III

“Abel tried to kill Cain first, that’s why Cain killed him. I firmly believe that. Offering fruit shows dedication. After all, you have to work really hard to cultivate it. On the other hand, sheep gets born without you having to do much. And so the story was probably muddled and both sacrifices were accepted and Abel just got jealous. But since Cain actually did commit the murder, he got in trouble, even though it was all in self-defense. It’s sad to see something like this happen – an innocent man getting punished – isn’t it?” Such nonsensical words were said to me once by Katagiri Reika-senpai back when I was in the literature club in high school. She always tended to say the weirdest things, and for seemingly no reason. I thought she was a weirdo at the time, certainly, but I think I liked the way she was. Even now, I remember her quite clearly: waist-length hair, big black eyes that always stared at you with a little too much intensity. She had a pointed chin and wore glasses typical of a lit club member. And she was tall. Perhaps the tallest person in her class – 2-D – even including the boys. A day after my revival (or whatever it was), I got a very strong urge to see her. I really wanted to talk to her again, especially since we lost touch after she graduated. If telling Nana to take a hike was my first regret, losing touch with senpai was my second and was at times equal in intensity with the first.

I have many regrets.

I slept like shit, and I woke up feeling tired before the sun was even up. I was still here. In my old room. In 2010. Utterly confused. Alone.

Katagiri-senpai was on my mind right as I woke up, and I didn’t dwell on it too much before I thought to myself that I’d go pay her a visit at the club room after breakfast. She was always there, I knew that. Even on weekends, she just sat there in that room – mostly all alone – and read her books. I’m embarrassed to say I don’t even remember what sort of books she likes (if I ever knew at all). Maybe she liked the atmosphere or the environment or maybe she didn’t feel comfortable in her home or didn’t have anywhere quiet to go, but I don’t recall asking about her predilection towards using the club room as her primary reading spot.

It occurred to me in that moment as I was getting up that I had never been one to really pay attention to people, to really look at them and care enough to know what sort of people they were. I can recall several events from back in high school but can’t place a face or name in any of them. It my mind, it was just “the one time that guy did this” or “the one time everyone found out about this guy.” It could just be that I didn’t think these nameless individuals were all that important. I was probably right. High school is filled with too many superfluous elements.

I went downstairs before anyone was up, fried a couple of eggs and was done eating them by the time my mother was down the stairs. By the time she was walking into the kitchen, I was almost done washing the dish. She was surprised, I could tell. She was always very bad at hiding concern or really any other negative emotion, but had a knack for hiding happiness or joy. She always said she was happy – and I believed her – but I never felt that she was.

“Why are you down here so early, Yuu-chan?” She asked, “and you’re already done with breakfast? How come?”

After I came back home yesterday, I was met with curious and doubtful, concerned eyes by my mother and sisters – my father was apparently working late on a project at work and so I haven’t seen him yet – who tried to scuttle around my odd behavior and ask if there was anything unusual going on or anything bothering me or whether or not I was fighting with Nana (Yuri, I would find out during my university years, was always in some form of contact with Nana and so she already knew what had happened and presumably told my mother after last night’s events) among other questions. I denied everything, insisted everything was normal, and acted as if I hadn’t done anything unusual. I let them assume my behavior was Nana-related and they weren’t too keen on intruding too much when they could tell I wasn’t in the mood. Things worked to my advantage this time, but I knew I would have to find some explanation or satisfactory resolution soon. Of course, I could just get really good at lying. But then again, I thought I was already pretty good at it. I was used to lying. For a period of around a year – my third year – at Heian Jogakuin University back in Osaka, I had developed a habit of pathologically lying. I lied about everything. I lied about my background – told some I was dirt poor and others I was the son of a rich magnate. I lied about my height and weight and age. I told people I had killed animals, served in the army, was a yakuza member. I told some I was a virgin and others that women just couldn’t get their hands off of me. I told people I wanted to be a monk and sometimes told others I was a chronic masturbator who was so specifically in order to spite monks – whom I allegedly hated because of some disagreement I had with some over cars. Sometimes, a story I told to the same people would change from day to day. I lied about everything. If asked why I did it – and people did ask when they weren’t in a hurry to get away after the jig was up – I wouldn’t know how to answer because I didn’t know the answer myself. I just lied on impulse and let my tongue loose.

