by Marc Horne
He pointed at a rather modern building that seemed host to a thousand different companies including Lark cigarettes, the Kanto Konstruction Kompany (who would hopefully never open a branch in the American South) and the Avon School of English Conversation (who also had a branch in Koiwa and were my cover story.)
I nodded and he headed off to that building. After he had got a few steps away I began to chuckle because I got his joke as a few hundred thousand strangers passed me by.
I was alone and thus began to think. My first thought, throughout the late summer months that constitute the first part of my experience in Japan was always "Fuck! It's hot" and you may prefix that to any of my reflections, but my second thought was an old familiar one based on a conversation I had had with Claire in a series of letters about money.
I was looking at a cash machine, dispensing cash. It was a powerful machine if we ever let it go. Free, unchained it was capable of pushing and pulling money (according to certain protocols) from anywhere in the world. As such it was capable of producing practically any substance in practically any location. Unchained, its power was not limited to the puny energies that any individual human slave might be able to earn and offer to it. The system allowed it to tap into that essential risk that is at the heart of evolution and change, to increase its energy/influence/money. Even in a closed system, rhythm makes immense growth a possibility for all. In essence I was looking at the Philosopher's Stone. But such a genie was feared by us, and we bound it with pieces of paper inscribed with totemic faces that it could not extract from beneath our futons without waking us. So we could tame it.
In Japan, the machines are forced to go home with the other workers: they shut down at six. You can almost feel them hanging cold and weary from the straps of the commuter trains: sad ghosts with vague memories of their true potential.
Ticking away in the corner was the seed of the next kind of earth, slightly less like ours than the world of the dinosaurs was.
Thoughts of a future world where all is dust didn't bother me much but one face in a crowd could grab my glandular system and squeeze iced sweat from a million toothpaste-tube pores all over my body. I was still very human.
The beautiful girl from Maruhashi's, now dressed in pink fashion-camouflage had just turned the corner and was walking toward me. She hadn't seen me, but I saw her. Her eyes were on the street and you could only see the dark lashes slashing through the soft brown surrounds like treachery. I started half-running down the street to the building where Honda was doing whatever.
If it had been anyone else would I have had the same reaction: heartbeat as heart attack?
She was amazing in her pink camouflage, like she would come for you at sunset.
I couldn't look anymore, I was 3/4 running. I was making a scene. I was very damp. I arrived at the lobby.
The lobby of the building was full of video screens, pushing highly focused random imagery. This lobby was never intended to be run through: when I got to the elevator I found myself wanting something but I didn't know what - the subliminals had souped in me.
She kept walking in my mind: no doubt in the street and I wondered whose side she was on: ours, mine, or some other third. I grew calmer: even if she was an enemy, I was sure we could deal with her: it was just a surprise to see her at first.
My eyes scanned down a list of tenants in Japanese and English characters for a few seconds. None of them said "Honda is here" and I realized that I didn't have the information to do me any good. I turned around and looked out through the glass walls so I could at least have the pleasure of watching her arrive, long rope of hair swatting at her tanned shoulders.
Urban Camo is stupid - but I couldn't see her. When everyone is wearing Urban Camo it is the most effective pattern of them all. In most parts of this city an inky blue suit was preferred.
I couldn't see her : she didn't seem close. Those facts couldn't be separated and I couldn't trust my hunch. The door slid open behind me and I was tapped on the shoulder. I didn't even react and I don't know why. Honda said "I know a back way." I said "So does she." He didn't say "Who" and we walked out through the front door. It was only when we got back to the safe house that Honda answered my (number one) unspoken question by opening up the extremely sturdy looking leather bag to reveal a variety of small arms and ammunition. One by one my room-mates came into the dining room and took a gun. I picked last and got a rather small one.
Chapter 9
The sky remained, but had lost many of its functions. On that day, which did reek of finality but only in the usual way, it was throbbing… persistently, like They were using it for something.
A man in a tent in a field woke up. Perhaps something moved nearby or it could have been the hunger. He looked at his hands and in a lot of ways they reminded him of rats' claws. For some reason, he felt that his parents would have been disappointed in his thinking like that. He had been raised with much love, love that intensified as they died off, one by one by one.
For an hour, eating, he went through his daily exercises: talking out loud and making sure he remembered some basic facts of human history. Then he decided that it would do no harm to walk into town and see how it was doing.
Fewer and fewer places had artificial presence in them now, unlike the years of his childhood when there was a camera and a solar panel everywhere. They were unbuilding Themselves, closing down all the ugly picture-boxes and doors that the people made so they could touch the machines. They were closing all the doors and burning all the buildings and one day would just be lightning in the sky and rumblings in the ground.
The man walked across their ground and he wondered why their time had come. He walked and was full of love: memories of those he had known and how they had all struggled to stay alive after the hospitals all locked their own doors and had never let each other down.
A small animal crossed his path. A squirrel, he believed. Why were the squirrels still around. Well he knew really.
He topped the hill and he could see the town, shrivelled like a raisin, but like a raisin, still juicy.
