Cult X

  Sasahara knocked the security guard over and pointed his gun at him as he sat up. A smile began to spread across Sasahara’s face.

  “Wait! Don’t shoot!”

  Sasahara let loose. The security guard’s body jumped, and a terrifying amount of blood sprayed out. Takahara was stunned. What was happening? The bullets were passing through the man’s body and making holes in the wall on the opposite side. Though the gun was supposed to have been altered. The security guard fell back, covered in blood. He didn’t move. Why? Why?

  “Sasahara!”

  “. . . Takahara-san.”

  Sasahara pulled a pistol from his left pocket. He pointed it at Takahara.

  “. . . Sasahara?”

  “Thank you for everything.”

  Sasahara was smiling.

  “It’s over. Your mission is over. We’ll take it from here.”

  Sasahara pulled the trigger.

  There was a dry sound.

  Amid the peal of screams, Takahara’s body collapsed.

  13

  Takahara’s Chronicle

  I’m going to write about what happened.

  Why I’ll write it, and who I’ll write it for, I don’t know. I will try to write down everything that’s happened to me. Is it because I can’t give up on writing a novel? This is how it always is. Before I write, I question myself. Who cares about the reasons. I don’t need a reason. I will just listen to the desires inside me. These may be my last words.

  Six years ago, I was abducted from the hotel I was staying at in the middle of the night. A sheet was pulled over my head, my arms were tied, and I was thrown into the back seat of a car. I guessed we were traveling down an unpaved dirt road, because the car bumped wildly as it went. The rough sheet covering my head smelled like some sort of farm animal. Maybe chickens or donkeys. I won’t say what country I was in. I can’t. It was a small one in central Africa. I worked for an NGO that dug wells. The hotel I was staying in was really just an iron container with a wooden door attached, a quiet, square space that smelled of rust and an unidentifiable sweet odor. Someone knocked, and when I opened the door, there were long guns pointed at me. The kidnappers prodded my back with the ends of those long barrels. They didn’t seem to have any plan.

  “Where are we going?” I asked in English, but they didn’t say anything, just threw me in the car. They had no interest in me, and seemed to think the whole thing was a bother. They didn’t understand English, so trying to negotiate would be meaningless. The first thing I thought when they covered my head with that cloth was that I mustn’t resist. If they were covering my head, they were taking me to a place they didn’t want me to see. Which meant they were still considering sending me back.

  Blind, surrounded by the smell of farm animals, bumping up and down along with the car, I felt myself being worn away. They were probably holding me hostage because I was a foreigner. Would my NGO pay them off? Would the government? What if their negotiations failed? I considered what would happen. They’d kill me right away. Here, human life had little value. Death was nothing rare. People died from starvation, from illness, from civil wars, in riots. People were raped and murdered. Lynched. I had seen the torso of a dead woman wearing a T-shirt in the town. That was all that was left of her. They wouldn’t hesitate to kill me, and within a few hours, they wouldn’t even remember doing it. If after they killed me the hostage negotiations turned in their favor, they’d just think, “We messed up.” Like they’d lost a game of cards in a dingy café.

  Both of my arms were tied behind my back, and on either side of me was a large man holding a gun. I had no hope of running away. Humans live according to their own will. But I was alienated from my will, from the flow of my life, and I was alienated from my proper destiny. All the work I had done up to now, my skills, my character, the better aspects of my nature, none of that mattered. Nothing that made me human mattered to my kidnappers.

