“Come here, you Jap cunt. Come here, you bitch.”

  Slurring, stumbling. Collapsing on the bed. Yumiko over him now with the knife. At his throat. His eyes opening right before the penetration.

  “Oh my dear God, baby, please don’t!”

  He had snapped and was changed forever. Perhaps the last brain cell had disintegrated in the booze or the shock of being so close to the “Final Curtain.” Jack Bender never the same. A spiritual awakening of some kind. Yumiko over the edge as well. Changed forever. Dropping the knife and hugging him. Letting all her pain pour out. Jack puking and then staring into space. Not Jack anymore. Of course Jack Bender had ceased to exist awhile back. Sometime shortly after his first heavy drinking sprees. The soul gone. Something had replaced it though. Something else inhabiting the body of Jack Bender. Something evil.

  Yumiko not noticing. She had gone somewhere else as well. It was calm and safe there. Jack though was in a turbulent area. Unfinished business. Getting sober only the beginning. A quest had begun that night. The nervous breakdown after coming out of an alcoholic blackout had precipitated what was to become the last piece of the puzzle for the Aum Cult.

  Jack Bender stayed sober a day at a time. He helped a lot of sailors as well as Japanese. Being a retired enlisted man made him a natural to help young sailors with drug and alcohol problems.

  Along the way he had met Adam Welsh. Took him to meetings for a while. Adam not making it though. Tough odds. Family history there. In the genes. Adam knowing Jack was always there for him though. Yes, and Adam would reciprocate thought Jack. When the time was right. One day at a time.

  26

  HONCHO I- YOKOSUKA, JAPAN 1965

  The young sailor fell to the ground hard. Nausea had set in. Blood. Tasted it in his mouth. He started to get up but thought better of it. Jack Bender, Seaman, United States Navy, power puked all over the shoes.

  Whose shoes were they?

  The vague thought amongst the spinning and outrage in his gut. Head pounding. Eyes blurred. The cute Japanese girl. Yumiko, of course. Memory returned. Yumiko Abe. Talked to her most of the night. Drank him under the table. First woman on earth to do that. Reason enough to fall in love. Another rough duty day for Seaman Bender. Everyone on his ass. A worthless drunk. That was Jack. No mean feat to achieve the moniker of drunk on a ship full of red-eyed swabbies. The drunk he was though. All coming at the age of twenty-five. This exalted status. An old twenty-five thought Jack now here in Honcho I, the name for the bar and entertainment district just outside the Yokosuka Naval Base gates.

  A connection with Yumiko though. Something there. Between them. Alive. The pain, that was it. The common denominator. The great equalizer. The bridge between the oceans. Yea, they shared the pain, mused Jack. The third sake had brought Hiroshima into view. The Bomb. The terrible days. Yumiko Abe had talked of that day. All coming back to Jack now as he took her hand to right himself.

  “Jack San, you ruined new shoes. My new shoes!”

  “I’ll buy you another pair. As many as you want, my beauty.”

  Staggering down the narrow streets towards the Love Hotel. Japan way ahead of the West, in matters concerning sex. Love hotels specifically set up for young lovers and cheaters of all ages. Very practical. Most Japanese houses were built with walls as thin as paper. No privacy. One reason for the Love Hotel – fucking. No allusions. If you took a girl to one of these dens of iniquity you were going to have sex. She knew it. You knew it. Nothing dirty about it at all. The neurosis of the West not existing here. No one slithering in and out. Perfectly acceptable. Sex as normal as breathing here in the Land of the Rising Sun.

  As they had entered the hotel, Jack saw a giant replica of the Statue of Liberty adorning the very top. Jack never did understand why all of these hotels had decorations of this type. If one saw the Statue of Liberty or the Washington Monument (actually that one made sense, thought Jack) it was a dead giveaway that you were not entering a Motel 6 but rather one of the numerous Love hotels throughout Japan. Yumiko had picked the room by pressing a button affixed to a picture. The faceless woman behind the counter, her hands the only visible part of her anatomy due to the partition blocking any other view. This another feature which was uniquely Japanese. Complete anonymity between the customer and the proprietor. The key passed through the slot, money exchanged and then straight into the elevator.

