Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone (6 page)

“Perhaps they all exist in the blind spot,” Masahiko said. “Perhaps that’s what the blind spot is, the part of the eye that registers these visual entities the mind can’t see.”

“Like the way the natural world embeds complex chaotic forms, like fractals, or the Mandelbrot set, that we find difficult to process,” Ethan said.

“Maybe consciousness is nothing more than a filtering mechanism so that we can go about our daily lives without being blinded by the constant light of God,” Luka said.

“Hey hey hey hey,” Marcus interrupted. “This is getting the teeniest bit scary, boys and girls.”

That night the marina burned. All the Nineteenth House and its neighbors in the unit turned out to watch the blaze and pass around cocktails and binoculars.

“Pure fucking apocalypse, the biggest burn since the Spanish Armada and I can’t find my fucking palmcorder!” Luka screamed in frustration. Someone was wheeling out a barbecue. Up on the road behind the Nineteenth House, the car headlights were nose to tail.

“What we were saying this afternoon,” Marcus confided to Ethan. “I think I know how it could be done. Expert systems sift images, locate those areas that embed this nonconscious stimulus thing, stack them to isolate common factors, and image-processing software amplifies and enhances them.” Ethan was less than half listening to Marcus’s evangelism, hot dogs and curled-up burgers were going round; Nikki Ring had brought out a beatbox. The flames were now throwing themselves thirty to forty meters into the hot summer night. A gasp from the assembled spectators: a gas cylinder had gone up with a scream and starburst like a rocket. Not even the Coronation fireworks had been this good.

“They reckon it’s terrorists,” said Masahiko, accepting something vaguely vodka-ey/orangey from one of Ethan’s co-sisters. “Islamic, Zionist, Third-World Debt-defaultist, Basque, Irish.”

’Becca appeared on the terrazzo with the palmcorder that she had found under a pile of Luka’s dirty underwear. Luka kissed her flamboyantly and with a rebel yell was over the fence, down on the beach, and running toward the conflagration, viewfinder pressed to eye.

“You are one lucky lucky bastard, Ethan Ring,” said Masahiko and for the first time Ethan Ring knew and understood and appreciated and valued what he had with Luka. He wanted then to just stand and look at her, flamelit, videoing thirteen million ecus of burning yacht but Marcus was a persistent whisper in his ear.

“Think about it, Eth. Think what you could get for a graphic image that does everything E-Base does with no side effects no addiction problem no accidental overdose; think what they would pay for a typeface that makes you obey whatever is written in it.”

“Marcus, it was a joke. A joke, that’s all.”

“Many a true word spoken in jest, Eth.”

I
T WAS BEAUTIFUL. IT
looked like… It looked like… Like…

“There’s nothing there,” said Ethan Ring. The thing slipped from his field of vision like a glass eel. “I don’t see anything.”

New term in the rainy-day city. Same faces, same places, moved up a year, October outside the computer suite windows. Masahiko had logged off tonight’s installment of
Kinjiru
Cyber Les-girls. The last technician had issued the ritual admonition to switch off the lights
and nothing else
and left the room of humming monitors to the three pioneers, and the thing Marcus had found.

“You can’t see anything,” said Luka Casipriadin.

“Luka’s right,” said Marcus Cranitch. “It’s the blind spot effect we talked about. It’s there all right.” Qwerty icons were summoned. “If I enlarge the image by a factor of ten…”

The visual nothingness opened like a lotus blooming and engulfed them.

It was awe and it was wonder. It was beauty and it was terror. It was purity and it was judgment. It was everything and nothing, void and light, annihilation and creation. Alpha and Omega. The Primal
Fiat.
The Great I Am. It was love and truth and justice and holiness and might, everything every book, every verse, every mantra, every sutra, said it was. It was every spiritual experience, every dervish dance, every glimmer of nirvana, every shaman trance, every elevation into rapture. It was more. Vastly more.

It was the face of God. The room shook. The computer suite was filled with the sound of a rushing mighty wind. Tongues of fire seemed to dance on the heads and hands of the trinity of observers, their lips moved with ecstatic utterances in languages never before heard on the tongues of humans.

After a time that seemed like a foretaste of eternity, Luka’s voice was heard. “ ‘My face you shall not see, for no man may see my face and live.’ ” Her words seemed to come through a cavernous white roar, as of angels’ wings beating before the throne of God. “But we see, we fucking see, and live!”

Every word of Marcus’s was a boulder of rationality pushed up the asymptotic incline of ecstasy.