  The car stopped. The men grabbed my arms, and took me to some sort of room. I couldn’t tell anything about the room except that the floor was hard like concrete. I sensed some sort of bug with many thin legs crawling up the fourth toe of my bare right foot. I thought about my life. I cried, and only then did I realize that I’d been crying the whole time in the car as well. It will be fine, I told myself. I’m a hostage, so they won’t kill me. But something inside me was struggling, crying, and screaming. I had to stay calm. In the distance there was some sort of warm, dim light. I didn’t actually see it—my head was covered. It felt as though the light filled my vision from within. That light seemed to be my life. My trivial life—the most precious and warm thing. So far, I thought. I’m so far away from that now. That warmth must have been everything I had experienced up till now, but I was so far from it. Suddenly I could see the door to an apartment in front of me. I felt like vomiting, but I swallowed it down. It was a memory from when I was small and starving. Was I going to starve to death like this? I was scared and tried to scream again. The memory probably surfaced to protect me. The fear of starving to death already existed within me. That memory seemed to have a will of its own. It was writhing inside me. By being guided to that fear I always have, I may have been able to push the death approaching right before my eyes out of my consciousness. Just a few seconds was all I needed. My emotions surged like they were trying to force me awake. I remembered the words “lose consciousness.” I couldn’t lose consciousness. Someone slapped my cheek and I knew I was awake. Despite that, I was caught up in a battle to not lose consciousness. My perception of the world was lagging. It kept trying to stop a few seconds before the present, as if to reject the passage of time. But time flowed on regardless of my will. At some point, there was a man in the room. He smelled like grime and animals, and, for some reason, milk.

  “Oh, no.”

  It was the man’s voice. He was speaking in English. I called out from the darkness of the cloth over my head, like I was clinging to some connected memory.

  “Save me.” I didn’t have the time for niceties.

  “You’re Japanese, right? That’s too bad. We made a mistake.”

  “What?”

  “We were planning on kidnapping an employee of the CUUA. Not you. We have no need for you. We’ll have to kill you.”

  CUUA isn’t their real name, but this company had made a successful bid for the rights to a small oil field. A tremendous number of farmers’ fields were destroyed for this company’s sake. The farmers whose fields had been destroyed all flowed into the withered towns looking for income. The women sold their bodies, and the men their children. The NGO I worked for objected to their business. We were trying to inform people of their profiteering.

  “I work for CUUA.”

  I didn’t know what I was saying.

  “No, you don’t. You’re Japanese. I saw your passport.”

  His voice rang through the darkness. I didn’t think about how I had promised to devote my life to fighting starvation. Nor did I think about how my friends had laughed at me in a bar when I tried to talk about living life to its fullest. If only we had exposed CUUA’s profiteering. But here I was, trying to pass myself off as one of their employees. Someone who would be valuable as a hostage. I wished I worked for CUUA, was jealous of people who did.

  “I work for them. Really!”

  “Don’t lie. You work for an NGO, don’t you? We made a mistake.”

  “You’re wrong. Please! Please!”

  I struggled toward the man, both my arms still tied behind my back. I probably looked like a wingless yellow insect. But I could never get any closer.

  “I haven’t seen anything. I don’t know anything about you. There’s no reason to kill me. Just leave me somewhere, and I’ll find my own way home.”

  “Impossible. You may find our hideout.”

  “So leave me somewhere far off.”

  “What?” He sounded surpri
sed. “Are you telling me to waste gas on you?”

  I noticed that my crotch was wet, but I wasn’t sure when I had started to piss myself.

  “It will all be over soon. Yes . . . Oh, I’ll take off this hood for you at least.”

  He snatched the cloth off roughly. The room was smaller than I expected. There were light spots in the darkness. I found myself trying to get up, my hands still tied, to run toward him. But the next thing I remember was being on the floor. The darkness was tinged red. That red eventually mixed with green, and before I was sure if those colors were real, or just an afterimage stained on my eyelids, they were lost in the darkness of the room.

  I cried. I screamed. I struggled to untie the ropes on my arms. I wasn’t sure if one hour had passed or three. I found myself looking for that bug, the one that had touched my foot earlier. I wasn’t sure why—maybe I was trying to help my kidnappers by killing that bug? Look, I killed this bug. I did it for you. I did it for you. I wondered if I was going mad. Even as I wondered, I continued to look for the bug. Maybe it will show up if I pretend I’ve given up, I thought. If I stick out my foot like this, maybe it will come here looking for warmth. No, I have to act as though I’m not looking for it—even in my thoughts. I’m good at that. But I could never find the bug. It was as if it had vanished. As if to reject my insanity. As if to alienate even me from that insanity.

