Ghostwritten Read online

  I slipped out of the cool lobby.

  I kept a low profile all week, but invisibility might attract attention. I invented business meetings to attend, and from Monday to Friday walked past the receptionist with a curt ‘Good morning’ promptly at 8.30 a.m. Time dragged its heels. Naha’s just another small city. The Americans from the military bases that plague these islands strut up and down the main streets, many of them with our females draped off their arms, Japanese females clad in nothing but little wraps of cloth. The Okinawan males ape the foreigners. I walked through the department stores, watching the endless chain of wanting and buying. I walked until my feet ached. I sat in shady coffee shops, where shelves sagged under the weight of magazines of mindtrash. I eavesdropped on businessmen, buying and selling what wasn’t theirs. I carried on walking. Workaday idiots gaped in the rattling vacuity of pachinko machines, as I had once done in the days before His Serendipity opened my inner eyes. Tourists from the mainland toured the souvenir shops, buying boxes of tat that nobody ever really wants. The usual foreigners selling watches and cheap jewellery on the pavements, without licences. I walked through the games arcades where the poisoned children congregate after school, gazing at screens where evil cyborgs, phantoms and zombies do battle. The same shops as anywhere else . . . Burger King, Benetton, Nike . . . High streets are becoming the same all over the world, I suppose. I walked through backstreets, where housewives put out futons to air, living the same year sixty times. I watched a potter with a pocked face, bent over a wheel. A dying man, coughing without removing his cigarette, repaired a child’s tricycle on a bottom step. A woman without any teeth put fresh flowers in a vase beneath a family shrine. I went to the old Ryukyu palace one afternoon. There were drinks machines in the courtyard, and a shop called The Holy Swordsman that sold nothing but key rings and camera film. The ancient ramparts were swarming with high school kids from Tokyo. The boys look like girls, with long hair and pierced ears and plucked eyebrows. The girls laugh like spider monkeys into their pocket phones. Hate them and you have to hate the world, Quasar.

  Very well, Quasar. Let us hate the world.

  The only peaceful place in Naha was the port. I watched boats, islanders, tourists, and mighty cargo ships. I’ve always enjoyed the sea. My biological uncle used to take me to the harbour at Yokohama. We used to take a pocket atlas to look up the ships’ ports and countries of origin.

  Of course, that was a lifetime ago. Before my true father called me home.

  Coming out of an alpha trance one day after my noon cleansing, a spoked shadow congealed into a spider. I was going to flush it down the toilet when, to my amazement, it transmitted an alpha message! Of course, His Serendipity was using it to speak with me. The Guru has an impish sense of humour.

  ‘Courage, Quasar, my chosen. Courage, and strength. This is your destiny.’

  I knelt before the spider. ‘I knew you wouldn’t forget me, Lord,’ I answered, and let the spider wander over my body. Then I put him in a little jar. I resolved to buy some flypaper to catch flies, so I could feed my little brother. We are both His Serendipity’s messengers.

  Speculation about the ‘doomsday cult’ continues. How it annoys me! The Fellowship stands for life, not for doom. The Fellowship is not a ‘cult’. Cults enslave. The Fellowship liberates. Leaders of cults are fork-tongued swindlers with private harems of whores and fleets of Rolls-Royces behind the stage set. I have been privileged to glimpse life in the Guru’s inner circle – not one girl in sight! His Serendipity is free of the sticky web of sex. His Serendipity’s wife was chosen merely to bear his children. The younger sons of Cabinet members and favoured disciples are permitted to attend to the Guru’s modest domestic needs. These fortunates are clad only in meditation loincloths so they are ready to assume zazen alpha positioning whenever the Master condescends to bestow his blessing. And in the whole of Sanctuary there are only three Cadillacs – His Serendipity well knows when to exorcise the demons of materialism that possess the unclean, and when to exploit this obsession as a Trojan Horse, to penetrate the mire of the world outside.

