Chapter 10: The First Echo

The alley didn’t end. It simply stooped like a switch back in the universe. Not a turn, so fine, so perfect, reality a folding of itself. The way the structure was leaning against the ground was to help bring the building towards one another and the air was extremely muggled up and seemed to me to be as though the breath was forced out of someone, but this breath had not been taken yet. Above they all went dark. No stars. No colors. Just total nothing.

Haruto slowed down. His heart beat was so slow that it almost felt as if sound itself had been filtered out.

Hina stood peeking at the ground next to him. “Do you feel that?” she asked.

He nodded. “The pressure?”

Hina nodded again. “Not in the air. In the ground. As though memories were breathing.”

“Then it will be remembered by us,” Haruto said. “Or maybe just me.” The place didn't feel haunted, rather it felt personal.

The farther they went the more the world held an unfamiliar nature. Light on the walls was also blinking like eyes, trying to be ill. These bricks were inscribed with names--some of them stamped off, others faintly shining.

We all came to the alley without a warning.

There was a large courtyard with run-down stone archways. The ground was not level, the tiles were broken by the weather. Chalk drawings all over the stones. Some names overlapped. Circles around nothing.

The school desk was in the middle of it. Wooden. Familiar.

And sitting on it was a boy.

Haruto stopped.

The shape was obvious.

Head resting on folded arms. Legs too long for the desk. Hair messy, uniform askew.

“…Yamazaki?”

The name was strange, as though it had been rusted closed for years.

The boy didn’t stir.

Hina touched Haruto on his wrist.

“There is something about this place that seems preserved. Not locked, but waiting.”

Haruto moved slowly forward.

Dullness now his inner ear overheard. Some sort of breathing, though not breathing enough--a cassette loop of a person who is trying not to cry.

He entered the ring of chalk.

And Yamazaki moved.

Just a blink. Just enough.

His head rose slowly. His gaze swept to Haruto, and an ugly bit of a smile appeared on his face.

“Oh,” he said. “So it wasn’t just a dream.”

Not a breath of air, not a mist of his words. No more than a sound, fading away too fast, as memory attempted to overwrite itself in the middle of the sentence.

“I… I didn’t know you were here.”

Yamazaki stood. His blazer was sleeveless and chalk-smeared. His eyes had seemed featureless at first, but the longer Haruto gazed, the more he saw of the boy he formerly knew.

“I kept thinking you’d show up,” Yamazaki said. “Every day. Now that no one ever asks about you anymore.”

Haruto swallowed. “We were friends.”

He recalled a day when Yamazaki sat all alone in lunch hour with his notebook on his knee, and tapping a complete silence on a pencil. Haruto had looked away.

“Yeah,” Yamazaki said softly. It was only you that laughed at me when I had those nonsensical jokes about volcanoes that I made in science.”

Something came to mind--Yamasaki pouring vinegar into a baking soda figurine, and the blow dipping the entire rear row. Haruto laughed and cried.

“You would always have had another pencil”, Yamazaki went on. “Because you knew I’d lose mine.”

Haruto looked away. “I didn’t forget that.”

“Didn’t you?”

It was accused of nothing. Just a question. Just pain.

Yamasaki recalled the time when he sat on the train station floor, and his cram session ended. “Holding both our passes. You said you’d meet me. I waited an hour.”

Haruto flinched.

“You were ill”, I told myself. “Then I got busy. Then it was… better not to speak out about it.”

Yamasaki wondered whether he had done something wrong or not. “Maybe I was annoying. Or forgettable. Perhaps I simply did not matter much.”

The statement smacked Haruto, as if he were struck in the lungs by ice.

“You mattered,” he said. “I just didn’t want to admit I needed anyone.”

Yamazaki stared at him. “Why now, then?”

Haruto stepped closer. “Now I know what it is to be abandoned.”

A crack formed in the air.

Some noise, as of the strike of a bell in fog.

The center desk opened and we saw inside it was hollow.

It contained within it a slightly burning small marble, red and likening a heart-beat.

Hina inhaled sharply. “Anchor seed.”

“You know what hurt most?” Yamazaki said. “Not that you disappeared. And that I dared hope you would still come back.”

Haruto’s throat closed. He was unable to stare directly at him. “I didn’t forget to hurt you. I just… I did not know how to bid good-bye. So I said nothing.”

Yamazaki’s eyes softened. “I’d have understood. Even if it hurts.”

Haruto said, “he supposed it would be more convenient for both of us just to fall asleep. But it didn’t. It just made me disappear too.”

Yamazaki did not say anything.

“You know you were the only person who did not write me off as background. And I had not thought there was any need of earning being seen with you.”

Haruto blinked. His chest ached.

“No,we weren't best friends or anything,” Yamazaki said, less vibrantly. "But you... you mattered to me."

Haruto came forward. "And I let that matter go. I'm sorry."

Yamasaki bowed half-noded, half-shrugged. "I didn't come here to be saved. I would have liked to know that I was not the only one who remembered.”

Slow, Deliberate Haruto took the marble.

"I do," he whispered. "Even if it's late. I remember now."

And as soon as his fingers closed on it, the marble throbbed once more--then again, as though it were beating time with his heart.

The courtyard shook. Sketches were rubbed away with the hot weather. Splits matted over the tiles. The outline of Yamazaki became indistinct, and divided into himself in various years, the laughing, Waiting, Fading one.

“You remembered,” a younger version of himself said. "That's enough... for now."

And then he was gone.

Everything folded inward. The chalk dissolved. The sky once more conglomerated, gray and dense.

Haruto floundered back to the alley. His breath caught. His heart rate was not quick to beat.

Hina moved to his side and gave him a close up, touching his arm with her hand without really doing it but she wanted to.

"You did it," she said softly.

"No," Haruto said. "I just... finally faced it."

He opened his hand. The marble was golden soft, and palming him.

The wall beside them shifted. A groaning, rusting door to an elevator burst open.

The panel was illuminated with five slots. One trembled now--as a candle that had just been lit.

Haruto didn't move right away.

“I didn’t think it would hit me that hard,” he murmured. “I thought we were just two kids who talked after class.”

“You were more than that,” said Hina. "Maybe not then. But now."

He hesitated, then extended a hand and brushed some of the chalk dust off of his arm. "He mattered to you."

Haruto looked back at the golden marble. And... “at the bottom of the abyss, what will there be to meet?”

Hina didn't answer. However, her eyes lingered on him, even though this was not necessary.

She followed Haruto into the elavator. The entrance shut with a metallic sigh.

His watch ticked softly.

99:36:00.

And there below, responding to the hum of memory.

The weight hadn't lifted.

And in this case he was aware where to take it.