Haruhi glared at me after her disturbingly accurate comment. It was like she could read my mind.
“Don’t do anything perverted to Mikuru until I get to the clubroom.”
I swallowed my So it’s okay once you’re there? and raised both hands in the air like an outlaw who’s got a sheriff pointing a gun at him in some Western.
As always, I waited for a response to my knock before entering the room. The maid sitting in her chair like a Therese doll greeted me with a smile like sunflowers in a grassy field. The sight healed my soul.
Nagato, flipping through a book in her corner, looked like a camellia that had bloomed in the wrong season. Yeah, I don’t understand my metaphors anymore either.
“I’ll make tea.”
Asahina adjusted her headband before flopping in her shoes over to the table covered with junk. She carefully placed tea leaves into the teapot.
I sagged into the brigade chief chair and blissfully watched Asahina prepare tea when I was hit by a sudden thought.
I turned on the computer and waited for the OS to boot up. I watched for the mouse icon to switch from hourglass to pointer. Then I opened the freeware viewer and input the password I set to load the contents of the folder MIKURU. I can understand why the Computer Research Society was in tears when they gave this new machine up. The thumbnails for Asahina’s maid outfit image collection loaded instantly.
As I verified that Asahina was still preparing tea with one eye, I enlarged one of the images and zoomed in.
This was when Haruhi forced her into her crouching tiger pose. I checked the edge of her exposed, ample cleavage. There was a black dot on her left mound. I zoomed in again. The dot was rather blurred, but it did indeed look like a star.
“I see. That’s what she meant.”
“Did you just figure something out?”
I closed the window seconds before she placed the teacup on the table. I don’t make mistakes. Asahina stood next to me and looked at the monitor. There was nothing to see.
“Huh? What is this? This MIKURU folder.”
Gah! I slipped up.
“Why is my name on here? Hey, hey. What’s inside? Show me, show me!”
“Uh, this is just, well… Hey, I wonder what this is. I’m sure it’s nothing important. Yep, that’s it. Nothing at all.”
“Sounds like a lie.”
Asahina reached for the mouse with a playful smile on her face and leaned over me, trying to grab my right hand. Not happening, sister. I grabbed onto the mouse. Asahina’s face popped over my shoulder as her soft body pressed into my back. I could feel her sweet breath against my cheek.
“Uh, Asahina. Could you let go….”
“Show me—”
Her upper body was crushing my back as she placed her left hand on my shoulder and reached for the mouse with her right. The sensation I felt was killing me.
Her soft giggling tickled my earlobes. It felt so good that I was about ready to let go of the mouse—
“What are you people doing?”
An icy –273°C voice froze Asahina and me. Haruhi stood in her gym uniform with her bookbag over her shoulder, looking like she’d just caught her dad molesting someone.
Asahina unfroze. She detached herself from my back, maid skirt rustling stiffly, and stepped back with robotic movements. She plopped into her chair like an ASIMO robot whose batteries are almost dead.
Haruhi made a “hmph” sound before stomping over the desk to glare down at me.
“So maids turn you on?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m going to get changed.”
Go ahead. I drank the tea Asahina had made and made myself comfortable.
“I said I’m going to get changed.”
What about it?
“Get out!”
I was practically kicked out of the room as I fell into the hallway. The door slammed in my face.
“What’s with her?”
I didn’t even have time to set down the teacup. I tugged at my tea-soaked shirt and leaned back against the door.
Why does something not feel right? Something feels different than usual.
“Oh, I get it.”
Haruhi had no qualms about changing in the classroom, yet she chased me out of the room just now. That’s what was nagging at me.
Well, now. Did she have a change of heart? Or had she finally grown up and learned what shame is? I wouldn’t know since the boys of 1-5 were still in the habit of sprinting out of the room right before gym class. Funny, the person who drilled this habit into us, Asakura, was no longer there.
I placed the teacup on the linoleum floor and sat cross-legged, one leg propped up.
