Apocalypse for Beginners

by Nicolas Dickner

  The Tony Lamas were waiting dutifully by the door. The leather felt cold under the soles of her feet, but now properly shod, Hope regained a sense of control over events.

  Once outside, she leaped into the future. The little traditional house—all rustic pine, rice paper and slate tiles—sat on the roof of a building, several floors above Tokyo!

  The sun was at its highest and the light made Hope squint. Her environment grew more distinct. A deck of greyish wood, synthetic resin furniture, a few empty flowerpots and a miniature Shinto altar (long unused, if the stubs of incense planted in the sand were any indication). The surrounding roof offered a depressing landscape: tarred gravel, discoloured tiles, braids of electric wire and dozens of parabolic dishes and Yagi antennas.

  A few kilometres away stood a thicket of waterfront cranes, which immediately brought back images of Yarmouth. Hope sniffed the air for traces of iodine, but the only smell the wind brought her was of diesel.

  Hope moved closer to the ledge and looked straight down. A fire escape zigzagged its way to an alley, five storeys below, where she could make out a hopscotch court drawn in pink chalk, and a pair of dumpsters.

  How the hell had she landed on top of this building? Someone must have carried her up here, but how?

  On inspecting the house more closely, she discovered a concrete staircase flanked by an old water heater. She opened the door a crack and cast a glance down something resembling a mineshaft. She swept her hand over the wall and flipped the switch. An ancient fluorescent tube started to blink two floors below.

  The stairway was barely wide enough for one person. It plunged directly into the building—no landing, no door, no handrail—at an impossible angle, as if the inner wall had been bored through to make the roof accessible from ground level without the need to stop on the floors in between.

  A secret stairway.

  66. AN INCREASING TOLERANCE FOR THE UNLIKELY

  Hope emerged in the back room of Jaffa’s. The bar was still closed and there was a tape of reggae music playing for no one in particular. “Come We Go Burn Down Babylon.”

  The girl she had glimpsed the day before was busy behind the counter. She was wearing a tattered Pac-Man T-shirt and had her hair up in a loose knot. She greeted Hope with a warm smile. Bob Marley continued to chant down Babylon.

  The girl wiped her hands on her T-shirt and lowered the volume.

  “Bon matin, camarade!”

  So, she spoke French … Hope wondered whether this should come as a surprise. No, ultimately, she was not really surprised. She realized that over the last few days she had shown an increasing tolerance for the unlikely and the improbable.

  “Feeling better? You had nightmares all night long.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Almost noon. Are you hungry?”

  Before Hope could say anything, the girl peeled opened a container of ramen, unscrewed the top of a thermos bottle and poured some boiling water on the noodles, which released a pungent aroma of buckwheat, seaweed and monosodium glutamate. She placed the bowl on the counter with a theatrical flourish.

  Hope immediately recognized the irksome little astronaut on the label, but never had the smell of a mundane package of ramen made her mouth water to such an extent! She sat down on the stool, grabbed the chopsticks with sudden virtuosity and began bolting the noodles down at an unreasonable rate. The girl burst out laughing.

  “Easy now! You look like you haven’t eaten anything for weeks! Is that why you fainted yesterday afternoon?”

  “I didn’t faint. I fell asleep.”

  “Well, you sleep very soundly, comrade! I had to lug you up five flights of stairs on my back!”

  Hope eyed the girl between mouthfuls of noodles. She did not look very Japanese, but it may simply have been the rasta hairdo that muddied the picture.

  “So the samurai hut on the roof—you live there?”

  “Cool, isn’t it? It’s the house where my boss grew up. He had it moved from Kokura in the fifties. A team of archaeologists dismantled it piece by piece. You can still see the numbers on some of the planks.”

  “That’s bizarre.”

  “Yeah, I agree. But it suits me fine. The boss never sets foot in Tokyo, so the house serves as lodging for the bar personnel. The personnel being yours truly.”

  She reached her hand out over the counter.

  “By the way, I’m Merriam.”

  “Hope.”

