Published at 4th of December 2019 10:10 am

Volume 2, Part V: Paradox Spiral II

This chapter is updated by NovelFree.ml

I hear the sound. An ominous metallic click, coming from the other room.

The time must be almost ten ‘o clock. Dead tired from working my job into the late hours of the evening, I immediately resigned myself to the safety of my mattress after I got home. But it isn’t even a few minutes before I am stirred from sleep by the sound. I heard it only once, but that is enough.

The door to my room opens, letting a slit of white light into my darkened room, widening slowly with each inch of the door that is parted. A shadow occludes the light, and I turn to towards it only to see my mom.

It’s always around this part that I realize, and wish that I could never see this scene again.

The light makes it difficult to make out any detail on her figure save for the fact that she is standing. However, what little I can see of the scene beyond the doorway is clear to my eyes: my dad, collapsed over the dining room table. It isn’t clear at first whether he is merely unconscious or dead, but it isn’t long before I see what I first perceive to be some sort of spilled coffee. It slowly dawns on me that it is blood, dying the varnished brown table into a deep red. It is then that the shadow in front of the door speaks.

“Die, Tomoe.”

I remember what comes afterwards. My mother advances, kneels in front of me, raises the kitchen knife high above her, and brings it down on my chest, then up, then down again, too many times for me to count. Then I see her taking the same knife to her throat, then in a single, determined motion, plunges it deep into her neck.

All of my nights are bookended by this nightmare, the worst I ever have.

I hear the sound. An ominous click, through which I wake up.

I turn my eyes toward the bed, only to find Ryōgi gone. I lift up my bruised and battered body to observe where I find myself in: a house in the nook of the second floor of a four-floor low rise, the house of the kimono wearing girl. Well, better to call it a room than a house, really. A one-meter long corridor barely deserving the label separates the front door and the small living room, which, seeing as the bed which she slept in is also there, probably also doubles as her bed room. Flanking the corridor to the right is the door to the bathroom. Another door in the living room leads to another, presumably unused, room. She led me to this place last night after an hour’s walk. The name plaque that rested beside the entryway bore the name “Ryōgi”, so that must be her last name.

That girl—Ryōgi—never said a thing when we entered her room, only taking off her leather jacket and heading straight for her bed to fall asleep. Her apathy almost provoked me to protest, but the last thing I wanted to do was mouth off and have the neighbors be curious. After some consideration, I took a cushion lying discarded on the floor and used it as a pillow, then slept away.

And now I wake up with her nowhere to be found. I wonder what she could be up to. It looks like our ages are quite close. Considering her age, maybe she went to school? And yet, that wouldn’t be at all fitting for such a drab room. The sum total of things in her room: a bed, a refrigerator, a phone, a coat rack with four leather jackets, and a closet, which I assume is for clothing. No TV, no radio, no throw-away magazines, and consequently, no table to read them on.

I suddenly remember what she said last night. When I said I’d murdered someone, she said she was the same. I only half-believed her last night, but seeing her room, it might actually be true. Her pad seems to be set for functionality, like a room designed not to be lived in, but instead for someone who could suddenly be on the run at any time and could leave the room behind. Thinking about what she said makes a chill run up my spine. Did I think luck would allow me to draw the ace of spades, but instead brought me the joker?

In any case, I don’t plan on staying any longer than I have to. I want to at least give a word of thanks to Ryōgi for helping me out in a pinch, but since she’s out, there’s really nothing I can do. With silent and careful steps more befitting a burglar than a visitor, I make my exit from the mysterious girl’s room.

Without heading toward any particular place, I loiter around town to kill the time. Initially I am hesitant, even a bit scared, trying to make myself as inconspicuous as possible, and think at first that I made the wrong decision. But it soon becomes apparent that the world is turning like it always did, with no one giving me a second glance. The days go on with all the haste and weight of the hour hand on a clock. Somewhat disappointed at the realization, I make my way to the main avenue.

