by Sarah Lotz
BOBBY: ‘One day I’ll bring [the dinosaurs] back to life.’
JESS: ‘It doesn’t work like that. A fucking wardrobe. As if, Uncle Paul.’
‘It was a mistake. Sometimes we get it wrong.’
CHIYOKO: [Hiro] says he remembers being hoisted up into the rescue helicopter. He said it was fun. ‘Like flying.’ He said he was looking forward to doing it again.
There are even several websites dedicated to discussing the implications of Jess’s obsession with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
But the rest of us have to admit that there’s a rational explanation for all of it: the kids survived the crashes because they got lucky; Paul Craddock’s version of events re Jess’s behaviour was just the ramblings of a lunatic; Reuben Small could easily have been in remission; and Hiro was simply aping his father’s obsession with androids. The kids’ changes in behaviour could all have been a result of the trauma they’d suffered. And let’s not forget the hours of material I chose not to include in the book–Paul Craddock’s lengthy complaints about not getting laid; the minutiae of Lillian Small’s daily life–where absolutely nothing happened. That Amazon reviewer was spot on when he accused me of being manipulative and sensationalist.
But… but… ‘She said that they’ve been before and sometimes she decides not to die. She said that sometimes they give people what they want, sometimes they don’t.’
I had a number of options. I could visit Paul again, ask him why he’d chosen to give me this information; I could ignore it as the ramblings of someone who was mentally ill; or I could throw rationality out of the window and look into what the words could possibly mean. I tried the first option, but I was told that Paul wasn’t interested in having any further contact with me (no doubt because he was concerned I might reveal what he’d given me to his psychiatrist). The second option was tempting, but presumably Paul had passed this onto me for a reason: Ask the others, THEY KNOW. I guess I thought that looking into it wouldn’t hurt–what else did I have to do with my time apart from delete abusive emails and wander around Notting Hill in a vodka-fuelled haze?
So I threw reason out of the window and decided to play devil’s advocate. Say that Paul was repeating something Jess had told him just before he’d killed her, what did it mean? The conspiracy nuts would have a trillion theories about they’ve been before and sometimes she decides not to die, but I wasn’t about to contact any of them. And what about: sometimes they give people what they want, sometimes they don’t. After all, The Three had given people–or at least the End Timers–what they wanted: apparent ‘proof’ that the end of the world was nigh. Then again, Jess had given Paul what he thought he wanted–fame; Hiro gave Chiyoko a reason to live, and Bobby… Bobby had given Lillian her husband back.
I decided it was time to break a promise.
Sam, I know it used to drive you crazy when I kept things from you (like the entire first draft of FCTC, for example), but I gave Lillian Small my word that I wouldn’t reveal that she’d survived the car crash that killed Reuben and Bobby. Out of all the people I’d interviewed for the book, her story affected me the most–and I’d been touched that she trusted me enough to contact me when she was in hospital. The FBI had offered to relocate her, and we decided after that it would be best to break contact–she didn’t need any further reminders of what she’d lost.
I doubted the FBI would simply pass on her phone number, so I decided to give Betsy–her neighbour–a shot.
The phone was answered with a ‘Ja?’
‘I’m looking for Mrs Katz?’
‘She no live here no more.’ (I couldn’t place the accent–it might have been Eastern European.)
‘Do you have a forwarding address? It’s really important.’
‘Wait.’
I heard the thunk of the handset being dropped; the thump of bass in the background. Then: ‘I have a number.’
I Googled the area code–Toronto, Canada. Somehow I couldn’t imagine Betsy in Canada.
[Sam–the following is the transcript of the call–yeah, I know, why would I have recorded it and transcribed it if I wasn’t planning on using it in a book or article? Please, trust me on this–I swear you will not be seeing Elspeth Martins’ Truth about The Three on sale in a store near you anytime soon:]
ME: Hi… is that Betsy? Betsy Katz?
BETSY: Who is this calling me?
ME: Elspeth Martins. I interviewed you for my book.
