L. Navid Osbert (東京)
28 September, 2009
I hadn’t known what to expect of my predecessor at all, but he still managed not to be it.
At Kay’s insistence, I left my things in the entryway of the apartment and followed her to where she was parked. Kay drives a company car, a black, intimidating Benz CLS — which if the pay I receive for the actual work I do weren’t indication enough, definitely suggests this company has deep pockets. Why they’re wasting time on a project like this is beyond me.
She drove me to Shibuya station, explaining that I was to board a Shonan-Shinjuku line train bound away from Tokyo, and get off at Saitama-Shintoshin station. My predecessor lived in that area and would meet me at the station. All I had to do was tell her what time I boarded the train, and she would let him know what time to expect me. Pretty simple.
“But you can’t tell anyone I did this. You can write it on the site, but you can’t tell anyone.”
“I can write it on the site?”
“Yeah. The site is fine. But if anyone asks you, you two either didn’t really meet, or if you did it had nothing to do with me.”
“What if they’re asking me after reading it on the site? Am I just supposed to contradict myself?”
“Yes. Or rather, your spoken word will contradict your written word in that point. Or wait, there are problems with putting it like that too. Your communicated word will contradict your official recorded word on that point. It’s not that complicated.”
I scratched my head. I wanted to point out that the official record seemed more important to leave bad behavior out of than off-the-record communication, but she seemed so certain that I didn’t.
“Fine by me,” I said. “Can I include this distinction you’re making?”
“If you mean on the site, yes, please. Not to anyone who asks you though. Distinguishing the two really isn’t that strange. Don’t you know anything about business or politics?”
“No, I guess I don’t.” I really don’t.
We stopped at a red light, and she leaned away from the steering wheel to reach into the backseat. She came back with a small hand-sign, kind of a cross between a protestor’s picket sign and an airport driver’s name sign. On it were written WAR IS OVER! in both Japanese and English.
“Here,” she said, handing me the sign. “When you get to the station, hold this.”
“What is this?” I looked more closely at the sign. It was written in fat black marker on a white background, by hand. “Did you write this?”
“It’s so he can identify you.”
“You can’t just describe me over the phone?”
“His idea. He was very particular about it.”
Well, I thought, what the hell. I’d look like a lone, confused protester, but it would be maybe ten minutes out of my life, in a place where I didn’t know anyone. It was a little annoying, but not worth complaining about.
“Okay then. I stand just outside the ticket gate and hold up this sign until he approaches me.”
“That should do,” she said, pulling the car up to a curb. “Oh, here we are.”
I hadn’t been paying attention, but Scramble Crossing was right in front of us, the mass of crossing pedestrians writhing and shuddering in its midst.
“He’s sort of a… different kind of person. But whatever questions you had, he can answer for you, I think. If you still want to tender your resignation, tell me and I’ll be back for the apartment keys.”
“Thanks, Kay.”
“Good luck,” she said.
—–
I tried my best to carry the sign discretely during the train ride, but it was too big. Finally I just rested it face-down on my lap, but it drew uneasy looks anyway.
Saitama-Shintoshin was a relatively small station, but still fairly crowded. When I came out of the ticket gate, I stood in the open for a few minutes with the sign at my side, searching the faces of passersby and those waiting for someone who might stand out in case I could find him without needing to display the sign. There were plenty of interesting characters there, to be sure, but finally nobody who seemed to be paying me any special attention or watching the gate very closely.
Finally, I lifted the sign, and stood just outside the gate, waiting. I scanned the faces around me again for any sudden looks of recognition, but there was still nothing. Well, people were looking at me, but just because I was holding a big sign that read WAR IS OVER!
A few minutes passed. It surprised me how quickly I got used to holding the sign. It seemed to merge with my identity once I gave up on shutting it out. Finally, I guess, that’s what the human animal is. Accept that you have to stand outside this train station and hold this sign, and you immediately become The Man Holding the Sign Outside the Station.
“Happy Christmas,” said one of a group of high school girls to me, in English, on her way into the station. Her friends tittered.
More time passed. A tall, thin, long-haired and bearded man about my age walked around from behind me, ran his eyes intently over the sign for a moment, and then grinned. He gave me a thumbs-up and then continued on his way.
