Ghostwritten Read Free Page A

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 toclean 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 computersystems engineer from Nagoya and knew nothing about such matters. Indifference was not enough for her: outrage has become compulsory. To avert suspicion, a little playacting 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.”
    Is this hypocrisy not blinding? Can’t they see that the real atrocity is the modern world’s systematic slaughter of man’s oneness with his anima? The act of the Fellowship was merely one counterattack against the true monster of our age. The first skirmish in a long war that evolution destines us to win.
    And why can people not see the futility? A mere politician, one more bribe-taking, back-stabbing, under-the-table cockroachwhose mind cannot even conceive of the cesspit it flounders in: How could such unclean lowlifes ever hope to coerce His Serendipity into doing anything? A boddhisatva who can make Himself invisible at will, a yogic flier, a divine being who can breathe underwater. Bring Him and His servants to “justice”?
We
are the floating ministers of justice! Of course I still lack the alpha quotient to shield myself with telepathy or telekinesis, but I am many hundreds of kilometers away from the scene of the cleansing. They’ll never think of looking for me here.
    I slipped out of the cool lobby.
    I kept a low profile all week, but invisibility might attract attention. I invented business meetings to attend, and from Monday to Friday walked past the receptionist with a curt “Good morning” promptly at 8:30 A.M . Time dragged its heels. Naha’s just another small city. The Americans from the military bases that plague these islands strut up and down the main streets, many of them with our females draped off their arms, Japanese females clad in nothing but little wraps of cloth. The Okinawan males ape the foreigners. I walked through the department stores, watching the endless chain of wanting and buying. I walked until my feet ached. I sat in shady coffee shops, where shelves sagged under the weight of magazines of mindtrash. I eavesdropped on businessmen, buying and selling what wasn’t theirs. I carried on walking. Workaday idiots gaped in the rattling vacuity of pachinko machines, as I had once done in the days before His Serendipity opened