Tokyo Zero

by Marc Horne

  He looked dapper in a blazer. I probably looked a little tired from a night of fast research and frantic phone calls and persuading Dad.

  I showed Shingu how the balls were lopsided and traveled in curves… explained that the little white ball was a moving target and that it was perfectly acceptable to slam it into the back gutter when need be. "Very English," he said. I took it as a sly compliment on the gentility of the game for a few minutes. Then I thought and put it in the context of this wily old man and realized this was unlikely to be the case.

  I left it alone.

  It was a great game. I was weak enough at the game to not even have to contemplate whether I should throw it. I could just enjoy the feeling as the ball rolled off your arm. I felt connected to great circles… not like I was forcing anything to go anywhere it didn't want to go.

  Old Shingu had a great time too. He had never expected to have such a merry English outing.

  Err, yes, he won. Possibly my subconscious was feeling political. And anyway there is no shame in being bad at Crown Green Bowls. In the pub after though, I did wish I didn't have to look at those smugly smiling dentures, loaded with cabbage. But then again, even if I had been holding the World Cup in my left hand, I wouldn't have liked to see that.

  We saw each other three more times on his trip. Feeding ducks, British museum, very romantic. The third time I received an invitation to eat at a Japanese restaurant that I knew to be so expensive that its name came up on the agenda of G7 meetings.

  I said 'fuck', and not because I expected to have to pay for the food and lose my house, but because the invitation was delivered to that very house, which was thought to be 'safe.'

  Over tea five minutes later, panic dying, I reflected that this situation, much like the word 'fuck', could be good or bad. I could not see into the event: it was like a mirrorball in my mind.

  I decided not to tell 'the gang' about the meeting. I headed out to catch the bus and there was a car waiting for me. That was the way the whole evening went.

  In a terribly empty and dark room at Manju, Shingu looked very different. His suit was funereal, his haircut so fresh that it was abstract, the diagram of a style.

  "Your group has an interesting way of doing business," he said.

  "With respect, we don't have much business… just a bundle of contradictory ideas."

  "Concerning this and that… concerning world peace and semtex explosives and free love… very interesting,"

  Sake sipped.

  "Also unlikely. Perhaps your screen is less effective against the religious mind. If one compares the various activities of your group against the interests of one man, your father Dr Harold Blake, then things start to look different."

  Well, I was very surprised by this development. I could not keep the word "inscrutable" from my mind. It pinged so many times it became meaningless, but then how much meaning does it have normally anyway? Who can you scrute… really truly scrute?

  In the midst of the noise of "inscrutable" consuming my mental bandwidth important thoughts struggled to be received. Had they worked out our big plan, did they know about the Big Machine?

  No think.. apocalypse… death ..inscrutable… don't be surprised… it is all there to be known… inscrutable.. think.

  "It appears that your group has lost faith in the Western Way. I discovered, I was surprised- such a young gentleman, if a little… relaxed - surprised that you have ties to terrorists all over Europe."

  I swigged down my sake hard. Acting was the most enjoyable part of my vocation.

  "Go on… " I said, unblinking, the terrified terrorist.

  "Then, and this was hard to find, so don't feel bad about it, your father's extensive research into augmenting conventional chemical weaponry with viral agents."

  Later talking to Dad, he was loving his whisky that night, he told me how many arguments he had had within the group about the wisdom of leaving that last nugget of info sufficiently exposed. His idea was that if you leave fifty pounds hanging out of your pocket they will never find the diamond hidden in your shoe. But if you are fast enough you will find them.

  After the call, I wondered how much I really knew about his plans. Was the destruction of the human race and midwifing of a new lifeform not even the end of his ambitions? I decided that it had to be, unless he planned to crack the planet in two and slay God. Y'know.

  ***

  "After I quit the SDF, I moved into security. But what was I securing? The majority of theft in Japan is in fact a form of accounting, moving assets beneath the paper.

  "I made elaborate plans for my company and recruited many men. The managers signed all the forms without looking at them. In fact they were scared to look at them… a suicide-inducing fact might stick to their eyes.

