The Future Is Japanese (13 page)

“Feeling any better yet?” It was my old captain. He handed me a bowl of soup.

I had only ever seen the captain in combat fatigues, but even though he was now wearing the sort of leather jacket white men wore, he was instantly recognizable by the gold chains and other wartime bling he used to wear. Also unchanged was the holster strapped to his waist, gun-strap open, so that he was always ready to draw and fire at a moment’s notice.

The big difference was in his eyes, in his manner. He’d gone so soft it was almost uncomfortable. Almost like he’d become one of those Christian priests.

I nodded and took the bowl of soup.

“This ain’t your government-approved synthetic rations, you know. This here’s real beans and real meat,” the captain said.

I wolfed the soup down. A few short days ago I’d been on the brink of starvation, and now I was in an empty warehouse in the middle of the slums, being pampered back to health. Nothing we had to eat at the institute ever tasted as good as this.

The captain attended me himself. When some of the food I was cramming down spilled down me, he gently wiped it off.

“Looks like you’ve had a rough time, huh, kid?” The captain smiled his new saintly smile and then sighed sorrowfully. “What’s the point of this newfound peace if my boys are suffering so badly under it, that’s what I say. This city, this whole country, is still proper messed up. But I’m real glad I could take care of you at least, kid.”

The captain’s eyes were gentle, full of fatherly love. Bizarrely, I was reminded of the fat lady back at Brave New World. The generosity of spirit. The unquestioning, unconditional love. All the warmth and human kindness that I’d forgotten how to feel and couldn’t imagine myself ever feeling again.

In spite of this kindness, though, there was no doubt I was in a dark place. A suspicious place.

There had been a number of guys taking care of me these past few days, and I’d peered into their faces to try and glimpse a hint as to whether they were Hoa or Xema. Nothing doing.

When the captain asked me how he came to find me half starved by the side of the road, I answered him truthfully. That I had run away from the institute. That I’d had their shot to the heart.

“Boy oh boy, you’ve had it rough,” the captain said, placing his hand softly on my shoulder. “But that’s all behind you now. As long as you’re here you’ll never have to worry about where your next meal is coming from, or about stupid squabbles between Hoa and Xema.”

My dark suspicions came rushing forward again. I needed to ask a question but could barely get the words out. “Are you telling me that there are Hoa here, Captain?”

“Well, well. It seems this shot to the heart really works, huh?” The captain laughed as if we were enjoying a joke together. My heart sank. “You remember the man who brought you food and looked after you while you were collapsed these past few days? Hoa, ex-soldier. His face is about as Hoa as it comes, in fact.”

My hackles rose.
A Hoa nursing me! For days!
The anger and hatred in my mind flooded through my body.

“Come with me. I’ll show you what it is we do here.” The captain beckoned me to the door. I managed to calm down enough to take a gulp of air, and steadied my breathing, willing myself to calm down. I got out of bed and followed the man who had once been my captain.

Khatsticks.

We used to chew them on the battlefield all the time. They numbed your senses and stopped you from having to dwell on things.

I’d been convalescing in an officelike room these past few days, but when I’d left the room the rest of the warehouse turned out to be a giant Khatstick factory. The floor was lined with rows of tables, each one a workstation for women and children standing and working in silence. Hoa or Xema, I couldn’t tell. They were taking the green powder made from the dried and pulverized leaves, turning it into sheets, rolling them up, and cutting them into small sticks that at first glance could have been cigarettes but in actuality were made of far stronger stuff.

“It’s all about business,” the captain said with a satisfied smile on his face. “We want to expand our field of operations, but there are people who want to get in our way. Bad people who are holding us back. I think it’s fate that we came across you when we did. You were a first-class soldier during the war. You fought well for the Xema. So how about doing the same for us here?”

“You mean you want me to become a soldier again?” I asked.

“Hey, it’s a cushier gig than fighting in any war!” The captain put his strong arm around my shoulder. “We’re minting it at the moment, so you’ll never have to worry about food, and you get all the Khatsticks you want, on the house. Perk of the job, you might say.”

In other words, my former captain had made it big as a drug dealer. Khatsticks were stupidly addictive—after you’d chewed one once you were sure to want more, and the withdrawal symptoms were something else. When you ran out you became irritated and nauseated. And even if you knew what it did to you, you ended up chewing it anyway, as it was the only way to get through the war. It had become a necessity, not a luxury. The reason I was constantly in a foul mood back at the institute was because I was craving the stuff with all my heart and soul—and body.

During the war we were all doped to the eyeballs on the stuff. We chewed away before a battle, we chewed away after a battle, we chewed away twenty-four-seven. When we ran out of the leaf we used gunpowder as a poor substitute. Vile stuff. No way you’d snort that normally, unless you needed your ersatz kick.

Then the war finished and we soldiers were let go. What this meant was that all the soldiers who’d gotten themselves addicted or who had had addiction forced upon them were suddenly cut off from the source of their addiction. In an instant, Khatsticks had changed from being a ration vital to everyday function to a luxurious vice. Funny how something can go from frivolous to essential at a moment’s notice, depending on which way the wind is blowing.

“The ignorant white fools are trying to put pressure on the new government to outlaw the stuff, of course,” said the captain. He was animated now, almost as if he were acting out a part in a play. “But the fact is this city’s overflowing with people who need the stuff, who rely on it. This new government won’t give them what they want. They’re too worried about what the white man would say. So that’s where we come in. Think of what we’re doing as a sort of public service.”