“I woke up early, and I have some club activities I have to go to so I figured I’d eat and head out as soon as I can.’ I tried to keep things curt but was generally very bad at it. The way I spoke now was way different from back when I was in high school, and I felt that people were starting to notice.

“Oh, I see…. Wait. You’re in a club?!”

I only joined the club at the very end of my first year, hence the confusion. Maybe I should’ve lied.

“I might be,” I said vaguely as I walked past her and out of the kitchen. She didn’t call to me as I went up the stairs.

Our summer school uniform was a standard black khaki and white button-down combo. For some reason, our principal had always insisted on and stressed the importance of wearing the school tie – an ugly and ill-fitting blue and green striped tie that didn’t look good with anything, much less the school uniform. I remember once seeing someone get away with wearing a normal t-shirt to school just because he had the tie on over it. Otherwise, the school wasn’t too strict with its rules granted you didn’t overdo it. As for girls, their uniform was a boring white button-down shirt and ugly brown and blue plaid skirt. Needless to say, they also had to wear the tie.

As I finished dressing and started to head out of my room, a few notebooks piled neatly on the top edge of my desk caught my eye. Summer homework. I had forgotten all about that. It never occurred to me. I picked up one of the notebooks and flitted through it. It was some math notebook, and it seems like I was using it to do my summer homework, which I always started early but normally never got around to finishing until the last day of summer. I didn’t understand much of what was written. Some would think that having done it once before, I would be a savant, but the truth is that I was never a math guy before, and since I ended up in the humanities at the university and had subsequently never needed this sort of math for work, my passable math skills deteriorated into a territory that lied between not-passable and grim. “Maybe Nana will tutor me,” I thought. It’ll make her happy and would go a long way to helping her forget what happened. It’ll keep her busy.

I put the notebook back in its place and left my room. Ninomae was an early riser so she was up and in the shower. “Good,” I thought, “there won’t be any confrontations.” Yuri normally slept a little more and then loafed around the house doing nothing, which my mom always told her was little better than staying in bed all day. If I left now, I would probably make it to school around the time the sports clubs started practicing. Katagiri-senpai usually – but not always – arrived at the club room fairly early, but even if she wasn’t there, I would wait it out. I knew she would go there eventually.

At the front door, my mother was apprehensive, and I started to feel a little guilty about everything, but then thought that none of this time travel or whatever was my idea and that I couldn’t help being so utterly different from my younger self, nor could I be expected to perfectly mimic my old mannerisms for everyone’s satisfaction, and so on and so forth. She asked me if I would be home for dinner and I said I probably would but that I wouldn’t be back too early. She left me with a not-so-convinced “enjoy your time at your club” and a strained smile and I was on my way.

It was sultry outside, but that was par for the course. Being taken away from winter to the unusually hot summer we had in 2010 was welcome, but I had yet to adjust. From my house, it took around 7 minutes to the train station. A 10 minute train ride and another 5 minutes from the station to the school and I was there. Before I even got to the entrance, I could hear yelling and cheering. The sports clubs had already started practicing, though I don’t recall my school having any particularly strong sports teams.

At the school gates, I stopped and looked around, examining the school grounds, which seemed to me at the same time completely novel and vaguely nostalgic. The look of the school itself was not exactly impressive – it was just like any other school – but I was struck by how large it seemed. Looking at it now, it definitely seemed that the school was a good amount larger than most, though I honestly did not remember it being that way, and couldn’t even begin to recollect an instance when I had needed to examine the supplementary aspects of the school grounds with any seriousness or for any purpose.

