The Future Is Japanese (11 page)

This I didn’t know. Still, I couldn’t quite shake off a niggling feeling that there was something not quite right about all this, even if I wasn’t the first to have the operation. It still felt like I was somehow being hoodwinked.

The doctor addressed the whole lot of us now. “Anyway, come on now, guys, the sooner you take a seat the sooner we can get you all home,” he said, almost cajoling us into the chairs.

What did he mean by “home” anyway? We’d lost that to the Hoa many years ago. Not just “home”: our villages had been wiped away completely. Where exactly was I supposed to go? As long as the war continued, I always had my company. That had been my home. War had been my home. What about now, though? Was the House of Smiles supposed to be my new home?

The doctor just didn’t get it. I ignored him as he droned on and slipped into one of the chairs, which turned out to be surprisingly comfortable. I decided to focus on the reality in front of me—if I went through with this, at the very least I’d be good for another meal.

We were moved again.

To the east side of town this time, to a building that had a big billboard displayed up top reading
SEEDS FOR A BRAVE NEW WORLD
. This new building was closer to a residential area, and people from the neighborhood had come out to watch our arrival. Their stares were full of curiosity—and hostility.

When I realized I wasn’t going to have to deal with those Hoa I had fought with, I breathed a sigh of relief. Half the class I was now with were guys who had fought alongside me back at the ruckus, the other half I didn’t recognize at all. We all seemed roughly the same age, and I figured the others had probably been involved in similar incidents elsewhere. I doubt they’d thought to use a pencil like I had, though.

Something seemed strange when we entered the classroom. It was almost as if my field of vision had been wrapped in a warm, fuzzy blanket. At that moment I hadn’t yet realized what had happened to my mind.

“I’m Ezgwai,” said the softspoken boy who was sitting next to me.

“What did you do to make them send you here?” I asked by way of introduction.

For a second he looked as if he’d been slapped, but then he laughed. “You don’t beat around the bush, do you?”

“We’re all here for a reason—we’re troublemakers. I just figure same goes for you guys,” I said.

“Touché. I’m sure you’ve probably worked it out by now, but we’ve just been moved here from a place called the Second Chance Rebirth Saloon, over on the other side of town,” Ezgwai answered.

“You guys ex-soldiers too?”

“Yep.”

“Huh. So you were a soldier too, huh? Like me.”

At this point Ezgwai seemed to bite down on his lip. As if he’d just remembered something he’d rather forget.

“My family were all killed,” Ezgwai said. “My ma, pa, gran, my brother—all of them.”

“What about your village?”

“Gone, I’m guessing. It was burnt to shit last I saw it. Most of us were killed, but I was one of the ‘lucky ones’ taken prisoner.”

An orphan. Just like me. He too had seen his house put to the flame, seen the piles of arms chopped off by the Hoa machetes like so much firewood. We were hardly the only ones here who’d seen such atrocities firsthand, of course, but nonetheless the shared experience seemed to act as a bond between us.

“My family was murdered too. Same goes for everyone else in our class.”

Ezgwai nodded in silent acknowledgment. There wasn’t any more to say on the subject, and the conversation tapered off into an uncomfortable silence. Unable to bear it any longer, I decided to change the subject completely.

“Did you guys go to that weird hotel too?” I asked.

“You guys too, huh?” Ezgwai actually seemed surprised about this. “Yeah, we were made to sit down and put those barrel things on our heads after being pumped full of stuff.”

“D’you know what they actually did to us?” I asked, my voice trailing off.

Ezgwai shook his head. “You?”

“Nah. One of the doctors did try explaining, but …”

“Forgot what he said, huh?”

I shook my head. “Something like that. There was this ridiculously complicated foreign word. Something to do with cutting something off or blocking or changing or something, I think. A million times more complicated than our classes here.”

“I wonder if the teachers here would explain it to us if we asked them,” Ezgwai said.

“Yeah, I wonder. I get the sense they’re keeping something from us,” I said.

Just then a teacher came into the room. A fat lady wearing a pearly white short-sleeved shirt. I wonder if she’d been raped too, I thought to myself. I couldn’t imagine that there were many women left in this country who hadn’t been raped at some point or another during the war. I’d done my fair share of rape after all. When we raided Hoa villages. The captain had said he’d kill me if I didn’t, so what else was there to do? I was shit-scared the first time, but once I’d done my first I realized there was nothing to it, really. If you needed to empty your bladder you pissed in a toilet, and if you needed to empty your balls you raped a woman. So it went, and so I did what needed to be done.

But I did wonder which tribe would have had this fat woman. The Hoa? Or would it have been us Xema?

And that was when I started to realize that something was not quite right.

“Good day, gentlemen. Welcome to the place where you will prepare for a new chapter in your lives,” said the fat lady.

Gentlemen. I looked around, surveying the others who were in the room.

“You have all been granted a new ability,” Fatty continued. “An ability that will stand you in good stead for the future of our country. This new ability is already commonplace in Europe and America, and I guarantee you that it will free you from the shackles of hatred that are currently holding you back.”

