The Sword of Heaven

by Mikkel Aaland

  The worst was to come.

  Kazz began talking about bad spirits, who were after me. “Because of this writing in the newspaper, you are,” he said, “one window for the world and the first target for bad spirits.”

  He ended the letter with words that seemed to taunt me. “You have to keep your mind all the time. The man who has a connection with God project has a great responsibility.”

  What the hell did Kazz mean when he wrote I was a target? Did he actually believe that there were entities that would swoop out of the sky like kamikazes and blast me? Or formless spirits that would maliciously create havoc in my life? Were they the same spirits he believed were engulfing the earth and causing all the problems?

  I tossed the letter angrily onto my desk. In all my years of writing and photographing for magazines, I’d never been threatened with bad spirits.

  I’m not superstitious. Bad spirits are merely a manifestation of some inner conflict or need. They are a psychological phenomena, an illusion of the mind. They are therefore explainable rationally. This is Kazz’s problem.

  Anyway, as long as I didn’t believe in them they couldn’t hurt me, could they?

  During the next few weeks, letters crisscrossed the Pacific. Kazz was trying to figure me out.“I asked my teacher about your writing in the paper, and he asked God. God told him that this is one part of the next new spiritual wave. You should explain everything.”

  I wrote and apologized to Kazz and his teacher for the breach of confidence. Kazz replied:“There is no problem. We know that we are one member of great project. Each one has a special individuality, and because we came from the God world to this human world, we are all the body of the God of Universe.”

  “All in the same boat,” I muttered to myself, translating Kazz’s strange choice of words into something familiar. “I shouldn’t get so caught up in this bad spirit thing. I can figure it all out later.”

  Then, just when it seemed that Kazz and I were beginning to understand (or at least accommodate) each other, there was a loud thud at my front door. I was having lunch with a friend, but I got up from the table and ran to investigate. The door was open and sitting inside the porch, bathed in afternoon light, was a large package. No one was around.

  “The Body of Shinto God Five Peaces Cased in Stone Box,” read the customs declaration. The package weighed 8.8 kilograms.

  Gods on my porch?

  A baby would have been less confusing.

  Kazz didn’t send any instructions where the gods should be placed or to whom they should be given. Then, on the very next day, a similar package arrived, this time under the arm of a disgruntled postman who complained profusely about the weight. Inside were five more gods.

  Sending a god to me in Norway had seemed an act of faith—a statement about Kazz and Juan Li’s friendship. Sending me ten more seemed crazy. I hadn’t even met this man, yet he was sending me ten of his sacred gods.

  What had I gotten myself into?

  chapter 3

  Me circa 1964 inside the bomb shelter.

  In March 1983, in a move seemingly meant to diffuse the enormous public outcry and fear over nuclear escalation, the president of the United States announced a plan to “protect” the country with a network of laser weapons and killer satellites that would sit just outside the earth’s atmosphere. This umbrella would, in theory, render enemy missiles useless and therefore discourage attack.

  The major responsibility for developing the so-called “Star Wars” technology went to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, formerly the Livermore Radiation Laboratory, my father’s former employer.

  On June 20, 1983, more than 950 people were arrested for demonstrating outside the Lab. They carried signs that read, “Livermore, City of Death.” There was widespread belief among the demonstrators that Star Wars was an offensive move that would accelerate the arms race.

  Three days after the arrests I drove to Livermore.

  In front of me, at the end of East Avenue, was the Livermore Lab. Next to me, inside my gym bag, was a Shinto god, the first of the ten that Kazz had sent to me several weeks before.

  I wiped sweat from my forehead, keeping one hand steady on the wheel. It felt wonderfully hot. Just a 55-minute drive away, in San Francisco, it was depressingly cold and foggy.

  I planned to stop briefly at my parents’ home, pick up the family pass to the Lab recreation center, one of the only perks my father had been allowed to keep, and then head to the Lab pool.

  The Shinto god?

