The thin woman looked at me as she spoke. ‘You’d have to ask them yourself. Maybe there are many answers. Some get a kick out of self-abasement and servitude. Some are afraid or lonely. Some crave the camaraderie of the persecuted. Some want to be big fish in a small pond. Some want magic. Some want revenge on teachers and parents who promised success would deliver all. They need shinier myths that will never be soiled by becoming true. The handing over of one’s will is a small price to pay, for the believers. They aren’t going to need a will in their New Earth.’
I couldn’t listen to this any more. ‘Maybe you’re reading too much into it. Maybe they just did it because they loved him.’ I downed my tea in one gulp. It burned my tongue and it was too bitter. ‘Could I have my key now, please?’
The old woman idly passed me the key. ‘You must be exhausted after your long walk. My nephew’s wife saw you out by the lighthouse!’
Secrets on islands are hidden from mainlanders, but never from the islanders.
I lay on my bed, and wept.
My brothers and sisters, committing self-slaughter! Which of my co-cleansers had fallen at this last hurdle, and why? We were heroes! Just a few months before the end of the unclean world! Paradise had been so near for them! I was further surprised at the Minister of Defence allowing himself to be captured. He has a high enough alpha quotient to displace molecules and walk through walls.
The spider in the jar had died. Why? Why, why, why?
After my evening cleansing I walked around this fishing village. Squealing children were playing some incomprehensible game. Teenagers hung around on street corners in their trendiest gear, doubtless imitating the Tokyo teenagers they see in their magazines. Mothers stood gossiping outside the supermarket. I want to shout at them,
The world is going to end soon, you are all going to fry in the White Nights!
Okinawan music blared out of a bar, all twinky-twanky and jangling . . . And at the end of the street I reached the mountains, the sea and the night.
I walked along the pebbly beach. Plastic buoys. A sea coconut, shaped like a woman’s loins. Junk, washed up with the driftwood. Cans, bottles, rubber gloves, detergent containers. I heard grunts and squeals from under a peeling boat, never to float again. In the distance a shadow lit a fire.
His Serendipity speaks to me in the crashing of the waves, and the sucking of the shingle. Why telephone when telepathy is possible? His Serendipity told me that his trusted cleanser Quasar had the greatest role to play. The Days of Persecution had begun, as prophesied in the 143rd Sacred Revelation. My Master told me I shall be a shepherd for the faithful during the White Nights. And after the comet ushers in the New Earth, I shall be at the right hand of His Serendipity, administering justice and wisdom in His name. I replied to His Serendipity that I was ready to die for Him. That I loved Him as a son does his father and would protect Him as a father does a son. His Serendipity, hundreds of miles away, smiled. The comet will be here by Christmas. The New Earth is not far away now. The Fellowship of Humanity will gather together on a purer island, and the survivors will call me ‘Father Quasar’. There will be no bullying. No victimising. All the selfish, petty, unbelieving unclean, they will fry in the fat of their ignorance. We will eat papayas, cashew nuts and mangos, and learn how to make traditional instruments and beautiful pottery. His Serendipity will select our mates according to our alpha quotients, and teach us advanced alpha techniques, and we will travel astrally, visiting other stars.
I knelt, and thanked my Lord for his encouragement. The moon rose over the open bay, and those same stars came on, one by one.
The baby in the woolly cap, strapped to her mother’s back, opened her eyes. They were my eyes. A disembodied voice was singing a chorus over and over again. And reflected in my eyes was her face. She knew what I was going to do. And she asked me not to. But she was fated to die anyway, Quasar, when the comet comes! You shortened her suffering in the land of the unclean! The innocents, surely, will be reborn into the Fellowship of the New Earth! Cleanse yourself, and anchor your faith, deep and fast!
The radio alarm clock glowed 1.30 a.m. Bad karaoke throbbed through the walls. I was wide awake, straitjacketed by my sweaty sheets. A headache dug its thumbs into my temples. My gut pulsed with gamma interference: I lurched to the toilet. My shit was a slurry of black crude oil. I kept thinking of the thin teacher, and what I should have said to her to put her in her place. My eyes wandered around the labyrinth on the worn lino. I took a shower, as hot as the flesh could bear.