“I accessed the National Gallery’s datacore for religious art and icons and set the program parameters to flag me every time it came on something that corresponded to my definition of the spiritual, the numinous, the irrational. Have you any idea how many Madonna and Childs I had to look at before I got a big enough sample? It took the machine three days to collate and render the samples I stored, another overnight fifteen-hour run to enhance the image.”

“And what came out in the end is something that stimulates the human facility for religious ecstasy,” Ethan said, his words slipping, sliding into the light-filled voice of God.

“You got it. All those icons, all those mandalas and Sanskrit mantras and illuminated Celtic manuscripts, they’re just reflections, hints, memories, explorations. This is the true glory.”

And the transfiguration was gone. The glory lifted. God’s face turned away. Only painful afterimages remained and a piercing sense of Paradise Lost. Luka’s hand moved from the off switch.

“We aren’t supposed to see these things. God hides his face for a reason. Humankind cannot bear too much divinity.”

“Secrets too terrible for Mankind to know?” Marcus’s scorn flayed. “Old sci-fi hokum. This is just the start. If there’s one, there’ve got to be others. And I’m going to find them.”

Luka shook her head.

“Dump it, Marcus. Erase it, smash it, get rid of it. It’s dangerous. It’ll burn you. It’ll destroy you. I promise.”

S
HINGON AND THE ART
of Mountain Bike Maintenance. I am up before dawn. It is a good time, the new hours, the fresh hours; the best time. Things are clearer. The air is crisp, cold, clean, the sky a prefaded shrink-fit denim blue deepening over the zenith to fresh, prewash indigo. The moon has been down for an hour. I sit on the curb dwarfed by the monolithic masses of trucks pulled in for the night at the coffin hotel, working patiently, steadily. When your safety depends on diligence, you do not rush your repairs. There is much value in tinkering with bicycles. As much as in riding bicycles, there is a state one enters where
I
and
you
cease to matter, where subject and object are abolished, where you and it become one thing, one unity, one awareness. True cyborg: man/machine fusion.

As I thought, the seatings for the thumb-shifts have worked loose. I tighten them with a small screwdriver from my toolkit, lubricate with a squirt or two of oil from the aerosol spray I carry in my belt pouch, and the sun comes over the roof tiles of Temple Nineteen on its hillside.

A hand touches my shoulder.

Mas. Bike ready. Bags packed. Kitted up.

“Just fixing the index system,” I say. “It kept slipping out of gear yesterday.” He nods, slides his wraparound shades beneath the dome of his henro hat and we are off, running down through the streets with the town waking up around us. Shops roll up their steel shutters; children hurry to school, multicolored backpacks swaying; delivery vans hum and purr through streets decorated with bunting and lanterns and banners for the Shinto festival. I share their sense of jubilee; of being on holiday, with one’s own agendas and destinations while elsewhere the world grinds on in the mundanities of work/eat/TV/sleep/work/eat/TV/sleep.

This stretch of henro path, from Temple Nineteen to Temple Twenty-three, is dense with connections to the life of the Daishi. The next valley over from Twenty contains the temple’s inmost sanctuary, a deep cave at the head of a narrow canyon where the saint meditated. Perhaps next pilgrimage. At Temple Twenty-one, atop Mount Tairyu—we must leave the bikes, and scramble up on foot—the Daishi attempted to invoke his guardian deity, Kokuzo, in a month-long ritual. No priest now—none are prepared to make the daily climb—but the diskperson guides from the yencard dispenser relish in the esoteric detail of the Daishi’s ritual: chanting the Mantra of Light one million times, painting the moon on a pure white sheet, and on the moon an image of Kokuzo, and on the image of Kokuzo a crown, and on the crown forty Buddhas, and in the palm of each Buddha an open lotus, and in each lotus a pearl emitting yellow rays…

“And so ad infinitum,” I comment.

It was not on the mountaintop that Kobo Daishi attained enlightenment, but in a sea cave at the eastern tip of the Muroto peninsula. And it is toward Cape Muroto, toward the sea, that we journey through whispering groves of bamboo—always, to me, a deeply spiritual sound, the voice of the Buddha of the valley. I can smell the ocean now beyond the hills where Temple Twenty-two lies hidden like a pearl in a lotus. As ever, it fills me with its divine discontent. Sea changes. Mas has not spoken to me, but I sense that his spiritual tide is on the turn. Our silence is the silence of two friends who do not need words to express their closeness. We have passed the barrier gate.

