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Aomame closed her eyes. She curled up and pressed her cheek against his chest.
Her ear was right above his heart. She was listening to his thoughts. “I needed to
know this,” Aomame said. “That we’re in the same world, seeing the same things.”
Tengo suddenly noticed that the whirling pillar rising up inside him had vanished.
All that surrounded him now was a quiet winter night. There were
lights on in a few
of the windows in the apartment building across the way, hinting at people other than
themselves alive in this world. This struck the two of them as exceedingly strange,
even as somehow illogical—that other people could also exist, and be living their
lives, in the same world.
Tengo leaned over slightly and breathed in the fragrance of Aomame’s hair.
Beautiful, straight hair. Her small, pink ears peeped out like shy little creatures.
It was such a long time
, Aomame thought.
It was such a long time
, Tengo thought too. At the same time, though,
he noticed
how the twenty years that had passed now held no substance. It had all passed by in
an instant, and took but an instant to be filled in.
Tengo took his hand out of his pocket and put it around her shoulder. Through his
palm he could feel the wholeness of her body. He raised his face and looked up at the
moons again. Through breaks in the clouds, the odd pair of moons was still bathing
the earth in a strange mix of color. The clouds made their way leisurely across the
sky. Under that light, Tengo once again keenly felt the mind’s ability to relativize
time. Twenty years was a long time. But Tengo knew that if
he were to meet Aomame
in another twenty years, he would feel the same way he did now. Even if they were
both over fifty, he would still feel the same mix of excitement and confusion in her
presence. His heart would be filled with the same joy and certainty.
Tengo kept these thoughts to himself, but he knew that Aomame was listening
carefully to these unspoken words. Her little pink ear pressed against his chest. She
was hearing everything that went on in his heart, like a person who can trace a map
with his fingertip and conjure up vivid, living scenery.
“I want to stay here forever and forget all
about time,” Aomame said in a small
voice. “But there’s something the two of us have to do.”
We have to move on
, Tengo thought.
“That’s right, we have to move on,” Aomame said. “The sooner the better. We
don’t have much time left. Though I can’t yet put into words where we’re going.”
There’s no need for words
, Tengo thought.
“Don’t you want to know where we’re going?” Aomame asked.
Tengo shook his head. The winds of reality had not extinguished the flame in his
heart. There was nothing more significant.
“We will never be apart,” Aomame said. “That’s more clear than anything. We
will never let go of each other’s hand again.”
A new cloud appeared and gradually swallowed up the moons. The shadow
enveloping the world grew one shade deeper.
“We have to hurry,” Aomame whispered. The two of them stood up on the slide.
Once again their shadows became one. Like little children groping their way through
a dark forest, they held on tightly to each other’s hand.
“We’re
going to leave the cat town,” Tengo said, speaking aloud for the first time.
Aomame treasured this fresh, newborn voice.
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“The cat town?”
“The town at the mercy of a deep loneliness during the day and, come night, of
large cats. There’s a beautiful river running through it, and an old stone bridge
spanning the river. But it’s not where we should stay.”
We call
this world
by different names
, Aomame thought.
I call it
the year 1Q84,
while he calls it the
cat town.
But it all means the same thing
. Aomame squeezed his
hand even tighter.
“You’re right, we’re going to leave the cat town now. The two of us, together,”
Aomame said. “Once we leave this town, day or night, we will never be apart.”
As the two of them hurried out of the park, the pair of moons remained hidden
behind the slowly moving clouds. The eyes of the moons were covered. And the boy
and the girl, hand in hand, made their way out of the forest.
