by Marc Horne
I began to have second thoughts about the operation: it seemed a little whimsical, and not fully described by Dad's master plan as it had gradually been revealed to me over the years.
The first real inkling of the plan came when I was about 7. Dad was ironing. Dad looked a lot like Muammar El Qadafi back in those days. You cannot really imaging Qadafi ironing but you must try.
I was reading a comic describing the adventures of Judge Dredd… a violent policeman of the future who had a law book extrapolated from the norms of western society until almost all offenses against human propriety were punishable by death. As he lived in a city of a hundred million people in the middle of a nuclear wasteland, this seemed acceptable. But even then I had my doubts, as the society was affluent and advanced enough that all crime seemed to have minimal consequences. How do you steal a hundred creds, y'know? Just make a hundred more. You made a new face last week and about a month ago there were talking monkeys in the city.
Anyway, Dredd was through with his killings for the week. There was a fact page describing various statistics about Dredd, and I was poring over it. Judge Dredd was thirty-three. I had heard that Jesus Christ maxed out at thirty-three. I asked my dad how old he was and he said… "I'm thirty-three."
I told him about that Dredd was the same age, and I described his role in Mega City 1. "So they had a nuclear war?" he asked and I told him that they had.
"And they all still live in a city and they do the same sort of things we do? Do they still hunt each other down and find weak people and kill them."
I mentioned that they did, and further outlined that those whose genes were damaged by the radiation were expelled from the city, and that they had recently suppressed a robot slave rebellion.
"Bloody typical," he said. "Mankind blasts the planet to near extinction and of it gains new enemies and new sub-humans to hate. Does this story seem true to you?"
"Really true?"
"Not really true but truly true."
"I don't know.."
"It's basically true. Man has been killing in the same style for as long as he could. He has to be changed."
"Who can change him"
"Why don't we?"
"I don't get it."
"You know Jesus Christ"
"He was thirty-three too."
"Yes, and he had a mind that was different from ours. He could see that something big was coming and that we should move out of the way."
I imagined Judge Dredd's enormous kill-dozer.
"We should wait until you are older, but I just want you to think that man doesn't always have to be here and the same like the cockroaches."
"OK"
Dad talked about the cockroaches a lot as I was growing up. His hatred of them seemed disproportionate to their total lack of impact on our daily life. I never saw a real cockroach until I was sixteen. What he seemed to hate most was that they never changed.
But one day, a mellow day with an evening that seemed curved to have no limit and where you could relax to death, he muttered under his breath. "They're not so bad… they just remind me of something." and I knew he was talking about the roaches.
He wanted the long evening to end it seemed, because he would not let it take his mind. In his head he was rehearsing a conversation with people who would not let it end .
Chapter 7
So, I was hungry. It had crept up on me because I had been basically inert: breathing and listening had somehow disposed of a sizable portion of whatever the hell that was they gave me on the plane. Am I alone in suspecting that the airlines have genetically engineered species of chicken that have red peppers sprouting from them like tumors and tomato juice for blood and that they shotgun them and heat them up for us?
Probably.
So I was hungry and it turned out that there was no food in the house. Honda smacked me on the back and with a wry smile told me that he had a place in mind.
We stepped out into the morning street which an old woman, somewhat ambitiously, had decided to wash. Underneath the realm of the eye, a slow toxic snow was falling all the time. Honda led me, always a few steps ahead. The streets of Koiwa showed me little new: repetitions of empty streets with breeze-block walls and then commercial streets with unambitious stores still partially wrapped in plastic. We walked past a lot of food places, many of them putting out delicious smells and a sound that hit you like the sound of someone settling into their favorite chair or slipping on a fine pair off shoes: one of them was even a McDonald's. We didn't go into any of them. He had a plan, it soon became obvious.
My hunger finally surfaced and broke through my skin and its tentacles began to reach around me to anything once-living that was not in my taboo set. I kept it together and kept following.
We bowed under a door-hanging and we were inside a stainless steel environment inhabited by two men in blue and white pajamas with hair like undergrowth who started cooking up some noodles and making me a cup of coffee without a word being spoken. As I sat down, I looked to Honda and I didn't mind letting him know with my eyes that this meant a lot to me. He answered, as silently as I, that he simply hoped I enjoyed my meal.
One of the cooks pulled an enormous serving of steaming noodles out of the large gray pan. What he did next immobilized my brain. He ran the noodles under very cold tap-water until he was absolutely sure that they were dead. He then grabbed a big sprinkle of seaweed and made sure that not a noodle was untouched by nature's fragrant gift.
Then it was not coffee and he sprinkled it all over the noodles. And with the flick of a wrist an unseen egg dropped its rawness on it all. And I ate them quietly and they chilled my teeth, and Honda was obviously trying not to be noticed as he anxiously followed my gulps. He wasn't very good at it.
Honda picked up the tab.
"We have a big day in front of us!" he said with enthusiasm, making me expect a fishing trip.
"So soon?"
