by Marc Horne
Chapter 33
Possibly the most important thing that happened during my time in Japan is also one of the least important things.
I was out jogging around the grounds, inside a cool medieval looking wall, when I saw a phalanx of limos head in with little flags waving on them. They looked like red eyes glaring at me. A tiny man in a nice gray suit got out and even Maruhashi bowed. I was struck by the slickness of the little man's hair and the great effort he was making not to bow lower … like he had just attained his new rank. They communicated him inside.
That night I watched Sumo Digest in my room. Then I went to BBC World. I caught the end of a piece about the man I had seen, about his being the Prime Minister of Japan and about his slipping into a coma. "It is expected that M__ K__ will be replaced after slipping into an irreversible coma."
British and Japanese understated had merged into something quite amusing in that phrase I thought to myself.
And once I had finished congratulating myself on that smart-arsery, I realized that everything I was doing was real.
The next day I saw Yosuke and Junko across the courtyard and I waved at them. They feebly waved back. It was a nice warm morning. Jogging I remembered yesterday and wondered why they had killed the Prime Minister.
Another Phalanx of cars came in through the gate. A more virile and taller man went through the same motions as the day before. I was gripped by a sensation that was not deja vu. It was vuja de. I actually had seen this before…
I watched Sumo Digest. For a laugh I went to BBC news. The new Prime Minister had suffered a heart attack and would probably not last the night.
I wandered out of my room. I could hear Maruhashi smashing things and cursing.
I walked to the large abstract room, mainly glass in which he was refracted. Sato had his arms crossed impatiently. They both looked at me: Sato said "Coincidence Mr Blake. These thing happen. The boss is a religious man and hence hates omens,"
"No fucking way… "
"These things happen… that's why it is best to stay away from politicians"
Looking back I believe it truly was coincidence, unless my already convoluted plot was part of something much bigger that I don't know about. Which is what a lot of books written after the event would have you believe ("My Tokyo Death Cult, 2001" is the worst example… all crap… all of it.)
Chapter 34
She was in my bed again when I woke up. Smiling in her sleep. An excellent argument for the opacity of the human head are her no doubt crazy dreams.
I wake her up "Hey, Mayumi, wake up."
She wakes up and says (in Japanese) 'Who's Mayumi?' : I don't need to push that one.
"Mayumi, by which I mean you. Where are we going today? Who's coming?"
"Some village. Somewhere. You, me, Sato, Honda, The Boss, some … people I guess. A small group of … people."
The way she said 'people.' Not dismissive exactly: more forgetful.
Then she added "And the gas." Then she rolled on top of me.
Sex.
Afterwards she told me she finally liked me. She said she hoped I stuck around in the new Japan. I should stay and be a shogun to the daimyo. She told me that she might have to kill herself when it was done, but if she didn't that we should get married. Maruhashi didn't mind, she told me. In two odd minutes she said more to me than she had at all before. I got the impression she didn't know she was awake.
"How much do you know about his plan?"
"I know I have to get the Avon 'teachers' together and show them the best places to loot. And make sure they get on TV. Unless I am dead from our gas thing."
"Why?"
"Foreigners going crazy… and you too… will be a good argument for… army law?"
"Martial law."
"Martian Law."
_____________
Two Mercs drove out of the compound; saluted by overdone security guards. A big sun trembled up over the horizon, obviously horrified to discover what the humans had been up to in his absence.
The countryside unfolded, pushing trees up and down, mountains up and down.
It was good to see Honda again. We smiled at each other for a while. I don't know why I liked him. He was definitely the kind of scum I was pledged to wipe out… a supremacist. On the other hand he was a victim too. He wanted religious things. His illness was being abused.
He looked well. I think he had not been that badly hurt the other night.
"Sorry, Mr Blake. About Benny."
"No problem, mate, no problem. Not your fault. So… what do you think about this new safe-house."
"Not the master's style. A little dangerous I think, to get Mr Maruhashi involved. But it is his decision.
"So, today we test your gas?"
Yes. I knew that. I expected that : the test. Dad had warned me about that. Told me not to lose faith. To be strong as they choked. To imagine the world with me never having been here, but with that still happening. We had courses on that. It is fairly easy. The first lesson involves setting mousetraps. It ends up with you watching neo-Nazis kill someone you know. Well it doesn't end there. It ends with everyone in the world happily gone. I had this urge to explain myself. I decided that I would tell Tetsuo the Yakuza the whole story next time I saw him. He was crazy enough to get it. Not that I expected him to agree… he was fairly down to earth.
A Japanese village materialized. Made of metal and concrete and tiny fields. It seemed a cold place. Old refrigerators littered the place. All the life of the place went to the cities. They had special dances. They were largely ignored. Taken for granted. The cars pulled up in the rear of a farmhouse made of wood on the far edge of the town. From the other SUV, two young men left with canisters like lunch boxes that contain tiny mechanisms to release the gas.
I was there, Honda, and Maruhashi and Sato had come too. It was cooler up here in the mountains.
"Hey, Maruhashi-san… is this a cult village… do they all have the thought helmets on."
