Ghostwritten

by David Mitchell

  They never loved me, anyway. They wouldn’t know of the word’s existence if they hadn’t seen it on the TV.

  His Serendipity came down the stairs, accompanied by the minister of security. The light whitened as He neared the office. I saw His sandaled feet and His purple robes first, then the rest of His beloved form came into view. He smiled at me, knowing telepathically who I was and what I had done. “I am the Guru.” And He permitted me to kiss His holy ruby ring as I knelt. I could feel His alpha emanations, like a compass feels magnetic north.

  “Master,” I replied. “I have come home.”

  His Serendipity spoke cleanly and beautifully, and the words came from His very eyes. “You have freed yourself from the asylum of the unclean. Little brother. Today you have joined a new family. You have transcended your old family of the skin, and you have joined a new family of the spirit. From this day, you have ten thousand brothers and sisters. This family will grow into millions by the end of the world. And it will grow, and grow, with roots in all nations. We are finding fertile soil in foreign lands. Our family will grow until the world without is the world within. This is not a prophecy. This is inevitable, future reality. How do you feel, newest child of our nation without borders, without suffering?”

  “Lucky, Your Serendipity. So very lucky to be able to drink from the fountain of truth while still in my twenties.”

  “My little brother, we both know that it was not luck which brought you here. Love brought you to us.” Then He kissed me, and I kissed the mouth of eternal life. “Who knows,” said my Master, “if you continue your alpha self-amplification as rapidly as the minister of education reports, you may be entrusted with a very special mission in the future.…” My heart leapt still higher. I had been discussed! Only a novice, but I had been discussed!

  In the coffee bars, in shops and offices and schools, on the giant screen in the shopping mall, in every rabbit-hutch apartment, people watched news of the cleansing. The maid who came to clean my room wouldn’t shut up about it. I let her babble. She asked me what I thought. I said that I was only a computersystems engineer from Nagoya and knew nothing about such matters. Indifference was not enough for her: outrage has become compulsory. To avert suspicion, a little playacting will be necessary. The maid mentioned the Fellowship. It seems that the leprous fingers of our country’s detestable media are being pointed, despite our past warnings.

  I went out in the middle of the afternoon to buy some more shampoo and soap. The receptionist was sitting with her back to the lobby, glued to the set. Television is unclean lies, and it damages your alpha cortex. However, I thought just a few minutes wouldn’t hurt me, so I watched it with her. Twenty-one cleansed, and many hundreds semi-cleansed. An unequivocal warning to the state of the unclean.

  “I can’t believe it happened in Japan,” said the receptionist. “In America, yes. But here?”

  A panel of “experts” was discussing the “atrocity.” The experts included a nineteen-year-old pop star and a sociology professor from Tokyo University. Why do Japanese only listen to pop stars and professors? They kept playing the same footage over and over again, a scene of the uncleansed running out of the metro station, handkerchiefs smothering their mouths, retching, scratching furiously at their eyes. As His Serendipity writes in the 32nd Sacred Revelation, If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out. Pictures of the cleansed, lying still where their cleansing had freed them. Their skin families, sobbing in their ignorance. Cut to the prime minister, the bushiest fool of them all, swearing that he wouldn’t rest until “the perpetrators of this monstrosity were brought to justice.”

  Is this hypocrisy not blinding? Can’t they see that the real atrocity is the modern world’s systematic slaughter of man’s oneness with his anima? The act of the Fellowship was merely one counterattack against the true monster of our age. The first skirmish in a long war that evolution destines us to win.

  And why can people not see the futility? A mere politician, one more bribe-taking, back-stabbing, under-the-table cockroach whose mind cannot even conceive of the cesspit it flounders in: How could such unclean lowlifes ever hope to coerce His Serendipity into doing anything? A boddhisatva who can make Himself invisible at will, a yogic flier, a divine being who can breathe underwater. Bring Him and His servants to “justice”? We are the floating ministers of justice! Of course I still lack the alpha quotient to shield myself with telepathy or telekinesis, but I am many hundreds of kilometers away from the scene of the cleansing. They’ll never think of looking for me here.

