A New Era

‘The brevity of our lives breeds a kind of temporal parochialism—an ignorance of or an indifference to those planetary gears which turn more slowly than our own.’
Kathryn Schulz, ‘The Really Big One’, New Yorker, 20 July 2015

To his surprise, Bian Lu got to the age of sixty without any major mishap. But as he looked in the mirror on that morning, two weeks after his sixtieth birthday, he knew it was all up. The green sheen, though very faint, was no trick of the light. When he emerged from the bathroom, Lam understood immediately.

‘Have they all gone?’ he asked.

She nodded.

‘It’s better this way,’ he said. ‘You’ll tell them how much I loved them?’

She nodded again.

He took his toilet bag, though he knew he wouldn’t need it for long. Lam sobbed gently.

‘We’ve had more life together than I could have expected,’ he said.

‘You’re right,’ said Lam.

He didn’t dare touch her. Who knew?

‘Goodbye, my love,’ he said. ‘Thank you for everything.’

Then he donned a mask, stepped out onto the crowded Hanoi streets, and made his way along the bustling pavements to the secure wing of the French hospital, trying hard to avoid any physical contact on the way.

 
******

Ryuichi Sakimato’s disappearance from a Tokyo playground was commonly regarded as having signalled the beginning of ‘The Events’, as they came to be known, though that was with the benefit of hindsight, of course. Eight-year-old Ryuichi was in his classroom before the break but was absent after it. His teacher raised the alarm and the school was searched. There was no sign of Ryuichi. His parents were called – he wasn’t at home. The police were informed. Two security cameras overlooked the playground. They both showed the same thing; one moment Ryuichi was in the playground, the next moment he wasn’t. He reappeared in the small hours that night, confused but apparently unharmed, wandering around the playground, where he was spotted by the night guard. He could tell the police nothing.

Since Ryuichi was safe and sound, the heat was off, and the mysterious incident would surely have been forgotten if the night guard had not spotted the bag. Out of curiosity, after he’d done his rounds, he played back the before and after CCTV footage from the playground cameras. It seemed like a standard grey-black bin bag, leaning against the playground fence. First, he wondered who would have put a bin bag in the playground, and then he noticed that the bag had changed its position at precisely the moment Ryuichi disappeared. He showed his discovery to the police the next morning. As if a disappearing and reappearing boy were not enough, they now had a levitating bin bag on their hands. They checked the playground – there was no sign of such a bag – and then quizzed all the staff. Nobody knew anything about a bag.

That might still have been the end of the story – the Tokyo police would have been laughed out of court if they had started talking about mysterious bin bags – if it hadn’t been for the sudden disappearance, one week later, of Teddy Haley from a Washington D.C. school playground. This wasn’t just any Washington playground. Teddy was the Vice-President’s son, and the school was at the heart of a security cordon. The first thoughts were kidnap and/or terrorism, but how? Teddy’s disappearance hit the front pages, and so it came to the attention of the Tokyo police. They got in touch with the US embassy and, rather sheepishly, asked whether a moving bin bag had been seen in the security footage. It had. Teddy being the Veep’s son, the whole US state security apparatus was immediately involved. Two apparently levitating bin bags did not an alien invasion make, but it was clear that something was going on – even when poor nine-year-old Teddy reappeared, confused just as Ryuichi had been, in the middle of the night.

The media were intrigued and excited. Any incident involving the Veep’s son would have been good copy, but the mystery as to where Teddy had gone, and how, had the journalists salivating. They got even more excited when the next two disappearances (and reappearances) occurred in Moscow and Beijing in rapid succession. Whatever this was, it wasn’t the Russians, and it wasn’t the Chinese. Back in Washington, there were leaks from the investigation. The bin bags filmed in Tokyo and Washington were, it was said, not bin bags but sophisticated shape-shifting entities that could apparently move with lightning speed. When the images were slowed down as much as they possibly could be, they seemed to show the entities darting towards Ryuichi and Teddy and enveloping them, before disappearing. Later, those same entities seemed to reappear briefly and somehow open up to let Ryuichi and Teddy reappear. The images showed them stepping back into the world, as if out of nowhere. What was going on?

