Free Interest by Kevin Gaughen Page A

Assault Team Tokyo” drove past him before pulling up in front of the monastery. Two helicopters circled overhead. Officers poured out of the vehicles and took aim with rifles at the monastery.
    Len heard a tremendous noise like an earthquake coming from the chaos. He had been doing his best to look uninvolved, but turning around, he saw the monastery exploding in slow motion, as though a balloon were being inflated inside a Lincoln Log house, with the terrible sounds of ripping timber and roof tiles popping off. As the main pagoda collapsed in on itself, Len thought he briefly saw a gleaming object underneath the destruction. The dust cloud rising from the collapsing temple frustrated his attempt to see what the object was. Pop-pop-pop of gunfire: the police were shooting at something.
    From the dust cloud emerged an enormous, pearl-white, spherical object that rose into the cobalt sky. Dirt fell off it as it floated upward. The police helicopters, which had been hovering nearby, quickly backed off to a defensive distance. The object hung in midair for about ten seconds while the officers below emptied magazines into it. Then, with a sound like thunder and enough force to cause a strong gust of wind, the object simply disappeared.
    ___ _
     
    Len had exactly three priorities at that moment:
     
Get the hell out of there before any cops saw him;
Booze, like right goddamn now; and
Get back to the hotel and type up his notes because holy fucking shit.
     
    There was nothing from Mr. Hamasaki at the front desk. Len went to his hotel room, which was about the size of a walk-in closet in America. Japan was a bad place for claustrophobic people, which Len thankfully wasn’t. The room had a mattress-type thing that could be folded into a chair when you weren’t using it for sleeping, a little television, and a tiny window.
    Len, disregarding the careful efficiency and tidiness of the space, unzipped his suitcase and dumped out all the stuff Neith had given him. He also shook out a shopping bag of items he’d hastily bought on the way back to the hotel: alcohol, cigarettes, and enough food to work all day without interruptions. He ripped open the carton of cigarettes, a local brand he’d never heard of, then fumbled to open the equally foreign bottle of whiskey. He took a few slugs to calm his nerves, struggling in disgust to swallow it each time. Japanese whiskey would be a lot better if it weren’t trying so hard to be scotch, he thought. Whatever. He rolled some paper into the typewriter and set to work.
    Len decided to omit what Ich-Ca-Gan had said about Neith. He figured it would be better if Neith didn’t know what Len had found out about her. Once he’d finished writing up everything else, he put the typed pages and handwritten notes into one of the envelopes, along with the film canister and the typewriter ribbon, and left it at the reception desk for Mr. Hamasaki, whoever the hell that was. The microcassette, however, he took with him to the deserted alley behind the hotel. He pulled the tape out of the cassette, lit the ball of gray ribbon on fire with his lighter, then put the remains into a street trashcan. Having been awake for forty hours at that point, Len went back to his room and slept until the next afternoon.
    One would have thought that the local SWAT team getting into a firefight with a UFO that had been hidden under a Buddhist monastery for seven hundred years would make some great front-page news. One would have further thought, in this day and age of ubiquitous surveillance and video cameras affixed to every conceivable electronic device, that footage of such an extraordinary event would surface and appear on TV or the Internet. One would have been surprisingly wrong. The next morning, Len went down the street to a newsstand and bought five different local papers. Inexplicably, none of them said anything about the incident. He went back to his room and turned on the little TV. Zilch.
    Len checked at the