by Marc Horne
"No problem… shit on that from me too. I was on the tracks? Who put me there?"
"Your good friend, man. Manuela says he's scary looking. Anyway, shut up : this is your life so listen.
"Before I can do much thinking the train is coming. So loud… screeeeee… but there are these two salaryman on the platform… one old and a young guy. The young guy is going crazy, trying to bow and bow and bow and then he stands up and he just falls like a tree. You know a cut tree. Falls right on the tracks. This is crazy for me, and so fast. The old guy is real fast . He's not thinking see… I was thinking too much… very weird for me to be doing that, Usually I'm all action, remember?
"So the old guy is like BANZAI!!! He jumps down and pulls the young guy up and the train is braking like crazy. Bang! The old guy goes like a balloon. His fucking head bounces down the platform, no shit. Two high school girls coming down the stairs. Bang… one is on the basketball team I guess. She catches it. Should have been at home instead of blowing old oyajis for money, I guess. Anyway, the old guy is in pieces. The young one… legs off here, just under his dick. I jump on the track, near the end where the front of train should be right now and where you are. I pull you on the platform… hard work… I thought you didn't like Japanese food fat boy! Ok, so I bring you back here. About three hours you been here."
My mind reeled. I was sure that the salarymen were those that I had seen earlier, all wrapped up in a strange human dynamic. I had been saved by that and the whole thing was so meaningless that I never thought about it again except that the young man tomorrow faced a terrible hangover and would be a suicide within a week.
So change of subject.
"How long have you known?"
"Hmm… kind of a long time. Those cult guys, you can tell. They get angry in shops. You know, little things and I listen a lot. Why are you with them… I hate those motherfuckers!"
"Why?"
"Cause they are not Japanese but people like you… foreign people think they are some Japanese spirit. 'We love suicide… we love end of the world. We are Japanese!' They are just here because we had the money for a long time and Uncle Sam to look after us. Bad fat kids. They will be everywhere soon. They don't live real life… it's all secret. They know the secrets and we don't. We can all go to hell and they will be ok.
"Take the family. Yes… we are… exclusive. We have secrets. But just family business. They are like… argh.. how to say. They want to take the world away from everyone else."
We were quiet for a while. I looked at his weapon of a face and he looked at my mask. I wanted to tell him that from different worlds and through different means we had come to the same place. This quiet room.
"Listen. I should tell you. I am here to … basically to stop them. I agree with you. They are the worst people.
"I have a family too and this is what we believe… part of it. There are too many groups in this world who… like you say… they take all that is good and they keep it secret. They control people by making us think that our group is at war with the other groups. Like Hitler or Pol Pot or Idi Amin. And we think that these groups have spoiled human life. So, we found out about the cult and I have been sent here to spoil their plan. I have to get back with the cult or they will do the attack without me and we'll take a step back again… history will fail again. We're stuck in the same brains we've always had. And a lot of people will die."
"80% I understand. Are you telling me the truth? You want to stop them. Then why don't you call the cops… or me… we could kill them all."
"All of them… all twenty thousand members? Let me do it my way. I have a plan."
"Okay. But first take that knife and you find the guy who put you on the tracks. Or he will kill you, big plan or no big plan.
"How's your head?"
"Different."
Chapter 28
He stayed in his bar, smoking by the door. I had the little knife. I tried to clean my mind of revenge. Revenge is where humans live their whole lives. The purity of justification: society cheers you on. We knew, in our family, that we always ran that risk. We would let people die because we knew we were right. But we had to keep clear of revenge. Had to know that what we did was not inevitable; not truly right.
All the same, clearly killing Benny was necessary. Or removing him somehow. That would be better - making the cult turn on him.
Back down the same old street. I hated arguments and the one before me was almost unfaceable. Maybe Mayumi would help out with a clinical bullet between the eyes… preferably his, of course. She was a funny one.
I was walking amusingly slowly. Despite the many 'brave' things I had done in my life I was essentially scared of everything. Possibly this was because I was always thinking about the fragility of things. Like when my mother died far off-camera and without a noise yet in the middle of a huge war. Or like the human race as a whole that seemed so strong but had a weak link in its genes.
Eventually it could be put off no longer, unless my footsteps stopped. They could get no shorter. I was outside the door. I opened it and walked up the stairs.
I entered the empty living room. It was dim in there; lit only from the light behind me and the light from the streets. Standing at the door I noticed a small brown paper parcel that had fallen behind the telephone table. Cautiously, I picked it up and split the paper with my knife. I found inside a high school girl's uniform. A pretty big one I thought.
I decided that the policeman must have brought it. He was probably off duty and heading to the old tele-club for some kinky thrills. Well I hope he got at least some… it is conceivable that he thought he was having the best time right up until he drowned in his puke.
I felt better, as I had been worrying if the incident with my bike being confiscated by the police had brought him here. I remembered that earlier that day Benny had asked where my bike was and I had said "I lost it," and he had been unusually nonchalant. In retrospect.