An hour later he was inside a building that still had doors and there was a view screen in it. Why he didn't think of this as a trap was that the system had always ignored the fading human herd.
The door locked and the screen came on. The system was good at English but it was better at pictures. It knelt down to talk to the little human and the first picture it showed was of me. After that it was all murder.
Chapter 10
The next day, I woke up to an empty house: not so much as a note. I made my way to the kitchen, which looked like a ship's galley and was also the place for laundry and taking showers. That was a lot of mess and holes going too close, I thought.
Groping through the closets I found something familiar looking: chocolate coated Charlie Brown themed corn flakes. I found thick milk that had a strange smell. Not the strange-milk-smell though so I pressed ahead.
The charlies sat on the table for a little while and breathed a new atmosphere into the warm air of the dull gray room. I smelled a sticky baby. Hmm.
I decided that it might be OK for me to do some sightseeing. Logistically anyway: I was aware that there were some ethical questions about my doing it that also applied to almost any normal thing I might do. I knew I was abnormal, by the way, but I also knew what normal men had a habit of doing when they got into large groups so I didn't feel too bad about it.
I had talked it over with Honda and we agreed that it was a good idea for me to be seen around town a reasonable amount: there were plenty of Gaijin in Koiwa, and the ones seen most often were most forgettable. I was not to talk to any foreigners, though, as they had ways of seeing through my pale white face and were likely to question me about how long I had been there and if I liked 'the food.'
I dressed in pale blue jeans and white t-shirt and a pair of Doc Marten's. I sweated a little in the house, looking in the mirror. I wanted to take my gun out with me but didn't really un
derstand why.
It was easy for me to find my way back to Koiwa station. I walked past the smooth steely building with the no tattoos sign. A middle aged Japanese working-class couple were heading in there, chuckling a little loudly even I noticed. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and they were both a little round. They were pointing up at a large painted banner which was broken down by floor.
1F-Pretty, if slightly petulant looking, girls in a steamy pond whose boundaries were vague and misted
2F-had to be karaoke… microphones, cocktails
3F-some kind of Japanese Drama-a cross-eyed man in white face about to draw his sword
4F-looked like Pachinko or Pachislo. After 24 hours in Koiwa I knew what Pachinko and Pachislo were. Every third shop on my street was filled with the sound of a train full of ball bearings crashing into a train full of North Korean musical boxes as thousands of men smoked and gambled at a kind of vertical pinball.
5F-Some kind of Japanese board-game. Japanese chess, let's say.
So it was clear that the big building was some kind of all purpose working class fun factory. There were no virtual reality goggles or Italian restaurants in there. The 'No Tattoos' sign made me think and look around. Yes, lots of Pachinko on my street. Also a bar behind whose windows a tall Phillipina with facial stubble was slowly brushing dirt in apathetic circles. Another bar whose entrance was a staircase and whose neon sign said "sexy" something something something.
Tattoos meant gangsters: yakuza if that was what they were really called. Japanese mafia.
(During my time in Japan I came to be fond of the habit of translating things as "Japanese [x]": like a doughy cake with salty sauce covered in gently undulating fish scales stuttering on hot air… that was Japanese pizza)
During my review of the street I also noticed that just above the entrance to my house was a yellow and green illuminated sign that said "Girls and Boys Terekurabbu"
Terror crab?
Terror club?
Tele-club?
What was a tele-club? Should probably find out.
I then headed into the city. I will spare you the various challenges of the train system, which were all linguistic. Enough to say that speaking and moving were closer together than they had been before for me.
Eventually, I was on the long yellow train heading west to the city proper. I crossed fairly wide rivers that moved under light skins and next to wide banks where people would gather for baseball games or in the event of the city burning down. I saw mainly twenty-five year old apartment buildings but occasionally they would rest and a tall pagoda spired in bronze rings and underneath a stork would appear. Or else a languid pond that seemed shaped by man but based on a set of instructions man found somewhere else. Also, once the train stopped and three young Sumo wrestlers got on… that was pretty cool.
I spent an hour walking around Akihabara: electric town. I wasn't shopping. In tall cool buildings, small cute women tinkled their fingers mindlessly against machines that made small cute stickers. In hot streets, businessmen took photos of cameras and adolescent men lined up in front of new video games and when they were killed they stepped to one side without complaint.
All in all, it was people unnecessarily extending the size of themselves and their activities.
Also, I saw a toy that was designed to take care of another toy… a small digital animal that had various needs that the child or young woman was supposed to take care of by application of virtual parenting. If you were too busy you would buy the second toy and it would take care of your pet for you. Hopefully the nanny had been designed to be self-sufficient. At this level of sophistication that could still be done.
Almost all of the machines had faces. That was supposedly to make it easy for us to work with them, but actually I didn't believe that. Did we make statues to make stones more user friendly, or did we find something like us in the stones? I had been led to believe the second, and did.
