Last Instructions Read online

  You’re on your way to an important meeting.

  The bus comes to a standstill in a traffic jam.

  You see a girl standing in the middle of the bus.

  She smiles at you and presses a switch she’s holding in her hand.

  The girl blows up along with the entire bus, and metal ball bearings penetrate your right cheek and your chest.

  The ball bearings that flew through your right cheek get lodged in the backrest behind you. The ones that entered your chest stop in your heart.

  You feel terrified. Your body is covered in a cold sweat. Your breathing is rapid and shallow. Fear engulfs you. You know what you need to do so that it doesn’t happen again.

  You feel your life slipping away.

  You die.

  Keiko

  You’re a soldier in the Battle of Iwo Jima in February 1945.

  You’re lying in a trench.

  The ground is muddy and your uniform is stained.

  You’re hungry.

  Your commander shouts: “Charge!” And you emerge from the trench and charge forward.

  A bayonet rises up in front of you from a trench you didn’t notice and pierces through your shirt.

  A girl is holding the rifle.

  You’re impaled on the bayonet and can’t move.

  The girl watches you die.

  You feel terrified. Your body is covered in a cold sweat. Your breathing is rapid and shallow. Fear engulfs you. You know what you need to do so that it doesn’t happen again.

  After you stop breathing, she removes the bayonet and cleans your blood off on her pants.

  Keiko

  You’re asleep in your bedroom.

  The whole building starts to sway.

  The ceiling collapses and you’re buried underneath it.

  You crawl out from under the rubble.

  You stop crawling when you see a pair of small sneakers in front of you.

  Standing in them is a girl.

  She’s holding a hammer and looking at you.

  The child takes—

  Elliot stops the recording. Carmit removes her earphones and they sip their coffees for a moment without saying a word.

  Carmit is the first to speak. “It’s a two-hour recording,” she says. “I don’t have the video file, but I’m assuming they bombarded his eyes for two hours with images of a girl killing him. And they performed this transformation on him five times. They made him suffer PTSD from this child.”

  “Not just any child. His daughter.”

  “Why?”

  “Did you bother to find out what happened to Kazuo Shimizu after the transformations?”

  “Not really. I read that he committed suicide.”

  “I did some research on the subject last night. They covered up some of the story; but several hours before he killed himself, he strangled his daughter.”

  “What?”

  “The Chinese corporation that hired you wanted him out of the picture and wanted it to look like a suicide. They also wanted it to shame his family in such a way that they wouldn’t want anything to do with what Kazuo Shimizu had built and would sell the Shimizu chemical conglomerate immediately after his death. Kazuo was a strong man; they knew it would be difficult to manipulate him into harming himself, so they caused him to suffer PTSD from his daughter. He saw her in his subconscious as someone who would kill him one day, and all that needed to happen to spark him into action was for him to return home in the evening after drinking too much sake, and for the transformation to kick in while he wasn’t at his best. That’s how it probably happened. He killed her and when he sobered up and realized what he’d done, he shot himself. Your dreams are echoes of the transformations you performed on him.”

  “I killed him. I killed her, too. When I started all of this, I didn’t think my career would include the murder of innocent people.”

  “What’s done is done. You’ve put it behind you. Don’t get all depressed on me now.”

  “Depressed? No, not depressed. I’m pissed off big-time. I know that the Organization also used me to kill lots of innocent people. I don’t know what their objectives were in doing so, but I do know what the results were.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look,” Carmit said, taking a note out of her pocket, “these are the three dates on which I performed transformations on one of the Organization’s agents. Back then, I warned Grandpa that they were screwing with his mind. When I flew to Geneva—a building collapsed with all its occupants inside. When I flew to Argentina—a park caught on fire and toasted everyone who was there. When I flew to Canada, there was that story about the guy who broadcasted a hypnosis recording over the radio and killed eleven thousand people. You must have heard about these three incidents. I connected the dots only after the hypnosis incident. I realized that each of the three occurred after I’d performed a transformation on that agent of theirs. He must have been involved in all these incidents.”

