by Toh EnJoe
“Why did you decide to call me ‘Tome’?”
“Perhaps because you were the youngest child in your family, and tome means ‘stop.’ That might be the reason. I can’t think of any other reason to use the name Tome.”
Tome. The period at the end of the otherwise-unending chapter that was the self-replication process. I know it had nothing to do with how her parents named her.
Then there is the English word tome. A ponderous, weighty, arcane book that is difficult to understand. Whenever the situation is getting worse, such “tomes” are of no help in focusing. They should contain everything one needs to know, but just trying to get an overview of a tome’s contents is enough to tire one out. It’s like picking one’s way through some dry, meaningless magnum opus.
“So, let’s see how much you understood. No matter how worthless, if we don’t keep things in order as much as we can, then we will simply be buried in ridiculous nonsense.”
“The text written in the catfish script. I can only imagine it says, ‘In one hundred years, I will come to retrieve the text.’”
In other words, the message in the text is a pre-announcement of the crime, and at the same time the object of the crime foretold. If there had been a slipup in this crime of the century, only a stone sculpture would have gone missing. I don’t believe there is anyone on earth who could say with certainty whether the miraculous crime hadn’t been foretold simply so that the people who enjoyed the text couldn’t simply copy and distribute the text themselves.
While the whole business has a strong scent of self-staging—or perhaps more accurately, reeks of self-staging—there is a reason why this miraculous crime had to foretell itself, for honesty’s sake. After the miraculous crime of the text declared itself, it was compelled to proceed with its larcenous plan, for both originals and copies.
Of course, this is nothing other than a terrible translation. The catfish script was supposed to be an untranslatable script, whether or not this black telephone is functioning. Speculation about a program that could automatically erase itself must also be a mistranslation in the same way, but both must have core truths that have been misconveyed in some way, a core truth that is in fact revealed as a result of the mistaken translation.
“So, what are you going to do?”
“Nothing.”
The continuation of this whole situation is just depressing to me. I have no intention of pursuing this stupendous crime and wrapping it all up, and neither do I intend to allow this diffuse debate to spread further, like stepping-stones of logic. If everybody just does as they please, what will ever come of it? I have no faith in the process. Somebody will have to try to gather up the texts and keep them in line.
“Just a difference of opinion,” Tome says.
“Just a difference of personality,” I say.
“Ms. Tome?” I ask.
“I am not Rita,” she says.
In this exchange, the two speakers, at cross-purposes, are talking past one another but not contradicting one another. My name is not Tome, and neither do I have the name Rita. Someone who is not laughing has that name. If I haven’t lost my horns, then I must be growing some.
“I am not James, and I am not Koji, and I am not Yuuta, and I am not Richard either.”
“That’s only too obvious.”
On the other end of the line, the person who says she is not Rita is laughing.
To get a grip on the situation, I sit and think about who I am and who I am supposed to be. Even after hanging up the phone, I continue to think.
07. BOBBY SOCKS
MANY THINGS ARE unclear about the life cycle of socks. Even if you’re used to socks, you can’t let down your guard.
An eel might seem like any ordinary living thing, but eels can come from deep in the Mariana Trench. Anybody who thinks he could look at an eel just swimming in the water and guess where it had come from is not quite right in the head.
“We are from the Mariana Trench.”
If an eel could talk, it might sound like it was just telling a joke. The likelihood of mistranslation is high. Where is the Mariana Trench, anyway? People might think you’re talking about some “Café Mariana Trench.” That would be a problem. The settings are extremely unconventional, but we can’t think of this as fiction. All those eels over there are coming from the same place. Doesn’t that seem a little overly fantastic to you? I wonder about this idea of freedom in the settings. What kind of special something could exist in an out-of-the-way place like that trench? Some kind of eel-making machine? If there is a machine that can manufacture eels, could that kind of machine itself be mass produced?
It would be easier to believe if the eels had said, “We come from outer space.” The way they wriggle makes them seem like space creatures. I almost want to call them the Placid Ones.
“The Mariana Trench is where the eel-making machine from outer space is submerged.” Like Cthulhu, maybe. That would work too. A machine created by übertechnology of a sort irreproducible by humans. Now said to be submerged in the Mariana Trench. Deliberately? Some even say it might be a transport ship for eel-shaped extraterrestrial immigrants. Their home having been grilled over high-quality charcoal, the eels left the star system where they were born. Sealing the data necessary for eel replication in its memory banks, they shut down the three-dimensional printer and launched it toward Earth.
That kind of story I can understand.
It couldn’t be a real story, but somehow I feel no one should mind. On the contrary, that’s the kind of story I want it to be. If you’re going to say there’s just one or two places on Earth that can produce eels, that’s not like a machine. It’s more like identity. Because substitutes that cannot be substituted are generally called identities.
But if that’s the case, then the question becomes what is that identity that emerges? It is not, of course, the characteristics of each individual eel. It is the true nature of the eels submerged in the Mariana Trench. The collective will of the eels. The abstract concept of eelness. Eels are not the grandchildren of catfish. Deep in the darkness of the trench, the eels are wriggling, undulating. Identity arises and slowly opens its mouth.
