If I were the moon, I’d probably have wondered why they were leaving weird footprints all over me.
“Four years ago,” said Kyoko Tachibana, as though she were recapping a TV show from the previous day to a friend, “I suddenly realized that I possessed some kind of power. I’d never felt that way before. It just came to me. I didn’t know the reason, and I didn’t know why it was me and not somebody else. What I did know was that I wasn’t alone, that there were others like me, and that the cause was a single person.”
Her shining eyes glanced next to me.
“And that was Sasaki. Before I even thought about it, I knew you were the one who gave this to me. I immediately started searching for you, and in the process met my comrades. All of whom had the same duty as me.”
I remembered the group of kidnappers that got out of the minivan.
“As we were debating whether to make contact with Sasaki, and if so, how to do it, we suddenly thought, ‘Huh?’—because another organization seemed to have been formed, one very similar to ours. And yet they seemed to be concentrating on another person instead of Sasaki.”
And that would be the Agency, eh?
“Yes. The ones who believe Suzumiya to be a god. We were conflicted. We thought they were mistaken. In order to correct their mistake, we met several times. But they said we were wrong, and they refused to listen to us. We could not accept that, and of course they couldn’t either. Communication broke down…” Kyoko Tachibana looked off into the distance but soon brought her gaze back to the present. “And has never been reestablished.”
“So?” I said. What else could I say? “What do you want to do?”
The representative of the Agency’s rival organization took a deep breath.
“We believe the power Haruhi Suzumiya currently has rightfully belongs to Sasaki. Somehow there was a mistake, and they became different people. We want them restored. It would set the world moving in a better direction.”
She looked right at me.
“And I want your cooperation.”
“Sasaki,” I said, breaking from Kyoko Tachibana’s gaze. “So that’s what she says, but what do you think?”
“I don’t want this strange power,” said Sasaki clearly. “If you’ll pardon my saying so, on top of being an introvert, I’m a below-average individual. If I were given these fantastic, incomprehensible powers, they would only wither. It would definitely cause me mental instability. Yes, I very much wish to abstain.”
“You heard her,” I said. “The girl herself just said it. You might as well give up.”
“Are you really okay with that?” pressed Kyoko Tachibana. “Do you want to let Haruhi Suzumiya have that power? Forever? Do you want to be constantly manipulated by her? Do you understand that this is not just about you? The entire world will be under her control.”
That persuasive, urgent gaze remained on Sasaki.
“I want to say this to you too, Sasaki. You are more qualified than Suzumiya. This much is certain. This is not something you need to worry about. You need only remain as you are, living as you always have. I know this. You would never warp the world. And I know people who can.”
Sasaki’s gaze fell upon me. “Is that true?” she asked, a subtle smile on her face—the same smile I’d seen countless times in middle school.
My head was starting to hurt. I knew that Kyoko Tachibana was being entirely sincere. I understood all too well what she was trying to say.
Haruhi was like a time bomb without a countdown display, set to a random amount of time such that nobody could predict when it would explode. The explosion’s power, too, was unpredictable. The idea that such a person would possess the power to remake the world according to her whim—without the forbearance of Christ or the Buddha, no one could ever approve of such a thing.
But this was only if you didn’t know Haruhi well.
I knew her, and Koizumi, Nagato, and Asahina knew her too. But these people did not. That was all there was to it. It was a simple thing to explain.
I faced Kyoko Tachibana again.
“I understand what you’re saying, but what do you propose to do? No matter how you think about it, Haruhi has the ability to ignore probability—which can be troublesome, but in any case it’s clear enough that she has the ability to make her wishes into reality. Like making cherry blossoms bloom in autumn. But Sasaki doesn’t, right? So isn’t that a stalemate? No matter how much you insist that Sasaki is the true deity, that doesn’t change reality.”
