I thought about it for a while. Where was I trying to go? Where was I? Why was I here?
But all I could do as I stood there was look into her dark eyes.
“Weren’t you thinking of going to XXXX?”
It was she who finally answered. When I heard her words, I finally understood my purpose. Yes. That was where I was trying to go. Why had I forgotten? Why had I forgotten such an important role, the very reason for my existence?
It was something I should never have forgotten.
“Well, that’s settled then.”
The girl smiled happily. I nodded and said my thanks.
“Good-bye.”
The girl disappeared, and I remained. Perhaps she had returned to where she belonged. Just as I was trying to return to where I belonged.
Something white began falling from the sky. Small, unstable water crystals. They disappeared as soon as they contacted the ground.
They were one of the wonders that fill all of space-time. This world is overflowing with wonders. I stood there, still. The passage of time lost all meaning.
That wondrous stuff continued to fall, piling up like cotton.
I decided to give it my name.
So I thought, and in thinking so, I became a ghost no longer.
“Bwuh…?” I got that far before looking up.
I was greeted by the familiar sight of my fellow students filing into the classroom before the morning homeroom period started. If this had been a usual morning, Haruhi would’ve been sitting behind me either gazing out the window or poking me in the back with a mechanical pencil, but this morning she was craning her neck to peer over my shoulder, her eyes following the letters of the manuscript I held in my hands, her expression at once thoughtful and troubled.
To be fair, my own expression wasn’t all that different from hers.
Both of our expressions were thanks to what was written there. It was a little heavy to be reading first thing in the morning.
It was true that the paper Nagato had drawn said, “Fantasy horror.”
I moved my eyes from Nagato’s writing and regarded Haruhi’s profile.
“Hey, Haruhi, I’m not exactly an expert on either fantasy or horror, but is this what fantasy horror looks like these days?”
“Beats me.” Haruhi put her hand to her chin, cocking her head just like an editor agonizing over how to judge a piece of work in front of her. “I guess there’s some fantasy there, but there’s definitely no horror. But… hmm. It does seem very Yuki-like. Maybe Yuki finds this kind of thing scary.”
Anything that would scare Nagato surely would utterly terrify me. I didn’t want to ever experience anything like that—not even in a story.
“Hey, by the way,” I said, looking at Haruhi’s confused face as a new thought occurred to me. “If you didn’t know what ‘fantasy horror’ was, why did you write it down on one of the lots? You’ve got to think before you pick genres like that.”
“I did think! A little.” Haruhi took the manuscript sheet out of my hands. “I added fantasy to it because I thought horror by itself wouldn’t be much fun. The genres I wrote down were the result of serious deliberation. Mystery, fairy tale, love story—once you’ve done those, you’ve gotta go with horror.”
She’d skipped science fiction entirely. And anyway, I seriously doubted she’d spent more than three seconds picking out those genres. I bet she’d just written them down in whatever random order they’d occurred to her, I said.
Haruhi smiled slightly. “I just wanted to mismatch the writing projects as much as I could. Yuki’d probably be great at science fiction, but that wouldn’t be any fun, would it?”
I twitched involuntarily, but an invisible hand calmed my hammering chest. Whether or not it would actually be “fiction,” it would be the easiest thing in the world for Nagato to write something about space. I mean, she was a space alien. For a moment I wondered if Haruhi had realized that, but then I remembered—even Haruhi could see that Nagato’s bookshelves overflowed with SF, so it wasn’t much of a stretch to assume that science fiction was a specialty of hers.
No, wait a sec. If that were true, then there’d be a similar setup for the mystery genre, I said.
“That’s right. I really hoped either you or Mikuru would do the mystery. I wanted to see what kind of crazy thing you’d come up with. But with science fiction, you can pretty much get away with any kind of absurdity—so while it pained me to do it, I had to cross it off the list.”
I wanted to tell her that was just her prejudice talking, but no amount of complaining about the lottery was going to reset time. The order with which I’d been burdened—writing a love story—wasn’t going to be rescinded, and I didn’t feel much more capable of writing mystery, fairy tale, or fantasy horror stories—not that I’m saying I preferred the love story, mind you. But at least with science fiction, I could’ve used some of my experiences as a foundation. Although I probably had no business informing editor in chief Haruhi about my true-life experiences.
Haruhi flipped through Nagato’s fantasy horror short story. “At least Koizumi got the mystery. If we don’t get at least one readable story, we won’t be able to put out a newsletter. If all we do is show off how eccentric we are, the readers will head for the hills.”
She was already thinking about turning the literature club newsletter into a periodical. This was supposed to be an emergency measure to stop the student council president’s evil plot. That was probably something I had to remind her about. The SOS Brigade was not part and parcel with the literature club; it was just a parasite, I told her.
“I know that much. I can’t think of a single thing I need you to tell me about the school. I am the brigade chief, and you are just a member.” Haruhi glanced at me. “Anyway, that doesn’t matter. There’s more to Yuki’s story. Read the second page.”
