Apocalypse for Beginners (17 page)

The excavators were working at a good clip, rather gracefully, too. It brought to mind some sort of dance, a demolition ballet. Merriam took a pack of Dubek No. 9 out of her pocket and offered one to Hope, who shook her
head. A match, a puff. They looked on as a section of wall crashed down in a cloud of dust. The smell of rubble spread around them, and Hope automatically brought the nail of her ring finger to her lips. But that morning’s manicure had left her incisors with nothing to sink into.

The mystery deepened. This was already the second time that Mekiddo had disappeared, and Merriam swore she had seen this place humming with activity only a few days earlier.

No matter how tolerant she had become toward the unlikely and the improbable, Hope refused to accept that a multinational corporation could, in no more than seventy-two hours, move several hundred employees, chairs and desks, flotillas of photocopiers, kilos of paper clips, potted ferns, water dispensers, coffee machines, sandwich vending machines—in total, a quantity of matter and biomass equivalent to the weight of a small iceberg.

Merriam did not seem especially surprised. She dragged on her cigarette as she watched the excavators working.

“They are razing Tokyo, comrade. One piece at a time.”

The way she saw it, Tokyo was in constant mutation. Nothing stayed still for very long and the landscape was
metamorphosing at a mind-boggling pace. You could go down the same street every morning, and then, from one day to the next, not recognize it any more.

“But there aren’t as many construction sites since the Nikkei crashed. And, in fact, they’re predicting the most severe real estate devaluation in decades, to be accompanied by a wave of suicides.”

“That bad?”

“That bad. And that’s just for starters. I could show you real estate not too far from here where the square metre was going for a million dollars last summer. Japan is going downhill fast.”

She hesitated, seemingly on the verge of adding something, but changed her mind. She smoked half her cigarette and then flicked the smoking butt into the back of a passing truck.

“Are you sure you’ll be able to find your way back?” Merriam asked three times as they stood on the corner of Akko Boulevard, about to part company for the afternoon.

Hope assured her that, yes, there was no problem—she had her
Rough Planet
in her pocket. Merriam nevertheless
insisted on marking the phone number of the Jaffa on Hope’s forearm, just in case.

“Which area are you planning to go to?”

Hope sniffed the air.

“Oh, I’ve got something in mind.”

She started on her way and pondered Tokyo’s instability in general and the disappearance of the Mekiddo offices in particular. She soon let herself get drawn into the environment: the display windows, the ever-present mascots, the restaurant menus, the screens, the faces of the passersby. She stopped in front of the door of a pachinko parlour. Techno music, neon lights, the roar of the steel balls. What
was
this place? For a moment, she considered going in and, guidebook at the ready, addressing the players.

“Where can I acquire a machete / machine-gun / rocket launcher?” (
Na ta / mashin gan / roketto hou ha doko de te ni hairi masu ka
?)

On second thought, maybe it wasn’t such a good idea.

One or two kilometres farther, Hope passed under a highway, absently kicking a few dead pigeons, and arrived at the port. A vast intermodal complex stretched away on both sides of the harbour: thousands of multicoloured containers stacked up on top of each other. Maersk, Hapag-Lloyd, Hanjin and China Shipping. Everywhere the landscape was the same.

Walking along the chain-link fence, she watched the activity on the other side. Forklifts scurrying around, droning like huge beetles. Workers shouting over the noise. The clanging of metal. Various rumbling noises. And in the background, the hulking orange mass of the
Aron Habrit
, a container ship in the process of being unloaded.

Hope passed the wall of containers and continued on to the unloading area. A crew of longshoremen were extricating a bulky object from a battered container in order to load it onto a truck. Posted at a sensible distance, three men in business suits watched the scene while exchanging remarks.

Curious to see the object that would soon come into view, Hope leaned against the fence. An old Korean tank? Gold ingots? A freeze-dried mammoth? In any case, the thing was awfully heavy, judging by the groans of the hoist.

What emerged from the container, centimetre by centimetre, was a concrete monolith. The surface was scarred and the edges bristled with the rusted stumps of steel rods. One side was completely covered with an interlacing of colourful graffiti, which to Hope looked vaguely familiar.

