My friends? License plate? What—
The dog kept barking. The cop was talking on his radio. Getaway car—two teenagers—witness—one person injured.
As he fought the vertigo, Kotaro slowly began to grasp what was happening. The jogger had seen Mika and Gaku being kidnapped and ran to a nearby police box. Kidnapped by whom? He was certain he knew the answer, but his memory had been wiped. His mind was a blank.
“Will the ambulance be much longer?” The jogger took the towel from her neck and wiped Kotaro’s face gently. “He was just trying to help his friends, and those men hurt him. The one who hit him had something in his hand. I think it was a crowbar.”
Her voice was quavering with shock. The old man tried to comfort her as he squatted next to his dog. “Don’t worry. He’s young. They were probably just drinking.”
“No they weren’t! There was a fat middle-aged guy and a young one, like a hooligan. They were taking this boy’s friends away. He was hollering for help.”
A fat, middle-aged man and a hooligan. Two people from the garbage emporium. They were with Kitty—
His memory was starting to return, but black waves of dizziness and nausea rose up, blotting it out.
“Hold on, kid! Help’s on the way. You friends will be all right too!”
It was no use. He couldn’t keep his eyes open. The black waves broke over him, but just before he lost consciousness, he saw the watch on the jogger’s wrist, inches from his face.
PM 18:32
He’d returned before he left.
Mika—
We made it after all. I made it. I got to you in time. And I tried to help and they hit me and I fell—
Blackout.
It was like watching an old TV on its last legs.
Sometimes the screen would come to life with ghostly, fragmentary images. The edges of the screen were blurred and distorted. Sometimes there was no picture, but the sound was clear and distinct.
“He’s had a severe concussion. He was hit on the forehead, which caused a small amount of bleeding between his brain and the opposite side of his skull. It’s called a traumatic subdural hematoma.”
A burst of static cut off the voice, then it returned. “Anyway, he’s going to survive, which is the only thing that matters.”
That’s Mom. Mom, I—
Suddenly a blinding brightness. He saw Kazumi’s face distinctly.
“Kotaro? Are you awake?” She sounded surprised. He opened his mouth and tried to answer, but all he could produce was a rattling in his throat. Not the warm purring of a cat, but more like a wheezing pigeon.
“Don’t worry, Mika’s okay. Gaku too. They caught the kidnappers.”
Something about a roadblock. Kazumi’s face blurred and her voice faded. Kotaro took a deep breath, trying to clear his head. Mika’s okay. Mika’s okay. Mika’s okay.
Head hurts. Nose hurts. Back hurts.
Caught the kidnappers? What was the name on that garbage dump?
Imazaki.
He must have said the name. “That’s right,” a voice said. “Imazaki, a husband and wife. Did you hear us talking about them? They’re some really bad people. But the worst one is—”
Glitter Kitty. I know. I know. I know.
He fell back to sleep. It was like sinking into quicksand.
He opened his eyes. Seigo Maki and Kaname Ashiya stood side by side, peering down at him.
“Kotaro, it’s Kaname. Do you recognize me?”
Yeah, but why are your eyes so puffy? Have you been crying?
“You’re a hero, Ko-Prime.” Seigo’s eyes smiled gently. “I always knew you were on the side of justice.”
No, Seigo. I’m the exact opposite. Or maybe I just went too far. Biting Kitty’s head off, for example.
“Makoto wants to see you soon,” Kaname said. “He’s really worried about you.”
“He’s got his hands full digging into Teen911.com. We’d already seen some suspicious goings on with that site, but it wasn’t on our watch list. After what happened, we’re not leaving any stone unturned.”
“Kotaro, can you hear us?”
Kotaro was struggling with more drowsiness than pain. He just wanted to sleep and escape reality. Mika’s okay. They caught the kidnappers. But I turned into a monster and bit someone’s—
No, I guess I didn’t. I came back before it happened, which means it didn’t happen. The cops rescued Mika and Gaku before they were taken to that house. That guy and his wife and the man with the tattoos and Kitty are all alive. They still exist. They’re not missing.
But I don’t remember doing anything. I don’t remember what I did in the park.
And what about Galla?
Did none of that happen? Has reality experienced a total reset? Or was everything that happened after I went to the park and thought I saw a giant spider with burning coals for eyes, was all that just a dream I had while I’ve been lying here?
What you see and feel may not be real. He heard Ash’s voice calling to him.
But was Galla unreal? Was she?
He heard a sudden, high-pitched beeping. The vital signs monitor was sounding a warning. His heart rate and blood pressure were spiking. It wasn’t his body; it was his mind. His heart cried out in pain and sadness.
He would never meet the guardian demon again. Everything was finished. The worst had been avoided. He’d been saved just short of the point of no return.
But Galla was gone.
“It’s called retrograde amnesia.”
Shigenori shifted uncomfortably on the hard hospital chair. “Hit your head hard enough and you can forget what happened just before and after that. So you don’t remember what really happened—that you were trying to help Mika.” The ex-detective snorted cynically and added quietly, “Some other things you still remember would be good to forget too.”