Haruhi didn’t let her mind drift too close to the borderline, generally. You could call it a kind of common sense. The most she did was fix the lotteries to make sure I always wound up in the lowliest brigade position. She seemed to like the world the way it was, and she wasn’t going to pointlessly destroy it. As far as closed space and
“I suppose so,” said Kyoko Tachibana with a sad expression. “I suppose so, but I can’t help feeling that Sasaki is more suitable. You may know Suzumiya, but the same is true for Sasaki. And you’ve spent about the same amount of time with each of them.”
It was true that my last year of middle school and my first year of high school represented similar lengths of time. But the density was different. I hadn’t formed a ridiculous brigade with Sasaki and gone around killing time outside of school, and as far as the amount of conversation we’d exchanged, Haruhi won in a knockout. She was always behind me in class and had bossed me around in the literature club room every day since the brigade’s founding. Furthermore, during the year I’d spent with Haruhi and the SOS Brigade, I’d had no contact with Sasaki. No matter how much I valued my friendship with my old classmate, I couldn’t just throw away my current circle. It wasn’t just Haruhi—I’d come to rely on Nagato, Asahina, and Koizumi as well, and I had done them favors too. For their sakes, I couldn’t switch allegiances from Haruhi to someone else, nor did I want to.
The last thing I thought of was that even if Haruhi was a walking indeterminate time bomb, I wasn’t going to abandon her. I hadn’t even played my trump card on her yet. What could possibly be cooler than a dire situation?
“That puts Sasaki in a bad position too,” I said. “You should back off for your own good. Forget about Koizumi—if you do something to make Nagato angry, you could set off a chain reaction that puts Haruhi into a rage. And then who knows what will happen?”
“That’s why we must. I want to make sure that Haruhi never uses her transformative powers—then you’d never have anything to worry about either.”
Kyoko Tachibana clasped her hands together as though praying.
“We’re not doing this for our own benefit. Just look at Koizumi—keeping up with Suzumiya is extremely difficult. But with Sasaki, all that would go away. It’s what I wish for with all of my heart—for stability in the world.”
“Even so…” Sasaki sighed softly, then looked in the direction of the counter. “Our hot coffee sure is taking a while.” She nudged her glass of water with a finger. “Hey, Kyon, I was just thinking. How come with the words ‘elementary school student,’ ‘middle school student,’ ‘high school student,’ and ‘college student,’ only ‘high school student’ is written differently in Japanese? It seems like something worth thinking about.”
“Sasaki!” Kyoko Tachibana raised her voice impatiently, then soon looked down, embarrassed at her own outburst. She looked genuinely disheartened, and I could sympathize a bit. It wasn’t her fault. Maybe I shouldn’t be the one to say this, but Sasaki was a really solid person, despite being one of my friends. She wasn’t enough of a fool to jump at the chance to become a god.
Hey, I was starting to feel relaxed.
So long as Sasaki was Sasaki, no matter what enemies confronted her, she would not give in. Kyoko Tachibana had chosen the wrong person. Sasaki just wasn’t the type.
I pointed at the other two who’d thus far only listened—Fu
jiwara and Kuyoh. “What do these two think? I know you’ve got Sasaki made out as some kind of god, but what about your pals? Have you reached a consensus?”
Naturally the reason I asked this way is because from the look on the two weirdos’ faces, Kyoko Tachibana’s reasoning hadn’t really gotten to them. Fujiwara was just staring, annoyed, at his chilled cup, while Kuyoh gazed out into space at nothing in particular.
The despondent Kyoko Tachibana peered out from between the gaps in her hair, and seeing the unmoved alien and time traveler, slumped even farther.
“You’re right. This is another bottleneck. They’re not the least bit cooperative.”
Fujiwara sniffed derisively at Kyoko Tachibana’s sad tone. “Of course not. Cooperation? I haven’t fallen so far as to have to cooperate with commoners from the past. I came here thinking there might be something to be gained, but it looks like not.”