  To deflect suspicion from the Fellowship, His Serendipity allowed some journalists into Sanctuary to film brothers and sisters during alpha enrichment. Our chemical facilities were also inspected. The Minister of Science explained that we were making fertiliser. Being vegetarians, he joked, the Fellowship needs to grow a lot of cucumbers! I recognised my brothers and sisters. They gave me telepathic messages of encouragement to their Brother Quasar through their screen images. I laughed aloud. The unclean TV news hyenas were trying to incriminate the Fellowship, not noticing how the Fellowship was using them to transmit messages to me. The Minister of Security allowed himself to be interviewed. Brilliantly, he defended the Fellowship from any involvement in the cleansing. One can only outwit demons, His Serendipity teaches in the 13th Sacred Revelation, if one is as cunning as the lord of Hell.

  More disturbing were the television interviews with the blind unclean. The apostates. People who are welcomed into the Fellowship’s love, but who reject it and fall again into the world of shit outside Sanctuary. In his infinite mercy His Serendipity permits these maggots to live, if ‘living’ it can be called, on condition that they do not defame the Fellowship. If they ignore this law and sow lies about Sanctuary in the press, the Minister of Security has to license the cleansing of them and their families.

  On television the faces of the blind unclean were digitalised out, but no image-doctoring can fool a mind of my alpha quotient. One was Mayumi Aoi, who joined the Fellowship in my Welcome Programme. She paid lip-service to His Serendipity, but one morning, eight weeks into the Programme, we awoke to find her gone. We all suspected her of being a police agent. Hearing the lies she told about life in Sanctuary, I switched the television off and resolved never to watch it again.

  A week after my first call I telephoned Sanctuary. I was answered by a voice I didn’t know.

  ‘Good morning. This is Quasar.’

  ‘Ah, Quasar. The Minister of Information is busy this morning. I am his under-secretary. We’ve been expecting your call. Have you seen the growing hysteria?’

  ‘Indeed, sir.’

  ‘Yes. Your cleansing operation was almost too successful, it might appear. His Serendipity has ordered me to tell you to lie low for a couple more weeks.’

  ‘I obey His Serendipity in all things.’

  ‘In addition, you are ordered to proceed to a more remote location. Purely as a precaution. Our brothers in the unclean police have told us your details are being circulated. We must act with stealth, and guile. Officially, we are denying complicity in your gas attack. This will win us more time to strengthen the Fellowship with new brothers and sisters. This tactic worked for our cleansing experiment in Nagano Prefecture last year. How easily misled are these dung-beetles!’

  ‘Indeed, sir.’

  ‘In the event that you are arrested, you are to assume full responsibility for your attack, and claim that you had acted entirely on your own volition, after being expelled from the Fellowship for insanity. You would then be teleported out of custody by His Serendipity.’

  ‘Naturally, sir. I obey His Serendipity in all things.’

  ‘You are a great asset to the Fellowship, Quasar. Any questions?’

  ‘I was wondering if phase two of the great cleansing has begun yet, sir? Have our yogic fliers been despatched to the parliament building to demand the integration of His Serendipity’s teachings into the national curriculum? If we leave it too long, then the unclean might—’

  ‘Quasar, you forget yourself! When was it decreed that your responsibilities included advocating Fellowship foreign policy?’

  ‘I understand my error, sir. Forgive me, sir. I beg you.’

  ‘You are already forgiven, dear son of His Serendipity! No doubt you are lonely, away from your family?’

  ‘Yes, sir. But I received the alpha-wave messages sent from my brothers and sisters through the news broadcasts. And Hi
s Serendipity speaks to me words of comfort in my exile as I meditate.’

  ‘Excellent. Two more weeks should be sufficient, Quasar. If your funds run low, you may contact the Fellowship’s Secret Service using the usual code. Otherwise maintain silence.’

  ‘One more thing, sir. The apostate Mayumi Aoi—’

  ‘The Minister of Information has noticed. The sewers of the blind unclean shall for ever be sealed. The Minister of Security will act, when the present scrutiny subsides. Perhaps we have shown too much mercy in the past. We are now at war.’