  “Just a moment, are you telling me that the Organization got you to perform transformations on the same agent on three occasions and in three different countries? How did you know he was one of their agents?”

  “He was a compete nutcase. He kept a journal in which he recorded everything that happened to him, and I read through it while he was unconscious. In it he talked about his childhood and how he was recruited into the Organization. He was a lunatic even before they messed with his head. I read the journal when I was performing the transformation on him in Argentina. It was the second transformation, after he’d already brought down the building in Geneva, but I didn’t know it then. I didn’t have time to read the entire journal, only the part where he wrote about his childhood and his recruitment into the Organization. The transformation ended and I had to get out of the room. If I’d read more, I guess I would have gotten to the part about the building in Geneva—maybe I would have stopped the treatment there and then. They went way too far.”

  Carmit placed her coffee cup on the table. The barista at the Starbucks in Hammersmith called out the name of a customer who had ordered a triple latte. “The Organization is responsible for those disasters. I don’t know why, but I’m going to find out. First I’m going to deal with the Chinese so I can stop Keiko from appearing in my dreams. I think I’ll go to China.”

  “I don’t think you should do that. Forget everything and go back to your family. Put it all behind you.”

  “I can’t.”

  I turn and walk away from the fountain. I sit down on the bench again and look at the flat stones that have been pieced together to form the floor around the fountain. The face of the same boy who appeared earlier in the waters of the fountain emerges now from one of them. His face is made of stone, as if it’s been pressed into the rock to form a 3-dimensional mold. He opens his eyes and gazes at me with his 2 stony white eyeballs. His stone mouth opens but no sound comes out. The stone face replicates itself. 2 boys stare at me and suddenly rise atop stone bodies that emerge from the rock, which appears to become plasticine or modeling clay of some kind. The 2 stone children turn to me. They take a few steps and stand in front of me. I’m sitting on the bench so my eyes are level with their empty orbs. One raises a finger to his lips. The 2nd points toward a silvery metal pyramid some 20 meters away. Funny how I hadn’t seen it before. Then all at once, the 2 stone children crumble and fall to the ground in a pile of dust. A gust of wind carries them away. I get up and walk toward the metal pyramid. It stands 20 meters high and its 4 triangular sides are made of silvery mirrors. I move closer and look into one of the mirrors. I see the man I once was, the man I am now, and the man I will become. Something is happening inside the pyramid. I try to peer inside. The pyramid shatters and comes crashing down, taking the old me with it. The new me is watching the scene unfold and smiling.

  Standing next to me is a woman in jeans, a black T-shirt, and sneakers. A cold wind blows through the park. I feel the icy chill on my face like you do when you open a freezer door. A
thin layer of ice covers the paving stones around the sidewalk and the surrounding grass takes on a thin layer of frost and goes from green to white in a widening circle.

  “It was customary at one time to make a death mask,” she says without turning to me. We are both looking at the remains of what used to be the pyramid and the body of the old me is lying in front of it, a thin layer of ice forming over it, too.

  “If you were a poet, philosopher, composer, or some other important persona in the 18th or 19th century,” she says, “you’d be fitted with a death mask. Following the departure of the priest, the death mask craftsman would show up with strips of fabric and plaster. After mixing the plaster in a vessel of water and soaking the strips of fabric in the solution, he would gently lay the strips over your dead face, fixing them firmly to your mouth and closed eyelids and using them to cover your cheeks, which by then would have already turned the color of plaster. Once the strips dried, he would remove the plaster mold of your face and fill it with wax or clay. Napoleon had a death mask. Beethoven and Chopin, too.”

  She runs a hand through her hair.

  “They also used them to document a violent death or suicide. In France, people who were found dead in the city were put into glass cabinets and displayed to the public on the banks of the Seine. A few of the onlookers would be people looking for a missing relative, but most would show up simply to satisfy their morbid curiosity. The murmurings of the crowd would sometimes be broken by a stifled cry from someone who recognized a loved one. They’d make death masks for some of those bodies, too, for documentation purposes.”