He continued in a voice that made me feel like if Kyoko Tachibana were to get angry, I’d be on her side. “It doesn’t matter who it is. Whether it be Suzumiya or Sasaki, if we think of them as natural phenomena, they’re the same. There’s not much value in an individual human. The power to warp time, the power to change space—that’s all we need to observe. So long as the power exists, it doesn’t matter whose it is.” Fujiwara’s gaze landed on Kuyoh. “You think so too, right?”
Kuyoh gave the time traveler no reaction. Her voluminous hair did not so much as stir in reaction to the café’s air conditioning, and she was simply, incredibly still and unresponsive. I got the sense that she had no idea where she was. Or rather—was she even really in front of me? Even though she was right there before my eyes, her sense of substance was so rarefied as to be near zero. She had no thickness—even a plywood cutout would’ve had more life in it.
Just as silence was once again descending over the table—
“Hmph! Honestly!” Kyoko Tachibana looked up and spoke suddenly. “Give me your hand,” she said, her eyes serious. “It’ll be faster if I just let you experience it instead of trying to explain it. Then you’ll understand what I’m trying to say. Just for a moment, give me your hand.”
She stretched her flawless hands out to mine, as though she were offering to read my palms. Just as I was wondering whether I should take them, given that I wasn’t drowning, Sasaki elbowed me. “Kyon, just do what Tachibana asks, will you?”
I held out my right hand. Kyoko Tachibana’s soft fingers grasped my palm, and she made another request. “Please close your eyes. This will only take a moment.”
Feeling a sense of déjà vu, I did as I was told. My lightly closed eyes could still detect ambient light, and thanks to the lack of visual information, my ears were more sensitive, picking up the easy-listening classical music in the café. I think it might have been Brahms.
But—
“You can open your eyes now.”
Kyoko Tachibana’s signal corresponded exactly to the sudden disappearance of the background music.
I opened my eyes.
Kyoko Tachibana was holding my hands and smiling. Only Kyoko Tachibana.
I was surrounded by an overwhelming stillness. Sasaki, Kuyoh, and Fujiwara were gone. The other customers and café staff had disappeared. Like they’d been spirited away en masse, like the crew of the Mary Celeste, in the blink of an eye everyone was gone.
Kyoko Tachibana and I sat at the same table for a few moments, our hands still joined.
“Wha…”
My eyes roamed. The café with its soft ambient lighting was a mere husk of itself, with only us left behind. Before I could ask what was going on, I felt a sensation I’d felt before and remembered exactly what it was. A different place, but one that felt similar—also with no people.
“Closed space…”
“That’s what Koizumi calls it, yes.” Kyoko Tachibana let go of my hands, then stood. “There’s not much to see, but would you like to take a look outside?”
Like a fish given water, Kyoko Tachibana took a graceful step and invited me up.
Nothing would happen so long as I kept sitting there. It had been quite a while since I’d visited closed space, and now that I thought about it, I’d only done it twice before—the first time with Koizumi and the second time with Haruhi. This was my third visit, and it felt similar to that cab ride with Koizumi.
I stood next to Kyoko Tachibana and watched the automatic door slide open. This was the same as before. For whatever reason, electricity seemed to work in this world.
Once outside, the first thing I did was look up at the sky. The rain had stopped. No—there weren’t any clouds. The sky was a sepia monotone. There did not seem to be a sun. The sky itself was the source of the light. The whole world was suffused with a sleepy glow.
“Let’s walk for a bit.” Kyoko Tachibana started walking, and I followed obediently along.
The town was a perfect no-man’s-land. Despite being shown this ghost town, I wasn’t particularly shocked. It was all exactly as Koizumi had previously explained to me.
The difference was—
The space I’d been drawn into twice before was completely gray-toned. Perhaps because it was nighttime, but I remember the dark, gloomy scenery quite vividly.