Several more minutes. A pair of young foreign twenty-something guys passed me on their way into the station. “Right on man,” said one to me, in an American surfer drawl. “Wicked, that’s brilliant,” said the other, this one’s accent British.
“Can we take a picture with you?” said the American.
“Fuck that, come get a beer with us,” said the Briton.
“Thanks, but I’m busy,” I said, trying my best to seem stand-offish. I focused on searching the crowd, and they continued on their way. But only a moment later, there was a tap on my shoulder. I turned around, expecting to find them there again and preparing to explain that I was not doing what it looked like I was doing and wanted to be left alone. But this time it was a small, old man in a fishing hat and a worn old baseball jacket.
“I think you’ve gotten the message across,” said the old man, in perfect English that caught me off guard. Not perfect in that his pronunciation and grammar were crisp and clean and spot-on, perfect because they weren’t. They were muddy and comfortable, like only native speakers can ever be.
“Want to get a cup of coffee?” the old man asked. “I usually don’t drink coffee after noon, but I think I’ll make an exception, this being a special occasion and all.”
“War’s End?” I asked him.
He tapped my sign with one finger. “As optimistic as you look about it, not today I’m afraid. Though it’s not where we are for the moment, so we can still enjoy a cup of coffee.”
—–
I dropped the sign in an umbrella holder at the entryway of the cafe we went into. We ordered our drinks, two black iced coffees, and sat down at a smoking seat by a window. He produced a kiseru, an old-style Japanese smoking pipe, and a small bag of loose leaf tobacco. The kiseru looked like a genuine antique. While he stuffed the bowl with practiced movements, I sipped my coffee.
“Thanks for being a good sport about the sign,” he said, though in fact I hadn’t said anything about it to him one way or the other. “There’s a John Lennon museum right around the corner from the station. I figured it was a convenient and clever double-entendre.”
“Forgive me,” I said, “but I’m not sure I get the reference.”
“Oh?” his eyes lit up as he struck a match and held it to the bowl, inhaling deeply. He turned his head and blew smoke slowly and deliberately from the corner of his mouth. “I guess that amnesia you’ve got is the real deal.”
This caught me off guard. “You know about that?”
“I’ve been following the project site you’ve put up,” he said simply. “And to be honest, I knew about it beforehand too. I’ve been following your work for a while, and even if it was a small blip on the news radar, I read that you were in Malaysia during the bombings and what rumors were published. Still, you’ve forgotten all about John and Yoko? That’s really something. You were a big fan, in your academic way.”
I said nothing.
“It’s tempting for me to wonder if it’s fate that you ended up back here again, of all places. But I can’t blame fate for what I myself had a hand in.”
I didn’t want to, but I took the bait. “You had something to do with it? You followed my work?”
“I just recommended you when I told them I was retiring. I’m still a little surprised they were able to track you down and hook you, though.” He puffed at the kiseru, smacking his lips. “As for your work,” he continued thoughtfully, “even your supporters questioned the meaningfulness of it in this day and age, but I thought it was important and insightful. Maybe as a Japanese-American, and as a fossil, I had a niche point of view, though.”
“Are you trying to side-track me with this?”
He laughed heartily. “It’d be a little difficult to side-track a conversation in its opening statements. But I guess I see what you’re saying. You want to cut straight to business then, to what it is you wanted to ask me?”
“That’s why I’m here, isn’t it?”
He bit his lip thoughtfully. “Well. I couldn’t say why you’re here. But I thought it’d be interesting to get to know you a little bit, is why I told Kay to put you in touch with me.”
“It was your idea?”
“Absolutely,” he nodded, and puffed at the pipe again. “But then again it was an idea I had after reading you talking about wishing you could talk to me on the site, so maybe the idea really did originate with you.” He went to take another pull, but the bowl of the kiseru had gone out. He frowned, rested it face down in the ash-tray on the table, and lifted his glass of iced coffee to his lips, ignoring the straw. “Anyway,” he said before taking a sip, “go on.”
“What the hell is War’s End?”
“Good question,” he said. “You cut to the quick.”
“You don’t honestly expect me to believe that it’s a genuine historical record.”
“I’m an academic, just like you are. I don’t honestly expect people to believe anything I work on. That’s for prophets and religious leaders. If I expect anything from people it’s just for them to think about the possibilities.”
