From the Fatherland, with Love, page 38
Toyohara gave his report: “Two mobile armored vehicles, each mounted with machine guns and autocannon, are about to arrive at the danchi in Odo.”
As it happened, the plasma TV in the Living was showing a live shot of the two MAVs. They were already there on the danchi grounds.
“So you and Mori were poking around again?” Ishihara said.
“Yes.”
The others all looked at them as if to say, “Oh yeah? You went again, eh?” No one had shown much interest in what the two of them had seen the previous day. None of them asked what it had been like in person. Not even Yamada had reacted much to Mori’s accounts of all he’d witnessed these past two days. True, Mori wasn’t very good at telling stories and, besides, the TV had shown nonstop coverage of the incidents. But he realized something from Yamada’s non-reaction, something that was true of himself as well. Neither of them had ever shared an emotion with someone else. When children experience happiness or sadness or are moved by a video or a picture book or something beautiful, they want to tell their family or friends about it. By telling others of our experiences and listening to others speak of theirs, we learn to share emotions—at least, according to a book Mori had found in the orphanage. He didn’t know exactly what it meant to “share emotions,” but he was pretty sure it had never happened to him.
Mori had grown up in a new housing development on the border of Tokyo and Saitama prefectures. His father had been a salesman for a real-estate company with headquarters in Tokyo, but the year after Mori was born the company went bust. What with the mortgage and tuition for Mori’s older brother’s private nursery school, the father was forced, when his unemployment insurance ran out, to take a job at a woodworking shop owned by an acquaintance in the neighborhood, and one day he lost the index and middle fingers of his left hand to a lathe. He had always been the silent type, but after the accident he barely ever spoke at all and eventually stopped leaving the house. Following treatment at a psychiatric clinic, he began working part-time at a neighborhood butcher shop, frying meat cakes and croquettes. Apparently the hourly wage for that was six hundred and eighty yen. Ever since Mori was a toddler his mother had repeated these words to him thousands of times: “Your father makes six hundred and eighty yen an hour.” The family couldn’t get by on what the old man was bringing home, so Mori’s mother got a job at Mos Burger, and for a long time all the family ever had for dinner was meat cakes or chiliburgers. Both Mori and his brother grew up constantly hearing their mother remind them that she worked her ass off just so she could send them to private schools. Behind this ambition of hers was the fact that she herself had been tormented by her classmates in public schools. When Mori failed to be accepted at any of the private middle schools he applied to, his mother spent an entire night weeping and wailing that all her hard work and sacrifice had been for nothing, while his father, as always, sat silently drinking whiskey and staring at the wall.
At least Mori was aware of the fact that the concept of sharing was beyond him. But could a group of people who didn’t know how to share really unite to fight a common enemy? When Ishihara named that enemy, the fighting spirit had been roused in all of them, but because there was no hierarchy in the group they lacked a proper chain of command. Boys like Mori and Yamada had ended up here precisely because it was a place where no one was forced to follow orders. They had all decided to fight the Koryos, but that was as far as it went. None of them had any experience of coming up with a plan and carrying it out by cooperating with others and delegating responsibilities. Not even the five Satanists had ever had a leader, or any particular plan; they had simply invented a story together and stuck to it, lying to the adults at every turn.
Mori wondered if this warehouse would be used as a base of operations for attacks on the new barracks in Odo once the reinforcements arrived. Set horizontally in one wall of Ishihara’s room was a long, narrow window from which you could see part of the danchi grounds where construction was to begin. There were more than thirty apartment buildings, most of them abandoned. The only residents remaining were people too indigent or too old to leave, and their deaths often went unnoticed if they had no one to look out for them. But it was said that when the Koryo commanding officer came to look the buildings over, he was impressed and declared the apartments as good as those inhabited by high-level functionaries in Pyongyang. Most of them consisted of three small rooms and a kitchen-cum-dining area, and would apparently house ten soldiers each.
Mori felt that the idea of attacking the Koryos’ own base was unrealistic. There was no way they could go head to head with these people. According to a military analyst on TV, the buses had been blown to bits by thirty-millimeter rounds fired from what were called autocannon—basically giant machine guns. You could see SAT guys staggering about inside, engulfed in flames. It was like a special effects scene in a Hollywood movie. The buses shuddered and bounced as the rounds slammed into them, and in under a minute they were turned into skeletons of glass and steel.
Takei, who had spent half a year at a guerrilla-training camp in Yemen, had suggested a few different strategies. One was to attack the Koryo encampment with mortars, although there were no mortars on the list of items in his arsenal. He also suggested they use anti-tank missiles against the MAVs, but there were no anti-tank missiles on the list either. When Kaneshiro pointed out that it was no good thinking up strategies involving weapons they didn’t have, Takei replied that real guerrillas captured the enemy’s weapons to use against them. No one could see that happening, however. Fukuda and Takeguchi were preparing explosives, and Takei would distribute his stockpiled weapons to the group—only that much had been vaguely settled.