Before Hope’s eyes was an enormous fragment of the
Grenzmauer
newly arrived from Berlin!

With her fingers hooked into the chain-links, she watched in disbelief. What was this artefact doing in Tokyo?
She tried to ask the workers, but none of them spoke English and her guidebook was not at all helpful

“Can you help me? I’m injured / infected / contagious.” (
Kega o shi te i masu / osen sa re te i masu / kansen shi te i masu. Te o kashi te morae masu ka
?)

One of the business-suited men crossed the loading zone and came toward Hope with a friendly expression. They exchanged small bows of the head. He explained that the section of wall, a gift of the Bundesrepublik Deutschland to the Tokyo prefecture, would soon be part of the permanent exhibition of the city’s Museum of Modern Art.

The Berlin Wall—modern art? Hope tried to mask her bewilderment.

The hoist operator deposited the precious object on the truck bed as softly as a snowflake. The truck’s suspension sagged with a painful creak. Immediately, the longshoremen strapped the fragment down on the bed, while the men in suits signed various papers.

The truck lurched away and lumbered onto the boulevard with its two tons of Cold War. A moment later it disappeared in a curve, behind a bulwark of containers.

Brushing the palm of her hand over her shirt pocket, Hope felt the reassuring bulge of the nail clipper.

It was nearly midnight when Hope came within sight of the Jaffa. The only source of light in the narrow lane was the window of a laundry, as blue and spectral as a chunk of iceberg. The bar’s neon signs were turned off and the steel grille was rolled halfway down. Stationed near the entrance, Merriam was smoking a cigarette.

“Do you realize what time it is? I was worried.”

Hope rubbed her arms under the thin cloth of her blouse.

“It’s freezing!”

“Of course it’s freezing! It
is
still March! Come on, I’ve just made some tea.”

Hope slipped under the grille, which Merriam closed behind her with a hefty shove. Two twists of the key and they were sheltered from looters and the living dead. As far as bunkers went, this one was unbeatable. Reggae music in the background, chairs tipped up on the tables, the unobtrusive swish of the dishwasher. Near the cash register a large teapot released a graceful question mark of steam.

Merriam tossed an old University of Tel Aviv sweatshirt on the counter, and Hope, shivering, pulled it over her head.

“Still, you might have given me a call.”

“I got slightly lost.”

“Didn’t you have your guidebook?”

“The layout of the streets doesn’t make any sense!”

“Yeah, it takes some getting used to.”

“I was on the wrong block. For a while I thought the Jaffa had been razed to the ground during the afternoon and replaced by a Holiday Inn.”

Merriam smiled and poured two glasses of tea.

“There’s no chance of that happening. The City of Tokyo put this crumbling shack on its list of protected heritage sites in 1971.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

“It’s one of the few buildings from the Edo period that has survived the 1923 earthquake, the 1945 bombing raids and the urban renewal wave of the 1960s. You can’t change so much as a lock without a permit. Speaking of which …”

She took a heavy set of keys out of a drawer and slipped off an old copper key, which she handed to Hope.

“From now on, if you ever find the steel grille locked, you can just go up the emergency stairway.”

Hope thanked her with a nod. The reggae music ebbed and flowed on the speakers, disappearing from time to time—a tidal movement typical of overused cassette tapes. While Hope warmed her hands on the cup of tea, Merriam began to add up the contents of the cash register.

“Need any help?”

“Thanks, but it’s not a problem. The sales never add up to very much.”

The Jaffa, Merriam explained as she mechanically smoothed out ¥1000 bills between her thumb and index finger, was located smack in the middle of the Sargasso Sea: a gyre bounded by three metro stations, eight hotels and one of the Tokyo University campuses. The surrounding neighbourhood swarmed with students, convention delegates and North American tourists, yet the Jaffa was unable to tap into this clientele. Whenever customers happened to wander in, it was because they were looking for something else. A phantom youth hostel, for instance.