“But how can you even relate this to academia? You just wrote notes for some grand fantasy epic and didn’t finish it.”
He sat up. “Let’s get something straight, Navid. I didn’t write the Eiji Daitokai Epic, or any of those other manuscripts. I wrote those notes, made those sketches, in the course of trying to understand them, but that’s all I’ll let you credit or blame me for.”
“Fine.” I sighed. “So you’re not the author either. But in that case, what made you take them seriously at all?”
“Another good quesion.” He gave two deliberate nods of his head, then picked up his kiseru and rapped it against the ashtray several times, forcefully. The noise drew looks from the cafe staff and other customers alike, but he didn’t seem to care. When all of the ash was emptied out, he picked up his bag, removed two more pinches of tobacco, and packed them into the bowl. He put the mouthpiece back to his lips and lit the bowl with another match, inhaling thoughtfully. He rested an elbow on the table and stared out the window, blowing smoke straight into the pane of glass. For a time I thought that he wasn’t going to respond any further to my question at all, but I didn’t press him. I wasn’t convinced at this point that this conversation was anything more than an interlude, a diversion preceding my immediate resignation. But finally he straightened out and gave another two nods.
“The answer to that question,” he started, his voice gone gruff now and quiet and serious, “is manifold. Like any question of cause and effect. I suppose the main component is that which will be the least satifying to you: I had a feeling.”
I bit my tongue here.
“I suspect that even if this revelation does not satisfy your quest for meaning in this project, you can sympathize with what I am trying to say enough to understand it. There are times a person has a feeling about a certain path in life. Sometimes it’s a job. Sometimes it’s a lover, a spouse. Sometimes it’s a house they’re considering buying, a new place they’re moving to. A shirt. They don’t have to be grandiose things, and sometimes the things that result from them are trivial. Sometimes they’re life-changing too, if you’ll forgive that expression. But in any case, when it came to these manuscripts, I had an unmistakeable feeling.”
I nodded.
“But of course a strict rationalist, under the weight of all we know about the mind, matter and energy, and the brain, would insist that feelings such as these cannot be first causes on any order. They are most likely a subconscious-level synthesis of other factors, the mind taking shortcuts, bundling other small reasons up into a larger and more powerful, if less tangible aggregate reason. So then, as an intellectual talking to another intellectual, I suppose you’d like to me to self-analyze, to at least conjecture on what the reasons for this indescribable feeling were.”
Though I had been impatient at first, I found myself calm and resigned now. Much the same as I’d felt after ten minutes of holding that sign in the station. What pressing matters did I have to attend to besides hitting the road aimlessly again? “That’s about right,” I said. I stirred my coffee with the green plastic straw.
“Well, let’s say first of all that my career as an academic who is taken seriously was well behind me. A younger man might’ve had time to lay low and make a recovery, but I’m too old. A fatal blow like what happened to me is at my age an absolutely fatal blow.” He sighed, smiled a little sadly to himself, and took a pull from his kiseru. “It’s Joji, by the way. My name is Joji. But in America, as a professor, I was always known as George. George Kisaragi.”
He stopped here, and smoked at his pipe for a bit. It was clear that he was expecting his name to ring bells for me, and I hesitated. It didn’t at all.
“Don’t recognize it?” he said.
“No,” I said, taking an embarrassed sip from my coffee. “But I didn’t get a John Lennon reference, either, for whatever that’s worth.”
He laughed. “Fair enough. It’s not a name anyone would recognize outside the cloistered world of university professors, but that said I have a feeling you might have known it before the injury.”
“Sorry.”
He shook his head. “That an amnesiac doesn’t know it causes me no great heartache. It is troubling though that of all my thesises, the one which had the most popular impact and which cost me the most has spread without even earning me any infamy.”
I thought I could see he wanted to go into more detail about it, so I was about to ask him, but he cut me off.
“It’s all right,” he said, “that’s another topic. I’ll tell you when we’ve gotten your questions out of the way. Any way, suffice it to say that I didn’t have much to lose as far as academic repute goes, so taking on a crank project — even by professor standards — like this one didn’t threaten me as far as that goes. The reasons may be different, but the way you’ve been living these recent years, I think it’s the same for you. And it’s interesting too, you’ll give it that.”
