I heard someone suddenly inhale next to me and turned to find Asahina fiddling with the digital watch on her right wrist.
“Huh? No way…! What? Really?”
I glanced at her wristwatch. “Don’t tell me that thing’s the TPDD.”
“It isn’t. This is just an atomic watch.”
“One of those watches that synchronizes with the atomic clock through radio waves, huh?”
Asahina smiled cheerfully as she continued, “It’s wonderful. We’ve returned. It’s just past nine PM… on July seventh, the day we departed. I’m so relieved… Whew.”
She sounded like the world had just been lifted off her shoulders.
The Nagato standing at the entrance was our Nagato. If you were going to differentiate between them by saying one was bespectacled and one wasn’t, this one would be the latter. The Yuki Nagato who’d softened just a little bit. I could tell after seeing how she was three years ago. The Nagato before me right now had definitely changed from the Nagato I’d met in the literary club room when Haruhi dragged me there. I’m guessing it was so slight that she couldn’t tell.
“But how?” Asahina asked in a daze.
Nagato responded in a flat voice, “I froze liquefied data within the selected space-time and unfroze the data once there were corresponding points from an already known space-time continuum.”
Was that even comprehensible? After a brief pause, she added, “Which would be now.”
Asahina attempted to stand before falling to her knees.
“You couldn’t have… Impossible… How could you… Nagato, you…”
Nagato remained silent.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Nagato—stopped time. She probably stopped time for the whole room we were in, for three whole years. And then at this time today, she unfroze us…?”
“Yes,” Nagato confirmed.
“That’s unbelievable. She stopped time… Whoa…”
Asahina sighed as she remained bent over. That’s when I thought of something.
It appeared that we had safely returned to our time three years later. After seeing Asahina’s reaction, that was certain. She’s incapable of hiding anything. Which is fine. The theory behind our return from three years ago involved stopping time—I can believe that. I have developed enough tolerance to accept just about anything at this point. That’s fine too. Just fine and dandy—but.
This wasn’t my first visit to Nagato’s home. I’d been invited inside just a little over a month ago. But I stayed in the living room the whole time and never entered the guest room. I didn’t even know about its existence. Which means, uh… What does it mean?
I looked at Nagato. Nagato looked back at me.
—So basically, when I visited this place to hear her crazy spiel, another me had been sleeping in the next room.
What the hell? Isn’t that what this means?
“Yes,” Nagato replied. I felt dizzy.
“… Hey. So in other words, you already knew everything back then? About me? About what happened today?”
“Yes.”
From my perspective, my first meeting with Nagato had been on that day in the season of newly green leaves when Haruhi came up with the idea of establishing the SOS Brigade. However, Nagato had met me earlier, on Tanabata three years ago. As far as I was concerned, that meeting had occurred just a moment ago, but three years had passed since. I’m going to go insane.
Asahina and I stood in a daze together. I’d known that Nagato was capable of many things, but I never would have dreamed that she could stop time. Doesn’t that make her invincible?
“Not exactly.”
A motion of denial.
“This was a special case. An exception. Emergency mode. Rarely engaged. Unless drastic measures are required.”
And we warranted those drastic measures.
“Thanks, Nagato.”
I thanked her. That was all I could do.
“Not necessary.”
Nagato nodded without a shred of amiability. Then she held out the card that had various geometric shapes on it. As I took the card, I noticed that the quality of the paper had deteriorated. As if it had been sitting there for three years.
“By the way, can you read what the writing on the card says?”
I didn’t expect anyone to be able to read Haruhi’s made-up message. So I was merely joking.
“ ‘I am here,’ ” Nagato answered.
I hadn’t expected a reply.
“That’s what it says.”
I was getting confused.
“Don’t tell me that… those pictographs or symbols or whatever actually ended up being the language of some alien race somewhere?”
Nagato didn’t respond.
After Asahina and I left Nagato’s room, we walked under the twinkling stars.
“Asahina, what was the point of me going back to the past?”
Asahina earnestly thought for a moment before looking up and speaking in a faint voice.
“I’m sorry. I, well… The truth is that, um… I don’t really know… I’m at the bottom of the chain… No, a peon… No, something like an intern…”
“Yet you’re close to Haruhi.”
“That’s because I never expected to be caught by Suzumiya.”
She pouted as she spoke. Your face looks adorable like that, Asahina.
“I just follow orders from my superiors… or I mean, the people at the top. So I don’t know the meaning behind my actions.”
As I watched Asahina speaking bashfully, I wondered if those superiors included the adult version of Asahina. I had no basis for that assumption. It was simply because she and the normal Asahina were the only time travelers I knew.
“I see.” I murmured, tilting my head.
I still don’t get it. The adult version of Asahina had come to give me a hint, so she should have known what would happen to us. But she didn’t tell anything to the present Asahina. What does that mean?
“Hmm.”
After some groaning, I decided that there was no way for me to understand something Asahina didn’t. Like Nagato said. There are many processes for time travel. Time travelers have their own rules and regulations to follow. Someone will explain it to me one day. When this is all over.