  Smiles, handshake. Merriam took a bag of lemons out of the fridge and emptied it on the counter. Then she began slicing the citrus into quarters using an oversized knife.

  “So, what brings you to Tokyo? Sightseeing? Business? Love?”

  “I’m looking for someone. A man called Hayao Kamajii. Is that a common name?”

  Merriam bit into a section of lemon and puckered her face.

  “Kind of. There must be about nine thousand of them in the phone book.”

  67. RAID

  Merriam listened attentively to Hope’s account of her misadventures. She examined Kamajii’s business card and confirmed the address. She was very familiar with the municipal swimming pool that Hope was referring to, but she had no recollection of seeing the Mekiddo offices there.

  “That said, I know where they are.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. In Nayot, the district just next to this one.”

  She glanced at the clock on the microwave oven.

  “I’ve still got an hour to spare. If you like, we can go check it out right now.”

  Without waiting for an answer, she reached into a narrow cupboard and pulled out a water-lily green folding bicycle. Hope gulped down the broth of her noodles in one go and mechanically noted the best-before date printed on the rim of the bowl of ramen: 17 07 01. The Mission was still on track.

  Merriam lifted the roll-up grille halfway and they slipped into the street. The spring sunshine beat down on the surrounding facades. Hope discovered a Tokyo completely different from the one she had seen the day before.

  Merriam lowered the grille again, swiftly unfolded the bicycle, and a minute later they were flying through the streets of the neighbourhood, with Merriam steering and Hope precariously balanced on the rack. It was a mild day, and the thoroughfare was overrun by schoolgirls in shirtsleeves with their sweaters knotted around their waists.

  Leaning over Merriam’s shoulder, Hope observed the streets.

  “About Mekiddo—exactly what sort of company is it?”

  Merriam shook her head.

  “No idea, comrade.”

  Merriam obviously knew the district inside out. They rode up Akko Boulevard, weaved in and out among the cars, sped across vast, overcrowded intersections like a bullet, threaded their way along a cluttered lane, cut across an inner courtyard, barrelled down three stairs (for an instant Hope lost contact with the bike), jumped over a median strip and rolled under a monorail ramp. Merriam flashed Hope a reassuring smile over her shoulder.

  “We’re almost there!”

  They careened around the corner and braked in front of a commercial building. With her heart pounding, Hope instantly caught sight of the strange bearded Mekiddo mascot. Next to the beast, however, hung a large sign advertising the upcoming construction of thirty-seven luxury condominiums, which the idyllic illustration made instantly understandable, even for someone without the slightest notion of Japanese. The doors were boarded up. Fifty metres away, three pink excavators with white polka dots were tearing bites of concrete and steel reinforcement rods out of the side of the building.

  Merriam spat on the sidewalk.

  “Beitzim!”

  She pulled a cellphone out of her pocket and dialed the directory assistance number. After a heated discussion with an unspecified interlocutor—secretary or telephone operator—Merriam hung up and checked her watch with a worried expression.

  “They’ve moved to the Gotah borough.”

  “Is it far?”

  “Yes, quite. We’ll have
to put the investigation off to another day.”

  The excavators were working at a good clip, rather gracefully, too. It brought to mind some sort of dance, a demolition ballet. Merriam took a pack of Dubek No. 9 out of her pocket and offered one to Hope, who shook her head. A match, a puff. They looked on as a section of wall crashed down in a cloud of dust. The smell of rubble spread around them, and Hope automatically brought the nail of her ring finger to her lips. But that morning’s manicure had left her incisors with nothing to sink into.

  68. MUTATION

  The mystery deepened. This was already the second time that Mekiddo had disappeared, and Merriam swore she had seen this place humming with activity only a few days earlier.

  No matter how tolerant she had become toward the unlikely and the improbable, Hope refused to accept that a multinational corporation could, in no more than seventy-two hours, move several hundred employees, chairs and desks, flotillas of photocopiers, kilos of paper clips, potted ferns, water dispensers, coffee machines, sandwich vending machines—in total, a quantity of matter and biomass equivalent to the weight of a small iceberg.

