Tokyo Zero

by Marc Horne

  Sometimes it was like that, but my first reflex memory of it is always some kind of crazed, shampoo commercial glory of sun and leaves and English splendor and her hair flowing as a slipstream behind her cheeks made rosy. For 3 years.

  "Do you remember that crazy Doctor Fasma from Poland? I saw him on TV the other day," (Claire's e-mail continued) "He is trying to ban the internet now or something… I think he knows that your Dad has moved on to stage two! Or maybe he doesn't, but I told your Dad anyway."

  So we had taken a beach holiday in Torquay, a very pleasant town with nice beaches and cliffs, I thought. Claire wanted to swim all day. I had found a stack of old comics at the our B&B and I wanted to read them. Over the top of the comic, where often a planet exploded, I would see her in her bikini jumping into a wave and as it washed over her it made her look fractionally more of a woman to my eye (which would then flash back to the page)

  Dr Fasma was with us, in a sailor suit with shorts on a beach lounger drinking lemonade. He had a face that was ratlike on a head that was bearlike. He was in his late forties and lived in England, teaching at the nearby University. Dad, Blythe and he sat parallel and looked at the sea. Conversation between people who don't look at each other assumes a wavelike quality after a period of time (beach or no beach) so I am not entirely sure who said what.

  They said that no one machine could ever be as powerful as a mind.

  They said that the mind was not just one thing, but did seem to have just one rule set, and that was the objective.

  They said that there was no guarantee that this next thing was going to be good.

  My Father said that he had seen immense beauty in his life, and he had seen moments of intense promise, he had seen the inherent goodness of children and had never, ever, heard a piece of music that was evil except in its lyrics. He also said that he was confident that we would see death camps in Europe within twenty years, and when that happened he would do what he had to do.

  They said that The Internet might go commercial if computer pricing followed its current trend and if there was something interesting up there for people.

  They made a commitment to invest a great deal of money into researching a piece of software that would allow one to view pornography across the Internet, and decided one should phase it in as a scientific tool with other purposes so people were not ashamed to acquire this software.

  Three years later and the Blythes left. The Doctor needed to go to the US and push some research along. Dad was shaking his hand as he prepared to leave.

  "Things look bad in Yugoslavia," Dad said with as near to satisfaction as a man whose wife died in a death camp can muster.

  "Research is accelerating… the Big Brain is coming… maybe the brain can sort us all out."

  "We fear him too much… we have to fear something else more or we will cling to this sick flesh as the temple of humanity."

  I was looking at Claire,who was shyly avoiding my eyes. She was so tall and thin and pretty as she kicked a little stone. Three nights ago, when it was clear that she was leaving we had stopped acting like brother and sister while our Fathers were in the lab we had struggled out a touching session of sex-like activity. I was awfully in love with her and sickened that she was leaving. But I knew that we would keep in touch and that I would always remember her in my heart (due to an equally touching little conversation we'd had) so I had a good high perspective on her departure. The two Dads continued their high blown talk until the window was wound up by a mischievous Claire who blew me a small kiss that had trouble making it through the sun-blasted glass. Yes, it was another sunny day.

  I saw her again when I was 18 and again at 22 for a month when we traveled around Germany together. And that was it. I didn't think about the success of our relationship too often. It was built on a layer of thick familial complacency.

  She signed off her e-mail with three xs that represented kisses. There was no code to represent the depth or passion of the kisses.

  Chapter 17

  Torture, kidnap and mind control were in every way contrary to my moral beliefs. I had a job to do and the need of it canceled out most of that. But the inevitable noise was outside a moral sphere. And I knew how much noise a broken hearted man makes even when he is not recovering from a beating. With horror I suddenly realized why the Korean Karaoke had been so familiar sounding… the brilliance of our location was frightening. I hated to think of where they would put him. It was the early morning. The city was on the verge of an immense noise. It held its breath. Money moved silently around us. Money was much more than it had ever been. It was the trace of what we did… the shell of the human race that washed up on a beach I had spent my life imagining.

