A Headphone Actor

by Jin (Shizen no Teki-P)

  HEADPHONE ACTOR I

  Within the dim, dusky corridor, I stood, accompanied only by my shadow.

  Until just a moment ago, I could hear the radio station leaking out from the headphones hanging around my neck.

  Now all I could hear was noise. That, and something that resembled a person’s voice.

  Something had plainly changed. Concerned, I tried putting on my headphones.

  —The crackling, intermittent voice slowly, gradually began to form coherent speech.

  It sounded like a press conference held by the president of some country or other.

  It was an exaggerated voice, affected for speech purposes, and a machinelike interpreter lagging a bit behind.

  The static made listening difficult, but one could still manage to discern it.

  “…It is with heartfelt regret that…by the…today…the Earth will…to an end.”

  When the voice came to a stop, it was greeted with a steady stream of shouting and seemingly meaningless gibberish.

  Even through the headphones, the blubbering, panic-driven desperation of the audience was all too clear.

  Beyond the red-tinged window, a large flock of birds had completely blocked the newly risen crescent moon from the deep violet sky, like a horde of black ants.

  Removing my headphones and shooting a glance at the room I just left, I saw an abandoned video game and a mountain of study guides, both shining orange from the setting sun.

  What was I doing up to now?

  I had the impression I was speaking with someone until just a minute ago, but I couldn’t even remember who.

  “…This has to be some kind of joke.”

  I whispered it to myself, trying to will myself into believing it, as I opened one of the windows lining the corridor. I was greeted with a loud, shrill siren, like none I had heard before, along with the screaming and ranting of people.

  The din steadily grew louder and louder, enveloping the entire city.

  My lips quivered as my teeth clattered against each other.

  I am alone.

  There’s nobody left here.

  And before too long, I’ll be gone, too.

  My pulse raced. Tears flowed across my cheeks.

  —I don’t want to be alone. It’s too scary.

  I put my enclosed headphones back on once more, to flee from the world as it was swallowed into its ultimate doom, to attempt to detach myself from it all.

  The radio was already cut off. All that remained now was static.

  “…It’s time to give it up. Everything…”

  The moment I whispered it, I suddenly thought that I heard something.

  Straining my ears, I found it was a voice. A voice speaking to me.

  —Then, in a flash, I realized.

  This was my voice. No one else’s.

  “Hey, can you hear me? There’s something you still have to do before going…Something you have to tell him, right?”

  I couldn’t remember what it was.

  But, for whatever reason, I felt like I understood the meaning behind the warning.

  “It’ll be okay. Trust me. If you can get over that hill, you’ll know what I’m talking about, whether you want to or not. If you stay where you are, you’re gonna disappear. Hey—”

  I wiped away the tears threatening to run down my face once more, then took a deep breath.

  “—You want to survive, don’t you?”

  It was the day the earth came to an end.

  I planted my foot down upon the undulating ground as hard as I could, just as my voice guided me to.

  YUUKEI YESTERDAY I

  The piercing sound of the alarm woke me up.

  I craned a hand to the side, searching for the source of the noise, before grabbing my cell phone by the cord.

  Then I shut off the alarm, checked the time, and with a heavy sigh, closed my eyes once more.

  …Hang on. This is weird. Like, really, really weird.

  According to the clock, I had slept for eleven whole hours today.

  So why am I so deathly tired? This is such a rip-off. This high-school teenager, at the peak of her flowering, has just given up the entirety of her late night—a costly loss indeed—and yet the relief this had granted her body was downright paltry.

  What could have gone wrong? Am I not as flowery as I’ve led myself to believe? Maybe there wasn’t much I did while awake besides play online games, but the price I had paid for this sleep was dear, too dear.

  A sense of malaise settled over my body, sending frantic danger signals: “Stop! Think it over! If you don’t sleep some more, you’re gonna die!”

  My brain, upon receiving this distress call, sprang into action, considering all methods available to avoid getting up out of the futon.

  For example, Plan A: Fake Sickness.

  Right now, I live alone with my grandmother. If I just told her something like “Ooh, I’m not feeling too well today…,” it’d be a cinch to take the day off from school.

  Tricking my grandmother wouldn’t win me any brownie points, no, but there wasn’t much to be done about it. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

  But this strategy possessed some critical flaws.

  If I went too far with complaining about feeling sick, my grandmother might whisk me away to the hospital.

  I’d be subject to examination, maybe even admitted…and just thinking about the concept made my heart plunge into my stomach.

  Lying in some hospital room, no video games, nothing to help pass the time at all? Not gonna happen.

  Besides, people are way too edgy about this sort of thing anyway. An “illness” like the one I have is hardly any matter of life and death. But some people just go nuts over anything.

  My dead grandfather, in particular. He was always on pins and needles about my illness, going through all these hoops and going way overboard for my sake—enough so to make the high school I was admitted to this year treat me like some kind of tumor.

  …Of course, from other people’s perspectives, I suppose my habit of suddenly fainting right away in the middle of class is a tad irritating. That, and embarrassing to me.

