This one advances in kangaroolike bounds. I brush it by with my staff, but its long bulbous tail strikes me as it passes. I recoil involuntarily from the shock I receive, my reflexes spinning the staff before me as I retreat. It turns quickly and rears then. This one is a quadruped, and its raised forelimbs are fountains of fire. Its faceful of eyes blazes and hurts to look upon.
It drops back onto its haunches then springs again.
I roll beneath it and attack as it descends. But I miss, and it turns to attack again even as I continue thrusting. It springs and I turn aside, striking upward. It seems that I connect, but I cannot be certain.
It lands quite near me, raising its forelimbs. But this time it does not spring. It simply falls forward, hind feet making a rapid shuffling movement the while, the legs seeming to adjust their lengths to accommodate a more perfect flow.
As it comes on, I catch it square in the midsection with the proper end of my staff. It keeps coming, or falling, even as it flares and begins to disintegrate. Its touch stiffens me for a moment, and I feel the flow of its charge down my shoulder and across my breast. I watch it come apart in a final photoflash instant and be gone.
I turn quickly again but there is no third emerging from the doorway. None overhead either. There is a car coming up the street, slowing, however. No matter. The terminal’s potential must be exhausted for the moment, though I am puzzled by the consideration of how long it must have been building to produce the two I just dispatched. It is best that I be away quickly now.
As I resume my progress, though, a voice calls to me from the car, which has now drawn up beside me:
“Madam, a moment please.”
It is a police car, and the young man who has addressed me wears a uniform and a very strange expression.
“Yes, officer?” I reply.
“I saw you just a few moments ago,” he says. “What were you doing?”
I laugh.
“It is such a fine evening,” I say then, “and the street was deserted. I thought I would do a kata with my bo.”
“I thought at first that something was attacking you, that I saw something . . .”
“I am alone,” I say, “as you can see.”
He opens the door and climbs out. He flicks on a flashlight and shines its beam across the sidewalk, into the doorway.
“Were you setting off fireworks?”
“No.”
“There were some sparkles and flashes.”
“You must be mistaken.”
He sniffs the air. He inspects the sidewalk very closely, then the gutter.
“Strange,” he says. “Have you far to go?”
“Not too far.”
“Have a good evening.”
He gets back into the car. Moments later it is headed up the street.
I continue quickly on my way. I wish to be out of the vicinity before another charge can be built. I also wish to be out of the vicinity simply because being here makes me uneasy.
I am puzzled at the ease with which I was located. What did I do wrong?
“My prints,” Hokusai seems to say, after I have reached my destination and drunk too much brandy. “Think, daughter, or they will trap you.”
I try, but Fuji is crushing my head, squeezing off thoughts. Epigons dance on his slopes. I pass into a fitful slumber.
In tomorrow’s light perhaps I shall see . . .
14. Mt. Fuji from Meguro in Edo
Again, the print is not the reality for me. It shows peasants amid a rustic village, terraced hillsides, a lone tree jutting from the slope of the hill to the right, a snowcapped Fuji partly eclipsed by the base of the rise.
I could not locate anything approximating it, though I do have a partly blocked view of Fuji—blocked in a similar manner, by a slope—from this bench I occupy in a small park. It will do.
Partly blocked, like my thinking. There is something I should be seeing but it is hidden from me. I felt it the moment the epigons appeared, like the devils sent to claim Faust’s soul. But I never made a pact with the Devil . . . just Kit, and it was called marriage. I had no way of knowing how similar it would be.
Now . . . What puzzles me most is how my location was determined despite my precautions. My head-on encounter must be on my terms, not anyone else’s. The reason for this transcends the personal, though I will not deny the involvement of the latter.
In Hagakure, Yamamoto Tsunetomo advised that the Way of the Samurai is the Way of Death, that one must live as though one’s body were already dead in order to gain full freedom. For me, this attitude is not so difficult to maintain. The freedom part is more complicated, however; when one no longer understands the full nature of the enemy, one’s actions are at least partly conditioned by uncertainty.
My occulted Fuji is still there in his entirety, I know, despite my lack of full visual data. By the same token I ought to be able to extend the lines I have seen thus far with respect to the power which now devils me. Let us return to death. There seems to be something there, though it also seems that there is only so much you can say about it and I already have.
Death . . . Come gentle . . . We used to play a parlor game, filling in bizarre causes on imaginary death certificates: “Eaten by the Loch Ness monster.” “Stepped on by Godzilla.” “Poisoned by a ninja.” “Translated.”
Kit had stared at me, brow knitting, when I’d offered that last one.
“What do you mean ‘translated’?” he asked.
“Okay, you can get me on a technicality,” I said, “but I still think the effect would be the same. ‘Enoch was translated that he should not see death’—Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews, 11:5.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It means to convey directly to heaven without messing around with the customary termination here on earth. Some Moslems believe that the Mahdi was translated.”
“An interesting concept,” he said. “I’ll have to think about it.”
Obviously, he did.
