Chapter 13: A World of Strangers

It was real. Brazil was real.

The memory of the jungle, the heat, the kind, weathered face of the old man-it all floods back, not as a dream, but as a genuine, lived experience. I scramble to my feet and look at my clothes. The same jeans and sweater. I pull my phone from my pocket. The battery is at 45%. I have no new messages from my time "away." I check my wallet. My yen is still there. My student ID still lists my name.

I look at my feet. My sneakers. I walk to the genkan, the entrance of my apartment, and look down. There is a fine, reddish-brown dust caked into the seams of my shoes and a small smear of it on the floor where I first entered.

It is the dust from the Brazilian road.

The proof sends a new wave of icy terror through me. I have traveled across the world. In my sleep. Without a passport, without a plane, without a single sound.

The laws of reality, the fundamental rules I have clung to in my gray, empty life, are not just broken. They are completely, utterly shattered.

My first thought, a desperate, animal instinct, is to call someone. To tell someone. I unlock my phone, my thumb hovering over my grandparents' number. What would I say? "Oji-san, I think I am a long-distance teleporter. I just spent a day in the Amazon." They would put me in a hospital.

My thumb moves to Aiko's contact. My only friend. She helped me when I was just depressed. What about this? This is not a "funk." This is not a problem for a family restaurant. This is madness. She will think I am insane. She will be scared. I cannot do that to her. I cannot inflict my insanity on the only person who has been kind to me.

So I remain silent.

The day is a torment of paranoid waiting. I do not leave my apartment. I triple-check the lock on my door, a futile, pathetic gesture. What good is a deadbolt against something that can pull me through the fabric of the world?

I sit on my floor, my back against the wall, and I watch the clock. I am terrified of the one thing my body needs: sleep. Sleep is no longer a refuge. It is a trapdoor. It is a monster waiting in the dark.

I try to rationalize. Is this Minaki's fault? Is it a side effect of meeting her? Her appearance has reawakened my past, and now it seems to have reawakened... something else. A "gift," Hitane has called it in my synopsis. But this does not feel like a gift. It feels like a curse.

My quest to find my past suddenly seems trivial. My new quest is simply to survive.

The sun begins to set, the light in my apartment turning a deep, bloody orange. The shadows in the corners of my room lengthen, and with them, my terror grows. I cannot do this. I cannot face the night.

I brew a pot of the strongest, blackest coffee I can find. I turn on every light in my apartment, bathing the small space in a harsh, sterile glow. I turn on the television to a 24-hour news channel, the sound a constant, grounding drone.

I will not sleep. I will fight it.

The first few hours are easy. I am wired, my body still thrumming with adrenaline. I pace my small apartment, from the kitchen to the window, back and forth, like a caged animal.

At 2:00 AM, the exhaustion hits me like a physical blow. My eyelids are lead weights. The coffee has turned my stomach into a knot of acid, but the caffeine is losing the war against my body's simple, biological need.

At 3:00 AM, I am sitting on the floor, my head propped against my bedframe, and I am bargaining. "Just a few minutes. Just... just a rest." I know it is a lie.

At 3:15 AM, my eyes close.

The feeling is not gentle. It is a violent pull, a sensation of falling and being squeezed through a straw at the same time. The air is ripped from my lungs.

I wake with a gasp, not on my floor, but on something hard and cold. Stone.

I sit up, my heart pounding. I am in a city. But it is not Tokyo. The buildings are old, ornate, and beautiful, bathed in the soft, yellow glow of gas lamps. The street is made of cobblestones, slick with a fine mist. The air is cold, and I can see my breath. A few people are walking nearby, but they are speaking a language I recognize instantly: French.

I am in Paris.

I scramble to my feet, a strangled, terrified sound escaping my lips. "No. No, no, no."

A couple, walking arm in arm, gives me a wide berth, whispering and looking at my panicked expression. I must look like a madman-a disheveled Japanese student in a sweater, appearing out of nowhere on a Parisian street at 3:00 AM.

This is my new reality. This is my life. A frantic, terrifying cycle.

I find a quiet, dark alleyway, away from the few late-night revelers, and I huddle behind a stack of crates, my arms wrapped around my knees, trying to control the tremors. I am cold, I am terrified, and I am completely, utterly alone on a different continent.

My phone is useless, a dead brick. I have no money, no passport. I am a ghost.

I wait. The hours tick by. The city begins to wake. The smell of fresh bread from a nearby boulangerie fills the air, a scent that is so wonderful it is a torment.

I am a prisoner of consciousness. My only way home is to surrender to the very thing that has cast me out. I must sleep.

I huddle deeper into the shadows, the exhaustion and fear a crushing weight. I close my eyes, and I do not pray. I simply... let go.

The pull is just as violent as before.

I wake up, my face pressed against my own carpet. I am in my apartment. The television is still droning on about the morning stock report. Sunlight is streaming through my window.

I am back.

I crawl to my bed and pull the covers over my head, but it is not a comfort. It is a pathetic attempt to hide from a world that has become a haunted house. And the monster is me.