  "I bought an armored car, that I would drive around Hokkaido. I had fifteen ex-SDF men at my call. We would carry out terrorist actions on remote farms. Beating and terrifying innocent people. Then we would congratulate them on their part in the 'exercise' we were carrying out.

  "As long as I was back to work on Monday morning, everything was ok. I was unraveling reality and the rules and then winding it up again. I was on the elastic leash of a blind, corrupt society.

  "Have you read any of the master's books on quantum theory? Fascinating. A tiny particle can suddenly begin to exist… energy from nowhere, but doomed to return to nothingness within the heartbeat of the universe, which is also careless about what its children do.

  "One day I told my boss what I had been doing… how I had forced five members of the human resources department to take part in mock executions. He dropped to his knees and pledged his loyalty to my Master… his eternal loyalty. I had no idea who he was referring to and I decided that he didn't either. I decided that something in our society, this… blindness … was creating a space for a master. I was not that man, but I could be his deputy. Had to find him. Found him"

  ++++++++++++

  A few months later I was walking in Hyde Park. It was consistently cold : the violent fever of summer passed. I was now in fairly regular contact with Shingu. I was amazed that he hadn't found out about the Semantic Net and the Talking Doorknob and all of the real work of the group. But we threw up so much noise, and if part of your work is deadly germs people will assume that is your big thing, I suppose.

  The park was quite full, considering. Everyone had nothing to do except run around in the maze of their own minds.

  Shingu had been very forceful in courting us. We were quite cautious about accepting their overtures for us to get involved in their BC weapons 'testing.' Dad was strangely against it but Claire, in a series of e-mails from Nicaragua, was bringing him round.

  I had this strong feeling, as I walked through a land and an air that was so totally English I felt my upper lip stiffen just being there, that I would die in Japan. Certainly I would deserve to.

  Leaving the park I found myself at Speaker's Corner. This is the equivalent of the American nation's First Amendment… several wooden boxes with old and dirty men screaming unshocking opinions from the tops of them. I watched one man, whose thin face was thickened only by the exertions of his madness, impugn the royal family and also the phonetic alphabet.

  Stepping back I saw seven men shouting, no men listening and a huge dead stone arch of the empire. Later that night they would go home, eat steak and kidney pie then be back out here again, speaking. Meanwhile all the listeners were in front of TVs: repeating cycles of Soap Opera would deafen them as surely as tight screeching feedback loops of a rock concert.

  Not long after that night, the pact was made. We would be getting involved with a strike they were planning a couple of years down the line… their first strike. I called my Dad. It turned out that part of the deal was that I would be the agent on site. I said OK, but i wanted his opinion. Why would they strike so soon… wasn't it too early.. wouldn't they just be crushed by the government?

  His answer was that it would be rather boring if tha
t happened. He hoped the world was more inventive and complex than that. He expected that some of the secret veins of the world would be exposed and we would get a lot out of it, on top of our own manipulation of the gas. He told me to be careful. If I was caught by the authorities, everything would probably be OK, but if the cult found out my agenda they would kill me. Yeah yeah, I said.

  Time passed.

  One week before I flew out, Shingu moved to take over the cult's massive Russian faction. We pressed on anyway.

  So like I was saying , I was arrested on Shibamata Kaido on my heavy red bike with a bag of onions in the baby seat. A little policeman ran behind me, blowing a whistle. In retrospect I should have kept pedaling. People died in part because I stopped.

  The police took me into a little room and asked me all sorts of questions in Japanese. I knew they were questions because the sentences ended in "ka." I used various shrugs and other gestures to try and create a picture of a kind but confused foreigner.

  After a while, they used a series of "baby" gestures and it clicked that they assumed I had stolen a mother and child's only means of transportation.

  As I walked home from the station I wondered how many crimes bigger than mine had been 'pardoned' because dinner-time was approaching.

  At five p.m. everyday a big gong was sounded over Shibamata/Koiwa. That was when I was released, just before the bell rang. Who knows what monsters got to roam the streets underneath the bell.

  ++++++

  "I do believe. I do.

  "But I would do it anyway."

