Chapter 18: In Her Absence

She was weightless.

Not in the literal sense - her body retained a shape which had to be strained to support it - but something about her had the effect of a half-complete photograph, a man half-awakening and not quite there.

Haruto dragged her along on the main street.

Every step clicked under his feet--not of dust or rock, but of strands of information, the wires of the city unraveling under his feet. The sidewalk was hissing as if the pavement was the tape reels winding up, glitch-codes streaming down the sidewalk like pieces of broken glass.

Before him, a gliding movement. Initially, he believed it was just another part of the street splitting up- and then some body moved through the lifeless. It looked like him. Same uniform. Same slouched walk.

But the eyes were wrong. Empty. Watching.

Nor did it come nearer, but reflected his movements transparently on the far side of the road, which were always in time with.

Another glitch. The other broken memory which was attempting to play a role of a warning.

Haruto didn’t stop. He didn’t blink. To frighten him now, the city would need to stomp its feet before demonstrating to him something he never had the good fortune to live long enough to be.

Faintly Hina murmured in his arms.

At first, it was just sounds.

Then words.

then recollections out of this epoch.

“Over the railroads, you must not pass after the fifth bell. That’s where the shadow comes.”

“You told us that we would go home on that long path--why not?”

“What should we do in this version never seeing one another again?”

“You told me we would go and hide in the theater when it would rain.” she said.

“Or was it the greenhouse? You had a different kind of a smile when you were wearing a red uniform. Wait… was that me? Or someone else?”

She paused. and then suddenly said to himself, “They took my name at the fountain. Said I had too many.”

I was what should have been a mirror, Haruto. Why did you give me weight?”

Haruto’s chest tightened.

A pebble dropped in a pond--that was every phrase. Her voice was only so distant, and was addressing him as he was never addressed.

He walked on.

Over its head was slow flickering. The clouds were turning in weird circles. In the distance he saw the spike of a bell tower, which he did not recollect his having heard in the past, it must be an image of an afterimage.

His chest was jerked against by the hand of Hina.

“Did you ever lose the red shoelaces?” she said.

Haruto’s breath hitched. That was his memory of being six, a little unconscious detail he had no reason to keep in mind. He thought the laces were the gift of Ayaka. Or had it been someone else?

He couldn’t tell anymore.

He stood beneath the archway which was one of a ruined archways.

Coring over them was the ruin of a former bookstore, titillating half its sign.

“ TA E & SONS B OKS ”

He set Hina very mildly down upon some ruins of a bench. as he touched that wood he became forgotten, soft, insubstantial, but now.

She stirred.

Her eyelids fluttered open.

Call me Haruto, mother; you know how I hate it when you speak to me!

“I’m here.”

Her brows knit.

“…Who?”

His breath caught.

But then: her lips models something different.

Not his name.

But a song.

A half-remembered song which they had heard the first thing when they had fallen into this world--the song which they had heard when they had heard the bell in the outer fringe of the drowned country.

Without being aware of what she was doing, she hummed it.

Haruto cleared an strand of hair out of her eyes.

But you are still in there, he said.

The city groaned above them. The archway cracked.

A figure came near, out of the street.

Not fast.

Not threatening.

Like it always had been, walking.

Long coat. Leather pad in one arm. He had a long train of torn pieces of maps floating behind him like feathers.

The Cartographer.

He didn’t speak right away.

Simply gazed down at Hina with silent unintelligible eyes.

Then: “She’s unraveling.”

“I know,” Haruto said.

She is not a memory, grumbled the Cartographer. “She’s a record. Of what you’ve done. What you’ve chosen to keep.”

Haruto stood, shielding her. “She’s not a record. She’s a person.”

The Cartographer did not make a case.

Rather, he turned another of his notebook pages.

Something she did not want to hear about Haruto.

A drawing.

Of Hina.

There are roughly a dozen versions of her that are slightly different. Long hair. Short hair. Closed eyes. Smiling. Bleeding. One of them was coded, hand breaking.

The Cartographer said that she was never meant to stabilize. This is not where people anchor , this is where they create echoes. But you are attempting to make her both.

I did not mean that, Haruto, said. And I simply did not want to forget her.

And thus you will recall, the Cartographer said. “Again and again. And each time you peg somebody your thoughts extend to grasp them. And each time that it spreads, she tears.

Haruto came toward it a little closer.

What can be done to prevent this?

The Cartographer glanced up. His features were more weathered, and looked until his face were old.

“You don’t.”

The intimacy among them became dense.

The Cartographer had added that she was once inert. A support system to my path, a place, a home. However, when she began to select me, in earnest, to pick me, she no longer fitted in with the comprehensive scheme of the city.

Haruto’s fists shook.

“I won’t let her disappear.”

The smile made by the Cartographer was not that pleasant.

“She won’t. Not fully. But she will be forgotten, bits and bits. And I will continue on and I need not know why.

He turned the page.

A sketch of Haruto this time.

Alone.

With hazy, pale outlines round him.

The Cartographer said he had seen it. Other people had attempted to recall too much. Tried to at all hale. They bring him continually back to the same place.

Haruto’s voice cracked.

“Which is?”

The Cartographer shut the volume.

“You forget yourself.”

He turned.

Began walking away.

No warning. No dramatic exit.

Just distance.

He disappeared the very second he was standing behind a shattered bus stop sign.

Haruto sank beside Hina.

She was humming again.

Eyes unfocused.

But there.

Still there.

He reached into his pocket.

Pulled out the soda can.

The one to the memory of his own father, the one the system had attempted to blot out, which he had successfully revived.

He placed it in her hand.

“I remember you,” he said softly. “And I’m not letting that go.”

The wind stirred.

there flew by a scrap of paper - a scrap of a map.

On it, in smeared ink:

They say that it is a way of declining the rewrite in order to remember.

He closed his eyes.

And held her hand.

There were still a few more numbers on his watch.

07:43:00

And held steady.

For now.