Jack of All Trade

Jack of All Trade – Chapter 3: Different Social Ideas

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Point of View: Uchiha Itachi

“He spiels all that morality stuff, but he’s fucking his young niece.”

Itachi and the man who spoke to him, Hoshigake Kisame, were on the outer edge of the crowd with their backs to the wall of a building. Itachi took his eyes off the man who was powerfully haranguing the crowd from the flatbed of a truck. Prudently, neither he nor Kisame wore a black band on their lapel that would identify them as the Yasukuni they were. A large crowd packed the square to hear the man on the truck speak, and neither the speaker nor the crowd were friendly to the outsiders of this party. Sennins is what the orator and his followers called their organization.

“How do you know?” Itachi asked.

“A man named Kabuto has broken off from him and started his own political party. He and his brother have been close friends with this man. He says incest is only one of his sex crimes, the least of them. He’s not married, is said to be shy around women in public, but in private does very outlandish things to them.”

“Like what?”

Kisame grinned. “We’re all perverts, aren’t we? There’s nothing like some sexual scandal to pique our interest. He likes to have women beat on him, even whip him, while he’s naked. Then he lies down and he eats them out and lets them piss on him. He doesn’t like to use his penis. Maybe he doesn’t have one. I heard he lost one of his nuts in the war, but maybe he got the whole set of tools whacked off.”

“And he wants to be leader of a perfect utopia,” Itachi said.

Uchiha Itachi was Konohao, but he spoke Soundan to Kisame with hardly a hint of accent. Twenty-six years old, Itachi had graduated from Konoha with advanced degrees in Central and Eastern region language and cultural studies. Besides his native tongue, he was fluent in most of the languages. A middle-class “intellectual Yasukist” whose political views were born and nurtured from collegian discussions and philosophical treatises, he had come to Sound to live with a coal-mining family to experience the poverty and suffering of the masses under the capitalistic system he believed enslaved workers.

It was a particularly appalling time economically all over the world. After the first brutal war ended eleven years before, most of the war-ravaged Eastern region had fallen into a terrible economic collapse. The war had brought the demise of the original king of Sound. In the wake of the governmental paralysis came unemployment and spiraling inflation that spawned political chaos. Much of the Eastern region was a boiling cauldron of conflicting ideals as different parties battled in the streets for control of governments and the minds of people.

It was a world of political violence and political confusion-the speaker on the truck called his political party Social Numbers, Sennin for short, despite the fact the part was antisocialist, while his pal in the fire country, got his start in politics by founding a “socialist” newspaper.

Now both men had private armies and engaged in terrorist campaigns against liberals, “left-wingers,” socialists and yasukists, burning down their opponents’ headquarters and terrorizing their supporters with humiliation, beatings, and even murder.

Itachi had not come to the Sound Capital to see the man on the truck speak, but to participate in a march by Sound yasukists. He felt both excitement and fear-with antiyasukists convening in large numbers for the Sennin rally, there was danger of violent confrontation. Although he thought of himself as a soldier for Yasukist, just as some missionaries think of themselves as soldiers for Christ, he was not a man of action, but a thin, medium-build young man with a handsome face, unruly short black hair, kindly red eyes and scholarly gold-rimmed eyeglasses.

The last-and only-fight he had been in had resulted in nary a scratch in the fourth grade. His opponent had a black eye.

The man on the truck, an Konohaon named Orochimaru, was not well known to the general public outside of Sound, but had gathered an impressive 18 percent of the national vote in a recent election. It was not enough to place him at the head of the government, but it was shocking considering that any rational person would question the man’s insane views.

And as he listened to Orochimaru haranguing the crowd and studied the faced of those around him, Itachi was stunned by the impression that the man was making on the people. The audience was buying into the ridiculous tirade.

“Look at the faces,” he whispered to Kisame. “They love him and they accept his lies with the awe and reverence of Moses receiving the Ten Commandments. Besides his powerful voice and dramatic gestures, he’s telling these people that they are the greatest on earth, that they should rule the world. He gives them some random race as a scapegoat to blame for their own failures and the terrible economy, and Yasukists conspiracies to make them fearful.”