  The lawyer was taken away gagged and bound. They took him down a back stairway that I had never really noticed until that point.

  Junko sat Benny down on the large couch in the living room. The couch sagged as he sat in it, and plunged him too far in. Essentially he was sitting on the floor but swathed in aged polyesters. That added to the frown he had worn since being smashed over the head. He spat out a sentence of Japanese that was all spit and consonants. He looked me in the eye for as long as he could manage. He looked away just as he spat out a sentence in English. "Who did you talk to?"

  "What do you mean?" was my answer and I stretched out the 'mean' to make him doubt his English rather than my honesty.

  "Someone knew we would be there… they came and passed a message with lawyer. Either he told them or they told him. Now our plans to keep him quiet and then let him go… they are no good. So who did you tell."

  "Hmmm… I didn't even know where we were going until we got in the car. You can check that with your boss. Honda, I mean." Then I withdrew from the room. Junko ran a dampened cloth down his grimy forehead and let her finger dangle off it against the skin like a noodle from the mouth. He looked at her like he despised her then closed his eyes like he despised himself.

  I was in my room for a few minutes with no lights on. Lights from outside passed through thin curtains and sliced the room into different times and moods… flashing pink, interrogation white, nameless sourceless brown. My shadow took equal part in them all. I couldn't stick around there, so I walked back through the living room where both cultists were looking at the walls. Different walls. It looked as though I was going to the kitchen but I was not. I headed down the back stairway which was so steep that you took it largely on faith that another step, rather than a stunning fall, lay beneath the one you could see. Light stopped halfway. I could hear a girl crying and a woman's voice alternating between calm and terror. No male voices could be heard. So the family were living downstairs. This was an amazing surprise. The ability humans had to change all the rules of another person's life were unthinkable and intolerable. I was shaking with anger. I had planned to check in on the scene down there but it was too much. I headed back up the stairs and then walked right out of the house.

  The usual flow of traffic was there. In the cafe below, the mutants were mopping up the floor. I could only hear the traffic but the slow sway of their bodies over the sticks put the slopping sounds in my head and my mind was skillfully able to mix them with sounds of women in horror. As the mopping continued, and they continued not to care, and I continued to be a part of it all, I vividly remembered all of my most cherished things about my mother. They are all hard to put into words… smells, hugs and the ends of hugs, certain long and beautiful days that seemed to exist wholly within the confines of her smiling face.

  My mother was one person and one person cannot survive in this world. Of that I was sure. And when the people are gone and the cults and the nations remain there is no beauty and we have to be judged.

  I had to stop thinking. I had been thinking my whole life. Even though Dad had brainwashed me, he had done it so skillfully that I felt I had free will. In truth my free will didn't extend far beyond internal dialog. True I had broken off from him a few years before when I first learned that he ha
d decided to accelerate the end of the human race (or rather what that implied for the people around us,) but all it took was one soppy e-mail from Claire to get me back in.

  I thought. About the Yakuza guy. He was a violent gangster, but on the other hand he had spared me when all codes told him it was acceptable to punish me. A man who does not punish when he is told he can… that is a rare thing indeed. Man in traffic, screaming and cursing the panicked old man going the wrong way down the street, protected in his car and crowd and suddenly finally free from wondering if he is wrong. That was all I saw in the world at the bottom. That is life: that is the ultimate truth: the joy of being justified. All beauty was contingent and transferable. A drink. I wanted a drink.

