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lounge about on their bikes outside the temple gate, smoking. The priest wants to call Tosa Securities, I dissuade him. Fat Boy accepts the Kabukiman henro slip with tears in his eyes and gives us each a pack of Black Cats as settai. Later, I say, when the pilgrimage is over and we can enjoy such things, we will smoke them and think fondly of Tokushima and the Setting Sons Chapter.
    As they drive away, pennants rippling, Mas quietly throws up into the neatly mown grass by the temple gate. When I go to help him, offer paper tissues, water from the bottle on my bike, he waves me away, angry, afraid. For the rest of the day’s ride to Temple Nineteen he will not speak to me. The incident with the akiras has affected him out of all proportion to the cause. For my part I am content with his silence; I have my own inner reaches to plumb: the seduction of power, the narrowness of my escape, a grace—the Daishi, walking with me?—that has so far permitted only the selfless use of my power while preventing the selfish, the harmful. But even selflessness is failure: I have crossed half the planet to come on this pilgrimage to break that power absolutely. The sky is crisscrossed with the contrails of many aircraft—local aerospace forces, weaving an intricate pattern of defense in the ionosphere I cannot decipher.
    Our prayers in the Daishi Hall at Temple Nineteen are dry and lifeless; a computer (read secretarial) error at our hotel has assigned our room to a brace of interior designers over from Osaka for the week-long Shinto anniversary. It is the big annual download. The place is busier than Bethlehem in a census. If apologies were roof tiles we would sleep warm and dry but as they are not, we find shelter in a truckers’ coffin hotel on the faded side of town. “No tattoos” says the sign behind the reception desk.
    “No room at the inn,” I joke but the girl on the desk doesn’t have the referential baggage and Mas still isn’t speaking. I am reluctant to leave the demon box in a locker in the communal changing room but the other guests in their uniform blue checkered kimonos and tabi are already politely not staring and, after the akiras, I am wary of provoking interest. The box on the third level—padded, air-conditioned, with integral videophone, radio, television, minibar (I raid the chocolate, pass, ruefully, on the Scotch), and service call button—is pleasingly womblike, if not exactly designed with people of my height in mind. I remember a bullshitting Beefeater once showing me the cell in the Tower of London called “Little Ease” that was too short, too narrow, too low to allow its occupant to stand or lie straight. Torture. I flick across television channels: sport, sport, chat show, sport, EmTeeVee, ads, ads, an old British sitcom that wasn’t funny when I first saw it fifteen years ago. No Danjuro 19: Kabukiman! I find le porno but the plotless, artless slomo-ing of rounded chunks of oiled anatomy to what sounds like the Japanese idea of Harlem elevator music is deeply depressing, utterly anti-erotic.
    I surface from contorted fleshtone dreams—falling asleep with the television on—wakened but not knowing what has woken me. The big rack of sleep pods shakes to the thunder of passing trucks, plumbing gurgles, air-conditioning whirs like a gray moth. A cry—more a wail—a voice begging for them not to hurt her don’t hurt her please don’t hurt her. Mas’s voice, beyond the thin plastic wall.
    Crouching on the mesh catwalk, I hammer on the coffin door until he opens. I heard you cry out, is anything the matter, what’s wrong?
    Nothing is the matter, nothing is wrong, everything is fine just fine he says but I see that his face is stone, hard stone, the face of a man who has been my friend all my adult life. Betrayed, confused, frightened, I return to my dark coffin in a far foreign country, and seek the pale comfort of memories.

L UKA CONCEIVED THEM. LATER, when she saw their true faces she