No matter how long he went on about it, I was only going to be able to tell him that yup, that was our Nagato. If he wanted to make a personal request, he should have been making it directly to the person in question, I told him. She’d probably explain everything. I doubted anyone on Earth could understand the explanation, though.
I dangled the end of the power cable. The third-year president of the computer club correctly inferred my meaning, and he happily plugged it into their extension cord. It was amazing how much the computer club had turned into a branch of the SOS Brigade. If someone didn’t put a stop to it soon, the SOS Brigadification of all humanity might be completed before desertification consumed the world. Although I want to believe that Homo sapiens aren’t quite that stupid.
After getting the cord plugged in, I unrolled the cable as I walked back, and was then greeted by Haruhi, who came up to me like a dog returning to its master with a Frisbee.
It was good to be cheerful. Especially for Koizumi, I thought to myself, and glanced his way. But the self-proclaimed boy esper did not seem especially pleased. He sat with his elbows on his desk, his fingers interlaced and supporting his chin, mouth hidden. What was his preoccupation? He seemed to be gazing unobtrusively at Nagato, which also puzzled me.
What was going on? Was there some rule that the members of the SOS Brigade had to become emotionally disturbed in order? Was it now Koizumi’s turn? Give me a break. Nagato and Asahina were one thing, but I’d been certain that Koizumi was the one guy I didn’t have to worry about.
Perhaps sensing my concern, Koizumi slowly looked my way, his eyes narrowing in a smile. He might have been smiling to make me feel better; I detected something artificial in his expression.
He’d been in Class 9, the math and science class, and along with his classmates had moved right on into the second year of that class as though carried by gondola, so it was unlikely anybody he couldn’t stand was suddenly in his class.
Haruhi was her usual energetic self, so I doubted that she was to blame for his state. I wondered if his boss in the Agency had docked his pay or something. But wasn’t that a good thing? Wasn’t it better for all of us if Koizumi had nothing to do?
Or perhaps even this early in the semester, he’d received a lovely envelope in his shoe locker from a new first-year student confessing her feelings, in which case my sympathy was as pointless as Shamisen’s shed hair. After all, if you lined up Koizumi and Haruhi silently next to each other, both of them had attention-grabbing good looks.
“C’mon, Kyon, play the video already!”
Haruhi ordered me with a smile, holding up her sign like she was the winner of the Miss China competition. I obediently did as I was told, and Koizumi got up to help me. As we were futzing around with connecting the DVD player to the LCD display, Koizumi had his normal pleasant smile on, but I kept getting a strange feeling from him.
Why did he keep glancing at me with that smile of his? Unfortunately, while I might accept meaningful eye contact from Asahina or Nagato, I didn’t have the skill necessary to understand a guy’s intentions from his gaze.
Once we’d gotten the AV equipment hooked up and I’d vaguely informed Haruhi of our completion, she nodded with satisfaction, like a fisherman who’d just discovered a large school of fish.
“Now, then.”
She rummaged through the cardboard box and produced a single disc. The DVD player’s tray opened reluctantly, and Haruhi tossed the disc into it, mashing the play button as impudently as she would ring the doorbell of her own house.
Immediately a suspicious image appeared on the LCD display, accompanied by a familiar sound that leaked from its speakers.
Asahina flinched. “Ah—”
She let slip a heavy sigh, slowly averting her eyes from the screen. The sight of her aroused a manly protective instinct in me.
“Haruhi, turn the volume down, will ya? If the president hears it he’s gonna come back.”
“Who cares! I’m not afraid of him in the slightest.”
Well, you should be, I told her.
“If he comes back, I’ll be happy to hold a public debate with him.”
Don’t you dare, I said.
“God, Kyon, you’re so annoying.” Haruhi adroitly arranged her mouth and eyes into inverted triangles of displeasure. “You and Koizumi can just wait here. Mikuru and I will handle the rest.” She wrapped her arms around Asahina’s waist, then pulled her in, grinning maniacally.
