by Ian McDonald
For some people it is the hairs on the back of the neck. For others, the pricking of the thumbs. For me, it has always been a tingle at the base of my spine; that unmistakable prescience of trouble. Eight of them, in light camouflage armor set to Chapter heraldics, enfolded by the elaborate streamlines of techno-gothic Yamahas. Akiras: middle-class kids seduced away from teleburbia’s low-key pleasures by fifteen channels of samurai-anime cut with the Guitarz’n’Blood ethos of Trash Metal, fleeing from a mythologized Imperial past, questing for an unattainable future. The big Yams circle us; engines growl, gobbling hydrocarbons. On the pillion seats, girls with fluttering standards fixed to the backs of their jackets analyze us with scanshades, intimidate us with black lip gloss. A word from the leader—a fat, dangerous youth who has solved a terminal greasy hair problem by knotting it into a queue—and they hustle us into dark and stinking ratrun between overlapping levels of housing pods. His blackseat girl plays with my red hair, twines it around her black leather fingers, sucks it between her wet black lips. Mas, an uncharacteristic tone of panic creeping into his voice, bows constantly, spastically, repeating that we are only pilgrims following in the footsteps of the Daishi, two innocent pilgrims. Fat Boy would rather stare at the impudent red-haired gaijin. His hand strokes to my neck; I flinch away. A silent flash lights up the inside of my skull, a numb dumbness; my language tap has been ripped out of its socket. He tosses it end for end, catches it in his gloved hand. Mas’s pleadings now verge on breaking down completely, and the words have been literally taken out of my mouth. Fat Boy is irritated. With people like these, irritated is dead. I have seen it, I know. And I know that I must act, though the henro in me screams at the thought of releasing the demons… I shout to Mas in English: Close your eyes. Now. Do as I say! and reach to peel the glove off my right hand. A steel whisper: the girl whips a short tachi from a sheathe on her thigh, presses the tip to my Adam’s apple. I raised my hands, gloved. Head cocked gaminely to one side, she is smiling. Fat Boy is smiling. His friends are smiling.
If irritated is dead, smiling is gutted. Smiling is head on a jacket-back pennant-stay. A shout. Fat Boy’s deputy has found something in Mas’s bags. The commander clicks his fingers show me. It is one of Masahiko’s Danjuro 19: Kabukiman! henro slips! Fat Boy holds it up before Mas’s face, raps questions. Even without my tap, their context is clear from Fat Boy’s intonation and Mas’s terrified, nodded answers. Then with the same terrifying speed with which it was drawn, the sword is resheathed. Fat Boy bows, returns me my tap, bows to Mas, and offers him the henro slip deferentially, with both hands.
“Kabukiman? You make Kabukiman?” He turns to his gang and shouts theatrically. “He! Invented! Danjuro 19!” His platoon murmur and bow, genuinely awed. “The Setting Sons Chapter owes you a big apology, both of you,” says Fat Boy. The transformation is so swift and staggering I still cannot believe it. “We’ve treated men on spiritual business dishonorably. Tosa Securities is expanding into Tokushima Holdings territory; they’re trying to win policyholders over by looking strong against the brothers. Tokushima Holdings is fighting back and the street is in the middle. The Black Dragon Chapter was wiped out last month; you can’t trust anyone anymore. They’ve got agents everywhere. Can you forgive us? At least let us escort you to the next temple; we’d be proud to do that for the creator of Kabukiman.”
We can hardly refuse. Pennants fluttering and tugging, wing mirrors glinting, the akiras mount up and form vanguard and rearguard around us. The sound of the Yamahas reverberates from the housing stacks and the recession-struck, shuttered-up businesses. On the faces of the people that we pass I see who are the back-street heroes, the Young Soul Rebels, the Robin Hoods to the big Police Corporations’ Sheriffs of Nottingham and Guy of Gisbornes. Fat Boy, riding close beside, tells me that, to them, Kabukiman is the spirit of true Japan, epitome of honor, justice, respect, individuality, faithfulness, action, experience, and violence; the measure of a real man. “He knows how to live,” Fat Boy says. His girlfriend reaches out to touch my hair, run it over her black glossy fingers.