It is here in the main avenue that I expected to find cops asking around for a Tomoe Enjō, or at least people that might throw me the “I saw him on the 6am news” look, but there are none. Maybe the bodies haven’t been found yet. Still, maybe I give myself too much credit. There’s no way someone like me can affect people’s reactions to a noticeable degree with such a half-baked murder. Either way, it seems, for the time being at least, I’m not a fugitive. That being said, I still didn’t feel like going back.

Noon comes and passes, and I find myself in Hachikō Square, right next to Shibuya Crossing. I find a bench to rest on and feel content to spend an hour or two just looking up at the neon lights set upon the buildings stretching high into the sky. When the lights turn green, the cars stop to give way to the mad press of people, flowing like water from a burst dam across the large avenue. I can’t even imagine what it’s like when it’s a holiday. The people are mostly teenagers like me, happily smiling and with a levity to their walking pace, looking like they’re the most blessed individuals in the universe. It’s the face of people in their world: a world where they don’t aspire to anything anymore, or need to live for a good future. There’s no need to. Their life is all laid out for them, and they know that’s all they need to get by in their world. So how many of those smiles are real? All of them, or only a handful? I keep looking at their faces, trying to figure out, but it’s impossible to tell the real from the fake. I should have known better than to try, since that realization comes from your own self.

Tired of looking at all the people moving to and fro, I instead cast my eyes toward the sky. Let’s be frank. I’m as much a fake as the rest of them. Maybe at some point in time, I thought that my life was good and real, but reality soon stripped that away.

Junior high school was my time. I was a sprinter in the track and field club, and I kicked ass in it. I participated in all of the inter-school competitions and I never, ever lost. I never even saw anyone’s back. No one could say anything about my skill. All I cared about was cutting my time, and even a few milliseconds difference was enough to make me happy. I was an engine built for the sport, and I cherished it more than anything.

It follows, of course, that all this came to a screeching halt.

My family was never one blessed with an abundance of money. Dad lost his job back when I was still in grade school, and never got one back again. Mom was born into a rich family, but had a falling out with them after she ran away to marry my dad. Her world didn’t teach her anything about what happens after that. I think that broken family did only one thing right for me: force me to grow up faster than other kids. I had to juggle jobs after school, lying about my age just to get in, all so I could scrape out money to pay the tuition I needed. I stopped trying to care about the antics of my parents, and began to focus only on what I could do right by myself: sustain myself, go to school, and work my ass off for tuition. I thought of running as my only release from both the constant problem of living expenses and my parents who to me no longer seemed anything of the sort, the only reason I kept paying for school and going to the club activities without giving a heed to how tired I was.

Our troubles only truly began when my dad took the car out without a license one day. He was never really good with driving, but it had never bothered him before if he had to take his time parking or maneuvering the car. That day, however, whatever luck that had compensated for his skill ran out, and he got involved in an accident. He ran a pedestrian over. It was apparently a quick death for the unlucky guy. It forced my mom to go back to her family, head bowed and pleading for money just to pay the cost for indemnities. To me it was yet another fuckup that I needed to look away from, and so I refrained from prying too deep. What eventually concerned me is the fallout from all that. It didn’t take long for everyone at school to find out about the incident, and though I thought nothing of it at first, I found that the attitude of everyone at school had changed. My coach, who had always been more helpful than anyone I could remember, suddenly started to ignore me. The upperclassmen who were so proud to have me as the rookie star of the track and field team pressured me to quit. All because of something I had no part in; all because I was their son.

My family was the real problem. Losing what little money he’d saved over to help pay for the accident, my dad was far from fit to keep a family together. Mom started to work part-time in jobs society hadn’t prepared her for and she had no real idea how to do, but even that only paid for a portion of the gas and electricity bills. Rumors about the accident began to infest my neighborhood, growing and catching its own embellishments, to the point that dad couldn’t even get out of the house without so much as an angry neighbor trying to give him a piece of their mind. Mom still tried to work, but the rumors always caught up to her, and it never made her stay in one place for too long. I remember one time I was just walking around when some random nobody threw a rock at me. And always, there were the threats.

