by Nisioisin
“Since my client has taken the trouble of traveling all the way here, it was the least I could do… Let’s meet in the lobby.”
“Well, well. Your consideration is most welcome. Quite the user-friendly swindler, aren’t you. What a laugh.”
Even without a videophone, Senshogahara’s utterly humorless expression came across loud and clear.
Not a glimmer of this new leaf she had supposedly turned over.
The same woman she’d been two years before.
What the hell was Koyomi Araragi up to─not that I had the faintest idea who Koyomi Araragi might be, but seriously, what was that moron doing?
What was he thinking, letting such a dangerous woman out of his sight?
Then again, maybe something had happened to make the reformed Senjogahara have yet another change of heart─could that something be what she wanted to see me about?
If so. If so…
“I thought for sure you’d flown into Okinawa from somewhere else in Japan yourself. That you’d just arrived at the airport too.”
This made it sound even more like she’d been watching me─a “not that you can know everything” type of intel…
She wasn’t in a position to access ANA’s customer data in such a short time.
So it was probably a shot in the dark, or a cheap shot. With that in mind, I responded calmly, “I have no idea what you’re talking about. I just arrived at the airport on the Naha monorail, if that’s what you mean.”
It’s infinitely easier for me to lie than to tell the truth─most of the time my mouth does the lying for me.
Almost like automatic writing. As phenomena go, a natural phenomenon.
Knowing Oshino, who’s a pro when it comes to seeing through people, and Gaen-senpai like I do, being looked at, being watched, doesn’t ruffle me one bit.
Go ahead, get an eyeful.
I’ll just turn everything you observe about me into a lie─because it’s my pet theory that the so-called “truth” is subject to ready substitution by falsehood.
Pet theory? When the hell did I start keeping a pet?
“Sure, whatever. ‘Lobby’ is a little vague. Can we meet in a coffee shop? There must be at least one in the airport.”
“But of course,” I replied, not at all patronizingly, with the utmost courtesy. It would be difficult to keep up the tone once I was face to face with Senshogahara, though. “Please take a seat in whichever establishment you prefer, have yourself a cup of coffee, and wait there for me. I’ll take it upon myself to come to you.”
“…Should I text you the name of the place I pick?”
“No, no. I wouldn’t want my client to go to such trouble. I’ll make the rounds of the airport’s coffee shops and make myself known to you, so please, Miss Senshogahara, I would be delighted if you had some coffee or a nice, refined cup of tea while you waited for me.”
“But we’ve never met before,” she objected. Whether she was playing along or was just fed up with me, I don’t know, but she seemed to have taken up the act again. “Should we decide on some kind of sign?”
“A fine idea. Please hold your iPhone in your right hand, then.”
“…Just about everyone has an iPhone these days. That won’t help at all.”
“Oh, theirs are just early models.”
A joke, a lame joke. At least it wasn’t sinister.
If I didn’t get off the plane soon they were going to start cleaning around me, so this was no time to be making such jokes, but that’s exactly when I make them.
Oshino used to take me to task for it back when we were in school.
Yes, that Oshino, the last person in the world who ought to be lecturing me. But if it was bad enough that he needed to say something, I have no choice but to admit it, galling as it is.
I thought I had become an adult, but if I was operating on the same conversational level as a high schooler, I had yet to shed my boyishness.
“My cell phone isn’t an iPhone in the first place,” Miss Senshogahara corrected me. “I don’t have a computer at home so I can’t even use one.”
“My goodness, is that so?”
“I’m wearing glasses, that’ll be the sign.”
And with that she hung up.
Wouldn’t even more people be wearing glasses than using iPhones? Wait, did she even wear glasses?
Had her eyesight deteriorated since the last time I saw her thanks to all the exam prep?
Though from what I understand, your eyesight is largely genetically determined anyway. However much you dress it up as “burning the candle at both ends,” it isn’t going to get much worse from studying─and in fact, she must not have been cramming for any entrance exams.
I got through them on shrewdness alone, but even such shrewdness wouldn’t impress Senjogahara. We’re talking about a woman who once argued, or joked, that studying lowers your tension and your grades along with it. Goofing off leads to higher marks or something. Even if she was kidding, and while what I know about her grades is two years out of date, if she continued on the trajectory she was on back then, she could get into basically any college she chose without any preparation at all.
In which case, maybe the glasses thing was some kind of joke as well. She, too, was the type who becomes more prone to telling silly jokes the more dire and unsuited to humor the situation.