“Eek!” cried a timid Asahina.
Haruhi nuzzled up against the newly minted third-year maid, grinning maliciously. “If anybody interesting comes by, you gotta write down his or her name and class number, got it? And we are not the film club, so if anybody comes over thinking that, you chase ’em off. Are we clear?”
Having made these unilateral declarations, Haruhi forcibly dragged Asahina off for a tour around the courtyard.
“Ugh.” I slumped and pulled the SOS Brigade sign out of the ground and hid it behind a chair, then gazed at the contents of the LCD display, its brightness turned pointlessly up to the maximum.
It was none other than a trailer for The Revenge of Yuki Nagato Episode 00, a short film that one couldn’t help but imagine was a waste of electricity and digital tape.
Before the new term started, there was a not-particularly-long spring break, but of course Haruhi was not going to quietly wait around for the new school year to start.
I imagined she’d started thinking about doing another movie around the time of the baseball tournament and the incident with Sakanaka’s dog. Spring break involves much less homework than the winter and summer vacations, which made it perfect for taking it easy, but the members of the SOS Brigade were summoned to action nearly every day of the break and dispatched by Haruhi to any number of locations like so many Tomahawk missiles.
We went all over the place—antique shops, flea markets, then over to Sakanaka’s place to check up on little Rousseau. We were invited over to the Tsuruya estate’s grand gardens to enjoy a flower-viewing party, which I admit was pretty fun. I was astonished at the way Tsuruya had but to snap her fingers to get mountains of party food brought out from the house.
Basically Haruhi went wherever she was invited to go, and even when she wasn’t invited she’d find a way in, breathing deeply in the spring air as she ran us all over creation. It remains a mystery to me how she didn’t run out of energy.
Among all that running around, what Haruhi devoted the most energy to was the sequel to her school festival film, The Adventure of Mikuru Asahina Episode 00. While I was surprised that a footnote like that had become the main event, I never thought that Haruhi would start planning for the next year’s school festival before she even became a second-year student herself.
So it was that Haruhi once again took up her megaphone and armband, and no sooner had the video camera, which had collected dust in a corner of the clubroom for months, been shoved into my hands than Haruhi began to peel off Asahina’s clothes, at which Koizumi and I immediately did an about-face.
While it was now Yuki Nagato occupying the title role, it seemed that Mikuru Asahina would again be the protagonist (wait, hadn’t Itsuki Koizumi been the protagonist in the last one?), and incidentally, because Mikuru’s true form was a combat waitress from the future, Director Haruhi declared it necessary for her to wear that inappropriate outfit yet again. Yuki Nagato again wore a pointy black hat and cape over her school uniform, and she carried a star-tipped wand; Koizumi again carried the reflecting board around.
Since the spring cherry blossoms were conveniently in bloom, we could easily continue the setting of the previous film. I couldn’t help but feel a little sympathy for the riverside cherry trees, though, having to bloom twice in one year.
But as to why we were doing a trailer, Haruhi broke it to us this way after we assembled, despite it being spring break, in the clubroom.
“Have you ever felt tricked by a trailer?”
I asked Haruhi what kind of
“tricked” she meant.
“I’m talking about movie trailers. They play on TV or before other movies all the time. And when you see ’em, you’re like, ‘Whoa, that looks awesome,’ right? And then you get excited and go see the actual film, and it’s total nonsense. For example—”
I didn’t need an example, but Haruhi named an American film that even I recognized.
“You’d think from its trailer that it’d be really good and super funny. It was just a commercial, but I laughed at it a bunch. So I was really excited to go see it on opening day.” Haruhi gave her head an exaggerated shake. “But it was totally lame. You want to know why? They’d taken the only good scenes in the movie and strung them together to make the trailer. I’d already seen them all before going to the movie, and on top of that they were the only good parts! What do you think of that?”