“Hey, mister with the fabulous hair, Danjuro 19 was always the friend of the true akiras,” she says.
At Temple Eighteen we make our ablutions and devotions and have our albums inscribed while the akiras lounge about on their bikes outside the temple gate, smoking. The priest wants to call Tosa Securities, I dissuade him. Fat Boy accepts the Kabukiman henro slip with tears in his eyes and gives us each a pack of Black Cats as settai. Later, I say, when the pilgrimage is over and we can enjoy such things, we will smoke them and think fondly of Tokushima and the Setting Sons Chapter.
As they drive away, pennants rippling, Mas quietly throws up into the neatly mown grass by the temple gate. When I go to help him, offer paper tissues, water from the bottle on my bike, he waves me away, angry, afraid. For the rest of the day’s ride to Temple Nineteen he will not speak to me. The incident with the akiras has affected him out of all proportion to the cause. For my part I am content with his silence; I have my own inner reaches to plumb: the seduction of power, the narrowness of my escape, a grace—the Daishi, walking with me?—that has so far permitted only the selfless use of my power while preventing the selfish, the harmful. But even selflessness is failure: I have crossed half the planet to come on this pilgrimage to break that power absolutely. The sky is crisscrossed with the contrails of many aircraft—local aerospace forces, weaving an intricate pattern of defense in the ionosphere I cannot decipher.
Our prayers in the Daishi Hall at Temple Nineteen are dry and lifeless; a computer (read secretarial) error at our hotel has assigned our room to a brace of interior designers over from Osaka for the week-long Shinto anniversary. It is the big annual download. The place is busier than Bethlehem in a census. If apologies were roof tiles we would sleep warm and dry but as they are not, we find shelter in a truckers’ coffin hotel on the faded side of town. “No tattoos” says the sign behind the reception desk.
“No room at the inn,” I joke but the girl on the desk doesn’t have the referential baggage and Mas still isn’t speaking. I am reluctant to leave the demon box in a locker in the communal changing room but the other guests in their uniform blue checkered kimonos and tabi are already politely not staring and, after the akiras, I am wary of provoking interest. The box on the third level—padded, air-conditioned, with integral videophone, radio, television, minibar (I raid the chocolate, pass, ruefully, on the Scotch), and service call button—is pleasingly womblike, if not exactly designed with people of my height in mind. I remember a bullshitting Beefeater once showing me the cell in the Tower of London called “Little Ease” that was too short, too narrow, too low to allow its occupant to stand or lie straight. Torture. I flick across television channels: sport, sport, chat show, sport, EmTeeVee, ads, ads, an old British sitcom that wasn’t funny when I first saw it fifteen years ago. No Danjuro 19: Kabukiman! I find le porno but the plotless, artless slomo-ing of rounded chunks of oiled anatomy to what sounds like the Japanese idea of Harlem elevator music is deeply depressing, utterly anti-erotic.
I surface from contorted fleshtone dreams—falling asleep with the television on—wakened but not knowing what has woken me. The big rack of sleep pods shakes to the thunder of passing trucks, plumbing gurgles, air-conditioning whirs like a gray moth. A cry—more a wail—a voice begging for them not to hurt her don’t hurt her please don’t hurt her. Mas’s voice, beyond the thin plastic wall.
Crouching on the mesh catwalk, I hammer on the coffin door until he opens. I heard you cry out, is anything the matter, what’s wrong?
Nothing is the matter, nothing is wrong, everything is fine just fine he says but I see that his face is stone, hard stone, the face of a man who has been my friend all my adult life. Betrayed, confused, frightened, I return to my dark coffin in a far foreign country, and seek the pale comfort of memories.
LUKA CONCEIVED THEM. LATER, when she saw their true faces she would disown them but her words, her speculations,
were the seed; the ten parts per thousand piss-water of the Nineteenth House pool the amniotic fluid in which conception took place.