  I walked to the port in the stellar heat of mid-afternoon, and collected boat schedules from a rack. I pulled open my map. I have always preferred maps to books. They don’t answer you back. Never throw a map away. The islands beckoned, imperial emeralds in a sky-blue sea. I chose one labelled Kumejima. Half a day away to the west, but not so small that a visitor would stand out. There was only one boat per day, departing at 6.45 a.m. I bought a ticket for the next day’s sailing.

  I spent the rest of the day sitting on the quay. I recited all of His Serendipity’s Sacred Revelations, oblivious to the flow of lost souls passing by.

  Eventually the sun sank, crimson and wobbling. I hadn’t noticed it grow dark. I walked back to my hotel, where I told the receptionist that my business was concluded and I would depart for Osaka early the next morning.

  The subway train in Tokyo was as crammed as a cattle-wagon. Crammed with organs, wrapped in meat, wrapped in clothes. Silent and sweaty. I was half-afraid some fool would crush the phials prematurely. Our Minister of Science had explained to me exactly how the package worked. When I ripped open the seal and pressed the three buttons simultaneously, I would have one minute to get clear before the solenoids shattered the phials, and the great cleansing of the world would begin.

  I put the package on the baggage rack and waited for the appointed minute. I focused my alpha telepathy, and sent messages of encouragement to my co-cleansers in various metro trains throughout Tokyo.

  I studied the people around me. The honoured unclean, the first to be cleansed. Dumb. Sorry. Tired. Mind-rotted. Mules, in a never-ending whirpool of lies, pain, and ignorance. I was a few inches away from a baby, in a woolly cap, strapped to its mother’s back. It was asleep and dribbling and smelt of toddlers’ marshiness. A girl, I guessed from the pink Minnie Mouse sewn onto the cap. Pensioners who had nothing to look forward to but senility and wheelchairs in lonely magnolia ‘homes’. Young salarymen, supposedly in their prime, their minds conditioned for greed and bullying.

  I had the life and death of those lowlives in my hands! What would they say? How would they try to dissuade me? How would they justify their insectoid existences? Where could they start? How could a tadpole address a god?

  The carriage swayed, jarred and the lights dipped for a moment into brown.

  Not well enough.

  I remembered His Serendipity’s words that morning. ‘I have seen the comet, far beyond the farthest orbit of the mundane mind. The New Earth is approaching. The judgement of the vermin is coming. By helping it along a little, we are putting them out of their misery. Sons, you are the chosen agents of the Divine.’

  In those last few moments, as we pulled into the station, His Serendipity fortified me with a vision of the future. Within three short years His Serendipity is going to enter Jerusalem. In the same year Mecca is going to bow down, and the Pope and the Dalai Lama will seek conversion. The Presidents of Russia and the US petition for His Serendipity’s patronage.

  Then, in July of that year, the comet is detected by observatories all over the world. Narrowly missing Neptune, it approaches Earth, eclipsing the Moon, blazing even in the midday sky over the airfields and mountain ranges and cities of the world. The unclean rush out and welcome this latest novelty. And that will be their undoing! The Earth is bathed in microwaves from the comet, and only those with high alpha quotients will be able to insulate themselves. The unclean die, retching, scratching out their eyes, stinking of their own flesh as it cooks on their bones. The survivors begin the creation of Paradise. His Serendipity will reveal himself as His Divinity. A butterfly emerging from the chrysalis of his body.

  I feel into the perforated sports bag, and I rip open the seal. I have to flick the switches, and hold them down for three seconds to set the timer. One. Two. Three. The New Earth is coming. History is ticking. I zip the bag shut, let it fall to my feet, and shunt it surreptitiously under a seat with the back of my heel. The compartment is so crammed that none of the zombies notices.

  The will of His Serendipity.

  The train pulls into the station, and—

  I hear the noises under the manhole cover, but I dared not, dared not listen to its words.

  If the noises ever become words – not now, not yet. Not ever. Where would it end?

  I entered the current that flowed to the escalators, and away from there.

  Over my shoulder, the train accelerated into the fumey darkness.

  The palms of my hands were pricking and sweaty. A seagull strutted along the window ledge and peered in. It had a cruel face.

  ‘And your name, sir?’ The old lady who ran the inn grinned the grimace of a temple god. Why was she grinning? To make me nervous? She had more black gaps than stained teeth.

