Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone (2 page)

We walked on the beach, away from the stifling heat of the Kursaal. She slipped off her shoes and fastened them to her belt, let warm sand caress bare soles. The ocean fell and ran, fell and ran on the long beach.

“Atlantic or Indian, Eth? Where exactly does Atlantic end and Indian begin? If you’re in a boat and cross the line, can you tell?”

Her entire life, it seemed then, had been made out of questions and considerations like those, of the peripheries of things.

“Heard from Mas?” she asked.

I told her that Danjuro 19:
Kabukiman!,
slayer of
ronin,
akiras, renegade robots, and Yakuza, Sword of Righteous Justice, et cetera, was now syndicated to fifteen Pacific Rim cable channels.

“Come a long way from a man, an
anime
deck, and a secret nocturnal vice,” she said.

“He wants me to go on some crazy thousand-mile Buddhist pilgrimage with him,” I said. “Says it would be good for my soul.”

“He’s probably right.”

“He probably is.” Even before Capetown, even before her, I had decided I would go. For my soul.

She took my hands in hers, studied them minutely.

“No more kid-glove treatment, Eth?”

“Synthetic skin. Looks better. It comes off as easily as the gloves.”

“That’s what frightens me, Eth.”

She let go of my hands, took my face between the palms of her hands, looked into my eyes. Gently but firmly she slapped me across the left cheek. Again and again and again, fitting her words to the tempo.

“Stupid stupid stupid boy. Always heroes and angels, isn’t it, Eth?”

She stalked away toward the lights of the Kursaal. An International Fireworks Convention in town the same time as Europa’s Three-Ring Diplomatic Circus was coming to a climax in the sky beneath Table Mountain.

“You’re not fucking worth it, Ethan Ring. There only ever was you; is that not enough?”

In the morning the assignment was waiting for me on the room fax. I called at the desk to leave a goodbye, and an apology for her. The lobby was full of hung-over black businessmen hunting down breakfast. The white receptionist said she had left before dawn.

T
HIS FIRST DAY OF
the pilgrimage we move up the Yoshino Valley, visiting each of the temples there and staying over at Temple Ten where the priest is a relation of a relation of a friend of Mas’s. This is good farming land, a many-colored land: neat fields of yellow rape, purple clover, the sheer startling viridian of rice shoots, but mostly we make our way down footpaths and tractor tracks between tall, whispery groves of sugarcane. Near Temple Three we passed a big syrup factory; rural Japan seems to have adopted the biomechanical revolution more quickly and completely than the monstrous, decaying urban sprawls. The houses that we pass, the neat hamlets, the new villages, are all green-roofed, the engineered grass has the warmth and rusticity of the old rice thatch but never needs replacing. The few remaining sheet-metal roofs are garish and sharp-edged in comparison.

I do place and people a disservice to paint them as rustic characters. These quaint hamlets and villages are the heartland of the post-industrial revolution; each green roof sports a satellite dish to keep Juniors One Two Three in touch with the orbital EmTeeVee and sports channels, all along the valley construction teams from the big telecom companies are laying new fiber-optic cables. This is telecommuter land. Those casually dressed farmers who wave to us as we wheel past are the new caste of lawyers, doctors, accountants, designers, engineers, management consultants, near-space laborers, deep-sea miners. When Mas had a sebaceous cyst removed from his back, the only human he saw during the operation was the receptionist. The cyst had been excised by a teleoperator robot controlled by a surgeon three hundred kilometers away in a country manor among the green and pleasant golf courses of Shizuoka Prefecture. “Faith healing for agnostics,” Mas calls it. When he called for his checkup, even the receptionist had been replaced by a suite of interactive software. “When it descends to sticking needles into holographic simulations of the patients to make them better, it’ll really be cybernetic
macumba
.”

Every Eden has its serpent. Among wage-earning professional A-type males age thirty-five to fifty the most frequent cause of death is suicide, the second, exercise-induced coronaries. Death by volleyball. I suppose if I were Adam in a beautiful, perfect paradise where every need, every whim, was catered for, without change, without challenge, I might develop a taste for apple.

Wrong god. In Buddhism, what shit you get is of your own making. You don’t inherit someone else’s racial midden. The doctrine of Kobo Daishi’s Shingon school is that any man may achieve enlightenment in this present life, not solely after struggling through countless thousands of painful incarnations. The Japanese have always been an optimistic people. You make your own karma.