“Sure,” I said. “I had no inclination to default back to the kind of work I’d been doing before the amnesia just because it theoretically would have been the path of least resistance. If it hadn’t held my interest I wouldn’t even be here resigning right now.”
“So you’re sure about that resignation?”
I shrugged. “If I can’t take what I’m doing seriously, how can I do it?”
He smiled, nodded, and puffed at his pipe, waving into the bowl with his fingers as he did so to excite the fire. As he exhaled, he nodded again. “So that hinges a great deal on what you’re asking me now then, doesn’t it?”
“I guess it might,” I said. “But I’ve learned that I’m pretty stubborn. You’re not going to sell me just by talking the right line. I just wanted more context, more of an idea of what I was dealing with, for my work. I’d say they’re trying to lock the pasture gate after the cows have already escaped, introducing us now.”
“Funny,” he raised an eyebrow at me. “That’s a Korean figure of speech you just used there. In English it’s ‘A day late and a dollar short,’ isn’t it?”
I shrugged again. “Either way.”
He smiled again, chuckled to himself. It was graceful, the kind of self-amusement that men can only indulge in with age, I thought.
“Either way indeed.” He turned the kiseru over and whacked it into the ashtray again, this time only drawing the attention of one young couple — the only ones who hadn’t been around for the first time — and then put another pinch of tobacco in it. “Let’s move on then. Another reason for the feeling I had. And here I can also communicate to you where these manuscripts came from insofar as I know.”
“Great,” I said. And not sarcastically, either. Once I had resigned myself to letting the conversation follow its own flow, without regard to expediency or efficiency, I found I was enjoying talking with him.
“I received the Eiji Daitokai Epic and the others from the internet.”
“What? From who?”
“From the internet, is as far as I can tell.”
“You mean you found them on a website?”
“No,” he said. “They were emailed to me. Piece by piece. Over the course of more than half a year.”
“Who emailed them to you?”
“That’s a question that still plagues me, but I’ve resigned myself to the understanding that the internet emailed them to me. The internet itself.” He held up a hand to silence my objection. “There are specialists for hire, you know, big companies and freelance hackers, even simple software, that trace email and IP addresses and track down the physical locations of where things appeared on the net from. And believe me, I made use of just about all of them. At first I thought it was random, vocabulary and syntax assembled by computer logic from some software, junk-mailed to me from accounts in Russia and Ukraine. That’s where the first emails were traced back to. But then they were coming from Mexico, from Nigeria, from North Korea and Brazil and India and then eventually each individual mail was from a different place. South Korea, China, England, France, Spain, New York, California, Texas, Quebec, Toronto, Australia, South Africa. Where I went to the trouble of having separate traces run on the same email, I was getting two different original locations on opposite sides of the globe. You wouldn’t believe how much money I spent on that, just to mystify myself more.”
“And then?”
“There is no and then. Some things are too big for us to defeat. I had to throw in the towel.”
“And the conclusion you come to is that the internet itself was writing this stuff?”
“It’s a place-holder conclusion, I admit, because I just couldn’t go any further. But in this day and age, is it so hard to accept as a possibility?”
“That the ‘internet’ is a conscious entity unto itself that can exercise creative free-will and contact individuals directly?”
“It sounds insane, and that’s exactly what I thought of it too. But as I told you, my standards for insanity had shifted, they had boiled down to my own abilities to reason and were free from the burdens of what society, my colleagues and friends and family, considered sane and insane. Finally I figured that it would be foolish to discount a possibility without the slightest shred of evidence to the contrary.”
“But how can you even regard an abstract collection of individual human beings acting as a unified consciousness with its own directives and creative output as a possibility?”
He nodded. “It would certainly be a new occurrence. New in those terms. But already there’s the widely-accepted idea of collective-consciousness. And now that there’s a means for near-instantaneous collective thought and action among individuals in geographically and linguistically disperate societies in the form of cyberspace, what’s to say we aren’t at a point of evolutionary singularity?”
“Singularity? Evolution?” I sipped at my coffee, and shrugged. “I think you’d better elaborate.”
