Espresso Love (A Dystopian Japan Novel) #Wattys2014

In Between

I drink a cup of cold water from the water cooler and skip the cafeteria to save money. When I reach the courtyard again, the same batch of students are still there, gathered in front of the statue. Above, the buds on the trees are visible. This time, I step closer intending to eavesdrop. But I hear nothing. They are entranced but I can't know for sure with what. It's like they are in a completely different world; only their bodies remain here, a hollow lifeless shell. Surely to stay outside in the cold for so long must not be an enjoyable experience - yet each stands, bags on the ground, immobile, craning their ears to hear something. Their faces are deadpan. Others stream by without batting an eye. It must be some sort of event or demonstration that I had no prior knowledge of.

I look up at the buds again. It wasn't an illusion after all. Things are testing the ground, one step at a time, from warped fiction into physical manifestation. I realize with much urgency Shizuka's disappearance is only becoming more factual as time passes by.

I sit down at the Library at around two o'clock and pick up a book. It isn't time to leave campus yet, if I am to abide by a typical schedule, and I figure some sort of arcane knowledge might be available, whether there are hidden messages available to me or my answers are methodologically derived from it.

I read through a history book - with a fraying cover and the distinct scent of moldy cheese - analyzing postwar Japan, after the Mutual Cooperation and Security Treaty between United States and Japan in the 1950s and 60s. The United States subsequently received much power and control over Japan and its domestic matters, and the rapid economic growth and reign of the capitalist system from then on to the 1990s, no doubt caused substantial changes to the system and the structure of the country. Somewhere in between the lines, fifty years ago, Processing might have begun as a result of American influence - is what I conclude. But further reading yields nothing else. It's like reading a textbook of facts and figures with no in depth theory or analysis on the subject. It doesn't explain where or when Processing began or who had figured out it was happening in the first place. Scouring through the racks again finds no new revelations. It's as if someone had been systematically removing all texts that had employed any kind of true critical thought. Most were limited to background studies of people and historic recording of events. Either that or it's fiction and poetry. Fiction and poetry both contain such immense riches of profound wisdom and prophetic power, but it must be still available since sadly, most are disregarded as extraneous and impractical.

As far as I can tell, the only information readily available on Processing is Shizuka's biased account and the contract the Emoto man had sent. It's in my backpack, in between the pages of an old notebook along with the other documents. I have no desire to take it out. Instead, I find myself drawn to a book on George Berkeley's philosophies of subjective idealism and immaterialism. It's a small book, no bigger than a grade school paperback novel. Something that outlines the basic principles and arguments, a little about the philosopher's life and small bits of commentary. It explains that nothing truly exists as material substance. While physical objects are fundamentally there in the world, it doesn't exist without being perceived by someone – there is nothing that is independent of the mind. Like the age old argument whether there is any real sound if a tree falls in a forest and no one is able to hear it. Once perceived, it takes on a form as an idea in the person's mind and therefore, exists. As such, the world and all matter manifests only as ideas in the perceiver's perspective, and each may differ. Furthermore, that particular reality will only exist within the perceiver alone and not for someone else because everything is relative.

After closing the book, I realize my eyes are burning from exhaustion. My head spins a little. I haven't slept much at all last night. But closing my eyes, within a few minutes, the text I had just read truly sinks in. Maybe it's the darkness beneath my eyelids that allows each word to settle like dirt on the bottom of a pool. Then it culminates into one blow, like someone had slapped me in the face. If all that I perceive are ideas, isn't it possible that contrarily, some ideas don't have material substance at all? Isn't that essentially what schizophrenia and other hallucinatory diagnoses are? I consider the absurd proposal that I'm able to see abstract concepts, perceived and constructed within my mind as imitations of physical reality: it would then be hard to tell what's real or not. And on the occasion that the physical material substance does exist but I have my own interpretation of it, it would furthermore be excessively complicated. There would be something severely wrong with me. If I couldn't trust my own instincts and my own perception, I would be living a lie. A fabricated pseudo-reality. When did it start? Had Shizuka even existed in the first place? Hadn't she been an external force who approached me? When does history become tale? Where does fiction become reality?

It's then when fear grips me and shakes my core like nothing I've ever felt before. I'm quivering all over like a leaf in the wind, sweating profusely, hands wet, slipping over the book, head pounding. Something is rushing through my mind with incredible pressure. It's so sudden I can no longer remain upright. I find it hard to breathe. Or see properly. The bookshelves seem to lean over me as I lean over my table.

I stay there, head on the table until the feeling subsides.

I receive a message on my cell phone at four thirty sharp. It isn't from the number I had called. Meet me at the coffee shop, it says. I don't recognize the number.

Now?

Now, comes the reply.

Who are you?

Come now.

I'm about to text back to ask which coffee shop, but there could only be one I'm known to visit. If someone were to mention a coffee shop and expect me to know, it would be that one. I shoulder my backpack and return the Berkeley book back on the shelf and realize I feel like a new man. Refreshed, as if I had woken from a deep sleep and a long dream. When I think about the world around me being only within my perceptions, I almost forget what I had read. Its details fade away into the background. I look upon the shelves and cubicles. I listen to the rustle of pages and the faint murmurs that converge together like the sound of a symphony. They seem too real to me. Is there any way to tell whether something is real or not after all, if the world is continuously interpreted and reinterpreted by different multiple points of reference and perception?