The rain was still falling in the morning. It was strong enough to be an excuse not to do anything after waking up. But it did give me plenty of time to think about what to do next.
I stared at my bucket list. Miyagi came over and asked, "How do you plan to spend today?" I was used to hearing bad news from her, so I steeled myself to not react, regardless of whatever she might tell me. But Miyagi only stared at the list. Apparently, it was just a simple question.
In the light of the morning, I considered Miyagi again.
As I had noticed from the very first time I met her, Miyagi had a fairly pleasing appearance.
In fact, let me be clear. Physically (and strictly physically), she was exactly my type. Cool, calm eyes; a gloomy brow; pursed lips; a well-shaped head; soft hair; tense fingers; thin, white thighs—once I got started listing the features I liked, I would never stop.
That was why I felt so badly self-conscious about my every action from the moment she appeared at my apartment. In the presence of a girl who matched all my favorite features, I couldn't even yawn for fear of looking foolish. I wanted to hide every sloppy expression and exhalation from her.
If my monitor had been an ugly, fat, slovenly middle-aged man rather than a girl, I would have relaxed and been able to think honestly about what I wanted to do. But with Miyagi here around me, I felt especially ashamed of my twisted desires and pathetic hopes.
"This is purely for my own curiosity," said Miyagi, "but are the things written on this list what you truly, personally want to do?"
"I was just wondering that myself."
"I hate to say this, but to me, this looks like a list of things you think someone else is likely to try doing before he dies."
"You might be right," I admitted. "The truth is, I might not really want to do a single thing before I die. But I can't just do nothing, so I'm copying someone else."
"Even still, I would think there's a way that's better suited to you," Miyagi said enigmatically, then returned to her usual location.
Later that morning, I arrived at a conclusion.
I needed to be truer to those twisted desires and pathetic hopes. I needed to be crasser, more self-interested, more vulgar, and truer to my base instincts over these last three months.
What did I even have to lose at this point? There was nothing for me to preserve or protect.
I glanced at my bucket list again, summoned my willpower, and called someone I knew.
This person answered after a few rings.
The rain was over by the time I reached the train station, umbrella in hand—another perfect example of what massively horrible timing I had. With the earlier rain simply gone and replaced by blue skies, the umbrella I carried around felt as superfluous and out of place as if I were walking down the street on ice skates.
The wet asphalt gleamed in the sun. I went into the station to escape the heat, but it wasn't any cooler in there, either.
It had been a while since I last rode a train. I entered the waiting area of the platform, bought a cola at the vending machine next to the trash can, then sat down and finished the drink in three gulps. Miyagi bought a mineral water and drank it, eyes closed.
The sky was visible through the windows. A faint rainbow hung in the distance.
I'd completely forgotten that was a thing. I knew—should have known—what a rainbow was, when they happened, and how people reacted to them. But the most basic fact of all, that they were things that existed, seemed to have completely left my mind at some point.
As I stared at it with new eyes, I realized something for the first time. I could see about five colors in that massive band of light spanning the sky—two short of the proper seven. Red, yellow, green, blue, purple. Which ones was I missing? I had to envision an imaginary paint palette to recall that it was orange and indigo.
"Yes, you probably should look at it closely," said Miyagi at my side. "This could be the last rainbow you ever see."
"True," I said. "And I might never use this waiting area again, and I might never drink another cola, and this could be the last time I ever toss an empty can."
I hurled the soda can at a light-blue trash bin. The clinking sound was loud in the waiting area.
"Everything could be the last time. But it was that way long before I sold my life span," I said. On the inside, however, Miyagi's words filled me with alarm.
Rainbows and waiting rooms and empty cans were one thing. But how many times would I get to listen to a CD between now and my death? How many books could I read? How many cigarettes could I smoke?
Those thoughts left me feeling shaken.
Dying meant doing nothing ever again but being dead.
A fifteen-minute bus ride after getting off the train brought me to the restaurant where I was going to meet Naruse.
Naruse was a friend from high school. He was of average height, or perhaps just under average, and his facial features were a bit too chiseled. He was a quick thinker and had a charismatic conversational style, so people liked him. Thinking back on it now, it was strange he was friends with an outcast like me.
We had one thing in common: the ability to laugh off most of the stuff that happened in the world. In high school, we'd hang out at a fast food place for hours and make fun of every little thing, to the point where it was a bit tasteless.
