The Surprise of Haruhi Suzumiya

by Nagaru Tanigawa

  I’d totally forgotten about that. Up until just a moment ago I had been at North High—and so had she. But unfortunately it looked as if I was the only victim of this particular time slip.

  Haruhi watched me take my shoes off, then, going back over to the window and gazing down at the three who were still standing there in the driveway, she took a deep breath.

  “If you were gonna do a surprise event, you could’ve picked a better time. I was sort of expecting it, but I have to admit I didn’t think it would be this late at night.”

  “It wouldn’t have been a surprise otherwise, would it? This is the only way we could surprise you,” I said. My pretentious ad-libbing was pretty persuasive, I gotta say, thanks to all the crazy stuff Haruhi had put me through. It would’ve been nice if we didn’t have to go to such lengths to get the drop on her.

  Haruhi was still looking down, smiling with tears in her eyes. She obviously didn’t care whether or not the window had actually been locked. The point was that I was there.

  “Kyon”—Haruhi drew close to my face and whispered in my ear—“I’ll show you to the front door, so follow me and try not to make any noise.” Her breath tickled as she spoke, but I managed to deal with it.

  Haruhi descended the steps on tiptoe so as not to alert the household, and with the skill of a veteran safecracker, opened her front door.

  Now I was finally able to meet up with the brigade members waiting outside. Since it was a residential area in the wee hours, everyone was silent. But I could read their faces. Although I still didn’t understand what happened, I could tell that everything had finally worked out well.

  Nagato had brought with her my favorite pair of sneakers, which she held out to me. This was the usual Nagato. Not stricken with fever, this was her unchanging, ever-reading face, and it had no need for emotional expression.

  Asahina—the Younger, of course—peered worriedly at me and Haruhi. I gave her a thumbs-up, and her sigh of relief quickly became a smile.

  With all the friendly openness of someone who’s just returned from an all-night convenience store, Koizumi spoke. “My apologies for coming so late at night, Suzumiya, but there was someone here who just had to express their deep feelings, you see.”

  Why did he look at me as he said that?

  Well, I knew. I faced Haruhi and spoke in my most composed tone of voice. “We had to figure out how to surprise you. If we didn’t strike while you were asleep, we couldn’t have done it.”

  But whether Haruhi was listening to me or not, she looked at Asahina and the rest in turn. “Well… thank you.”

  She held her present close and smiled a smile that would’ve outshone the full moon. Normally her grin blazed like a vast star, but this was like a peaceful moon, and it made me kind of… how can I say it? No, I couldn’t say anything. All I could do was gaze back at her.

  Somewhere a crow cawed. Damn dark bird. I didn’t remember ordering any sound effects.

  As though taking that as her cue, Haruhi looked up from her package. “It’s pretty late. Let’s meet up later in the clubroom—also, what’s inside?”

  “I hope that you’ll look forward to opening it and finding out. Incidentally, the person who chose it is your bedroom intruder here,” said Koizumi. “He even wrapped it for you. He was rather insistent about doing it himself, so the rest of us merely acted as observers. Perhaps we should have just left everything to him.”

  I finally managed to shut Koizumi up by stepping on his foot.

  Still, apparently my past self had been the one to pick out the present’s contents. I could understand the reasoning.

  Haruhi looked back, then looked back again as she returned to her front door. “Take care on your way home. Koizumi and Kyon, you better make sure Yuki and Mikuru get home safe, got that? That’s an order from your brigade chief.”

  She left us with those words, spoken at a surprisingly reasonable volume, then went back inside her house. She really was being considerate of both her parents and neighbors. I suppose she does have a cuteness to her.

  After we left Haruhi, the three other brigade members and I walked along the deserted night street.

  I knew that it was the middle of May. I also knew that from my perspective, being summoned to the clubroom for a showdown with Fujiwara and Kuyoh, and my soft landing with Haruhi in the palm of a , were things that had happened just a short while ago, but I had now jumped nearly a month ahead—but given that I’d previously jumped through time amounting to years, this wasn’t that much of a surprise to me, and just felt like a novel discovery.

