Tokyo Zero

by Marc Horne

  "We have a situation boys… I have written it down on these cards." She gave them little business cards. "No hurry… things are at the bottom already. Wait till it gets dark and these people you have to teach can say 'thrilled' and then come over. Be ready to get dirty."

  We walked out then and she had to stop, burdened momentarily by her pure-sexual flesh. "Bad dirty," she added.

  The two men sniggered. I could see that she regretted the way she was for a second.

  We left and strolled through a hall of mirrors. But actually it was a dense hive of glass cubes with very similar teachers teaching very similar students.

  I had to go to the toilet, and was given permission. The teachers were all men, and all brutal and tanned and somewhat scarred. On the way to the toilet, I passed several supply rooms… with metal doors, and hand scanners. On the way back I reflected that I knew bullet proof glass when I saw it, and that all of those little cubes were made of it. And those slots were not necessary for ventilation. And I saw a little brochure about the Avon Schools and a very familiar, very urbane, face wrote the introduction.

  Back outside… not talking but walking in sync. As in sync as a round thing and a square thing (our walks) can get.

  All around me were neon signs, and I had lost some of my illiterate immunity to them. I could see scratches of meaning in them. They all began as cracks in bones in ancient Chinese rituals. Now I was seeing them as cracks in the city. Some meaning came out… odd sounds. It is probably inevitable that a partially understood language seems like desire.

  I peeked over at Mayumi. Several months into this adventure, and everyone I knew was some kind of enigma. They all spoke in short terse phrases and secrets were there way of life. I did not consider any of them typical of the Japanese nation in their manner, but only in their intentions.

  "Avon… " I said. "There is an Avon school at every station in Tokyo. Full of harmless foreigners. And the day I met you… Honda went to Avon headquarters."

  She looked up with a genuine smile. My first steps: so cute.

  "Maruhashi owns them all… that is part of why he is so rich. Or maybe not… maybe they came later. A good way to get visas for an army of foreign mercenaries… his back up plan in case he is betrayed by Samsara."

  Still smiling she said "… or something like that."

  "Right, I shouldn't worry about the specifics… I'll be shot in the head before the Avon teachers storm the Diet building. Right?"

  She pulled me very close and then planted a strong kiss on me. Ripples of shock in the semi-crowded street.

  "Honey… I will make sure you don't hurt."

  Not Get hurt? Or Not Feel A Thing. Despite my microfiber shirt and tie (I hoped they did not melt together) I had no urge to parse her grammar.

  We moved toward the train line and back to the bad part of town. Two drunken businessmen staggered up the street a hundred meters ahead. They were in the shadow of the bridge but I could see them. Judging by their ages and suits I decided one was the boss and the other his junior. They supported each other as they walked and a certain good natured bouncing against each other like a weak wrestling was taking place. Both men laughed. Suddenly the younger man made a grab for the crotch of the older who was able to twist out of the way. The old man managed to get a laugh out but the young man didn't . His concentration was intense… he made another grab and then another for the older man's sex organs and his hand was palm up and needing. There was a brief stroke, a very long pause and then the older man flung himself back and arranged his loud words with military precision and fury, bending the young man forwards with their force and folding him in on himself. At which point, he vomited over his senior's shoes. We passed it by and in my passing they were frozen into a tableau that I could imagine no escape from. I didn't look back… it was hard to be in other people's lives.

  At the corner near our house she stopped and we kissed again. What was this? Love? I believed that the dead policeman was the priest of our short marriage. I invited her to eat some noodles across the street from the den and she agreed. We slurped them by the glass and peacefully watched the mute people very much like we would watch a fish tank. We could share their silence through glass and distance. That does funny things to time. Before too long the mutes were suddenly gone, like the light that filled the room just a microsecond before you flipped the switch. The two Avon boys strolled up. I looked at Mayumi on the stool in the little pink outfit that had an explanation that I had forgotten to seek out. She hardened inside it as I watched. She moved to the door without a word. I had to stay and pay the bill. I watched her cross the street and wondered which of us would die first and how much time would separate that.