“Jesus Joseph and Mary, a pool!” was Luka’s first reaction on arriving with Masahiko, Marcus, and ’Becca to take up Ethan Ring’s offer of summer hospitality in the sun. Thereafter she spent a significant part of every day stroking up and down, up and down, up and down; clear, glossy water shedding across her back, the crest of hair slicked across her shaved scalp, her brown shoulders. “Bet you never guessed I had an Esther Williams fetish. Why couldn’t they have had kinships for men, and why couldn’t my dad been in one? I was a deprived child, sympathy sympathy.”
On the third morning that the thermometer stuck at ninety-eight, they all decided to follow Luka’s example, returned to the primeval semi-aquatic state, and congregated breast-deep in the deep end around a floating tin bath full of slushy ice studded with bottles of import beer. Immersed in cool water, their talk turned to ambitions, hopes, fears, art, ideas.
“I’ve an idea!” Luka shouted. Bottles were deftly uncapped on the tiled pool edge, bottle caps sashayed down through the green-tinted water to form improbable constellations on the bottom. “Wrap this in a Rizla and toke it. In every piece of art or architecture or design there is an essence, a visual element that bypasses conscious discrimination and stimulates a direct psychological—even physiological—effect. Something that precedes understanding, analysis, interpretation, appreciation; that hits straight home in some deep reptile part of the brain and fires it off. Like, say, patterns of color and shape that create an overpowering impression—even a feeling—of dread, without there being any image you could specifically identify as dreadful.”
“Like emotional response?” asked ’Becca, floating on her back with a bottle of Becks balanced between her breasts.
“More powerful than that. More primal. Pre-emotional. Chemical.”
“I’m only a mere designer, but isn’t the whole point of abstract art to stimulate this kind of response?” asked Marcus.
“It strikes me that this effect can only be found in abstract art.” This from Masahiko, pressing a fresh-from-the-bath beer bottle to his forehead. “Ecstasy. In representational art, or design, the strength of the image itself would drown out this… preconscious effect.”
Ethan considered the flags rattling from the mastheads of the sleek white cruisers down in the marina before speaking.
“Not necessarily. Not at all. Like I once read this book.” Hoots of derision. Ethan persevered. “Like I said, I once read this book about typography, by this really famous designer from back in the eighties, nineties: Neville Brody. Neville Brody?” Shrugs. “Barbarians. Well, there’s a bit I remember where he talks about a typeface being ‘authoritarian.’ At the time I thought, What is this shit, how can letters on a page convey authority? But he was right; it’s exactly the same thing you’re talking about, Loo.”
“Call me that once more, Ethan Ring, and you’re catfood.”
“That the form of the letters in which a message is printed can somehow embed a subliminal meta-text?” asked Masahiko.
“I wouldn’t have put it quite like that, but yes.”
“You mean, like printing political pamphlets in heavy, dark sans serif type can make the reader subconsciously more susceptible to the message than if it were in an italic or script font?” ’Becca suggested.
“Conversely,” said Luka brightly, “you could set the Koran in one of those ghastly 1970s fonts made up from Art Nouveau women’s faces as an act of graphic subversion.”
“To get back to Luka’s original idea,” Ethan Ring said, “does there exist, is it possible to construct, the ultimate authoritarian typeface? One in which the embedded subconscious message is so powerful that the reader has to obey whatever is written in it?”
“To hear is to obey,” Marcus said.
“To see is to obey,” Luka corrected. “Shut up, you guys, Ethan has something here.” He was wagging a finger at unseen choirs of Muses, sucking in his lower lip, and gazing at the bottom right quadrant of heaven as he did when the creative saps were flowing in him.
“Are there, in fact, whole families of these things, out there, in there, somewhere; pure refined forms of what we have been talking about. Visual”—he caught at words—“entities that the conscious mind can’t process, that slip past our powers of rationality and discrimination and stimulate direct, physical responses. Like joy, or anger, or religious ecstasy, like getting high. Or even entirely new altered states of consciousness.”
“Buddhist mandalas are supposed to open the mind to nirvana,” Masahiko threw in. “Perhaps mandalas, abstract art, different styles of typography, all contain hints, diluted forms of these things Eth’s talking about. The true visual entities, the pure forms, the absolute forms, await to be seen, synthesized, isolated.”