After a short while, the rummaging sounds from within the club room ceased without any voice telling me to go in. I hugged my knees and waited ten minutes, then knocked.
“Come in….”
I heard Asahina’s small voice through the door. I look past Asahina, opening the door for me like a real maid, to see Haruhi, looking bored, elbows propped on the table, and her long, pale legs. On her head were swaying bunny ears. The familiar sight of her as a bunny girl. Maybe she didn’t feel like putting in the effort. Collar and cuffs were absent. Her bare legs weren’t covered in fishnet stockings. But the bunny ears were still there as Haruhi sat with her legs crossed.
“My arms and shoulders feel cool, but this outfit doesn’t allow much ventilation,” Haruhi said as she sipped her tea. Nagato flipped another page.
Surrounded by a bunny girl and a maid, I was at a loss as to how to act. I considered how much I would make if I introduced these two to a part-time job for attracting customers.
“Whoa, what’s going on?”
That was Koizumi’s merry response in a somewhat hysterical voice, all while maintaining a smile on his face.
“Oh? Was today a costume party? Forgive me. I didn’t prepare anything.”
Don’t say anything that’ll make this situation more complicated.
“Mikuru, sit down here.”
Haruhi pointed to the metal chair before her. Asahina was obviously cowering as she timidly sat down in the chair with her back to Haruhi. I was wondering what Haruhi was planning when she took Asahina’s chestnut hair in her hands from behind and began braiding it.
If you just looked at this scene by itself, it was like a beautiful picture of an older sister arranging her younger sister’s hair, but Asahina’s face was frozen in fear and Haruhi had a sour look on her face. She probably just wanted to turn her into a maid with braids.
I turned to Koizumi, chuckling deeply as he watched, and asked, “Up for a game of Othello?”
“Sounds fabulous. We haven’t played in a while.”
We spent the next period of time engaged in the struggle between black and white (Koizumi sucked pretty bad for someone who could turn into a ball of light) while Haruhi braided and unbraided Asahina’s hair, then played around by tying it into two pigtails and then a bun (Asahina would shudder every time Haruhi touched her). Nagato was absorbed in her reading and didn’t look up for a second.
Why are we all gathered here? It was becoming harder and harder to understand.
That day, we simply engaged in monotonous SOS Brigade club activities. No aliens talking about some space-distorting data. No visitors from the future. No blue giants. No red spheres. Nothing at all. We didn’t know what we wanted to do. We didn’t know what we should do. We just let the clock tick by as we lived a routine sort of high school life. The everyday happenings of a natural world.
While I did feel a bit dissatisfied when nothing was going on, I could just tell myself, “Oh, well. There’s still plenty of time,” and aimlessly look to the next day and repeat.
I was still having more than enough fun though. We gathered in the room with no purpose in mind. I would watch Asahina hard at work like a maid. Watch Nagato be as still as a statue of Buddha. Watch Koizumi’s perfectly harmless smile. Watch Haruhi’s face jump consta
ntly between good and bad moods. All these things had their own sort of essence of the unordinary. And it was part of this oddly satisfying school life I was living. As for almost getting killed by a classmate and encountering some rampaging monster in a gray, uninhabited world, those things just don’t happen that often. Though I couldn’t write them off as hallucinations, hypnosis, or daydreams.
I did resent being addressed as one of Haruhi Suzumiya’s lackeys, but I was the only one lucky enough to be involved, in various ways, with such an interesting group of people. For now, I’d just put aside the question of why I was the only one. Another human may join one of these days.
That’s right: I wanted everything to stay this way.
Just about anyone would agree with me on that point, right? Normally, yes.
But there was one person who didn’t.
You know who—Haruhi Suzumiya.
