Tokyo Zero | Page 9

Samsara had to help him with that and so he was more than happy to reciprocate by entering Samsara's inner circle.
I had entered that circle. My reasons were more complicated. I had always been meant to do it, and was happy just to be there.
SIX
I woke up in the middle of the night. Why?
Well, I've mentioned the heat enough that You know it was there, sitting like a vulture on my chest as my eyes opened. Also, I was on a wood floor on a futon about two inches thick, so all of my bones were getting to know the outside world much better than they had before.
Also it was no time at all, my body clock was in free float. SO a burp or an inch could have thrown me out of the castle of sleep. And finally, all the people around me, who I had never met before, were committed without scruple to the primacy of death. That knowledge will turn the scuttle of a cockroach into a stuka dive.
When I woke up the light of the world was four long rectangles, like glowing scarves of two very friendly priests. In moments I saw the bars on the windows.
I took a deep breath and then I was on the bars, couldn't keep my hands off them.
When I felt them give a little, like I could maybe tear them down, I could let go and remember that I had happily lain down before those bars to sleep as I had happily chosen to come to Japan, and Japan was the reason for the heat and that I should lie down. The moon berated me. I went back to the thin futon on the harsh floor to sweat and worry about whether I could breathe in my sleep when I was not there to force each gasp of the awful soup in and out.
I began to have second thoughts about the operation: it seemed a little whimsical, and not fully described by Dad's master plan as it had gradually been revealed to me over the years.
The first real inkling of the plan came when I was about 7. Dad was ironing. Dad looked a lot like Muammar El Qadafi back in those days. You cannot really imaging Qadafi ironing but you must try.
I was reading a comic describing the adventures of Judge Dredd... a violent policeman of the future who had a law book extrapolated from the norms of western society until almost all offenses against human propriety were punishable by death. As he lived in a city of a hundred million people in the middle of a nuclear wasteland, this seemed acceptable. But even then I had my doubts, as the society was affluent and advanced enough that all crime seemed to have minimal consequences. How do you steal a hundred creds, y'know? Just make a hundred more. You made a new face last week and about a month ago there were talking monkeys in the city.
Anyway, Dredd was through with his killings for the week. There was a fact page describing various statistics about Dredd, and I was poring over it. Judge Dredd was thirty-three. I had heard that Jesus Christ maxed out at thirty-three. I asked my dad how old he was and he said... "I'm thirty-three."
I told him about that Dredd was the same age, and I described his role in Mega City 1. "So they had a nuclear war?" he asked and I told him that they had.
"And they all still live in a city and they do the same sort of things we do? Do they still hunt each other down and find weak people and kill them."
I mentioned that they did, and further outlined that those whose genes were damaged by the radiation were expelled from the city, and that they had recently suppressed a robot slave rebellion.
"Bloody typical," he said. "Mankind blasts the planet to near extinction and of it gains new enemies and new sub-humans to hate. Does this story seem true to you?"
"Really true?"
"Not really true but truly true."
"I don't know.."
"It's basically true. Man has been killing in the same style for as long as he could. He has to be changed."
"Who can change him"
"Why don't we?"
"I don't get it."
"You know Jesus Christ"
"He was thirty-three too."
"Yes, and he had a mind that was different from ours. He could see that something big was coming and that we should move out of the way."
I imagined Judge Dredd's enormous kill-dozer.
"We should wait until you are older, but I just want you to think that man doesn't always have to be here and the same like the cockroaches."
"OK"
Dad talked about the cockroaches a lot as I was growing up. His hatred of them seemed disproportionate to their total lack of impact on our