The climb out of the valley to Temple Ten is steep. Thigh muscles throb and ache. After a long day in the saddle, we do not need this. It is as if the pilgrimage is testing our constitution and resolve: the way will only get harder; are you up to it, pilgrim?

Pilgrim drops down into low gear, grabs thrustbars, leans into pedals. I think I can I think I can I think I can…

I know I can.

The altar in the Daishi Hall of Temple Ten enshrines two images, both statues of Kannon, Boddhisattva of Mercy. According to temple legend, the first was carved by the Daishi from a living tree; the saint bowed three times before each stroke of the adze. The second is a woman weaver, a refugee from some Kyoto palace intrigue, who offered the saint a cut of her cloth—hence the name Kirihata-ji, Cut-Cloth Temple—to replace his ragged clothes. In reward for her piety a purple haze descended, and she was enlightened and transformed into a statue. After our devotions, Priest Mizuno shows us both images. I murmur with properly respectful awe, though both are crude, a few rough slashes in a wooden log. I suppose one must see with the eye of faith. The point, the priest tells us, is that anyone, including women—at the time an heretical notion, dogs had a better chance of gaining nirvana—may aspire to enlightenment.

After showering and freshening up, we dine with the priest’s young family. His two sons, ten and twelve, are politely gobsmacked to be in the presence of the creator of Danjuro 19:
Kabukiman!
I am certain that the smartplastic
anime
slips Mas presents to them will be as enshrined and treasured as the Daishi’s images of Kannon. After tea, Mrs. Mizuno announces that our baths are ready. As I have been expecting. As I have been dreading. On the pretext of blisters I return to our room and hunt for the synthflesh. For one heart-stopping moment I cannot find it among socks underwear shorts teeshirts weather-proofs, then my fingers close around its stubby, comforting cylinder.
This product dries to a flexible, porous, smooth finish in fifteen seconds,
say Hoffmann Helvetica Chemie Ag. Eyes firmly shut, I slip off my left glove, feel cool spray in the palm of my hand. I give it a double dose, just to be sure. Thirteen hippopotamus fourteen hippopotamus fifteen hippopotamus. Quick glance to make sure I am alone, then I close my eyes again, repeat the procedure for the right hand and go to join Mas and Mizuno, who, it transpires, is an old Soul fan. Up to our chests in hot, tangerine-scented water, we holler out Motown, Atlantic, and Stax classics in creaky three-part harmony. Mrs. Mizuno says it is the funniest thing she has heard in weeks.

The henro lodge is cool and airy, filled with the sounds and scents of late spring in the Yoshino Valley. Sleep is easily found in such a room: within seconds I have tumbled into the slumber of the righteous.

When the cry wakes me I cannot think where I am for one hideous instant. I find my fingers tearing at the scab of artificial flesh in the palm of my right hand. No. No.
Namu Daishi Henjo;
I fight the demons with the weapons of a good pilgrim. And it passes.

Masahiko is bolt upright in his bed, eyes wide, body rigid, trembling. I can see that he is deep, far below the surface of his subconscious.

“Mas…” Kneeling before him, I touch his shoulder, gently.

“No! No!” he shouts. “Leave her alone!”

“Mas?”

No answer.

“Mas…”

No answer. I sit with him until whatever storm has troubled him has passed and he has settled back into sleep. I join him, we two, pilgrims together, and sleep without any further dreams until dawn.

T
HE DAY IS WARM
and bright as we splash across the gravel bed of the Yoshino River and follow the old henro path into the hill country. At Temple Ten valley Buddhism ends, mountain Buddhism begins. Zen is the spirit of the valleys, Shingon the spirit of the mountaintop. And as the spirit of Zen is different from the spirit of Shingon, so the sunlight and warmth of the valley give way to the more testing weather of the mountains. Gray wads of cloud move in from the west; within an hour it is raining steadily. Rain and mud, the henro’s twin curses. Our legs are spattered with it, the bikes are caked with it, and our hands and faces are numb from cold rain. Rain sheets from our plastic capes and pilgrim hats. The way is steep and treacherous—bottom gear for an hour, with many portages. All head-on into wind and driving rain. Concentration is total. Misery absolute. Temple Eleven is deserted, derelict, decaying, vandalized by akiras. Among their graffiti, their beer cans, we find the remains of cooking fires, silver foil sachets of camping ready meals, condoms, needles, rotting biomotors and batteries, empty cartridges.