  There were no windows in that room. If there were a window to give me perspective on the outside world, would I notice how incredibly small my life was, and grow embarrassed? But I chewed over the fact that I was alive. I was tied up, but I could move my hands. My legs too. One second passed. And now another. My eyes grew used to the darkness. I couldn’t take my eyes off the tiny cracks in the walls. The cracks in the lower part of the wall, right at my eye level as I lay there, collapsed. There are cracks, I thought. Cracks exist. I thought about how in an instant I would stop existing. I would be forever cut off from what does exist. They were so heartless. The walls, and the cracks, and the bug that would never let me catch it, and time with its seconds just passing by without me, they were all so heartless. That can’t be true, I thought again. There’s no way the world is like this. The cold, hard stone floor remained cold and hard. I remembered starving again. I don’t know if I was trying to protect myself. The world was certainly heartless back then. Because of my body weakening from starvation, the door, and the television that no longer worked because the power had been cut, and the metal in the shape of a heater, and the wood in the shape of a chair, they were all heartless. I moved toward the wall, and pressed my cheek against it. I could feel a slight chill. The wall is giving me its coldness now. Which means that the wall isn’t being heartless. No, but, it is. The wall doesn’t care if I die. I’m the only one who thinks it matters whether I die or not. The world, this wall, to them this is normal. The people who are trying to kill me think so, too. I must also make myself feel that my death is something normal. But I can’t. I can’t make myself fit with the essence of the world. The world and I are totally different things. And maybe I’m the one that’s wrong.

  The door opened. I shouted something, and a gun was thrust toward me. It looked like a machine gun, but I wasn’t really sure. “Let’s go. We’ll get the room bloody if we shoot you in here.” I didn’t understand what they were saying.

  “I won’t get you bloody,” I said. “I won’t get your clothes dirty. So let me live.” My words were failing. They tried to stand me up, but I tensed my body as best I could and resisted. If I leave this floor, I’ll really die, I thought. Why aren’t I a floor or a wall? I wondered. If I were a floor or a wall, I’d never be killed. They couldn’t stand me up, so they dragged me. Like a heavy bundle of grass tied up with rope. Is this a lie? I wondered. It can’t be real, can it? I’m Japanese and I have always followed the rules, and I came here out of good intentions, so it can’t be real. This can’t be life’s answer to my good intentions, can it? Even if they’re going to kill me, isn’t it too sudden? Shouldn’t they do something to solemnize my death? When I was taken outside, I felt an oppressive chill. It’s cold, I thought. I hate the cold, I thought. I thought it was funny that even though I was going to die, I could think about how I hated the cold, and I wanted to tell them that. Did I tell them, “It’s cold,” like I was flattering them? Like we were friends or something, and I was trying to confirm the fact that it was cold out? “It’s cold. Strange, isn’t it? Don’t you think so? Even though I’m going to die, it’s cold.” But regardless of my will, I was pushed down, and a gun was pressed up to the back of my head. The skin where the muzzle touched me twitched in resistance. I cried. I started to piss myself again. It was like the water in me was trying to run away from the body that would die in a few seconds. “What,” I asked, “What are you?”

  I didn’t ask because I wanted to know who those people really were. I was speaking to the thing that was trying to crush me, that heedless force that would go on to crush so many others.

  But they laughed and said, “YG.” It was a name I hadn’t heard at the time.

  Then I heard a car. Based on their response to that sound, I gathered they were expecting someone. The car stopped, and someone got out. He was still far away. I thought that, if nothing else, I’d at least get to live until he made it to us. One second. I can live one second more. One second. This one second. My field of vision kept shrinking, and I couldn’t see anything but his shoes. “This is the teacher,” the man I had spoken to in English whispered to me. “You’ve got good luck, getting to meet the teacher before you die. He’ll pray for you.”