[long pause]
BETSY: Ah! The writer! Elspeth! You are well?
ME: I’m fine. How are you?
BETSY: If I complain, who will listen? What do you think about what is happening in New York? Those riots on the news and the fuel shortages. Are you safe? Are you keeping warm? You have enough food?
ME: I’m fine, thanks. I was wondering… do you know how I can get hold of Lillian?
[longer pause]
BETSY: You don’t know? Well, of course how would you know? I’m sorry to tell you this, but Lillian has passed. A month ago, now. She went in her sleep–a good way to go. She didn’t suffer.
ME: [after several seconds of silence while I fought not to lose control–Sam, I was a fucking mess] I’m so sorry.
BETSY: She was such a good woman, you know she invited me to stay with her? When the first of the blackouts hit New York. Out of nowhere she called me and said, ‘Betsy, you can’t live there on your own, come to Canada.’ Canada! Me! I miss her, I won’t lie. But there’s a good community here, a nice Rabbi who takes care of me. Lily said she appreciated how you made her sound in your book–smarter than she was. But what Mona said–what poison! Lily found that hard to read. And what do you think about what is happening in Israel? That schmuck in the White House, what does he think he is doing? Does he want all the Muslims down on our heads?
ME: Betsy… before she passed, did Lillian mention anything… um… particular about Bobby?
BETSY: About Bobby? What would she say? Only that her life has been a tragedy. Everyone she ever loved taken away from her. God can be cruel.
I hung up. Cried for two hours straight. For once they weren’t tears of self-pity.
But say that I had spoken to Lillian, what would she have said anyway? That the Bobby who came home after the crash wasn’t her grandson? When I interviewed her all those months ago, whenever she spoke about him I could hear the love in her voice.
Ask the others, THEY KNOW.
So who else was there? I knew Lori Small’s best friend Mona was out (after the FCTC furore she denied ever having spoken to me), but there was someone else who’d encountered Bobby and hadn’t come away unscathed.
Ace Kelso.
Sam, I can just picture your face as you read this: a mixture of exasperation and fury. You were right when you said I should have put his reputation first. You were right when you accused me of not fighting hard enough to have his admission that he saw blood in Bobby Small’s eyes taken out of the later editions (another nail in the coffin of our relationship). And yeah, I should have destroyed the recording refuting Ace’s claim that he’d said it off the record. Why the fuck didn’t I listen to you?
The last time I’d seen him was in that soulless boardroom in the publishers’ lawyers’ offices, when he was told he didn’t have a case. His flesh hung loose on his face, his eyes were bloodshot, he hadn’t shaved in days. His threadbare jeans sagged at the knees; his tatty leather jacket stank of stale sweat. The Ace I’d interviewed for the book and seen on TV was square-jawed, blue-eyed–a real Captain America type (as Paul Craddock once described him).
I had no clue if Ace would even talk to me, but what did I have to lose? I Skyped him, fully expecting that he wouldn’t answer. When he did, his voice was blurry, as if he’d just woken up.
ACE: Yeah?
ME: Ace… Hi. It’s Elspeth Martins. Um… how are you?
[a pause of several seconds]
ACE: I’m still on extended sick leave. A euphemism for permanent suspension. What the hell do
you want, Elspeth?
ME: I thought you should know… I’ve been to see Paul Craddock.
ACE: So?
ME: When I met with him, he was adamant that what he’d done to Jess was the result of a psychotic break. But as I was leaving he handed me a note. Look, this is going to sound crazy, but in it he said that–among other things–Jess told him she’d ‘been here before’ and ‘sometimes she decides not to die’.
[another long pause]
ACE: Why are you telling me this?
ME: I thought… I dunno. I guess… what you said about Bobby… Like I say, it’s crazy to even think like this, but Paul said, ‘ask the others’ and I—
ACE: You know something, Elspeth? I know you got a lot of criticism for what you included in that book, but far as I’m concerned you were lambasted for the wrong reasons. You published all that inflammatory stuff about the kids’ personalities changing, dropped the bomb and just walked away. You didn’t take it further; you assumed everything had a rational explanation and naively thought everyone who read it would also see it like that.