  Very strange dark green feelings bubbled up in me. I got up and went over, maybe five minutes later. The two Avon boys burst out of the door singing "Girls and Boys" and supporting their so drunk friend in the baseball cap and trench coat who just reeked of Lemon Chu Hi and Pink Shawa Shawa. They all tumbled down the road… down to the river. The boys were loving the singing.

  I hope that was Pink Shawa Shawa I was smelling. The smell of a dead man usually kept me awake once I got it on me.

  I walked through the living room. Everyone was tired and going to bed one by one. Benny watched Sumo digest. I was tempted but didn't. Sumo Digest was the nearest thing to real TV I had found in Japan… a think suspension jelly - real TV.

  I went downstairs to talk to the lawyer. Because the law, and the police were things that interested me very much.

  Chapter 25

  Mizukami: The Lawyer. Age thirty-five or so. Large glasses full of light like lava lamps. When he was wearing them, that is. Sometimes I came in and found them lying in the corner, full of slap.

  His hair was salt and pepper and kind of wild… quiffed up like filmmaker David Lynch. His face was square but soft in the cheeks. He was a little stumpy. Depending on what had happened to him before I came in, he had varying degrees of silent calm and silent resignation. He had a nice smile, and I could tell that he had always been the type to look at the floor when you talked to him… even before.

  The wife was a monstrosity. And a Frankenstein: man made. She had been a captive for a long time and many different games had been played with her. This was why I thought she had that look on her face: unveiled hate. She did not even have the luxury of identifying with her kidnappers because she had had so many and no one was totally sure why they still had her. To be an arbitrary victim is sometimes the worst: you know they don't hate you but you wake up most mornings with blood in your mouth anyway. She was about thirty but could have been born any time in the last then thousand years of human 'culture.' She was a small woman.

  The daughter was about ten and had been in captivity for a long time. It was deforming her. I stroked her hair as I came into the room and a lot of it came free. Tears filled my eyes and I looked at the wall, the latest of her walls. The room quivered for a second. What was I doing down here? Was I about to go crazy again? No, I was focusing. This was why… why it all had to end. Thoughts and flesh don't mix. Crazy chimp brains full of hate are not fit to be the carriers of gods. Just a compromise, a spawning place. Nice and warm, virulent in nature itself. Opening my eyes, looking at the wall ,dreaming of a silent earth, dry of tears but still with music and cool thought to make it hum in the throne of stars.

  I wished she would stop sniffing.

  I turned to Dad and pulled up a chair in front of him. He masked his feelings well: meaningless blinks.

  "I believe you speak English, Mr Mizukami?"

  "Yes… I speak English."

  "Do you know who I am?"

  "They call you… the Englishman. They say you are here with … medical information. Special information."

  "That's me. I came to your house… that night."

  "I know… I saw your blue eyes under the… "

  "Mask," I offered

  "Yes."

  "Do you know why we took you?"

  "Y
es… I do."

  "She told you."

  "Who… I… "

  "No one can hear… relax. She and I … we are on the same side… same team. She told you what was going to happen. And she also gave you instructions. She had a message from her boss… what was the message."

  "I'm sorry… I … no."

  "I have one idea. She told you that if you watched everything these people said and did… and reported it back to her that she would make sure you survived… they didn't kill you."

  "No."

  "Well that was just a guess. I don't really know what she told you. Wait, maybe she told you not to say something. Keep a secret : is that it?"

  "A… a secret. Sorry. A secret."

  "About Maruhashi? His army? Do you know something, Mr Mizukami."

  "You won't kill me. I'm sorry to be rude. But I know. So I won't tell you. Also… my loyalty is to the Master."

  "What… what are you TALKING about."

  I jumped to my feet. "What are you fucking… I'm… have you seen your daughter? She has green skin!!!" I surrendered to dramatic gestures to illustrate this.