  Chapter 23

  The walk is longer than the bike ride. I walk by the river to make it more fun and I either see the silhouette of Mount Fuji or an arrogant flume of industrial pollution taunting us. Again, I marvel at the city, even though it is webbed with overhead cables that just scream "third world."

  An apparent oddity : surely no one knows how the billion shoestrings above us relate together, but it still works. How has man made so many things that "just work" in such a manner?

  I get back to Koiwa and everything is blood red. I want to get home before it gets dark and I am sucked into the seedy world of the Yakuza, although I am tempted to get sucked into certain aspects of that seedy world. Ever since Mayumi moved in a couple of days ago I have been unusually (and somewhat locally) … tense.

  Yeah, Mayumi moved in. Apparently, we needed some muscle. It is true that only Honda had muscles before she arrived. No one objected. I thought it was strange: I wondered if it had anything to do with what she told Maruhashi after our little fling on the yacht.

  She moves around like a cat. Always that weight of a small pistol anchors her. Otherwise she would move like a sine wave or a sea-snake. Her face is so emotionless at all times and her eyes so masked by the colorless way they capture all the light in the room that she cannot be looked at because you know you are inventing her and aiding her in her disguise as you try and divine her thoughts, wishes, needs. I'm not making this up or exaggerating. Even now I have seen her in her pajamas eating a rice ball she still seems fictional to me.

  The pajamas even had penguins on them for Christ's sake.

  For some reason, I do not want to enter the door beneath the still glowing "Tele-Club" sign when I finally get home. I stare up at the semi-symbolic woman-curves up there and wonder about all the men who came here, looking for young girls that they had already tested on the phone and I think of all the people in the chat rooms on the net shifting between various levels of reality in their minds, choosing which parts of their flesh to digitize and which to leave behind and graft fiction into. And I think of all the parts they leave behind in the system when they go to bed: all the spare parts for anyone who wanted their own human race.

  The fictionality of the human race was to be its downfall. Anytime it extended outside of its own head it was writing a story and had written that story so often that no one would notice when the reruns started. Some lifeforms could not be written out of their own history, but we could. For me, Australia was a vast fiction, so was almost everything.

  For a vast information organism, infinitely connected and whose senses were not hard wired, only the stars were fiction. Every moment would be truth.

  Heady thoughts : religious thoughts I knew. Be killed by your own god, Shingu had said. But if you gave birth to him first… wouldn't that be a beautiful and natural thing.

  I can now definitely not go upstairs, all ecstatic. So I go, for the first time in the two months I have been here, into the coffee shop on the ground floor. Home of Honda's mutants.

  A middle aged man and woman, both in pale yellow shirts, busying themselves about the coffee-making machinery. They vaguely resemble each other and also bees at work. I plant myself at a table (one of four) more toward the back of the shop.

  The woman, face soft round and happy, comes over and I point at a frothy coffee on the picture menu and say "Kore o kudasai"

  After a while, in the silence of the coffee shop, nearing sleep, I realize that they are mutes. A few minutes later, when I hear a feeble pounding on the wall from the captive family that I think about less and less as time goes by, I decide that they are deaf-mute.

  While I was there drinking coffee for no particular reason, something critical happened. I should mention also that tomorrow was to be the day when the chemist brought around his first batch of gas components and I added my own magic touch to it. So my credibility was very much in the forefront of everyone's mind.

  Junko, Honda, Mayumi, Benny and Yosuke were all on the upper two levels. No one was with the family.

  Here is what I believe happened.

  In the streets outside, a policeman, a thin middle-aged man, was walking past our front door. He whistled as he walked. Something stopped him and he spent a minute in front of our door. His brow furrowed, he looked down at his watch and then he opened the door. Japanese policeman wander around alone a lot because nothing bad ever happens to them. Except when it does.