"So soon, so good," he said and it was only when I was writing out my secret report that I noticed he had made some new English.
"Can we talk here?" I asked as I looked at the two men, who in turn were looking at the glass in their one large window.
"No names and we should be OK."
"Which of the people I met is the chemist?"
A long pause.
"You are the chemist."
I made my pause as short as possible. "Not really."
Honda looked down at his fingertips for a long time and I almost expected a chop to my throat.
"How so?"
"I know how to put the final mix together… but I don't think we can buy the ingredients we need on the streets. I need someone who can make those ingredients for us."
"We know many chemists."
"Well good!"
"It will take a week or two. We have some work for you to do in the meantime."
I felt a chill going down my spine. I was about to be asked something outside my plan. It would probably be dangerous.
"Something dangerous… ?"
"Relatively.. no."
***
The cab, yellow immaculate, glided to a halt and the door popped open untouched by any human hand and the cool air from the inside hissed out and then that hot air came in and the cab driver mopped his bald head with his floppy cap and as we left sprayed us with last minute directions, antidirections.
We were awfully close to the American Embassy considering that Honda had failed to clarify his earlier hints. The embassy was well hidden by hundreds of meters of wall and ivy and it was also very flattened out and skulking among hills. I got the feeling it was a front or a misdirection. The Americans couldn't really occupy such a place: it wasn't fitting. But maybe it was just some post-colonial thing.
In the end we did nothing related to the embassy. We walked a few blocks: I don't know exactly why the taxi didn't take us all the way. It was either a token spy move, or the taxi was actually incapable of taking us there. Taxi drivers in Tokyo only go where they know and
the streets have no names. Yes, like the song but lacking the liberating sensation Bono feels.
We walked around a corner and a strange thing happened. The city angled away: the tall glassy banks, that I knew were so close, disappeared and we were next to a flattened construction zone with an escalator in the middle of it, going underground. We walked past it and then down a slight hill then we turned left and found ourselves in front of a modest two-story building that had certain swimming pool features, such as green blue coloring and a wall constructed of glass bricks.
"Why are we here," I asked softly.
Honda lit a cigarette. "We need to talk to one of our friends. He is a backer. He wants to meet you."
Excited, I tried to open the door. It was locked. What was I thinking? Rich people lock their doors, even in Japan. A few seconds later a very attractive young woman opened the door. Young, thin, dressed in a smart grey suit. Not happy to see us: her perfect face bore no scars or marks but seemed a mask for something. I was surprised to find that she was looking me in the eye. She had very delicate brown eye make-up that made her seem to glow. I tried to end the eye lock, because I could have been clubbed to death and not noticed. Honda put a hand on my shoulder and moved me inside and she saw us into an elevator and disappeared.
It had been a while since I had had any kind of relationship with a woman… other than my life-long-distance love affair with Claire Blythe. That was a strange one, and a dominating factor in my life. It was why I was here, really, because she had brought me back to Dad after our big schism. I thought about us both in the slow seconds of the elevator. I wished that at least one of us had a normal life instead of being two moons locked in a convoluted dance. I decided to check my e-mail on my custom Palm when I got back to 'HQ': an encrypted love letter might be waiting. It would be encrypted on two levels: first, mathematically and second that it would apparently contain no words of love or passion… just dry descriptions of hate crimes in Bucharest. The computer would handle the first, I the second.
The elevator doors opened to some amazing decor. Italian and Japanese styles had been meshed so successfully that Martian style had been created - there was a complete culture behind the way the leather curved around the black skeletons of wood and beneath the carpet that phased in and out, putting softness only where it was needed.
There was a faint music and footsteps emerged from it. What a fucking incredible suit! A man arrived inside it.
He was Japanese, tan and fit in his mid forties, with a round face and wide thin mouth that said "yes, yes, I am aware of that." He wore his obligatory large facial moles with real aplomb. They made me think of elegant cigarette holders.
He shook Honda's hand rather than bowing. Honda responded: this was clearly something the rich fellow did all the time, even when foreigners weren't around. He must be cosmopolitan.
They speedily exchanged a few words in mumbled Japanese. Then Honda introduced me to Toshiro Maruhashi, construction magnate.
In his urbane manner, including clippings from The Times (of London), Maruhashi introduced me to the world of the dashing property developer who was returning English-style housing to London and European panache to Tokyo and Osaka.
We three seated ourselves on a trio of Italian mini-sofas that belonged together like certain sub-atomic particles do. As we had toured the spacious room, three cups of green tea had been prepared and they rippled obediently on slave tables near our perfect seats.
"So enough about us, what about you Mr. Blake?"
Where to begin? Hold back too much and provoke suspicion. Tell too much and possibly induce panic. The correct line is in our affinities… our need to mess with the people of the city.
"I'm sure you know all but the most boring details. I am a… traveler who facilitates certain operations that fit in with certain goals that my family and I hold to be important. And we also have certain values, certain expectations of the world that we know your revered founder is dedicated towards. In particular we are dissatisfied with the world as it is being carried out everywhere today.