Somehow or other, eel fry emerge from that mouth. They start to swim, their tails like musical notes. Many individual eels, creating a single sound. Until the point when this song of eel identity seeks companionship and ends up drenched in sauce, roasted on charcoal, and set on a bed of white rice.
How’s that for communication?
And as I am thinking hard, wondering how that is, I can also see that that’s what mutual understanding is. This “interaction” thing is working out. With a high degree of specificity. And deliciousness.
Eat or be eaten, something gets communicated. And we’ve come this far.
That is what Bobby Socks spends his time talking about.
Bobby socks. Cute little white socks. Stop just above the ankles, where they get turned down. They’re a bit small for my legs. They were popular in the fifties. Some have lace frills, or even red ribbons. Girls like them. And of course, I am not a girl.
“Hey, Bobby!”
“Yuck. Lower form of life.”
Despite his cute appearance, Bobby has a brusque manner of speaking. A big voice. When he talks about lower forms of life, he doesn’t mean my position in the hierarchy of living beings, he means the position of living things in the hierarchy of physical things.
I mean, this is socks we’re talking about, and I’m not so sure anybody pays any attention to anything they say.
To look at Bobby, you would think he was just a sock. The proof of the contrary, however, is that he walked up to my room under his own steam. This raises a lot of questions.
When I ask Bobby how this all came about, he shakes his lace and answers casually, “I am a police inspector, and you are suspected of sock abuse!” From his voice, it is hard to imagine him strong-arming me.
For my part, I have learned that socks are almost all male, an
d somehow that seems strangely right to me. You can tell by the sound of their voices. I would like to let the extraterrestrials know this—there is an easy way to tell the gender of terrestrials. Just shut a certain number of them up in a convenient box, give them food and water, and keep them at a comfortable temperature. The ones that get all squirmy and clump together in a bunch are the boys; the ones that make themselves small and hold hands are the girls.
By extension, socks, which are always in pairs that get along well with one another, may seem at first glance to be girls, but the matter bears further observation.
Socks with holes in them are to be left in the corner of the room.
In a few days, they will call their friends, and there will be a mountain of them. For whatever reason, socks are boys.
“That’s not what I mean!” yells Bobby angrily. “This is the sock graveyard. Hard to overlook.”
Bobby Socks stays atop the mountain, his chest all puffed up. A flimsy old lie, apparently. This is where socks arrange to meet when they approach death. This is a place that exists nowhere in this universe. When poachers are asked how they are able to harvest so many socks, they claim to have looted a sock graveyard.But that was just a desperate lie.
Actually, there is an area in my house that could be described as a graveyard of socks. It’s right by the front door. Most people take off their shoes at the door, but I’m in the habit of also removing my socks. I step on my right toe with my left, and the sock slips right off. Sometimes the other way around. I give a little kick, and a step, and the socks just leap into the corner.
If I may say something about my own obliviousness, it sometimes transpires that holey socks go flying toward the vicinity of the entryway wall, and there they stay. I step up across the entryway threshold, and the socks stay behind. When I kick a sock to my right, it ends up in the sock graveyard. When I kick a sock to my left, it ends up on the pile headed for the laundry. Right, to the wall, left, to the hallway. Into the sink beside the washing machine.
Whether the socks go right or left has nothing to do with whether they have holes; someone even lower in the hierarchy than Mr. Semiconsciousness makes the decision. The constituents of the left pile are buried in the samsara known as the washing machine, treading their way through the thousand sorrows and vicissitudes of this world. The denizens of the right pile are close to enlightenment. While they may not yet have reached nirvana, they have reached Sumeru, the mountain at the center of the Buddhist cosmology.
“Excuses!”
Bobby has made up his mind, and he is waving the end of a little red ribbon at me.
The history of suffering, as told by socks. Bobby is the police inspector of that history. Since people wear socks, what would socks wear? That is the question. Socks can see right away the negative spiral this kind of thinking leads to, or so Bobby says. They know they are being worn, so they think about wearing something as a kind of revenge, but then realize they will have to bear the same sins as the beings who wear things. Let things that want to wear things wear them. Someday they will realize the error of their ways. At least that’s what the socks think.
No one, from the moderates to the radicals, doubts this.
The radicals have already given up hope that modern humans will ever free their socks. People are just not progressive enough, at least not as much as the radicals had once hoped. The day humans graduate from wearing socks will not mean the end of their race. That is the radicals’ position.
Some socks say the only way to achieve sock liberation is to completely wipe out the human race, and the sooner the better. Socks, when they set their mind to it, have no shortage of options: letting pebbles into shoes, switching price tags, causing nerve-wracking tingling sensations, creeping between toes. Socks can make it hard for people to walk, and people might even give up walking and thus slowly starve to death. If people prove hardier than initial sock forecasting predicts, humanity might just grow massively morbidly obese from lack of exercise, and that will do them in. In the end it will be the socks who have the last laugh, and they might forgive the sins of their repentant tormentors.