Her voice was soft, gentle, brimming with hopefulness—and gave me the creeps.

I leaned in toward Ezgwai. “They just don’t get it, do they? I mean, it’s not as if they don’t know what we’ve been through.”

Ezgwai suppressed a laugh. “You said it, bro. I do see where they’re coming from, though. That sooner or later we’re going to have to let it go, or we’ll never be happy. Otherwise we’ll never have peace, I guess.”

“What about our mothers and sisters? They’ll never be happy. Do we let that go too?”

“No, that’ll always be with us,” said Ezgwai, his face suddenly a picture of desolation. “And even when I know in my head that sooner or later we’re going to have to let bygones be bygones, whenever I actually see someone who used to be the enemy … I see red. I feel like I’m going to explode with hatred. But what can I do? I don’t have my AK-47 with me anymore, and even if I did, if I killed someone I’d just be imprisoned for murder. It’s not like it used to be, when you could kill all you wanted.”

“Well, we might not have our guns anymore,” I replied, holding up the pencil I’d been given, “but this baby here can go a long way in a pinch. Trust me, I know.”

Ezgwai and I became tight.

We lined up for rations together, and we helped each other out with our homework. He was a real good guy, was Ezgwai. He had his head screwed on too and was always there to calm me down whenever I was about to flip out over something. You could have called us opposites—could have, that is, if we hadn’t shared the uniting factor that we’d both been driven into the army when our families had been killed.

Our actual classes were more or less identical to those we’d had back at the House of Smiles, with one key difference: the teachers seemed awful keen on speaking to us individually. Do you like it here? Anything that’s annoyed you or made you feel angry recently? There seemed to be a constant barrage of questions like these. And there always seemed to be a white doctor by the teacher’s side, tapping away at their keyboard.

“So, can you tell me why you’re feeling grumpy?” Fatty asked me one day.

I nodded. “I guess ’cause I got no Khatsticks or gunpowder.”

“That’s the reason, is it?” Fatty gave a sympathetic nod of her head. As if to show she understood my pain. All this did, though, was piss me off even more.

Fatty continued regardless. “We call those sorts of things drugs. If you carried on using them you would have destroyed your bodies.”

“I feel so irritable without them though,” I said.

“And what about your friends? Have you noticed any of them fighting? Anyone you particularly don’t like?” Fatty continued.

“Fighting?” I asked. “Not really—what do we have to fight about?”

Fatty and the white doctor exchanged glances. Then she smiled at me again. “Looks like we’re making progress.” She rubbed her eyes. And then I realized it was to wipe away her tears. She seemed deeply moved by something.

“By the time you young men become fully fledged adults this country should be a wonderful place again. A gentler place where the terms ‘Xema’ and ‘Hoa’ are nothing but irrelevant old labels. Even though at the moment it might seem like all you can think about is hatred, it won’t be long before you breech that final frontier. You’ll explore strange new worlds together. You boys are our hope incarnate, you are new life. We adults have been irredeemably corrupted by our hatred. But you’re different. You’ll be able to leave this place and boldly go where no man has gone before. You’ll found new civilizations, a new Shelmikedmus.”

With that, Fatty rose from her seat and enveloped me in her ample bosom with a tight hug.

The main feeling I experienced at that moment, with my face pressed into her massive tits, was an uneasy sense that something wasn’t quite right about what she had just said. I wondered from where this woman’s hopes and dreams were springing. Personally, I’d seen too much—and done too much—to expect anything good from this world.

I had settled into life in Brave New World after a fashion. Things were much easier now I didn’t have to live side by side with Hoa. Back when I was at the House of Smiles, all I could think of during lessons was the fat jugular running down the neck of the Hoa bastard sitting next to me and ramming my pencil right into it. It was far too febrile an atmosphere for their lectures about how we should all get along in peace to have any effect at all back then. In fact, they often had the opposite effect, stirring things up even more.

I was a part of the community now, though. Ezgwai’s serene demeanor was a calming influence on me. Ezgwai was so gentle, so thoughtful, so considerate, that I often thought it a miracle that he ever survived in the army.

Ezgwai always spoke steadily. Deliberately. Whereas most of us soldiers had become used to barking at each other, fighting to get a word in edgewise over the din of gunfire. The result was that even when the battlefield was a distant memory, we were still used to shouting over each other all the time.

“I am,” was Ezgwai’s simple reply when I asked him if he was deliberately trying to go in the other direction by speaking quietly and slowly. “When I’m shouting and spitting words out like there’s no tomorrow, I can’t help but feel I’m back on the battlefield. So I decided to make a conscious effort to speak calmly at all times. I guess I kind of hope that it might catch on, in time.”

And catch on it did before too long. Whether or not it was all down to Ezgwai’s deliberate efforts, it wasn’t long before everyone at the institute had stopped shouting all the time and started speaking much more calmly. Including me. Once this happened, it became possible for us to start thinking of the institute as a place where you could actually relax, chill out.