  In other words, for me this was the world of the future, and as such was unexplored territory, I said.

  “Indeed it is.” Koizumi’s unconcerned tone as he spoke was frustrating. Maybe it was because he was in such high spirits.

  “Which means I’m going to have to do another time jump.”

  “Yes. It will be rather inconvenient if you don’t.”

  “Um, er—” Asahina raised her hand slightly. And as befit the time travel expert (apprentice) that she was, she stumblingly explained the situation to me.

  And according to her, right after I was saved by the , I jumped ahead in the future—that would be now.

  Which meant that I had to go back in time once more, to a month ago. Asahina would send me herself, very shortly.

  I looked to Nagato. She looked back at me with the eyes of a nutcracker doll. I couldn’t sense so much as a particle of the weakness that she’d suffered from back when Haruhi was nursing her.

  “Can’t I just sleep in a time-freeze until the right moment comes?”

  “No,” answered Nagato instantly. “That is not a suitable solution for the problem.”

  What did that mean? I asked Koizumi.

  “Actually, there’s another you that exists in this time. The one who returned from this time to a month ago.”

  I seem to have been fusing with other versions of myself quite a bit these days, I said.

  “That was a different case. There, your original self had split into two versions, but in the case of time travel, there really is only one of you. So if you don’t return, your double existence here remains unresolved.”

  Asahina looked up at me from one side. “And it would go against the fixed event, so… we really need you to go back. From our perspective, you returning to the past is part of reality.”

  So that was how it is. The proof that I did return to my proper time was in the fact that there was another me in this time. The “me” that returns to the past here becomes the other “me” that now exists here. Anyway, it was just a month. Compared with three years, that was hardly anything.

  “We wanted to bring the you that exists in this time period along too, but you insisted that you really didn’t want to meet yourself. So just the three of us came.”

  That’s certainly what I would’ve done.

  “Incidentally, I was told to keep the nature of Suzumiya’s present a secret. Please give the matter some thought once you return to your proper time,” Koizumi said mischievously. “And please don’t forget to tell the us of next month about today. Although I’m sure you’ll remember.”

  “…”

  I was at least relieved to see that Nagato had returned to her normal silent, expressionless self.

  “My past self will explain everything to you. Actually, I already have.”

  “Yeah, I’ll ask you right away. Is the clubroom all right for that?”

  “No, we’ll actually be meeting in a different location. As for where—well, I suppose I’ll leave that to you. You needn’t overthink the matter.”

  I looked to Nagato.

  “…”

  The ever-silent girl said nothing. Back in the courtyard, the last thing I saw had been those three figures on the roof. There was no question that one of them had been Nagato. And Koizumi had said that the α-route Nagato hadn’t suffered any changes. Far from it, he’d even mentioned something ab
out Yasumi summoning her to go.

  Did you know everything, Nagato? What Yasumi was, and the reason the appeared back there…

  But Nagato silently turned her back to me, walking off with Koizumi, who gave me a wave before leaving.

  I might as well believe Koizumi. According to him, he’d already given me an explanation. To the me of a month ago, that is.

  I turned to Asahina, the other person that had been left behind. “Shall we go?”

  “Yes!”

  Asahina seemed pleased that there was something useful for her to do. And she probably was. After following orders she didn’t understand from her superiors for so long, she was trying to take the initiative to use time travel on her own.

  But first.

  “Asahina.”

  “What is it?”

  “Do you have a brother, Asahina? Particularly a younger brother—I’d like to know.”

  Asahina giggled and put a finger to her lips, winking a perfect wink. “Information about my family is top-level classified information.”

  I’ll just bet.

  Having experienced it several times, I was finally starting to get used to time travel, and the weightless, dizzying feeling soon passed. Maybe that was because a time span of one month was less than three years, so the time travel involved was shorter.