The main school building was composed of three floors (not including the ground floor) and stood facing the entrance gate. Behind that was the back court with the water fountain where it all went down with me and Nana. Further were the sports courts, gym, pool, and other areas, all of which not too important at the moment. To the extreme right at the entrance, occupying a small corner of the school grounds, there stood a relatively small two-storied building (again, not including the ground floor), not too old but not new either, one that always looked out of place on the school grounds, like it was moved here wholesale from some random corner of the city and plopped there to be repurposed for club activities. Any non-sports clubs held their activities in there, and in the case of clubs that qualified for club status but did not qualify for receiving any funding from the school, those clubs were barely recognized as such and held their meetings and activities wherever they could find space – sometimes in family restaurants or in members’ houses.

I walked through the gates, and amid the din of shouts and laughter of sports teams, in the midst of these school grounds filled with truants and lazy (or otherwise stupid) individuals that had to take summer classes in the main building or those loitering around for a lack of anything better to do, I felt an odd sense of dread. Like I didn’t belong anywhere here.

As soon as I walked through the club building, things were a little more quiet, but the building was alive with the hustle and bustle of students from different clubs all wasting their summers away in their own way. I felt like an outsider. Like a robber or at least someone that shouldn’t be there and that at any moment someone was going to stop me and ask why I was there and what business did I have. I felt like a pervert that had snuck into some girl’s room and was rifling through her stuff and needed to get his business done before someone showed up to catch him in the act. Everywhere I looked, I felt as if people were giving me questioning looks and I wanted to run away and out of the school and throw up and never come back. The literature club room was in a tiny corner on the second floor at the very end of the hallway, far away from the stairwell – the farthest club – and all the while I was walking there I internally hoped and prayed that senpai wouldn’t be there and I wouldn’t have to spend a second there. I didn’t recognize anyone that flitted by and I might as well have been wearing a high schooler costume that disguised my age and alienness. And so I avoided bumping into anyone with all my might and only caught glimpses of others as I walked with my head down and made my way through until, finally, I was at the club door. I didn’t knock or announce myself. I opened the door and rushed inside to escape questioning looks and the invisible pressure of my own anxiety.

The room was empty. Senpai wasn’t in yet, but I knew she would be sooner or later. There was only room for a rectangular table in the middle, flanked by 6 chairs, a space heater in the corner for the winter, and a small bookcase that was always mostly empty tucked into another corner. A laptop should have sat on top of the space heater, but it wasn’t there at the moment. The laptop, I recalled, was that asshole first year’s device – whatever his name was – who thought he was above everyone and everything and that he was going to get something published sooner rather than later and that he was doing the club a favor by joining because that was going to make it more famous. I was in my second year when he started high school and he ended up publishing a novel during his first year’s summer break – not 6 months after he matriculated – much to the surprise and awe of much of the club as well as my anger and chagrin. I didn’t read his novel but I remember telling him it was fine and distinctly recall that he smiled at me with a crooked, knowing smile that told me he knew I hadn’t read it and that he wanted me to know that he knew. He pissed me off enough even now that I forgot about my dread and took the second seat at the upper right side of the table, right where he liked to sit.

Sitting there in that empty room waiting for senpai to arrive, that’s when the gears in my head finally started to turn and I started to really consider what exactly I wanted to do with this second run at life (however long it would last). The problem was, I couldn’t really use any foreknowledge because I had none. Knowledge of the fact that the market crashed a couple of years ago is as far as my knowledge of stocks went and I didn’t know the results of any sports for gambling purposes – and I couldn’t gamble anyways due to my current age. As for studying, I think that’s been touched on before. Maybe the familiarity of some concepts will give me some slight edge but overall I had no real advantage. One might suggest finding out the “secret” (or whatever) of what had happened to me, but it seemed nonsensical for me to even try. Where would I even start? One thing I knew is I wasn’t looking forward to reliving this period of my life and the longer I stayed, the worse it was going to get.