A week after the incident, Kotaro was sitting on his bed in a private room. He head was wrapped in bandages and a hair net. The pain was mostly gone; he was feeling much better and could receive visitors like Shigenori. “Nothing like a fruit basket when you’re laid up,” he’d said as he set the huge basket at the foot of Kotaro’s bed.
He told Shigenori everything that happened that night. He was the only one Kotaro could talk to about these things—seeing the Tower of Inception, traveling to the Nameless Land, looking up at the Gate of Sorrows, and Galla’s fate.
“You don’t really think it would be better for me to forget all that,” he told Shigenori when the story was finished. “I sure don’t.”
Shigenori didn’t seem surprised at this reaction.
“Those things are reality for me,” Kotaro added. “They really happened.”
Shigenori looked at him steadily and slowly shook his head. “No, you’re wrong about that. This is reality, here and now.”
The daily news shows were still focused on the Teen911 Incident. Toshiki Imazaki, forty-one, website administrator and self-styled systems engineer. Mieko Nakai, his common-law wife, age forty. She managed a small bar in the neighborhood. The man with the tattoos was a regular customer: Shinji Hino, thirty-one, unemployed. He had a record of sexual assault and not the faintest concept of PCs or the Internet, but when Teen911 had a revenge assignment, he supplied the muscle.
According to Seigo, Teen911.com had popped up on the web five years ago. In the beginning, it really did seem to be a site students could go for advice about romance and friendship, worries about their appearance, problems with their studies and so forth. The site was just what it claimed to be.
About a year ago, this had started to change. A student consulted the Imazakis about a bullying problem. They forced the leader of the students who were involved in the bullying to write a letter of apology, and they squeezed a “compensation” payment out of him. It was around this time that Shinj
i Hino fell in with them. His criminal record and appearance was more than effective for coercing and intimidating naïve young people. Teen911 quickly gained a reputation as the go-to site for local teens who wanted to get back at someone.
“School Island wasn’t tracking them at all. We really screwed up,” Seigo said regretfully.
The Imazakis’ standard MO was to hustle the young person they’d been hired to deal with into their car, driving them around and berating them, or locking them up in the punishment room in their house for a few hours. Once the news broke, many past victims started coming forward. The media even speculated that the Imazakis might be involved in the disappearance of a male college student just after the beginning of the year.
Glitter Kitty, a 16-year-old high school student, was also in the spotlight. She’d paid to have Mika Sonoi kidnapped and beaten up, and because the Internet was the point of contact between her and the Imazakis, it was the perfect opportunity for the mainstream media to criticize web culture. At the same time, while the networks and newspapers were referring to Kitty as “Girl A,” her face and home address, details about her parents and everything else concerning her were all over the web, a situation that fueled a fierce debate of its own.
Kitty had always insisted on winning at any cost. Many people weighed in with stories about her cruelty, her obsession with being first, and her unwillingness to take advice. As a fifth grader, she’d harassed her homeroom teacher so badly that the woman had been forced to take a leave of absence.
As Kotaro had heard himself that night at the Imazakis—an event that his reset had wiped from reality—Kitty’s family was quite well-off, a fact she was stuck-up about. She was one of the wealthy who’d moved into the neighborhood after the farmland was turned into a residential area. She had a fierce superiority complex toward “aborigines” like Mika and Kazumi. It seemed that her hatred of Mika was partially fired by such prejudice.
That was reality on “this side.” Kotaro was losing interest in the details. Mika was okay. The kidnappers had been caught. That was enough.
But he was not satisfied. He was extremely dissatisfied.
“I don’t know how this ‘law of the Circle’ thing works, but if they were going to send me back in time, why didn’t they send me back a lot further than just a few hours?”
Before Ayuko’s murder. Before Kenji noticed that homeless people were going missing along the Seibu-Shinjuku Line. Kotaro would’ve been ready to have his whole life reset if it had meant saving those two people.
But Shigenori was having nothing of his disgruntled muttering. “You ought to be happy with getting just a few hours back. It was enough to save Mika, wasn’t it?”
Kotaro hated to admit it, but Shigenori was right. He always was; that was why Kotaro felt driven to disagree with him.
“Mika’s a cute girl. Your sister is more of a classic beauty. She takes after her mother.”
When Shigenori had walked through the door, weighed down by his lavish fruit basket, he had run into two mother/daughter duos: Asako and Kazumi, and Takako and Mika. He’d casually introduced himself as a “colleague” of Kotaro’s—Asako assumed he was from Kumar, someone even higher up the ladder than Seigo, and treated him with inflated politeness.
“I know it’s none of my business, but I’m a bit worried about Takako Sonoi,” Shigenori said. “When something like this happens to a child, it can be harder for the parents than for the child.”
He was right. Mika had come out of her ordeal with barely a scratch, and she seemed buoyant and scrappy, but Kotaro thought Takako was looking haggard.
“I wouldn’t say this to her, but I think she feels responsible for what happened to me too. Like, if she’d been more involved and a better mother, I wouldn’t be sitting here.”
Shigenori nodded. “You should make sure she knows that’s not true. There wasn’t anything she could’ve done to prevent it. Coming from you, I think she’ll believe that. In less than ten months you’ve just about seen it all. You’ve been through hell.”