  In any case, when I opened my eyes next, I was on my own bed, in my own room.

  Perhaps startled by my sudden appearance, Shamisen, who had been curled up napping on my pillow, jumped to his feet and stumbled off the bed, then glared at me, his tail puffed up. I gave the room a quick look. Unsurprisingly, Asahina was nowhere to be seen.

  First I checked the time.

  On a day in early April, a Friday, eight PM, I had returned to my room.

  Just two hours earlier, in the literature club room, I’d been involved in a desperate struggle for the fate of the world, or the future, and if I were to seriously tell anyone about it, the only person who would believe me outside of the people that had been there was probably Sasaki. Not that it was a story I particularly wanted to broadcast.

  I stretched a big stretch, and murmured a few words to celebrate my return to normal life.

  “Guess I’ll take a bath and go to bed.”

  I decided to take one day out of the weekend to clear my head.

  EPILOGUE

  When the new week started, the world was again a peaceful one.

  Nagato had recovered as though nothing had ever been wrong, and returned to school. I still had both sets of memories in my head—one of her felled by the fever, and another where she sat silently reading in the SOS Brigade clubroom while the entrance examinations took place. No matter how much I rethink them, there are no discrepancies between them, and the sensation of those overlapping memories remains a strange one.

  As for me, both histories are part of reality, so it’s not the case that one of them is true and one is false. They cover the same time, and both actually happened.

  When I actually think back over the week Koizumi calls the α version, I have no trouble seeing Yasumi and everyone else’s faces, and in the β version, my exchanges with Sasaki and her group are perfectly clear in my mind. And the two layers of memory aren’t confused at all. When I think of one, that’s all I’m conscious of, and when I think of the other, the actions I took in the first don’t come to mind at all.

  If I calm myself down and really focus, I can manage to connect the two weeks as I recall them. It’s something like the non-intersection of a double-helix staircase. I ascend two sets of stairs that feel as though they should cross each other, but they never do, despite having the same start and end points—that’s how the experience feels.

  A new Monday succeeded that busy, eventful week. Nothing about my pilgrimage up the hill to school had changed, and while time might have gone kind of crazy, spatially speaking it felt exactly the same, and as I cooled myself off in the spring breeze that blew through the open window next to my seat, and as the chime signaling the beginning of class sounded, the blissfully unaware source of all this commotion barely made it into the classroom.

  With a strange half-smiling, half-disappointed look on her face, Haruhi adroitly kept her composure as she took her seat behind me.

  As I looked at her face, the grammatically complex sentence “This Haruhi is not yet the Haruhi that I already have met a month from now” forced itself through my head. The tenses of the statement were quite confusing, but it was the truth nonetheless. At this point, Haruhi didn’t have the slightest idea that I was going to appear in her bedroom in the middle of the night.

  … So why did she have such a strange expression on her face? I asked.

  “Yeah, about that.” Haruhi put her elbows on her desk and rested her chin in the palms of her hands. “Yesterday Yasumi came by my house.”

  … Oh ho.

  “And she said she was really sorry, but that she had to decline her brigade membership.”

  Oh?

  “I was really surprised. Turns out she was still in middle school.”

  … Oh, so that explained it.

  “She goes to a nearby middle school, and her sister graduated from North High, so Yasumi borrowed her uniform and snuck into the school, she said. She just had to join the SOS Brigade, so she was only sneaking in after class ended. She’ll probably be able to get admitted to North High without any trouble, but she said she just couldn’t stand to wait. Can you believe she was such a prankster?”

  So that’s why she hadn’t been in the classrooms when I’d gone all over the school looking for her during lunch. She hadn’t even been a North High student, so no wonder I couldn’t find her.

  Haruhi laid her head down on her desk and stared vaguely out the window. “But Yuki’s better now, and the brigade entrance examinations were fun, and the weather’s nice today, so I guess I can’t complain. She was such a promising girl, but there’s no way she could keep posing as a high school student.”