"Outside of my work in this area there is little to know about me other than that I enjoy S.C.U.B.A. diving"
I contemplated the effect my final sentence was having on the two as we all looked down into our swirling tea. I thought it had struck just the right note and put an end to all discussion about me.
We will never know because a loud banging was followed by a gust of wind and before I knew it a man in a torn and wet shirt hurdled across the sturdy oak and meteorite table in front of me and crashed through a tall statue toward the door .
A few seconds later I was following Honda out of the door at full speed. It wasn't just that I was following or even running. I had to catch that man to learn more about what the Cult was doing to people. Clearly they had been doing something to him.
We hit the streets and he was about forty feet ahead of us, running with all of his energy, burning everything. We began to run too. It was two o'clock on a side street and so no one got in our way. Honda's and my feet pounded down for a few seconds out of sync and sounding like the first rain but after that as steady as the long wet day. The man ahead of us hurdled a car and cut across the street, shaving a taxi and blasting twenty extra feet of running at us. Honda exhaled in anger and inhaled in determination. We were that close.
We pushed and, untortured, steadily gained on the man. To his credit he never looked back. He made his own pace and path. He was older, late thirties. There was no doubt that we would catch him unless he had a trick, hopefully involving a helicopter, lined up.
We were on a narrow and unusually long street, streaked in violet that looked like speed. I increased my pace as I saw his legs begin to shake and a ring of perspiration flew from me and I could feel it hanging in the air, not a thing yet separate from me.
He tried to dash a display of sports watches to the ground to confound me, but it was firmly dash-proofed and all he did was lose his balance and his next twenty steps had twenty different directions, the last of which being down, down, down.
Barely bothering to slow down and with a violence fairly untypical of me I launched a kick into the belly that had just rolled into my view and then hopped over his body as he groaned. Turning, I threw myself onto him and got him in a head lock.
"Stop," said Honda, fairly quietly and I did.
He bent over the man and slowly helped him to his feet talking in an apologetic tone clearly explaining that some horrible misunderstanding had taken place. For his part the man who ran seemed to be apologizing for causing any trouble in the first place.
The three of us slowly retraced the steps that we had blazed a few moments earlier. The two continued to chatter quietly which led me to hang back, adrenaline withdrawal kicking in, feeling stupid. I felt stupid because I had kicked him and because I didn't know who he was and because I couldn't read or understand a fucking word within several thousand miles.
Just then a small boy (not at school) said "Harro!" to me and I replied "Hello" to him.
We arrived back at Maruhashi's office where two large men with facial hair took the runner's arms like nurses and took him back through a barely noticeable pale blue door. I could see behind the door for a second. A wooden chair and a large video screen and a sink. The door closed with a faint hiss.
"Thank you for your effort, but Mr Goto is a friend of ours," said Honda and Maruhashi nodded agreement.
"His education continues. I am surprised he ran out like that but I think it was more like an extreme lust for fresh air than anything else. All human lusts become extreme in that room," said Maruhashi.
"And then are gone," added Honda and they nodded again. I nodded too this time in an earnest recognition that I did actually have something in common with the cult and was not just faking this whole thing. Their radical cosmology and eschatology were faint novelties but their attitude to what we call Human Nature was close to me and to my group.
We shared a quiet moment and th
en decided it was prudent that we leave before any investigation into the ruckus began. Maruhashi said he was impressed by me and that was enough.
We left, but didn't go home.
Chapter 8
We got off the train one stop from Shinjuku, the enormous central station (that you may remember from the prologue,) in Yoyogi.
Yoyogi had the usual concrete but also there was the inescapable presence of itchy looking greenery. Looking off a little in the distance a large park could be seen. On the verges of it, I could see teenagers dressed to outrage (assuming a shiny jacket and orange 'teddy-boy' hair could do that) and making energetic music through small amps. There was much choreographed dancing, robotically correct for such a hot day. There were also two girls in sun-blotting black who, perhaps as their only way of joining in the fun, took turns at screaming into each other's face until something dried up or popped in their throat.
We walked out of the station and then I paused for a second as it became clear that Honda intended to walk down a street that resembled a mosh pit in dress and density.
Hundreds of Japanese punks and schoolgirls in distressed sailor suits were thronging (collectively speaking, little sign of individual movement could be discerned) from shops that sold jackets made from converted plastic trash bags to shops that bought jackets and converted them to plastic trash bags. Or so it seemed. I was a little cynical about this knot of 'youth culture' because despite being clearly and pleasingly non-political (I took the "Nazi Shop" as a sign of that) it was clear that they could resist nothing and wanted everything. If some cool band started playing on a platform raised above them they would change shape as I watched, their clothes morphing to match, hair falling or growing in sync and their histories would be rewritten : now-deleted vinyl disks sprouting in their record collections at home.
After twenty minutes or so, we were through the street.
Honda said to me "Would you mind waiting here and if you see anyone that you recognize then run into the lobby of that building there."