‘The treasurer was most generous, and my needs are simple.’
‘Very good. Contact us again in seven days. The Fellowship looks forward to welcoming our beloved brother home.’
I returned to the hotel for my midday cleaning and meditation. I ate some crackers, seaweed snacks and cashew nuts, and drank green tea from a vending machine outside my room. When I went out again after lunch the unclean receptionist gave me a map, and I chose a tourist spot to visit.
The Japanese naval headquarters was set in a scrubby park at the top of a hill overlooking Naha, to the north. During the war it had been so well hidden that it took the invading Americans three weeks after they had seized Okinawa to stumble across it. The Americans are not a very bright race. They miss the obvious. Their embassy had the effrontery to deny His Serendipity a residence visa ten years ago. Now, of course, His Serendipity can come and go where he pleases using sub-space conversion techniques. He has visited the White House several times, unhindered.
I paid for my ticket and went down the steps. The dim coolness welcomed me. A pipe somewhere was dripping. There was one more surprise waiting for the American invaders. In order to die an honourable death, the full contingent of four thousand men had taken their own lives. Twenty days previously.
Honour. What does this frothy, idol-riddled world of the unclean know of honour? Walking through the tunnels I stroked the walls with my fingertips. I stroked the scars on the wall, made by the grenade blasts and the picks that the soldiers had used to dig their stronghold, and I felt true kinship with them. The same kinship I feel at Sanctuary. With my enhanced alpha quotient, I was picking up on their anima residue. I wandered the tunnels until I lost track of the time.
As I left that memorial to nobility a coachload of tourists arrived. I took one look at them, with their cameras and potato-chip packets and their stupid Kansai expressions and their limbless minds with less alpha capacity than a housefly, and I wished that I had one more phial of the cleansing fluid left, so that I could lob it down the stairs after them and lock them in. They would be cleansed in the same way that the money-blinded of Tokyo had been cleansed. It would have appeased the souls of the young soldiers who had died for their beliefs decades ago, as I had been ready to do only seventy-two hours ago. They were betrayed by the puppet governments that despoiled our land after the war. As have we all been betrayed by a society evolving into markets for Disney and McDonald’s. All that sacrifice, to build what? To build an unsinkable aircraft carrier for the United States.
But I had no phials left, and so I had to endure those unclean, chattering, defecating, spawning, defiling, cretins. Literally, they made me gasp for air.
I walked back down the hill under the palm trees.
In the palm of the left hand there is an alpha receptor point. When His Serendipity first granted me a personal audience He held my hand open and gently pressed this receptor point with his index finger. I felt a peculiar buzz, like a pleasant electric shock, and I was later to discover that my concentrative powers had quadrupled.
It was raining on that most precious day, three and a half years ago. Clouds marched down from Mt Fuji, an eastern wind blew across the undulating farmland around Sanctuary. I’d enlisted on the Fellowship Welcome Programme twelve weeks before, and on this morning I had completed some business with one of the under-secretaries of the Fellowship Treasury. I had signed the papers releasing me from the prison of materialism. Now the Fellowship owned my house and its contents, my savings, pension funds, my golf membership, and my car. I felt freer than I had ever believed possible. My family — my unclean, biological family, my skin family — predictably failed to understand. All my life, they had measured every last millimetre of failure and success, and here I was snapping their rule across my knee. The last letter I ever received from my mother informed me that my father had written me out of his will. But as His Serendipity writes in the 71st Sacred Revelation, The fury of the damned is as impotent as a rat gnawing a holy mountain.
They never loved me, anyway. They wouldn’t know of the word’s existence if they hadn’t seen it on the TV.
His Serendipity came down the stairs, accompanied by the Minister of Security. The light whitened as he neared the office. I saw his sandalled feet and his purple robes first, then the rest of his beloved form came into view. He smiled at me, knowing telepathically who I was and what I had done. ‘I am the Guru.’ And he permitted me to kiss his holy ruby ring as I knelt. I could feel his alpha emantions, like a compass feels magnetic north.
‘Master,’ I replied. ‘I have come home.’
His Serendipity spoke cleanly and beautifully, and the words came from His very eyes. ‘You have freed yourself from the asylum of the unclean. Little brother. Today you have joined a new family. You have transcended your old family of the skin, and you have joined a new family of the spirit. From this day, you have ten thousand brothers and sisters. This family will grow into millions by the end of the world. And it will grow, and grow, with roots in all nations. We are finding fertile soil in foreign lands. Our family will grow until the world without is the world within. This is not a prophecy. This is inevitable, future reality. How do you feel, newest child of our nation without borders, without suffering?’
‘Lucky, Your Serendipity. So very lucky to be able to drink from the fountain of truth, while still in my twenties.’
‘My little brother, we both know that it was not luck which brought you here. Love brought you to us.’ Then He kissed me, and I kissed the mouth of eternal life. ‘Who knows,’ said my Master, ‘if you continue your alpha self-amplification as rapidly as the Minister of Education reports, you may be entrusted with a very special mission in the future...’ My heart leapt still higher. I had been discussed! Only a novice, but I had been discussed!
In the coffee bars, in shops and offices and schools, on the giant screen in the shopping mall, in every rabbit-hutch apartment, people watched news of the cleansing. The maid who came to clean my room wouldn’t shut up about it. I let her babble. She asked me what I thought. I said that I was only a computer-systems engineer from Nagoya and knew nothing about such matters. Indifference was not enough for her: outrage has become compulsory. To avert suspicion, a little play-acting will be necessary. The maid mentioned the Fellowship. It seems that the leprous fingers of our country’s detestable media are being pointed, despite our past warnings.
I went out in the middle of the afternoon to buy some more shampoo and soap. The receptionist was sitting with her back to the lobby, glued to the set. Television is unclean lies, and it damages your alpha cortex. However, I thought just a few minutes wouldn’t hurt me, so I watched it with her. Twenty-one cleansed, and many hundreds semi-cleansed. An unequivocal warning to the state of the unclean.
‘I can’t believe it happened in Japan,’ said the receptionist. ‘In America, yes. But here?’
A panel of ‘experts’ was discussing the ‘atrocity’. The experts included a nineteen-year-old pop star and a sociology professor from Tokyo University. Why do Japanese only listen to pop stars and professors? They kept playing the same footage over and over again, a scene of the uncleansed running out of the metro station, handkerchiefs smothering their mouths, retching, scratching furiously at their eyes. As His Serendipity writes in the 32nd Sacred Revelation, If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out. Pictures of the cleansed, lying still where their cleansing had freed them. Their skin families, sobbing in their ignorance. Cut to the Prime Minister, the bushiest fool of them all, swearing that he wouldn’t rest until ‘the perpetrators of this monstrosity were brought to justice’.