“Takei-san,” Kaneshiro said, “just pass out the damn weapons, all right?” He was sitting on the big sofa, scowling impatiently. It seemed that Takei was determined to make some sort of stage show of the whole thing. Toyohara, Ando, and the five Satanists had been cast in it and were up on the third floor getting ready. Mori sat down on the carpet, along with Yamada and three others. The rest were sitting on the sofa or in armchairs. “Will someone go tell them to hurry up?” Kaneshiro said, and Ishihara glanced up from the photo book to say, “Don’t get your knickers in a twist.” He didn’t seem at all curious about the forthcoming performance. But then, Ishihara could appear to be bored to death one moment and apoplectically excited the next. He was, to Mori at least, a complete mystery.
Kaneshiro, who was peering impatiently toward the top of the stairs, was about the same height as Mori but extremely thin, probably less than half his weight. He had a narrow little face, with small eyes, nose, and mouth. It was the sort of face Mori wished he himself had. You wouldn’t call it handsome, but all the features were neatly arranged. There was something plant-like about him, and so self-contained that he was never tiring to be around. He didn’t eat much, either. Once in a while you’d see him reluctantly nibbling on a protein bar. Mori, on the other hand, had always taken a lot of grief for his owl-shaped body and his doughy face. His father had been a bit overweight, but his mother and brother were both thin. After walking or running even short distances, Mori would have to stop awhile, wobbling and breathing hard. His wheezing was so loud that a teacher in elementary school had given him the nickname Steamwhistle.
“I want my weapon now,” Hino was muttering. Matsuyama said, “I wonder what sort of gun I’ll get,” and Felix said, “I want one that doesn’t weigh too much.” Fukuda and Takeguchi were explaining their new explosives, the “cookies,” to a small group gathered around them and saying that between these babies and the firearms, they could do something spectacular. The various little bombs were circular, oval, triangular, or star-shaped, and small enough to fit in the palm of your hand: they really did look like cookies. Takeguchi explained that they were made of a high-yield explosive called RDX mixed with wheat flour, baking powder, salt, lard, and water. He said that RDX wouldn’t explode when exposed to an open flame, so that you could actually brown these cookies in an oven. “And eat ’em?” Tateno joked. “Definitely not,” Takeguchi said. “They’re extremely toxic and can induce epileptic-type seizures.” The RDX in them had once belonged to the Iraqi military. It had been sold on the black market, and Takei’s connections in Yemen had repackaged it as olive soap and shipped it to Japan. Takeguchi and Fukuda’s laboratory was in the basement of Building E and was off limits to everyone else for obvious reasons—not that anyone wanted to go near the place.
Even Yamada seemed excited for once. “I’ve never even shot a water pistol!” he said, baring his big front teeth and laughing along with the others. He looked like a rabbit who’d just discovered a carrot and a female in heat at the same time. Hino and Tateno were laughing as well. Hino had a face like a stone-bodhisattva statue and rarely said anything at all, and though he sometimes flashed an embarrassed grin, Mori had never heard him laugh out loud before. The general excitement had a strange effect on Mori: it gave him a familiar feeling, but one he’d forgotten about since coming to Fukuoka—the sense of being left out. All the others were slapping one another’s backs and talking about the weapons and laughing together, and though he wanted to join in he couldn’t.
He was still having vivid flashbacks of Ohori Park. The iridescent windows of burning buses; the earthshaking booms of the autocannon; the shoop of a hot shell casing as it hit the surface of the pond; bullets pelting the ground like rain; the severed arm of a child, launched into the air by an explosion… Disconnected images bubbled up one after another in his brain. When one of the Koryo soldiers was hit in the right shoulder, leaving his arm hanging limply, he had quickly grabbed his pistol with his left hand and shot down a SAT guy coming in for the kill. The Koryos didn’t grit their teeth or scowl or cry out but fought with the calm and dispassionate look of people working in a factory—or packing crates at Mori’s part-time job. The speed with which they switched the magazines of their automatic pistols, the precision and efficiency with which they picked out some cover and ran for it—you’d have to have been there to believe it, Mori thought. You couldn’t get the full effect just watching it on TV.
As he watched Yamada and the others whooping it up, his sense of discomfort only increased. Any crowd of people united in excitement scared him, but until now he had never felt this separation from Yamada and the other members of the group. Then again, the group had never felt this united before. Normally, if some of them got turned on watching a war movie or horror film, say, others would be indifferent or bored. Of course, there was something special about the focus of attention this time—actual weapons. The rifles Mori had carried from Building G had been heavier than the giant watermelons he’d unloaded at his job a couple of weeks earlier. Takei had unwrapped a pistol and allowed him to hold it. It weighed more than a laptop, and he couldn’t hold it out at arm’s length for longer than a second or two.
A gun was a hard, heavy, unfamiliar tool that Mori felt he would never be able to master. The Koryo soldiers, on the other hand, wielded their weapons freely and effortlessly, as if they were extensions of their own bodies. Once the battle was over, Mori had picked a spent rifle bullet out of the earth. The bullet had been flattened on impact into a compressed cone of hard metal. Mori pressed the cone firmly against the skin of his left forearm a number of times, but all it did was leave a small, reddish indentation. He was unable to imagine this little piece of metal bursting through the flesh, shredding muscle and bone, and creating a shock wave capable of rupturing internal organs.