The bar’s clientele was made up exclusively of regulars, mostly anthropology students who nursed their beers for hours while reviewing their course notes. As a result, the proceeds were chronically thin and the profit was nil. In fact, the place operated at a loss every other month, a situation to which the owner seemed completely indifferent. This, according to Merriam, lent credence to the tax-shelter hypothesis.

“He bought the bar in the late fifties. At the time, he owned a small light bulb factory in Kobe. Today he manufactures printed circuits in three countries. So he may have totally forgotten that he owns this building. In any case, I’ve never seen him.”

“Never?”

“Never. The accountant comes to check the books every quarter and takes a look at the inventory. It almost never takes more than twenty minutes. In other words, we’re in the blind spot. Which reminds me—would you like to call Canada?”

“Call Canada?”

“Your family. Your friends. Your boyfriend. Anyone you like. In any case, just feel free to use the bar phone. The bill disappears on one of the boss’s six hundred accounts.”

She arranged the bundles of money as she spoke and then scribbled some numbers on a piece of paper, slipped the (meagre) earnings into an envelope and locked everything into a small safe hidden under the counter. Then she rubbed her hands together in satisfaction and glanced at the clock. Twenty past midnight. Out of a drawer she pulled a large cloth-bound edition of the Torah, which concealed a bag of tender green buds, a pack of rolling papers and a plastic lighter.

Hope watched her crush a bud and blend it with tobacco on the cover of the Torah, brush a small amount into a piece of the thin paper and roll it with her thumbs. She flicked her tongue back and forth across the edge of the paper, and voilà! Then, like some manic engineer, she examined the joint to ensure it was properly shaped. Hope smiled and took a gulp of tea.

“Nice work!”

“Thanks. I’ve had lots of spare time since I moved to Japan.”

The smell of sulphur and resin floated into the air. Merriam took two ceremonious puffs and offered the joint to Hope, who declined with a little wave.

“You’re wrong not to accept. It’s an excellent remedy for jet lag. What’s more, this stuff is aeroponic: the plants grow with their roots exposed to the air. A method developed by the Japanese Space Agency to make farming possible in a weightless environment.”

Hope laughed.

“Who’d want to farm in a weightless environment?”

“Good question. I guess it would be someone who had doubts about the future of the planet.”

An oceanic wind swept over the roof of the building and the sound of ten highways kilometres away was clearly audible, rumblings transported by the biting cold.

Leaning against the guardrail, Hope admired the city lights—billions of lumens, radiating and then evaporating in space. Tokyo was no doubt visible from the moon.

Merriam yawned and pulled out a pack of No. 9. A flash of the lighter and then there was another little red light shining in Tokyo.

“The Americans tested napalm around here, you know.”

“Oh?”

“A few months before Hiroshima. Everything you see around us, forty square kilometres—levelled. In one night. A B-29 every two minutes. Eight tons of bombs per plane. I’ll let you do the arithmetic.”

The tip of the cigarette pulsated against the darkness like a heartbeat, appearing almost alive.

“According to the census there were forty thousand people per square kilometre living in this district. Large families crowded into houses made of wood and paper.”

“Like this house?”

“Not really, no, but the materials used were similar. Once the fire started it was impossible to put out. Also, napalm has the consistency of jelly. It sticks to clothing, and hair.”

She took two long drags on her cigarette.

“When the bombardment ended, at about five in the morning, the U.S. Air Force had killed a hundred thousand people and left a million homeless. In military jargon it’s called carpet bombing. You flatten the landscape down to carpet level.”

Hope fought back a shiver, either from horror or the cold—she couldn’t quite tell.

“Hard to believe it happened right here …”

Merriam took one last puff and rubbed her cigarette
out in a muddy ashtray standing near the Shinto shrine.

“Wait a minute, I think I have a picture.”

They took off their shoes and went inside the house. Merriam brought out a battery lamp and a gas radiator. The radiator coughed a little as it started up. Merriam rubbed her hands for a moment in the lukewarm breath of the heater. Then she searched through her bookcase and drew out a large illustrated book.

The History of Tokyo, she translated.