Well, this may sound overly self-conscious, but she got that way thanks to me… My personality was slightly too strong a poison for a high school first-year, an adolescent child.
Anyhow, I put my cell phone in my pocket and got off the plane─I had no carry-on luggage. It’s my policy never to carry luggage of any kind.
My person is the sum total of my worldly goods.
I don’t like to carry anything I can’t put in my pocket.
Sometimes the nature of my work calls for more, of course, but in such cases I ultimately, and immediately, dispose of whatever materials I acquired for the job.
Oshino once chided me that my lifestyle was a little extreme, or something to that effect, but again, look who’s talking.
Seriously.
My mood tinged with nostalgia as I cast my mind back to college, I disembarked, going from head in the clouds to feet on the ground─though the nostalgia part is a total lie, of course.
006
I wandered around the airport─and it didn’t take long to locate the client. It wasn’t my first time in Okinawa and I had a pretty good sense of the coffee shops at Naha Airport, but the simplicity of the task stemmed more from the fact that my client Senshogahara’s “glasses” turned out to be an extraordinarily effective “sign” after all.
I can’t imagine a better one.
I knew it was her right away, even from outside the shop.
An immediate positive I.D.─because the “glasses” in question were in fact novelty nose glasses.
The kind with a moustache attached.
What could be more conspicuous than a high school girl wearing her school uniform and Groucho glasses at a café─forget conspicuous, it was outlandish. Even I was caught off guard.
That’s not the kind of thing they sell at airport shops, so she must have had them ready to go even before we brought up signs and so on… Yeah, no, I mean, dammit, what a fool!
But at the same time, touché…
I was overcome with a sense of defeat.
I felt like a whipped dog.
The rubric for judging this kind of contest is extremely delicate, and subtle, so it’s a little hard to explain, but to put it simply, the moment you think you’ve lost, you’ve lost.
Senjogahara or Senshogahara, now that I had found her, I didn’t feel like going into the café.
If I went in and sat down across from her feeling like I did, I would definitely have lost the initiative. The whole conversation would proceed at her pace─which is not how I preferred to do things.
Or more like hated to.
I eased away from the café and headed
to the airport souvenir shop to purchase those reliable staples of Okinawan retail: sunglasses and a Hawaiian shirt.
It’s a mystery to me why they sell Hawaiian shirts in Okinawa…but those iconic articles were supposedly based on Japanese kimono, so if you think of it as reverse importation, it seems less strange.
In a bathroom stall I removed my jacket and shirt and put on the Hawaiian shirt and sunglasses, then checked my look in the mirror. Some cheerful fellow was reflected there, like, who the hell is this guy? Perfect with a ukulele─but it’s never productive to pursue perfection. If you don’t leave a little wiggle room, a little play, you won’t be able to act when it really counts, like with the steering wheel of a car.
After ensuring that I hadn’t left anything in the pockets, I dropped my jacket, shirt, and necktie into a garbage can just outside the bathroom and headed once more to the café where my client waited.
Wearing a supremely composed expression to complement my new outfit, I strode straight up to the table and sat down across from her.
“Bwah!” the woman with the nose glasses spat out the orange juice she was drinking.
The fact that she was drinking orange juice and not coffee or tea as I had suggested might have been a token of defiance on her part.
Whatever the beverage, with that spit-take I had her in the palm of my hand.
Keheh.
I had won.
My brains had.
Inwardly I pumped my fist─though of course my expression didn’t waver for a second.
I calmly settled into my seat like everything was totally normal and said to the waitress who came over with a towel, “Hot coffee. And another glass of orange juice for the young lady.”
A man in a Hawaiian shirt and sunglasses must be a completely unremarkable sight in an Okinawa airport because the waitress just took my order and left. As she did so, however, she glanced somewhat suspiciously at the high school girl holding her sides in seeming pain across from me.
“Wh-Where’s,” having finally recovered enough to speak, the girl in the Groucho glasses said between shallow breaths, “that funeral suit you always wear… Does Okinawa make even a person like you, um, cheerful?”
“It’s not a funeral suit. Not all black suits are for funerals.”
Just as I suspected, my polite tone was gone the moment we were face to face.
Part of me wanted to keep playacting a little longer, but whenever I catch myself in that sort of mood, I consciously bring it to a close.
I’m a contrarian and a congenital liar.
I keep at it, fooling myself too.
“And I wear the occasional Hawaiian shirt, why not?”
“Yeah right, you’re still wearing your usual trousers…and leather shoes. Kinda ruins the effect. Cracks me up…”
Hmph. She was definitely laughing at me, not with me.