  I slipped out of the cool lobby.

  I kept a low profile all week, but invisibility might attract attention. I invented business meetings to attend, and from Monday to Friday walked past the receptionist with a curt “Good morning” promptly at 8:30 A.M. Time dragged its heels. Naha’s just another small city. The Americans from the military bases that plague these islands strut up and down the main streets, many of them with our females draped off their arms, Japanese females clad in nothing but little wraps of cloth. The Okinawan males ape the foreigners. I walked through the department stores, watching the endless chain of wanting and buying. I walked until my feet ached. I sat in shady coffee shops, where shelves sagged under the weight of magazines of mindtrash. I eavesdropped on businessmen, buying and selling what wasn’t theirs. I carried on walking. Workaday idiots gaped in the rattling vacuity of pachinko machines, as I had once done in the days before His Serendipity opened my inner eyes. Tourists from the mainland toured the souvenir shops, buying boxes of tat that nobody ever really wants. The usual foreigners selling watches and cheap jewelry on the pavements, without licenses. I walked through the games arcades where the poisoned children congregate after school, gazing at screens where evil cyborgs, phantoms, and zombies do battle. The same shops as anywhere else … Burger King, Benetton, Nike … High streets are becoming the same all over the world, I suppose. I walked through backstreets, where housewives put out futons to air, living the same year sixty times. I watched a potter with a pocked face, bent over a wheel. A dying man, coughing without removing his cigarette, repaired a child’s tricycle on a bottom step. A woman without any teeth put fresh flowers in a vase beneath a family shrine. I went to the old Ryukyu palace one afternoon. There were drinks machines in the courtyard, and a shop called The Holy Swordsman that sold nothing but key rings and camera film. The ancient ramparts were swarming with high school kids from Tokyo. The boys look like girls, with long hair and pierced ears and plucked eyebrows. The girls laugh like spider monkeys into their pocket phones. Hate them and you have to hate the world, Quasar.

  Very well, Quasar. Let us hate the world.

  The only peaceful place in Naha was the port. I watched boats, islanders, tourists, and mighty cargo ships. I’ve always enjoyed the sea. My biological uncle used to take me to the harbor at Yokohama. We used to take a pocket atlas to look up the ships’ ports and countries of origin.

  Of course, that was a lifetime ago. Before my true father called me home.

  Coming out of an alpha trance one day after my noon cleansing, a spoked shadow congealed into a spider. I was going to flush it down the toilet when, to my amazement, it transmitted an alpha message! Of course, His Serendipity was using it to speak with me. The Guru has an impish sense of humor.

  “Courage, Quasar, my chosen. Courage, and strength. This is your destiny.”

  I knelt before the spider. “I knew You wouldn’t forget me, Lord,” I answered, and let the spider wander over my body. Then I put him in a little jar. I resolved to buy some flypaper to catch flies, so I could feed my little brother. We are both His Serendipity’s messengers.

  Speculation about the “doomsday cult” continues. How it annoys me! The Fellowship stands for life, not for doom. The Fellowship is not a “cult.” Cults enslave. The Fellowship liberates. Leaders of cults are fork-tongued swindlers with private harems of whores and fleets of Rolls-Royces behind the stage set. I have been privileged to glimpse life in the Guru’s i
nner circle—not one girl in sight! His Serendipity is free of the sticky web of sex. His Serendipity’s wife was chosen merely to bear His children. The younger sons of Cabinet members and favored disciples are permitted to attend to the Guru’s modest domestic needs. These fortunates are clad only in meditation loincloths so they are ready to assume çaçen alpha positioning whenever the Master condescends to bestow his blessing. And in the whole of Sanctuary there are only three Cadillacs—His Serendipity well knows when to exorcise the demons of materialism that possess the unclean, and when to exploit this obsession as a Trojan Horse, to penetrate the mire of the world outside.