Once night had fallen, I had dinner, took a bath, and randomly studied whichever words might come up in English tomorrow. Once that was finished, the clock indicated that it was time to sleep. As I lay down in my bed, I perused the novel Nagato had forced on me. I figured a little reading was good every now and then, so I opened up the book. It was unexpectedly engaging as I continued reading page after page. I guess you really can’t judge a book by its cover.
But it was a bit too long for me to finish in one night, so I put down the book once one of the characters finished a long monologue. The demons of sleep were setting up camp on my eyelids. I marked my spot with the bookmark Nagato had written on and shut the book. I then turned off the lights and sank under the covers. Within a few minutes, I was sound asleep.
Incidentally, do you know why people dream? Sleep rotates between cycles of REM and non-REM stages. The first few hours of sleep are deep sleep and spent mostly in non-REM sleep. The brain is in a restive state during this stage. Once the body is resting and the brain becomes semi-active, you’re in REM sleep. This is when we dream. The closer we get to morning, the higher the frequency of REM sleep. Which means that most of our dreams last until right before we wake up. I dream every night, but I lie in bed until the last possible second so once I wake up, I have to frantically get ready for school and end up forgetting what my dream was about. Though on occasion I abruptly recall some dream I’d forgotten about years ago. Yeah, human memory is still an unsolved mystery.
But I digress. None of that really matters.
Someone was slapping my cheek. You’re annoying. I’m sleeping. Don’t interrupt me when I’m comfortably asleep.
“… Kyon.”
My alarm clock hadn’t gone off yet, even though I just turn it off every time it does. I should still have some time before my mother sends my sister to merrily drag me out of my bed.
“Wake up.”
No. I want to sleep. No time for dubious dreams.
“I told you to wake your ass up!”
The hands wrapped around my neck began shaking my head. When the back of my head slammed against a hard surface, I finally woke up.
… Hard surface?
I quickly sat up. Haruhi’s face, which had been staring at me, dodged my head.
“Finally awake?”
Kneeling next to me in her sailor uniform was Haruhi. Her pale face was filled with anxiety.
“Do you know where we are?”
Yeah. School. The school we go to, North Prefectural High. The paved stone between the front gate and the lockers. Not a single light was on. At night, the school building looked like a gray silhouette to my eyes—
Hold on…. There was no night sky.
Just a flat plane of dark gray. A monochrome sky emitting soft phosphorescence. No moon, stars, or clouds. A gray sky that resembled a wall.
Closed space.
I slowly stood up. I wasn’t wearing my sweats that served as pajamas. Instead, I was clothed in my school uniform.
“I thought I had woken up, but then I found myself here, and you were lying down next to me. What’s going on? Why are we at school?” Haruhi asked in an unusually subdued voice.
Instead of responding, I groped around my surroundings. Both pinching the back of my hand and touching my uniform felt far too real for this to be a dream.
“Haruhi, are we the only ones here?”
“Yeah. I know I was sleeping in my bed, so how did I end up here? And the sky looks strange….”
“Did you see Koizumi?”
“No… Why?”
“No reason. Just asking.”
If this is that dimensional fault or closed space or whatever, then the giants of light and Koizumi and his buddies should also be here.
“Let’s leave the school grounds for now. We might run into someone somewhere.”
“You don’t seem very surprised.”
I’m surprised. Especially by the fact that you’re here. Wasn’t this a playground for those giants she created? Or was this just an unusually real dream I was having? Alone with Haruhi in a deserted school. I wonder what Freud would have to say about this.
I maintained a reasonable distance from Haruhi as we stepped through the gate when my nose ran into an invisible wall. I remembered this clammy sensation. I could force my way a bit further but I soon ran into firm wall. An invisible wall stood right outside the school entrance.
“What is this?”
As Haruhi vigorously pushed with her two hands, her eyes grew wider. I walked around the school premises to confirm my suspicions. An imperceptible wall extended seamlessly as far as I could walk.
Almost as if it were trying to trap us inside.
“It doesn’t look like we can get out from here.”
There wasn’t even a breeze. The air was totally still.
