I turned out the lights and continued drinking. Fortunately, I managed to get peacefully drunk that night. Sometimes it's best not to fight the flow of feelings, but to leap into the abyss of despair headlong and wallow in the muck of your own self-pity. It can be the quickest way to get back on your feet.
My familiar apartment began to take on a slightly different meaning. The moonlight coming through the window was tinged with navy blue, and the night breeze of the summer filled the space, which felt alien and strange with Miyagi lurking in the corner like some kind of haunting spirit. I never knew this room could feel this way.
I felt as if I were in the wings of a stage. That if I stepped out, my act would finally begin.
Suddenly, I felt as though I could do anything. It was only because being drunk made me temporarily forget my own incompetence, but in that state, I mistakenly believed that something about me was shifting.
With great pomp and circumstance, I announced to Miyagi, "With the three hundred thousand yen and three months I have left, I'm gonna change something."
Then I drained the last of the beer in my can and set it down violently on the table.
Miyagi's reaction was cold. She raised her eyes just a few inches, asked, "Is that so?" and returned to her notebook.
Undeterred, I continued, "Yeah, maybe it's three hundred thousand yen, but it's my life. I'll make it go farther than thirty million or three hundred million. I'll work my ass off and hit back at the world."
To my drunken mind, this sounded extremely badass.
But Miyagi was not impressed. "Everyone says something like that."
She placed the pen down beside her, cradled her knees, and rested her chin between them.
"I've heard that line almost verbatim five times already. As death approaches, everyone's ideas get more and more extreme. The effect is especially pronounced among those whose lives have been unfulfilling. It's the same reason that people who keep losing bets aim for increasingly unrealistic jackpots to win it all back. People who have spent their lives failing have to grasp for improbable happiness, I suppose. When death is imminent, they can finally see the relative brilliance of life regain some semblance of vitality. They fall into the trap of thinking, 'I was worthless before, but now that I've realized my mistake, I can do anything,' and they end up believing that fatal misconception. They're only standing at the starting line. It means that after a long losing streak of gambling, they've finally regained their wits. Nothing good comes from assuming this is your chance for a once-in-a-lifetime jackpot. Mr. Kusunoki, think carefully about this. The reason the price for the rest of your life was so low is because you would have been unable to achieve anything in your remaining thirty years on Earth. You understand that, don't you?" she said. "If you weren't going to accomplish anything in thirty years, how do you expect to do anything in three months?"
"…Never know unless you try," I argued, a trite sentiment. It made me sick to say it. The truth was obvious, long before I tried. She was absolutely correct.
"I would think it wise to seek a more mundane sort of satisfaction," Miyagi said. "There's no taking it back at this point. Three months is too short of a time to change anything. But it's also too long to spend doing nothing. Don't you think it would be smarter to find for yourself small but certain bits of happiness instead? You lose because you try to win. Finding the little victories amid your loss will leave you with less disappointment in the end."
"Fine, fine, I get it. But I'm tired of hearing about the right way to do things," I said, shaking my head. If I weren't drunk, I might have continued arguing with her, but in this state, I didn't have the willpower to overturn her wisdom. "I probably just don't fully understand how incompetent I am as a person… Will you tell me everything that would've happened? How was I going to live the next thirty years? Maybe hearing that will keep me from hoping for too much."
Miyagi did not speak at first. After a while, she sighed with resignation.
"Very well. Perhaps it would be better for you to learn everything at this point… But I'll tell you now, just in case, that there's no need for you to self-destruct after you hear me out. What I know about is what might have happened but is now guaranteed to never happen."
"I get it. What I'm going to hear is more like a divination… And if I can say one thing, it's that there's never a need to self-destruct. It just happens when there's nothing else to do."
"I'm hoping it doesn't come to that," Miyagi said.
There was a rumbling in the distance, like some gigantic tower crumbling to the ground. It took a while for me to realize it was a fireworks show. I hadn't actually gone to see any in years.
It was always something I watched through the window. I never bought fresh festival food from the cart to eat for the show. I never looked back and forth from the fireworks to the face of the girlfriend whose hand I was holding.
From the moment I was old enough to understand, I was an outcast. I avoided places full of people. When I found myself in those situations, it felt like some kind of mistake, and the thought of running into someone I knew there was terrifying. In elementary school, I never went to the park or the pool or the hills behind the school or the shopping district or the summer festival or the fireworks show unless someone forced me to go. As a teenager, I stayed away from recreational places and avoided the major streets when I walked through the city.
The last time I watched a fireworks show was when I was very young.
Himeno might have been there with me at the time, I think.
I'd already forgotten how big fireworks were when you saw them up close. I didn't remember how loud the sound was in person. Did the smell of gunpowder fill the area? How long did the smoke hang in the air? How did the people look when they watched the show? As I considered each of these points, I realized I knew almost nothing about fireworks.
The temptation to look out the window swept over me, but I couldn't debase myself like that with Miyagi watching. If I did, she would probably say something like "If you want to see the fireworks that badly, why don't you just go watch?" And what would I say in response? Was I going to admit I would be too distracted by worrying about other people looking at me?
Why did I care about what other people were looking at, when I had so little time left to live?
Miyagi crossed in front of me—practically mocking my silent battle against temptation—opened the screen, and leaned out the window frame so she could watch the pyrotechnic display. It seemed as if she was marveling at something rare and strange, rather than taking in the wondrous beauty of it. Whatever the source of it was, she had some kind of interest in the show.