  The circle of frost continues to spread all around us.

  “L’Inconnue de la Seine also drowned in the river. She got her death mask by chance, from someone who couldn’t ignore her beauty as she lay in a glass cabinet on the bank of the Seine. He ordered and paid for the work of the death mask craftsman. She was young. 16 or 17 perhaps. The mask was the final courtesy extended to her before she was buried without a name. She was believed to have committed suicide, but there were other rumors, too.”

  The old me is now covered by a thick layer of ice.

  “She became known as L’Inconnue de la Seine, the unknown woman of the Seine. Replicas of her death mask were produced over and over again. Molds were made from the replicas and more replicas were made from the new molds. Her face, alongside Napoleon’s, stood proudly on display in many a French home, and the story about the beautiful young girl continued to spread, changing from time to time—the mistress of a banker who killed herself, a young girl who fell overboard from a ship on her wedding day, the victim of a horrible murder. Her face is everywhere today. The face of the Rescue Annie doll, which is used for CPR training, is a replica of L’Inconnue de la Seine.”

  She goes silent for a moment.

  “Staring up into the face of everyone who undergoes CPR training these days is the face of L’Inconnue de la Seine. Her mouth is slightly open. She was designed in that way by Asmund Laerdal so that air can be blown into her. But in the original death mask, her mouth is closed—with that same hint of a smile she displayed as she lay in her glass cabinet on the bank of the Seine on that sunny winter’s day. Every one of the 300 million people who have been trained in CPR with a Rescue Annie doll and every one of the 17,800 people who are currently undergoing CPR training courses in various countries around the world right now as we speak is working with a Rescue Annie doll and they cannot see that smile—the smile that says: ‘You couldn’t do it.’”

  The woman turns her head and looks at me, “This place is the death mask of the unknown man you used to be.”

  She turns and walks away.

  A cold wind is blowing.

  03/02/2016–11 weeks and 5 days since waking

  Gina and Mark are an Australian couple. They’ve been traveling around South America for 8 months and have managed to get through Venezuela, Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia, and now plan to move on to Peru. They’re driving around the continent in a large RV that they shipped from Brisbane, Australia, to Santiago, Chile. They flew to Santiago, met up with their RV, and kicked off their travels from there. I buy it from them with the 300,000 euros from the barrel. Initially, they didn’t want to part with the RV. Gina said they had so many beautiful memories from their time driving around in it, so I doubled my offer from 150,000 to 300,000 euros.

  “With 300,000 euros,” I said, “you can continue traveling for a very long time, and buy a newer and nicer RV.”

  The increased amount did the trick; and after 2 days of faxes and emails to the Australian Licensing Department, the vehicle ownership was transferred to the name of Oscar Salstrom, a Swedish citizen—me.

  A much smaller sum was enough to persuade several locals to help me to carry a particularly heavy barrel from my rented vehicle to my newly acquired RV. When they asked me what was in the barrel, I told them I had filled it and several sacks with salt from the Salar and that I was going to sell it all in Sweden as a medicinal antiaging product for the skin and make lots of money. I also gave them most of the lumber I no longer needed. I kept 4 lengths of wood that I tied to the roof of the RV. Gina joined me in the RV for the drive to the car rental agency and she used the time to fill me in on how to maintain the vehicle’s various systems and how to hook it up to the power supply and sewage facilities in the trailer parks, and Mark followed us in the rented pickup. I returned the rental vehicle, paid a fine of $150 for a few scratches and dents on the back of the pickup’s open cargo bay, and said farewell to Gina and Mark, who then hired a car for themselves. Before saying good-bye to one another, we all enjoyed a wonderfully tasty cup of coffee from a flask offered by the rental agency employee.