I’ve always thought that Kurosawa could have done a hell of a job with Don Quixote. Say there is this old gentleman living in modern times, a scholar, a man who is fascinated by the early days of the samurai and the Code of Bushido. Say that he identifies so strongly with these ideals that one day he loses his senses and comes to believe that he is an old-time samurai. He dons some ill-fitting armor he had collected, takes up his katana, goes forth to change the world. Ultimately, he is destroyed by it, but he holds to the Code. That quality of dedication sets him apart and ennobles him, for all of his ludicrousness. I have never felt that Don Quixote was merely a parody of chivalry, especially not after I’d learned that Cervantes had served under Don John of Austria at the battle of Lepanto. For it might be argued that Don John was the last European to be guided by the medieval code of chivalry. Brought up on medieval romances, he had conducted his life along these lines. What did it matter if the medieval knights themselves had not? He believed and he acted on his belief. In anyone else it might simply have been amusing, save that time and circumstance granted him the opportunity to act on several large occasions, and he won. Cervantes could not but have been impressed by his old commander, and who knows how this might have influenced his later literary endeavor? Ortega y Gasset referred to Quixote as a Gothic Christ. Dostoevsky felt the same way about him, and in his attempt to portray a Christ—figure in Prince Myshkin he, too, felt that madness was a necessary precondition for this state in modern times.
All of which is preamble to stating my belief that Kit was at least partly mad. But he was no Gothic Christ. An Electronic Buddha would be much closer.
“Does the data-net have the Buddha-nature?” he asked me one day.
“Sure,” I said. “Doesn’t everything?” Then I saw the look in his eyes and added, “How the hell should I know?”
He grunted then and reclined his resonance couch, lowered the induction helmet, and continued his computer-augmented analysis of a Lucifer cipher with a 128-bit key. Theoretic
ally, it would take thousands of years to crack it by brute force, but the answer was needed within two weeks. His nervous system coupled with the data-net, he was able to deliver.
I did not notice his breathing patterns for some time. It was not until later that I came to realize that after he had finished his work, he would meditate for increasingly long periods of time while still joined with the system.
When I realized this, I chided him for being too lazy to turn the thing off.
He smiled.
“The flow,” he said. “You do not fixate at one point. You go with the flow.”
“You could throw the switch before you go with the flow and cut down on our electric bill.”
He shook his head, still smiling.
“But it is that particular flow that I am going with. I am getting farther and farther into it. You should try it sometime. There have been moments when I felt I could translate myself into it.”
“Linguistically or theologically?”
“Both,” he replied.
And one night he did indeed go with the flow. I found him in the morning—sleeping, I thought—in his resonance couch, the helmet still in place. This time, at least, he had shut down our terminal. I let him rest. I had no idea how late he might have been working. By evening, though, I was beginning to grow concerned and I tried to rouse him. I could not. He was in a coma.
Later, in the hospital, he showed a flat EEG. His breathing had grown extremely shallow, his blood pressure was very low, his pulse feeble. He continued to decline during the next two days. The doctors gave him every test they could think of but could determine no cause for his condition. In that he had once signed a document requesting that no heroic measures be taken to prolong his existence should something irreversible take him, he was not hooked up to respirators and pumps and IVs after his heart had stopped beating for the fourth time. The autopsy was unsatisfactory. The death certificate merely showed: “Heart stoppage. Possible cerebrovascular accident.” The latter was pure speculation. They had found no sign of it. His organs were not distributed to the needy as he had once requested, for fear of some strange new virus which might be transmitted.
Kit, like Marley, was dead to begin with.
15. Mt. Fuji from Tsukudajima in Edo
Blue sky, a few low clouds, Fuji across the bay’s bright water, a few boats and an islet between us. Again, dismissing time’s changes, I find considerable congruence with reality. Again, I sit within a small boat. Here, however, I’ve no desire to dive beneath the waves in search of sunken splendor or to sample the bacteria—count with my person.
My passage to this place was direct and without incident. Preoccupied I came. Preoccupied I remain. My vitality remains high. My health is no worse. My concerns also remain the same, which means that my major question is still unanswered.
At least I feel safe out here on the water. “Safe,” though, is a relative term. “Safer” then, than I felt ashore and passing among possible places of ambush. I have not really felt safe since that day after my return from the hospital. . . .
I was tired when I got back home, following several sleepless nights. I went directly to bed. I did not even bother to note the hour, so I have no idea how long I slept.
I was awakened in the dark by what seemed to be the ringing of the telephone. Sleepily, I reached for the instrument, then realized that it was not actually ringing. Had I been dreaming? I sat up in bed. I rubbed my eyes. I stretched. Slowly, the recent past filled my mind and I knew that I would not sleep again for a time. A cup of tea, I decided, might serve me well now. I rose, to go to the kitchen and heat some water.
As I passed through the work area, I saw that one of the CRTs for our terminal was lit. I could not recall its having been on but I moved to turn it off.
I saw then that its switch was not turned on. Puzzled, I looked again at the screen and for the first time realized that there was a display present:
MARI.
ALL IS WELL.
I AM TRANSLATED.
USE THE COUCH AND THE HELMET.