  He slowly padded up the stairs, and pulled a small package from under his jacket. Sweat beaded up on his thin, cheekboney face. His steps were light but hesitant. In her bedroom, which I had yet to visit, Mayumi was polishing her guns or fingernails. She was a woman who had listened to many men skulking around in her lifetime and had always had to react. Maruhashi had found her on a trip to Osaka… she was only eighteen then. He had wanted sex and had seen her hanging around the nightclub he'd had himself taken to. She was a dirty punk girl then with pink hair. He had noticed that almost every man in the bar had bought her a drink and she had taken one swig from each and then moved along. He wanted her dirty mouth. He sent one of his men to pick her up but he had been vaguely rude and ended up with a bottle cracked over his head. When the bodyguard returned, scabbed to the neck, Maruhashi had the further bad news that this crazy girl, who he would later find out had been national youth Aikido champion at one time, now had both a grudge against him and a gun from him. All the sex could have gone out of the evening for some men at that point, but not Maruhashi. That would have been against his rules of what a Maruhashi was like. Instead he savored every moment of her slow approach across the parking lot. He didn't move because he was busy spinning the jukebox of his mind to find the perfect soundtrack for her slow leggy walk through pools of light which somehow could not touch her face. Shadows stretched from under her breasts then disappeared as she passed under each light, their throb was like the equalizer on his Bang and Olufsen. Something from "Massive Attack : Protection" was what the shadows brought to his mind.

  Gun nowhere to be seen she leaned against his now open car window. "I wanna job" she said and she got one.

  Since then, five years, she had done some amazing things: violent, sexual, religious… the big three. But very often it came down to listening for footsteps and acting accordingly. She got up and left her room as silently as all her training allowed. Her tiny feet made her a natural for stealth and she moved down the stairs. She saw the policeman and moved
towards him as she weighed up her options. He was about to enter the front room, which she felt would be messy. A gunshot would shatter the safe-house's facade and this just the day before things began in earnest for both the Master and Maruhashi's plans (and the Englishman's !)

  As he put his hand on the door knob, she smashed her knuckles into his temple.

  All the psychos in the living room practically shat themselves when the policeman fell through the slapping open door. Yes, even Honda, who almost choked on his noodles. I missed that unfortunately.

  Yosuke leapt up and pulled out his gun and was about to shoot the cop until he saw Mayumi's finger pressed to her pursed lips. Her mouth seemed to be just inches from his eyes. He could not help but obey.

  Benny ran around frantically, looking out of every window, half-expecting to be shot between the eyes but not noticing. That was how he always felt and had done ever since atoms themselves drove him mad. If you are driven mad by atoms you have nowhere to go and nothing but fear. I should have been more sympathetic to him. But then, given what he was shortly to do to me, perhaps not.

  Junko ran downstairs. She entered the room where the family were ankle chained and leveled an Uzi at them. Even the girl was beyond crying at this and even Junko was beyond crying at it.

  In the shop, I sipped coffee and hummed along to the faint Chinese pop songs that I had been learning from the karaoke shop nearby.

  Honda and Mayumi pulled the cop indoors. Then they both practically tripped over each other assuming the best tactical position for covering the door. Honda resented Mayumi immensely at that point when their relationship was crystallized by the act of trying to occupy the same space at the same time. Reflecting later this would start him thinking about Maruhashi's status in the organization: did he plan to occupy the Master's space? Were they matter and anti-matter?

  Now though he simply decided to take the rash offensive, against his nature, and he barreled down the stairs to stand immediately behind the door into a position that created a cone of solid death. Two large, identical semi-automatics extended his arms; expressed his natural violence perfectly. His eyes hollowed and he concentrated on the correct death… the one that would be measured as the first step of the apocalypse and the revealing of the secret master of Japan. That was his objective, to end the hypocrisy and personify the true spirit of his nation. As Godzilla personified 50s Japan (this is my own sacrilegious take on the matter,) a post-radioactive monster that was forced to take over the world against its wishes, so Samsara was the spirit of modern Japan: a nation whose every social act implied the Other, the God king to underpin all of the various bowings. Also a nation that had always drawn its religion from its environment and whose old environment was gone. The new environment was a vast machine of stolen truths that were on the verge of being made universal. Gnosis was necessary - mysticism, occult: the power of truth is like diamonds - dependent upon a cartel of rarity.