Ghostwritten (5 page)

But this is bad. I have run out of Japan. My passport is in the possession of the Fellowship’s Foreign Office, so seeking assistance with our Russian or Korean brothers and sisters is impossible. I am running out of money. Of course I have no money of my own: after my initiation every last yen was transferred to the Fellowship. My skin family has disowned me, and would turn me in. So would my skin friends from my life of blindness. This causes me no sorrow. When the White Nights come, they shall reap what they have sown. The Fellowship is my true family.

I had one final resort. The Fellowship’s Secret Service. The media had mentioned nothing about their arrest, so perhaps they had gone to ground in time. I dialed the secret number, and gave the encoded message: “The
dog needs to be fed.”

I kept on the line, saying nothing, as instructed during my cleansing training sessions at Sanctuary. The Secret Serviceman on the other end hung up when enough time for my call to be traced had elapsed. Help would be on its way. A levitator would be dispatched, bearing a wallet of crisp ten-thousand yen notes. He will scan for my alpha signature, and find me during one of my rambles around the island, when I am alone, or asleep in a grove of palm trees. He will be there when I awake, glowing, perhaps, like Buddha or Gabriel.

•  •  •

Kumejima is a squalid, incestuous prison. To think, this lump of rock was once the main trading center of the Ryuku Empire with China. Boats laden with spices, slaves, coral, ivory, silk. Swords, coconuts, hemp. The shouts of men would have filled the bustling harbor, old women would have knelt in the marketplace, with their scales and piles of fruit and dried fish. Girls with obedient breasts lean out of the dusky windows, over the flower boxes, promising, murmuring.…

Now it’s all gone. Long gone. Okinawa became a squalid apology for a fiefdom, squabbled over by masters far beyond its curved horizons. Nobody admits it, but the islands are dying now. The young people are moving to the mainland. Without subsidies and price-fixing the agriculture would collapse. When the mainland peaceniks get the American military rapists off the islands the economy will slow, splutter, and expire. The fish are all being fished out by factory trawlers. Tracks lead nowhere. Building projects have been started, but end in patches of concrete, piles of gravel, and tall, thorny weeds. Such a place would be ripe for His Serendipity’s Mission! I long to awaken people, to tell people about the White Nights and the New Earth, but I daren’t risk bringing attention to myself. My last defense is my ordinariness. When that wears out, I have nothing but my novice’s alpha potential to protect me.

The island’s bewhiskered policeman spoke to me yesterday. I passed him outside a snorkel shop while he was bent over tying up his shoelaces.

“How’s your holiday, Mr. Tokunaga?”

“Very restful, officer. Thank you.”

“I was sorry to hear about your wife. It must have been terribly traumatic.”

“Kind of you to say so, officer.” I tried to focus my alpha coercion faculty to make him go away.

“So you’ll be off tomorrow, Mr. Tokunaga? Mrs. Mori at the guest house said you were staying for a couple of weeks.”

“I’m thinking of extending, actually, just a few more days.”

“Is that a fact? Won’t your company be missing you?”

“Actually, I’m working on a new computer system. I can do it here just as well as in Tokyo. In fact, the peace and quiet is more conducive to inspiration.”

The policeman nodded thoughtfully. “I wonder … At the junior high school the youngsters have recently started up a computer club. My sister-in-law’s the headmistress there. Mrs. Oe. You’ve met already, I believe, at Mrs. Mori’s. I wonder … Mrs. Oe is far too polite to dream of imposing upon your time herself, I know, but …”

I waited.

“It would be a great honor for the school if you could go along some time and tell the computer class about life in a real computer company.…”

I sensed a trap. But it would be safer to get out of it later than refuse now. “Sure.”

“That would be very kind of you. I’ll mention it when I see my brother next.…”

I met the husky dog on the beach. His Serendipity chose to address me in its barks.

“What did you expect, Quasar? Did you think raising the curtain on the age of
Homo serendipitous
was going to be easy?”

“No, my Lord. But when are the yogic fliers going to be dispatched to the White House and the European parliament, to demand your release?”

“Eat eggs, my faithful one.”

“Eggs, my Lord?”

“Eggs are a symbol of rebirth, Quasar. And eat Orange Rocket ice lollies.”

“What do they symbolize, Guru?”