  I wondered if the Yakuza guy would be back at the bar we had visited nights before. It was a big bar, with the sheen of a chain but the grime of a weak link. It had all the plastic food outside, but some of it was so extravagant… gigantic "Godzilla vs" style crab… that you knew it was at last partially atmospheric. Inside, mainly people my age or younger were gathered. There were about twenty people in the bar. A table full of young couples engaged in playful banter that humped up and down in pitch, that rocked the young girls whose eye makeup was playing by new rules I had yet to learn or learn to ignore. It seemed to start and end further out and stretch the rules of eye. They were mainly wearing tight sweaters that stretched and sparked as they moved and threatened to become obscuringly interesting in their own right. The men were in short sleeved shirts and were taking it in turns to battle the girls before being laughed down. They would inflate a little and then say something deliberately ridiculous. In this way, the essential dynamics of adulthood were ignored. This was a new, simpler variant of the way the majority of Japanese people had always lived… but now everyone bowed to everyone else. See figure 1, the famous Escher print of an endlessly ascending staircase.

  I sat down and was brought a steaming hot yellow towel wrapped in plastic. I unwrapped it, enjoying the too-hotness of parts of it and then stuck it to my face, which it melted. But it was just melting the outer face that Tokyo layers on you always, so that was good.

  The beams were everywhere, unlike the waitresses who avoided my eyes like Bambi would. Perhaps they were still getting over my somewhat 'cutting edge' use of the yellow hand towel. But no, this was not the first time I had felt that everyone was happier if the taking of an order at a restaurant took on the appearance of a chance encounter, much as some like sex to be.

  "Biiru" I said when the magic moment finally came, and in her little red costume she made the hand gestures we needed to determine how much beer I wanted. I knew the word for big, but wanted to make sure I didn't miss out on "Super" or even "UltraBig" beer.

  A frothing beer that was big enough came. I got some pieces of chicken too, although the word "pieces" is perhaps too specific for what I received.

  I looked through the window mainly. A number of men in pale suits walked past over a two hour period. Some of them were dragging women by the wrist and it was evident they knew how to quietly hurt a woman when they did that to her. Various Asian faces that were not quite the same as those around me were distorted by pain as they were dragged by. None of these men was my new friend. In two hours in a bar little happens, everything is rhythmic like piston arms slugging beer and he says something she says something. She brings the plates full and takes them empty, everyone is chewing. You begin to notice that your watch in fact moves in circles. When the sun comes up you realize it is even bigger than that. When they close the bar you end up in your bed.

  The next day you wake up.

  The Tokyo hangover: like the others in the world, but you are in intense heat and humidity and sound is everywhere. You open your eyes and your heart accelerates in panic. You make your first breath and relax a little. Then it starts again as you drag the soup into your chest and the veins on your head are up. But ultimately it is just a hangover and although you look like you have been beaten, you just puke bile and lean on things for a morning.

  I remembered, as I looked at my white face and red eyes from a limp slouch over a dirty sink, that people were being held captive on the ground floor. That changed things. The size of Africa and its suffering makes it unreal as, say, genocide (Yes, I can't stop thinking about genocide: I remember a friend of Dad's with a German wife turning up on our doorstep one hangover morning and proclaiming "This World War Two is ruining my social life!")

  So, a girl I once knew tried to silence my hangover groans by comparing my suffering with the suffering of some guy with no name who lived in this Never Never Land known as 'Africa' and it didn't work. But even though they made no noise, the captives downstairs made all action hard for me. Selfishly enjoying my cup of tea… were they thirsty?

  It was Saturday, usually my favorite day. Particularly the early hours, shortly after the paperboy delivered the newspaper and (of course) 2000 AD. It was now 2000 AD I suddenly realized. I was living in a violent fantasy involving robots and imminent apocalypse. In a t-shirt and jeans every day.

  Honda entered the room, drenched in a sweat. Thankfully he came from the direction of the street, so clearly he had been jogging not beating. Good honest sweat. His swollen knuckles, however, made my head throb and then made me feel guilty about it. I looked into my tea. Empty tea cups tell you the future. When they are full, they are all about the living present and feeling warm. The present is meaningless and can be dispelled with just a little blow.

  "Good Morning! We will go to Shibuya today," he said between two strong and measured breaths.

  "Shibuya… what's in Shibuya?"

