Tokyo Zero | Page 6

no irony, such was my dedication at that time.
I noticed, as we passed another store that sold large roots that were floating in liquid, that my presence was causing none of the hem-grabbing attention I had expected. Honda explained to me that there were several large chain English Conversation schools in the area, and that people who looked like me were common here. That is why they had suggested I wear a micro-fibre shirt and "shocking" tie on the flight over. I saw myself on a smudgy mirror in the fish-store and could well imagine standing with ink stains on my fingers explaining the word 'surveillance' to appreciative hordes.
We turned right at the biggest fruit and veg store, the one that spilled onto the sidewalk like a father spilling from his arm-chair, confident of no opposition. We were at the foot of the other building I had noted from the station. It didn't make full sense: was it a bath house, a movie theater, a kabuki theater, a brothel. a corporate headquarters, a karaoke bar, a restaurant or what? Outside the door was a large sign of a man with a large dragon tattooed on his back trapped inside a "No!" sign.
Within a minute we were at our destination, a small coffee shop that in England would specialize in greasy chip sarnies. It was on the ground floor of a three story, gray tiled building that was too sloped to be new but too ugly to be old. Next to the coffee shop was a slim steel door that I hadn't even noticed at first.
"The shop is ours too... the people who run it are... mutant?"
I peeked through the window to look at them. They seemed no more mutant than the rest of us: a particularly aggressive mid-sized mammal with a brain that couldn't rest (even when it should) and that shivered in the night when the true intelligences ran their inventory on us.
So I just nodded and followed Honda up a narrow staircase. I didn't notice the sign above the door that announced the building as a tele-sex shop so I won't get into it just yet.
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I mentioned already that my mother died in Cambodia. This was my first trip to Asia and although I wasn't fool enough to confuse Pnhom Penh and Tokyo, memories were being juggled around by smells. Smells are bullies and able to vault all divisions of the mind. So as I followed Honda up the steps, watching his dueling buttocks effortlessly handle the gradient, I was at least partially back in the week of crying and throwing things, falling over and dragging things with you. The week of staring through, then at, then through windows (but never at the reflections that the windows were making.)
I think I only started doing these things after Father had been doing them for a while. The telegram made no sense to me. It said she had been killed in Cambodia but not how. I had heard of people being killed by cars or the flu, but not by a country. It was as if some spirit had risen from the soil and killed her. I asked my father what had happened and he could only answer "Everyone is dying out there... and worse. Someone is making them live through their sickest dreams. Someone is pulling down the crazy dreams that only people have and bringing them here where things are supposed to be just real."
This was not the last I would hear about the dream magic of mankind.
FIVE
A flimsy door divided us from them. Once I was inside, the same door divided a different us from a different them. That was true in all senses. That was the truth that defined my life in Japan: the flimsy door.
We had stepped into a large communal living room. The only windows in the room were two excessively high slots that grudgingly opened about an inch. They were streaming the bare minimum of light into the room right now. If there was a trade union of windows, these ones were in it.
The walls bore a uniform grayness; they had a texture that was close to random. They were different than the things humans had made before these days. All of the somewhat remarkable people I was about to meet were framed by these walls, and supported by a carpet that was as out of place as a gray carpet in a gray room can be.
There were three people in the room and they would be part of my team for the next several months. What I liked most about my meeting with them was that they all sighed when I came in the room because they knew that they had to take care of me and because of the fact that