  I hadn’t forgotten Kazz’s threat of bad spirits, and I was still confused by many of the responses to the newspaper article. But the Lab, a nuclear weapons research center, seemed a perfect place for a Shinto god.

  After all, there were Hiroshima and Nagasaki to consider and I had ten gods to get rid of.

  My mother met me on her porch. She was holding a newspaper with a picture of a demonstrator being dragged away by the police.

  “They are so angry,” she said, clearly upset that Livermore was receiving such notoriety.

  I gave her a kiss on the cheek and then glanced quickly at the photograph. “Mostly scared,” I suggested.

  I walked toward the living room but remained standing. I was in a hurry.

  “You want lunch?” my mother asked as she passed me on her way to the kitchen.

  “No thanks, I should be going. I really crave some sun.”

  She walked into the living room and sat wearily on the couch. My father was back in Norway after spending the winter in California. My mother would join him in a few weeks.

  “Sit and talk, please,” she said.

  “Next time, I promise.”

  I shifted from one foot to the next nervously.

  “On the radio,” she said looking up at me, “someone called the Lab ‘Auschwitz West.’ Can you imagine?”

  That comment stopped me and I stared at her incredulously. I thought, damn the Lab. Not only had it made us a top priority for Soviet nuclear missiles, but now, because of this ridiculous Star Wars plan, it was making my hometown the ridicule of the peace-loving world.

  “You sure you don’t want lunch?” my mother said when I didn’t respond.

  I just shook my head.

  “Well at least do me a favor. Check out your old room, would you?”

  As she spoke, she reached for the pool pass that was sitting on the fireplace mantel and then handed it to me.

  “With all the rain, I’m afraid your room flooded. Your father got most everything of value out before he left. Maybe you want to salvage something. It’ll only take a minute.”

  “Sure, sure,” I said, annoyed that time spent checking out the flooded old bomb shelter would cut into the time I’d planned to spend in the sun.

  “And take a flashlight!” my mother called out as I headed toward the long hallway and the concrete stairs that led down to my bedroom. “Your father turned off the electricity.”

  Technically, it wasn’t a bomb shelter, since it wouldn’t have survived a direct hit from a thermonuclear device, but rather it was a radiation shelter. It also wasn’t a claustrophobic capsule like the bomb shelters advertised in the magazines of the time. My father never worked in small scale. The Southern Pacific boxcar, which provided the basic frame for the shelter, was plenty big enough for the entire family. However, no one in the family liked it quite like I did. It was warm in the winter, cool in the summer, and always quiet. And I was safe, which was important because I didn’t want to die in a nuclear holocaust.

  There were seventeen concrete steps, just as I remembered from childhood. The last few were underwater. As I waded into the cold, knee-deep water, my flashlight illuminated an old photographic enlarger, rusted.

  No use trying to save that, I thought. I hadn’t used it since high school, anyway. Can’t believe I actually made pictures with that archaic piece of junk.

  I turned the light to the concrete walls, then to a solid metal hatch, which I had painted fluores
cent orange in the late 1960s.

  I knew that beyond the hatch was a metal pipe, three feet in diameter that angled 45 degrees to the surface. It was a combination escape hatch and air vent. On the opposite end of the shelter another similar pipe shot straight up to the surface at a 90-degree angle. When the shelter was first built the pipe continued, past the surface, ten feet into the air. This way, when you escaped, you could avoid stepping in the radioactive fallout that had accumulated on the ground. Since it blocked the view from the front window of our house, my father eventually tore the pipe down and sealed it off at the surface.

  Next to the angled, bolted hatch was my old metal cot.

  The flashlight died. I shook it and it revived. One more sweep of the room—a file cabinet, empty; shelves that were once full of canned foods. Now there was only the Geiger counter. I reached for the familiar instrument, but the batteries were long defunct. I placed it back on the bare shelf.

  There was nothing I wanted so I turned back to the stairs.