“Brilliant. Devilish. Insane,” Kisame said. “We offer them a society in which there will always be full employments, bread on the table, and an equal share of all the fruits of labor, and they listen to this maniac who calls people ‘parasites’ and instills in them that Yasukists and the others are infecting them with a disease that is keeping them from ruling the world.”

“Look at the joy and veneration on their faces,” Itachi said. “His voice is reaching inside them and touching something, the type of preternatural emotion that you see on people enraptured by religious ceremonies. He makes the inferior the incarnation of evil, responsible for all their troubles, like a witch doctor telling the tribe one of its members has to be killed because he’s responsible for the tribe’s failure in the hunt. And these people believe every word, every lie. Look at the bliss and nervous energy of these sheep suckling on these lies. What fools!”

Itachi shook his head. “I’m dumbfounded that the common man can be so completely stupid and naïve. And I don’t think the rest of the world has any inkling about what this man is talking about, what danger he can be. I heard he wrote a memoir filled with these crazy ideas. I’m going to read it.”

“There is a social disease,” Kisame said, disgusted. “It’s a killer disease with pogroms against the inferior races and the murder of our allies in Yasukism. That’s the true illness spreading throughout Sound as a pandemic. And it’s not just a contagion among people out of work, not just among bakers and clerks who fear for their jobs and for bread on the table. The big bankers and industrialists running this country see this madman as a wedge against the Yasukist Revolution that would tear down the pillars of privilege they reside upon.”

“Maybe the incest with the niece and his sexual perversions should be well publicized.”

Kisame shook his head, “Coming from us, it would sound like smear tactics. And it’s the type of story that no newspaper would carry. Papers get too critical of these animals are liable to find themselves bombed and their editors murdered.”

A young woman was pushing her way through the crowd toward them.

“Comrade Mitarashi,” Kisame whispered. “A personal secretary at the Sunahoan Embassy. She was sent here to help assist in the preparations for the parade. A very good organizer.”

Itachi guessed the woman’s age at four or five years younger than his twenty-six. She had short, light brown hair and large brown eyes. His first impression was that she was modestly attractive, but her physical appearance conveyed more than the sexual nuances members of the opposite sex convey to each other. There was a serious cast to her features, a studiousness that he himself was often accused of having. Like the proverbial absentminded scientist, Itachi and Kisame both saw the world as a place that needed constant study and analysis.

“Comrade Mitarashi, comrade Uchiha,” Kisame said.

She offered a handshake. Itachi was caught by surprise at the strength of her grip.

“We are assembling six blocks from here,” she said, quietly. “We will keep a block away from this square as we march.”

“Just a block? That will still provoke the Sennins,” Itachi said.

She stared at him and frowned. “Of course, that is our purpose. We will be attacked by these socialists, the police will intervene on their side, and many of us will receive the blows of martyrs. But the world will have another example of how these brutal animals treat anyone who does not agree with their sick theories.” She gave Itachi a look, sizing him up. “Are you up to this, Comrade Uchiha? Perhaps you are more used to defending our movement in the drawing room over a cup of tea rather than on the streets with blood.”

He flushed. “I’m up to anything you are.”

“Isn’t she a tiger?” Kisame said, grinning. “That’s why the Embassy sends her around to organize demonstrations. She’s wonderful at making a man stand up for himself when he is shitting his pants from fright.”

What annoyed Itachi the most was that the woman had seen through him instantly. He was a drawing-room revolutionary. Itachi mulled over the young woman’s accusation that he was a drawing-room revolutionary as he walked toward the rendezvous point where the Yasukists were forming for their march through the streets. Although he was more than middle-class in terms of society, by comparison with the poor of Eastern region, he was privileged.

His own father, Uchiha Kyatto, was a minor Konohaon government career official, a supervising engineer in electrical works. Asked to describe his father at a meeting of a Yasukist cell, he told the group that his father was a sturdy, pipe-smoking Konohaon yeoman, a stouthearted man of the kind who made Konoha the empire that the sun never set upon.

That description of his father brought criticism from his fellow radicals because they tended to see people in economic terms, as the exploited and the exploiters, and the Konoha Empire was high on the list of exploiters. Although Itachi, too, saw the world through eyes tinted by the economics of oppression, he didn’t think of his own family as part of those dynamics. His father was just a rather reserved and stern older man, who took little interest in politics-though he didn’t temper his own feelings about his son being a radical. Like most young intellectuals of Itachi’s time, being a revolutionist was not in his family’s ancestral makeup, and by all the odds of heredity and environment, he should never have been drawn to Yasukism.

