by Nisioisin
“Ah, ye may be right. I was wrong by a day. If the time warp was indeed successful, today would be the first day of the new term.”
“You were so confident that you’d been successful…”
“My confidence transcends reality.”
“That just means you were wrong… No, hang on, if that’s true, then this is bad. Really bad. If it was a pirate, it would be Sinbad. I never finished my summer homework, so I’m going to have to blow off the very first day of school.”
I was in trouble.
If it was just a question of not doing my homework, in the end it’d be fine, but my poor attitude would be reflected in my permanent record. The poor impression he makes is beyond the pale─
And so on.
These were my concerns.
My misguided concerns.
Since this was now a world where those kinds of concerns were totally unnecessary.
To say nothing of it being a world where it didn’t even matter whether it was the last day or the first, such trivial distinctions having lost all meaning.
What really made ignoring my sense of disquiet impossible─what made me start noticing the sense of disquiet that I expect I had been feeling all along─wasn’t the lack of passersby, but the realization that there wasn’t a single car on the road.
Sure, this was a rural town, and the population wasn’t much to speak of, but for that very reason, cars were an indispensable mode of transportation─and yet.
Not a single car.
I could state with absolute certainty that even if I ran out into the street, even if the light was red, I wouldn’t get hit─a road so deserted it could be used as a runway for airplanes stretched out before my, before our, eyes.
…No.
The traffic lights weren’t even working.
Every single one was out of order─with nary an out-of-order sign to be seen.
“Shinobu. Does something seem strange to you?”
“Speak not to me.”
“What, why not?”
“I am deep in thought. So, speak not to me.”
“Okay…” From her tone of voice, it didn’t seem like a gag, so I said, “I’ll think too.”
And the conversation ended there.
There was a long period after spring break when Shinobu didn’t speak, but at heart she was a real talker, so lately it had been unusual for the chatter between the two of us to falter─the scene laid out before us, however, was even more unusual.
And while I said I would try thinking too, the more I thought, the more I sank into deep sorrow─the closer we got to my house, the more my uncertainty turned into unease.
In reality, it was clear at a glance.
But it was hard to put the what and why of it into words─it was beyond words.
One straightforward example: the trees lining the road and the gardens of the neighboring houses were all overgrown, like no one was tending them at all─everything was like that. Or, while this might be a less straightforward example, the rows of houses themselves.
They looked damaged─decrepit.
I don’t know.
Maybe it was just my imagination.
Having witnessed the town as it had been eleven years earlier, maybe it was natural that, in comparison, the vicissitudes of time were lending such an impression to what had once been familiar.
However.
How can I put this─I knew.
I knew this kind of town.
To be precise, I knew these kinds of buildings.
Like the back of my hand.
“Hey, Shinobu…”
“…”
Unable to stand all of this weighing on my mind, I spoke to Shinobu again, but this time she didn’t even say, Speak not to me.
She didn’t say anything at all.
Come to think of it, the first thing Hachikuji ever said to me was, “Please don’t speak to me”─anyway, unable to seek refuge even in our misguided attempts to avoid reality, we kept walking.
The truth is, we were just shuffling our legs.
We were just kicking against the pricks.
Without wavering─without losing our way, you might say─both Shinobu and I had come to a conclusion quite a while ago.
But in order to avoid bringing it out into the light and recognizing that conclusion as the conclusion─in order to delay being presented with conclusive proof.
We were kicking against the pricks.
In reality, we’d already been presented with conclusive proof─nevertheless, we kept on kicking against the pricks, trying to scratch that unscratchable itch, right up until we arrived at the Araragi residence.
My house, as damaged as damaged could be─was conclusive, definitive, unshakeable proof.
Damaged.
Not just fallen into ruin─damaged.
Not in disarray─damaged.
The kind of damage─that can only come from a place being uninhabited for months and months.
The dust was piled high, and it resembled nothing so much as an abandoned building.
In fact─well, even if it took looking inside my own house to make me realize it, the whole town.
The whole world was like that.
Yes.
I knew them well.
I knew these kinds of buildings.
I know─that abandoned cram school.
Uninhabited, neglected, at the mercy of the elements─in brief, my town was one big abandoned ruin.
In other words, it had become a ghost town.