  This being called the teacher crouched in front of me. He had black skin and big white eyes. He was a thin, beautiful old man. I tried to speak, to spit up some words to beg for my life. But I couldn’t say anything. More tears streamed down my already damp face. I was about to lose my final chance. But that being they called the teacher nodded slightly as though he understood everything I was trying to say.

  Words in a language I didn’t understand flew over my head. For some reason, the tears I was crying were different from before. A warmth spread through me, and my body wouldn’t stop shaking violently. Why did I know then, that I, on all fours, had been saved? Even though that being hadn’t said anything to me.

  That being crouched in front of me once again. I looked at his beautiful black face, crying.

  “Help us,” he told me, and stood up. I hadn’t responded, but it was as if he knew what I would say. Just like the heartless walls and cracks, he didn’t care about me. But he wasn’t heartless. He was something else entirely.

  “The teacher has saved you. You’re Japanese; that’s rare around here. Since no one will expect you to be a terrorist, we can use you.”

  But that wasn’t why, I thought. That being and I, we just made a deal the others don’t know about. I didn’t know what the deal was, but I couldn’t escape that thought.

  14

  This armed organization, “YG,” was founded by the adherents of a small folk religion.

  They had been persecuted for centuries, but the religion was passed on in secret. Religions have always fought to acquire believers. And they didn’t just fight with physical power. The more easily their teachings spread among the people, the more powerful and effective their religion became. In other words, they tried to give the people what they wanted. There’s research that claims the reason Christianity included teachings about healing the sick was to attract believers. Actually, when one considers religions not as faiths but as history, you can see that most religious texts show the influence of their various historical contexts and cultural interests.

  This folk belief lost out to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the battle to get believers. I won’t write its proper name, which is forbidden, but it is commonly referred to as “R.” R contains a pantheistic element that existed everywhere in the world at that time. Their religious texts, their songs, were passed
down orally from about 600 BC. That means that their founding texts are older than those of Christianity, Islam, and even Judaism. In their religion, sex was a religious rite. It was a kindness given from the gods to humans, who are all fated to die, and to make sure that humans experience that gift, the gods were said to descend when people had sex. However, the gods hope that humans are so caught up in the act that they can’t sense them. Because of that, the only people who can sense the gods are those who are watching others have sex. And thus, in this religion, there is a custom of watching others have sex. While they watch, those people thank the gods for the kindness granted them in this world. On days of worship, they spread a sheet outside, and people gather around to watch men and women having sex. The young men and women go mad by the light of bonfires. The spectators are allowed to masturbate.

  It is an unsophisticated religion. Some may even say it’s barbaric. This religion even lacks the essential concept of a division between good and evil. There is only one standard by which things are judged: starvation is forbidden.

  Starvation is forbidden. This is both a standard of judgment in their religion, and a religious precept. It’s a simple precept, taken straight from the villagers’ desire to not starve. Thus if, for example, someone were to kill someone, take their money, and distribute it to the poor, that would be approved of. A rich man would not be considered a good person as long as there were any poor people who lived nearby.

  One wouldn’t expect such a religion to spread. It’s radical, and there are many lapses in its teachings. It’s primitive and sloppy and at the same time rejects the rights of those with power. Religions spread through the powerful. Of course such a religion was suppressed.

  I became a member of YG, and was given a basic lesson on how to use a gun. I had been possessed by a fear of death, but once I knew I was saved, all I could think of was running away. Though the teacher had spared my life, I didn’t become one of his disciples. In my desperation I’d thought I would do whatever they wanted if they just spared my life, but once it was spared, it turned out I couldn’t keep a promise like that. I was not simple enough to be brainwashed that way. The reason I didn’t flee immediately was that my life wasn’t in pressing danger, and I thought it would be better to wait for a safe opportunity.