  The embrace was immediate and cataclysmic. A hunger. One born more out of fear and anger than anything else. Yumiko engulfed the man who represented the destruction of her family and her way of life while rejoicing in the excitement of a new beginning. A new life. Jack looked up from the void. The blackness that he had wandered in for what seemed an interminable time now being wiped out by the passionate, all-consuming kisses of this wanton siren. Jack beside himself now, grappling with her breasts, falling back on the bed. Mounting her now as if his entire existence depended on this moment. Lips, loins interchangeable in this dance of passion. On and on now. Jack in a veritable delirium. Yumiko crying out her testament of love for this man whose soul had almost passed into the night but for the intercession of the beauty now passing out in ecstasy beside him.

  27

  YOKOSUKA NAVAL BASE, 1992

  Walking back towards his office at the Ship Repair Facility, Yokosuka Naval Base, Jack Bender pondered his life to this point. Peanut beside him, trance-like. Waiting for direction it seemed. Jack, content to stay within himself for a while longer. A kind of escape for the man who had not drank in a very long time. There would be time for stress very soon in any case. Jack Bender, retired United States Navy walked with Peanut, a man who would not be given a second glance by the passerby on the street. “Peanut” known as Haruki Okamoto within the circles of Aum Cult. A valuable soldier, he had killed the daughter of a former Aum lawyer who had been guilty of testifying against the Cult. Killed her while she slept. A lesson. The lawyer saving them the trouble by killing himself soon thereafter. The wife and mother now in an insane asylum. The grief too much. The human mind dealing with grief by switching on the automatic shut-down valve that we all have. The pain threshold only so high and then the valve opened and all pain gone along with one’s very sanity. Some would say a fair trade.

  A chance meeting by a roving security patrol. A more alert marine on duty at the gate and the events of the next week may have been averted. This was not to be. Jack Bender entered the empty office with one of the most notorious terrorists in the world with the ease of the unlocking of a door.

  Here in the Supervisor of Toxic Waste’s Office at Yokosuka Naval Base, a different Jack Bender. In no way reminiscent of the man who just an hour earlier had spoken of “One Day at a Time,” “Easy Does It,” and “God Grant Me the Serenity.” No this was the Jack Bender born of years of guilt. A result of his alcohol consumed torture of the tragic Yumiko. Reparations had to be made now. Amends due.

  “Soon we will move the gas out of the caves. I have a scheduled hazardous material pick-up just outside of Yokohama. We’ll make the switch then,” he barked to Okamoto.

  “There will be no suspicion?”

  “I’ve worked here 15 years now. Half of the Japanese base workers respect me, and the others think I’m crazy and leave me alone,” Jack pausing but no laugh forthcoming from the caved in forehead that was Haruki Okamoto.

  Jack continued, “Adam Welsh will be with me. He doesn’t have any idea what’s going on. He’s been assigned to me on a Temporary Duty Status since he has complained of depression. He’ll be just the diversion we need.”

  “The lover of Keiko.”

  “Yes, but I wouldn’t bring that up when we’re there tomorrow, even though he doesn’t speak any Japanese and we can converse freely. The transfer will be made as planned.”

  They studied the map Jack had kept hidden in his lunch box. Stored underneath the dental floss that he would bring out from time to time at the base restaurant. Right in front of God and everyone, Jack Bender would floss his teeth. This after a lunch of apple pie and ice cream, fishcakes and a burrito. All in that sequence. Eccentric would be a word used for Jack if one were feeling thoughtful and kind. “Horse’s ass” would be the term most often that came to Adam Welsh’s disgusted mind as he looked upon the absurd visage of Jack Bender pulling morsels of burrito, ice cream and fish from his nonetheless stained teeth on those occasions that they dined together.

  An hour, perhaps two passed. Now about midnight. Time to leave the base. Take Okamoto to the taxi. No chancing the trains just yet. Next week, of course, no problem. But taxis for now. No public viewing. No one able to say, “Yes I saw him. The man in the newspaper.” The man who undoubtedly would be found under the wheels of a train somewhere after the Event. His usefulness passed.