I continued to ruminate on all of these ideas, but senpai still had not come. Maybe she was late.. It was a mistake, really, to have come here so early even though I knew she would probably be here for much of the day, but I also didn’t feel comfortable staying in that house and wanted to get away. “Maybe I should’ve went to an arcade,” I thought.

An hour of boredom later, the door opened, and in walked Katagiri Reika in the flesh, with her bag around her shoulder and a book in her hand. That is when I noticed my mistake: I forgot to bring a book with me so that I could at least pretend to read, so as it stands I just seem like some weirdo that had come into the club room unannounced and was lounging around wasting time. We said our good mornings and she sat in the seat on my right. That was her spot. Almost immediately, she opened her book and started reading without saying another word to me. This wasn’t unexpected of her but it did leave me ill at ease what with everything else that’s been going on. I think she stretched her legs as well but I didn’t want to look under the table because I didn’t want to seem like a pervert. I had developed some weird fear during my working years, that my actions would be misconstrued and that I’d be branded a lecher and a pervert. Again, my mother always said I thought too much and was prone to overthinking and that this held me back. She was reading “Musashi”, I noticed.

Forgetting to bring that book was a major mistake. The room was stuffy and hot, and while the birds chirped, the cicadas screeched, and senpai read out of her massive volume, I sat there twiddling my thumbs with no plans or intentions to say anything, and without much to do in order to justify my presence in the room or the building as a whole. I thought about standing up and just walking out and while I could’ve done that, it seemed antithetical to my entire arrival here. How would I explain it if I walked out and then showed up some other day with some book to finally explain my presence anyways? In the end, I just sat there and waited (and hoped) for something to happen and nothing did – for 4 hours nothing did – as my brain spun out of control and back into focus in a loop while senpai sat there and flipped through her pages and no one else showed up to relieve me. And so I relieved myself.

Suddenly, breathing heavily, I stood up. The chair clacked as it moved back and I made to move, but before I had the chance, senpai spoke. “Do you believe in aliens?” she asked before looking up from her book and straight at me. Her large black eyes stared right into my face and followed my eyes as I sat back down and tried to breathe more normally. Her book was now closed and she awaited my answer.

“Well, I’ve never seen one before,” I managed after I sat there for some time and collected myself.

“Is that a yes or a no?”

“No”

“And so you’ve never seen one, but you can say with certainty that they don’t exist? Even if we found microbes in space, those would count as aliens. And so you’re so sure such things don’t exist?”

“I didn’t say anything about certainty, just that I didn’t believe in them. There’s a difference.”

“Is there?”

“I can’t say with certainty that you won’t jump out the window right now, but I don’t believe you’ll do it.”

“Huh…” She thought for a second. “And so you think we’re special then? Earthlings, I mean.”

“Yes.”

“And so such a large universe but life only exists on this tiny little planet? Or not life – maybe we can say stones are alive, too, and so maybe are other inanimates – but whatever it is we call living things. These only exist here? On earth?”

“Why not? Can you, on the other hand say with certainty that aliens are real? That these so called “living things” are out there in space?” I already knew she didn’t believe in them.

“I wonder what they’re like.”

“No point in thinking about it too much. Won’t know until we see one.”

“If everyone thought the way you did, we won’t be seeing anything. In fact, we wouldn’t discover anything at all, alien or otherwise.” She was dodging my questions or skirting around actually having to say anything of value. Everything she said was shallow, but she wrapped it up in a confident attitude and an inquisitive tone, which made what she said seem more important than it actually was. It was starting to piss me off. I didn’t remember her being like this, but she wasn’t saying anything that for her seemed to me to be out of character and she still had this habit of constantly using “and so” in her speech.

“Observatories still look around in space; they’re still looking out there so no matter their attitude or thoughts on the topic, scientists’ chances of discovery won’t change. In any case, most discoveries happen without anyone intentionally looking, and people most of the time don’t know what to look for before finding something new.”

