a smile the way Mariko put on lipstick: it wasn’t a part of him, just something he wore to make the right impression. He wore the smile in his voice too, and transformed seamlessly from pissed-off CO to genteel public relations rep. Whoever was on the other end of the phone could never guess that he was ready to eat Mariko alive.
But whatever he heard over the phone made his face go green. His eyes turned to those big, beautiful windows, as if he might catch sight of whatever it was that made him sick to his stomach.
He hung up the phone without a word. Looking at Mariko and Sakakibara, he said, “There’s been an incident. Haneda Airport. We need to go.”
2
At long last, Koji Makoto was reunited with his father. This time they would not easily be parted.
They sat together at a writing desk in the home of Makoto’s lawyer, friend, and worshipper, Hamaya Jiro. It was a tidy desk in a tidy two-floor condominium in a high-rise Meguro apartment complex. The second floor of the condo was not supposed to exist. There was only one entrance, a stairway from below, though on the upper floor there was a false door. There were also neighbors up there who, had they been ordinary tenants, would have wondered why no one ever came or went from the apartment between them. But they were not ordinary neighbors; they were Makoto’s worshippers and concubines, nuns of the Divine Wind. Neither was Hamaya’s apartment ordinary. It concealed the hidden staircase that led upstairs to Makoto’s sanctum sanctorum. None of this was in the building’s floor plan.
The sanctuary upstairs was for worship. Since listening to his father was not worship, Makoto sat at the writing desk in the study downstairs, hunched over his notebook and scribbling furiously. His father looked at him, mute because they did not speak in words.
Makoto didn’t take his time with his father for granted. Sooner or later the law would separate them, perhaps permanently. Before that happened Makoto wanted to record every last drop of wisdom. His father never commanded him, never prescribed what to do. Rather, he dared Makoto to go further, to think on a grander scale, to express the truth in ways Makoto hadn’t dreamed possible. That was why they would be separated: because his father’s vision was so grand. That was also why the condominium was not leased in Hamaya’s name, and why it was not the only one of its kind, and why Makoto and his father never stayed at one address for more than a couple of nights: because otherwise it would be far too easy for law enforcement to track them.
There was no doubting that the law would come, for Makoto’s sermon at the airport would unsettle them beyond words. Of course that was the object of the sermon. Being settled was an obstacle to their enlightenment, and Makoto’s calling was to enlighten all beings. But Makoto had many more sermons to deliver before his time was up, and that meant he had to stay clear of the police, at least for a little while.
News of his sermon at the airport had already reached the television. Makoto could not watch it with the sound on, for without exception the reporters only reacted with delusion and fear. Even the wordless cameramen were deluded. They chose to film all the tear-streaked, fear-stricken faces, not the smoke rising from the hollowed terminal. Why could they not see the truth? Fright was the reaction of the undisciplined mind, the mind that wanted reality to be other than what it was. Why broadcast such a senseless emotion when they could film something like smoke? Evanescence was truth; fear of it was sickness.
Makoto had learned that long before he was reunited with his father, but he could talk about the truth with his father in a way that no one else could comprehend. Even now he wrote with all the urgency of a medic performing CPR, trying to record everything his father was telling him before it was too late. “One thousand,” Makoto said. “Three hundred. Four.” He scribbled the numbers in kanji, drew them in big numerals, repeated them aloud. He did not yet know what they meant.
He and his father were so dissimilar. Makoto had long, flowing hair; his father was bald. Makoto had a thick black beard; his father had no lower jaw from which to grow a beard. Makoto was a man of flesh; his