What was I supposed to think of that? Maybe she should’ve called the studio. They probably had some kind of department in charge of trailers, and the workers there were surely good at their jobs.
“Even if it is for the sake of marketing, I just think it’s weird to show all the good parts of a movie ahead of time. That is why, Kyon!” Haruhi’s eyes glittered with their characteristic cosmic light. “We’ll make the trailer first, then work out the rest of the movie later! There’s no limit to how great we can make a short preview film. We don’t need a climax or anything; we just need a bunch of highlights! So that’s the plan.”
That was the plan, so that’s why we wound up making a trailer for a film that didn’t actually exist. Even Haruhi wasn’t thinking about what kind of story would be in the second film. Yet she planned on using the piece to attract new members. We didn’t have a script. What to do? Why, of course! Just shoot a trailer!
Her reasoning was direct; I’ll give her that. I could see she hadn’t given up on burning copies of The Adventure of Mikuru Asahina Episode 00 to DVD and selling them off. We could’ve edited it down for this latest promotional purpose, but she seemed to think that giving people even a glimpse of it would be to our disadvantage. Or maybe she wanted people to join the brigade if they wanted to see more of it. It would just give them a headache, although as a promotional video for Asahina you’d have to give it a twelve out of ten.
I glanced at the monitor we’d brought all the way out here as I returned to my seat and sat down.
It seemed almost reluctant to display the parade of ripped-off scenes, whose only possible justification would be in the name of parody.
There was the one where Koizumi brandished a dimly glowing stick that suspiciously resembled a fluorescent tube, to whom Yuki explained without any particular context, “Itsuki, I am your mother.” Or the one where Yuki puts on glasses and is suddenly an ordinary citizen, but when she takes them off she instantly changes costume and flies right into the sky. Or the one where she drags a black coffin around in the wilderness. Or the one where having finally run out of ideas, Haruhi decided that Mikuru and Shamisen would switch personalities, which involved Asahina walking around saying, “Meow, meow!” while Haruhi recorded Shamisen’s lines, which of course didn’t match the movements of his mouth in the slightest—since he didn’t open his mouth at all. On and on it went, with scenes that might have looked promising at a glance, but without any story simply cascaded like dominoes, with scene after scene having different characters and settings, the tempo of editing so bad it was nonsensical. On top of all that were the special effects, which were so bad it seemed like we’d made them that way on purpose, and the capriciously added music clips, which to be honest were basically noise.
Despite having no obligation to appear, Tsuruya showed up in a traditional kimono, laughing heartily in front of a Japanese-style garden filled with cherry blossoms, with my little sister and Shamisen inexplicably included in the shot. It was no better than a home video. This was thanks to Haruhi having brought the video camera along during our flower-viewing party and pointlessly shooting footage. The junk footage was an insult to bad movies; I didn’t need to see it again to know that it would be worse than the original. At least the scenes of a waitress-outfitted Asahina jumping around succeeded at promoting her. I wondered how many people who saw this would even realize it was a trailer, save for Haruhi shouting, “The Revenge of Yuki Nagato, coming this fall at the school festival!”
Can I just ask one thing? Yuki went flying off into space at the end of the last movie, so how is she back on Earth?
“I’ll think about that next. New enemies too!” said ultra-director Haruhi.
Which meant that she hadn’t thought about it at all. This was the epitome of marrying in haste and repenting at leisure; the film was a sham. If there were any first-year students who would watch it and want to join the club, I’d ask them to withdraw their applications.
The same went for the rubberneckers whose attention had been captured by Haruhi’s cheongsam and Asahina’s maid outfit.
The students milling about the courtyard had all escaped middle school and transcended the bounds of compulsory public education, which meant this was not just an institutional problem, and they circled widely around the desks where Koizumi and I sat, cold-faced, making no move to approach.