I parted ways with Asahina in front of the station. Her tiny figure bowed to me over and over as she reluctantly walked away. I also began heading home, which was when I realized that I’d left my bag in the club room.
The next day. Which would be July eighth. It felt like the next day to me, but physically, it’d been three years and a day since I’d gone to school. Empty-handed, I went straight to the club room, grabbed my bag, and headed to my classroom. I assumed Asahina had come before me since her bag wasn’t there.
Haruhi was already in the classroom staring out the window with an impressed look on her face. Like she was ticking off the seconds before the arrival of aliens.
“What’s wrong? You’ve been awfully melancholy since yesterday. Did you eat a poisonous mushroom or something?”
I sat down in my seat. Haruhi sighed in an exaggerated fashion.
“Not really. Just remembering something. The Tanabata season holds some memories for me.”
I felt a chill down my spine. But I won’t ask—what those memories might be.
“Really.”
Haruhi turned back to stare at the clouds. I shrugged. I have no intention of playing with fire around a bomb fuse. That’s how a person with common sense would act.
After school in the literary club room that had been turned into the SOS Brigade’s hideout, Haruhi simply delivered the order, “Clean up the bamboo leaves. We don’t need them anymore,” and left. The “Brigade Chief” armband lying on the desk looks lonely. Oh, well. She’ll be back to her usual crazy self tomorrow and telling us to do impossible things. That’s the kind of person she is.
Asahina was nowhere to be seen. The only other people here were Yuki Nagato and Koizum
i, who was playing chess with me. I’d given in to Koizumi’s enthusiasm and allowed him to at least teach me how each piece was supposed to move.
It would seem that I’d been too quick to assume that he’d brought the chessboard because he was bad at Othello.
Koizumi was as bad at chess as he was at Othello.
As I took Koizumi’s pawn with my knight, I glanced at the poker-faced Nagato, who was staring at the board with interest.
“Hey, Nagato. I can’t really tell, but Asahina is actually from the future, right?”
Nagato slowly tilted her head.
“Yes.”
“Still, the whole process of going to the past and coming back to the future didn’t seem very consistent…”
Yeah. If time has no continuity—if we traveled three years into the past and then slept until the present time, the “present” we’re in right now would be a different world from the “yesterday” we departed from. But in the end, I had given Haruhi unnecessary information and there was a possibility… that information had brought Haruhi to North High to search for nonhuman life… So it’s possible that none of this would have happened if I hadn’t gone three years into the past. Which means that there is continuity between the past and the future. That would contradict the explanation I’d heard from Asahina. I could at least figure that out by myself.
“Axiomatic set theory cannot prove the antinomies within itself without antinomies,” Nagato said flatly.
I suppose you could say that she was showing emotion from a relative standpoint. You may consider that an adequate explanation, but I have no idea what you just said.
Nagato exposed her pale throat as she looked up at me.
“You will understand eventually.”
And with that, she returned to her usual position and began reading again. Koizumi started to speak in her place.
“It’s like this. My king is currently in check by your rook. What a quandary. Where should it escape?”
As Koizumi spoke, he lifted his king and dropped it into his shirt pocket. Then he spread his arms like a magician.
“Well, was there anything inconsistent about my actions?”
I stroked a white rook as I considered his words. I had no intention of going along with his stupid Zen philosophy crap or abstract bull for the sake of compliments to satisfy my own vanity. So I didn’t respond.
In any case—There’s no doubt that Haruhi is made up of paradoxes. Same goes for this world.
“Of course, in our case, the king holds little value. What matters is the queen.”
I placed the white rook on the square where the king had been. Queen’s Knight 8.
“I have no idea what’s going to be happening, but next time, I’d prefer to not have to use my head so much,” Koizumi continued.
Nagato didn’t respond and Koizumi merely smiled.
“I personally believe that some peace and quiet would be best, but would you prefer that something happen?”
I snorted as I marked a win under my name on the scorecard.
MYSTERIQUE SIGN
As expected, Haruhi had recovered from her state of melancholy and returned to doing whatever she wanted by the time term exams came around. As for me, I was totally depressed, as though Haruhi had passed the blue-colored baton of melancholy on to me. And I only felt worse every time a test was passed out. The only person who shared my melancholy was Taniguchi, probably. He’d been my buddy during midterms when we flew as close to the ground as possible while barely avoiding a lock from the radar called a failing grade. Humans are creatures who always want to be around people dumber than them. It makes you feel better, relatively. Of course, from an absolute standpoint, I didn’t really have time to be feeling good about myself.
Haruhi, taking her test in the seat behind mine, somehow always finished with time to spare and could usually be found sleeping on her desk thirty minutes before time was up.
So annoying.
All clubs were on hiatus during term exams, so under normal circumstances, today would be the day clubs started meeting again, but for some reason, the SOS Brigade was in business year round and we’d met up yesterday and the day before that. It appears that school policy doesn’t apply to SOS Brigade activities. Obviously, since this whole thing has been wrong from the very beginning. This enigma of a brigade wasn’t a club per se, so it didn’t matter. That’s Haruhi logic for you.
