Espresso Love (A Dystopian Japan Novel) #Wattys2014

Rabbit Hole

-Rabbit Hole-

The door opens. There stands a pale, balding man, stooped over on a cane, all but skin and bones, peculiarly shaped spectacles resting on a long, curved nose. He is wearing an olive green bomber jacket. It's almost like he had just arrived straight off a plane, slightly disoriented from another world, another point in time. I stare.

He seems to hesitate a long while, looking roughly in our direction but without making any sort of eye contact as if he's looking straight past us. I almost want to turn around to see if someone is behind us.

Shirayuki next to me is unfazed, but her mouth twists into a frown seemingly caught between a look of disgust and pity.

"Looks like I have to get out of here, for real," she says. Her eyes remain locked on the old man who had just arrived.

I look from her to my magazine which still says April 2015, wondering if I am hallucinating.

"Just one thing, has it always been April," I say.

She looks at me strangely. "It's been April for eleven days."

"I see." But I don't quite see.

At the moment, the fact that it is April hasn't quite registered in my mind. The sensation is like peering into an empty, hollow well, dry, devoid of water. Nothing is inside. Light doesn't reach the muddy bottom. It is a black hole, whistling with air. If it is truly April, then I may have missed Shizuka by four months and several days. Without arriving to any conclusions, I close the magazine and set it back on the shelf.

"Farewell, Mr. Maeda. And good luck," she says.

"Good luck?"

But when I turn to look at her, she's gone already. There seems to have been a brief pause where nothing had stood, like waiting for a film to load onto a screen. During that time, I had an impression that time itself had stood still. Sound seemed to disappear and all my muscles failed to move. The air around grew chilled and lifeless. My heart might have stopped, but I hadn't been paying attention to my heartbeat. Then I had seen a quick shimmer of something I had long forgotten. Like a coin reflecting sunlight at a specific angle, now lost deep in the sands of a beach. When I looked again, I couldn't find it anymore. It bothered me: I couldn't remember exactly what it was. Had I met her before? Perhaps a long time ago? But I had no contact with any high school girls, except when I had been in high school myself years ago. I cut off connections with any relatives since senior year. Any high school student I knew would be approximately the same age as I am now. I came to these thoughts in that moment. She only felt familiar after she had disappeared, borne away in a gust of wind I could not see.

Shizuka picks up a magazine like nothing had happened. Maybe she had casually walked in through the door and approached me without a word, as expected. But I had neither seen her enter nor come up beside me. It was like seeing something I hadn't noticed before. It had been there the whole time, only I didn't have the awareness or the care to see it.

I might have been relieved to see her but I look over the magazine shelves. There isn't a B-Pass magazine with Flumpool on the cover. Instead, there is a picture of a Korean band. My eyes search frantically. December 2014, it says.

For a moment, I re-read the issue date over. I take in each number and its blocky typewriter font. 2014. 12. B-Pass magazines only display numbers to represent the issue date. No Kanji character for month or year. Just 2014 and 12. The numbers solicit a deep sigh from my body, a heavy something from within, as if I have finally landed from a long airborne voyage around the world and now at last am rooted firmly into the ground. I am still here, in this world, in this moment in time.