Ghostwritten (2 page)

I cleaned myself and examined my face in the bathroom mirror. You are one such survivor, Quasar. Strong features, highlighting my samurai legacy. Ridged eyebrows. A hawkish nose. Quasar, the harbinger. His Serendipity had chosen my name prophetically. My role was to pulse at the edge of the universe of the faithful, alone in the darkness. An outrider. A herald.

The extractor fan droned. Somewhere beyond its drone I could hear a little girl, sobbing. So much sadness in this twisted world. I began shaving.

I awoke early, not remembering where I was for the first few moments. Jigsaw pieces of my dream lay dropped around. There had been Mr. Ikeda, my home-room teacher from high school, and two or three of the worst bullies. My biological father had appeared too. I remembered that day when the bullies had got everyone in the class to pretend that I was dead. By afternoon it had spread through the whole school. Everyone pretended they couldn’t see me. When I spoke they pretended they couldn’t hear me. Mr. Ikeda got to hear about it, and as a society-appointed guardian of young minds what did he take it upon himself to do? The bastard conducted a funeral service for me during the final home-room hour. He’d even lit some incense, and led the chanting, and everything.

Before His Serendipity lit my life I was defenseless. I sobbed and screamed at them to stop, but nobody saw me. I was dead.

After awakening, I found I was tormented with an erection. Too much gamma wave interference. I meditated under my picture of His Serendipity until it subsided.

If it’s funerals the unclean want, they shall have them aplenty, during the White Nights, before His Serendipity rises to claim His kingdom. Funerals with no mourners.

I walked down the Kokusai Dori, the main street of the city, doubling back and weaving off to lose anybody who was trailing me. Unfortunately my alpha potential is still too weak to achieve invisibility,
so I have to shake trailers the old-fashioned way. When I was sure nobody was following me I ducked into a games center and placed a call from a telephone booth. Public call boxes are much less likely to be bugged.

“Brother, this is Quasar. Please connect me with the minister of defense.”

“Certainly, brother. The minister is expecting you. Permit me to congratulate you on the success of our recent mission.”

I was put on hold for a couple of moments. The minister of defense is a favorite of His Serendipity’s. He graduated from the Imperial University. He was a judge, before hearing the call of His Serendipity. He is a born leader. “Ah, Quasar. Excellent. You are in good health?”

“On His Serendipity’s service, Minister, I always enjoy good health. I have overcome my allergies, and for nine months I haven’t suffered from—”

“We are delighted with you. His Serendipity is mightily impressed with the depth of your faith.
Mightily
impressed. He is meditating on your anima now, in His retreat. On yours alone, for fortification and enrichment.”

“Minister! I beg you to convey my deepest thanks.”

“Gladly. You’ve earned it. This is a war against the unclean myriad, and in this war acts of courage do not go unacknowledged, nor unrewarded. Now. You’ll be wondering how long you are to remain away from your family. The Cabinet believes seven days will suffice.”

“I understand, Minister.” I bowed deeply.

“Have you seen the television reports?”

“I avoid the lies of the unclean state, Minister.
For what snake would willingly heed the voice of the snake charmer?
Even though I am away from Sanctuary, His Serendipity’s instructions are inscribed in my heart. I imagine we have caused a stir among the hornets.”

“Indeed. They are talking about terrorism, showing the unclean foaming at the mouth. The poor animals are almost to be pitied—almost. As His Serendipity predicted, they are missing the point that it is
their
sins being visited on
their
heads. Be proud, Quasar, that
you
were one of the chosen ministers of justice! The
39th Sacred Revelation:
Pride in one’s sacrifice is not a sin but self-respect
. Keep a low profile, nonetheless. Blend in. Do a little sightseeing. I trust your expense account will suffice?”

“The treasurer was most generous, and my needs are simple.”

“Very good. Contact us again in seven days. The Fellowship looks forward to welcoming our beloved brother home.”

I returned to the hotel for my midday cleaning and meditation. I ate some crackers, seaweed snacks, and cashew nuts, and drank green tea from a vending machine outside my room. When I went out again after lunch the unclean receptionist gave me a map, and I chose a tourist spot to visit.

The Japanese naval headquarters was set in a scrubby park at the top of a hill overlooking Naha, to the north. During the war it had been so well hidden that it took the invading Americans three weeks after they had seized Okinawa to stumble across it. The Americans are not a very bright race. They miss the obvious. Their embassy had the effrontery to deny His Serendipity a residence visa ten years ago. Now, of course, His Serendipity can come and go where he pleases using subspace conversion techniques. He has visited the White House several times, unhindered.