“Let’s try circling to the back.”
“Shouldn’t we try to contact someone first?” Haruhi asked. “If there’s a phone, at least. I don’t have my cell on me.”
If we were in closed space, then according to Koizumi’s explanation, a phone wouldn’t do us any good, but we still went into the school building. There should be a phone in the faculty office.
None of the lights were on. The dark school building was pretty creepy. We walked past the rows of lockers and headed into the silent school building. On the way, I flipped the light switches in the first-floor classrooms and the fluorescent lights flickered on. It was just cold, artificial light, but it was enough to make the two of us exchange relieved looks.
First, we headed for the night watchman’s office. After confirming that it was empty, we headed for the faculty office. Naturally, it was locked, so we pulled out a nearby fire extinguisher, smashed its bottom into the glass window, and broke into the room.
Haruhi held the phone out to me. “Doesn’t seem to work.” I took it and put it to my ear. No sound at all. I tried pushing the buttons a few times but nothing happened.
We left the faculty office and headed up, turning on all the lights in the classrooms as we went. Our classroom was on the top floor. If we looked down from there, we might learn something about our surroundings. At least that’s what Haruhi said.
As we walked through the school, Haruhi tightly clenched the sleeve of my blazer. “Don’t expect much from me, Haruhi. I don’t have the power to do anything. But if you’re scared, just cling to my arm. It creates more of an atmosphere.”
“Idiot.”
Haruhi glared at me with upturned eyes, but her fingers didn’t release their grip.
Nothing looked different about classroom 1-5. Looked just the way it did when I left it that afternoon. The eraser marks on the chalkboard. The thumbtack-filled mortar wall.
“Kyon, look….” Haruhi said after rushing over to the window before falling silent. I stood next to her and looked down at the world below.
The gray world extended as far as I could see. Our school was built on the side of a mountain so you could see the shoreline from the fourth floor. I looked 180 degrees to the left, then 180 degrees to the right. Everywhere I looked, I saw no li
ght suggesting human life. All the houses were plunged in darkness. Even the ones covered by curtains didn’t have any light spilling out. As though every last person had vanished from this world.
“Where are we…?”
It wasn’t that everyone else had disappeared. We were the ones who had disappeared. In this case, we would be the intruders who had slipped into this deserted world.
“This gives me the creeps,” Haruhi murmured as she hugged her shoulders.
We didn’t know where to go. And so we made our way to the club room we had just left that evening. We had swiped the key from the faculty office, so we had no trouble getting in.
Under the fluorescent lights, we sighed with relief at returning to our familiar headquarters.
I turned on the radio but there wasn’t even any white noise. Without the slightest hint of wind, the only sound in the club room was the sound of me pouring water into the teapot. I didn’t feel like bothering to change the tea leaves, so it was just diluted tea. I’m the one who brewed it. Haruhi was just half-dazed, staring at the gray world outside.
“Want tea?”
“No.”
I carried my teacup and pulled out a metal chair. I took a sip. Asahina’s tea is a hundred times better.
“What’s going on? What is this? I don’t get it. Where are we? Why am I in this place?” Haruhi said all this without turning around, still standing at the window. From behind, she looked really thin. “And why is it just you and me?”
“Hell if I know.” Haruhi flipped her skirt and hair and looked at me with a pissed-off look on her face.
“I’m going to go explore a bit,” she said as she headed out of the room. I began to stand up.
“You stay here. I’ll be right back.”
And with that, she left the room. Hmm, I guess that’s typical of her. As her lively footsteps faded into the distance, I sipped my unsavory tea. That was when he finally showed up.
A small red ball of light. At first, it was the size of a ping pong ball. Then its outline gradually grew in size while flickering like a firefly before settling into the shape of a human.
“Koizumi?”
Though it had a human shape, it did not look human. No eyes, nose, or mouth. Just a shining red doll.
The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya Page 16