Tokyo Zero

by Marc Horne

  This is how he thought, I believe. Not of blood and bullets but of the Right he had discovered and which he would give birth to.

  Upstairs Mayumi kicked down the door to my room. I like to think she was concerned for my safety. I require no connection between this thought and reality… it is standalone.

  Benny saw her kick the door down, she was in her underwear and the sudden solidifying of her soft curves into door smashing muscle must have galvanized his sick mind. A sudden surge of energy to his head, (and maybe a muscular transformation of his own) must have taken place. My empty room was burned into his energized eye. I was absent and judged guilty.

  Crying downstairs, panic fading into drill upstairs. That is what I imagine.

  The policeman was tied up, carried downstairs and chained to heavy pipes. Benny and Yosuke waited for him to wake up. After a while, not many minutes, Yosuke remembered how waiting was what had got him into this mess so long ago, waiting for the old man to die. So he stripped off some electrical cable, plugged it in and proceeded to wake the policeman up.

  A child watched a policeman being tortured. No further policemen came.

  Chapter 24

  When I returned the first thing I noticed was my door. The second was that everyone was in the living room with guns in their laps.

  No matter how improbable, when it becomes possible, your mind makes your death certain. My throat was dried by cold metal and eyes.

  Shot to death by five people… ludicrous, you can't imagine a death like that. I moved to the center of the room and I asked "What happened to my door."

  Benny stood up and exploded a shout that was so rough it needed a pint of saliva to lubricate it (I quickly discovered) "Why do the police come?"

  Why do firemen wear red belts?

  That flashed in my mind. I still could not take Benny seriously. It could have been his name, or memories of how he looked with a vase shattered over him: a decorated hero.

  Suddenly, away from the point, I realized (with no evidence) that it had been Mayumi at the Lawyer's house the night of the kidnapping. I looked at her and our eyes met and I was trying to read her mind or to send her a piece of mine that said 'We know the secrets, the real plans: don't let me die here.'

  Relaxed, almost naked, she issued a 'no comment.' Very pretty, she sat.

  I said "What police?" and then everyone started shouting in Japanese, even Ms. Supercool.

  Eventually, Honda put a stop to it with a military bark.

  "Blake-san… please explain where you have been for the last thirty minutes," he said. His look was, I am sure the same one he had given me when offering me the Pocari Sweat when we had first met : the essence of polite calm. I am sure.

  "Easy question… I was downstairs in the coffee shop." They began to talk. "Drinking coffee. So tell me… what kind of fuck-up do we have here… Jesus, I step out for a bloody hour!"

  I wasn't faking my anger. Despite the fact that I was planning to sabotage their gas attack, I had been nothing other than an ideal member of the cult. I walked over to Yosuke, the weak link. "What police, Yosuke."

  If I had turned around and Mayumi had been even 1% smiling I would have lost it. So I didn't turn round.

  "One cop. He came here tonight. We got him."

  "Damn! Where is he now? Downstairs?"

  "Yes."

  "Well.. shouldn't we get out of here? Honda… ?"

  Honda looked out of the tiny windows of the large living room.

  "No, we should stay. We overtortured the policeman and he can't tell us anything now. I suspect he is not here as part of an investigation. It's something else. Chance."

  Mayumi stood up. "Honda, with your permission I wish to leave and inform the organization of what is going on." Honda nodded and then she was gone, stopping upstairs to get dressed before climbing out through a window.

  We arranged watch shifts and the night passed by in one-second increments.

  *******

  Next morning we all calmed down. Honda received a call on a small cell-phone that nonetheless looked like a walkie-talkie. It was probably a matter of technique… the way you snap it to your head.

  A woman's voice, most likely not his aged mother.

  "Alert over, Mr Blake. Go for your run if you want."

  Actually that sounded good.

  "Aren't they missing the policeman yet?"

  "Nothing in the news. He may have been off duty… but then why would he be here?"

  "We can't keep him here. If he has some kind of beat, they might come sniffing around."

  "There's no rush. Police don't get killed much. And if they do get killed in Koiwa, the Koreans get it first. Then the cops pause to decide how to politely bring it up with the Yakuza. So we have time to make a good decision. Now get out of here… we're all go crazy if we don't get some air!"

  Jolly Honda! Well, a run did sound good. Benny was starting to bother me. He was thinking. So I got changed and strapped on my new Walkman and I hit the road. It was just hot enough to make it fun. I liked to run in the Tokyo heat. I now had this completely different relationship to the heat than the soft me of the early chapters. How to explain it? I don't know… I just felt free in the heat. I also had to respect the Japanese people's ability to maintain their characteristic calm in the middle of conditions that were somehow supposed to excuse New Yorkers from their periodic homicides.