  “You know, if you think about all of that, things are probably best right now as they are.”

  —It’s been six or so months since I started living under that credo. That might be one of the reasons why I have yet to make any kind of decent friends.

  Be that as it may, Plan A was a nonstarter.

  Contemplating the issue and reaching this conclusion took approximately two minutes. Factoring in the Law of Real Time Versus Relative Time Experienced While In Bed, this speed had to be worthy of praise.

  Plan B: I Actually Have Off School Today.

  If I told my grandmother that today was an optional day or something…But then I remembered that she asked me, “Did you need a bento lunch tomorrow?” last night and I replied, “Yeah! Couldja make up some fried eggs?”

  …I am so stupid! Why fried eggs, of all things?! I didn’t need any bento—I should have requested a sleep-time extension ticket. Not that that exists or anything.

  As if to defy this thought, the inviting smell of eggs cooking over a burner wafted into the room. Chef Grandma must have been cooking my bento right now, giving everything she could to fulfill my request.

  “Nnnngh,” I muttered, full of guilt over expending all this effort to come up with an excuse to goof off. Could I possibly be any less considerate of my poor old grandmother?

  Rolling over, I burrowed my way back underneath the covers and pushed the reset button on my mind.

  …How can my grandmother even do that, anyway? The way she always wakes up at the crack of dawn, day in and day out, no alarm required? The only answe
r I had was that she had some kind of precision stopwatch installed in her body. My grandma’s a cyborg…

  —As my brain stumbled its way from one inane thought to the next, I heard the creaking and whining of someone climbing up the stairs. The creaking was straight out of horror movies, the kind you only hear in old wooden houses, and it probably—no, definitely meant that I was about to be forced out of the futon.

  I tugged the sheets tighter over my body, making one final, noble struggle.

  Ughh…I’m out of time…Plan C…Plan C…Plan—

  “You gonna be in there all day or what?! Hurry up and get dressed before you wind up late!”

  “Ergh…yeah…”

  Mission failed.

  Blazing sunlight poured through the opened curtains. GAME OVER flashed in red lettering across my mind.

  A balmy late-autumn morning.

  The haze-laden dog days of summer were behind us. Most of the fall was too, making my surroundings on the journey to school seem positively wintry by now. You could notice the extra layers beginning to appear on the bodies of other students. A few couples passed by in sweaters as they got friendly with each other.

  —I flashed obvious glares of animosity at these students, shutting out their asinine conversations with my headphones as I silently plodded toward school. I, Takane Enomoto, was in an extremely bad mood.

  Although maybe this isn’t even worth noting. To me, this is the default.

  Since I had grown accustomed to staying up late, I was generally tired and crabby throughout the prenoon hours, from the moment I opened my eyes in the morning.

  Perhaps due to that, my facial expression had grown into one of plain and apparent malice. People asked me if I was angry over something all the time.

  And that, of course, would only make me crabbier. It was a seriously vicious cycle.

  I wouldn’t mind more of a carefree life, giggling mindlessly at things and engaging in wacky teenage hijinks and so forth, but I never thought for a moment I could become that sort of girl, and I didn’t want to anyway.

  Even the delusions my mind conjured up about the ridiculous things I could become in the future annoyed me. Thus, I walked to school, just as peeved as any other day of my life.

  My only salvation is that it’s a fairly short way to school, one that doesn’t require a bus or train to speed up.

  That saves me from depleting my strength on the trip to school, and it also lets me sleep until the very last minute.

  Thanks to that, I had leisurely pulled myself out of bed while the rest of the student body were struggling to catch their train connections. I was on track to reach the school gates a good fifteen minutes before homeroom.

  Once I reached the road leading straight to my school, I spotted a sudden increase in the number of students wearing the same uniform I had on.

  My walking pace instinctively accelerated, and my eyes grew more menacing than ever.

  Removing my headphones just before the front gate, I rolled my coat up and placed it in my backpack.

  I really liked these headphones. They were a birthday gift from my grandmother. They had kind of a cute design, and the sound quality was nice. I say “nice” just because the earbuds I borrowed from my classmates seemed kind of tinny by comparison; it’s not like these were meant for rich audiophiles or anything.

  But now that I was used to them, they had become my inseparable partner in life.

  Giving a polite bow to the square-jawed gym teacher standing in front of the gate, I went inside to find the school grounds brimming with activity. All over, students were preparing for the school festival coming up in a week’s time.

  The spread-out path between the gate and the front entrance, several dozen meters in width, was dotted here and there with the booths allotted to each class for their festival activities.

  I spotted several posters taped over some of them, from warnings like WET PAINT! DO NOT TOUCH!! to requests like WE NEED CARDBOARD! IF YOU HAVE ANY, CONTACT THE 2-A CLASS PRESIDENT!

  Looking around, I spotted students everywhere—one who must have been working since dawn, what with all the paint spatters on his clothing; one who was already dressed up like some kind of movie monster; a girl whining about how “the guys in class never do anything for us”; the classic “rah rah, this school festival is sooo important, we gotta do our best!” kind of woman. It was all the splendors of boundless youth, writ large before my eyes.