“And so it’s better to go into it completely blind? If they at least imagined these beings as being one color or another, they could focus on those colors in their search. Makes things a whole lot simpler.”

This was pointless. What was this girl talking about? “Colors”? People always thought she was a weirdo because she kept saying these sorts of things. More than a weirdo though, I’m starting to think she was just playing the weirdo act, just saying things she knew people would think were weird or odd. So maybe I was the fool. Everyone saw right through it but I believed this jester. Is that it?

“It would take too much time to segment everything like that.” I was disinterested now.

“Too much time? And so if things take too much time, they’re automatically not worth doing? Nothing useful ever comes about by thinking that way,”

“Okay, just shut up. The only thing that’s taken too much time is your drivel. You dance around questions and give a few oddball responses and what’s the aim? What’s the endgame? Even with things regarding your own topics, you refuse to address things in which you yourself are interested – and I know for a fact that, a clown though you seem, there is some ingot of interest there in your blithering. You talk and talk until someone decides they’re bored or weirded out and then leave. In fact, you wish for this. Because conversing with anyone for any length of time would show everyone how shallow and empty all of this is. “How would our interactions with extraterrestrials be? Peaceful? Friendly? Marked with animosity?” Your kind seems to be really eager to discuss these things. And so are you, I bet. Yet you scuttle around the question and you don’t ask or try to answer. You just ask questions and people think you’re weird and you get off on these feelings. Well, I’ll give you the answer. People love being subservient. They’ll go down on their hands and knees and prostrate themselves and beg with passion, like dogs. Like dogs, they’ll beg, if they think they could get ahead of everyone else, if they think they’ll be comfortable. If these aliens have some cool little thing that’ll make people more comfortable, they’ll grovel right then and there at their feet – no pride at all. That’s what people would do and you’re no better. And what the hell is wrong with you anyways? When you talk, who are you even talking to? You’re acting, but who’s the audience? Who do you hope to wow? You think if you keep talking someone will come along and think you’re cool and you’ll have a nice little chat and you’ll make some new friend – except you’ll still pretend like you buy any of the shit you’re spewing so there’s no honesty anywhere and you still wouldn’t show yourself – but maybe, just maybe, that new friend will happen to be some guy? Maybe it’ll be a guy you like or something, and then what? You’ll be open and honest and hope the fact that it was an act hadn’t put him off and maybe then you’ll show some intelligence that you’ve hidden somewhere and somehow that’ll be just enough – because that’s what most people are okay with, things being good enough or passable as long as things work out in the end. But in the end you’ll know the whole thing was a lie because it started with a lie – it started with you making a fool of yourself and being the fraud you are. And I can’t believe I fell for it. The tricks, the little snippets of conversation, the slightly off-putting but to me at least somewhat interesting remarks, and it made you beguiling and enigmatic and I fell for it and thought back with nostalgia – nostalgia I felt when I thought back, but no more. A charlatan! A charlatan is all you are and just so you know, everyone knows it and everyone talks about it behind your back and you’re the only one not in on it because you’re the joke and you always have been.”

And there it was. Up till now, for the past couple of days since my little adventure began, I had avoided speaking at length with anyone about anything. To put it simply: I was a rambler. I rambled too much once I started to really speak. I wasn’t always like this, but that’s how I’ve been for the past few years. In fact, everyone at the docks was a rambler. Everyone there rambled about one thing or another – had a topic that they always rambled about constantly – and the longer someone had been a dock worker, I noticed, the longer they tended to ramble and the more rabid and pronounced were their gesticulations and gesturing as they rambled on and on. As one can imagine, things became incoherent at some point or another. And yet, no one who worked at the docks was bothered by it and no one thought it was a problem, but everyone knew they did it, even if in the moment they didn’t notice it themselves. That’s how things worked out here. Disillusioned and angry, my tongue flew out before I could catch it.