  I didn’t know if Yasumi had actually gone to meet Haruhi. It was entirely possible that had never happened. But Haruhi said so, so that’s how it was.

  “Won’t she be properly entering high school next year, though? Just readmit her to the brigade without another exam, then.”

  “I forgot to ask what year she is in middle school. It might take two or three years, honestly.” Haruhi sounded a little lonely, but then she suddenly looked up, and got right up in my face. “Hey, by the way—you’re not hiding anything from me, are you? Did you meet with anyone this Saturday? Or, like, make some kind of strange plan behind my back…”

  She was getting more and more perceptive with age. The truth was she was exactly right, but—

  “I didn’t do anything. I slept for half of Saturday and took Shamisen in for immunizations on Sunday, that’s all.”

  Haruhi fixed me in her gorgon-like stare, and it took several seconds before she released me. “I see. Well, fine, then.”

  “Hey, Haruhi.” I wonder if I spoke up because as she turned sideways and looked out the window, her face was illuminated by the rays of sun in a way that made her look much more grown-up.

  “What?”

  “Suppose someone invents a time machine not too far in the future. If the you from a few years in the future met your current self, what do you think your future self would say?”

  “Huh?” Haruhi scowled dubiously. “I guess in a few years I’ll be a college student. So if that person met me now… hmm. I think I’d probably look at my future self and tell her she hasn’t changed at all. Because, I mean, I’m pretty confident that my values aren’t going to change in just two, three, or even five years. But what makes you ask?”

  “I was just wondering. I got to thinking about what kind of person my future self is going to grow up into.”

  “Well, don’t worry. You’ll probably be the same as you are now. Or, what, do you want to think you psychologically matured enough to be able to lecture your middle school sel
f?”

  There wasn’t room for even a vague grumble in objection to that.

  But, Haruhi—when my just-barely second-year high school student self travels through time and meets the future you, I hope you’ll be nice to me. I hope you’ll give me the gentle smile I remember seeing.

  That goes for my future self too.

  Haruhi opened her mouth as though to further talk at me, but with perfect timing I was saved by the bell, which rang just as Mr. Okabe strode jauntily into the room. Thanks, bell. Ditto to our hot-blooded instructor.

  So, then.

  My memories of each person in the split world had been fused such that there weren’t any inconsistencies. Both existed in my mind, and having two sets of memories meant that they’d been unconsciously arranged in a system such that when I was accessing one, the other one didn’t come to mind.

  So I had the memories of Haruhi nursing the downed Nagato, but also the memories of Yasumi.

  Of course, most parts of each world, which Koizumi had termed α and β, were the same, so the only places where significant differences arose between them, not counting things related to the SOS Brigade, involved Taniguchi, Kunikida, Sasaki, Kyoko Tachibana, and so on.

  We ended up with zero new club members, which settled things nicely.

  Incidentally, just as the ever-perceptive Haruhi had guessed, I had hosted Koizumi and Nagato on Sunday.

  Or rather, I called them over. Unsurprisingly I had no energy whatsoever to leave my house, so I had them come to me. And at the time I had a pile of questions I wanted to ask them—for example, about what happened after I’d fallen holding Haruhi into the palm of the hand and gotten sent into the future.

  What had happened in the clubroom after that? How had the two worlds been reconnected? What happened to Fujiwara and Kuyoh and Tachibana? And just who was Yasumi Watahashi?

  Not counting Haruhi, the month-later versions of everyone else in the SOS Brigade had had distinctly knowing looks on their faces, which meant their counterparts here and now had to know.

  When the intercom buzzer rang right on schedule, I went to greet them, accompanied, for some reason, by my sister and Shamisen. Koizumi was dressed in street clothes as if he was about to go on a date or something, and he gave a chagrined smile. Nagato returned my look as though she were a marble statue, her dark eyes clear as ever.