Tokyo Zero | Page 7

I existed. And people who wanted to kill and to die and who had already taken the apocalypse into themselves still thought like this... that was what impressed me.
The first one to catch my eye was the fat one, as always. They sometimes have a very furtive look about them: skulking in shadows, swimming like all the fish in the shoal. They think. Unusually fat people are superb. Thin idiots and fascists and so forth can pass a whole life lubricated by the fat of the fat. The fat are allowed to be jovial about it or excel in some functional area of life, quietly.
The fat one was (eventually) Yosuke Kawabata, In addition to being fat he was a little hairy, a little tall, and somewhat speckled with objects of varying vintage and lifespan and color that made his facial movements seem daring, a little dangerous (especially if you were dressed in something nice when he made them.)
He had been alone when it had happened. He had taken the small alto sax that he had worked rather hard for down under the bridge near the river to play his haunting noises.
He had never even considered playing the sax back in the paper thin apartment building that his parents lived in with him. That would be like shitting in the living room.
He walked the five minutes to the enormous train bridge that brutally ignored the fairly wide and fast flowing river. He took his place, the least damp, least ratted, and pulled out his sax to make the noises of the various emergency services (for he was new at this game)
He began by just amplifying his breath and all the random trends that passed through his fairly random mind. Toots and hollers like those of a large game bird. Then he remembered this thing he had heard of: music, and tried to approximate that. Joggers passed by him with an almost perceptible relief in their step when they saw him:glad that no-one was being hurt up there in the shadowy nook under the bridge.
Then, across the water, he saw something. It haunted the step of an old man dressed in a kimono. The old man looked over his shoulder all the time. Yosuke's eye was fixed on the old man. The old man made a gesture in the air, like shooing away a bird. Then he fell to the ground with a scream. Yosuke knew that it would take at least fifteen minutes for him to get across the river and help the man, so he just sat and watched. When his watch got to about thirteen minutes and the old man was still alive it did indeed become necessary to stop looking at his watch.
Several hours later, after the body had been removed, Yosuke went home. He left his sax at the bottom of the river. He would no longer dedicate his life to making, but to searching. He was determined to see what the old man had seen but live to tell the world. That would be his performance. He would teach the world the nature of final things. And, sarcasm aside, the sax just wouldn't cut it.
Next in the room was a thin girl with a boyish haircut that spoke of enforced cleansing. Her eyes were unusually deep set for a Japanese person. She looked at me out of the corner of her eye, even though doing so involved twisting her body slightly.
Honda introduced us: she was Junko Watanabe. I was dragging my bag in and bowing. There was no air conditioning in the room, the house, the street, except that big building, but it was cooler now. I was among my people.
For her, the moment of apocalypse came when she was at university. She was walking down the street to a class with a group of girls who looked a lot like she did and one who didn't. She was fully in tune with them and the tune they were making was the sound of talking talking about talking.
The one girl was discussing her future. Her name was Remi, after the brandy because her parents wanted her to have an international name. It was almost pronounced Lemmy, the leader of the metal group Motorhead, big in Northern Europe.
"I'll be a stewardess. I'll outsmile all of them, but I'll be tough too because safety is our number one priority and because that's what they want anyway... a firm hand."
Remi began to bounce in the sun. Her calves, which would take the immaculate sheaths of her space stockings like a suntan, sprang her through a tiny sphere... the remisphere.
All human life takes place within the earthpeel, the skin. Remi bounces within even less, the dew, the mold. She plans to ride at eight miles high and that's it. That's