I dropped my gaze to the sheet of copier paper that remained in my hand and began reading the printed characters there, which were so neat I wondered if they were Nagato’s handwriting.
“Untitled 2”
Yuki Nagato
Up until that point, I had not been alone. There were many of me. I was one of many.
My other selves, once bound together like ice, soon dispersed like water, then finally diffused like vapor.
One atom of that vapor was me.
I could go anywhere. I went many places and saw many things. But I learned nothing. The act of seeing was the only function I was permitted.
I performed that function for a long span. Time was meaningless. In that false universe, no illusion held any meaning.
But eventually I found meaning. Proof of existence.
Matter attracts matter. That was true and correct. It was because it possessed a shape that I was drawn in.
Light, darkness, inconsistency, sense. I met each, intersected with each. I did not have their capabilities, but I might have liked to have them.
If I were permitted to, I would have them.
As I continued to wait, would those wonders fall?
Those tiny wonders.
Thus concluded the second page.
“Hrrmmm…”
I cocked my head and read it over and over. It wasn’t really horror, and it was hard to call it fantasy horror—it was difficult, even, to call it a story. If it were anything, it was sort of memoir-ish. Or it was a simple reflection, or it was just words she’d randomly strung together.
Nagato’s story, eh…?
As I was reading it, I thought of something else. Something that happened during December of last year, something I’ll never forget, no matter how long I should live. That other Nagato, there in the literature club room—could she have been writing a story? All alone on that ancient computer?
I don’t know how Haruhi interpreted my silence and my thoughtful face, but she snatched the paper out of my hands.
“Then there’s the last page, the third one. The more you read it, the less sense it makes. I’d like to hear
your thoughts.”
“Untitled 3”
Nagato Yuki
There was a black coffin in the room. There was nothing else.
Atop the coffin in the middle of the room, there sat one man.
“Hello,” he said to me. He smiled.
Hello.
I said the same thing to him. I don’t know what my expression was.
As I continued to stand there, a white cloth floated down behind the man. In the darkness, the cloth was bathed in faint light.
“I am sorry for being late,” said the white cloth.
It was actually a person, who was covered by the white cloth. There were holes cut where the eyes would be, and black pupils looked out at me.
The person within the cloth seemed to be a girl. I could tell from the voice.
The man laughed in a low voice.
“The presentation has not yet begun.”
He did not move from the coffin.
“There is still time.”
The presentation.
I tried to remember. Had I come here to present something? I was nervous. I could not remember.
“There is time,” said the man. He smiled at me. The white sheet girl danced happily.
“Let us wait. Until you remember,” said the girl. I looked at the black coffin.
I remembered only a single goal.
I belonged within that coffin.
I had come from it, and I had returned here so that I could go back to it. The man was sitting on the coffin. If he did not move, I could not get into it.
But I had nothing to present. I was not qualified to participate in the presentation.
The man began to sing in a low voice. The white sheet danced along with it.
If he did not move, I could not get into it.
“… Hmm. This is a tough one.”
I laid the third page on my desk and empathized with Haruhi.
Good old Nagato had written something totally incomprehensible. She seemed to have completely ignored the fantasy-horror topic, and this was hardly a story—it was more of a poem, I said.
“It doesn’t seem like just any old poem, though.” Haruhi collected the three pages and put them into her bag. “Hey, Kyon. I don’t think Yuki just wrote this without thinking about it. I think she’s really revealing something about herself here. Don’t you think all that stuff about the ghost and the coffin is a metaphor for something?”
“How the hell should I know?” I said, but the truth was that I felt like on some level I could understand it. I didn’t see how the “I” in the story could be anyone besides Nagato. As for the other characters—the ghost girl, the man, and the sheet girl—I had the sense that the ghost girl and the sheet girl were the same person, and that (I was just guessing here, but…) the man was Koizumi-ish and the girl was Asahina. In any case, she’d probably used the people around her as models for the characters. Haruhi and I hadn’t shown up, but I wasn’t so worried about it that I wished I’d been included.
“Anyway, does it matter?” I looked out the window and down at the tennis courts. “Nagato wrote the story she wanted to write. Trying to read an author’s mind through her work is a pain. That kind of question belongs on modern-literature tests.”
“I guess.” Haruhi also looked out the window. She seemed to be looking up at the clouds, as though willing them to bring unseasonal snow. Eventually she turned back to me and smiled like a blooming spring flower. “We’ll call this okay, then. Yuki’s done. There’s no telling how it’d turn out if I made her rewrite it. Koizumi seems to be making steady progress, and Mikuru’s getting close to finishing her illustrations.” Her smile shifted from brigade chief to editor in chief. “So, what about you? I haven’t even gotten so much as a prologue from you. When will it be done?”
I had been wrong to hope she had forgotten about it.
“Let me just say,” began Haruhi with an unpleasant grin, “that I want a proper story from you. And if it’s not a love story, it’s getting spiked. Spiked! Not a horror story, or a mystery, or a fairy tale. And don’t try to weasel out of it either, because it won’t work.”
I looked around the classroom for some sort of salvation.
