The Wrong Side

Ken's hands were on my shoulders before I understood they were there.

That is the thing I keep returning to, the order of it, because I have spent most of my life believing that perception precedes event, that the mind registers and then the body follows, but Ken's hands were already pressing, already decided, and my mind was still somewhere three seconds behind asking what are you doing here, why are you in my apartment, I didn't hear the door. His face was completely calm. That is the part that took the longest to process, longer even than what happened after. Not frightened, not apologetic, not the face of someone doing something they hadn't planned. The face of someone finishing something they had planned for a long time.

He said my name.

Then the floor was gone.

I don't know how else to describe it. There was a sensation like pressure inverting, like the air itself turned inside out around me, and my stomach went somewhere my body wasn't, and I had exactly enough time to think this is not falling, falling has a direction, before I hit the floor of my apartment so hard my teeth snapped together and the taste of copper spread across my tongue.

I lay there for a while.

The ceiling looked correct. That was the first thing I checked, which tells you something about the state I was in, that ceiling correctness was my opening diagnostic. The water stain in the northeast corner from the leak three winters ago. The small crack running from the light fitting toward the window that I had been meaning to report to the building manager since I moved in. Both present. Both in the right place.

I sat up slowly.

The room was my room. The kotatsu in the center with my notebooks stacked on one end and the empty cup I'd left there that morning on the other. The bookshelves covering the east wall, physics and mathematics on the upper shelves, the observation journals I'd kept since I was seventeen on the lower ones, thirty-one volumes now, every documented anomaly I had ever recorded in Misakiura, every light that behaved at the wrong angle, every collective forgetting, every rupture cluster mapped against weather and tide. The window facing the harbor, the fog already coming in from the water the way it always did by late afternoon.

Ken was not there.

I looked at the cup.

This is the moment I have tried to reconstruct most carefully since, the exact sequence of my attention, because I think the order in which I noticed things tells me something about which part of my brain was still functioning and which parts had gone somewhere else entirely. I looked at the cup first. I don't know why. It was an ordinary cup, ceramic, pale blue, the one I use every morning, and I had knocked it off the kotatsu four days earlier and it had broken, I had swept the pieces up myself, I remembered the specific sound of it hitting the floor, a short sharp crack and then a smaller sound as the handle separated.

The cup was not broken.

It sat on the kotatsu exactly where I had placed it that morning before it was broken, before I knocked it over, whole and ordinary and the pale blue of it somehow more vivid than I remembered, or maybe that was just my attention, stripped of everything else, landing on it the way attention lands on the thing that is wrong.

I picked it up. Turned it in my hands. No crack, no repair line, no sign it had ever been anything other than whole.

I set it down very carefully.

My mouth was still tasting of copper and my hands had started shaking, not badly, a fine tremor I could see if I held them flat, and I recognized this as adrenaline metabolizing, I knew the physiology of it, which helped and did not help. There is something almost insulting about understanding exactly what your body is doing and being unable to stop it.

I stood up and went to the window.

The harbor was there. The water the particular grey-green of Misakiura water in late afternoon, the fishing boats in, the shrine visible on the headland, the fog thickening at the mouth of the bay. All of it the harbor I had looked at from this window my entire life, all of it identical to the harbor I had looked at that morning before Ken appeared in my apartment and put his hands on my shoulders with a calm that still made something cold move through me when I thought about it.

I pulled out my phone and called him.

The number rang four times and then a woman answered. Her voice was pleasant and confused and completely unfamiliar. She said hello twice. I said I was sorry, wrong number, and hung up, and then I stood at the window with my phone in my hand and watched the fog come in and thought about what I knew.

What I knew was this: my floor had disappeared and returned. The cup on my kotatsu had been broken and was not broken. Ken's number belonged to someone else. The ceiling crack was in the right place. The harbor was outside the window. My hands were shaking with a fine precise tremor and my mouth tasted of copper and pressure.

What I had been theorizing for seven years, in thirty-one notebooks stacked on the lower shelf of my bookcase, was that the town of Misakiura sat on an unstable boundary between layers of spacetime, and that periodically, under conditions I had not yet been able to fully isolate, objects and occasionally people slipped between those layers, and that most of the documented anomalies in the town's history, the collective forgettings, the objects appearing in wrong places, the people who came back from the harbor talking about things that hadn't happened, were evidence of exactly that process occurring.

I had theorized this for seven years.

I had not theorized that it would happen to me.

I went and sat back down on the floor next to the kotatsu and picked up the nearest notebook, volume twenty-eight, and opened it to a blank page near the back, and I wrote the date at the top, and then I wrote: K. pushed me. Floor inverted. Duration unknown. Cup intact. Phone number wrong. And then I sat there for a long time looking at those words, because there was a part of me, the part that had spent seven years being taken less than seriously, by everyone including sometimes myself, that wanted badly to feel vindicated, and there was another part that understood that vindication was not the word for what this was.

The cup sat on the kotatsu and did not comment.

Outside, the fog came in off the water. I could hear it, almost, the way the sound of the harbor shifted when the fog thickened, the boats becoming quieter, the gulls going somewhere else. My hands had mostly stopped shaking.

I thought about Ken's face. The calm of it. The way he had said my name, not as a question or an apology but as a kind of marker, the way you'd say something out loud to remember it. I thought about the fact that he had known exactly how to do it, whatever it was, that his hands had found my shoulders with the confidence of someone who had been thinking about the angle for a while. I had known Ken since we were teenagers, I had looked up to him in the uncomplicated way you look up to someone a few years older who seems to have figured out things you haven't, and the calm of his face was the most frightening thing that had happened to me today, which was a sentence I would not have expected to be able to say twenty-four hours ago.

I wrote underneath my first entry: He wasn't surprised. He knew what would happen. He knew what he was doing.

I underlined it.

Then I closed the notebook and sat in my apartment that was my apartment and looked at the cup that had been broken and was not broken, and I started, methodically, from the beginning, to catalog everything that was wrong.