Yet even though the abuses got worse and worse, I never could muster the motivation to be mad at them. After all, the one driving the car, the one really at fault then was my dad. It’s all his fault. But then it’s not like I hated my folks in particular back then either, because it’s when I realized that whatever you do, even if you try as hard as you can, no matter how fast and how far you run, it’ll all be the same. You can’t escape your family, your past, or what you are. I mean, my folks walked their own path, tried to live a life as best they could, and look where it got them. That’s when I stopped trying to fight it. I figured if I just accepted it, then I wouldn’t have anything to cry about. It’s the moment when you’re a kid and you throw away your fantasies because they’re useless, and in its place grows a kind of new, self-crafted wisdom.

After that, feeling that there was little else it could teach me, I quit school. Besides, I had to work whole days now for the money. If you aren’t picky there’s plenty of work to be done even for people my age. Being someone still straddled with at least half a conscience, I couldn’t completely abandon my family, and so I had to put money in the house. Still, that didn’t mean I needed to talk to them. I never did after I quit high school. Slowly, like a poison, the joy and exhilaration in running and sprinting that I’d once found essential faded into dim memory, along with the faces of the people who once cheered me on, and the cold wind whipping past my face. It was something I’d thought I couldn’t ever live without at one point, and to find that I’d essentially thrown it away gave me no small measure of surprise. My mind made its customary excuses: I didn’t need it anymore, there were more important things. But they were only excuses. I lost. I gave up.

That’s the proof that I’m fake. If “running” was some sort of origin, a cosmic impetus laid out for the boy known as Tomoe Enjō, then I had failed it. And maybe, my mind thought, things would have turned out better if I had just indulged that call.

My parents took me to see a stud farm once when I was little. There I looked at all the nameless horses, whose lives were bred and figures built solely for the singular act of running, and I cried, thinking that if such a thing as a previous incarnation was truer than a tale spun for the naïve idea of destiny, then I must surely have been one of those beautiful beasts. My passion was born there. And it was killed by the weight of the real. I ultimately amounted to nothing more than a sham, imbued with dreams that only lie.

And in the end, I became a murderer. I laugh, though there is nothing truly funny about it. The sky I look at hardly changes, and I turn my eyes back to the spectacle of the city, where at least the people move, never stopping, with their smiling and content faces, all of us dolls as fake as anyone else with no real purpose. Or maybe they do have a real purpose: to fool around. They are in Shibuya after all. That’s the brand of reality I can’t really tolerate, though.

The collective footsteps of the throng bring me back to reality. Positioned above the entryway to a nearby building is a clock, showing the time nearing evening. Not wanting to loiter here any more than I’ve already allowed myself, I push myself up and out of the bench and leave the mass of people, heading for no particular direction.

Even here in the housing district the streetlamps shine no brighter than in any other part of the city. I’ve been walking aimlessly for the past three hours, and the autumn sun has long since set, reminding me that I still need a place to stay for the night. Without thinking about it, I find myself back in the familiar façade of Ryōgi’s apartment building. Though I always thought that I could let go of lingering affections easily when the situation demanded it, judging by where my wandering feet took me, it seems that’s not the case. I look to the second floor, and find that her window is dark. Looks like she isn’t home.

“Well, since I’m here anyway…” I mutter under my breath as I start to climb the stairs to the second floor, squaring myself with the fact that the only reason I’m doing this is to hang on pathetically to the last person that helped me in my life. The metal threaded staircase rings a harsh sound as I ascend as if to announce my presence. Confronting the door of Ryōgi’s room, I find that the newspaper that was slipped under her door as I left this morning is nowhere to be found. At first I think that she’s inside, but when I rap on the door, no response follows. So she came home at least once. Deciding to leave if the door is locked, I reach for the doorknob and turn it.