The truth was that I hadn’t written so much as a single word. Of course I hadn’t. Why the hell did I have to write a love story, anyway? The question was racing through my body faster than an immune system overreacting to the influenza virus. I’d thought about trying to summon reinforcements in the form of Taniguchi and Kunikida (who themselves had also failed to write anything), but my two supposed friends had been looking over at me for some time, whispering to each other and avoiding my gaze, and just when I was about to cross myself, Catholic-style, in preparation for being crushed along with my friends by Haruhi’s assault, the school bell finally rang.
I was thus able to avoid confronting the advancing burden, but that didn’t mean I had escaped—I had merely bought myself some time.
But seriously, Haruhi—a love story?
I pretended to take the first-period class seriously, sinking deeply into thought, like a ship plunging to the bottom of the Challenger Deep.
So what was I going to write?
After school, I went to the clubroom to escape Haruhi’s manuscript demands.
“What about writing something based on your personal experience?” said Koizumi, his fingers moving swiftly over the keyboard of his laptop. “In other words, why not just get involved in a romance? Then you can simply write what happens and claim it’s fiction. I recommend using first-person perspective. In such a case, it wouldn’t be hard to transform your normal thoughts into prose.”
“Is that your idea of sarcasm?” I shot back, before returning myself to the pressing job of staring at my own laptop’s screen saver.
The clubroom had temporarily become a safe place, since Haruhi was away from her desk.
Even now she was running all over the place as part of her campaign of total war against the student council; she was so cunning that I wanted to add “demon” to the part of her armband that read “editor in chief.”
Her first targets had been her nearby classmates, Taniguchi and Kunikida. No sooner had homeroom period ended than Haruhi had quickly seized the escaping Taniguchi, and with a brief exchange (“I’m going home.” “I won’t let you.”), the battle was joined. Kunikida didn’t even bother trying to escape, and soon she’d forced them into seats and put sheaves of loose-leaf paper in front of them.
“You’re not leaving until you’re done writing.”
Her face was strangely happy, perhaps from the pleasure of having discovered a new outlet for her sadism.
Taniguchi continued to grumble, while Kunikida simply shook his head softly and picked up a pencil. He didn’t seem to be too put out, but Taniguchi complained bitterly about the imposition, as though he’d realized that even minor involvement with Haruhi’s machinations might cause him to someday miss the bus to paradise. I could understand where he was coming from. Unless they wrote the interesting essays that Haruhi demanded, they couldn’t even dream of escape.
“What the hell is ‘an interesting slice-of-life essay’ supposed to be, anyway?” said Taniguchi. “Kyon, listen—slices of your life are way more interesting, anyway. You should be writing this.”
No thanks. I had my own literary problems.
“Suzumiya, isn’t twelve columns a bit too much?” said Kunikida, relaxed. “Surely five would be more reasonable. I’m pretty good at English, math, classics, chemistry, and physics, but I’m crap at Japanese history and civics.”
If he had that many specialties, then his manuscript was the only one I was looking forward to reading. Twelve subject-specific study columns. If they were actually useful, there’d be nothing I’d want to read more.
“I’m going to come back in an hour to check on you,” said Haruhi to the pair, who were the only ones remaining in the classroom. “If you’re not here then… you know what’ll happen, right?”
&nb
sp; After dropping that threat, she left the classroom. Our editor in chief was a busy woman.
Nevertheless, I should add that there were people who readily accepted Haruhi’s writing assignments.
One of them, it goes without saying, was Tsuruya. The upperclassman, possibly the only person as formidable as Haruhi, when abstractly asked, “So, will you write something? Anything is fine!” ended up readily giving her assent.
“Sure, when’s the deadline? I’ll definitely have it for you! Ha ha, this’ll be fun!” she answered with a smile. I wondered what she would possibly write.
There was one other—and this was not a single person, but a group. The computer club. Now that their attempt to cheat us with their rigged video game had passed and the clubs were friendly enough that Nagato would occasionally visit them, the computer club had become like a second branch of the SOS Brigade, so our brigade chief had no trouble securing a promise from them to write a “Game-Busting Primer! Reviews of all the latest games!” or something or other. Apparently the whole club, from the president on down, was pretty into the idea. Incidentally, I’d never played a proper computer game, so I had absolutely no interest in this.
And even so, Haruhi’s work was not done. Having decided to make the newsletter’s cover into something worthwhile, she hoofed it over to the art club to ask who their best artist was, then strong-armed a piece out of that person—then, having decided that a newsletter filled with nothing but text wouldn’t be interesting enough, went over to the manga club and ordered some illustrations. It seemed pretty presumptuous of her, but sadly I didn’t want to be any more empathetic with the inconveniences of the others than I already was, so I left Taniguchi and Kunikida in the classroom and made my way back to the clubroom.
Haruhi was not there. She was running all over the school on the aforementioned errands, and while that should’ve made it easy for me to relax, the act of staring at a screen saver was far from being relaxing.
The Indignation of Haruhi Suzumiya Page 6