Their decision was every bit as wise as that of the rat that deserts the sinking ship. The youths before me would never understand just how fortunate they were to be enjoying a normal, healthy high school life. But I knew, and I didn’t feel the slightest reluctance to inform them. At this age, a year’s difference is like a swallowtail butterfly larva progressing from the fourth to the fifth stage in its development. Even if you were just messing around, you wouldn’t go walking around a field if you knew there were land mines buried there.
I turned the volume down on Haruhi’s terrible movie, then glanced sideways again.
“…”
Nagato was so still she looked like a laptop that had gone into standby mode to conserve energy. No one else was at her desk. I wasn’t sure if I should’ve been happy on Haruhi’s behalf or not, but as yet no first-year students had approached with any interest in creative literary activities.
Last year the literature club’s sole activity was a newsletter Haruhi had happily supervised at the behest of the student council president (who’d in turn been manipulated by Koizumi), and thanks to our careless distribution of it, we had but one copy left, which lay in front of Nagato at her desk as a sample of the club’s functions. Every contributor to the newsletter, including me, had been given a copy, but it seemed that such hard-won spoils were not easily parted from people, and nobody was inclined to offer up their copy as a sample—not even Taniguchi, despite how much he’d complained.
Which all meant that if someone wanted to read the newsletter, their only choice was to read the sample that was normally housed in Nagato’s clubroom library.
I gazed at Nagato, whose deep interest in the book in front of her never wavered.
“…”
She looked up, turning the transparent light in her eyes toward me. It was such a natural movement that it took me a moment to realize that our eyes had met, and as the awareness of it suddenly came to me—
“The cat,” she said in her zephyr-like voice; it took me a full second to realize what she’d said as I endured the scrutiny of her evaluating gaze.
“What about the cat?” I asked.
“How is it.”
“What do you mean, ‘how’?”
Nagato seemed to think for a moment, though her head’s position did not change. “How is it?”
Though she’d only added a hint of the interrogative to her phrasing, I now understood.
“Oh, you mean Shamisen.”
She nodded minutely. “Yes.”
“He’s doing great. Doesn’t seem inclined to talk these days.”
“I see,” was all the reply she gave before returning to her reading.
So she’d been concerned about the strangely clever cat that lived at my house. Oh, right, Nagato was the one who’d
turned him into the host for that whatever-it-was data life-form symbiont thing whose name I couldn’t remember.
Ever since then, he hadn’t really changed save for putting on weight thanks to his overeating and lack of exercise. Ever since Haruhi’d found him and foisted him off on me, he’d been living the perfect cat life.
The old phrase “spring, when skies are cloudy and cats fat,” came to mind, but I wasn’t so sure. I’d wanted to laze around cat-style during spring break, but it hadn’t happened that way.
“It certainly was a busy spring break,” said Koizumi, lamenting. He was staring out into space, so I thought he was talking to himself, but—
“Don’t you think?” he prompted.
The smile he directed at me as he asked the question seemed a little tired to me, I said.
“There’s no question about it. You’re quite right. I am a bit fatigued.”
Of course he was, I said. Any normal person would be exhausted if they had to keep up with Haruhi.
“I am not speaking in conventional terms. You do remember my true nature and responsibility, don’t you? The real reason why I am here?”
At first it was to observe Haruhi, and then it became being her flunky, I said.
“Excuse me, but surely you haven’t forgotten that I am an esper, nor have you forgotten when, where, how, and with whom my powers are utilized.”
I remembered all right, having gotten enough of an earful about it. His confession had come after Nagato’s and Asahina’s—in other words, it was the most recent information about a brigade member to come to light.
“That’s good. That will make this easier to explain.” Koizumi gave an affectedly relieved sigh, then lowered his voice. “To be honest, I haven’t been sleeping well recently. I’ve been waking up in the middle of the night or early morning, day after day, and not because I want to. It’s taken quite a toll on my health.”
If he couldn’t sleep at night, why not just sleep in class? I said. They say five minutes of sleeping in class is worth an hour of regular sleep, after all.
The Dissociation of Haruhi Suzumiya Page 3