Katagiri-senpai stared at me with wide eyes and an open mouth. She looked at me the same way people often looked at her, making it known they found her insane and weird. But her stare was intense, and I felt embarrassed to have spewed a tirade out of nowhere. Nevertheless, I said what was on my mind and my anger and frustration and disillusionment greatly overshadowed any embarrassment I felt. I stood suddenly and quickly turned to leave.

A short, wide-eyed little girl with large black eyes and a short sidetail fixed up with a red hair band stood at the open door. I couldn’t remember who she was in the moment but it was clear she’d been standing there for a bit, though I don’t know for how long and how much she’d heard. Our eyes locked and she lifted the book in her hand – a tattered copy of “The Box Man” – and started pointing at it in an embarrassed stutter. Most likely, she was here to return the book and had intruded upon our conversation and heard things she wasn’t expecting to hear.

I moved to the door and went right past the frightened girl as she made way for me, causing her to drop the book on the ground. People were milling about the building at this point but I ignored everyone and ran as fast possible through the hallway, down the stairs and out of the building. I wanted to escape as soon as I could and wanted to never go back to that room and preferably the school as a whole.

I had spent so much time inside that, at this point, those sports clubs that weren’t already leaving were at least finishing up practice and tidying up their courts or fields or areas or whatever, like good little innocent boys and girls that had no concerns beyond how their next matches were going to go or where they wanted to hang out now that practice was over.

“Yuuki-kun, wait up!” I heard someone call at me as I was approaching the school gates. He was jogging towards me while a couple of his teammates were hanging back and looking on. He wore our school’s soccer jersey – all blue with the school emblem where his heart should be – and carried around a black duffle bag. “Good-looking,” that was the first impression I had of him. He was tall and wore his hair short. His muscles were toned and his legs looked strong but he jogged with restraint and had a relaxed smile on his face that accentuated the joy emanating from his small eyes. “Yuuki-kun,” he’d called me, all too familiarly, as if we were best friends, but I couldn’t place him or even recall what his name was and his face didn’t remind me of anyone. I didn’t know if he was just one of those classmates that liked to address everyone casually or if we were acquainted or friends or what. All I knew was that I didn’t remember him at all.

Who the hell was this guy?!

When he caught up to me, he spoke before I could. “I wasn’t expecting to see you here today. What’re you doing at school?” He spoke jovially and wore his same relaxed smile.

“What the hell do you want?” I asked, with a little too much force and still angry from the events of the day. I bet it showed on my face.

He started, but he didn’t seem insulted and his face quickly morphed into one of concern, especially his eyes. It was a rare sight: To see someone with genuinely concerned eyes that told you they actually cared and weren’t just showing you a face they felt was appropriate for the occasion when otherwise they couldn’t give a damn about you or your problems. It was a rare sight to see as an adult. “Are you okay?” He almost whispered. It made me feel bad I reacted the way I had, but I didn’t know who he was and that hadn’t made me feel any better.

“Sorry. I was just a little upset. Didn’t mean to yell at you.”

“Did something happen?” He was persistent.

“Nothing really, but I had to take some some supplementary test for Maebara-sensei’s class. Had to do it multiple times before he was satisfied and it wasted my whole day so I’m a little pissed.”

“Supplementary test? I don’t remember your grades being all that bad.”

“Overall, they’re fine, but I did bad on one test and, well, you know how Maebara-sensei is.”

“Yeah, that’s true,” he chuckled a little and went back to smiling. A few seconds later, he looked a little serious and wanted to ask me something, but I interjected just in time.

“Looks like your buddies are waiting for you, so I won’t keep you.” I nodded towards his teammates.

He quickly looked back towards them then back at me. “Uh… yeah, you’re right. Gotta go, I guess, haha.” And he jogged back in their direction. “I’ll see you around!” He looked back and said while jogging, still smiling, still innocently happy.

I’ve met many people over the years, and have had to get good at gauging the sort of person someone was. I could tell he had a good and pure heart and couldn’t help – even in my anger – but to wish him a good day and a good life as I walked out the gate and headed back to my parents’ house.