KIT
I felt my fingers digging into my cheeks and my chest was tight from breath retained. Who had done this? How? Was it perhaps some final delirious message left by Kit himself before he went under?
I reached out and flipped the ON-OFF switch back and forth several times, leaving it finally in the OFF position.
The display faded but the light remained on. Shortly, a new display was flashed upon the screen:
YOU READ ME. GOOD.
IT IS ALL RIGHT. I LIVE.
I HAVE ENTERED THE DATA-NET.
SIT ON THE COUCH AND USE THE HELMET.
I WILL EXPLAIN EVERYTHING.
I ran from the room. In the bathroom I threw up, several times. Then I sat upon the toilet, shaking. Who would play such a horrible joke upon me? I drank several glasses of water and waited for my trembling to subside.
When it had, I went directly to the kitchen, made the tea, and drank some. My thoughts settled slowly into the channels of analysis. I considered possibilities. The one that seemed more likely than most was that Kit had left a message for me and that my use of the induction interface gear would trigger its delivery. I wanted that message, whatever it might be, but I did not know whether I possessed sufficient emotional fortitude to receive it at the moment.
I must have sat there for the better part of an hour. I looked out the window once and saw that the sky was growing light. I put down my cup. I returned to the work area.
The screen was still lit. The message, though, had changed:
DO NOT BE AFRAID.
SIT ON THE COUCH AND USE THE HELMET.
THEN YOU WILL UNDERSTAND.
I crossed to the couch. I sat on it and reclined it. I lowered the helmet. At first there was nothing but field noise.
Then I felt his presence, a thing difficult to describe in a world customarily filled only with data flows. I waited. I tried to be receptive to whatever he had somehow left imprinted for me.
“I am not a recording, Mari,” he seemed to say to me then. “I am really here.”
I resisted the impulse to flee. I had worked hard for this composure and I meant to maintain it.
“I made it over,” he seemed to say. “I have entered the net. I am spread out through many places. It is pure kundalini. I am nothing but flow. It is wonderful. I will be forever here. It is nirvana.”
“It really is you,” I said.
“Yes. I have translated myself. I want to show you what it means.”
“Very well.”
“I am gathered here now. Open the legs of your mind and let me in fully.”
I relaxed and he flowed into me. Then I was borne away and I understood.
16. Mt. Fuji from Umezawa
Fuji across lava fields and wisps of fog, drifting clouds; birds on the wing and birds on the ground. This one at least is close. I lean on my staff and stare at his peaceful reaches across the chaos. The lesson is like that of a piece of music: I am strengthened in some fashion I cannot describe.
And I had seen blossoming cherry trees on the way over here, and fields purple with clover, cultivated fields yellow with rape-blossoms, grown for its oil, a few winter camellias still holding forth their reds and pinks, the green shoots of rice beds, here and there a tulip tree dashed with white, blue mountains in the distance, foggy river valleys. I had passed villages where colored sheet metal now covers the roofs’ thatching—blue and yellow, green, black, red—and yards filled with the slate-blue rocks so fine for landscape gardening; an occasional cow, munching, lowing softly; scarlike rows of plastic-covered mulberry bushes where the silkworms are bred. My heart jogged at the sights—the tiles, the little bridges, the color. . . . It was like entering a tale by Lafcadio Hearn, to have come back.
My mind was drawn back along the path I had followed, to the points of its intersection with my electronic bane. Hokusai’s warning that night I drank too much—that his prints may trap me—could wel
l be correct. Kit had anticipated my passage a number of times. How could he have?
Then it struck me. My little book of Hokusai’s prints—a small cloth-bound volume by the Charles ES. Turtle Company—had been a present from Kit.
It is possible that he was expecting me in Japan at about this time, because of Osaka. Once his epigons had spotted me a couple of times, probably in a massive scanning of terminals, could he have correlated my movements with the sequence of the prints in Hokusai’s Views of Mt. Fuji, for which he knew my great fondness, and simply extrapolated and waited? I’ve a strong feeling that the answer is in the affirmative.
Entering the data-net with Kit was an overwhelming experience. That my consciousness spread and flowed I do not deny. That I was many places simultaneously, that I rode currents I did not at first understand, that knowledge and transcendence and a kind of glory were all about me and within me was also a fact of peculiar perception. The speed with which I was borne seemed instantaneous, and this was a taste of eternity. The access to multitudes of terminals and enormous memory banks seemed a measure of omniscience. The possibility of the manipulation of whatever I would change within this realm and its consequences at that place where I still felt my distant body seemed a version of omnipotence. And the feeling . . . I tasted the sweetness, Kit with me and within me. It was self surrendered and recovered in a new incarnation, it was freedom from mundane desire, liberation . . .
“Stay with me here forever,” Kit seemed to say.
“No,” I seemed to answer, dreamlike, finding myself changing even further. “I cannot surrender myself so willingly.”
“Not for this? For unity and the flow of connecting energy?”
“And this wonderful lack of responsibility?”
“Responsibility? For what? This is pure existence. There is no past.”
“Then conscience vanishes.”
“What do you need it for? There is no future either.”
“Then all actions lose their meaning.”
24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai [Illustrated] Page 5