  "Our church. Our biggest church. The Master would like to meet you"

  "Everyone wants to meet me."

  "Everyone has to meet you."

  Then he walked through the kitchen for his shower. I turned on the TV so I could be alone in the house. Otherwise they were all breathing and shuffling around you in 3D through the paper-thin (but not actually paper) walls.

  *******

  We took the JR (Japan Rail) train to Kanda, an unremarkable place where people came to buy books, if they were that way inclined. Japanese people loved to read, I heard, but they didn't seem choosy. The whole city of Tokyo was tattooed with words anyway, the words they needed to safely guard others from their eyes. We moved down to the underground. The train sensed our arrival and swished up to greet us. My foot moved and the door moved and we were even able to find seats, Honda and I. We were on the orange line. The station was a soft and pleasant off-white and all in all a great place to be. The train smelt ok and it took us into a tunnel without making a big deal of it. In two-minute spurts of quiet speed it took us under the city to Shibuya. Probably at least 20% of the Tokyo people were under the treacherous, shifting ground at any one time. Things whizzed by. Honda didn't want to talk on the train. He handed me a vast book. It was a Mah Jong manga, a thousand comic-book pages of old and young men slapping down gigantic tiles that bled speed lines and shifted tables when they landed. It was no Judge Dredd, but was a place to keep my eyes during the dark-light-dark ride.

  Eventually, Shibuya. The train was different when we got there : as full as a pregnant dog in a laboratory. It was mainly full of attractive girls and young women who seemed to have dressed each part of their body separately and during a distinct era of human history. Some were alone, headphoned and entertained by some microscopic Sony secreted somewhere on their person. Others were in circles talking about their life (also headphoned) with their fingers twitching around their tiny pink telephones which would release them (once they got out of the underground) from the limitations of just their fleshy friends. The doors opened with a pop and the ex-army man and the ex-normal man went with the flow and floated to the surface of a medium that was made of humans like themselves. Raindrops floating in the sea.

  We emerged at the Hachiko crossing. There was a statue of a small dog. "He waited here faithfully for his dead master," Honda spoke in my ear. Our master
was alive and waiting for us. In addition to the dog were all the people you could ever imagine. We couldn't move because a traffic light just over the horizon was red. Two vast video screens beamed Pop Videos at us from the tops of the large department stores that defined us (not me, not Honda but there are times when one is diluted out of even one's own existence)

  Dominance of sound swam alternately between the two great towers. Varying Pop groups mastered the auditorium. I suspected that as the crowd became more interested in one group's video than the other and turned to view a different boy jumping, the acoustics of all these soft sacs of water bent the sound the machines were pumping out. We were part of the battle between the screens and they used our tastes to move us. Other machines had simpler methods. They triggered a green light and we moved to buy the things we wanted. Green and red scissors cut off fifty meters of human meat for the machine.

  Across the main crossing, the humans diversified down their channels. A series of exclusive decisions defined the mass. A left turn, a right turn, and one of us was eating ramen… was a ramen eater. Another turned left then left and was a CD buyer. In the system you are what you do. Look at the word "living" if you don't believe me.

  Like electrons buzz around in silicon for some reason of their own. We don't care.

  Turn left, cross the street, follow the curvy street that makes you feel free. Suddenly some people are dancing in the street. In pale purple robes, Japanese people with the thicker hairdos of the more forgiving seventies dance the dance that cults do. Free movement in the cloth, of the limbs, but yeah the thing is you have to do this five times a day for an hour OK?

  The crowd pauses around them, in a ring. Everyone stays for about a minute. Looking defines them merely as Not In The Circle. Does more to define the circle. Clearly it is undesirable to the system to support such a parasite, but it persists. This is Honda's cult we are looking at. He is next to me in a tight black t-shirt full of muscle, decisively smoking. He has nothing like a facial expression: looking for one you get distracted by the reflection of the smoke in his mirror glasses, which can at least temporarily seem to be meaningful.