But it moves unhindered, and the door slips ever so slightly open. As I saw back in the street, the lights inside look like they aren’t turned on. In the silence, even the mechanical clicking of the doorknob is audible, and for a moment, it freezes my hand and blanks my mind in hesitation. Thinking myself ridiculous for standing there doing nothing for such a long time, I slowly widen the opening I’ve made and creep inside. I probably would never have thought as a kid that I would be committing trespass after killing someone not a few days earlier, and yet here I am. Well, she did say I was welcome in her house, but I don’t know if this is what she meant by that.

While my mind is busy making excuses, my body is creeping forward, closing the door, going past the entrance, past the short corridor, and finally into her living room. It’s black as pitch in here. Nothing can be heard except my muffled footsteps and my suspiciously rough respiration. Man, this makes me look like any random break and enter. Fuck, I need a light. The lights, where the fuck are the lights? I start to take a hand to the wall and feel around for the switch.

At that point, I hear the distinct sound of the front door opening. The person turns on the lights faster than I could even begin to consider who it is. As the fluorescent lamp casts a warm glow over the room, she looks at me with slightly surprised eyes that blink twice before she starts talking.

“Oh, you’re here. I hope you weren’t doing anything inappropriate, what with lights being off and all,” she says in the manner of someone just berating a classmate. She closes the door and takes off her jacket, then sits down on her bed, rifling through the plastic bag she’s holding and producing a small cup. “Wanna eat it? Cold things just don’t do it for me.”

She tosses the cup toward me, and up close I can see that it’s a cup of Haagen-Dazs strawberry. Why she doesn’t care about my trespassing is as much a mystery to me as her buying something she doesn’t even like. Taking the cold cup in my hands makes me think. She knows I’m a murderer, though I don’t know how seriously she takes it. And yet she offered her room to me. I remember what I thought this morning: that her room looked like she was some sort of fugitive ready to run at a moment’s notice.

“Square one thing with me, Ryōgi,” I say to her. “Are you someone I should be keeping one eye open for when I sleep?”

Contrary to what I expect, she laughs quite heartily at my question.”You’re a strange one, aren’t you? A nice way to phrase that question, I have to say,” she says in between bouts of raucous laughter that throws her already mismanaged hair into even greater disarray. The sight only tells me to be more cautious than before. At length, her laughter finally starts to die down, and she exhales one long breath before she continues to talk. “Hah, well, it’s true that this place has a shortage of people that can carry themselves in a fight better than I can. But hey, you’re here aren’t you? Since we’re both stuck with our respective pieces of wood in each other’s eye, let’s just leave them in there and keep our peace. Is that all you wanted to talk about?”

The kimono-clad girl looks up at me with a dangerously calm countenance of a child expecting to get a new present, her grin laden with meaning. “No, there’s something else I need to ask. Why did you help me?”

“’Cause you asked me to, that’s why. I wasn’t doing anything at the time anyway, so hey, what the hell. By the way, you don’t have a place to sleep right? I meant it when I said you could use my place for now. Not like Mikiya’s going to come by in a while, anyway.”

Because she wasn’t doing anything? What the hell kind of reason is that? My brain might be a bit frazzled lately, but not to the extent that I’d believe what she just said. I glare at her, which seems to garner no reaction. She only ignores me, not—I sense—out of indifference, but of a dignified sort of oblivion that just comes naturally to her. It’s an alluring paradox. Still, I realize that Ryōgi hasn’t given me any real reason to lie to me. Maybe she does have no particular reason to take me in. She could have invented any number of excuses to leech money from me by doing this, but she didn’t. But even so…

“Are you serious? You take me in no questions asked without even being suspicious of me? You sure you aren’t high?”