For the first time since my initiation ceremony into the Fellowship I bought some cigarettes, from a machine in the deserted lobby. I lit one, walking back up to my room. I was going to be up for a while.
My palms have become blotchy. I clean myself eight or nine times a day, but something is wrong with my skin. I have taken to watching the television every morning. Proceedings are under way to disband the Fellowship, and make membership illegal. I have been named, and my photograph shown, ransacked from Fellowship archives. Luckily it was taken with my scalp shaved and an alpha energiser on my head, so the likeness isn’t close. I am the last of the Tokyo cleansers to evade capture. I saw my skin father and mother being chased into my skin sister’s car by a baying pack of reporters. The whole scene was lit by flashbulbs. His Serendipity has been caught and charged with conspiracy to commit genocide, and with fraud, kidnapping and possession of Category 1 nerve agents. The news showed the same clip of His Serendipity being bundled into a car by agents of the unclean and driven through a mob shouting for His blood. They showed it over and over again, to a sinister soundtrack, to tell the mindless that He is a villain, like Darth Vader, to be loathed and feared. The rest of the Cabinet have also been arrested. They are falling over themselves to denounce each other, hoping their death sentence will be commuted to life imprisonment. I myself was denounced by the Minister of Education. Even His Serendipity’s wife has denounced our Master, saying that she didn’t know anything about the production of the gas. She, who was so zealous about the cleansing! One television news station flew their jackals to Los Angeles, to film the elite school in Beverly Hills where His Serendipity’s sons were boarded.
I telephoned Sanctuary from the port.
‘State your name, business and present location,’ said the cold voice. A cop. Even with the alpha quotient of a fruitfly, you could spot them a mile off. I hung up.
But this is bad. I have run out of Japan. My passport is in the possession of the Fellowship’s Foreign Office, so seeking assistance with our Russian or Korean brothers and sisters is impossible. I am running out of money. Of course I have no money of my own: after my initiation every last yen was transferred to the Fellowship. My skin family have disowned me, and would turn me in. So would my skin friends from my life of blindness. This causes me no sorrow. When the White Nights come, they shall reap what they have sown. The Fellowship are my true family.
I had one final resort. The Fellowship’s Secret Service. The media had mentioned nothing about their arrest, so perhaps they had gone to ground in time. I dialled the secret number, and gave the encoded message:
‘The dog needs to be fed.’
I kept on the line, saying nothing, as instructed during my cleansing training sessions at Sanctuary. The Secret Serviceman on the other end hung up when enough time for my call to be traced had elapsed. Help would be on its way. A levitator would be despatched, bearing a wallet of crisp ten-thousand yen notes. He will scan for my alpha signature, and find me during one of my rambles around the island, when I am alone, or asleep in a grove of palm trees. He will be there when I awake, glowing, perhaps, like Buddha or Gabriel.
Kumejima is a squalid, incestuous prison. To think, this lump of rock was once the main trading centre of the Ryuku Empire with China. Boats laden with spices, slaves, coral, ivory, silk. Swords, coconuts, hemp. The shouts of men would have filled the bustling harbour, old women would have knelt in the market place, with their scales and piles of fruit and dried fish. Girls with obedient breasts lean out of the dusky windows, over the flower boxes, promising, murmuring . . .
Now it’s all gone. Long gone. Okinawa became a squalid apology for a fiefdom, squabbled over by masters far beyond its curved horizons. Nobody admits it, but the islands are dying now. The young people are moving to the mainland. Without subsidies and price-fixing the agriculture would collapse. When the mainland peaceniks get the American military rapists off the islands the economy will slow, splutter and expire. The fish are all being fished out by factory trawlers. Tracks lead nowhere. Building projects have been started, but end in patches of concrete, piles of gravel and tall, thorny weeds. Such a place would be ripe for His Serendipity’s Mission! I long to awaken people, to tell people about the White Nights and the New Earth, but I daren’t risk bringing attention to myself. My last defence is my ordinariness. When that wears out, I have nothing but my novice’s alpha potential to protect me.
The island’s bewhiskered policeman spoke to me yesterday. I passed him outside a snorkel shop while he was bent over tying up his shoelaces.
‘How’s your holiday, Mr Tokunaga?’
‘Very restful, officer. Thank you.’
‘I was sorry to hear about your wife. It must have been terribly traumatic.’