“Monday, August twenty-first─9:17 a.m.,” Shinobu read the display on the clock radio, the one with the calendar function that was set in front of the TV in our house’s living room. “I daresay the time warp itself hath gone as planned.”
Then again, it was doubtful that that clock was still properly receiving radio transmissions─it was hard to believe that an antenna was still functioning well enough in this world to convey the hour.
True, the display agreed with my cell phone, so Shinobu was probably correct in her conviction that the time warp itself─the return to the present had been successful.
What I actually felt on hearing that was not joy at learning the current time, however, but the forlorn emptiness of the banal fact that, even without people, a clock went on working as long as the batteries held out.
At the very least.
This showed, at the very least, that someone had once changed the batteries─though I had no idea how long the Araragi residence had been abandoned.
I picked up the remote and tried to turn on the TV.
Nothing happened.
I suspected this wasn’t because the batteries in the remote were dead but because no electricity was flowing to the house itself. Even though it wasn’t dark, being daytime and all, I flipped the light switch just to make sure.
Nothing.
The light bulb─wasn’t burnt out either.
“And the traffic lights weren’t working… Somehow I feel like I’m starting to understand the situation…though I still can’t seem to wrap my mind around it. Hmm, it stands to reason, but it doesn’t look like it’s been abandoned for as long as that old cram school. It feels like it’s been neglected for maybe a few months, at most half a year?”
I voiced my thoughts just as they came to me. Not really understanding, not really going anywhere.
“If we go to my room and check how far I got in my study guide, we should be able to determine when this house─when this town, became unpopulated…right, Shinobu?”
Though I wasn’t giving much thought to what I was saying, I was still more or less talking to her. But she gave absolutely no response.
This was different from the “I’m thinking” silence that she’d maintained all the way back to our home─it was as though she couldn’t even hear me.
She wasn’t ignoring me because she was lost in thought─it was more like she couldn’t be dealing with me.
“Hey, Shinobu.”
“…�
�
“Hey, Shinobu!”
“Hiekk!”
When I approached Shinobu and addressed her, touching her collarbone (not her ribs, just to be clear…), she finally responded and turned to face me.
“O-Ohh… I knew not who ’twas, but ’tis thee.”
“Who the hell else would it be? Everyone’s gone.”
Karen and Tsukihi.
My mother and father.
All gone.
Like smoke, or mist─vanished without a trace.
“Everybody’s gone, just like the…was it the Mary Celeste? That ship where the entire crew just vanished… Not that there are mugs of half-drunk coffee lying around or anything, but still.”
“My lord. Shall we not investigate another domicile, just to be sure? To confirm if ’tis only the Araragi residence that is so, or if ’tis indeed the entire town.”
“I don’t think there’s anything left to confirm.”
“And yet we must be sure.”
Such is our responsibility, urged Shinobu.
Well, she was right about that.
There was both the responsibility, and the sense of responsibility.
We decided to survey not only the neighbors’ houses but the whole town─and spent five full hours at it.
Were we seeking relief by doing this or looking to descend further into despair? Judging by the result, it can only have been the latter─no, I have to say, I don’t know which.
How can I put this… Somewhere along the way inertia took over, and no matter how much this unreal situation thrust itself into our reality, we remained staunchly unable to accept it.
We got back to the Araragi residence before 3 p.m. Coffee or something would have been nice, but the water and gas were shut off, same as the electricity.
Shinobu and I sat on the sofa, bereft of both food and drink (there were actually some snacks in the kitchen that hadn’t spoiled yet, but they were the type of dried stuff that’s too intense to eat without a beverage to hand, so we decided to hold off).
If you want to know, we weren’t sitting facing one another, but in a lap embrace─Shinobu in my lap, naturally.
“All right, then.” It didn’t matter, since it was evident whichever of us ended up saying it, but by way of setting an example, or maybe to take some kind of responsibility, I said it. “World’s been destroyed.”
“Yup.”
“Cute response.”
“Yup.”
“So I guess there’s no question that your careless time slip has changed history.”
“I can but think that history hath been altered because thou didst save that lost lass.”
The prospect of a two-man cell with zero sense of accountability reared its ugly head as we sat blithely blaming the whole thing on each other. In another light, that showed the extent to which we both felt accountable─however.