If there had only been four such incidents, then perhaps the excitement would have died down after a while, but thereafter further disappearances rapidly occurred in Nairobi, Reykjavik, Buenos Aires, and Hanoi. People around the world, understandably, became increasingly alarmed. Was it safe to let their children play outside? Was it safe to send them to school? There was speculative talk of patterns and sequences. So far, only boys under the age of ten and over the age of six had been ‘taken’ (vocabulary already implying some sort of intelligence and design). Did that mean that girls and younger and older boys were safe? And the sequential incidents seemed to be geographically – and perhaps politically – distant, even opposite: Tokyo, in the East, was followed by Washington, in the West; Moscow, in the West, was followed by Beijing, in the East; Nairobi, in the South, was followed by Reykjavik, in the North; and Buenos Aires, in the South West, was followed by Hanoi, in the East. Each time, it seemed, there was just one disappearance. Was this a pattern? Which city – and it did seem to be only cities - would be next? Were those cities that had already experienced a disappearance safe from further disappearances? At least, said some, the boys returned unharmed.

Meanwhile, officialdom floundered. The authorities everywhere were said to be vigorously investigating the apparently mysterious circumstances surrounding the disappearances and reappearances of the young boys, and there was much talk about international cooperation. Scientists were interviewed at length. Philosophers and public commentators gave their opinions on how mankind should be behaving. There was a great deal of media speculation about the entities that the CCTV footage apparently showed, and which soon became popularly known as the ‘baggies’. Their very appearance was taken as being, possibly, an indication of intelligence and agency, for was this not a deliberate disguise? Two further disappearances occurred, in Ottawa, and in Mumbai, and then the disappearances (and the apparitions of the baggies) seemed to stop. 

Media coverage flickered and flared for a while. Gradually, the world returned to normalcy. Meanwhile, the boys who had been abducted returned to their lives at their various schools and in their various families. Attempts were made to establish some sort of international scientific programme to monitor their mental and physical health, but the attempts soon foundered on the simple fact that the ten boys were, to all intents and purposes, completely fine. None of them exhibited any symptoms of psychological trauma and all of them continued to grow quite normally. On the first anniversary of Ryuichi’s abduction, media coverage around the world flickered and flared again, but soon subsided. Meanwhile, books and articles were written. Journalistic potboilers at first, and then more scientific studies. A respectable documentary series about the disappearances was made, followed by several dramatized versions of the same events. There was a deal of affectionate nostalgia. A children’s cartoon series ran for several years, with the baggies anthropomorphised so that they could ‘talk’ and make human expressions of various sorts. For several years soft-fur baggies were all the rage for younger children in the richer economies. Thereafter, the world moved on. The baggies and the disappearing boys were forgotten.

******

Around the date of the twentieth anniversary of the disappearances, they reappeared in the media and public consciousness. The ‘boys’ were all now in their mid- to late-twenties. Not all of them had been fortunate in life. When a network decided to invite all ten to a reunion – in return for a generous fee and travel expenses, naturally, enough of them accepted to give the idea critical mass, and all ten came on board. The producer took them to Tokyo, where Ryuichi showed his nine fellow abductees the old playground (still there) where he had disappeared and ‘the ten’ discussed their experiences. The programme was accompanied by interviews with some of those who had been involved in the investigations. A similar programme would probably have been made around the date of the thirtieth anniversary, except that in the meantime Teddy Haley managed to kill himself accidentally with a drug overdose. ‘The nine’ didn’t have quite the same ring and, anyway, thirty years was a long time for a set of events that, while remaining mysterious, never reoccurred.

******

 When he was in his early fifties, Sergei Petrov, who had been nine when he disappeared from a Moscow playground, fell ill with a strange and alarming ailment. The first sign was a faint green sheen on his skin. Fortunately, his doctor knew his limits and rapidly referred him to a clinic specialised in infectious skin diseases. Sergei was immediately quarantined and placed in a hermetically-sealed tent. Those who had had recent contact with him were instructed to isolate themselves and watch carefully for any symptoms. Meanwhile, Sergei’s skin rapidly turned deep green and hardened. Skin grew over his eyes. By the fifth day he was dead.

