The Future Is Japanese (12 page)

Not only that, it was much easier for me to relax because I hadn’t seen a single Hoa from the moment I arrived at Brave New World. At least, it was easier to relax right up until the moment I discovered we had been living a lie.

“Bro.”

I’d been standing in line in the mess hall one day when Ezgwai spoke to me. Standing there with my enamel bowl, waiting patiently for my state-mandated ration of synthetic meat. The real stuff was way out of our league pricewise, I’d heard—real meat something only the white man’s countries could afford. After all, they could even afford to use stuff like maize and wheat as fuel for their cars and airplanes, apparently. Hard to believe you could really power a car on food.

“Whassup, bro?” I replied. Then I noticed Ezgwai’s face was something real strange. Warped, twisted, like he wanted to cry and was suppressing something incredible.

“I heard that you took part in the raid on Minga Village,” he said.

“Hey, why are you asking me about the war all of a sudden?” I asked. “And who told you that anyway?”

Ezgwai dropped his container and brought his face right up close to mine. I could feel the breath from his nostrils on my cheek.

“Thankwa told me. Thankwa from the same company as you,” he said.

I’d fought alongside Thankwa in the same company for a long while. I suppose you’d call him a comrade. He’d been one of the first to join in the melee when I sprung that Hoa bastard with my sharpened pencil, and naturally he’d been sent here with me.

“Bro. Please. Just tell me. Were you or were you not part of the raid on Minga?” Ezgwai asked.

I’d no idea why he was being like this. “Calm down, man. We’re talking about an op from three years ago, you know?” I said. “Yeah, I remember, that village was a key point in the Hoa supply lines. Quite a battle. Yup, it’s coming back to me now.”

Then Ezgwai fell dead silent, his gaze fixed on mine. It was as if he’d forgotten he needed to breathe. His eyes were unnaturally wide, and his teeth were gritted behind his tightened lips.

“Minga Village was my home,” he said.

I didn’t understand. I looked into his eyes, which were now filmed over. How would Ezgwai have been living in Minga? Minga didn’t have any of our captives …

Then it hit me. The true meaning behind Ezgwai’s awful, twisted face.

And what his face
didn’t
mean.

“Ezgwai … what tribe are you from?” I asked.

But I already knew. I knew then why I hadn’t seen any Hoa since arriving here. While we were at it, what tribe was Fatty from? Hoa and Xema were different species. Hoa were subhuman. The Hoa had completely different faces from us Xema. Didn’t they?

But the reason I hadn’t seen any Hoa since arriving here was simple: I could no longer tell who was Hoa and who was Xema.

That’s why I had automatically assumed that everyone here was Xema like me. It hadn’t even occurred to me to wonder what tribe people were from. I’d been lulled into a false sense of security, and that’s why I’d just presumed that Ezgwai must have been Xema too.

Don’t answer my question, I prayed in my heart, even as the words were escaping my lips. But there was no going back.

Ezgwai gave an unearthly yell and jumped me.

I had no time to react or hit back. The back of my head smashed into the floor, almost knocking me out. But fortunately (could you call it fortunately?) my eyes remained open, and I was conscious that Ezgwai was on sitting on top of me, fist raised up high.

His fist came down, burying itself in my face.

I tasted blood in my mouth. Before I had the chance to recover from the surprise attack another blow rained down on me, and this time smashed into my left temple. I was reminded of the time the captain fired that bullet into Ndunga’s head.

“I was born in Minga!” Ezgwai yelled through his tears. A fist came down for the third time, shattering my nose. I heard the crunch from inside my skull, and the next second blood was pouring out my nostrils. “You killed my family!”

Another blow was flying toward the right side of my face. At this rate I was going to be smashed to a pulp. I’d better play my cards right, I thought to myself. Better try and avoid the next blow.

“I’m a Hoa! A Hoa man!”

And then, somehow, I managed to raise my right arm to deflect the incoming fist, and at the same time shoved Ezgwai off me with my left arm, and used all my pent-up energy to spring up onto my feet.

Ezgwai landed on his ass, and I used the opportunity to get the hell out of there. I had no intention of fighting after taking the hits I’d taken, and anyway I needed a moment to figure out what had happened to my head. And when I say “what had happened to my head” I wasn’t talking about what Ezgwai had just done to me with his fists. I figured it had to do with when I was back at that ruin of a hotel, when the white doctors injected me with something as I wore that bucket on my head.

“Why? Why are you a Xema?” came an anguished cry from Ezgwai, already in the distance. I hardened my heart. I wasn’t going to listen; I needed to block his voice completely.