The henro path from Twenty-two to Twenty-three has been overlain with blacktop and is now the pawing ground of monstrous, fast-moving juggernauts. Our maps mark an alternative coastal route: a good-riding switchback of a path with sheer forested hills on one side and the serene blue Pacific on the other. Nirvana between the mountains and the sea. We cross a rocky headland and before us is a curving beach of white sand. At the end of it, the town of Hiyasa and the many-colored steeple of Temple Twenty-three’s pagoda.

I yell to Mas; he is as willing as I to pause awhile in this beautiful place. The water is cold; almost a physical shock. Air says late May, ocean says early March. I yell and flap and flubber enough to convince my long-cherished ambition to swim in every major ocean, then come running out, flicking long ropes of droplets from my hair. Mas waits beneath the outstretched branch of an ancient pine, like a blessing hand, drawing with light, fluid strokes of a brush pen. Turtles.

It’s good to see him drawing again.

“Every spring, about this time, they come to lay their eggs,” he says. “Every year, for millions of years, something calls them back to this beach to lay their eggs by the full moon. Long before we were, they came; long after we are gone, all of us, and all our plans and ambitions, they will return still.

“I take great reassurance from that.”

He signs and dates the drawing in his sketchbook, titles it
Turtle Beach, Temple Twenty-three, Moon’s Third Quarter: Namu Daishi Henjo Kongo.

After a time, Masahiko speaks again.

“I remember, years ago, we talked. That summer we all came down to your place, we talked about graphic entities that stimulated direct physical responses. A typeface that embedded subconscious images so that the reader would find it impossible to resist what the message said.”

“I remember that conversation.”

“You did it, didn’t you?”

My gloved fists clench instinctively. To relax them takes a mighty effort of will.

“Tell me, Ethan.”

“Yes. We did. Yes.”

“The Morikawa girl.”

“Healing is one of them. Laughter too. Tears. Ecstasy. Fear. Pain. Many many more. We named them after angels, the Sefirahs, but they deceived us.”

Mas laughs, bitter and theatrical; a kabuki laugh. “All this time, and I never knew I was traveling in the company of Danjuro 19 himself.”

“I’m no superhero, Mas. There are no superheroes, there is no James Bond; life isn’t
anime
.”

“Those akiras.” The word is like vomit to him. “You could have—I don’t know—frightened them, blinded them.” An unsuspected tight, clenched anger in Mas explodes. “Burned out their fucking brains.”

“I didn’t need to. You heard them say Kabukiman was always the friend of true akiras. They thought you were God.”

“I didn’t ask them to be Kabukiman freaks. I didn’t ask to be God; I didn’t ask for their adulation and hero worship and telling me how Danjuro stands for everything that is holy to them when everything they stand for, everything they are, makes me sick; sick, Ethan, like cancer in my stomach, and angry, and afraid; sick, angry, and afraid.” He is silent, tight, clenched within himself so long I think he has nothing more to say. It is only the pause for a deeper pain to percolate through the sands of the spirit.

“We were going to get married. She was a PR manager for my Tokyo distributors. I met her at the Free Queensland
Kabukiman!
launch. I loved her. Like that.” Five fingers snap, like a trap closing. “It can happen.” I know. “More often than people think.” I know that too, Masahiko.

Out on the ocean, million-ton ore carriers are moving ponderously between probabilities of tropical storms. Beyond them, a low dark smear is an offshore arcology burning, staining the horizon with oily smoke. Down the beach toward the town, two kids are throwing sticks for a woolly dog.

“She moved in with me after three days. She was like that, she would do things because she felt like doing them. She had this bobtail cat: a
mi-ke,
the rarest kind, blind in one eye. It would sit in the window and look down at the street. Sometimes it would bat at the people it saw moving down there. It thought they were insects. Didn’t have 3-D vision, you see. I had to work a lot at night—got into bad ways at art college, you remember, when I had to steal computer time to work on
Kinjiru
Cyber Les-girls, that’s where Kabukiman started, Danjuro had a walk-on part. She would bring me endless cups of coffee. She made the only perfect coffee. She measured it, you see. Funny; the big things fade, her face, her body; it’s the small things that remain; cats, coffee. She used to play volleyball up on the roof, in those tight, cute shorts they wear, and kneeguards and elbow pads. Kneeguards, elbow pads, and shorts, they remain floating in space. I can’t see her anymore. Isn’t that strange? I loved to watch her running, jumping, shouting, totally unself-conscious. She was beautiful, I loved her.