An autopsy was carried out. When they cut into Sergei’s abdomen, they found that his innards had somehow been hollowed out and that a strange, almost spherical object had grown in the space where his vital organs had been. Tests revealed the object to be vegetal in origin, and it seemed to be still growing. The Moscow medical team were flummoxed. Such a parasitic growth was unknown to them. Curiously, though, it didn’t seem to be contagious in its current form. There was a debate among the medical team as to whether they should let the growth continue. It was surmised that this would probably demonstrate the full life cycle of the parasite. In the end, though, the growth died. Samples were taken and then the growth and what was left of poor Sergei were incinerated. He had been the seventh boy to disappear and, including Teddy Haley’s self-destruction, was the second to die.

Then one of the nurses, who had seen the twentieth anniversary programme about ‘The Events’, remembered Petrov’s name and realised he had been one of ‘the ten’. Could there be a connection? It was thought best to err on the side of caution. A call went out to the remaining eight ‘boys’. They were warned that they might have been infected somehow. They were told about the early-warning symptoms and urged to go to hospital straightaway if they did start to fall ill. They were not told what might happen next, but they were told that the disease was probably fatal. The Moscow team also shared their notes with the medical authorities in Japan, Kenya, Iceland, Argentina, Vietnam, China, Canada and India. The World Health Organisation was discretely informed about the possibility of a new disease, previously unknown to mankind. It was agreed that there was no need – yet – for public announcements of any sort, but the authorities remained quietly vigilant.

Sokoro Mwangi, who had disappeared from a Nairobi playground fifty years before, confirmed everybody’s worst fears when he checked into hospital some six months later, complaining of green, hardened skin. His illness took the same course as that of Sergei’s – a hollowing-out of his insides, followed by clinical death, but with the growth of something vegetal inside him. Again, the medical team debated whether they should let the growth continue and again the growth died before they had reached a decision. Further samples were taken and Sokoro’s corpse and its parasitic guest were incinerated. Tests on the samples revealed that Sokoro’s skin had taken on some aspects of tree bark, whilst the growth inside him was simply unclassifiable.

Ryuichi Sakimato was the next to go, followed just two months later by the Canadian ‘boy’, Ken Tremblay, who had long since moved to Vancouver, and then by Vijay Anand, in Mumbai. The next six months saw the ‘boys’ in Reykjavik, Buenos Aires and Beijing fall ill and die in the same way. Bian Lu was the last of ‘the ten’ to fall ill. Officialdom breathed a private sigh of relief. Whatever it had been, whatever had happened to the ‘boys’, the episode was now over. The medical authorities could relax and go back to fighting existing scourges – ebola, Nile disease, and so on. It was agreed that, just as there had been no need to terrify populations while the illnesses took their course, there was no need to frighten them by telling them about the mystery illness now that it had gone for good.

The medical specialists and security services were agreed, though, that it had been a very strange illness. Were the ‘baggies’ the adult version of the vegetal growths they had found inside the victims? How did the growths evolve? How had the ‘boys’ been infected, given that there had been absolutely no detectable trace in their bodies?

Somehow, Raoni Metuktire knew when the time had come. She had lived all her life in a tiny village in the Trincheira Bacajá Indigenous Land in the heart of the Amazon Rainforest. When a young girl, she had disappeared from the village for a day and a night, and then returned. Her parents believed she had been taken to God and brought back. They revered her, believing her to be special. Since then she had counted fifty summers. Her parents had long since passed, but she kept the hut in good repair and worked with her fellow villagers. On the day, she could see a faint green sheen on the skin on the backs of her hands. She waited until the villagers were sleeping in the afternoon heat before setting off through the rain forest. After a while, she broke away from the usual path and forced her way through the undergrowth until she reached a flat spot close to the roots of a massive palm tree. She lay down and waited for the end. Two weeks after her death, the hard green skin on her belly split open and a vegetal column slowly grew upwards. A strangely-shaped flower head developed at the top of the stalk. A few days later, a storm blew up and the flower head, perhaps encouraged by the humidity, bloomed. The petals gradually drew back and tiny translucent envelopes like miniature bags blew out and drifted away on the wind. A new era was about to begin.

THE END

Bio: Martin Westlake is a British-born resident of Brussels, Belgium. His last Aphelion appearance was "Boianai" in our October 2020, issue.

E-mail: Martin Westlake

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