九

When I open my eyes again I find myself in a familiar place. Ashi-Toku station is a station with only two platforms, one each for trains going either way on its singular line.

Keisuke hauls himself onto the platform and sits down across from me.

“How many times have you had to see this?” I ask.

“New Year’s Eve was when I stopped being able to leave.”

“What?”

“Come on, you were always the one who was good at maths.”

Trying to put what happened on New Year’s Eve out of my mind, I focus on the numbers.

The high school girl swipes her train card over the scanner, once for herself and then a second time for her brother.

This whole loop lasts about 2 minutes, so 30 times an hour, then 720 times a day. Winter had just turned to spring when I got sucked into this whole mess, so 60 days give or take. That would mean he’s seen this…

“Fourty thousand times…”

“Is that all?” Keisuke laughs, hollow.

Excitedly, the young boy points at a vending machine as his sister tries to drag him past it. She loses.

My hand comes up to my mouth inadvertently. I trace my lips to make sure they’re still closed, they went numb a while ago. So unlike ‘yesterday’, I can’t feel angry at him, just sorry. Less than a hundred loops into this and I already feel like I’m losing my mind.

A cold can of cola drops to the retrieval hatch in exchange for a couple of 100 yen coins. The high school girl tells her brother to wait for a moment before opening it.

That cold hand I can never shake tightens around my chest again. I feel bad for Keisuke now but that feeling is so insignificant. Sympathy recedes like the ocean, fear is the tsunami that follows. This could happen to me, I could get stuck in something like this.

“Why didn’t you say anything?” I can’t help but ask.

“You’re not the only one who thought we weren’t close enough for that sort of thing…”

The two siblings set into place just behind the yellow safety line. One of them does not notice the other.

“I was so angry at you, back in first grade," Keisuke tells me. "You disappeared for a while, and that made me angry. I was angrier still when you came back different, you wouldn’t laugh at my jokes or play with me and Maiko. We were 5 so I didn't understand, I thought that you were just being mean. But I get it now. You have a place like this inside you.” 

The boy who wants to be a footballer kicks the air as he imagines himself scoring a great goal. This drags the siblings onto the yellow safety line. The boy fails to notice, the high school girl fails to care.

I didn’t want him to say it, but he’s right. The day ‘Kage’ appeared, there was an impossible spike in suicides. Officially, it was a coordinated mass suicide by members of an infamous cult, around 1000 people. But everyone knows at least two people who died that day, economically it was treated like a natural disaster, we all know that it was much worse but we don’t talk about it. They don’t release raw numbers anymore, suicides are only ever reported as a percentage of something else.

There’s no reason to look up anymore, the stars are gone.

My father was one of the people who died that day. I had faked a sickness that because I didn’t want to go to school, there was a test that I hadn’t prepared for or told my parents about. Father was such a loving, unquestioning person. He didn’t take my temperature or quiz my symptoms, he just put on his shoes and went out to buy me some medicine.

Far too late, the boy has realized something is wrong. He fights against his sister’s grip but she will never let him go. The siblings step across the yellow safety line.

So then how did he end up on the pavement? The konbini was two minutes from our house. Why did he end up dead in the middle of the city? It’s because of ‘Kage’, people who look at that thing go mad, even now that it’s become a fact of life. For people who saw it pop into existence, the shock was far far greater. It’s because of me, if I had just done what I was supposed to and gone to school, he wouldn’t have been outside when Kage appeared. He wouldn’t have been alone.

It’s my fault. It’s Kage’s fault.

The high school girl falls in front of the oncoming train, she did not stay behind the line. She is no immovable object, her body engulfs her brother’s as it is sent back the way it came. The siblings bounce on the tarmac, then they skid for two seconds, then they roll for a couple dozen meters, then they bounce again and come to a stop. The brown sugary liquid incessantly tries to penetrate the pool of blood that threatens to drown the siblings. It can't.