pull on it.

  Trying to overhear, I instead heard a whimpering and sniffing off in the distance. It was a whimper from a recent offense, it seemed.

  As they talked my mind turned back to Germany. We had been there on a research project: to determine the extent that neo-Nazism could be viewed as a social aberration.

  For several months we hung out in the neo-Nazi bars, listened to the CDs, kidnapped neo-Nazis and watched what the police would do.

  It was the worst time of my life: considerably worse than planing to gas thousands of people. In the end we came to the conclusion that the neo-Nazis were driven less by social injustice than by the power of symbols and the inability to withstand the meaninglessness that everyday life presented them. It was as if, when humans didn't have to kill for food and land, other forces were able to use them for their own ends. Either hunger or hatred had willing servants.

  I remembered this as I heard Tetsuo beat up someone in the box. There wasn't much to hear… just a hand landing in flesh again and again. In Germany we found ourselves gathering around the captive Nazi in the dark, knowing that there was no-one… even our own side… that would blame us for doing whatever to him. That feeling dominates life… when you arrive in the place where you will not be judged, people do terrible things. When that man came into the box he felt like that but didn't know that the same rule applied to him. Now his kidneys were leaking.

  Tetsuo came out and two younger Yakuza who appeared from the staircase rushed into the room. They had apologetic looks on their faces.

  Tetsuo had a sweat on him. "It's hard… to stop." he said. "Let's go somewhere else."

  We went to a more normal bar and sat off to one side in a private booth that was a mere approximation of the iso-cubes above the ultraviolet bar.

  "Does that kind of thing happen a lot?" I asked as we drank sake from a bottle with no label.

  "No… not much. We water down the booze and Japanese people follow rules. That guy was crazy though… you can't plan for that."

  "What will happen to him?"

  "That depends whether he apologized to the boys or not. Eve
ryone gets a second chance."

  "Everyone?"

  "Yeah… we're nice guys! No really. We do kill people, and hurt many many people. But we know who we are hurting and they know us. So we're cool. Not like… I dunno… like serial killers. Or cults."

  I swallowed the sake. I assumed that the lack of label meant that it was the finest available - it was unreadable, no cheating to learn what it was.

  "Cults don't hurt people, do they?"

  "They steal people's children and the people never know why. They also send down instructions and then some member finds he has to kill himself or burn his house down and he never knows why. One man makes decision for a hundred thousand people. And his decisions might be like his dreams, so even if you are his best friend you can never say to yourself 'That's the decision I would have made… this is a good system.' Killed by a dream!!! Fuck!"

  I drank some more sake. Two white men entered the bar. Something looked brutal about them : like members of the French Foreign Legion. One wore an Arabic looking shawl around his neck but he was blond. Very strange. They ordered from the menu with no fear - not your regular white men.

  "Anyway," I said, "Enough about cults… "

  "I hear that there may be a cult here in Koiwa." Tetuso said and he adjusted his sunglasses.

  "Isn't this a bit… busy for them Don't they all live in the mountains… showering in cold waterfalls.. I thought I heard so… " I imagine my face at the time showed the guilt that innocent people feel when the police go by. After all, I was just infiltrating the cult, not a real member.

  Tetsuo didn't talk about the cult much but later, out of the blue after showing me how to break chopsticks on your forehead (and I showed him how not to do it) he said "That's the gang… you know everyone you hurt and they know you. And everyone gets a second chance."

  I was so relieved to be good friends with Tetsuo.

  Chapter 22

  Honda told me some things over time:

  "Yes, I was in the Japanese Self Defense Force. I was a paratrooper. Jumping from the planes is always fun.. I never got bored of it. But some people do. Why are they jumping? Because it is scary. They like to pretend they are dying. When I would see that look on their faces I would fix their parachutes so they wouldn't open. In freefall I would glide over to them and look them in the eye and they would know what I had done. It was fun to watch their faces flip between knowing I was joking and knowing I wasn't. They would do some important thinking then.

  "I quit the SDF when I realized I was longing for someone to do that to me."

  ++++++++++

  One week after I was given my red bike, I was stopped by the police. I was cruising down Shibamata Kaido, on the sidewalk as one does. On the way back, I decided to buy an onion from one of the local fruit and veg stores. I saw one shop with onions on display in bowls on the street, so I pulled over.

  He wouldn't sell me just one, I had to buy twenty onions. But he was asking a ridiculously small sum of money. He could see I was confused and concerned but he didn't help me when he started pretending to cry and saying "For Diana… very sad… boo hoo." Was he making a sly commentary on the national panic that had gripped England when Diana Spencer died in a car accident?

  As I wound the immense gyroscope wheels of my bike through their vast inertia, legs straining, I remembered that it was several years ago, during Diana's funeral that I had first met Mr Shingu… then the number two man of the Way of Forgetting.