  I didn’t notice the wind on my neck until I was nearly on the stairs. Although it was warm and faint and smelled of summer trees, it affected me like a blast of icy Arctic air. My head snapped back. My body froze as if someone were holding a gun to me. I knew that the air must be coming from the escape hatch, which had never been sealed properly, but even with this rational explanation I panicked.

  Then I stumbled, and the darkness swallowed the flashlight, which fell out of my hand, and old childhood demons rushed to surround me.

  Suddenly Kazz’s warning leapt to my mind.“You are now the first target of bad spirits.”

  I sloshed madly through the water, smashed into a concrete wall, groped my way around it, and then dashed up the stairs. I bid my mother a hasty, breathless goodbye and left for the Lab.

  A few blocks from my family’s house is East Avenue, the main artery that connects the Lab with the town. I drove past Callahan’s mortuary and the cemetery. In my rear view mirror I saw the tall stucco tower of Livermore High, from which I graduated in 1970. On my right was the East Avenue Elementary School, which I attended from kindergarten through the eighth grade. I passed churches, grocery stores, and, farther out of town, the vineyards that provide grapes for Wente Brothers, one of Livermore’s two wineries. Except for the flat-roofed buildings at the end of East Avenue, it was a typical suburban scene.

  I parked in the recreation center’s visitors lot. It was almost empty, and there were no demonstrators. I walked quickly, the Shinto god lying in my gym bag next to my swimsuit and towel.

  These buildings and the Lab were built in 1952, the year I was born. A few years earlier the Soviets had exploded a nuclear bomb, and in response the United States Department of Energy was given a virtual blank check to expand America’s nuclear capabilities. Scientists from all over the U.S., and even other countries, poured into Livermore, where tract homes went up as rapidly as the flimsy shacks of California’s gold rush days. A sleepy town known for its rodeo, wineries, and railroad station changed quickly into a modern town of science. A sign on the outskirts of town read: Livermore, the Atomic City.

  The Olympic-sized pool was in the center of the giant complex, but it was surrounded by a fence that kept it as a separate island. A single fenced walkway led from the parking lot to the pool, flanked by guard towers that made sure no one wandered off the path.

  I lay on the grass near the pool, surrounded by children of Lab employees. Even with a slight breeze it was hot. I swam a few laps, then went back to the grass, reveling in how serene I felt.

  Slowly, the afternoon sun dropped behind a guard tower; the long shadows of buildings fell across the grass. The lifeguard’s whistle sounded. I sat on the grass and watched people leave the pool.

  I took the Shinto god from the bag.

  Suddenly I didn’t feel all that well.

  I paced around the perimeter of the pool like a nervous animal, near the fence and bushes. There wasn’t really any reason why I couldn’t have simply found a hidden spot under some bushes and dug a hole for the god. None of the guards could see. And if they did, so what? I was merely planting a stone, nothing dangerous, nothing threatening.

  But there was no denying it. Something was very wrong. In the depths of my consciousness, I could sense the faint stirrings of something struggling to surface.

  Something to do with the Lab, my childhood…something to do with the panic I felt earlier in the bomb shelter.

  I tried in vain to find the connection, but the harder I tried the more elusive the something became. What was it? I felt a barrier that kept me from remembering, a wall stronger and more fortified than the one physically surrounding the pool and the Lab. What was on the other side? I didn’t know. I only knew that for all practical purposes I was paralyzed, unable to perform the simple task of placing the Shinto god.

  I never did place the god at the Lab.

  Instead, as that summer day in 1983 ended, I grabbed my towel, the god, and as my father had done for 30 years, joined the other stragglers from the pool and the throngs of scientists dressed in white shirts and ties as they filed out the gate to drive home.

  chapter 4

  Juan Li at a restaurant in San Francisco’s Mission District.