"Oh, really? You're gonna watch that, Miss Monitor? What if I just run out while you're not looking?"
Without taking her eyes off the fireworks, Miyagi snarked, "Did you want me to keep an eye on you?"
"Nope. In fact, I want you to go away. It's hard to do anything with you watching."
"I see. You must feel quite a lot of guilt, then. Just so you know…if you run away and get beyond a certain distance from me, that will be seen as a sign of intent to cause trouble for others, and your remaining life will be subtracted so that you die. Be careful."
"How much distance are we talking about?"
"It's not an exact rule. I suppose it would be about a hundred yards."
I wish she'd said that earlier.
"I'll be careful," I told her.
There was a series of quick pops in the sky. The fireworks display was heading into its climax, it seemed. The clamor from the room next door had quieted down. Maybe they'd gone out to see the show.
At last, Miyagi began to talk about the things that "might have happened."
"Now, about your lost thirty years… First, your college life ends shortly," she said. "You make enough money to get by, read books, listen to music, and sleep—nothing else. Your days are empty and interchangeable, until it's hard to even distinguish one from another. Once that happens, they will simply fly by. You graduate college without having gained anything of true substance, and ironically, you end up in the line of work you despised the most when you were younger and full of hope. If only you had given up and accepted the simple truth back then. Instead, you were unable to get over your memory of the time you were 'special,' and your belief that this isn't the place you really belong prevents you from ever settling in. You go back and forth from home to work every day with dead eyes, working yourself to the bone, without the ability to think about anything else, until the only pleasure you have left in life is drinking. Your ambition to be great and important one day fades, and you lead a life completely adrift from the ideal adulthood you envisioned as a child."
"Doesn't sound that out of the ordinary," I interrupted.
"True, it is not an uncommon story. It is a very commonplace despair. But the suffering that people take from it is what varies. You were a person who needed to be better than everyone else. And without a partner to help you find mental solace, you had to support your entire world by yourself. When that solitary pillar breaks, the agony that results is plenty enough to drive you to destruction."
"Destruction?" I repeated.
"The next thing you know, you're heading into your late thirties. In your solitude, the only hobby you have is riding a motorcycle around without a destination. But as you know, motorcycles are dangerous. Especially when the person riding it has largely given up on his own life… The silver lining is that you don't hit a car some innocent person was driving or run over a pedestrian. You merely fall off the bike on your own. But as a result of that accident, you lose half of your face, the ability to walk, and most of your fingers."
It was easy to parse the meaning of "losing half of your face" but very hard to actually imagine it.
It probably meant I was in such a horrific state, the only thing anyone might recognize is "the place where my face was."
"You considered your appearance to be one of your better points, so this leads you to consider making the ultimate decision. But you are unable to take that final plunge. You can't give up that last little drop of hope—the hope that someday, somehow, something good might happen. It's a wish no one can take away from you…but that's all it is. It's a kind of devil's proof. You will live on this feeble hope until the age of fifty—but without anything to show for it, you finally fall apart and die alone. Unloved and unremembered by anyone. And to the very last moment, you will lament, 'It wasn't supposed to be like this.'"
It was a very strange thing. I found I completely accepted and believed what she told me.
"So what do you think?"
"Let's see. First of all, I'm very glad I decided to sell off those extra thirty years," I replied. I wasn't just acting tough. After all, what Miyagi called "what might have happened" was now "what would never happen."
"But I do wish I hadn't bothered with the three months and just sold down to three days."
"You can still do that," Miyagi said. "You can sell your life span two more times."
"Once I'm down to three days, you won't be hanging around me anymore, right?"
"That's correct. If you really dislike me that much, that is an option you can choose."
"I'll keep it in mind," I said.
As a matter of fact, given that I had no hope with three months left to live, the wiser choice seemed to be selling off everything but the last three days. But I held off on doing so, because even now, I had that hope, that devil's proof, whispering, "Still, something good might happen for you."
The three months ahead of me were completely distinct from the lost thirty years Miyagi told me about. The future wasn't set in stone. Maybe something good would happen. Perhaps I would experience something that made me glad I kept living.
The chances weren't zero.
And that meant I couldn't yet give in to the allure of death.
I woke up to the sound of rain in the middle of the night. The patter of droplets spilling onto the ground from the broken rain gutter was unavoidable. I checked my clock and saw that it was after three o'clock in the morning.
A sweet scent hung in the air. It was something I hadn't smelled in a while, so I found it quite difficult to identify what it was: women's shampoo.
By the process of elimination, it had to belong to Miyagi. All I could assume was that while I was asleep, Miyagi had washed up.
But I found that conclusion very hard to accept. Not to brag, but I always slept so lightly that I might as well have been dozing. I woke up at the slightest sounds, like the newspaper being delivered or footsteps from upstairs. It didn't make sense that I wouldn't wake up at all while Miyagi was showering. Maybe it had been lost in the sound of the rain.
I decided to accept the conclusion. It was strange to know that a girl I'd just met had taken a shower in my own living space, but I chose not to think about it. Besides, I needed to get my sleep for tomorrow. Awake in the middle of the night during the rain, I had nothing to do.
But I wasn't going to fall back to sleep on my own, so I decided to enlist the help of music. I put one of the CDs I didn't sell, Please Mr. Lostman, into the player near my pillow, then listened with headphones. It was a pet theory of mine that anyone who would listen to Please Mr. Lostman on a sleepless night would not lead a proper life. I used this music to forgive myself for being unable to fit into the world, and for not trying, either.
Maybe now I was paying the tab for that choice.