  28

  Jack Bender dropped the terrorist at the taxi stand and without a word began the walk to his humble abode. Twenty years in the Navy and ten more with Ship Repair Facility and Jack Bender was living in an apartment the size of a room at the local YMCA in Schenectady, New York. This apartment he shared with his soulmate in torture, Yumiko. Walking towards the hovel, Jack thought back to that night in 1965. The night of the metamorphosis for him and his beloved Yumiko.

  Something else had happened though. The sense of impending doom had hovered over them almost from the beginning. Even after Jack had stopped drinking for good, the anxiety and fear would always creep under their door like the Casper character of the cartoons that Jack watched in his youth in Bakersfield, California. Funny he should think of that now. Hadn’t thought of Casper in years. Crazy what a guy can think of on a clear night with Armageddon approaching.

  The apartment in Yokosuka was small even by Japanese standards. One entered to a tableau of two figures speaking quietly. Jack Bender and Yumiko Abe, husband and wife, but Yumiko, despite her deep love for her husband, unable to bring herself to take his American name. Too much. Enough for Jack that this Asian beauty had chosen to stay with him for all these years now. Through the drinking, the beatings, the insanity. Sitting here at the table few words needed. Two human beings who had shared so much over the years did not need to rely on verbal communication. Periods of silence were not awkward in any way. They were welcome in fact. Language such an imperfect, flawed device anyway, Jack thought. One always reading things into what had been said.

  What did she really mean by that?

  A simple look would suffice now. A gesture. Body language the order of the day. Most days they could reach each other’s minds in Japanese and English. The talk tonight did not touch on the events at the train station. They both knew that Jack had been an integral part of the Event. The eradication of the American woman a deposit on the past due note from Hiroshima. A note that Jack Bender prayed would be paid in full in less than a week.

  Yumiko Abe ate her rice and Kobe beef tentatively. The Kobe an unspoken gesture of celebration from Jack. In her senior years now , she was a small woman. Average size for her generation but still dwarfed by the modern day Japanese woman. Diet of course as well as the inbreeding with the West being the difference. Yumiko rationalizing her union with Jack by refusing to bring even half an American into the world. The Japanese women of the day disgusted her. Yellow Cabs, she called them whenever the subject came up. The inference of course being that these girls were “ridden” by American men with the ease of riding a local taxi. Too much coddling. More and more like their Western sisters. Trying to be like a man. Women should be a woman. Number one job was to please the man. Man of course always sure to show respect.

  Yumiko had given Jack a good life. The sex had been in Jack’s words, “Out of this world.” Her own vengeance though could be other-worldly as well. Jack had witnessed it first-hand the night of his last drunk when she had pressed the naked blade against his throat.

  Yumiko had been a young woman when she met Jack on that summer night on Honcho I so many years ago. Leaving Hiroshima after the War, her uncle getting work at the American Naval Base at Yokosuka. Yumiko drinking at an early age but able to function. Always in control. A tolerance of sorts. Breezing through a series of American sailors and marines in rapid succession. “Kicking ‘em to the curb” as one of her broken-hearted quarry had blurted out to his sympathetic shipmates.

  Jack was somehow different. She hadn’t planned to fall in love with him. Hadn’t planned to fall in love with anyone in fact. In the end, she had and a gaijin no less. An American, the enemy. Her enemy. The remitter of all of her suffering. His vulnerability was what had sealed her fate. The broken soul badly in need of repair.

  Since that night in the Honcho, Jack and Yumiko had barely been apart. A slight of build man, Jack nonetheless had the intensity of a pit bull when he set his mind on something. Once he put down the booze, all the energy that had hitherto been focused on the hard work of leading the life of a functioning drunk had been re-directed to whatever the mind of Jack Bender determined to be the good. Alcoholics Anonymous, more specifically Alcoholics Anonymous in the Tokyo, Japan area became an all-consuming vocation for Jack. He had started the first Japanese-English A.A. groups in the area and was known throughout the offices of the Navy brass at Yokosuka Naval Base as the man to send a sailor to who was having problems with the “Demon Alcohol,” as Jack called it.