The moderates’ view is quite simple. They want to create a more comfortable environment, improve the capabilities of the human race, and suspend the pointless abuse of socks, so that humans will naturally take to walking around barefoot. Even humans must realize that everyone must accept responsibility for their own actions.
At the very least, no one should ever wear anyone else. The socks have made up their minds.
They are different from mechanical socks.
“Wait!” You won’t find it unusual that I am interrupting Bobby. I have the feeling he seems relaxed, atop the heap of socks, but I can sense he is tensing up. “What do you mean, ‘mechanical socks’?”
In the back of my mind, I am picturing steel shoes with some sort of built-in pedometer.
“What do you mean what do I mean?”
“What are ‘mechanical socks’ like?” I ask Bobby again. I have a feeling that isn’t the thing he isn’t telling me, but as expected, he keeps silent, thinking hard.
Finally, he says, “What would ‘natural socks’ be?”
“Cotton, hemp, things like that.”
“Hmmph,” he says. “Are people morons?” he asks, a serious look on his face. I can never be really sure about his face, but I just assume it is somewhere around the heel.
“Morons are morons, but everything is relative, so you have to tell me what your benchmarks are.”
Bobby has apparently decided to ignore my counterdemand.
“So, that’s how it’s going to be, eh? You seem to be overlooking the fact that I am male.”
While I struggle not to be misled by his sweet appearance, he goes on. “This appearance of mine, what you see, is a disguise.”
Bobby seems to be asking, in bold Helvetica type and in all earnestness, that I not take him for something he isn’t. I have a sense of danger, and I nod quickly several times.
“It’s a disguise, just to cause people to overlook me. Actually, we socks don’t wear clothing. This is a disguise we are born with, a form that evolved over a long period of time, through a process of natural selection. In sock society, the cutest appearance is taken as a strong sign of an excellent bloodline, of a sock capable of performing the duties of police inspector.”
I didn’t even really ask a question, but Bobby continues to spout this rapid-fire explanation, and I just wave my hands as if to say, There there.
“But I have such a bloodline, so people think I’m cute, but even cute has its limits, and it is humans that make a big deal about it. But I want you to know that among socks I am considered quite handsome, and I am proud of that. You’re the ones who are fooled by the illusion and ridicule it.”
Caught up in his passion, I nod affirmatively as Bobby Socks speaks. “I’ve got nothing to be embarrassed about,” he says in a deep voice. I am so engaged in trying to figure out where he is going with this, I somehow lose the train of thought.
Bobby and I stare silently at one another for a few seconds.
Somehow I have the illusion that his cute, frilly form is shaking, just a bit.
Bobby’s story started out kind of shaky, but I think it can be summed up like this.
Even with his lace frills, and setting aside the red ribbon, Bobby is a natural-born police inspector from an old and esteemed lineage. A child’s sock is not necessarily a sock child. No one would assume a lady’s sock is a lady sock, or an old person’s sock an elderly sock, and just because a sock is old doesn’t mean it belongs to an old soldier. Right for girls and left for boys—there is no special rule like that.
Still, I wonder about all this.
And then Bobby asks gravely, “So, you must be wondering, where are the socks’ children?”
My answer is short and to the point.
“I think there are none. If I had to say anything, I’d say the children are thread or cloth, and the parents are sew
ing machines.”
“Socks do not make sewing machines,” Bobby notes dispassionately.
“I mean, you guys don’t grow or pass on your traits from one generation to the next…” Then I stop speaking. Discretion is the better part of valor.
“We do too. First of all, the fact that I am some kind of living thing, or even some higher form of being, is practically a precondition for us to be having a proper conversation. Otherwise, you’d be standing here talking to some old sock, for Pete’s sake.”
That wouldn’t be good, now, would it.
“So, you’d be better off just explaining how you think we socks go on propagating ourselves.”
“Hey, it’s your life cycle. You explain it.”
“You’re the problem, not me. Why should I even care if you’re just talking to yourself? Nothing you say to anybody is going to change me.”
He’s got a point there, I think to myself. At this point, it might be wise to just get Bobby Socks to go away, by feeding him whatever explanation happens to come to mind. Another possibility would be some kind of joke, or a bad pun or something.
But I’m talking to a sock, a cute little white sock, and the conversation has turned to reproduction, of all things. On top of that, I am on the defensive. If this goes on like this we might end up talking about my own sexual proclivities, and that would be a pickle. Suddenly I imagine myself being questioned by a “police inspector.”
“You guys are just some baloney that impersonates socks and propagates by parasitizing humans, a pack of baloney lies, just lining up for the moment, but your ultimate aim is to be worn by humans.”
“Wrong,” Bobby says. “If that were the case, why are your feet too big to fit in me? I wouldn’t need to be standing here talking to you.”
“Size doesn’t matter. Even if my feet won’t fit into you, I mean, you’re self-propagating—you fit on feet. It’s only further down the line that the trouble sets in, and it’s inevitable. At least the simplest solution is.”
“Well, can’t argue with that.”