“Nothing. They contain vitamin C in abundance.”

“It shall be so, my Lord. But the yogic fliers, my Father—”

My only reply was a barking dog, and a puzzled look from the two lovers, jumping up suddenly from behind a stack of rusty oil drums. The three of us looked at each other in confusion. The dog cocked its leg and pissed against a tractor tire. The ocean boomed its indifference.

•  •  •

The little baby girl in the woolly cap, she had liked me. How could she have liked me? It was just some facial reflex, no doubt. She gurgled at me, smiling. Her mother looked at whom she was smiling, and she smiled at me too. Her eyes were warm. I didn’t smile back. I looked away. I wish I had smiled back. But I wish they hadn’t smiled at me. Would they have survived? Or would the gas have got them? If they hadn’t moved, it would have leaked out of the package and straight into their noses, eyes, and lungs.…

Mom. Dad.

But we were only defending ourselves!
There was one day, during my assignment to the ministry of information. One of our sister’s skin relatives, her unclean uncle, had taken court action to stop her selling their family’s farmhouse and land. He was a property lawyer. The Secret Service had brought this flesh brother in for questioning. His Serendipity instantly knew he was a spy sent by the unclean. An assassination plot was being engineered, it seemed. Laughable! All of us in Sanctuary knew how, thirty years ago, while traveling in Tibet, a being of pure consciousness named Arupadhatu transmigrated into His Serendipity, and revealed the secrets of freeing the mind from its physical shackles. This had been the beginning of His Serendipity’s path up the holy mountain. Even if the body of His Serendipity were harmed, He could leave His old body and transmigrate into another, as easily as I change hotels and islands. He could transmigrate into His own assassin.

Anyway, this lawyer was injected with truth serum and confessed to everything. His mission had been to put an odorless poison into the refectory rice cookers. His Serendipity’s wife conducted the interview herself, I heard.

You see! We were only defending ourselves.

My fingernails are coming loose.

I spent the afternoon walking to the lighthouse. I sat on a rock and watched the waves and the birds. A typhoon was moving up
the coast of China, skirting Taiwan, and looming over the Okinawan horizon. Clouds were piling up in the west, winds were unraveling. I was being discussed, and decisions were being taken. What had gone wrong? A few more months, and my alpha quotient would have been 25, putting me in the top two hundred on Earth—His Serendipity had assured me, in person. I had ingested some of His Serendipity’s eyelashes. After winning converts on the Welcome Program I was rewarded with a test tube of the Guru’s sperm to imbibe. It boosted my gamma resistance. I had been taken off the lavatory docket and been made a cleanser. For the first time in my life, I was becoming a name.

The corrugated iron roof of an abandoned shed clattered to and fro in the wind.

Nothing has gone wrong. Nothing has gone wrong, Quasar. It was your faith that brought you to His Serendipity’s notice. It is your faith that will guide you through the Days of Persecution, through the terrible days of the White Nights to the New Earth. It is your faith that will nourish you now.

Everything around me on this godforsaken island is crumbling. I should have stayed in Naha. I should have hidden in snow country, or deep-frozen Hokkaido, or lost myself amid a metropolis of my own kind. What happened, I wonder, to Mr. Ikeda? Where do people who drop off the edge of your world end up?

Typhoon weather.

The curtains I keep drawn. Our minister of defense received some reports that the government of the unclean had developed microcameras which they implanted in the craniums of seagulls, which were then trained to spy. Not to mention the Americans’ secret satellites, scrolling over the globe, scanning for the Fellowship at the behest of the politicians and the Jews, who long ago had set up the Freemasons, and funded Chinese efforts to pollute the well of history.

I was sitting with my back to the lighthouse on the lonely headland. Headlights approached, seeking me out. I looked for a place to hide. There was none. A seagull watched me. It had a cruel
face. A blue and white car pulled up. Too late, I looked for a place to hide. A door opened, and a dim light lit up the interior.

They’ve found me! The rest of forever in a cell …

And then, so strangely, I’m relieved it’s all over. At least I can stop running.

A hand was already clearing stuff from the front seat. Its owner leaned forward. “Mr. Tokunaga, I presume?”

Grimly, I nodded, and walked toward my captor.