What to do? Who to wake up?
Honda? Go through channels and have a meeting?
Benny? A frigging knife fight
Mayumi? A weird twist.. something unexpected.
A long time passed while I weighed up that question. Eventually I decided to see who was guarding the hostages.
When I got down there I was extremely surprised to find the room empty. I immediately turned around and headed back up the stairs. It would not do to be bumped into down there.
I voiced to myself that I would figure it out after some sleep. But I kept walking and I headed upstairs to Honda's room.I opened the door and said "Don't shoot. We have to talk."
Honda's eyes fluttered open behind the pointed gun, and the jigsaw of his mind rapidly solved itself. "What is happening?" he asked.
"In brief… Benny tried to kill me and the hostages are gone.
Honda moved so fast that he seemed to be in two places at once. Benny's attack on me had possibly broken my sense of time. Honda was in his jeans and out of the door. I swiveled to follow as he headed to Benny's door, knelt in shooting posture and pointed his gun at the middle of the door. I was touched.
We waited there for quite a while. Then suddenly Benny came running out of the door and Honda shot him right in the belly. Sparks came shooting from him, which was bizarre and a bad sign, I thought. Benny span like a ballerina on one foot and tumbled onto Honda with extreme force, flattening him. Tiny demons raced around in his head like they had done in his nuclear power generator back in the old days. Benny stood up but Honda was dazed, bloodied and spread over floor and wall. Benny got up and ran out and I ran after him.
Chasing again, blurring the stairs and the street. My head started to hurt and the blurs piled up and multiplied. Benny kept running.
Two buildings from ours was a huge vertical car park, barely thirty feet long but over a hundred in height and filled with a large vertical conveyor loop that dangled cars like some tie rack that would arrive from your wife after the love was gone. There were usually a number of
cars idling outside there. He jumped into a Toyota Celica and with a screech of tires he was on his way to the third phase of his life.
But I wanted to be in it, so I jumped into a Honda Accord with my knife flashing away the curly-haired attendees in colorful jumpsuits, open to the waist.
I too, screeched out and headed after him.
The nearly empty streets awaited . We each threw a handful of coins in some sick arcade game.
We were bonded by near death: the universe considered us one and the same, like a split particle. That's what kept us together as we raced between small buildings and curved between sharp rails and up the banks to the river. Red lights flashed by like sunsets at the retirement home. How many lights spelt out the word death was the same question raised.
A mansize distance apart we raced up the straight line next to the oozing fat river. I was screaming almost every time I noticed myself.
We burst onto the highway and I almost turned left to his right but I didn't… was surprised when I found out, as I had certainly not made that decision.
We were headed toward the city and now we weaved between innocents who slugged home or away on some other man's schedule or out of boredom. I was losing him because he was not caring and I still cared because I had my always ghosts with me: Father, mother and sisterlover.
So I tried to forget them and I did get faster. An experiment in the weight of ghosts.
The city got involved. I was in its veins: we were. Big buildings came close to the elevated highway that we sped down like spectators peering on tiptoe. The buildings were breathing slowly like great trees doing the slow processes. They were full of computers exchanging information at night pace. We were not in their thoughts but we reflected on their eyes.
Where were the police? I felt let down. This whole trip had given me that feeling. Was no one going to try and stop me.
Well… I suppose I had just been attempted murdered.
I was woozy. My car was about ten meters behind Benny's and he started swerving around and the red eyes on the back of the car glared at me and streaked my eyes with razor blade trails. I hit the brakes to get away from the screaming, rolling, smoking rear end. Then he hit the accelerator again and so did I, his puppet. We were downtown somewhere : traffic was still light but we had left the highway… we were in the maze of the banks and the trading companies. We both agreed that we should slow down. After all… we didn't want an accident.
I didn't look up at the blazing neons and I didn't meditate on the sleeping giant whose veins we drove through. I didn't have to anyway.
Then we crashed. The back of his car finally came roaring into the front of mine and I swerved and it hit the right side, flipping me back onto two wheels and sending me skidding onto the sidewalk where I gently shattered a large window with the last of my momentum. My skull, no doubt full of blood already, pinged like a depth charge had gone off in it. The whole chase went through my head a dozen times. All the shapes I had seen, the speed with which I had experienced the city. Taken it in in huge gulps, at a totally different time scale. My mind's powers were amplified by the scale I had been offered: propelled by the machine. A dozen times the race ran through my head, compressing and combining, and I felt a touch like Samsara must have felt when he stepped outside time. I now believed his crazy story.
I was brain damaged. But alive. After a few minutes passed I was able to leave the car, brushing soft toys from my lap… beady eyed creatures that had descended upon me during the crash.
Outside a huge orange light, a self-sufficient sun, sat in the street. Its heat and its smoke were too strong for me… pushed me away. Benny was burning and gasoline was burning. The car was barely an outline around him… like some reminder of why he was being incinerated. When he dreamed, so many years ago, of an insanity at the heart of the universe he had not imagined this would happen to him, just weeks before the apocalypse. Because it wasn't that kind of insanity… it was the kind that someone had the answer to.