ME: My intention wasn’t to—
ACE: I know what your intentions were. And now you’re sniffing around to see if there really was something up with those kids, am I right?
ME: I’m just looking into things.
ACE: [a sigh] Tell you what. I’m gonna email you something.
ME: What?
ACE: Read it first, then we’ll talk.
[The email came through immediately and I clicked on an attachment entitled: SA678ORG
At first glance I thought it was an exact copy of the Sun Air Cockpit Voice Recording transcript that I’d included in FCTC. And it was exactly the same, apart from this exchange that occurred a second before the plane ran into trouble:
Captain: [expletive] You see that?
First Officer: Hai! Lightning?
Captain: Negative. Never seen a flash like that. There’s nothing on TCAS, ask ATC if there’s another aircraft up here with us—]
ME: What the fuck is this?
ACE: You gotta understand, we didn’t want to fuel the panic. People needed to know that the causes of those crashes were explainable. The grounded planes had to get back in the air.
ME: The NTSB faked the Sun Air transcript? You’re telling me that you guys seriously believed you were dealing with an alien encounter?
ACE: What I’m telling you is that we were confronted by facts that we couldn’t explain. Sun Air aside, the only disaster that had a definite cause was the Dalu Air crash.
ME: What the hell are you talking about? What about the Maiden Air disaster?
ACE: We had a multiple bird strike with no snarge. Sure, possibly explainable if the engines had been consumed by fire–but they weren’t. How in the hell do two jet engines get imploded by birds–without a trace of matter? And look at the Go!Go! incident. We were grasping at straws with that one–but one thing’s for sure–it’s pretty damn unusual for pilots to fly into a storm of that magnitude in this day and age. And answer me this, how in the fuck did those three kids survive?
ME: Look at Zainab Farra, the little girl who survived that crash in Ethiopia. The Three were like her, they got lucky—
ACE: Bullshit. And you know it.
ME: This transcript… why did you send it to me? Do you actually want me to publish it?
ACE: [a bitter laugh] What’s the worst that can happen now? Reynard will give me a medal–more proof that The Three weren’t just normal kids. Do what you want with it. The NTSB and JTSB will deny it anyway.
ME: So you’re seriously saying you think there’s something… I don’t know… otherworldly about The Three? You’re an investigator–a scientist.
ACE: All I know is what I saw when I went to see Bobby. It wasn’t an hallucination, Elspeth. And that photographer, the one who ended up being dinner for his goddamned reptiles, he saw something as well.
[another sigh]
Listen, you were just doing your job. I shouldn’t have gone after you for publishing what I said about Bobby. Maybe I said it was off the record, maybe I didn’t. But it was the truth. Fact is, you gotta be blind not to see that there was something wrong with those kids.
ME: So what do you suggest I do now?
ACE: Up to you, Elspeth. But whatever you do, I suggest you make it quick. The End Timers are hell-bent on fulfilling their own prophecies. How in the hell do you negotiate with a president who’s convinced that the end of the world is nigh and that the only way to save people from eternal damnation is to turn the US into a theocracy? Simple. You can’t.
Of course I struggled to believe that the NTSB would actually doctor the record–even if it was concerned about people panicking about the causes of the disasters. Could the transcript be Ace’s revenge for the eye-bleeding debacle? If I made something like this public, the Rationalist League would have another reason to string me up.
But you know where this is going, right? I had Paul’s note, Ace’s (possibly faked) transcript, and his assurances that he really had seen blood in Bobby’s eyes.
It could all be bullshit–probably was. But there was one child left.
I spent the next few days researching Chiyoko and Hiro. Most of the links led to new material on Ryu and Chiyoko’s tragic love story, among them a recent article on a spate of copycat suicides, but there was surprisingly little on Hiro. I contacted Eric Kushan, the guy who’d translated the Japanese extracts in FCTC, to see if he could give me any leads, but he’d left Japan a few months earlier after the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation between the States and Japan was overturned, and all he could suggest was that I look into the Cult of Hiro.