He laughed like he had seen it all in his time, and through the refraction of a fancy cocktail as unique as a fingerprint : "No no dear chap, they are far away from here. This is real people."
"Is the lawyer dead?"
"It is very strange that you should ask that. He is in that house there, waiting for me to telephone him." The boxes were in position. It was still dim: we had twenty minutes before the sun actually came up.
I looked at Honda. Something remarkable was happening to his face. It appeared to be beating itself, trying to leap off his skull. His eyes burned through Maruhashi, who didn't notice.
Hissing came from far away.
I felt excited and scared. I had substituted the real gas with a fake gas that would make the people in the house, the Mizukamis, very, very sick and infected but not kill them. Then we would go back to the drawing board back at the lab and kill some rats and feel better. But we were so close to the deadline that they would not do another test. I thought I could pull it off and congratulated myself. Because as you must have worked out by now I was not going to release an extremely fatal gas in the train station if I could avoid it and still get my job done (although I expected some fatalities.)
Raising an eyebrow very slightly Maruhashi said "Sato.. I really shouldn't be so rude, should I?" and he pulled out his cell-phone.
Knowing the lawyer, he would answer even as my weakened but very nasty gas flooded his lungs and I couldn't wait to see Maruhashi's surprised face as the subservient victim conversed through his vomits.
He didn't answer. Ever. And ten minutes later little tissue samples were being hacked off his family inside their house and they were burned to the ground. In the SUV the calmness of Honda's face blazed through the turmoil and guilt of my mind. I had fucked up so badly. The little lumps of flesh were in the other car, and the plume of oily smoke was far behind us and no-one was congratulating me but I felt in hell.
Chapter 35
We drove quite briskly. I was getting over it, a l
ittle. An easily enough made mistake.
But no, I wasn't getting over it.
Honda was sitting opposite Maruhashi and me, on a pull-down seat that allowed him to see were we had been. He was thinking.
"Maruhashi, do you mind if we speak English?" he asked.
Maruhashi crossed his legs and smiled like a chess player in a movie when some young upstart makes a move. In reality they get a pissy look on their face. I used to play chess with Claire's dad a lot. I was getting fairly good at it and he was getting increasingly aggressive toward me. Once, I started a move then saw a bulge in his head, almost as if there was a very fine fishing line tied around my rook and hooked to his temple. As I lifted, it lifted.
So of course I put it down before I heard it rip. And he shouted "Make your bloody move you little git… don't sodding insult me!"
I ran away almost crying, despite actually being too old for that. Over the following months Blythe developed a really good chess program. In all likelihood we exchanged less than a hundred words in the years that followed beta 2 of B.A.S.T.A.R.D. (Blythe's Advanced Stochastic Technology for the Advancement of Rational Development.) I had been obsoleted.
When B.A.S.T.A.R.D. was running well I got a lot of free time to wander around the English countryside. Strangely, I appreciated it. Not in some William Wordsworth way: I knew daisies, roses and maybe tulips but no other flower names. I looked at mushrooms in horror. But I appreciated that when the sun came down on the river and it was quiet and even the insects seemed to have time on their hands, I was in a special place.
I sometimes went out with Claire, sometimes not. About the time B.A.S.T.A.R.D. came out, we weren't hanging out as much. She was going through a Goth phase that I couldn't keep pace with. We would sit out on the patio, she all in black and white like a photo, and her mind would race through the meaninglessness of life and my mind would still be struggling with the meaningfulness of it and I couldn't keep up with her.
"Yeah… let's get it all over with… all the violence and the hatred. All the fucking rules."
Yeah… the rules… the laws… the freedom of the mind… the dreams that are half our life… even when we sleep in a ditch… no the pain… the death camps… "Yeah… those rules!"
"Let's just drop the bomb. I can't handle all this… ugliness. I was in Brighton outside the Pavilion. The sun was going down and the dome went all peach. It was amazing. And then I smelt piss… and I couldn't even tell where it was coming from. Like God was pissing on me. Life is ugly, Billy."
I should mention that she was only a Goth for three months. Then she came back fair and beautiful, her winter over. But that was always beneath the surface with her. She was political in a humanist sense. She judged politically, not cosmically like the rest of our little family. She felt that human goals could actually be achieved by human beings, she rejected that monkey brains were unsuitable for creating heaven on earth, hosting angelic rationalities. That is to say she rejected most of our basic rules. I knew that, but Dad and her dad kidded themselves about her. And it is true she still joined in all our games… pushing our software on unwilling net developers by means of a tight t-shirt, spying on Russian mafiosi, etc. I felt that she yet planned to hijack our game and make it something more realistic. In her eyes, which were big and blue, apocalyptic seeds were untraceable.
During the Goth period I went for a walk across fields and hills reading Jorge Luis Borges. Christ… sitting in that car, feeling that Honda was about to start some deadly shit, I treasured what may have been the happiest hours of my life. My brain had been popping with ideas that seemed to preexist the language that incarnated them or the human figures that momentarily moved around the true structure-inhabitants of the universe. The permutations, mazes, books, thinking machines, thoughts clashing for dominance of the field of events, and hence creating the circle of reality.