But the colors here were different. The world was lit in the soft, warm tones of oxford white and cream, seemingly brighter than the closed space of my memory.
There was another big difference. I moved my gaze through a full 360-degree rotation, and there was something I failed to see. Even though there was no way one could miss those giant, eerie forms.
“Heh,” said Kyoko Tachibana, looking back at me. “That’s right. We don’t have those here. We never have. That’s the best part about this place. It’s quite nice, don’t you think?”
The blue-white giants, the masses of destructive energy, the instruments of Haruhi’s subconscious.
There were no
“Is this not closed space?”
“Oh, it is. The same kind you know,” said Kyoko Tachibana, seemingly pleased to be able to tell me. “But a different person made it. This is not a world constructed by Haruhi Suzumiya.”
Who besides her could create something like this…? Wait, not—
“That’s right. Sasaki. This is Sasaki’s closed space. Although it doesn’t feel closed to us at all. It’s like different people making the same dish. The flavor is a reflection of the individual.” She sounded like a real-estate agent introducing a property. “I feel calm when I’m here. It’s very peaceful and has a gentle atmosphere, doesn’t it? What do you think? Which closed space makes you feel safer?”
“Now wait just a minute.” If we were talking about which place I’d rather live in, the answer was neither. “You said Sasaki created this place? For what reason? When? Why aren’t there any
“There is no reason,” she said casually. “This world isn’t a temporary container or model. It’s always like this and has been from the beginning. Yes, for four years now. The reason there are no
No matter how much I looked, I couldn’t see any birds in the sky. The silence was so keen it almost hurt my ears.
“That’s a huge difference. Sasaki has no desire to destroy or remake the world. She is, both subconsciously and consciously, totally stable. She’s ideal. She’ll never flip the world upside down because she doesn’t like it anymore. Everything will stay as it is.”
The only thing I could hear was the girl’s polite voice.
“So I will ask you again: which is better? A god who could carelessly destroy the world, or a person with common sense who won’t do anything rash?”
Unreasonably, I wanted to defend her. Haruhi had common sense too. She might seem to have a screw loose sometimes, but cl
oser inspection showed that she was just an ordinary girl. I don’t know about the past, but the current Haruhi was getting closer and closer to reality. She still sometimes got a little out of hand, but she wasn’t going to make UFOs rain from the sky or anything.
The one thing I could say for certain was that she wasn’t going to remake the world ever again.
“You sound quite confident. I don’t think anyone knows what Haruhi’s subconscious is doing. Not Koizumi, and not the time traveler.”
Clasping her hands behind her, Kyoko Tachibana turned on her heel and looked me in the eye.
“I don’t know either, which is why I’m worried. But Sasaki is safe. You can tell just by looking around, can’t you? There’s nothing unstable about this place.” Her cheerful smile included a generous helping of charm. “That’s why I think Sasaki is the rightful owner of this power. I think it was meant to be hers. I think Suzumiya only became the way she is because of some kind of mistake.”
Haruhi’s still unexplained transformative power. It allowed Koizumi to become a scarlet ball of energy, attracted the attention of cosmic consciousnesses, and according to Asahina was at the center of a severe time-quake.
And if it had been given to Sasaki? What would have become of the SOS Brigade?
I couldn’t imagine it.
I shook my head to clear it of the pointless notion.
“So,” I said, my voice finally recovered, “what do you want me to do about it? Transfer Haruhi’s power to Sasaki? That’s totally impossible.”
Kyoko Tachibana looked at me seriously for a while, then giggled. “Not necessarily. If you cooperate, it can be done. If you and Sasaki both say you’ll do it. That’s all we want. Simple, isn’t it?”
She hopped one step backward.
“Let’s go back to the café. My business here is done, since I expect you’ll want some time to think.”
Come to think of it, what had happened to us? We were sitting in the café but had gotten up and left—what would that look like to Sasaki and the others?
The Dissociation of Haruhi Suzumiya Page 12