  I was impressed by the Japanese as a whole. They seemed to me to be on the verge of something. They had created thousands of robot dogs and Tamagotchi eggs and virtual fish and cyber pop stars. And as I mentioned they liked their cars to have faces and their ATM machines to have social lives. They were beginning to see humanity as something everywhere… something you do, not something you are.

  Not all of them, of course.

  Dead Jimi Hendrix was playing "The Wind Cries Mary." I was reminded for the first time in several days (as I overtook a hundred child long line of mini baseballers who did a "hello" wave) of the love of my life, Claire. You remember her, right?

  With all the squelchiness of Mayumi's arrival at the TeleConcentrationClub, my thoughts had turned from Claire a little. I decided to let my mind celebrate her for a little while.

  Christ, it had been a long time since I saw her in the flesh. Maybe that was why I so easily thought of her as the conscience of our group. She had stayed with the east European Neo-Nazis longer than necessary for our research. We all suspected that she intended to do something reactionary… like try and stop them, report them to the police.

  During those long months in DŸsseldorf, without her, I had started to go that way too. I wanted to burn down houses that I knew to be full of sleeping, schnaps-soaked skins. I wanted to forget about the coming good and fight the present evil.

  I broke on that trip. I was with our German agents and had not seen a real friend in a long time. Hadn't even heard from Claire, I assumed she was underground.

  Matthias and Dirk, black haired Germans who were so serious-minded that they seemed perpetually confused, were the other members of my cell. For months we had been capturing skins and interrogating them so we could get agents inside. We now had six insiders and the cell was supposed to watch the groups and put together a list of pseudo-quantifiable flags that our group could track. The objective was to get an index of hatred in Europe. We wanted to track hatred and fear and ignorance like financiers follow the market. "Sell sell sell. Kill kill kill."

  The reason we wanted that info was to know if and when it was time for us to step in and do our thing. Two lines were on the biggest graph at our most secret meetings in little chateaux : 1) a log chart of network connections worldwide adjusted for security laws and corporate firewalls etc. This was called the Life line. It had to reach a certain point before action was viable, the point above which pulling the plug would kill more people than leaving it in. 2) a line based on our indicators worldwide known variously as the Hate line and the Weakness line. It was called the Weakness line only by the
most radical members of the group. It was there as a failsafe measure. It was combined with the Life line in such a way that if the human race suddenly got its shit together we would instead all become telecomms millionaires and leave things be.

  It was hard work working the Hate line for 8 months. Just as many Americans living behind shields of fat and steel and TV can easily believe in God so people on the Hate Line can only see the Devil.

  I was out one day, enjoying a cup of coffee in the Altschtadt part of the city. Not the kind of place you usually found the skins. But two of them were just around the corner talking. I listened. They were talking about their plan to firebomb a Turkish nightclub nearby. They had apparently just scouted out the fire exits.

  I couldn't believe they were talking about this right out in the open. But then again I could not see where they were, at least without looking like I was looking. Some acoustic phenomenon was bringing me this. Some genie.

  I watched a man with a huge moustache laugh. I decided that I would do what I had occasionally contemplated. I would just tell the police what these bastards had planned and they would get arrested. It would skew the figures a little, but the human sciences are renowned for their flexibility.

  Things changed when some new words arrived. They mentioned several names that I knew from reports and one that I knew to be the alias of a guy called Hannes that was our latest mole… like the very latest, barely join the fascists two days past. Suddenly things were complicated.

  I went back to HQ. Dirk was fiddling with a short-wave radio, a project that suited him immensely. I decided to share my news with him. The gloom of Two World Wars settled on him, visibly wrinkling. He said "You know, Blake, I believe in what we do here. Scientists shouldn't get involved. I wish you hadn't told me this."

  "If it makes you feel any better there are a million fucked-up things in the world you don't have to worry yourself about," I pouted.

  "If we stop them Hannes is dead… I don't think we can get a message to him before tomorrow night… he is supposed to be 'radio silent' the first two weeks. That's the other bad thing."

  "It's all bad."

  "Call your father."

  "Yeah… "

  The next day five Turkish guys were dead, Hannes had some amazing data and I was in Amsterdam incoherent and trying to remember if Interpol was here or in Belgium. I was known as Paddy and felt very free; free from a Manichaean game that I had never been sure was real. I was real now. Fuck them all.

  "Fuck 'em all!" I laughed as I ran. I could see thousands of apartment buildings that looked like they had been designed to be easy to clean up after an earthquake rather than to resist one. Like Spain or the Lebanon was the architectural style. Many golf practice areas broke up the general monotony and every now and then a magnificent temple with a tree that had been tended for decades and that roamed around with some spirit.

  Several months of craziness followed the German incident. I got a job designing t-shirts and I put troublesome statements like "It will kill you," "Have you seen your brain recently?" and "Last Man Standing Defrag please" on the front.

  Some program they had tracked me down from the t-shirts which were not random but me echo-testing my soul to see if I could fully rebel and actually go to the other side.