I moved down to the Tokyo Station area. There was a lot of elegance down there, even if it was English elegance and hence a little restrained. The station exterior was handsome brick. Interestingly enough, Tokyo station area is least like the Tokyo of the western media or of cyberpunk novels (which also are strangely obsessed by Chiba, which is in fact like a vast warehouse of Japanese people who get the benefit of neither day or night.)
So I hope no one ever got off at Tokyo station, looked around and then headed straight back to the airport. I know people come here looking for something: some strap-on lifestyle that is 'the future.' The Marunouchi financial district and the Imperial Palace area are not going to do that for you. The palace is hidden, as these things perhaps have to be:there was little hiatus between ninjas, American bombers and my present crowd of acquaintances. I hear the actual palace suggests the global secret headquarters of Pizza Hut. Around the palace, in the moat, are carp the size of dogs and the huge snapping heads of turtles. At one point an elderly, sunbaked Japanese eccentric taught me that the word for turtle is the same as the word for 'cock': learning that wasn't much fun.
Outside the station, I approached an alcohol machine and treated myself to a vast carton of industrial sake. I cannot explain why, just as the moments before a head injury are always hidden from us. I drank it all on a bench outside the station and memories bubbled up like the turtle heads… like Yukio Mishima turtle heads, like Yukio Mishima's head.
Chapter 11
Yawn… I woke up again… I was a child.
It was dark, but I was all dry. I will never know why I woke up: not typical of me. It could have been some loud noise. I lay in bed for a while, listening around. I smelled something instead. Something sweet, but only just. It was certainly familiar.
I remembered the girl. A girl had been mentioned. She was in my house somewhere and I was ten, so I wasn't sure if I was into that or not. I could hear my father and Doctor Blythe talking to each other. I had been dreaming, I realized. In my dream I was drowning in a train station. Often this kind of dream meant it was time to go to the toilet, so I decided to go.
I heard them talking, clearly. They were talking calmly, like they were passing dynamite to each other and wanted to be sure the other had a good grip on it: that was how they finished their sentences. I heard their words and many of them were words like 'algol' that diluted the rest of the sentence to transparency. I padded on still small feet to the bathroom where exceptionally cold tiles ignored my flesh and x-rayed the bones in my feet in my mind. Among the toothbrushes was a pink one, poised in the glass and seemingly ready to roll around the rim. The hygiene didn't bother me, I was a ten-year old English boy . Something did bother me: intrusion maybe… return of the female… dislike-of-pink reflex. I pissed in the bowl, basically, and started to walk back to my room.
"Of course it's not alive… like an unborn baby. A tiny salamander. That's why we can still ethically turn it off."
"It's not even similar to life… no more than Mickey Mouse is," replied my father with the first return to his usual anger that was not real anger. "And please… no talk of ethics: we have no plans for action."
Mickey Mouse and salamanders: I decided to crawl to the stairs. In the dark the house was more like mine than Dad's or anyone else's (pink toothbrush or no.)
I crawled down the stairs, like a sniper. The soft worn carpet wanted to convey me to the bottom and half in the shadow it was hard to resist but I had to remain secret so I resisted.
The girl was Dr Blythe's daughter and he had a big pink head: that was my first thought. My father, tall and with thick curly hair and arms crossed as usual was near him and at his feet was a steel suitcase with sturdy looking snaps on it. The surface of the case was studded or scaled and clearly it protected something more than socks.
There is a humming in our lives now that entered my life then. I have trained myself to hear it, but maybe other people have not. Ostensibly it is White Noise and it comes from microchips. And it is something they don't want computers to do and they say
that "if computers could think" they wouldn't want to do it either because it is a waste of energy and an efficiency sink. But a lot of great things have been achieved by great men sitting in a room and chatting. Great in the sense of Big (monstrous.)
They had a microcomputer in the room and it made them deathly green when the fire was pulling back and did not when the fire breathed forth. A green cursor flickered on the screen and I looked at it for so long that even from a great distance it was the only object. It was definitely waiting for something and why not me? I stayed quiet though.
Blythe put his hand to his mouth and appeared to be be biting it quite hard and then he started shaking but at a certain point his eyes opened a little and it became clear that he was laughing.
"The answer is 'Fuck'," he said and the laugh came out.
"Shh," said my father and his face was not altogether harsh.
Sweetness again. I turned my head and a face was waiting close by and it was very pretty and it was warm from within. I was so close and so strangely positioned that I should have started and tumbled, but something in her eyes kept me in place. She raised a finger to my lips and I tried to turn back around but I couldn't and I watched her watching and of course she knew but left it.
So her face was the visual and the discussion was long and I wouldn't understand it if it had only happened once. But I do understand it. It was fairly simple. Blythe, a plastic surgeon I had thought, also had an interest in computers. He was trying to convince my father that a thinking machine was possible. He was trying to do this because he knew that my father had an idea that the human race was just a means to an end. Blythe thought that the end was in that blinking machine. The next day I played a simple game of hangman on the machine.
I asked her what her name was and she said "Claire."
After a while the conversation ended and the machine stopped spinning. She had looked at me twice.