I surveyed the faces of the people working on the shop floor. Hoa? Xema? I walked up to one of them and stared straight into her face from point-blank range. Still nothing. I just couldn’t tell.

“The woman you’re looking at? She’s Hoa. A valued member of our staff. Part of our family,” the captain told me. I looked at her again, trying to sniff out even a hint of a clue that would give away whether she was Xema or Hoa: her pupils, nose, her forehead, the thickness of her lips. I stared and I stared. Perhaps she felt uncomfortable, I’m not sure, but suddenly she turned to me without warning and answered a question I hadn’t even asked.

“I’m glad I found this place,” she said with a smile, her hands continuing to work away all the while. “I earn a decent wage and can feed my family well on it. Mr. Entoleh there is a fine gentleman, he looks after all his workers good and proper. This one time, my boy was sick in bed with a fever, and when Mr. Entoleh heard about it he went out of his way to bring the boy some medicine. He came himself, personally! Right over to my house, even though I’m a Hoa!”

“Well, we’re all in this together, after all,” said the captain. “It’s the least I could do for one of my best workers.” He spoke calmly and with an apparently unshakeable confidence.

Mr. Entoleh
. I realized that I had never known the captain’s real name up until now. During the war we only ever called officers by their rank.

The man who had ordered our company of children about during the war, telling us to kill this person and burn that village down to the ground, that man was now making a different sort of killing altogether by selling Khatsticks on a grand scale. Not that this was the part that bothered me. Khatsticks may have been illegal or whatever, but there were plenty of people who needed them and wanted them, and anyway, shit on the white man’s law and his government lackeys. No, what bothered me was the other thing. The fact that, for me, the war was still not over yet.

“But, but … there are Hoa here!” I couldn’t stop myself from blurting this out.

Captain Entoleh made a big show of shaking his head theatrically. “The war’s over, kid. In order to do business we all need to get along. Try talking to one of the Hoa guys sometime. You’ll find that they get it. The fact is, there’s no real difference between them and us.”

No real difference between them and us.

The words stabbed me deep. I remembered words this man had shouted at us before our assault on Minga Village, before countless raids on Hoa villages. They’re different from us. They’re not human.
So kill, kill, kill them all
. Then he’d give us a swift slap on the butt to send us into the thick of it.

“But we were fighting the Hoa for ages! You were the one who taught me about all the terrible things the Hoa did before I was born, Captain!”

Entoleh shook his head as if he were indulging a petulant child. “I did what I had to do to get you to fight.”

“Are you saying you lied to us, Captain?”

Entoleh frowned. “No. They weren’t lies. What you were taught was real history. History from the SDA perspective. In order to fight, you need history. People need to know why they are fighting, what they are fighting for.”

“So you made up some bullshit history just so you could get us to fight your fucking war!” I was shouting now. This man in front of me, all the adults, had poisoned my mind, getting me to do their dirty work for them by spinning me their lies. The Hoa started it. Hoa don’t feel pain, that’s why they’re so cruel themselves. My friends and I bought it hook, line, and sinker: my friends who fell all around me in battle.

“As I said. They weren’t lies.” The man who had once been my captain raised his voice and rubbed his eyes with his fingertips as if he were now dealing with some wearisome episode. “What you have to understand is that no one had any conception of a history between us before the war actually started. Not us Xema, not the Hoa. Until the war began, no one cared less what sort of history their tribe may or may not have been shouldering. It’s only when we constructed a concept of history that the Xema started to hate the Hoa. And vice versa. History is just a backdrop to pin your wars on, nothing more, nothing less. Wars don’t start because of history, but you do need history to start a war. You need a pretext to fight, to find a way, however tenuous, to differentiate yourselves from the other side. And not just history either. The same goes for countries. Even tribal distinctions such as Xema and Hoa, all artificial constructs. You can even take this to its logical conclusion—even distinctions between ‘you’ and ‘I’ exist only to make war possible. Think about it. In order to kill each other, the ‘each’ needs to be distinct from the ‘other.’ Wars don’t start because ‘you’ and ‘I’ hate each other, oh no, that’s the wrong way round. Better to say the very concept of ‘I’ exists purely in order to fuel war.”

“You think your fancy fucking speeches somehow make everything all right?” I screamed at him to try and cut through his bullshit. The factory workers, who had up until a minute ago been absorbed in trying to make their quotas, all stopped still. Their eyes surreptitiously flicked toward us. “They don’t. They don’t, and you know it, Captain. All you’re really saying is that you made up some crap so you could get us to kill each other.”

I pressed my point. I was now completely playing the part of the stubborn child refusing to listen to what he was being told. I didn’t understand a single thing this man was saying to me. “I” and “you” only exist so we can go to war with each other? That was crazy … I’d never fought with Mom, not really. Only a little with Sis. Sure, I argued with Pop all the time, but that sure as hell couldn’t be called war.

“Okay, well, do you know what? Let’s go with that. You got me.” Entoleh spoke as if he were resigning himself to something, but then continued, “So, do me a favor, kid, and stop taking everything out on the Hoa, stop flipping out and attacking them every time you see them, stop getting angry at them or blaming them for everything. I’d much rather you blamed me. Just remember, we Xema speak the same language as they do; we eat the same food. We just look a little different, that’s all. Just keep telling yourself that everything we taught you was all lies, and you’ll see there’s no logical reason why you should hate them anymore. Much more important to move on and concentrate on surviving in this new world. Working side by side for a better future, if that’s what it takes.”