Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone (7 page)

“They killed her.”

An aged aged couple comes poking along the tideline with sticks, turning over wrack, driftwood, looking for treasures floated from mythic California. An aircraft makes a long, slow left turn, beginning its descent toward the Tokyo Bay hypurbation.

“That stupid car. It was one of the first of the new model Daihatsu 4x4s, when the biomotors were being introduced and it was a real status symbol to have one. She could be very stupid that way, about things like status. Very vain, sometimes. ‘Give it up,’ I told her. ‘It’s only a damn car, let the akiras have it.’ She sat there with both hands on the wheel with that piss-on-you look I knew so well, the one she’d turn on me when I did something she didn’t approve of, and everyone was shouting, all there was was shouting and the sound of police sirens approaching and she said to me, ‘Get in we’re going’ and—you know the way it happens in films when it all goes slow motion and you think reality is nothing like that, but it’s true—it was like I saw it all in slow motion: the Boss taking one step back to get a clear shot, the way the machine-pistol jerked in his hand as he emptied the magazine into her, the way it opened her up, like a fish—can you believe it, that was what I thought, like a fileted bonito, the sound the last cartridge case made as it hit the concrete, the blare of the horn as she fell against it and how suddenly it stopped when they pulled her onto the street, how much blood there was, an amazing amount of blood, I didn’t think there could be so much blood in one body… Funny, isn’t it? The one thing I can’t remember is the sound of the firing. They took the car. Incredible, she was still alive when the ambulance came. She didn’t make it to the hospital. They got the akiras, you know. Chiba Security put the heads on display at the main district shrine.

“She was beautiful. I loved her. They killed her. Ethan, what is happening to my country? What’s gone wrong?”

He cries unashamedly. Cold and wet, I fold him in my arms, offer him comfort. The aged aged couple pass by and murmur fondly to each other, misunderstanding. The tide advances up the beach. The big ships vanish one by one below the horizon. The edge of night approaches low across the ocean. Growing chill, I pull on shirt, zip-up jacket, track bottoms. I think about the turtles moving out there under many, many fathoms of water. I think about the burning arcologies.

M
ALKHUT: WHO SEES THE
face of angels,
obeys.

Yesod: Empire of the senses, domain of limitless pleasure.

Hod: glory: full frontal God.

Nezah: pain: emotional anguish, spiritual torment, physical agony, existential angst.

Tiferet: healing and wholeness.

Gevurah: terror. Pure. Raw. Absolute. Terror.

Hesed: arousal to orgasm in under three seconds.

Binah: the fracter that annihilates the sense of time the creator of order.

Hokhmah: forgetting. Utterly, instantly, irrevocably.

It was as if that one glimpse of the face of God had set in motion a wave of crystallization that precipitated entire choirs and chapters of visual entities. Every night, at the Hour of Harassed Cleaners, perceptual pioneers Cranitch and Ring would watch the un-images—
fracters,
Ethan Ring’s coinage—unfold from their blind spots into things that sent them into paroxysms of laughter or hysterical weeping or plunged them into suicidal depression or took them to highs that the designers of the new mass-market synthetics could only hope for in wet dreams or left them paralyzed, immobile, dropped into stasis by a display that annihilated their sense of time until the fail-safe timer blanked the display and released them. Marcus, having digested The Illuminati during his teenage paranoia years, suggested naming them after the ten Sefirot of the Hebrew Cabala.

Luka now only visited the C.A.D. suite to issue warnings to Ethan. Marcus she must have thought beyond hope of salvation. Her visits to the sixth floor and the mayhem of Design Communications decreased correspondingly. She no longer came knocking on his downstairs door. It was months since she had slept with him, or stolen his shopping. Ethan stopped her on the stairs one Thursday evening in the hope that a confrontation might cause her to relent.

“Why? Close encounter between two Trans-Atlantics this morning?”

“A smart mouth isn’t you, Eth. Okay. Why. You’ve been lucky so far, what happens one day you’re gawking at the screen and up comes something that induces psychotic rage? Or total amnesia? How about schizophrenia, how about epilepsy, or suicidal depression, or worse? It frightens me. There. That’s it out in the open. Luka Casipriadin, that girl who isn’t afraid of nothing? This scares her. Just because I got this natty Mohawk doesn’t make me a cyberpunk ice-queen. This. Scares. Me. Fuckless. It scares me fuckless because I love you, Ethan Ring, and you’re too fucking stupid to realize it.”