  In a survey of the high-school class of 1979, 50 percent of the sample reported that advances in nuclear weaponry affected their thoughts about marriage and the future, and a majority said they were even affected in their daily thoughts and feelings. There were vivid expressions of terror and powerlessness, grim images of nuclear destruction, doubts about whether they will ever have a chance to grow up and an accompanying attitude of ‘live for now.’”

  —Baby Boomers by Paul C. Light

  Juan Li picked another serendipitous time to enter my life, calling me two weeks after my afternoon at the Lab pool. We met at a small Chinese restaurant near my house in San Francisco’s Mission District. He told me that he had read my newspaper article and liked it.

  “But,” I said sternly, “you should have warned me that Kazz considers the Sword of Heaven a secret project. I would never have written about it had I known.”

  “Sometimes I can’t figure Kazz out,” Juan replied. “He never told me it was secret.”

  “Well, it’s not now,” I said nervously. I described the responses I had received to the article, both the positive and the skeptical.

  “And to be honest,” I continued, “I’m having some second thoughts.”

  His big eyes were bright, amused by what he saw as my naïveté. “There is nothing simple about Shinto or the Japanese.”

  “I know,” I said softly.

  Juan was silent. I told him about the strange arrival of ten more gods. He looked surprised. “Did you ask for more?”

  “No,” I said. “Do you want them?”

  “At the end of the summer, when I go back to Canada, I’ll take one,” he said. “But I’ll be traveling until then. Why not give them to some of the people who offered to help?”

  “I will. But some of them seemed so desperate.”

  He stared at me intently. “Then why don’t you place another one?”

  I gulped my Coke and ignored his question, choosing not to tell him of my aborted try at the Lab. Instead, I told him that one of Kazz’s letters had threatened me with bad spirits.

  “Bad spirits?” asked Juan leaning closer to me.

  “Those were his words.”

  “Kazz is superstitious,” he said.“He sees bad spirits everywhere. But whatever you call it, any action releases forces in response.”

  “Action like trying to save the earth…”

  “Any positive action will meet negative resistance.”

  “You don’t think bad spirits are a psychological phenomena?”

  “Psychological?”

  “In the head.”

  Juan looked thoughtful. “That’s a very Western concept, the idea that the mind is separate from the world. In Shinto, and other Eastern religions, there is no d
istinction.”

  “So you believe in bad spirits too.”

  “I didn’t say that. I just said that resistance is a natural ebb to life’s flow.”

  Juan grinned at my frustrated look.

  “Because of the newspaper article, Kazz said I was the first target. Why target me? ”

  “I am sure he didn’t mean only you. He meant anyone who helped. After I placed a god in Taiwan, at the Sun & Moon Lake, a cloud opened up and a beautiful ray of light lit a huge pagoda on the shore. I told you that already. But that night I had a dream, and I knew that by my action I had exposed myself to something very dangerous. By writing the article in the newspaper you’ve just made yourself a bigger target.”

  “Wonderful. And it’s not even my project.”

  Juan pulled back in his seat. “Are you sure?”

  After a long pause, I said,“Maybe you better tell me more about Kazz.” I was more eager than ever to hang flesh on the man behind the strange letters. “Who is this guy? Exactly how did you meet him?”

  For a moment it looked as if he wouldn’t answer my question. Then he asked: “What have I told you?”

  “Not enough.” My irritation was showing.

  “It was really an amazing coincidence. I met Kazz in Kashmir in 1976.”

  Juan had arrived by bus in Srinagar, Kashmir’s capital. It was evening, and he was quickly hustled for a place to stay. Someone insisted he stay at a houseboat on the lake, where another Japanese “like him,” was staying.

  “My mother is Cuban, my father is Chinese,” he explained. “For some reason, in India, I’m always confused with the Japanese.”

  I looked at his face, a handsome blend of Eastern and Western genes, and understood.

  The Japanese boatmate was Kazz. He had already been there a few days, waiting for a storm to subside before continuing on his way.

  “In truth, though,” Juan said,“Kazz was a bit of a lost soul. He wasn’t sure what he was doing or where he was going.”