  As you know my life was different than other people's. I didn't watch much television: I was frequently sent to European countries to infiltrate think tanks or hate groups. And I had just finished a period of drunken stupor in Amsterdam. So I didn't know that the Queen's Son's Ex-Wife had died in a car crash. And even if that nugget of information had got through to me I would have expected nothing more than a double-size issue of "Hello Magazine"… perhaps with a black trim. The surprises began in Gatwick Airport. People were sobbing a little, as they do in airports. But they were also sobbing in the sweet shop when I picked up a Cadbury's Flake to eat on the way into town.

  "Why are you crying?" I asked.

  "Today's the day!" was the only answer I got. I didn't push it. Tears on my Flake were bothering me. She could have her day.

  By the time I got into town I knew what was going on, but I couldn't believe it. The cabby had to navigate around a huge prone animal that had stumbled down on the streets of London. The beast was spraying flowers from wounds self-inflicted. In this grief we saw the side of England it had hidden for hundreds of years… a dense sentimentality that belonged to the alternative rulers of the country… working-class women. It seemed that Diana's death was a major power shift - she was a symbol of the pent up resentment the people felt at living in a fake and timeless England since their forgotten births.

  At least that was my reading of it… I had been noticing a strange shift in England ever since "Definitely Maybe" came out. Except when it got in my way, England was not a major project of mine. Exactly when the British would emerge as a people (barring major war) and then be susceptible to the kind of idea-viruses we were in favor of, was something that occasionally came up over tea. So it was interesting. The endless crying… no-one in the media questioned it! Were they that addicted to easy answers? Well, good.

  Later in the pub a tiny and fragile Japanese man with dusty hair came in, very confused and flustered. That he was the boss of some mega-corporation was not in doubt. It was clear that he made both fish oil and weapons-grade plutonium. If he looked at any object long enough it would dissolve into a shimmering blue field of pure money and with a button he could make it leap anywhere in the world at any time.

  I had made many impassioned pleas at various of our meetings that we should infiltrate and subvert a Japanese Mega Corporation (endless reading on the subject had given me the feel for my prey that allowed me to read him when he pushed open the unwelcomingly heavy door of the 'Bull and Radish.')

  The answer was always the same… they would see right through you… you don't get "inside" a keiretsu… there is no way we could invent a cover deep enough to get you inside and even if we did it would be your children or grandchildren who got the passwords we need. I wanted to get access to their raiding programs, to connect up the vast networks of pure money that their conventions kept apart, to do something nasty with their private armies. I felt that a truly progressive Japanese multinational could precipitate the crisis of civilization that would allow information structures to reach critical mass. I even wrote a paper on it "Using a Japanese Multinational to precipitate a police state and computerized secret police."

  Their objections were strong. But I had to try, so I bought him a pint.

  He was very thankful. I chose "Bass" for him and invited him to join me at my table. It was the usual dark pub that recently had started serving good food and now got many fewer thugs and hooligans and skinheads. That was all it took to get rid of them sometimes. Maybe we should move into catering.

  His English was surprisingly good. He told me how he had left his hotel that morning.

  "I walked out into a very surprisingly cold morning. I wanted to see this old city waking up. I knew they were burying the princess. Even the new buildings here look old… like you English discovered concrete a thousand years ago. And all of the women crying… like Queen Guinevere had died. I thought I might catch… the black death. Hu hu hu hu .

  "Soon though it was hard to move. Everywhere all the women were crying and throwing flowers. The city wasn't moving like a big city should. It was not the end of the world, but sounded like the end of the world. I had to get away."

  I was surprised to hear him talking like that.

  "How's business?" I asked.

  "Very good. My business is stealing people's minds. And these days people are glad to put them in my protection."

  "… advertising?"

  "Hu hu. No… religion. New religion. Instant religion where you have to be killed directly by your
god. Apocalypse in your own lifetime."

  "You sound… cynical. Like you don't believe?"

  "I know what cynical means. Just because my religion is exactly what the stupid people want doesn't mean it isn't true. Sometimes they feel the future better than we do… like dogs."

  My head was spinning. That I was right and that I was so wrong. Not a Sony man, but the new Japanese corporation, fulfilling the old role of government. Just as businesses were replacing governments everywhere, in Japan they now had to supply the state religion too.

  "What do they call your religion… might I have heard of it?"

  He sipped the Bass and its uncomplicated taste took a few seconds to slip across his slightly pointed tongue.

  "It is called "The Path of Forgetting" What do we forget? Firstly,ourselves… that cluster of preferences and resistances. Secondly, history which is perversely oriented at things we cannot change: a heap of dead futures that were wasted. Thirdly, forget life. Life is at once everywhere and nowhere, and so really will take care of itself."

  "It sounds like a philosophy of… nothingness. Like nothing matters?"

  "No, some things matter. But you need to know your place. Not everyone can be Superman or Jesus. At best, most people are food for the gods. That is a realistic ambition."

  "Food for the gods! I like that. Listen… do you know about … no let me

  ask you another question. Are you an actively apocalyptic cult?"

  "Actively apocalyptic? No… "

  "I don't believe you… 'actively apocalyptic' is not taught at the Berlitz School of Languages"

  We laughed.

  We met again the next day for a round of Crown Green Bowls… not easy to get a green and to roll the leather balls at the end of summer but I got us in.