No Room

The figure drifted closer. They stood out against the backdrop of speckled black. I couldn’t be sure, but the clothes and voice resembled Hasegawa. Why did she scream? She drifted closer, but her path vacillated between directions. She spun on every axis, like she’d hit her head underwater and couldn’t orient to the surface. I found out why as she got closer: A dense haze, like sickly smog, covered her. It was hard to judge distance in the void, and I realised she was closer than I thought, but the haze made her look blurry and distant.

‘Hasegawa!’ I called. Nothing. I called again. She continued to scream. Her throat started to go hoarse. No problem, I thought. She drifted toward me. When she got close enough I would—

Her body jerked to the side, spun, and began to circle a localised region of the void, as if trapped in a whirlpool. She flailed and couldn’t escape.

My mouth went dry and heart pounded. A sharp apprehension followed by guilt filled me, that sort of self-preservation based on the demise of others. She’ll be fine when she wakes up, I thought. But as I watched her flail in the void, I knew something was wrong. Neither Junko nor Hasegawa had talked about troubles like that.

If Junko went to sleep to access the pocket dimension, what if a form of the opposite was equally true? What if staying in the pocket dimension somehow kept the person from waking up? Or did an external force keep them unconscious? Had Junko gotten to Hasegawa?

She couldn’t stay there. If she couldn’t wake up, who knows what’d happen to her in reality.

I left my door open and paced my closet-like space. Help her, I told myself.

Yeah, how?

I didn’t fear darkness. I feared open spaces. Oceans. Space. Unloaded parts of video games. The void before me embodied every aspect of that fear: An emptiness with safety so close yet impossible to reach. What if I went to help Hasegawa and we both ended up trapped, like when you save a drowning person but in their panic they drag you under.

As I paced, I tripped on a skipping rope.

Don’t even think about it, I thought with the rational part of my brain. The irrational, heroic, chivalric, naïve, idealistic, optimistic part of my brain—shrivelled from disuse—suddenly woke up and decided it had an opinion. More than an opinion, it had a course of action.

I tied the skipping rope to a barbell and loaded it with weights. It wouldn’t budge, even if both Hasegawa and I pulled. Plus, I jammed the barbell against the doorframe, to give extra reach. I knew the skipping rope was nowhere near long enough, so I tied it to a resistance band, and that band to two others. Again, I couldn’t judge the distance well, so I tied my shirt and Fulcrum to the end, just in case.

I stood at the edge of my room, toes off the threshold, nothing but black below them, waiting and breathing and puffing out my cheeks like an amateur swimmer about to try the highest diving platform. Or like in those old American movies where the boy is trying to get the courage to ask the girl to a school dance. Except instead of rejection from a girl, I faced total rejection from reality. No big deal, I thought. Since when did you care about life?

Since I started enjoying it.

But I’d told Junko about Hasegawa. If Hasegawa was in trouble, I’d caused it. And for once in my damn life, I needed to take responsibility for myself.

I leapt into the void.

I hadn’t even thought about it. Most of my brain was too occupied with my internal monologue. It felt like I’d gotten bored of myself. Instinct took over, not that it meant bravery. I started to scream, too, as I drifted toward Hasegawa. We looked like astronauts. After a few seconds, I oriented my feet toward the doorway, making that the “ground” to my sense of equilibrium.

I flailed my arms, which helped adjust my speed. I needed to time my arrival with when Hasegawa’s spinning put her closest. Too far, and I’d have to wait. Too close, and she risked hitting the rope-band-clothing safety line.

Three…

Two…

One…

I kicked and pushed against the nothingness and picked up speed. On track. Hasegawa rounded toward me. I kept my limbs splayed wide, ready to catch her. ‘Hasegawa,’ I said. ‘Hasegawa—’

Her body slammed into mine. I didn’t “catch” her, so much as she hit me and slowed down. My chest ached and I couldn’t intake air. It worked, though. The spinning stopped, as did Hasegawa’s screaming. We slowed to a stop in the void. One of my hands braced Hasegawa against me, and the other held the Fulcrum tied to everything else.

‘Hasegawa,’ I wheezed.

‘Who are you?’ she replied.

‘Fukuzawa Kenji,’ I replied. ‘What happened?’

Disoriented, Hasegawa gave a disjoined account of being kidnapped by Junko and injected with something to put her in a state somewhere between knocked out and a coma. With our proximity, the haze wasn’t as prevalent, but Hasegawa said she couldn’t perceive my features, only a vague blob of colour.

‘I’m going to pull us back to my room,’ I said, wrapping my other hand around the Fulcrum and gently pulling. Hasegawa held me, and I held the Fulcrum, and in the weightless environment the minor force pulled us toward the doorway. But closer to the door and barbell, the skipping rope loosened. When I pulled, it slackened for a moment before going taut. Hasegawa couldn’t see, but my eyes had gone wide. I barely pulled. I used the slightest touches to get us closer. Even that proved too much, for the skipping rope gave way. My next pull removed it from the room, and it joined us in the void.

‘Are we close?’ Hasegawa asked.

I didn’t respond. Despair crept through me. Yet apathy followed, as if a sense of peace that the end came and couldn’t be stopped. I pulled on the line and bundled it. I considered trying to use as a lasso, but there wasn’t anything to catch. No, I’d failed. I’d gotten cocky. When Hasegawa hit me, it must’ve loosened the line. I should’ve used better knots, or I should’ve timed my approach better. Or anything.

‘We’re not moving, are we?’ Hasegawa asked.

‘No.’

We didn’t move. We held each other, neither intimate nor comforting, just expected when there was nothing else to hold. I wondered if we had enough momentum applied from before the skipping rope slackened to reach the door, but the unseen force that sent Hasegawa into a spiral restarted anew.

We span.

‘You feel that?’ Hasegawa asked. ‘It’s cold.’

I shivered. A chill seeped into my bones. I lost feeling in my extremities. As I lost partial sense of my body, thoughts drifted inward. To Junko. To my parents. To Hasegawa. I tried to comprehend Junko’s betrayal, but when I replayed events in my mind it felt like looking at someone else. I’d been too close to see the problem or solution. Now, I saw both but couldn’t act upon them. I thought about my parents, who were out in the world somewhere and probably hadn’t heard about me. I thought of Hasegawa. I didn’t know much about her, but she looked to be around my age. She wasn’t a shut-in, either, I assumed, just a young girl with a wasted life.

I didn’t want it to end. I’d wasted so much time, and finally I’d made some kind of progress, only to be faced with nothing.

‘Be my Conduit,’ I whispered.

‘What?’ The haze still affected Hasegawa.

‘Be my Conduit,’ I repeated, louder, mouth to her ear. ‘I’ll be the Source.’ I expected her to ask why, but she looked at the approximation of my face, expressionless, and nodded.

‘I’ll be your Conduit,’ she said. No trumpets went off. Nothing acknowledged a supposed pact between us. ‘How does this work?’

‘Junko kind of went…’ I mimicked aiming my hand at something to levitate it. ‘Then I pulled the Fulcrum.’

‘I don’t know what—’

She mimicked the hand movement.

‘—is, and I can’t see the door.’

I aligned my arm with Hasegawa and pointed our hands at the door.

‘Is it working?’ she asked.

‘Keep trying.’

Hasegawa strained, changed her hand position, and made different faces, but we didn’t move. ‘Is it working?’

‘Keep trying.’

She strained, exhaled, and swore. ‘Am I supposed to feel something, because when I do this…’ She extended her hand to the door. ‘I don’t feel…’ She frowned. The muscles in her arm tensed.

The Fulcrum glowed dull red.