It pissed me off. Was I being small?
“And you, did you cut off that flowing mane of yours? Whatta surprise, you look good.”
Small as I am, I chose not to comment on the Groucho glasses. In other words I gave it the cold shoulder and instead steered the conversation to her hair, which she had cut audaciously short.
It hadn’t actually taken me by surprise, though, since over the summer Koyomi Araragi had shown me a picture of her with short hair. That being said, it was currently a little longer than it had been in the photo─maybe?
“…”
She used her napkin to wipe up the orange juice she had spewed all over the table, then turned to face me─and I finally found myself confronted by her trademark iron mask, which the party item seemed only to diminish.
I guess she missed her chance to remove it.
“Been a long time, Senshogahara.”
“Yes, Suzuki.”
Our six-month reunion─I’m pretty sure that’s how long it had been.
I could be wrong. I couldn’t care less.
It was a reunion with a woman I never thought I’d see again, who I thought would kill me on sight if I ever did─with the daughter of a family I had swindled in the past.
Hitagi Senjogahara.
007
“Never thought I’d hear from you like this. So what’s up? Something happen?”
“There’s a person I want you to deceive.”
My client Hitagi Senjogahara, whom I can finally stop calling Senshogahara, a high school senior at, what was it, Naoetsu High, repeated what she’d said to me over the phone. Like she could only make her pitch as if she were reading it straight off a cheat sheet.
From her attitude, it seemed possible I had misheard her after all when I thought she said, “I owe you one.” Maybe it had been wishful thinking.
But again, I couldn’t care less.
It’s an open question whether there’s anything I could care less about.
I wouldn’t be surprised if those mumbled words had been a trick to lure me out─in reality, though, now that I had been lured to Okinawa and was listening to her pitch, there was no end to how much less I couldn’t care about the call’s particulars. It was ancient history.
History was never my favorite subject.
It was all the same to me whether the woman sitting across the table was someone I had swindled a long time ago, a passing tourist, or the daughter of my greatest benefactor. I couldn’t care less, across the board.
“There’s a person I want you to deceive,” she said again─not so much to me, by this third time, but as if she were trying to persuade herself. As far as I was concerned, she was getting tedious. “I wonder if you can pull it off.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence. There’s not a soul in the world I can’t deceive─”
I was intentionally talking big because I figured Senjogahara hated that kind of braggadocio more than anything. When I don’t have a handle on the conversation, my first move is to say and do whatever I think will displease my interlocutor.
What’s the point, you ask?
No particular point.
I just feel more comfortable being hated than liked─if anything, lessee, maybe it’s because being liked equals being taken lightly, while being hated at least means you’re being taken seriously.
Or whatever.
“─But until I hear some concrete details, I can’t say one way or the other.”
“I only couched it as a job offer so you could save face, since even if you’re not my better you’re at least my elder. This is something you were going to have to do all along.”
“What the hell?” I shrugged my shoulders at Senjogahara’s statement. I had no idea what she was talking about. Talk about pointless. “Is this about atonement? You want me to make up for putting you through the wringer once upon a time? What can I say, you’ve really grown, Senjogahara, and I don’t just mean your boobs.”
I threw in that dash of sexual harassment to make myself that much more hateful, of course, but maybe it didn’t have the desired effect on the girlfriend of a pedophile─and anyway, she had penetrated my “make them hate me first” defense a couple of years ago.
Penetrated it like a sword, or maybe with the sharp tip of a writing implement.
So maybe it was pointless, after all. However adept the sleight of hand, it was like performing a magic trick after the secret has been revealed─even if it’s easier for the victim of a con to be victimized again, this young lady, who’d been so harshly deceived, falling for my tricks a second time was unthinkable.
So I didn’t think it.
“I’m not asking you to make it up to me,” Senjogahara continued seamlessly as though she’d taken no damage.
I didn’t care for her knowing attitude. Didn’t care for it at all.
“Araragi already healed the wounds I suffered at your hands.”
“Oho. That’s splendid. Aren’t you two cozy.”
“I’m asking you to make it up to someone else─and you have absolutely no choice in the matter.”
“I’m getting a little t
ired of you dictating my actions to me.” For once, I was being honest about how I felt─maybe the word sounds hollow coming from me, but it was how I honestly felt. “I’m going to take off now, if that’s all right with you,” I announced.
“Try it and I’ll stab you. Don’t think for a moment that I came here unprepared.”
“…”