I wanted to laugh off everything again, like we used to do. That was my first goal.
But there was another thing I was hoping to accomplish by meeting with him today.
While I waited for Naruse to arrive, Miyagi sat in a seat along the aisle. She gazed at me from a very close distance. Sometimes our eyes would meet, but she did not react in any way.
No matter where I went, I had Miyagi following me and staring at me—and my hope was that Naruse would notice this and misinterpret what it meant.
I'll admit that this was about as pathetic as it could possibly be. But it's what I wanted to do, so I was going to do it. Sad as it is to admit, after selling off the rest of my life, that was the first thing I thought of that I wanted to do, deep down.
"Hey, Miss Monitor," I said to Miyagi.
"What is it?"
I scratched the back of my neck and said, "I've got a favor to ask…"
I was going to ask her to evade or disregard anything the man coming to visit me might ask, but just then, a waitress came to our table, beaming.
"Pardon me. Do you know what you'd like?" she asked.
I had no choice but to order a coffee. Since the waitress was asking, I checked with Miyagi, just in case.
"You don't want anything?"
Miyagi made an awkward face and said, "Um…you probably shouldn't talk to me in the presence of others."
"Why, is there something bad about that?"
"As I believe I explained right at the start, which you ought to remember…the existence of monitors like me cannot be detected by anyone other than the person being monitored. Just like this."
Miyagi reached out and grabbed the waitress's sleeve and shook it a little. As she claimed, the waitress had no reaction whatsoever.
"Every influence I might potentially have on another person is resolved with no effect," Miyagi said, picking up her glass. "So if I lift this up, she doesn't even see the glass floating in the air. She doesn't think it vanished; she doesn't see it still sitting on the table. Whatever happens, it has no effect on her. She doesn't sense my existence as being present, and she doesn't even sense me as being absent…but for one exception. That is when the only person who can see me, the observation target, interacts with me. Unfortunately, while I myself can be made to have no effect on others, the same does not apply to your actions in observance of me… In other words, Mr. Kusunoki, she saw you speaking into empty space."
I glanced at the waitress. She was looking at me like I was crazy.
A few minutes later, I was sipping the coffee she brought out and thinking of simply going back home when I was done, before Naruse arrived. I probably would have done so if he'd arrived just a minute or two later. But before I could make up my mind for good, I saw him coming through the door. I had no choice but to beckon him over.
When he sat down, he made an overblown show of being happy to see me. Sure enough, he showed no sign of noticing Miyagi sitting next to me.
"Man, it's been ages. How have you been?" Naruse asked.
"Oh, you know. Pretty good."
That's not really the kind of thing you should say when you're dying in less than half a year, I reflected.
By the time we were done catching up, it was as if we were back in high school again. I don't even remember exactly what we talked about, but the topics weren't important. The point of our conversation was to break things down through our grammar and syntax. We chatted and laughed about things so trivial we forgot them as soon as the words were gone.
I didn't speak a word about my remaining life. For one thing, I had no idea if he would believe me, and I didn't want to make our meeting a downer. If Naruse knew I was going to die in less than half a year, he would be careful and try not to upset me. He'd hold back on his jokes and feel compelled to offer some kind of verbal reassurance or comfort. I didn't want him to worry about nonsense like that.
I probably would have had a good time for the duration, except for that one thing he said.
"By the way, Kusunoki," Naruse said, suddenly recalling something. "Are you still drawing?"
"No," I replied at once. Then I realized that reply was too abrupt. "Since I started college…I haven't drawn anything at all."
"I figured." Naruse said with a chuckle. "If you were still drawing, I'd be worried about you, man."
That was the end of it.
Even I knew it was crazy, but that little snippet of conversation, lasting less than ten seconds, was enough to completely eliminate all the affection I'd built up for Naruse over three whole years.
Just like that. It was so fragile, so weak.
He threw in a few more jokes to brush past the topic, but I said nothing. I only thought.
Hey, Naruse.
That was the one thing you shouldn't have laughed about.
I know I admitted it myself. But that does not make it okay for you to laugh about it, too.
I thought if anyone might actually understand, it was you.
The smile on my face directed at Naruse slowly became a mask, an empty shell. I lit up a cigarette and began to murmur "Uh-huh" to all his comments, rather than trading words back and forth.
To my side, Miyagi said, "Now…let's check the answer."