“You are seriously damaging your goodwill here, buddy. And to answer your question seriously, no I don’t take drugs, and to answer the question percolating in your mind, no I didn’t report you to the police this morning. Although I will if you tell me to.”

Well, nothing to worry about on that front. Besides, just the thought of this person talking to the police in polite tones seems like an impossible picture to paint in my mind. “Then what are you after? Is it a quick fuck, because—”

“Huh? There’s far better places a man can go to for sex in this town than my place, that’s for damn sure.”

“Well, see, what I’m saying is—”

“Alright, fine, whatever man! If you don’t like it here and you’re just gonna stand there and criticize me then you know the way to the door, buddy. I absolutely do not understand why you feel the need to judge every word out of my mouth, you know that?”

Her words brook no refusal. A silence hangs between us, but is broken by her rummaging through the plastic convenience store bag again, pulling out a triangularly-shaped tomato sandwich. Well, if I had any doubts about whether or not she thought nothing of me before, I don’t now.

“Well…then I’m sleeping over! You said it was fine, didn’t you?” I say maybe a bit too loudly. Ryōgi, for her part, doesn’t even seem all that angry, even though her words seem to indicate otherwise.

“Yeah, go ahead. I’ll be sure to tell you if your asshole glands are working up again,” she says while nibbling on the sandwich. At that, I suddenly realize how tired I am and promptly sit myself down on the floor. Time passes, but I can’t seem to give a mind to how long or how short that lasts. I turn my thoughts away from my little spat with Ryōgi to more practical matters. I’d found a place to sleep, if only temporarily. The 30,000 yen in loose change I hastily took with me should last me the month for food, but finding some way to work so I can survive while still hiding from the cops is going to be key.

Wait. Now I remember what I was supposed to ask Ryōgi. How could I forget?

“Hey,” I call to her. “Why ain’t your door locked?”

“Lost the key, obviously.” Her answer is almost like a blow to the back of my head. “I only lock the door when I’m sleeping, and I just close the door when I’m out. Works for me, and as you can see, not much here for a burglar to burgle.”

So my attempted trespassing wasn’t just some lucky coincidence. Her not locking the room might even be the reason for why she barely has anything in the room. Some regular thief could be slipping in and just stealing what isn’t nailed down. It’s too much of an assault on my regular sensibility that I have to tell her off.

“Christ, girl. You could at least ask for a spare one from the landlord.” “Lost the spare too. C’mon, it’s not as if you have to worry about it, and it’s not as if I need one.”

It’s really starting to grate on me how she just takes everything in stride. I can’t have any sort of peace of mind without a key. Meanwhile, Ryōgi here seems to lack the part of your brain that’s supposed to sound warning alarms when you aren’t secure even in your own home. I forget about my anger toward her some minutes ago and replace it with worry for this reckless girl.

“A house without a key ain’t a house. Just you wait; I’ll get you a new key.” An idea suddenly forms in my mind. I remembered the last job I managed to hold down, until two days ago at least, was in a moving company. I got to learn a few things about fixing some household related stuff, so a simple doorknob replacement wouldn’t be beyond me. They must have some kind of regular doorknob in that warehouse of theirs. “No, scratch that. I’ll replace the whole damn thing.”

“Well, whatever floats your boat. Do you have money for it?”

“Of course I do. It’s the least I could do for you. In fact, I’ll even do it tonight, so you’ll have no problem tomorrow!”

And on saying that, I stand up immediately, filled with a force of will whose origin even I couldn’t even begin to guess. I run towards the entrance, twist the doorknob, swing open the door, and break out into a run into the city canopied by night, barely allowing Ryōgi a word in edgewise. Here I am, a wanted (or soon-to-be-wanted) man sprinting to a moving company I planned to rob in the dead of night, putting some serious thought into how I could slip in without getting caught. Forget Ryōgi. Going on this little excursion for a girl whose first name I didn’t even know pretty much makes me the certified crazy one.

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