  Merriam did not seem especially surprised. She dragged on her cigarette as she watched the excavators working.

  “They are razing Tokyo, comrade. One piece at a time.”

  The way she saw it, Tokyo was in constant mutation. Nothing stayed still for very long and the landscape was metamorphosing at a mind-boggling pace. You could go down the same street every morning, and then, from one day to the next, not recognize it any more.

  “But there aren’t as many construction sites since the Nikkei crashed. And, in fact, they’re predicting the most severe real estate devaluation in decades, to be accompanied by a wave of suicides.”

  “That bad?”

  “That bad. And that’s just for starters. I could show you real estate not too far from here where the square metre was going for a million dollars last summer. Japan is going downhill fast.”

  She hesitated, seemingly on the verge of adding something, but changed her mind. She smoked half her cigarette and then flicked the smoking butt into the back of a passing truck.

  69. MODERN ART

  “Are you sure you’ll be able to find your way back?” Merriam asked three times as they stood on the corner of Akko Boulevard, about to part company for the afternoon.

  Hope assured her that, yes, there was no problem—she had her Rough Planet in her pocket. Merriam nevertheless insisted on marking the phone number of the Jaffa on Hope’s forearm, just in case.

  “Which area are you planning to go to?”

  Hope sniffed the air.

  “Oh, I’ve got something in mind.”

  She started on her way and pondered Tokyo’s instability in general and the disappearance of the Mekiddo offices in particular. She soon let herself get drawn into the environment: the display windows, the ever-present mascots, the restaurant menus, the screens, the faces of the passersby. She stopped in front of the door of a pachinko parlour. Techno music, neon lights, the roar of the steel balls. What was this place? For a moment, she considered going in and, guidebook at the ready, addressing the players.

  “Where can I acquire a machete / machine-gun / rocket launcher?” (Na ta / mashin gan / roketto hou ha doko de te ni hairi masu ka?)

  On second thought, maybe it wasn’t such a good idea.

  One or two kilometres farther, Hope passed under a highway, absently kicking a few dead pigeons, and arrived at the port. A vast intermodal complex stretched away on both sides of the harbour: thousands of multicoloured containers stacked up on top of each other. Maersk, Hapag-Lloyd, Hanjin and China Shipping. Everywhere the landscape was the same.

  Walking along the chain-link fence, she watched the activity on the other side. Forklifts scurrying around, droning like huge beetles. Workers shouting over the noise. The clanging of metal. Various rumbling noises. And in the background, the hulking orange mass of the Aron Habrit, a container ship in the process of being unloaded.

  Hope passed the wall of containers and continued on to the unloading area. A crew of longshoremen were extricating a bulky object from a battered container in order to load it onto a truck. Posted at a sensible distance, three men in business suits watched the scene while exchanging remarks.

  Curious to see the object that would soon come into view, Hope leaned against the fence. An old Korean tank? Gold ingots? A freeze-dried mammoth? In any case, the thing was awfully heavy, judging by the groans of the hoist.

  What emerged from the container, centimetre by centimetre, was a concrete monolith. The surface was scarred and the edges bristled with the rusted stumps of steel rods. One side was completely covered with an interlacing of colourful graffiti, which to Hope looked vaguely familiar.

  Before Hope’s eyes was an enormous fragment of the Grenzmauer newly arrived from Berlin!

  With her fingers hooked into the chain-links, she watched in disbelief. What was this artefact doing in Tokyo? She tried to ask the workers, but none of them spoke English and her guidebook was not at all helpful

  “Can you help me? I’m injured / infected / contagious.” (Kega o shi te i masu / osen sa re te i masu / kansen shi te i masu. Te o kashi te morae masu ka?)

  One of the business-suited men crossed the loading zone and came toward Hope with a friendly expression. They exchanged small bows of the head. He explained that the section of wall, a gift of the Bundesrepublik Deutschland to the Tokyo prefecture, would soon be part of the permanent exhibition of the city’s Museum of Modern Art.