‘Kind of you to say so, officer.’ I tried to focus my alpha-coercion faculty to make him go away.
‘So you’ll be off tomorrow, Mr Tokunaga? Mrs Mori at the guest house said you were staying for a couple of weeks.’
‘I’m thinking of extending, actually, just a few more days.’
‘Is that a fact? Won’t your company be missing you?’
‘Actually, I’m working on a new computer system. I can do it here just as well as in Tokyo. In fact, the peace and quiet is more conducive to inspiration.’
The policeman nodded thoughtfully. ‘I wonder . . . At the junior high school the youngsters have recently started up a computer club. My sister-in-law’s the headmistress there. Mrs Oe. You’ve met already, I believe, at Mrs Mori’s. I wonder . . . Mrs Oe is far too polite to dream of imposing upon your time herself, I know, but . . .’
I waited.
‘It would be a great honour for the school if you could go along some time and tell the computer class about life in a real computer company . . .’
I sensed a trap. But it would be safer to get out of it later than refuse now. ‘Sure.’
‘That would be very kind of you. I’ll mention it when I see my brother-in-law next . . .’
I met the husky dog on the beach. His Serendipity chose to address me in its barks.
‘What did you expect, Quasar? Did you think raising the curtain on the age of
homo serendipitous
was going to be easy?’
‘No, my Lord. But when are the yogic fliers going to be despatched to the White House and the European parliament, to demand your release?’
‘Eat eggs, my faithful one.’
‘Eggs, my Lord?’
‘Eggs are a symbol of rebirth, Quasar. And eat Orange Rocket ice lollies.’
‘What do they symbolise, Guru?’
‘Nothing. They contain vitamin C in abundance.’
‘It shall be so, my Lord. But the yogic fliers, my Father—’
My only reply was a barking dog, and a puzzled look from the two lovers, jumping up suddenly from behind a stack of rusty oil drums. The three of us looked at each other in confusion. The dog cocked its leg and pissed against a tractor tyre. The ocean boomed its indifference.
The little baby girl in the woolly cap, she had liked me. How could she have liked me? It was just some facial reflex, no doubt. She gurgled at me, smiling. Her mother looked at who she was smiling at, and she smiled at me too. Her eyes were warm. I didn’t smile back. I looked away. I wish I had smiled back. But I wish they hadn’t smiled at me. Would they have survived? Or would the gas have got them? If they hadn’t moved, it would have leaked out of the package and straight into their noses, eyes, and lungs . . .
Mum. Dad.
But we were only defending ourselves!
There was one day, during my assignment to the Ministry of Information. One of our sister’s skin relatives, her unclean uncle, had taken court action to stop her selling their family’s farmhouse and land. He was a property lawyer. The Secret Service had brought this flesh brother in for questioning. His Serendipity instantly knew he was a spy sent by the unclean. An assassination plot was being engineered, it seemed. Laughable! All of us in Sanctuary knew how, thirty years ago, while travelling in Tibet, a being of pure consciousness named Arupadhatu transmigrated into His Serendipity, and revealed the secrets of freeing the mind from its physical shackles. This had been the beginning of His Serendipity’s path up the holy mountain. Even if the body of His Serendipity were harmed, he could leave his old body and transmigrate into another, as easily as I change hotels and islands. He could transmigrate into his own assassin.
Anyway, this lawyer was injected with truth serum and confessed to everything. His mission had been to put an odourless poison into the refectory rice cookers. His Serendipity’s wife conducted the interview herself, I heard.
You see! We were only defending ourselves.
My fingernails are coming loose.
I spent the afternoon walking to the lighthouse. I sat on a rock and watched the waves and the birds. A typhoon was moving up the coast of China, skirting Taiwan, and looming over the Okinawan horizon. Clouds were piling up in the west, winds were unravelling. I was being discussed, and decisions were being taken. What had gone wrong? A few more months, and my alpha quotient would have been 25, putting me in the top two hundred on Earth – His Serendipity had assured me, in person. I had ingested some of His Serendipity’s eyelashes. After winning converts on the Welcome Programme I was rewarded with a test tube of the Guru’s sperm to imbibe. It boosted my gamma resistance. I had been taken off the lavatory docket and been made a cleanser. For the first time in my life, I was becoming a name.