  "Wait… who is the Master? Samsara? Maruhashi?"

  He hung his head.

  "It doesn't matter," he said.

  "You will all die down here," I said coldly and, yes, cruelly. "And your master… one of them… will kill everyone he can and then he will try and take over the world and he will fail. And orphans will rebuild the world again. The same world."

  I headed up the stairs. His daughter cried and I felt quite shitty. He was rambling about being tested. And then that a the bad ones would be cleaned out by the good ones. The usual stuff.

  I dreamt of the cleaned-out world again.

  It is like a blue egg. The vastness of space, its emptiness, protects it from the vast forces that roam the universe. A shell of pure vacuum.

  Birds still fly around… all manner of biological arms races are played out. Weather is not what it used to be, it is harnessed now and more predictable. But it would seem horrifying to humans from time to time. Great vents of heat moving through canyons, crackling with thunder.

  All around the planet the best of the humans survives. Dreams of love, mathematical visions. All events are remembered. The machine reads Shakespeare infinitely and, like backwards monkeys, will eventually understand it. Who knows how long it will take for it to wake the earth, shed its metal skin and circuits and get ready to make the next leap that we can't really imagine.

  If it loses love, becomes pure thought then we have failed. But if love came from the dirt once, it can come from our graves. It is the flower of the universe and it is waiting to bloom.

  I am smashed on the head with tremendous force half way up the stairs and my consciousness shatters.

  Chapter 26

  My body is free at last and the first thing it does is live out a childhood cowboy fantasy and just plain tumbles down to the bottom of the stairs.

  The stairs are sharp, hard and they tag me with purple lines that normally would matter.

  Nothing is broken. I lie at the bottom, not too badly contorted. He leers down at me, happy at last. Benny Odajima's pitted face lives up to the moment: inches below a naked bulb he is General Noriega in a film noir. He is panting with a post adrenal rush. It is not clear to him whether I am dead or alive.

  He comes down the stairs, scared that I will jump up and stab him in the eye or similar. When he gets to the bottom, he finds he had no cause to fear… I am stone cold unconscious. His gentle slaps disturb me not a bit. Nor his less gentle slaps. His kick, even.

  My body is hefted onto his shoulder. He has a surprising strength for a medium-sized Japanese man. Something about him suggests he is made out of a single solid substance… animated dog food: so maybe he is like one big muscle.

  At the top of the stairs, he pauses and my arms swing together: pendulums counting down to something horrible for me. He's listening to make sure no-one has come back into the living room. Satisfied, he passes through the living room where I have eaten so many bowls of Charlie Browns with my unconscious form his burden.

  Earlier, elaborate precautions were taken to remove a dead body from our house but now Benny walks out the front door without a care in the world. The joy of action is on him. He has always known I am a traitor, and my conversation with the lawyer has confirmed that. Now he is a cult of one and will live with it.

  I am carried down the neon street I love with all the pretty prostitutes playing around and all the shadowed men doing their various things. I get pink, I get blue, I get green. Yet fundamentally I am invisible. Perhaps because I have always been implausible.

  It doesn't take long to get to the station: this is Tokyo after all. It is midnight and everyone is heading for the last train. So are we it seems.

  The track is elevated in Koiwa, but Benny knows his way around. We walk down towards Repo's Bar. Repo's is a charming bar with a US theme and a huge gorilla on its yellow exterior.It also has a huge collection of Country records by the American wrestler Terry Funk that came from somewhere in the past.

  This is a quieter part of town and very close to where a road goes under the train tracks. He puts me down in a little shadowed section that would house a homeless man in most societies. I sleep in his stead while Odajima smokes a cigarette. Repo's bar is slowly emptying out. It is barely an hour since I walked back from the Avon school with Mayumi and I am close to death: He is smoking.

  Benny's strength returns. He stands for a while longer. Quite possibly I am some sacrificial lamb in his mind. We are only two weeks away from the apocalypse, after all.

