The Observer With Her Knees Up
On top of feeling bad enough as it was, it was a hot, restless night. Thanks to that, I had a very vivid dream.
Everyone was having a fun time watching fireworks. Their light colored the smoke red. I stood outside the park, watching them.
I suddenly noticed Himeno beside me when she asked - How’s high school going?
But in my dream, I thought that her face was absolutely stunning. I felt proud to have been acquaintances with her for so long.
Can’t say I’ve been enjoying it, I replied honestly. But it’s far from being the worst.
I secretly delighted that she’d gone through a similarly miserable adolescence.
You know, thinking about it now, she said, it really was a lot of fun back then.
Himeno didn’t answer. She squatted down, looked up at me, and said, Kusunoki, are you still on the shelf?
I guess, I replied, while keeping an eye on her expression. Checking her reaction.
Then she added, with a bashful look, good. That’s perfect.
I’m certain that when I was ten, I didn’t have much affection for Himeno at all. Maybe only the tiniest bit. The problem was that I couldn’t feel even a “tiniest bit of affection” for anyone else since.
Keeping all the details of the Himeno dream in memory, I laid in bed thinking about yesterday’s events. I’d sold all but three months of my remaining lifespan at that shoddy old building.
What had kept me bound to life thus far had been the shallow hope that something good might happen someday. It was a baseless hope, but discarding it was a difficult task.
That was my salvation, but it was also a trap. Which is why now that I’d been clearly told “Nothing good will happen in your life,” I could see it as a blessing.
First, I decided I’d go to the bookstore, read some magazines, think about what I should do next - but just then, the doorbell rang.
I was not expecting any visitors. I hadn’t had one of those in years, and surely wouldn’t in my last months.
The doorbell rang again. I rose from bed and was immediately hit with last night’s queasiness. Hangover.
After giving me a stunned look, she pulled glasses out of her bag with a sigh, wore them, and gave me a “How about now?” look.
“I am,” the girl said.
The image of the suit stood out in my mind, so in casual clothes she looked like someone else entirely. She wore a cotton blouse and a sax blue dungaree skirt.
Looking at her eyes through the glasses she’d put on, they seemed to carry a certain sorrow somehow.
When I first met her, I couldn’t pin her age down any more accurately than between 18 and 24, but looking at her that day, I figured it out. Maybe she’s about my age. 19 or 20.
But all that aside, why was she here? Actually, one of the first ideas that came to mind was that she was here to tell me there’d been a mistake in the evaluation.
“I’m Miyagi. I’ll be your observer from today forth.”
As I tried to remember my conversation with Miyagi yesterday, I became unable to stomach my nausea, and ran to the toilet to throw up again.
I tried to brush her aside, going to the sink. I washed my face, gargled, and took a swig of water from a cup, then laid on my bed again. I had a killer headache. And the killer heat helped foster it.
“While I explained it yesterday,” Miyagi said, suddenly standing at my bedside, “since your lifespan has been reduced to less than a year, I will be observing you from today forth. Therefore…”
“Understood. Later, then,” she said. Miyagi took her luggage to the corner of the room, and sat with her knees up and her back to the wall.
But just having her tell me that wasn’t going to change the reality of being constantly monitored by a girl no more than two years away from my age.
The one-sided surveillance was unpleasant. The half of me she was looking at felt like it was being grilled by her gaze.
Indeed, I had received a detailed explanation about this “observer” business yesterday.
Because one of the biggest keys to having people follow rules is their faith that they’ll keep living. But if you have confirmation that your life will soon end, that all changes. You can’t take that faith to the afterlife.
The observer system, then, is what was instated to prevent desperate people from bringing harm to others.
Which meant the girl sitting with her knees up in the corner of my room was a single phone call away from ending my life.
However - and this is apparently backed by statistics - once there are mere days before death, people seem to lose the will to bother others. So when there are only three days of lifespan remaining, the observer leaves.
I ended up falling asleep, apparently. My headache and nausea were gone when I woke up. The clock showed 7 in the afternoon. I’d call that a pretty awful way to spend the first day of the most important three months of my life.
I washed my face with cool water, undressed in my room, changed into jeans that were no longer blue and a frayed T-shirt, and went out to get dinner.
I heard evening cicadas crying from a distant thicket. Railcars listlessly ran along the track beside the road.
I arrived at an auto-restaurant along a former national highway. It was a wide building, and the trees growing behind seemed to loom over its roof.
In the corner were arcade cabinets over a decade old, whose background music helped brighten the place’s desolate atmosphere just a little.
I put 300 yen in a noodle vending machine, then took a smoke while I waited for the process to finish. Miyagi sat on a stool, looking up at the single flickering light.
She felt unusually mechanical, you might say. Not so much like a human.
After gobbling down tempura soba that was all heat and a cheap taste, I got a coffee from another vending machine. The sweet iced coffee spread throughout my dry body.
Until very recently, splurging and eating at a fancy restaurant simply wasn’t an option. I’d been living in poverty for years, and I must have lost a lot of imagination in that time too.
Though it was easier at first to think of the things I didn’t want to do, the more I moved my hand, the more things that I wanted to do before I died came to mind.
Things to Do Before I Die
- Don’t go to school
- Don’t resist desires
- See some beautiful things
- Meet and talk with Naruse
I turned around, and Miyagi was no longer sitting in the corner, but stood right behind me staring at what I was writing.
“Do observers really have the right to probe and meddle with this stuff?”, I asked.
”…You know that much about me?“, I finally breathed out, trying to hide how shaken I was. "From the way you’re talking… do you know everything that’s going to happen?”
“All I know are the possibilities of what may happen in and around your life, Mr. Kusunoki. Of course, it’s all meaningless information at this point, as your future changed drastically when you sold your lifespan. What’s more, even those mere future possibilities I know are only the most important events.”
Still looking into her notebook, Miyagi slowly raised her right hand and tucked her hair behind her ear.
"That’s only relatively speaking,” I denied. “Like, it’s just that everything else barely matters to me, right?”
“Thanks for your concern, but it was spoiled a long time ago.”
“Yeah, maybe. Can you really just talk to me about my future like that, though?”
“We fundamentally desire that you have a peaceful end to your life,” said Miyagi. “To that end, I may predict your future and give you warnings.”
Miyagi gave a tired sigh. “Is that so. Well, I had only good intentions. But if that is indeed the case, perhaps I did intrude too readily. I must apologize.”
With that, Miyagi returned to the corner of the room and reassumed her knees-up position.
“That said, in this instance, having relinquished you of your, ah, "reason to get hurt and lose hope,” I will refrain from meddling in any of the other items on your list. Do as you please, so long as it does not trouble others. I will not stop you.“
But I didn’t give any deep thought into what that expression meant.