The question of who had killed Benny fluttered around my mind as I staggered off to find a place to sleep till the trains started again. It was going to be a cold night but there were worse things.
Chapter 29
Well … it was all over.
"Did you really think you would get away with it Mr… Blake? A mass murder on the scale of an act of war? Do you really think people get away with such things?
"Even governments struggle to achieve such things during peace time. Yes, there are rare successes such as Bopal, Chernobyl… but on the whole the culls are left aside until the bombs are falling and the bridges are burning.
"I look at you and see the worst kind of Englishman… the kind that makes me ashamed to deserve that title myself.
"And what kind of Englishman is that you may ask? The dilettante of death. He leaves his cozy little village because he has finally stopped peeing the bed and mumsy isn't giving him the attention he craves anymore. The he finds himself somewhere where the other Englishmen have dug their groove and pre-raped and he just sits and watches. And if he notices that a bunch of bloody natives would love to kill each other, well I'll be frigged if he doesn't want to stick his nose in and help out with all his English know-how and sense of sport.
"I mean… it's laughable. So laughable that I am 90% confident you are just some kind of cover… a beard. Except they don't have beards in Japan do they? So you are some kind of wiry stubble.
"So tell me why you are involved with these people? I know you have nothing in common… unless the Church of England has taken its progressive leaning even further since I was last back there… is that it? The Archbishop of Canterbury made you do it? Because when I look at your pasty, sick, eggy-eyed face I see middle class complacency going back to the Civil War… I see more cups of tea and scones… enough to build a mountain and you are under it. You are content with the world. If you kill a bunch of people you had a bloody good, somewhat practical reason for it.
"Don't talk much do we Mr Blake… ? Scared to get ourselves in the s-h-i-t no doubt? Well it is too late… . you might as well talk because you know they will. I bet they have their books already written. I bet one of them guessed how the last chapter was going to be and submitted the whole thing to their publisher in a handsome manila. And I don't think they will have smiling pictures of you on the front cover. You will be the devil, my son… are you ready to be the devil?
"Again?"
Chapter 30
I got home on a pocket of change.
Waking up in an alleyway, numb in every way, I shambled trying to look clean and good past the investigation site. Was I responsible for that smell, that awful smell that was worse, so much worse when it reminded you of food?
Yes, I was. But so was he.
He had paid his dues, though, you had to give him that. A wave of instant karma had taken him away and washed him down. I was not sure where the Path of Forgetting went after death. The right hand of Samsara? Some happy afterlife? A manageable hell? I really didn't know even though I am sure I used to know at some point.
I decided to recap things in my head.
So my dad and his friends had decided to clean up the world, and they invented the Internet and they infiltrated and observed hate groups around the world as a kind of 'engine' to their ultimate plan which involved genetic terrorism.
Speaking of genetic terrorism, I ,Blake Jr, was an integral part of the various field missions. I never quite got the genetics or the computer science required for the back end of things but I muddled by on the front end, through various crises.
Like Germany where I couldn't handle the deaths we caused or allowed. And then my old girlfriend pulled me back in … of all people she was the one who could do that. Because… well… I don't know… I guess I have always enjoyed outsourcing my free will and she had done nothing but love me since we were children.
So then I decided we could get inside Japan, where we had always wanted to be by sneaking in one of the new st
yle corporations that was progressive and flexible and multinational: religious fanaticism.
So I got us in, based on Dad's Metropolitan Immune System Theory, which Maruhashi and I will discuss at length later. Then my contact had gone off to Russia at the last moment and now I was wondering… why hadn't we stopped at that point?
Instead Kan Sato had stepped in. Sato had not appeared at all since his strange reception for me at Narita Airport. He was, we knew, an old school Japanese Red who had killed dozens of people. Presumably the authorities knew this too. He never showed up in Path literature, of course.
So I come to Japan, with the secrets of Genetic Terrorism locked up in my head and the few samples I sneaked through in passive form in my bloodstream. You had to love those injections that turned you into a time bomb, a factory. A real rush to feel like Earth did when the humans arrived, maybe.
Then I hung out with the cell and Maruhashi and Samsara tested me and acted like I was cool.
Then Mayumi tested me too. Quite a test. But what was that test all about? She was reading me like a palm I think. Reading the wrinkles in my face as close as only a naked woman can.
We had already captured the lawyer… I forgot that. In theory we did that because he was going to spill the beans to the cops but now I knew that something else was happening. The lawyer was involved in something with Maruhashi… who was the friend of nothing and no one in the world… even its destroyers.
Then we started scouting the train stations and the Sarin was readied and I was going to put my special sauce in it.
Then the thing with the red bike… my little run in with the police. I think that started to make things wobble.Coincidentally, the policeman came to our house and he died. Maruhashi's thugs took him away in the night. Benny went nuts and tried to kill me and my friend the pimp saved me from that.