Driven by something primal, I ran straight out of the mess, and before I knew it I found myself outside the institute too. I was terrified of returning. I couldn’t tell the difference between Xema and Hoa there. Between friend and foe.

In other words I was out of my mind. After all, it didn’t even occur to me at that moment that there was no reason things should be any different in the outside world.

I had nowhere to go.

I’d been effectively confined to different institutions ever since the war had ended and I was released from the SDA, so I had no real idea of the geography of the city. Or rather, I had no real idea of the important things: safe places to go to make myself scarce, or places I could go to scrounge a bite to eat.

There were plenty of children who didn’t make it into an institution. Not just children, of course, but adults too. But the children, well, they had formed themselves into gangs and roamed the city’s slums. They kept their AK-47s well out of sight from the occasional American patrols, and sold Khatsticks just as they did during the war.

At this moment it seemed to me the most unlucky thing in the world that I’d been “rescued” by an institution, because it meant I hadn’t had the opportunity to join one of these gangs. That’s how it seemed to me right now anyway. I didn’t know the layout of the town, how it had changed since the war ended, who lived in which sector, who ruled the streets where. I had no idea about any of the things that actually mattered.

In other words, I was fucked.

When I tried to root through a pile of trash to see if I could find anything useful, I heard someone shout, “You piece of Xema shit!” Before I knew it I was surrounded by kids. Orphaned Hoa children, I guess they must have been. I couldn’t help but think how full of energy and life they seemed.

Now, because I’d spent so much time in institutes, my garbage-foraging skills were distinctly lagging behind those who’d had more experience in it. But that was the least of my worries. There was a pecking order to the various dumps and skips that littered the town. There were turfs, patches, cribs, and the best spots, those with the juiciest hauls, were all taken. I didn’t know this at first, and almost died when I tried to approach a spot that was already spoken for—by Hoa.

Sharp kicks. Feet digging into my gut. I hold my breath, and now it’s fists, flailing, coming at me. Now it’s my jaw that’s smashed. My face is slammed, I fly back, and now a leg is pinning my chest down. I’m forced down into the pile of trash.

“Easy, guys, easy. We’re ruining good food here. Throw this punk off the heap.”

Someone gives orders, I’m hauled off the trash pile and bundled down onto the road beside it. And that’s where they properly put the boot into me.

Who said that wartime hatred was dead?

Every kick digging into me felt like payback for each bullet I fired during the war. But how was I supposed to avoid this? I had no way of telling whether I was on Xema turf or Hoa. And I had no way of telling in the future. I could always have gone up to the gang first to ask them which they were, but doing so would have put me at a fifty-fifty risk of being half killed. Killed, maybe even.

The orphans of this town weren’t done with their war yet. They were fighting over the castoffs and the scraps of “generosity” shown by the white men and the rich people of the city. They weren’t quite shooting each other up to protect their neighborhoods and their sources of sustenance, but otherwise it was just like before.

Are you Xema or are you Hoa?
This question was now more important than ever. If you wanted to eat, that was.

For a while I was so desperate that I thought about raiding a store, but I had no gun and no comrades to help me. In any case, I wouldn’t have been able to tell whether I was attacking a Hoa- or Xema-run shop. It wouldn’t have been right to raid Xema.

The upshot of all this was that because I was now the proud owner of a brain that had no way of telling the difference between one tribe and another, I also had no way of finding a way to eat. I grew thinner and thinner.

After a while, I grew accustomed to my new, emaciated state, and could even contemplate it objectively. I was able to compartmentalize my raging hunger, push it to the back of my mind where it no longer bothered me, even as it gnawed away inside me. Yes, it was like I’d been shot through the heart, all right. I’d had my birthright taken away from me: the ability of anyone born in this country to instantly distinguish between Hoa and Xema.

Anyway, I was lying by the side of the road, about to waste away, when a voice called out to me.

“Long time no see.”

I heard this voice call to me indistinctly, far far away from a place that could have been called consciousness.
Who is it?
Even the thought was too much for me. I was fading away, after all, getting smaller and smaller until soon I’d be dwarfed by a single grain of sand and then, finally, disappear into nothing. I’d been collapsed here for the last few days with this single thought spinning round in my mind. Even opening my eyelids was a herculean task. Everything was too much for me—I was almost past caring.

“Hey, can you hear me?”

Maybe I can’t
, I thought.
What can I hear, what could I hear?
I didn’t rightly know anymore.

“Carry him, will you?”

I was lifted up. Up, up, like a fluffy cloud floating away in the sky.

At some point in time I was laid down on something. Somewhere softer and much nicer than where I was before.