I sat down and thought about Blythe and my Dad. Blythe had been a plastic surgeon. He had spent his days cutting noses off and putting most of them back on. Or pulling back the mask of the human face and putting it back on an inch higher.
Then suddenly he was obsessed with Turing machines, with circuits, with infinite networks. What was the connection between the two Blythes?
It became clear to me that it was a loathing for the imperfections for the flesh. You pulled back the mask of the face and saw the terrible clockwork within. And it was a bloody accidental mess and also the most incredible mechanism. You could practically see the brain. But you could never see the thoughts.
Then my father. Geneticist turned … destroyer? On the two sides of my mother's death were two worlds.
One was tolerant of the march of the genes, selfishly replicating. And that was nice and then you closed the book and went and gave her a kiss on the head and played with the baby.
On the other side of her death was a stalled paradise. Ideas that came from vast truths (such as love and god) filtering up and down in the universe, bursting from slime but getting stalled in the monkey minds of the human race. The ideas would race around the world conversing and mating but outside the libraries you could often see mass graves. Monkeys were increasingly out-of-date hardware.
"Not at all," said Maruhashi. "In fact, it's probably a good idea. The Japanese language wouldn't suit the… challenge I see in your face."
Honda bowed an inch. It looked like a nod but I am pretty sure it was a bow of thanks.
"Your killing of the lawyer, when we were under instructions to keep him alive…
"Your sending your spy among us…
"Your testing of Mr Blake…
"What I have found out about Mr Sato's connections to the Japanese army…
"The probable death of Shingu-sama…
"These and other things tell me that you are planning to destroy the religious purity of our mission. I believe that the lawyer knew about something I had heard rumored… your obtaining visas for hundreds of wanted international criminals, who are placed at your English Schools… yes.. I believe that now. And those schools are at every major station, near every major police station and army base.
"I know a revolution when I see one."
"I see… and when did you work all this out?"
"Mr Blake told me a lot in his sleep. The walls are thin. He has interesting ideas, but also many strange paranoid dreams. Empty worlds with machines… so I was not sure what to believe until now."
Maruhashi swallowed hard. "Dreams… indeed… Mr Honda."
He sipped a gin.
"And what do you plan to do?"
The door opened. The road whizzed by at eighty mph. Honda was on the road at eighty mph. He had a hundred arms and legs and no clear form, like rotor blades. The door slammed shut. We looked out at his rolling body. Not far behind it was a police car.
"Fuck!" said our car.
Chapter 36
Maruhashi barked at his driver to go faster. Honda's body slowed in its tumble. The cop car hit the brakes and it wriggled around like its tires were about to fall off. I don't think it hit Honda but we had lost them so I am not sure.
Maruhashi picked up his cell-phone with urgency. Then he looked at it in his hand like a viper. Then he looked at the air around him and the electromagnetic web he was snared in and threw the phone down. Then he curled over and looked out of the window… really just hiding his face was all.
He felt vulnerable. So rich and so vulnerable. If he extended his hand he could practically reach the new world where he was king. But it was just out of reach, the kind of distance that only the metric system can express with sufficient eloquence.
How did I feel? It was a complex picture. I was washed with blue from the gas, then stunned black from Honda's likely death, then all kinds of pictures of my future fate faded in and out.
We raced back to near Tokyo. I think the car must have had spikes or saw blades coming out of the tires cause we just sliced through the traffic. Maruhashi cheered up when we got within sight of his fence.
"Mr Blake… what do you think about the last few days… all the setbacks?" he asked me with a strange hope or something like it in his voice.
"Hard to say. It's going to be hard to get all the stuff placed correctly without Honda… he is our expert on air currents, as you know.
"But you know… I think we'll be OK unless the army comes and gets us within the next couple of hours."
He thought for a while as the huge gates filtered us into his compound.
"Good point… the army is with us… and they can stop the police."
"So the army IS with you?"
He giggled.
"Oh… well… yes. Well, Sato has a lot of contacts at the key barracks. As long as we leave the Emperor alone they think a bit of Martial Law would be just the trick.. especially with the recession and all. They all have the immunizations necessary. They are looking forward to it, I think."
Yes, I bet they are. That smell has not been here for more than fifty years. The smell of prehistory, as reassuring as the smell of your own pillow with all of last night's dreams smeared on it. The smell of total fucking carnage.
The army don't come. Maruhashi, Mayumi and I wait for them by the swimming pool. Mayumi is in a sensible black one-piece. I am wearing an ugly pair of shorts (or rather making a pair of shorts ugly by my decision to wear them… an unfortunate aspect of my life)
Mayumi's chair is between where Maruhashi and I sit. From different angles she is nearer to different men. I become aware that she is on loan to me, but wholeheartedly so. And I console myself that we are all but on loan from the grave and I have some kind of love of my life wandering somewhere in Central Europe right now, years away from sex with me either future or past but still special to me.
The sun starts to set and cocktails arrive. A hot tub burbles in the background. We don't talk much: every now and then the two of them exchange compressed Japanese two-word messages.
