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  “Hey, did you hear me?”

  “I’m listening,” I said.

  “Yuzan said Kirarin got in touch with her. When she said she was with you, I couldn’t believe it. I guess I never thought she was interested in you.”

  I’m not interested in you anymore. The prisoner’s comment came back to me.

  “Your dad stopped by our house today.”

  “How come?”

  “Just to apologize for all the trouble. Seems like he’s making the rounds of the neighbors. He said he can’t sleep at night, wondering where his son is, wandering somewhere. He’s miserable about losing his wife, but he said that all he can think of is saving his son’s soul. At night when he’s all alone in the house, he obsesses over what happened and blames himself. He said sometimes he wants to die. And when he feels like that, he says he keeps himself together by staring at straight lines for all he’s worth.”

  “Straight lines?” I said in a loud voice. “What do you mean?”

  “Objects that are straight. Like the frame of a shoji screen or a pillar. Staring at things that are straight, he said, makes him feel like there’s a world that’s still stable and solid. He said he can be more objective that way. He can objectively keep his act together and wait for his son to come home.”

  What a load of crap. My old man was so full of it, I didn’t know what to say. A stable world this late in the game? The world had come undone and floated away long ago. The idiot. Objective—what sort of crap is that? That’s why all you can see is a totally flat world. I made up my mind right then and there—I might be confused, but I was going to forge ahead. Toward the even more incomprehensible, chaotic front lines. Confusion. If the old man looked at straight lines to keep his act together, I was going to stare at curved lines and go down in flames. My eyes flitted around the room, looking for curved lines. Wall, floor, ceiling, door, TV. Straight lines everywhere.

  Then I looked over at the body of my prisoner, lying in the bed.

  “Hey, Worm,” Toshi said. “Can you hear me?”

  I switched off the cell phone.

  CHAPTER SIX

  TERAUCHI

  There really are things that are irreparable. I’m always wanting to tell people this. It doesn’t matter who I say it to. It could be a rainy day and I’m standing on the station platform of the Keio Line, waiting for an express train that’s late. Or I’m standing in line at a convenience store where a brand-new employee is slowly working the register. Either way, I see myself muttering this without thinking. Like the phrase has wormed its way into my unconscious so much that, when I’m irritated, I can’t help but blurt it out.

  I don’t think I could blurt it out to Yuzan or Kirarin, though. They’d just say, “Hmm. You could be right,” their eyes dreamily looking around for a bit, but then, as soon as the subject changed, they’d forget all about it. They’d drop it so fast I’d be left there feeling stupid and embarrassed. I’d hate that, so that’s why I don’t bring it up with them. It’d be like a lighthouse, where the spotlight rotates and, for an instant, illuminates something. But once the light moves on, everything melts back into the dark. They couldn’t care less. Unless you actually experience something that can’t be undone, you can’t possibly understand it. People like that just think it’s some phrase and misinterpret it. To them, it’s some cheap truism.

  Toshi alone might react differently. On the surface she acts all casual, but she’s a sensitive person and is very intuitive. I bet she’d look me in the eye and try to tease out what I’m getting at. But not finding anything, Toshi, too, would soon be disappointed and turn to other things.

  By “things that are irreparable,” I don’t mean something like Worm’s killing his mother. It’s not that simple. And it’s not something like the guilt Yuzan has over avoiding her mother’s death. It’s actually the opposite. How can I put it? Once you’re dead you can’t come back to life—it’s final. But to my way of thinking, those are also events that aren’t entirely irreparable, because they are the easy way out. I mean, death is something everybody’s going to experience someday, so it’s an easy-to-understand ending Worm’s chosen, and in that sense something close to defeat. Killing somebody is just payback motivated by all your anger, humiliation, and desires, and since it doesn’t put an end to problems, it doesn’t fit in the category of an irreparable action. Something that’s really irreparable is more like this: a horribly frightening feeling that keeps building up inside you forever until your heart is devoured. People who carry around the burden of something that can’t be undone will one day be destroyed.

  Are my ideas too complicated? I’m the kind of person who thinks about difficult things more than others. That’s why at home and at school I’m always joking around. The reason’s simple—even if I exposed the real me to other people, they wouldn’t understand. Toshi might pick up a little of what’s going on, but I’ve yet to meet a person—child or adult—who really gets me.

  There’s this huge gap between me and other people—a gap in ability, experience, and feelings. I’m really emotional, and bright. When I say bright I don’t mean good at schoolwork. I mean I can think abstractly. Some adults might think a high school student can’t do this, but they’re wrong.

  I feel above human relationships, so I’m constantly holding myself in check. Controlling myself like this zaps all my energy, so I gave up on studying and don’t take it seriously. I figured out long ago that studying for exams is nothing more than figuring out how to work the system.

  * * *

  When I became a senior in high school, we all took this psychological test. It was a multiple-choice test with two hundred totally stupid questions on it and you had to choose things like “I tend to go along with what other people are saying.” I decided to see how far I could fool people, so I deliberately made a total mess of it. Toshi, Yuzan, and Kirarin—all the bright ones in our class—did the same thing, but the only one called into the guidance counselor’s cubbyhole office afterward was me. Seems my homeroom teacher had quietly put in a call to my parents.

  So I went, partly curious, partly disgusted, and as you can imagine this middle-aged woman in a navy blue suit, no makeup, was waiting for me. She told me her name—Suzuki or Sato, some totally banal name—and I forgot it right away.

  “You would be Kazuko Terauchi? I’d like to meet with you a few times to talk over things.”

  “What kind of things?” I asked.

  “What you think about, and any worries you might have.”

  What good’s going come from talking with the likes of you? Why do I have to do this? Trying to hold back my rising anger, I gave my usual silly laugh. My weapon is that I can hide my feelings and say something stupid to cover them up. Toshi’s weapon is her made-up name, Ninna Hori. For Kirarin, it’s always pretending to be cheerful. Yuzan’s the only one who painfully exposes herself to the world.

  “I don’t have any worries,” I said. “Other than college entrance exams.”

  Entrance exams, the woman noted down on a sheet of white paper. I sneered inside. We met like that a total of three times. I made up a story about being afraid my friends might exclude me from their group and this seemed to satisfy her and no more summonses came to meet with her.

  Each time I met her I became more and more frightened of adults. She just listened silently to my made-up stories, smiling. I was frightened by the optimism of adults, their stupid trust in science to treat a troubled heart. Afraid of their obsession with believing they have to treat troubled kids. I just wanted them to leave me alone, so how come they didn’t get it? But that’s the way it always is.

  I’ve got to hand it to them, though—adults, that is. They’ve created this society where lies are uncovered. The woman told me proudly that these psych tests were able to ferret out any untruths you would tell. It turned out I’d scored the highest of anyone on the test. Higher than anyone in any other school or even school district. Which meant that they saw right through me, that I’m