  He walks over to the locked gate at the foot of the iron staircase that has pictures of people dying in various ways all over it and he pulls a little tool from his pocket and has unlocked the gate in no time at all. He comes back for me and then we are on our way again. It is surprising that I am still unconscious but I am not even twitching. Am I dead? Benny checks again and finds out I am alive: continues to climb.

  He emerges next to the tracks. The station is a blaze of light. The platform is only ten feet away and if anyone looked down they would see us. So he hangs back from the tracks, below the platform practically; like a troll or a … shit .. I dunno… a tengu?

  He listens. The station is talking. It says He smiles. Puts me down on the tracks and leaves, feeling superhumanly strong now that I am gone.

  He has spread me out so that I will be cut up nicely. The tracks are not electrified. They are very cold and hard and will be knives very soon. My body does not feel the cold. It feels nothing. It is in fact "the" body… not my body. It belongs to no one now that Benny has abandoned it.

  At fifty miles an hour the train comes into the station. Its brakes squeal… emergency brakes. The train is trying to stop… it is trying not to kill. But it is too late. Screams under the squeal. The train slices through flesh and bone as if it were meant to. The first drop of blood lands on my face.

  Chapter 27

  I woke up alive. I would've sighed with relief if I had known what had just happened to me. But I didn't know.

  Aching everywhere, I made a feeble attempt to sit up. A room was appearing out of gray fog and lack of focus. It was… very Japanese. I laughed at that act of genius my mind had made. I was punished by stabbing pains that started in my brain and short-cut everywhere.

  I forced my eyes open and was at least able to move them around; swirling around in their dry sockets they became fairly sure that I was in one of Tetsuo's private rooms. All was quiet within and without the paper walls around me.

  "You keep bad company," he said in his white suit with little pink smears: Tetsuo crouched in the corner, fairly coiled and in sunglasses.

  "I'm sorry… " I croaked.

  "You should be sorry!" he barked. I was worried. I had been planning to say "I'm sorry, but what the hell is going on?" Now I had learned that I had done something bad. He was playing with
a little knife that seemed able to catch the light that was coming from nowhere in particular and then stick it in your eye.

  "I am… I… what happened?"

  "Someone tried to kill you."

  When he said that, my nose received the little nudge it had been waiting for. It recognized blood in the air.

  "Not you?"

  He laughed and threw his knife in my direction so it stuck in the mat. Too fast to bother me.

  "Crazy Gaijin!!!" he laughed and laughed. "Your other friends did it… the cult."

  "You know about that?"

  "I do."

  "Do the … erm.. is Yakuza polite or rude… I don't know… do they know?"

  "Call them the family. I don't know if they know. I doubt." He stood up and walked once about the room. "But aren't you curious. At least I would say 'Hey man… who is this fucking blood, man?' Hah hahah ah!!!"

  I looked down and saw that there were three narrow jets of blood across me, like vampire cowboys had been using me as a spittoon.

  I sat up a little.

  "Good point. Who is this fucking blood, man?" We laughed hard for a minute. Occasionally my people had wondered if there would be humor in the future. Opinion was divided on whether humor was one of those irrationalities of the monkey brain or desirable meta-thought. It felt good now to laugh even though it hurt: that was my opinion.

  "So Manuela… you know her? She knows you. Tall girl from Phillipines… really a man? Anyway, she sees someone carrying you down street and I guess we're not giving her enough drugs because she is straight enough to care about a thing like that and she comes and tells me.

  "So maybe I need to start taking drugs again because I stupid enough to follow you. I know where he is taking you, I think. The station. When I get there, on the … platform I start looking around for you then I'm thinking 'Baka yaro! Why would he bring a body in the train station… you crazy?' But then I think 'Yeah crazy but he's crazy too… I know he is here.' Just I think that I see you all on the train tracks. Shit! What to do. No way am I fucking go down there, man. Shit on that! Sorry man"