I shook my head, almost imperceptibly, but she continued anyway.
"You're a little disgusted with Naruse now, but as a matter of fact, Naruse does not like you as much as you think, either. Originally, two years from now, you would meet with him in a similar manner as this and get into an argument over something trivial, an argument so bad that you would never speak again… You should probably break this off before too long. Nothing good will come of putting your hopes in him."
The reason I lashed out at Miyagi was not because she insulted my friend. It wasn't because she told me something I didn't want to know, and it wasn't because I was upset by her acerbic tone. It wasn't even because my anger at Naruse for laughing at my old dream was unfairly turned against Miyagi.
So what was I mad about? It's a difficult question to answer. I had Naruse blathering on about vapid topics across from me, Miyagi muttering gloomy proclamations into one ear, a pair of young women on the other side conversing in high-pitched exclamations, a group of theater nerds having a heated and extremely pretentious debate behind me, and a cluster of students in the corner clapping and shouting as a group—and it suddenly became unbearable.
Shut up, I thought. Do you have to talk so loud?
The next moment, I threw the glass in my hand against the wall on Miyagi's side.
It was much louder than I expected, and the glass shattered and sprayed, but it only caused the restaurant to fall quiet for a moment before getting just as loud soon after. Naruse stared at me in shock. I saw an employee rushing over. Miyagi sighed with exasperation.
What the hell am I doing?
I placed a few thousand-yen bills on the table and scampered out of the building.
While I was riding the bus back to the train station, I stared out the window and saw a dilapidated old batting center. I hit the stop request button and got off the bus so I could swing at about three hundred pitches. By the time I set down the bat, my hands were numb and bleeding, and I was sweating like a pig.
I bought a Pocari Sweat at the vending machine, sat down on the bench, and drank the sports drink slowly, watching the men in the other cages who had stopped in to swing on their way home from work. Perhaps it was just the lights, but the overall color palette of everything seemed strangely blue.
I didn't regret leaving Naruse behind like that. By now, I felt skeptical of the idea that I was ever really fond of him to begin with. Perhaps I didn't even like Naruse for who he was; I just loved myself through the lens of another person who would affirm and reflect my own ideas.
And with the passage of time, Naruse changed, and I couldn't.
If either of us was right, it was probably him.
I left the batting cages and walked to the station. A train pulled up as soon as I reached the platform. It was packed with teenagers coming home from after-school club activities, and I suddenly felt much older. I closed my eyes and focused on the sound of the train.
It was already night. I stopped at a convenience store on the way home. There were a number of large moths in the parking lot, none of which showed signs of movement. I took some beer and snacks to the register, where a pair of male and female college students in tracksuits and sandals were buying the same thing.
When I got home, I heated up some canned barbecue meat and spring onions and drank beer as I ate them. I wondered how many more pints of beer I'd drink before I died, and for some reason, it started to taste even better.
"Hey, Monitor," I called out to Miyagi. "I'm sorry for what I did earlier. I think my mind got all confused. Sometimes I just snap and do things like that."
"Yes, I know," replied Miyagi. I sensed caution in the way she looked at me. I couldn't blame her. Anyone would feel on edge in the presence of a man who would abruptly throw a glass against the wall in the middle of a conversation.
"Are you hurt?"
"No. Unfortunately."
"Look, I feel bad about it."
"It's fine. You didn't hit me."
"When you're done writing in your observation record, you wanna have a drink?"
"…You want to get drunk with me?"
I wasn't expecting that reaction. But I had a feeling it was best to be honest at moments like this. "Sure I do. I'm lonely."
"I see. Well, I'm sorry to say that I am at work."
"Then just say that first."
"I'm sorry. I only thought it was curious. I wondered why you would ask that."
"I get lonely, just like everyone else. The other people you saw before me probably got lonely before they died, too, right?"
"I don't recall," said Miyagi.
By the time I had emptied out all the beer cans, taken a hot shower, and brushed my teeth, I felt a healthy drowsiness coming on. That was thanks to the batting cages, surely.
I turned out the lights and got into bed.
It was clear I needed to rethink some things, I realized.
Just because my death was approaching did not mean the world was going to suddenly coddle me. It would only do that for those who were already dead, if it was going to. I should have known that already, but I was unable to give up my softer wishes, so somewhere deep down, there was a part of me that had hoped things would suddenly go much easier.