  I’m now using my Swedish passport—one of several I still have from the time when I worked for the Organization in Europe. I kept them in the basement. I’ve replaced René Mercier the Frenchman with Oscar Salstrom the Swede after checking online and revealing that a Swedish passport will allow me entry into Peru, Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, and the United States without having to acquire a visa for those countries. The only problem I may have will involve arranging the RV permits to go from one country to the next, but I’ll make the necessary arrangements beforehand so as to speed up the process.

  I say farewell to the Australians and visit a number of stores and a gas station to collect the items on my shopping list:

    1.  10 20-liter jerrycans

    2.  200 liters of fuel

    3.  Strong fishing line

    4.  Sufficient food for a week until my next purchase

    5.  Shampoo, soap, conditioner

    6.  2 cartons of whiskey

    7.  Cartons of Marlboro (50 packs)

    8.  2 large truck jacks

    9.  3 1-inch steel irrigation pipes, each 2 meters in length

  10.  1 packet of 1-inch metal nuts

  11.  1 power drill

  12.  1 standard electrical switch

  13.  1 set of drill bits of various sizes

  14.  Nuts and bolts of various sizes

  15.  1 length of strong metal cable

  16.  A length of thin metal cable

  17.  1 puncture repair kit

  18.  1 box of contact adhesive

  19.  Another box of duct tape

  20.  1 1 × 1 meter sheet of metal

  To check:

  Condition of spare tire

  I visit several hardware stores and a gas station. It’s harder here to find all the items I need. In Europe or North America, I would have been done with my shopping list within 2 hours. Here it takes me 2 full days to get to the end of my list. I waste a lot of time finding the cartons of cigarettes. None of the stores carry much stock.

  I leave La Paz and head down Route 1 in the direction of the border with Peru. I turn off the main highway near the town of Guaqui and drive n
orth until I get to an isolated beach on the shores of Lake Titicaca. I park in a spot that can’t be seen from the nearby trails and get to work on the mobile home for a few days.

  I place large rocks behind and in front of the RV’s 4 wheels to prevent it from moving and use my shovel to dig a large hole under the vehicle. The hole is a meter and half deep and its opening extends slightly beyond the sides of the RV so I can climb in and out with ease. It takes me 2 days to dig the hole.

  I empty the RV’s sewage with the designated flexible conduit pipe, rolling the pipe out to its maximum length and using it to drain the waste from the tank. Once the tank is completely drained, I disconnect the pipe, roll it up again, and dip it into the mound of waste I’ve created on the ground. With the tube now filthy and smelly, I return it to its place in a compartment near the floor at the back of the trailer. I recall the work I did for the Organization at the Iranian Embassy in the Netherlands. The sewage there smelled a lot worse. I remember crawling through the sewage pipes along Duinweg Street.

  I climb back into the hole and dismantle the RV’s empty sewage tank. I bring it out of the hole and measure it. The warhead isn’t very big and will fit inside, but it’s very heavy and the screws and 2 metal strips that hold the sewage tank in place won’t be able to bear the weight of the nuclear device.

  I cut a rectangular opening into the upper part of the sewage tank and place the piece of the tank that I’ve sawn away off to one side. Using the steel pipes, the rope, and the pulley wheels, I construct an improvised set of tracks along which I slide the barrel down the steps of the RV. I then carefully roll the barrel into the hole I’ve dug under the RV and leave it there for now.

  I’m hot and I take off the protective apron I purchased from the dentist. I’ll wear it when I’m on the road and that will suffice.

  I climb down into the pit again and drill 2 parallel rows of 5 holes each into the underside of the RV, above the spot where the sewage tank sits. Into each pair of holes I insert a length of metal cable to create 5 loops. When the 5 cables are in place, I roll the barrel a little closer and retrieve the 2 jacks, placing them on the ground under the loops I’ve created. I then saw away the side of the barrel and roll the plastic-wrapped warhead onto the square sheet of metal I position on the 2 jacks. I secure the 5 loops around the warhead and slowly raise the jacks, 2 to 3 centimeters at a time, stopping to tighten the loops before continuing. By the time I’m done, the warhead is tightly secured to the underside of the RV.