Ethan reported the conversation, minus the last eighteen words verbatim.

“Worse,”
Marcus mused. Their experiments had now taken them into the realm of the Diabolicals, subfracters—now numbering over one hundred—evolved from permutation of the Sefirah program parameters. “Gives you that cold prickle right down in your balls, doesn’t it, Eth? Like when you know you’re going to get laid. She always could put her finger right on it. There is bigger game out there waiting for us. The biggest game. Epilepsy, amnesia, psychosis, sure. But sometime you got to put it all on the line for the big one. Live on the edge. Kiss the razor. Every explorer knows he’s taking a risk. That’s what we are, Eth; mental explorers, psychonauts, going deep in the darkest places of the mind.”

“One hundred percent pure rockist macho bullshit,” said Ethan Ring. “You’ll be asking me to sniff your armpits next.”

“You going to let Luka Casipriadin tell you what’s game and what’s not?”

Two fistfuls of black denim shirt. Face ten centimeters from face. The closest range of social interaction: lovemaking range, violent anger range. Taste-my-breath distance.

“You are within
this
of having your face pushed through that screen, Marcus Cranitch.”

Illuminatus. Ethan Ring saw the unsuspected depths of anger within him, the fear he had made appear on Marcus’s face, and was afraid. It was as if one of his mothers had sat him down and told him, quietly, fearfully, of some hitherto unmentioned congenital defect: schizophrenia, hemophilia, AIDS, lycanthropy. Ethan Ring, his life, his history, were a pretense, a robing and masking of the glass-hearted monster that was the true Ethan Ring. For an instant—brief but real—he had been filled with a hot, unclean excitement at the image of Marcus’s face smashing the curved glass of the monitor into cubes and crumbs. He fled the computer suite. He fled the university and everything to do with it. He hid for three days behind his artless posters and CDs and scraps of unsuccessful projects. Then he could no longer bear to look at the face of his anger and went to ask forgiveness. There was one light in the darkened, murmuring computer suite.

“Marcus.

“Marcus, I’m sorry. I just sometimes go kind of mad, you know?

“I’ve come to apologize, Marcus.

“Say something Marcus, don’t make me feel worse than I do now.

“Marcus? You okay?

“Marcus!”

The figure on the floor, lit blue by the light of the screen, lay supine, head tilted back, repeatedly slamming the rear of its skull against the cigarette-burned floor tiles. Arms and legs thrashed, the body convulsed epileptically. Tears of blood trickled from each eye, down the cheeks, onto the floor.

“Christ, Marcus!” Ethan Ring came around the desk to touch, to help, to do something, anything,
anything.
And the thing in the blue screen reached out and smashed him against the wall.

O
NCE, WHEN ETHAN RING
was a boy, he had given himself a severe electric shock playing with an old television.

Once Ethan Ring caught some mutant strain of influenza that sent his temperature to 103 and hallucinated he was climbing the concrete and glass face of an infinite office block, up and up and up and up and up.

Once, Nikki Ring’s old Vauxhall Nova with Ethan-at-seven in the backseat had been sideswiped at a dark country crossing by something that did not stop and it had been spun three times around before Ethan Ring came to looking at a billboard proclaiming “All Have Sinned and Fallen Short of the Glory of God.”

Once, Ethan Ring, walking merrily mellow back to his flat, had been set upon by two young white men in designer sportswear who headbutted him, kicked him in the small of the back, and relieved him of eighty ecus and a take-away curry.

The thing in the screen was all those. The thing in the screen was more. It was
shock.
Toxic karmic physical spiritual emotional culture techno socio cold turkey pure total utter: shock.

His heart skipped and misfired. His breath fluttered. His head screamed
migraine
at him. His hands, his arms, his legs, would not obey him but thrashed spastically. Urgent nausea pressed at the base of his gullet. He opened his eyes. The thing in the screen leapt out of his peripheral vision and slammed his brain against the inside of his skull. He waited forever hiding inside his skull until proprioception told him his body would now do what he told it. Eyes closed, he groped across the floor. He swore at his hands
stop shaking, stop fucking shaking.
His eyes flickered at the touch of soft, spasming flesh. No. No. Medusa’s sister, basilisk’s brother. To look upon their faces was to die. Fingers climbed the desk leg, crossed the desktop, found the
off
switch, and pushed it. Almost, he opened his eyes. Almost. Marcus could have printed out a hardcopy. Fingers felt their way to the printer, delved into its nooks and crevices. Nothing. He opened his eyes. The disk. The fracter disk. He ejected it from the drive. It burned his hand like an ingot of white iron. Taking the elevator to the front door was eternal torment.