  To deflect suspicion from the Fellowship, His Serendipity allowed some journalists into Sanctuary to film brothers and sisters during alpha enrichment. Our chemical facilities were also inspected. The minister of science explained that we were making fertilizer. Being vegetarians, he joked, the Fellowship needs to grow a lot of cucumbers! I recognized my brothers and sisters. They gave telepathic messages of encouragement to their brother Quasar through their screen images. I laughed aloud. The unclean TV news hyenas were trying to incriminate the Fellowship, not noticing how the Fellowship was using them to transmit messages to me. The minister of security allowed himself to be interviewed. Brilliantly, he defended the Fellowship from any involvement in the cleansing. One can only outwit demons, His Serendipity teaches in the 13th Sacred Revelation, if one is as cunning as the lord of Hell.

  More disturbing were the television interviews with the blind unclean. The apostates. People who are welcomed into the Fellowship’s love, but who reject it and fall again into the world of shit outside Sanctuary. In his infinite mercy His Serendipity permits these maggots to live, if “living” it can be called, on condition that they do not defame the Fellowship. If they ignore this law and sow lies about Sanctuary in the press, the minister of security has to license the cleansing of them and their families.

  On television the faces of the blind unclean were digitalized out, but no image-doctoring can fool a mind of my alpha quotient. One was Mayumi Aoi, who joined the Fellowship in my Welcome Program. She paid lip-service to His Serendipity, but one morning, eight weeks into the Program, we awoke to find her gone. We all suspected her of being a police agent. Hearing the lies she told about life in Sanctuary, I switched the television off and resolved never to watch it again.

  A week after my first call I telephoned Sanctuary. I was answered by a voice I didn’t know.

  “Good morning. This is Quasar.”

  “Ah, Quasar. The minister of information is busy this morning. I am his undersecretary. We’ve been expecting your call. Have you seen the growing hysteria?”

  “Indeed, sir.”

  “Yes. Your cleansing operation was almost too successful, it might appear. His Serendipity has ordered me to tell you to lie low for a couple more weeks.”

  “I obey His Serendipity in all things.”

  “In addition, you are ordered to proceed to a more remote location. Purely as a precaution. Our brothers in the unclean police have told us your details are being circulated. We must act with stealth, and guile. Officially, we are denying complicity in your gas attack. This will win us more time to strengthen the Fellowship with new brothers and sisters. This tactic worked for our cleansing experiment in Nagano Prefecture last year. How easily misled are these dung beetles!”

  “Indeed, sir.”

  “In the event that you are arrested, you are to assume full responsibility for your attack, and claim that you had acted entirely on your own volition, after being expelled from the Fellowship for insanity. You would then be teleported out of custody by His Serendipity.”

  “Naturally, sir. I obey His Serendipity in all things.”

  “You are a great asset to the Fellowship, Quasar. Any questions?”

  “I was wondering if phase two of the great cleansing has begun yet, sir? Have our yogic fliers been despatched to the parliament building to demand the integration of His Serendipity’s teachings into the national curriculum? If we leave it too long, then the unclean might—”

  “Quasar, you forget yourself! When was it decreed that your responsibilities included advocating Fellowship foreign policy?”

  “I understand my error, sir. Forgive me, sir. I beg you.”

  “You are already forgiven, dear son of His Serendipity! No doubt you are lonely, away from your family?”

  “Yes, sir. But I received the alpha wave messages sent from my brothers and sisters through the news broadcasts. And His Serendipity speaks to me words of comfort in my exile as I meditate.”

  “Excellent. Two more weeks should be sufficient, Quasar. If your funds run low, you may contact the Fellowship’s Secret Service using the usual code. Otherwise maintain silence.”

  “One more thing, sir. The apostate Mayumi Aoi—”

  “The minister of information has noticed. The sewers of the blind unclean shall forever be sealed. The minister of security will act, when the present scrutiny subsides. Perhaps we have shown too much mercy in the past. We are now at war.”

