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Maybe I can
look at it this way—the problem is not with me but with the world around me. It’s not
that my consciousness or mind has given rise to some abnormality, but rather that
some kind of incomprehensible power has caused the world around me to change
.
The more she thought about it, the more natural her second hypothesis began to
feel to her because, no matter how much she searched for it, she could not find in
herself a gap or distortion in her mind.
And so she carried this hypothesis forward:
It’s not me but the world that’s deranged
.
Yes, that settles it
.
101
At some point in time, the world I knew either vanished or withdrew, and another
world came to take its place. Like the switching of a track. In other words, my mind,
here and now, belongs to the world that was, but the world itself has already changed
into something else. So far, the actual changes carried out in that process are limited
in number. Most of the new world has been retained from the world I knew, which is
why the changes have presented (virtually) no impediments to my daily life—so far.
But the changes that have already taken place will almost certainly create other,
greater, differences around me as time goes by. Those differences will expand little by
little and will, in some cases, destroy the logicality of the actions I take. They could
well cause me to commit errors that are—for me—literally fatal
.
Parallel worlds
.
Aomame scowled as if she had bitten into something horribly sour, though the
scowl was not as extreme as the earlier one. She started tapping her ballpoint pen
against her teeth again, and released a deep groan. The high school student behind her
heard it rattle in her throat, but this time pretended not to hear.
This is starting to sound like science fiction
.
Am I just making up a self-serving hypothesis as a form of self-defense? Maybe it’s
just that I’ve gone crazy. I see my own mind as perfectly normal, as free of distortion.
But don’t all mental patients insist that they are perfectly fine and it’s the world
around them that is crazy? Aren’t I just proposing the wild hypothesis of parallel
worlds as a way to justify my own madness?
This calls for the detached opinion of a third party
.
But going to a psychiatrist for analysis is out of the question. The situation is far
too complicated for that, and there’s too much that I can’t talk about. Take my recent
“work,” for example, which, without a doubt, is against the law. I mean, I’ve been
secretly killing men with a homemade ice pick. I couldn’t possibly tell a doctor about
that, even if the men themselves have been utterly despicable, twisted individuals
.
Even supposing I could successfully conceal my illegal activities, the legal parts of
the life I’ve led since birth could hardly be called normal, either. My life is like a
trunk stuffed with dirty laundry. It contains more than enough material to drive any
one human being to mental aberration—maybe two or three people’s worth. My sex
life alone would do. It’s nothing I could talk about to anyone
.
No, I can’t go to a doctor. I have to solve this on my own
.
Let me pursue this hypothesis a little further if I can
.
If something like this has actually happened—if, that is, this world I’m standing in
now has in fact taken the place of the old one—then when, where, and how did the
switching of the tracks occur, in the most concrete sense?
Aomame made another concentrated effort to work her way back through her
memory.
She had first become aware of the changes in the world a few days earlier, when
she took care of the oil field development specialist in a hotel room in Shibuya. She
had left her taxi on the elevated Metropolitan Expressway No. 3, climbed down an
emergency escape stairway to Route 246, changed her stockings, and headed for
Sangenjaya Station on the Tokyu Line. On the way to the station, she passed a young
policeman and noticed for the first time that something about his appearance was
different.
That’s when it all started. Which means the world switched tracks just
102
before that. The policeman I saw near home that morning was wearing the same old
uniform and carrying an old-fashioned revolver
.
Aomame recalled the odd sensation she had felt when she heard the opening of
Janá
č
ek’s
Sinfonietta
in the taxi caught in traffic. She had experienced it as a kind of
physical
wrenching
, as if the components of her body were being wrung out like a
rag.
Then the driver told me about the Metropolitan Expressway’s emergency
stairway. I took off my high heels and climbed down. The entire time I climbed down
that precarious stairway in my stocking feet with the wind tearing at me, the opening
fanfare of Janá
č
ek’s
Sinfonietta
echoed on and off in my ears. That may have been
when it started
, she thought.
There had been something strange about that taxi driver, too. Aomame still
remembered his parting words. She reproduced them as precisely as she could in her
mind:
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