Like the other day. I’d finally gotten myself all psyched up to study, when at that very moment, Haruhi grabbed me by the sleeve and dragged me to the club room.
“Take a look at this.”
Haruhi was pointing to the computer monitor she’d stolen from that other club a while back.
I had no choice but to look. A drawing program was open with some kind of scribble displayed. A circle around some letters that looked like drunken tapeworms. I couldn’t tell if it was a picture or writing or both. This is what I would expect from a kid in preschool.
“What is this?”
I just spoke my mind.
Haruhi immediately puckered her lips like a duckbill.
“Can’t you tell?”
“I have no idea. No idea at all. This thing makes yesterday’s Modern Japanese test look easy.”
“What are you talking about? The Modern Japanese test was really easy. Your little sister could have aced that thing.”
That statement really pissed me off.
“This is the SOS Brigade emblem,” she answered with a triumphant look on her face, as though she’d just accomplished something amazing.
“Emblem?” I asked.
“Yes. Emblem,” Haruhi said.
“This is? It looks like something left by a drunken businessman, permanently stuck in a middle management position, who’s on his way home from an all-nighter after working weekends for two straight months.”
“Look closer. See? It says SOS Brigade in the center, right?”
When you put it that way, I can’t say that I don’t get the feeling that it does or doesn’t, yet I wouldn’t be confident enough not to refrain from voicing agreement. How many negatives did I just string together? I don’t feel like counting, so if someone’s free, tally them up for me.
“You’re the one with the most free time. You probably won’t even bother to study.”
“I was fully intent on studying just a moment ago, but now that you mention it, it’s true that I don’t feel like bothering now.”
“I’m thinking about putting this on the front page of the SOS Brigade’s website.”
Oh, yeah. We had a website. The worthless thing that only has a front page.
“We aren’t getting any visitors. That’s unacceptable. We haven’t gotten any e-mails about mysterious happenings either. It’s all because you got in my way. I was going to attract visitors with sexy pictures of Mikuru.”
All pictures of Asahina as an earnest maid belong to me and I have no intention of letting anyone else see them. Some things in this world can’t be bought with money.
“About the site you made, it’s a lost cause. There totally isn’t anything flashy on there. That’s why I came up with this idea. To add a symbol of the SOS Brigade.”
Delete that thing off the Internet already. I feel bad for anybody who accidentally visits such a stupid homepage. There are no contents so there’s nothing to update. The whole site consists of the “Welcome to the SOS Brigade’s website” image, a link to our e-mail address, and an access counter. And the access counter hasn’t even reached three digits, and 90 percent of those hits came from Haruhi.
I watched as Haruhi opened a browser and loaded our amateur website.
“Why don’t you write a journal or something? It’s the job of the brigade chief to keep a log, right? The captain of a ship has to maintain a ship’s log.”
“No way. That sounds like a pain.”
It’d be a pain for me too. If I were to attempt to describe a day in this place, I could only write about stuff like what book
Nagato was reading or how I beat Koizumi at Five in a Row or how cute Asahina looked today or how Haruhi should sit down and keep her mouth shut. It wouldn’t be fun to write and I doubt it’d be fun to read. Which is why I refuse to do something that wouldn’t entertain a single person.
“Come on, Kyon. Put this symbol at the top of the page.”
“Do it yourself.”
“I don’t know how.”
“Look it up then. You’re never going to learn anything if you turn to someone else every time you don’t know something.”
“I’m the brigade chief. The brigade chief’s job is to give orders. Besides, if I do everything, you guys won’t have any work to do. Try to use your head once in a while. You won’t become a better person if you just do what you’re told.”
Are you telling me to do it or not to do it? Learn how to argue properly.
“Just do it already. I won’t be fooled by your sophistry. Only bored Greeks during the BC era would appreciate that. Hurry it up!”
I really didn’t want my ears to suffer any more of Haruhi’s cawing like a crow at dawn, so I reluctantly opened the HTML editor and shrank master artist Haruhi’s illustration, which looked something like a bored kid’s scribbling, to an adequate size, pasted it onto the file, and uploaded the whole thing.
I refreshed the page to make sure it had worked. It appeared that the unwarranted SOS Brigade emblem had left its footprint on the Internet. A glance at the access counter told me that we were still in the double digits. I’m hoping that Haruhi’s the only person checking this website. Since I don’t want people to know that I was the one who made such a stupid site.
And with that side note, the first stage of my melancholy days comes to a close as a brief break begins tomorrow. This break is known as a post-exam vacation. A preparatory period for summer vacation during which teachers mark my test answers wrong.
Damn, this is annoying.
There was no point in feeling depressed about it, so I headed to the literary-club-room-turned-SOS-Brigade-hideout. At least I can ogle Asahina for some peace of mind.
The Boredom of Haruhi Suzumiya Page 8