  I walked to the port in the stellar heat of mid-afternoon and collected boat schedules from a rack. I pulled open my map. I have always preferred maps to books. They don’t answer you back. Never throw a map away. The islands beckoned, imperial emeralds in a sky-blue sea. I chose one labeled Kumejima. Half a day away to the west, but not so small that a visitor would stand out. There was only one boat per day, departing at 6:45 A.M. I bought a ticket for the next day’s sailing.

  I spent the rest of the day sitting on the quay. I recited all of His Serendipity’s Sacred Revelations, oblivious to the flow of lost souls passing by.

  Eventually the sun sank, crimson and wobbling. I hadn’t noticed it grow dark. I walked back to my hotel, where I told the receptionist that my business was concluded and I would depart for Osaka early the next morning.

  The subway train in Tokyo was as crammed as a cattle wagon. Crammed with organs, wrapped in meat, wrapped in clothes. Silent and sweaty. I was half-afraid some fool would crush the phials prematurely. Our minister of science had explained to me exactly how the package worked. When I ripped open the seal and pressed the three buttons simultaneously, I would have one minute to get clear before the solenoids shattered the phials, and the great cleansing of the world would begin.

  I put the package on the baggage rack and waited for the appointed minute. I focused my alpha telepathy, and sent messages of encouragement to my co-cleansers in various metro trains throughout Tokyo.

  I studied the people around me. The honored unclean, the first to be cleansed. Dumb. Sorry. Tired. Mind-rotted. Mules, in a never-ending whirlpool of lies, pain, and ignorance. I was a few inches away from a baby, in a woolly cap, strapped to its mother’s back. It was asleep and dribbling and smelt of toddlers’ marshiness. A girl, I guessed from the pink Minnie Mouse sewn onto the cap. Pensioners who had nothing to look forward to but senility and wheelchairs in lonely magnolia “homes.” Young salarymen, supposedly in their prime, their minds conditioned for greed and bullying.

  I had the life and death of those lowlifes in my hands! What would they say? How would they try to dissuade me? How would they justify their insectoid existences? Where could they start? How could a tadpole address a god?

  The carriage swayed, jarred, and the lights dipped for a moment into brown.

  Not well enough.

  I remembered His Serendipity’s words that morning. “I have seen the comet, far beyond the farthest orbit of the mundane mind. The New Earth is approaching. The judgment of the vermin is coming. By helping it along a little, we are putting them out of their misery. Sons, you are the chosen agents of the Divine.”

  In those last few moments, as we pulled into the station, His Serendipity fortified me with a vision of the future. Within three short years His Serendipity is going to enter Jerusalem. In the same year Mecca is going to bow down, and the Pope and the Dalai Lama will seek conversion. The presidents of Russia and the U.S
. petition for His Serendipity’s patronage.

  Then, in July of that year, the comet is detected by observatories all over the world. Narrowly missing Neptune, it approaches Earth, eclipsing the Moon, blazing even in the midday sky over the airfields and mountain ranges and cities of the world. The unclean rush out and welcome this latest novelty. And that will be their undoing! The Earth is bathed in microwaves from the comet, and only those with high alpha quotients will be able to insulate themselves. The unclean die, retching, scratching out their eyes, stinking of their own flesh as it cooks on their bones. The survivors begin the creation of Paradise. His Serendipity will reveal himself as His Divinity. A butterfly emerging from the chrysalis of His body.

  I feel into the perforated sports bag, and I rip open the seal. I have to flick the switches, and hold them down for three seconds to set the timer. One. Two. Three. The New Earth is coming. History is ticking. I zip the bag shut, let it fall to my feet, and shunt it surreptitiously under a seat with the back of my heel. The compartment is so crammed that none of the zombies notices.

  The will of His Serendipity.

  The train pulls into the station, and—

  I hear the noises under the manhole cover, but I dare not, dare not listen to its words.

  If the noises ever become words—not now, not yet. Not ever. Where would it end?