“ ‘Lost Acres,’ ” ’Becca said. “An old poem by Robert Graves, I think. Didn’t they teach you anything at school?”
“Wanking mostly,” said Marcus. “And how to roll joints one-handed.”
“Shows. ‘Lost Acres’ is about how small parts of the landscape disappeared due to surveying errors. I’m not exactly sure how, but bits of fields, lanes, hedgerows, woods, got folded up and never appeared on the maps. On the map, A-ville will be right next to B-town; on the ground, there could be entire geographies in between.”
“Hidden realities. Bit Swords’n’Sorcery for me,” Marcus said.
“Like these entities may be the lost acres of the mind, things that have been overlooked by the higher consciousness; that it can’t see them, can’t process them, fills in the space where they are by folding up the visual map around them, putting things on either side next to each other, like the blind spot in the eye.” ’Becca again.
“Perhaps they all exist in the blind spot,” Masahiko said. “Perhaps that’s what the blind spot is, the part of the eye that registers these visual entities the mind can’t see.”
“Like the way the natural world embeds complex chaotic forms, like fractals, or the Mandelbrot set, that we find difficult to process,” Ethan said.
“Maybe consciousness is nothing more than a filtering mechanism so that we can go about our daily lives without being blinded by the constant light of God,” Luka said.
“Hey hey hey hey,” Marcus interrupted. “This is getting the teeniest bit scary, boys and girls.”
That night the marina burned. All the Nineteenth House and its neighbors in the unit turned out to watch the blaze and pass around cocktails and binoculars.
“Pure fucking apocalypse, the biggest burn since the Spanish Armada and I can’t find my fucking palmcorder!” Luka screamed in frustration. Someone was wheeling out a barbecue. Up on the road behind the Nineteenth House, the car headlights were nose to tail.
“What we were saying this afternoon,” Marcus confided to Ethan. “I think I know how it could be done. Expert systems sift images, locate those areas that embed this nonconscious stimulus thing, stack them to isolate common factors, and image-processing software amplifies and enhances them.” Ethan was less than half listening to Marcus’s evangelism, hot dogs and curled-up burgers were going round; Nikki Ring had brought out a beatbox. The flames were now throwing themselves thirty to forty meters into the hot summer night. A gasp from the assembled spectators: a gas cylinder had gone up with a scream and starburst like a rocket. Not even the Coronation fireworks had been this good.
“They reckon it’s terrorists,” said Masahiko, accepting something vaguely vodka-ey/orangey from one of Ethan’s co-sisters. “Islamic, Zionist, Third-World Debt-defaultist, Basque, Irish.”
’Becca appeared on the terrazzo with the palmcorder that she had found under a pile of Luka’s dirty underwear. Luka kissed her flamboyantly and with a rebel yell was over the fence, down on the beach, and running toward the conflagration, viewfinder pressed to eye.
“You are one lucky lucky bastard, Ethan Ring,” said Masahiko and for the fir
st time Ethan Ring knew and understood and appreciated and valued what he had with Luka. He wanted then to just stand and look at her, flamelit, videoing thirteen million ecus of burning yacht but Marcus was a persistent whisper in his ear.
“Think about it, Eth. Think what you could get for a graphic image that does everything E-Base does with no side effects no addiction problem no accidental overdose; think what they would pay for a typeface that makes you obey whatever is written in it.”
“Marcus, it was a joke. A joke, that’s all.”
“Many a true word spoken in jest, Eth.”
IT WAS BEAUTIFUL. IT looked like… It looked like… Like…
“There’s nothing there,” said Ethan Ring. The thing slipped from his field of vision like a glass eel. “I don’t see anything.”
New term in the rainy-day city. Same faces, same places, moved up a year, October outside the computer suite windows. Masahiko had logged off tonight’s installment of Kinjiru Cyber Les-girls. The last technician had issued the ritual admonition to switch off the lights and nothing else and left the room of humming monitors to the three pioneers, and the thing Marcus had found.
“You can’t see anything,” said Luka Casipriadin.