However.
“It’s no good…” I lamented. “The whole world. The scale is too big, it just doesn’t feel real… It’s so shocking, I can’t even panic.” If spring break was hell, and Golden Week was a nightmare─I couldn’t help but feel that this was all just a joke. A funny one, even. “Though Karen and Tsukihi are missing, though I can’t find Senjogahara or Hanekawa, or Kanbaru, or Sengoku, I can’t seem to grieve, which is frankly a real shock… It’s too much to even cry over.”
My consciousness just couldn’t catch up.
The feelings just wouldn’t come.
In reality, “shock” probably didn’t begin to express it.
Come on─the entire world?
The magnitude of such an incident wasn’t something a high school student could come to terms with.
“I mean, it totally caused a time paradox, after all. What happened to the compulsion of history or the theory that fate corrects itself? Whatever happens, and whatever results from it, humanity’s been wiped out just because I saved a lost girl.”
“Hm. The butterfly effect,” Shinobu said like she got it now. Like she had come to understand a new term all on her own─isn’t that nice, what a clever kid.
“But what the hell happened? I mean, after we saved her, did Hachikuji do something outrageous in her newly prolonged life that caused the whole world to fall into ruin?”
“Methinks the lass hath not the capacity…”
“Yeah, and it doesn’t seem like there was a nuclear war or anything.”
While the town, and all the houses, were damaged, it didn’t look as though they had been destroyed by weapons. It really did seem like an abandoned town, where the damage just came from neglect─
“It kind of feels like every single resident was kidnapped… Do you think maybe someone like Raoh from Fist of the North Star conscripted them all for his army?”
“There’s no semblance of such harsh ruination…but I know not.”
Ugh, grunted Shinobu, slumping all her weight against me.
She appeared defeated, but not by the powerful midday sun that beat down on us as we surveyed the town─it was psychological.
While she had lived for 500 years, or make that 600 years, maybe precisely because she had lived for 600 years, her spirit could be very weak─to the point that she’d wanted to commit suicide.
So this situation, this reality.
Might have been even harder on her─than it was for me.
Though she may have seen the ruin of many nations and the downfall of many regimes─that doesn’t mean she ever developed the fortitude to accept ruination.
In fact, maybe it’s just the opposite.
That kind of experience has to be traumatic.
“The butterfly effect…” I muttered. “Given the circumstances, we’re lucky we raised each other’s vampiric levels, huh, Shinobu? We’ll both be fine even if we don’t eat or drink anything for a while.”
“If thou art seeking consolation, I suppose there is that,” Shinobu said. “It seems I can but abandon my plan to feast on donuts for the nonce.”
Yup.
It hardly promised to be the only thing we’d be giving up.
020
In this sort of instance, I would always start by trying to get a handle on the current situation. But this time, at least, the honest truth was that there wasn’t really any situation to get a handle on.
Because the world I would’ve gotten a handle on lay in ruins.
It was meaningless to get a handle on anything.
If we were going to seek any consolation, as Shinobu put it, in this situation─not that there was anything left you could really call a situation─the silver lining was that it seemed my memory hadn’t thus far been altered to accord with “history”─in particular, I still remembered my summer break in the “unruined world.”
My summer break, the one I knew─the summer break of an unruined history.
It was like a daydream, that summer break that had now never existed.
My back and forth with Kaiki.
The rehabilitation of Senjogahara.
My violent encounter with Kagenui─I remembered all these things, which had probably never even happened in this present, in this timeline.
On the other hand, my memory had not been supplemented with events from this altered history─that went not only for summer break, but for that Mother’s Day three months ago as well.
My memory of encountering that lost young lady, Mayoi Hachikuji, my memory of our subsequent lighthearted repartee, none of it had been erased.
By rescuing Hachikuji from that traffic accident in the past and delivering her to Mrs. Tsunade’s doorstep, I definitely should have staved off her transformation into an aberration, so that Mother’s Day never happened, which would be at odds with reality─but that part didn’t seem to have been corrected for.
It resolved one concern, anyway.
But considering the overwhelming number of concerns that were presenting themselves before me, I thought perhaps that wasn’t a consolation worthy of the name.