He grew up next to the sea, in the picturesque fishing village at the foot of the cold, dark and windy waters of the Konoha Channel. Like his, he was bright, an excellent student, but while his father excelled at technical studies-math and physical science-Itachi was drawn to the humanities-philosophy, politics, languages and other human concerns.

Intensely intellectual, a genius of a student, Itachi won a scholarship to Syncoption-a prestigious university, where he excelled at Central and Eastern regional languages, speaking these languages fluently, hoping for a career in the Foreign Service because he loved traveling and experiencing different cultures.

Itachi evolved into young manhood on the Konohaon Isles as the labor movement fought the factory owners for employment rights and the overseas continents tore at each other’s entrails. While his father, who had never left Konoha except for a stint in the navy, saw a world where the well defined social orders of the past should be maintained, Itachi saw a world of have-and-have-nots, of greedy factory owners and workers without food to feed their families.

Traveling in Eastern and Central Regions-to advance to knowledge of the languages, he saw and even wider gulf between rich and poor. Already a socialist and Yasukist, when he returned to Konoha he joined a Yasukist cell.

The leader of the cell gave him an assignment to live with a working-class family to broaden his awareness of the suffering of the people. Living for a month with a coal-mining family in the rut, he saw firsthand how the poor suffered under terrible living conditions and dangerous working ones. He had even shown up “for work” one day in the mine, falling into line with workers to see what it was like to work in a hot black hole hundreds of feet below the surface. Exposed by a supervisor, he was taken back atop and would have been prosecuted but he managed to talk his way out of it, putting across a story that he was a Konohaon university student doing research. Had the mine management found out he was a Yasukist, he would have been given a good beating before being turned over to the police.

A week ago he had been instructed by his cell leader to leave the countryside and go to another country to help build membership and organize resistance. The Yasukists march set for the same day and area as the Sennin rally made him nervous. It was planned to interfere with the Sennin meeting, sure to provoke a confrontation. He was bothered by the idea of violence on two levels-his own personal safety and his philosophy that a yasukist society could be achieved peaceful means.

He didn’t think of himself as a coward, but he also wasn’t practiced in the way of violence. Nor was he eager to be martyred-he wanted to live to see Yasukism victorious, not die for it. The idea of getting clubbed by a policeman or having to fight a Sennin brute knotted his stomach.

Even though he was frightened, he kept one foot in front of the other, kept himself moving in the direction where the Yaskukists were gathering. He would not let down his comrades, nor would he humiliate himself in front of the firebrand from Sand. Comrade Mitarashi had not only jabbed him through the chink in his armor, she had aroused a more fundamental aspect of mankind than bread and bullets. Lust. He didn’t particularly find himself attractive or desirable, although women, especially ones older than him, let him know otherwise. But the young Soundian firebrand had stirred his blood.

His sole sexual experience, beyond breast-petting and finger-fucking with a university girlfriend, and a brief and unsatisfactory “experiment” with the boy he roomed with when he attended a private prep school, had been losing his cherry to an older member of the Syncoption Yasukist cell he belonged to.

She was the wife of a university don who was also a member of the cell. Itachi had been invited to their country home for a weekend visit. After he retired, the don’s wife came in, took off her robe-totally naked-and crawled into bed with him. She explained that they had an “open” marriage and then if he liked, he could also have sex with the don. He would have been too mortified to get it up even for her, much less climbing into bed with an older man. However, she had helped him along by stroking his penis until it finally came erect, and then pulled him into her.

He had come quickly-and prematurely-as much out of fright as pleasure, and had left for town early the next morning to avoid any sort of tit-for-tat that the professor might expect after letting his wife fuck him.

His reserve and shyness around women had cost him many opportunities for intimacies, but he had regretted few of them. He was very much interested in cerebral matters than those of the flesh. In his own mind, he was reserving his passion for the cause of the revolution. But Comrade Mitarashi had challenged him both intellectually and emotionally, arousing in him an instant sexual attraction.

As he hurried down the streets, he tried to imagine her naked body in his mind.