Tokyo Zero | Page 6

years after the fire-bombings constituted old. Maybe
it did. Tokyo was destroyed in cycles and, as Honda and I were particularly aware, it was
currently overdue.
"We will be staying here as our country facility has been under heavy surveillance
recently. Our headquarters here is positioned near a fish market and between several
karaoke bars, including a Korean bar and a Chinese bar, so we have good cover for
smells and sounds."
"Excellent," I noted. With 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.
++++++++
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