I thought it might have morphed into something approximating the Moonies or Aum Shrinrikyo, but rather than becoming a hardcore nationalist cult, it had fizzled into little more than a bizarre celebrity trend. Now that her husband had won the election, Aikao Uri appeared to have dumped her alien theories and surrabot, focusing her energies on campaigning for the tri-Asian alliance. The Orz Movement had gone completely underground
Do you remember Daniel Mimura? He was one of the Tokyo Herald journalists who’d given me permission to use a couple of his articles for FCTC. He was one of the few contributors (along with Lola–Pastor Len’s ‘fancy woman’–and the documentary filmmaker Malcolm Adelstein) who’d sent me a supportive note after the shit hit the fan. He sounded delighted to hear from me, and we chatted for a while about how the Japanese people were coping with the spectre of a possible alliance with China and Korea.
I transcribed the rest of our conversation:
ME: You think Chiyoko and Ryu really did die in Aokigahara?
DANIEL: Reckon Ryu did for sure, they did an autopsy, which is quite unusual for Tokyo–they aren’t done automatically in every suspicious death. Chiyoko’s body was never found, so who knows?
ME: You think she could be alive?
DANIEL: Possibly. You heard the rumours about Hiro? They’ve been circulating for a while.
ME: You mean the usual ‘The Three are still alive’ bullshit?
DANIEL: Yeah. You want me to go into it?
ME: Sure.
DANIEL: This is crazy conspiricist stuff but… Look, to start with, the cops shut down that scene really fast. The paramedics and forensics guys were instructed not to talk to the press. Even the police agency guys couldn’t get much of a story out of them, except for the official statement.
ME: Okay… but why would they fake his death?
DANIEL: The New Nationalists could have planned it, maybe. I mean, what better way to turn the public against the US? S’pose at a push, if you were that way inclined, you could say they set the whole thing up, staged the scene, killed the Kamamotos and that soldier, made it look like Hiro was dead.
ME: That doesn’t make sense. Private Jake Wallace was a Pamelist–he had a motive to kill Hiro. How would they get him involved in a scheme like that?
DANIEL: Hey, don’t shoot the messenger. I’m just tellin
g you about the rumours. Hell, I dunno, maybe they got wind about what he was gonna do, set him up. Hacked into his emails like those other guys did.
ME: But the witnesses said that they saw Chiyoko carrying Hiro’s body.
DANIEL: Yeah. But have you seen those surrabots Kenji Yanagida makes? They’re eerie. Unless you’re close up to them, they look seriously convincing.
ME: Hang on… wouldn’t that mean that Chiyoko would’ve been in on it?
DANIEL: Yeah.
ME: So let’s say what you’re saying did happen. Chiyoko sat back and allowed her parents to be murdered… why?
DANIEL: Who knows? Money? So that she and Hiro could go off to some unknown country and live out their lives in luxury? And poor old Ryu got caught up in it and ended up another casualty.
ME: You any idea how often I’ve heard these kinds of theories?
DANIEL: Sure. Like I say, all bullshit.
ME: You ever looked into it?
DANIEL: Dug around a bit, nothing major. You know how these things go. If there was anything to it, someone would have leaked it by now.
ME: Didn’t Kenji Yanagida identify Hiro’s body?
DANIEL: So?
ME: If anyone knows the truth, it’s him. Would he talk to me?
DANIEL: [a laugh] No fucking way. It’s all bullshit, Ellie. The kid is dead.
ME: Is Kenji Yanagida still in Osaka?
DANIEL: Last I heard he left the university after being hounded by the Cult of Hiro–they were desperate for him to be one of their high-profile mascots. Apparently he moved to Tokyo, changed his name.
ME: Can you track him down for me?
DANIEL: You have any idea how many people have tried to talk to Kenji Yanagida and been stonewalled?
ME: But I have something they don’t have.