“I don’t think so,” Kotaro said. Shigenori’s eyebrows rose in surprise.
“Galla’s eye didn’t show me evil. It showed me words. Words created by people’s thoughts.”
The moment words are uttered, they are past. All words are residue. They gather like fallen leaves.
Shigenori looked at him intently. “I saw them once myself. At Naka-chan. Two paper strips for the Star Festival, turned blood red. I’ve thought a lot about that since then, and I’ve come to a conclusion. Words, and the residue they leave behind—what Galla showed you, what you experienced—people since ancient times have had a name for it.
“It’s called karma. The karma each person carries with them. You accumulate it just by being alive. It’s not good or bad in itself. But when it ripens, it can bring real misfortune. The monsters you saw, giants and two-headed beasts, are the personification of karma.”
Kotaro was silent for a moment. Then: “Do you think Galla was evil?”
“I don’t know. But I’m standing by my conclusion. She was a concept. That’s how she could be real, yet not exist. Other than that, your guess is as good as mine. But she did deceive you. She used you—”
“Maybe she didn’t. You know what she told me? That she chose me in the beginning, but in the end I was the one who chose. She was right. It wasn’t her fault. I made the wrong choice, but her son Auzo ended up saving my neck.”
“If you think that’s what happened, then that’s how it happened.” Shigenori nodded, almost as if trying to convince himself. “By the way, it looks like the tea caddy building has a buyer.” He shifted uncomfortably in the chair. “Things may be settled before you get out of here.”
“If they put a shop in there, we can walk right in the front door,” Kotaro said.
“They probably won’t let us go up to the roof, though.”
“That first floor looked like a good place for a restaurant. If they open one, let’s have a party and celebrate my recovery.”
“Sure, sure. Looking forward to it. By that time, you’ll probably have a nice new implant to close that gap in your teeth. You’ll be handsome again.”
Shigenori’s response was playful, but his eyes weren’t smiling. Kotaro probably looked the same.
This is the end of the line.
It was better for both of them. They didn’t have to say it to know it was true. This wasn’t a sympathy visit. Shigenori had come to say goodbye.
The matter is closed. I’m going back to my life. You should do the same, kid.
That was how detectives said goodbye.
Fortunately for Kotaro, his hematoma wasn’t so large that it required surgery. With time it would be reabsorbed naturally. Until then he’d have to be monitored closely, but that was all. Still, more than two weeks after that night in the park, he remained in the hospital.
Summer had hung on tenaciously but was finally gone. He climbed the stairs to the roof of his wing. As he strolled along the roof between the lines of flapping laundry and the high net fence, Seigo peeked around the door to the stairwell and stepped out onto the roof.
“I asked the nurse. She told me you were probably up here doing calisthenics.”
“I’m not quite in shape for that yet,” Kotaro said.
“It’s nice up here on the roof.”
“It’s where they hang the laundry, but it’s a paradise for secret smokers, too.”
Seigo squinted against the breezy sunlight. “About five years ago, was it? Ayuko ended up in the hospital with meningitis. At the time, she was a smoker. As soon as she was up and around, she started sneaking around looking for a place to smoke. Another patient clued her in. And here I’d been telling her it was a good chance for her to quit.”
Kotaro peered at him closely. The was the first time he’d heard Seigo talk about Ayuko since she died.
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That was the end of the story. He turned his back to Kotaro, reached up and grabbed the wire mesh of the fence. “We’re pretty high up here. It’s making me dizzy.”
The matter is closed. I’m going back to my life. Shigenori was gone, but for Kotaro, one loose end remained. Without an answer to that question—if he didn’t at least try to get an answer—he couldn’t go back to his own life.
“Seigo?” They were alone on the roof. He probably wouldn’t have another chance like this.
“What?” Seigo glanced over his shoulder. From his expression, he seemed to have guessed what Kotaro was about to ask. He turned and looked off into the distance again.
“That woman, Keiko Tashiro—”
“Whereabouts unknown. Still.”
“You two had a relationship, didn’t you?”
Seigo had lost a lot of weight. Ayuko’s death had deprived him of a vital part of his life. It was as if part of him had been cut away, leaving him small and diminished.
He’d never be the same again. The thought made Kotaro’s throat tighten with grief, but he pushed on. “You weren’t just friends, were you?”
It’s yes or no. There are no other answers. You’ll either face the challenge or run away. But Seigo didn’t follow the script.
“I’m certain Ayuko didn’t know. It was my fault. I never wanted to hurt her, though. I made sure she’d never find out. It was a one-time slip, it didn’t last long. Afterward I felt like an idiot.”
He finally turned around and made eye contact with Kotaro. “But that’s no excuse. What she did was because of her relationship with me.”
“The possibility occurred to me too.”
“I see.”
“But I don’t see it that way now.”
Seigo’s mouth twitched for an instant. “Okay,” he said. “But I’m not going to change how I feel. Once you lose something, it’s gone forever.”
“Sure. Sorry, that was a little rude.”
“When did you notice? At the wake? She was there.”
“I don’t remember.”