“If you boys spent as much time on your projects as you did in the Union bar…” admonished the doorman, well used to student excess.

“An ambulance!” Ethan Ring screamed. “Call a fucking ambulance!”

The last of the ten Sefirot was enthroned.

Keter: the Void.
Annihilation.

T
HERE IS TO BE
a Fire Ceremony tonight at Temple Twenty-four. All are welcome, Priest Tsunoda tells us. He is a small, vigorous man of great charm and charisma; a retired cram-school teacher in Beloved Schoolmaster tradition of Bette Davis, Robert Donat, Robin Williams. The stories that roost around this isolated cluster of three Temples at the tip of the Muroto Peninsula whisper that he could have been a Nobel laureate in his chosen field of mathematics, but he renounced worldly fame and the praises of men to devote his life to what he called “subversion through education”: kebabing the Japanese sacred cow of exam-cram-4-job-4-life-in-the-Company on the thin, dangerous skewer of learning for learning’s sake. School governors, PTAs, local politicians, villified him. His students deified him. Bertrand Russell’s quotable: “How good it is to know things!” had been painted above his chalkboard. It followed him to Temple Twenty-four with only one change: the addition of the prefix “un” to the penultimate word of the motto.

“One third of your life to learn things, and the rest of it to unlearn all the rubbish they cram into you,” he says as he shows us to our neat, scrupulously clean room, scented with sandalwood, lavender, and the sea. “Quality: to know what is good, what is not good, and why: that was what I was trying to teach. If even a handful learned that, I can pass from this world content.”

Cape Muroto is a sixty-mile sharks-tooth hooked into the skin of the Western Pacific Basin. Its northern face is a forbidding scarp of sheer black cliff, its southern a grand sweep of sandy bays and headlands terminating in Cape Ashizuri two hundred kilometers to the south.
Enola Gay
used Moroto as a landmark en route from Tinian Island to her two minutes of fame over Hiroshima. To the henro, it marked in no uncertain terms the arrival of the hardships of Tosa Prefecture.

Tosa is the Devil’s country,

No hospitality there, you may be sure.

complained a sixteenth-century henro. The names may have changed—it’s Kōchi Prefecture now—but the song remains the same.

We were ten kilometers out on the main road east out of Hiyasa—not a route we would have chosen but the rough coastal terrain made beach riding impossible—when we hit the checkpoint. We came on it unawares, blindsided by a line of trucks. Glimpsing uniforms and flashing blue lights between the walls of traffic, we imagined an RTA. Only at the head of the queue did we see our mistake. Two armored personnel carriers—ex-military—were parked across the highway; on their flanks, on the helmets and shoulders of the armored men checking the vehicles through one by one was a symbol of an eagle clutching crossed lightning bolts in its talons and the name: Tosa Securities Incorporated.

They were the ones who had caused Mr. Morikawa’s death at Temple Twelve. We were entering the heart of their empire.

“Purging undesirable elements, they tell you,” the driver of a pickup told us. He was transporting a load of young trees with their roots wrapped in wet sacking. “My ass. It’s good old medieval transit tax.”

A white-helmeted, white-gloved private policeman beckoned us forward, polite, but eternally a policeman. Our security transit passes—supposedly good for all the private forces on the pilgrimage route—henro albums, and my European passport were examined minutely, then taken for further examination by an unseen officer inside one of the troop transports. I found it a thoroughly disagreeable sensation, to have one’s identity, one’s right to move and be, taken away, to be so vulnerable. After ten minutes our papers were returned stamped with transit permits and thirty-day policy cover-notes for which we were required to part with thirty thousand yen each.

At least you could tell Long John Silver by the parrot on his shoulder. I could not rid myself of the impression that my documents had been digitally scanned. They smelled vaguely… electronic, like fresh photocopies, or faxes. Everything in order, the policeman welcomed us to Kōchi Prefecture, advised us to stick wherever possible to the signposted Approved Tourist Route as “Antisocial Elements” were still active and he could not guarantee that our policy would fully cover us if we wandered off the proper way. He politely bowed us through. Dodgy cover or not, we were seldom so glad to find an opportunity to turn off the Approved Tourist Route onto the old henro path.