“I don’t like this,” says Mas, clearly spooked. Pigeons explode from beneath the eaves of the ruined Daishi Hall. Some, I notice, have parasitical zoomorphs clinging to their bodies. Reading it for an ill omen, we press on.

From Eleven to Twelve is half a day’s ride past two
bangai
—unnumbered temples on the pilgrimage route that are not Sacred Sites. Both, like Eleven, are deserted and desecrated. On. Uphill all the way. I find my mind withdrawing, shutting out the sensual world and its insistencies, drawing veils of memory. I am no longer conscious of the cold and rain, the ache in my thighs. I remember.

I remember his life.

I call him “he” because, though he shared the same face, the same name, the same body and mind as I, he is dead. Unarguably. Indisputably. Dead. He was killed. Not with bullets or knives or monomolecular wire in an alley in some anonymous central European city, not with drugs or poisons. He was killed with guilt. What survived him, this thing pushing its gaudily colored MTB up the side of a Japanese mountain, is only the slag. Only the ashes.

I remember…

O
N THE DAY THAT
Ethan Ring was conceived, West Germany won the World Cup to the refrain of Luciano Pavarotti singing
Nessun Dormas
as Nikki Ring, twenty-something, unemployed, unemployable, engaged in five minutes of intense coitus in South Mimms Services car park off the M25 with a Dutch truck driver hauling a consignment of salad vegetables.

On the day that Ethan Ring was born an armor-piercing smartbomb hit an underground shelter in Baghdad and incinerated five hundred men, women, and children while Bette Midler sang about God watching us from a distance.

On the day that Ethan Ring kissed his first girl—Roberta Cunningham at the back of Miss MacConkey’s P2 class—Europe very quietly, very unremarkably, without any embarrassing mess or fuss or anyone noticing,
united.

On the day that Ethan Ring took his first date, Ange Elliot, age thirteen, to the local Pizza Hut for a double-cheese, diet Coke, and under-the-table footsie, Doctors ten Boom and Huitsdorp of the new, respectable, fully integrated, and racially harmonious South Africa won the Nobel prize for biology in recognition of their work on designing an artificial organism that converted sugars into useful electricity—to layman Ethan and his contemporaries, a living battery.

Too tall too early, red hair—too much of it—socially crippled by acne and self-consciousness, Ethan Ring would almost certainly have grown into neurotic teenhood but for the shelter, succor, and support of the Nineteenth House kinship. From the moral ruins of the HIV-haunted nineties, strewn with the desiccated bones of broken relationships, a new sociological order had emerged of clusters of single women—separated, widowed, divorced, never partnered—joined together under a common roof against a sea of free-floating males. The kinship: average size five point three: three point two generating the income to support themselves and the average two point one career mothers who parented the children. Men come, men go at the individual partners’ discretions, but are never considered part of the family unit. 2003: the kinship achieves legal recognition in the European courts. 2012: one third of all permanent relationships are kinships. 2013, early May: Nikki Ring joins the Nineteenth House gaining a telecommuting designer of European farming magazines, a home-delivery sandwich Empress, a jewelry maker, a co-mother who has retired thankfully into parenthood out of Futures, two new daughters, one new son, a condominium on the South Coast (the eponymous Nineteenth House) with sun terrace and shared swimming pool, peace, stability, love, security; contributing: Ethan Ring. Ethan Ring gained roots; he whose prior experience of the New Europe had been Doppler blur of tail-lights punctuated by ten thousand radio jingles and the smell of scorched sunflower oil in a nation of bed’n’breakfast rooms. The fertile ground of the kinship germinated a long-dormant talent for
visualization,
for seeing ideas projected on the backs of his eyeballs and making them seeable to others. Nurtured by his ex-Futures co-mother, his talent took him through and out of Michael Heseltine Comprehensive to art college in some rainy day city in the north to study Graphic Communications. He suffered agonies of acclimatization and socialization. He contemplated leaving. He contemplated a bottle and a half of paracetamol. He found friends in time: a Japanese exchange student with a dark and secret passion for comic-book animation; a dark-haired computer junkie from the North Country who taught Ethan the necessary skills of drinking rolling joints pulling girls; his girlfriend, a fellow Graphic Communications student who looked as if her name should end with a “y” but in fact didn’t.