At Ohori Park, Mori had learned that it was only in the movies that shooting someone would send them flying backward through a window or whatever. Bullets didn’t lift people off their feet and send them through the air, they bored through the body at unimaginable speed. One of the four members of the Koryo police who ran to the building as backup was killed instantly when a bullet ripped through his chest and out his back. The one who’d been shot in the right shoulder had dived into a canal ditch to take cover, aimed left-handed at the SAT member who came running to finish him off, and shot him twice in the head at close range. This exchange took place just several meters in front of Mori, who was watching from the shadow of an MAV. The two shots were fired so rapidly as to sound almost simultaneous: ba-bang! The first one blew away part of the SAT guy’s forehead and the second lodged in the center of his face. He stood there for some moments with his head partially pared away, moving his mouth as if trying to speak while blood and brain matter overflowed the wound and slid down his face, obscuring his features. He finally crumpled to the ground, but it seemed for ever before he stopped twitching.
Yamada was telling Shinohara about the handguns and rifles Takei had let him handle. “They’re sooo cool,” he said, his eyes shining and his front teeth on full display. It wasn’t that Mori resented the others for whooping it up; he simply had the sense of being apart from something important. This wasn’t a feeling he could consciously dispel. When he was small, a sort of transparent barrier would suddenly descend around him, wedging him in so that he couldn’t move. The first time it happened was on the bus to kindergarten. Riding the bus with the other children, he was seized with the distressing sense that he alone was separate from his surroundings and began to wonder if he was really even there. That doubt, once it had occurred, clicked with something ingrained in him as securely as one Lego piece connects with another.
It seemed to Mori the kindergartener that the doubt wasn’t anything new, that it had always been lurking inside him, as a vague foreboding, before coming into full view, the way the scenery beyond a tree is revealed after an autumn storm. He knew it was ridiculous to doubt that he was actually there, on the bus with the other children. But then he remembered what happened at night, when he went to the bathroom. There was a mirror next to the toilet, and whenever he finished peeing and turned off the light, the Mori in the mirror disappeared. There must be some kind of switch that that could be flicked to make him disappear from the bus as well. What couldn’t be denied, in any case, was that an invisible barrier now separated him from the others, and the barrier itself was impervious to the reality beyond it. It was terrifying. Am I really sitting here on this bus with you? Can you really see me and hear my voice, or are you only pretending to? He wanted to put these questions to the kid next to him but hated the thought of being taken for a nutcase.
Mori’s heart was really pounding now. He hadn’t experienced this feeling since becoming friends with Yamada and coming with him to Fukuoka. Why did it have to show up at a time like this? He believed that meeting Yamada had been ordained by destiny. Yamada was easy to be around—he seemed somehow less physically substantial than other people. Mori was pretty sure that if you cloned human beings in test tubes, they’d come out with faces and bodies and a general vibe a lot like Yamada’s. His skin and muscles were spongy soft, and he had almost no hair on his body. He remembered seeing Yamada lying on the bed in the massage parlor, his naked back glistening in the red ceiling light. If he were to lose this guy, he’d probably never find another friend. Having someone else tattoo Mickey Mouse on their shoulder just wouldn’t be the same.
“Hey, Mori.” Ishihara was looking straight at him. “Hey, Mori the Ewok.” He was sitting in his rocking chair in a pair of comfortable-looking linen pajamas. His pet name for Mori derived of course from the tribe of little owl-like beings in Star Wars. He held up a two-page spread from the vintage porn actress’s photo book, raised his eyebrows, burbled an inscrutable “Blind blind blind blind blind,” and burst out laughing. The photo was of the actress on all fours, with her ass high in the air and an eggplant half-buried in her vagina. Ishihara kept tapping at the photo, inviting him to inspect it closely. When Mori just gaped at him, uncomprehending, Ishihara pointed at the woman’s anus and pouted. “Piles piles piles piles piles,” he explained. Apparently he was indicating that the woman had hemorrhoids. This was so stupid that Mori, without thinking, let out a little laugh of his own. And the instant he did so, incredibly, the barrier disappeared. Ishihara couldn’t have read his mind, surely; he’d just chosen him because he was nearby. But he wouldn’t have shared his silly joke with an absent Mori, and that realization made the barrier dissolve.
“Here we go! Music, please,” Takei called down from the top of the stairs. “Just push the switch on the MD player there.” Shinohara was standing next to the old boombox and did as instructed. A soaring classical piece came on, and Felix, next to Mori, muttered “Wagner.” Takei slowly made his way down the stairs in a dark-blue commando uniform. He was wearing leather gloves of the same color; a bulletproof vest, from which dangled a triangular groin protector; and lace-up boots. The elbows and knees of the uniform had flexible rubber guards, a sheathed combat knife was strapped to one shin, and on top of a woolen ski mask he wore a helmet, complete with radio headset. The jacket was too large and the pants too baggy, however, so that in fact he looked more like a construction worker than a commando.