“I’ve been searching for you. The name’s Ota. I’m the harbormaster. You spoke with my brother just the other day, about giving a lecture at my wife’s school. How about a lift back to town? You must be tired, after walking all the way out here, all on your own?”

I obeyed, and still trembling I climbed in and put on my seat belt.

“Lucky I was passing … there’s a typhoon warning, you know. I saw a figure, all hunched like it was the end of the world, and I thought to myself, I wonder if that’s Mr. Tokunaga? Not feeling too chipper, this evening?”

“No.”

“Maybe you’ve been overdoing it. The island air is good for clearing the head, but at the rate you’ve been tramping around … Terribly sorry to hear about your wife.”

“Death is a part of life.”

“That’s a sound philosophy, but it can’t be easy to keep your thoughts focused.”

“I can. I’m a good focuser.”

He braked and beeped a couple of times at a goat standing in the middle of the road. Magisterially, the goat sniffed at us, and wandered into a field.

“Must tell Mrs. Bessho that Caligula’s escaped again. You name it, goats eat it! So, you’re a good focuser, you were saying. Splendid, splendid. It would be a crime not to try diving while you’re here, you know. We have the finest Pacific reefs north of the equator, I’m told. By the way, the youngsters are delighted at the prospect of a real computer man coming to talk to them. No great scholars, I’m afraid, but they’re keen. My wife would like
you to join us for dinner tomorrow, if you’re free. So, Mr. Tokunaga. Tell me a little about yourself.…”

The road looped back around to the port, as all the roads on this island eventually do.

Clouds began to ink out the stars, one by one.

SPRING WAS LATE, and so was I. The commuters streamed to work with their collars and umbrellas up. The cherry trees lining the backstreets were still winter trees, craggy, pocked, and dripping with morning rain. I fished around for my keys, rattled up the shutters, and opened the shop.

I looked through the post while the water was boiling. Some mail orders—good. Bills, bills—bad. A couple of inquiries from a regular customer in Nagano about rare discs that I’d never heard of. Bumf. An entirely ordinary morning. Time for oolong tea. I put on a very rare Miles Davis recording that Takeshi had discovered in a box of mixed-quality discs that he’d picked up at an auction last month out in Shinagawa.

It was a gem. “You Never Entered My Mind” was blissful and forlorn. Some faultless mute-work, the trumpet filtered down to a single ray of sound. The brassy sun lost behind the clouds.

The first customer of the week was a foreigner, either American or European or Australian, you can never tell because they all look the same. A lanky, zitty foreigner. He was a real collector, though, not just a browser. He had that manic glint in his eyes, and his fingers were adept at flicking through meters of discs at high speed, like a bank teller counting notes. He bought a virgin copy of “Stormy Sunday” by Kenny Burrell, and “Flight to Denmark” by Duke Jordan, recorded in 1973. He had a cool T-shirt, too. A bat flying around a skyscraper, leaving a trail of stars. I asked him where he was from. He said thank you very much. Westerners can’t learn Japanese.

•  •  •

Takeshi phoned a bit later.

“Satoru! Have a good day off yesterday?”

“Pretty quiet. Sax lesson in the afternoon. Hung around with Koji for a bit afterwards. Helped Taro with the delivery from the brewery.”

“Any vast checks for me in the post?”

“Sorry, nothing that vast. Some nice bills, though. How was your weekend?”

This was what he had been waiting for. “Funny you ask me that! I met this
gorgeous
creature of the night last Friday at a club in Roppongi.” I could almost hear his saliva glands juicing. “Get this. Twenty-five,” which for Takeshi is the perfect age, making him ten years her senior. “Engaged,” which for Takeshi adds the thrill of adultery while subtracting any responsibility. “Only shag women who have more to lose than you do” was a motto of his. “Clubbed until four in the morning. Woke up Saturday afternoon, with my clothes on back-to-front, in a hotel somewhere in Chiyoda ward. No idea how I got there. She came out of the shower, naked, brown, and dripping, and damn if she wasn’t
still
gasping for it!”

“It must have been heaven. Are you seeing her again?”

“Of course we’re seeing each other again. This is love at first sight! We’re having dinner tonight at a French restaurant in Ichigaya,” meaning they were having each other in an Ichigaya love hotel. “Seriously, you should see her ass! Two overripe nectarines squeezed together in a paper bag. One prod and they explode! Juice everywhere!”