  —But to someone like me, the classic “You spent all week making snide remarks about me, and now all of a sudden you’re acting like my friend? What’s with that?” kind of woman, all this festival prep was nothing but one giant obstacle on the way to class.

  The carnival atmosphere of the festival prep outside had revved up the noise and energy inside school as well. Some of the students had even stayed overnight, fooling around with each other in the most despicable ways until dawn. It was deplorable.

  And once all of this was over, the only thing the festival left behind was an unfathomable amount of garbage.

  What is with this pointless show? It’s so stupid. Brainless.

  And come to think of it, the printout handed out to Year 1, class B yesterday, the class I’m (ostensibly) part of, mentioned that they’d be doing perhaps the most hackneyed festival booth of them all—the “maid café” route.

  This kind of booth was something that I—who hardly attended my officially assigned class at all, much less the festival-planning conferences—was wholly unrelated to, a fact that I relished.

  If I let myself get caught up in some crazy whim and actually dressed up as a maid, it’d be a blemish I’d never be able to wipe away for the rest of my life. Who could even do something like that to themselves?

  As I dwelled upon this nasty state of business, I glared hard enough at a dopey-faced boy blocking the way ahead, standing between the legs of a giant dinosaur model, to make him scurry aside as I headed for the front door.

  Pushing a handle whose PUSH engraving had long disintegrated from overuse, I set foot inside the building, noticing that the heater was making the indoor temperature remarkably pleasant.

  Removing my outside shoes, I turned an eye toward my shoe locker in order to fetch my indoor slippers. The wooden shelves were pretty ancient.

  I had heard that the school building itself had a fair amount of history to it, a prestigious place of higher learning that birthed a wide variety of politicians, celebrities, and other famous people.

  But, to be frank, most of the students would sooner talk about how much they hoped the school building would receive a sorely needed renovation before they boasted about its illustrious past.

  During the typhoon that passed by this summer, our beloved alma mater had its gymnasium roof poked full of holes, the floor around the drinking fountain collapse within itself, and a whole variety of other pitiful disasters happen to it.

  The most serious issue, though, came when the entire building’s air conditioner blew itself up on the hottest summer day of the year. It was enough to make the majority of students eagerly hope for a school transfer.

  Still, thanks to the bare minimum of repairs the school shelled out for during summer break, the HVAC system was back online. A portion of the student body, hoping to use the breakdown as a tool to earn themselves an extended summer vacation, were forced to reluctantly trudge back to school for the second semester.

  Changing into my slippers atop the wooden grating by the front entrance, I briskly made my way down the hall.

  This was the one moment in school life that always grieved me the most. Right where everyone turned left from the corridor with the shoe lockers, happily chattering amongst each other as they went upstairs to their normal classrooms, I alone turned right, heading for the labs and other subject-specific classrooms—in particular, a room with a distinctly chemical odor to it.

  Yes. That’s right. The “normal classroom” I reported to every day, thanks to the efforts of my assigned proctor, was
the science storage room.

  Due to the rapid influx of new students into the local neighborhood over the past few years, all the nonspecialized classrooms had already been assigned to groups of students, which meant that there were no classrooms left for the “special” classes to use.

  In terms of equipment, any room would do as long as it had desks and a teacher’s chair, but I still wished they gave at least a little more thought to my situation. I mean, I’m spending the majority of my three years as a high schooler, a teenager in full flower, inside a room that always faintly smelled of formaldehyde.

  The thought would be enough to make anyone mope a bit, but since there were only two students (counting myself) assigned to this “classroom,” it was a joy to spend time there in terms of serene quietude. Considering my illness, and considering how much of a persona non grata I’d be if I went back to a normal classroom at this point, I found it difficult to complain about this state of affairs.

  Proceeding down the hall, I checked around me to ensure no one was near, then let out a long, dramatic sigh.

  I passed by the art room, the music room, the home-ec room, before reaching the SCIENCE STORAGE plate on the right side of a broad, left-curving corridor leading to the club-activity rooms.

  —Below the plate was a faded green sliding door I was all too familiar with.

  I may have my complaints, but there was something oddly soothing about a classroom with only a few people inside.

  My teacher was undoubtedly going to be late as always, and my sole classmate was the epitome of easygoing, spending the whole day drawing those pictures of his.

  I opened the door, contemplating a quick nap before my teacher showed up, only to have a sight thrust before me that instantly dissipated any sleepiness I still had.

  “Good morn…Aaaaggghhh!!”

  “Huh? Oh, hey, Takane. Morning!”

  There stood my sole classmate, Haruka Kokonose, not a single speck of malice lurking behind his broad smile.

  His skin was a sickly pale of white, his bearing unfussy and unpretentious. His sole hobby was drawing, as was his sole talent. That kind of background (along with the name) seems remarkably womanly, but he was just a regular guy.