  The Berlin Wall—modern art? Hope tried to mask her bewilderment.

  The hoist operator deposited the precious object on the truck bed as softly as a snowflake. The truck’s suspension sagged with a painful creak. Immediately, the longshoremen strapped the fragment down on the bed, while the men in suits signed various papers.

  The truck lurched away and lumbered onto the boulevard with its two tons of Cold War. A moment later it disappeared in a curve, behind a bulwark of containers.

  Brushing the palm of her hand over her shirt pocket, Hope felt the reassuring bulge of the nail clipper.

  70. THE GYRE

  It was nearly midnight when Hope came within sight of the Jaffa. The only source of light in the narrow lane was the window of a laundry, as blue and spectral as a chunk of iceberg. The bar’s neon signs were turned off and the steel grille was rolled halfway down. Stationed near the entrance, Merriam was smoking a cigarette.

  “Do you realize what time it is? I was worried.”

  Hope rubbed her arms under the thin cloth of her blouse.

  “It’s freezing!”

  “Of course it’s freezing! It is still March! Come on, I’ve just made some tea.”

  Hope slipped under the grille, which Merriam closed behind her with a hefty shove. Two twists of the key and they were sheltered from looters and the living dead. As far as bunkers went, this one was unbeatable. Reggae music in the background, chairs tipped up on the tables, the unobtrusive swish of the dishwasher. Near the cash register a large teapot released a graceful question mark of steam.

  Merriam tossed an old University of Tel Aviv sweatshirt on the counter, and Hope, shivering, pulled it over her head.

  “Still, you might have given me a call.”

  “I got slightly lost.”

  “Didn’t you have your guidebook?”

  “The layout of the streets doesn’t make any sense!”

  “Yeah, it takes some getting used to.”

  “I was on the wrong block. For a while I thought the Jaffa had been razed to the ground during the afternoon and replaced by a Holiday Inn.”

  Merriam smiled and poured two glasses of tea.

  “There’s no chance of that happening. The City of Tokyo put this crumbling shack on its list of protected heritage sites in 1971.”

  “I find that hard to believe.”

  “It’s one of the few buildings from the Edo period that has survived the 1923 earthquake,
the 1945 bombing raids and the urban renewal wave of the 1960s. You can’t change so much as a lock without a permit. Speaking of which …”

  She took a heavy set of keys out of a drawer and slipped off an old copper key, which she handed to Hope.

  “From now on, if you ever find the steel grille locked, you can just go up the emergency stairway.”

  Hope thanked her with a nod. The reggae music ebbed and flowed on the speakers, disappearing from time to time—a tidal movement typical of overused cassette tapes. While Hope warmed her hands on the cup of tea, Merriam began to add up the contents of the cash register.

  “Need any help?”

  “Thanks, but it’s not a problem. The sales never add up to very much.”

  The Jaffa, Merriam explained as she mechanically smoothed out ¥1000 bills between her thumb and index finger, was located smack in the middle of the Sargasso Sea: a gyre bounded by three metro stations, eight hotels and one of the Tokyo University campuses. The surrounding neighbourhood swarmed with students, convention delegates and North American tourists, yet the Jaffa was unable to tap into this clientele. Whenever customers happened to wander in, it was because they were looking for something else. A phantom youth hostel, for instance.

  The bar’s clientele was made up exclusively of regulars, mostly anthropology students who nursed their beers for hours while reviewing their course notes. As a result, the proceeds were chronically thin and the profit was nil. In fact, the place operated at a loss every other month, a situation to which the owner seemed completely indifferent. This, according to Merriam, lent credence to the tax-shelter hypothesis.

  “He bought the bar in the late fifties. At the time, he owned a small light bulb factory in Kobe. Today he manufactures printed circuits in three countries. So he may have totally forgotten that he owns this building. In any case, I’ve never seen him.”

  “Never?”

  “Never. The accountant comes to check the books every quarter and takes a look at the inventory. It almost never takes more than twenty minutes. In other words, we’re in the blind spot. Which reminds me—would you like to call Canada?”