I paid for my ticket and went down the steps. The dim coolness welcomed me. A pipe somewhere was dripping. There was one more surprise waiting for the American invaders. In order to die an honorable death, the full contingent of four thousand men had taken their own lives. Twenty days previously.

Honor. What does this frothy, idol-riddled world of the unclean know of honor? Walking through the tunnels I stroked the walls with my fingertips. I stroked the scars on the wall, made by the grenade blasts and the picks that the soldiers had used to dig their stronghold, and I felt true kinship with them. The same kinship I feel at Sanctuary. With my enhanced alpha quotient, I was picking up on their anima residue. I wandered the tunnels until I lost track of the time.

As I left that memorial to nobility a coachload of tourists arrived. I took one look at them, with their cameras and potato-chip
packets and their stupid Kansai expressions and their limbless minds with less alpha capacity than a housefly, and I wished that I had one more phial of the cleansing fluid left, so that I could lob it down the stairs after them and lock them in. They would be cleansed in the same way that the money-blinded of Tokyo had been cleansed. It would have appeased the souls of the young soldiers who had died for their beliefs decades ago, as I had been ready to do only seventy-two hours ago. They were betrayed by the puppet governments that despoiled our land after the war. As have we
all
been betrayed by a society evolving into markets for Disney and McDonald’s. All that sacrifice, to build what? To build an unsinkable aircraft carrier for the United States.

But I had no phials left, and so I had to endure those unclean, chattering, defecating, spawning, defiling cretins. Literally, they made me gasp for air.

I walked back down the hill under the palm trees.

————

In the palm of the left hand there is an alpha receptor point. When His Serendipity first granted me a personal audience He held my hand open and gently pressed this receptor point with His index finger. I felt a peculiar buzz, like a pleasant electric shock, and I was later to discover that my concentrative powers had quadrupled.

It was raining on that most precious day, three and a half years ago. Clouds marched down from Mt. Fuji, an eastern wind blew across the undulating farmland around Sanctuary. I’d enlisted on the Fellowship Welcome Program twelve weeks before, and on this morning I had completed some business with one of the undersecretaries of the Fellowship Treasury. I had signed the papers releasing me from the prison of materialism. Now the Fellowship owned my house and its contents, my savings, pension funds, my golf membership, and my car. I felt freer than I had ever believed possible. My family—my unclean, biological family, my skin family—predictably failed to understand. All my life, they had measured every last millimeter of failure and success, and here I was snapping their rule across my knee. The last letter I
ever received from my mother informed me that my father had written me out of his will. But as His Serendipity writes in the 71st Sacred Revelation,
The fury of the damned is as impotent as a rat gnawing a holy mountain
.

They never loved me, anyway. They wouldn’t know of the word’s existence if they hadn’t seen it on the TV.

His Serendipity came down the stairs, accompanied by the minister of security. The light whitened as He neared the office. I saw His sandaled feet and His purple robes first, then the rest of His beloved form came into view. He smiled at me, knowing telepathically who I was and what I had done. “I am the Guru.” And He permitted me to kiss His holy ruby ring as I knelt. I could feel His alpha emanations, like a compass feels magnetic north.

“Master,” I replied. “I have come home.”

His Serendipity spoke cleanly and beautifully, and the words came from His very eyes. “You have freed yourself from the asylum of the unclean. Little brother. Today you have joined a new family. You have transcended your old family of the skin, and you have joined a new family of the spirit. From this day, you have ten thousand brothers and sisters. This family will grow into millions by the end of the world. And it will grow, and grow, with roots in all nations. We are finding fertile soil in foreign lands. Our family will grow until the world without is the world within. This is not a prophecy. This is inevitable, future reality. How do you feel, newest child of our nation without borders, without suffering?”

“Lucky, Your Serendipity. So very lucky to be able to drink from the fountain of truth while still in my twenties.”

“My little brother, we both know that it was not luck which brought you here. Love brought you to us.” Then He kissed me, and I kissed the mouth of eternal life. “Who knows,” said my Master, “if you continue your alpha self-amplification as rapidly as the minister of education reports, you may be entrusted with a very special mission in the future.…” My heart leapt still higher. I had been discussed! Only a novice, but I had been discussed!