“Something akin to the emergence of the first multicellular organism. If you compared the relative timelines, it might seem ridiculous that in the short time modern-consciousness-possessing human beings have walked the earth, we would already be pooling together into some grander-scale entity when it took amino acids so long to become DNA, DNA so long to become self-replicating cell nuclei, and so on, but there is a basis in history for these things speeding up. And if you look at historical human behavioral patterns from the emergence of nomadic societies to the emergence of late-stage capitalist nation-states, it’s clear that as a species we have an inescapable predisposition for intelligent specialization and collectivization, even in ostensibly individualistic societies like the U.S.A.”
“I see what youre saying,” I shrugged again. “So let’s say I take the leap and believe that it’s possible that the internet might represent some new form of consciousness that arises from cellular behavior of a huge number of lesser consciousnesses. Let’s say I ignore all the objections that come to mind for that happening here and now at the current level of human societal and technological development. It would be god-like in comparison to us. Even simple or tiny organisms like earthworms or fleas are too big to communicate or interact directly and intentionally with individual bacteria or amoeba, much less talk to their own cells.” I stopped, and sucked coffee through the straw, frowned. “I guess they can talk to their own cells, in a manner of speaking. Nervous systems might be like the information media of the cell world. But even so, neurons in my brain firing, releasing neurotransmitters that in turn release hormones into my bloodstream that cause the organs and muscles of my body to perform actions couldn’t really be called me talking to my cells. I can’t, say, contact a white blood cell in a scratch on my ankle and tell it a story that would be in any sense intelligible to it.”
“No, you couldn’t,” he nodded. “But if you developed some means to single it out and send it coded messages of a sort, if it were a white blood cell with the disposition, time, and capacity, it might receive these signals and attempt to interpret them in a pattern that was meaningful to itself.”
“It’s tough to accept extending the analogy to personification at that level.”
“Sure,” he nodded. “This is a vague way of describing a vague process that I’m conjecturing to be taking place. And it may be, in any case, that the contact a super-consciousness made with me wasn’t particularly conscious. It’s counter-intuitive, perhaps, but I may have received these documents by a process similar to the muscle cells in your wrist receiving neurotransmitters fired from your brainstem because your forebrain thought that you needed to pick up that cup of coffee and sip at it while you listened to this strange idea.”
I stopped the coffee on its way to my lips, and set it down. “Okay.” I said. I didn’t know what else to say, I was feeling pretty fried by this point.
As if reading my mood, he suddenly checked his watch, which as he pulled the sleeve of his varsity jacket back, looked almost as old as the kiseru from which he’d been smoking. The brown leather of its strap was rough and stained a dozen different shades.
“About time to call it an afternoon,” he said. “I hope you’ve enjoyed this chat as much as I have. It’s tough enough to find intellectual conversation nowadays, but here it’s especially tough to find it in English.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “Thank you for taking the time.”
“Still gonna call it quits?”
“I guess I can’t answer that just now.” In fact I didn’t feel particularly motivated at that point to take the reigns of the project back up, but I also didn’t feel capable of making any binding decisions either, as overloaded as my head felt. “I’ll let you know.”
“No need,” he said. “The site’s there, and if there’s any need for clarification I can always ask Kay. She’s not technically supposed to make me privy to any confidential information on the project since I quit it, but she’s a reasonable person. Sees me as kind of… an alumni. And I guess recognizes that without me there wouldn’t be a project at all.”
I nodded again, unsure of why he was telling me this. Just talking, I guess. I can understand that. Suddenly something jarred my memory.
“That’s right,” I said. “One last thing. Why are they so interested in continuing this? Why are they taking this lark so seriously, if the person who discovered the documents himself has thrown in the towel?”
“Ho,” he said, grinning. “That’ll have to be another talk, I’m afraid. But that’s okay. Sequence and pacing are important, don’t you think?”
I shrugged. I knew I wanted to be more persistent, but I was pretty spent.
“I’m sure they’re taking care of you there,” he said, slipping his kiseru and tobacco back into a small zippered bag, “so you mind covering this one?”
“Sure, no problem.”
“Take care of yourself, Navid,” he said. “And good luck. Whatever happens, I’ll be keeping up.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Have a nice rest of the day.”
And with that, he donned his fishing hat, got slowly to his feet, and strolled toward the exit, shoulders hunched and hands thrust into his jacket pockets.
I put the coffee straw back to my lips and sipped. The last droplets of liquid and air groaned into the plastic tube.