  ‘My name’s Tokunaga. Buntaro Tokunaga.’

  ‘Tokunaga . . . lovely name. It has a regal air.’

  ‘I’ve never thought about it.’

  ‘And what business are you in, Mr Tokunaga?’

  Questions and questions. Do the unclean never stop?

  ‘I’m just an ordinary salaryman. I don’t work for a famous company. I’m the department head of a small computer business in the suburbs of Tokyo.’

  ‘Tokyo? Is that so? I’ve never been to the mainland. We get a lot of holidaymakers from Tokyo. Though not off-season, like now. You can see for yourself, we’re almost empty. I only go to the main island once a year, to visit my grandchildren. I have fourteen grandchildren, you know. Of course, when I say “main island”, I mean the main island of Okinawa, not mainland Japan. I’d never dream of going there!’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘They tell me Tokyo’s very big. Bigger even than Naha. A department head? Your mother and father must be so proud! My, that’s grand. I’ve got to ask you to fill out these dratted forms, you know. I wouldn’t bother with it myself but my daughter makes me do it. It’s all to do with licences and tax. It’s a real nuisance. Still. And how long will you be with us on Kumejima, Mr Tokunaga?’

  ‘I intend to stay a couple of weeks.’

  ‘Is that so? My, I hope you’ll find enough to do. We’re not a very big island, you know. You can go fishing, or go surfing, or go snorkelling, or scuba-diving . . . but apart from that, life is very quiet, here. Very slow. Not like Tokyo, I imagine. Won’t your wife be missing you?’

  ‘No.’ Time to shut her up. ‘The truth is, I’m here on compassionate leave. My wife passed away last month. Cancer.’

  The old crone’s face fell, and her hand covered her mouth. Her voice fell to a whisper. ‘Oh, my. Is that so? Oh, my. There I go, putting my foot in it again. My daughter would be so ashamed. I don’t know what to say—’ She kept wheezing apologetically, which was doubly irksome as her breath reeked of prawns.

  ‘Not to worry. When she passed away, she was finally released from the pain. It was a cruel release, but it was a release. Please don’t be embarrassed. I am a little tired, though. Would you show me to my room?’

  ‘Yes, of course . . . Here are your slippers, and I’ll just show you the bathroom . . . This is the dining room. Come this way, you poor, poor, man . . . Oh my, what you must have been through . . . But you’ve come to the right island. Kumejima is wonderful place for healing. I’ve always believed so . . .’

  After my evening cleansing I felt fatigue that no amount of alpha refocusing could dispel. Cursing my weakness, I went to bed and sank into a sleep that was almost bottomless.

 
The bottom was in a tunnel. A deserted metro tunnel, with rails and service pipes. My job was to patrol it, and guard it from the evil that lived down there. A superior officer walked up to me. ‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded.

  ‘Obeying orders, sir.’

  ‘Which are?’

  ‘Patrolling this tunnel, sir.’

  He whistled between his teeth. ‘As usual, a muddle at Sanctuary. There’s a new threat down here. The evil can only consume you when it knows about you. If you maintain your anonymity, all will be well. Now, officer. Give me your name.’

  ‘Quasar, sir.’

  ‘And your name from your old life? Your real name?’

  ‘Tanaka. Keisuke Tanaka.’

  ‘What is your alpha quotient, Keisuke Tanaka?’

  ‘16.9.’

  ‘Place of birth?’

  Suddenly, I realise that I have walked into a trap! The evil is my superior officer, ploughing me with questions so it can consume me. My last defence is not to let it know that I have caught on. I am still floundering when a new character walks down the tunnel towards us. She is carrying a viola case and some flowers, and I’ve seen her before somewhere. Someone from my uncleansed days. The evil that is in the guise of my superior officer turns to her and starts the same ruse. ‘Haven’t you heard about the evil? Who authorised your presence here? Give me your name, address, occupation – immediately!’

  I want to save her. Lacking a plan, I grab her arm and we run, faster than air currents.

  ‘Why are we running?’

  A foreign woman on a hill, watching a wooden pole sinking into the ground.