  I left my apartment, which I was sharing with a woman called Inge, who I had slept with just once, and found a hand-delivered letter from Claire outside.

  She wrote with a passion and conviction I had never seen from her before. She talked about all the things we'd talked about a hundred times… the biological errors, gorilla elements in the brain, that would make us killers as long as we were in this hardware. She referenced all the usual landmarks, politely discreet about Cambodia.

  But then she wrote something I will never forget "If we had children with our bodies they would die. They might even kill. In the machine our children live forever and we are within them."

  Simple concepts but ones I had never heard from her, who was usually so pragmatic. The romanticism of death was unified with that of birth in this crazy project. We had first met in the dim light of the first seed of the new being. We were all mixed up in it: fathers daughters mothers brothers sons sisters : we could choose whatever relationship we wanted to it. But we had all grown up with it : the machine was our family.

  That was such a strange moment for me. Very simple words, that seemed … how to say it?… like my eyes wrote them on the paper as they scanned across.

  Inge was pleased to see me go.

  Jogging over, I turned around and headed back to my Tokyo Death Cult.

  I got near the leaning fragile building that was webbed between two relatively solid blocks. I have a theory about deja vu which is based on to fact that "now" is actually a flexible space of the mind and can expand so much that perception of an event and reaction to it both occur within the same perceptual quantum.

  But for the five minutes before I saw the dead policeman I had this awful feeling that something terrible had happened. My theory doesn't account for that.

  Honda was on the phone, Junko was sobbing in the corner. The daughter was hiding in her mother. The lawyer was silent. Everyone else looked at the body and the vomit around his mouth. Its mouth, sorry.

  "So he didn't make any noises… they didn't hear him?" I asked Yosuke.

  "They say."

  "Wasn't anyone down here? Junko?"

  "Toilet"

  The policeman was burned, battered and most of all dead. He looked like a nice man. Many police are nice. Some of them are servants of Interests that keep knowledge from the people as they have done since Atlantis. Many are not, and are compassionate, brave, and some of the best humanity has to offer. I would never know about this one. It didn't matter much, I suppose, in the long run. We had similar plans for both kinds of individuals. Only dreams would survive and only the kind we liked.

  A few hours later, hours crowded with far too many people that seemed magnified by the minutes, Mayumi arrived.

  She was dressed in the conservative pink pseudo-uniform of the receptionist class. Her charms were tamed in the way that a sleeping tiger is tamed.

  "A disguise?" I asked.

  "Who are you?" she asked. A joke or the usual existential confrontation?

  "Your boyfriend," I replied.

  With a cute smile that she had perhaps found in the pocket of her new jacket she asked if I would accompany her to the Avon School of English, my putative place of employment. How could I have resisted, even if there hadn't been a body in the basement.

  We left and walked down the street. Everything was different now I was walking the streets with her. In the end, that is the definition of love. Human love.

  No… you're right. Human hate is like that too. It's a thin line I hear. This is how it was different: when I saw someone who was old and tired picking up huge root vegetables I noticed that they were not her. When I saw an orange sun, a huge blazing gas ball that was the source of all life, I noticed that her face was orange. When I noticed that I was sexually obsessed with the essence of my enemy, a tool of hatred, I had excuses dripping from my swollen mind too numerous to mention.

  In the fresh, or different anyway, air the policeman was not only not dead, he had never existed. In neither of our languages did we discuss him. It looked like she was going to hold my hand at one point, but she didn't.

  Before long, we were at the foot of one of those bubble-economy buildings that had a church on the third floor, and an also an Avon school of English Conversation. We entered a small elevator an headed up to 7F. There was faint music, or the tinkle of water. The doors slid up with a k-ching.

  In this place where I had never been before, guided by the subtle signals from Mayumi, I passed unnoticed through to the staff room out back. I stood out like an apple at an apple store.

  I quickly recognized the two men we greeted in the back room that smelt of failed coffee: the two tough guys from the bar a while back. They still had that bas
ically paramilitary look about them, even in their nylon shirts. They appraised me on my arrival and checked Mayumi out thoroughly and familiarly. I picked up a picture dictionary and marveled at the task humans had set themselves… a name for everything.

  The tall blonde guy, whose stubble was relevant and built to him, moved into my space. I was not concentrating and he took it from me. He was not intimidatingly large but his muscles had something about them : built not to lift but to crush. His name was Rich and the price for learning that was learning also how close together the bones in one's hand are.

  The darker guy whose head was stubbled like a shadow was named Antony. He had a tan, too. He watched a lot. You couldn't watch him : he was so boring that no excuse existed : if you watched him it would be as a warden does and he would know.

  "I know you. I've seen you around. You are not so subtle mate! Ha ha." said rich. His teeth were metallic. I suppose that made sense… for eating etc. The more metal the better.

  "I've seen you too. You two too. You're subtle… I thought… well, I should be polite."