  Yumiko did not always support these efforts of her husband. At first, being young and still uncomfortable in the circles that Jack traveled, which included many Americans, she felt resentful. Just another phase of his, she thought. He’ll tire of it soon enough. It wasn’t until she realized that the days of sobriety were turning into weeks, then months and finally years did she accept that Jack’s work with other alcoholics would indeed be a significant part of their life.

  In point of fact, acceptance had been imbedded into the psyche of Yumiko Abe from the first flash of the Bomb, and she had used it as a drowning victim clings to a raft.

  The headaches came for Yumiko about five years into her almost perfect union with Jack Bender.

  “Where are you, Nami? I can’t see you.”

  Screaming. Cold sweat. Jack in his low-key, unassuming voice now.

  “Honey, wake up. It’s the nightmare again. Only a dream.”

  “She’s gone! I can’t find her! Jack, what happened!”

  The flash again and then the heat.

  “My head. It hurts so much. Hold me. Please, Jack, Make it go away. So painful. Where is Nami? Where is my sister? Where did she go?”

  Jack holding her tight now. The human being in his arms; his wife. His very life. The reason for his existence. His Savior.

  Nami Abe had been incinerated at Ground Zero on the day of the Bomb. The clean-cut boys from the Midwest United States. The land of corn and Oz. The apple of their mothers’ eyes turned in an instant to the Furies that day. The deliverers of death parcels that were still being received by generations of innocent Japanese. Little Yumiko had made her way out of the city with her uncle. For reasons Yumiko still did not know, her older sister, Nami, had not. In the recurring nightmare, Yumiko would see her sister briefly. Nami, two years older. A look of confusion. Fear. Trying to call out to Yumiko. The white flash and then, nothing. The dream at least once a week now and always the intense pounding in her head afterwards. Jack doing his best to console and comfort but to no avail. An impossible task in any case. Doctors, both Japanese and American all saying the same thing. The headaches a result of some catastrophic blow to the nervous system. Yumiko not forthcoming. Jack knowing the source. It could be found years ago in the bomb-well of a B-17 with the incredulous name Enola Gay. The tumor in the brain of Yumiko Abe would be discovered a year later. Not malignant. Aggressive drug treatments wiping it out but taking part of Jack Bender’s wife as well. The spark that had attracted Jack in the beginning now but a flicker. Yumiko becoming more and more distant. Withdrawn. The love-making, while continuing becoming less and less emphatic. What was once a toil of bliss now a workmanlike chore for Yumiko. A wifely duty.

  Jack more and more involved with helping other alcoholics. Promoted to Toxic Waste Facility Supervisor at the Naval base. Doing a bang up job. People talking. What a change. The drunk nobody could count on a ghost of the past. Of course the eccentric with the dental floss during lunch still alive and well. The good outweighing the bad. An amicable trade-off. Meanwhile, Yumiko, his soul-mate for the ages, falling into the void. Communication with friends non-existent. The meetings helped. The program the saving constant. Not enough though. A.A. had kept Jack Bender alive and saved his marriage with his beloved Yumiko but still the recurring nightmare. The horror that he and his wife would always face. The need for retribution would always be there. Thus the alignment with Asahara and now the Irish scum. Unpleasant. Jack hated them both, but in the end, they were a necessity. An evil one but albeit a necessity. Once this was all over, he and Yumiko could live again. Did Jack Bender really believe this? Not important. It would be so though. Then he would gladly face his judgment. Always a price.

  29

  The state of the art modern day chariot navigated through the security checkpoint at John F. Kennedy Airport with the ease one would expect from a vehicle being piloted by a Formula One driver. Alas, the driver today was a twenty-three year old woman, and the mode of transport was airport cart not a super charged race car.

  Kelley Bronsan took her carry-on bag from the conveyor belt and moved to the departure area. The plane to Tokyo would be boarding soon. Her heart was racing. Thoughts of Dad and Japan. A different culture. Another planet, her father had told her when they talked last week.