In the coffee bars, in shops and offices and schools, on the giant screen in the shopping mall, in every rabbit-hutch apartment, people watched news of the cleansing. The maid who came to
clean my room wouldn’t shut up about it. I let her babble. She asked me what I thought. I said that I was only a computersystems engineer from Nagoya and knew nothing about such matters. Indifference was not enough for her: outrage has become compulsory. To avert suspicion, a little playacting will be necessary. The maid mentioned the Fellowship. It seems that the leprous fingers of our country’s detestable media are being pointed, despite our past warnings.

I went out in the middle of the afternoon to buy some more shampoo and soap. The receptionist was sitting with her back to the lobby, glued to the set. Television is unclean lies, and it damages your alpha cortex. However, I thought just a few minutes wouldn’t hurt me, so I watched it with her. Twenty-one cleansed, and many hundreds semi-cleansed. An unequivocal warning to the state of the unclean.

“I can’t believe it happened in Japan,” said the receptionist. “In America, yes. But here?”

A panel of “experts” was discussing the “atrocity.” The experts included a nineteen-year-old pop star and a sociology professor from Tokyo University. Why do Japanese only listen to pop stars and professors? They kept playing the same footage over and over again, a scene of the uncleansed running out of the metro station, handkerchiefs smothering their mouths, retching, scratching furiously at their eyes. As His Serendipity writes in the 32nd Sacred Revelation,
If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out
. Pictures of the cleansed, lying still where their cleansing had freed them. Their skin families, sobbing in their ignorance. Cut to the prime minister, the bushiest fool of them all, swearing that he wouldn’t rest until “the perpetrators of this monstrosity were brought to justice.”

Is this hypocrisy not blinding? Can’t they see that the real atrocity is the modern world’s systematic slaughter of man’s oneness with his anima? The act of the Fellowship was merely one counterattack against the true monster of our age. The first skirmish in a long war that evolution destines us to win.

And why can people not see the futility? A mere politician, one more bribe-taking, back-stabbing, under-the-table cockroach
whose mind cannot even conceive of the cesspit it flounders in: How could such unclean lowlifes ever hope to coerce His Serendipity into doing anything? A boddhisatva who can make Himself invisible at will, a yogic flier, a divine being who can breathe underwater. Bring Him and His servants to “justice”?
We
are the floating ministers of justice! Of course I still lack the alpha quotient to shield myself with telepathy or telekinesis, but I am many hundreds of kilometers away from the scene of the cleansing. They’ll never think of looking for me here.

I slipped out of the cool lobby.

I kept a low profile all week, but invisibility might attract attention. I invented business meetings to attend, and from Monday to Friday walked past the receptionist with a curt “Good morning” promptly at 8:30
A.M
. Time dragged its heels. Naha’s just another small city. The Americans from the military bases that plague these islands strut up and down the main streets, many of them with our females draped off their arms, Japanese females clad in nothing but little wraps of cloth. The Okinawan males ape the foreigners. I walked through the department stores, watching the endless chain of wanting and buying. I walked until my feet ached. I sat in shady coffee shops, where shelves sagged under the weight of magazines of mindtrash. I eavesdropped on businessmen, buying and selling what wasn’t theirs. I carried on walking. Workaday idiots gaped in the rattling vacuity of pachinko machines, as I had once done in the days before His Serendipity opened my inner eyes. Tourists from the mainland toured the souvenir shops, buying boxes of tat that nobody ever really wants. The usual foreigners selling watches and cheap jewelry on the pavements, without licenses. I walked through the games arcades where the poisoned children congregate after school, gazing at screens where evil cyborgs, phantoms, and zombies do battle. The same shops as anywhere else … Burger King, Benetton, Nike … High streets are becoming the same all over the world, I suppose. I walked through backstreets, where housewives put out futons to air, living the same year sixty times. I watched a potter with a pocked face, bent over a wheel. A dying man, coughing
without removing his cigarette, repaired a child’s tricycle on a bottom step. A woman without any teeth put fresh flowers in a vase beneath a family shrine. I went to the old Ryukyu palace one afternoon. There were drinks machines in the courtyard, and a shop called The Holy Swordsman that sold nothing but key rings and camera film. The ancient ramparts were swarming with high school kids from Tokyo. The boys look like girls, with long hair and pierced ears and plucked eyebrows. The girls laugh like spider monkeys into their pocket phones. Hate them and you have to hate the world, Quasar.