694
“Could you go on with your hypothesis? It’s getting more interesting.”
“They are looking
for a successor to the
one who hears the voice
,” Tengo said.
“But they also have to find a new,
properly functional dohta
. A new Receiver will
need a new Perceiver.”
“In other words, they need to find a new
maza
as well. And in order to do so, they
have to make a new air chrysalis. That sounds like a pretty large-scale operation.”
“Which is why they’re so deadly serious.”
“Exactly.”
“But they can’t be going about this blind,” Tengo said. “They’ve got to have
somebody in mind.”
Komatsu nodded. “I got that impression, too. That’s why they wanted to get rid of
us as fast as they could—so we don’t bother them anymore. I think we were quite a
blot on their personal landscape.”
“How so?”
Komatsu shook his head. He didn’t know either.
“I wonder what message the voice told them until now. And
what connection there
is between the voice and the Little People.”
Komatsu shook his head listlessly again. This, too, went beyond anything the two
of them could imagine.
“Did you see the movie
2001: A Space Odyssey?
”
“I did,” Tengo said.
“We’re like the apes in the movie,” Komatsu said. “The ones with shaggy black
fur, screeching out some nonsense as they dance around the monolith.”
A new pair of customers came into the bar, sat down at the counter like they were
regulars, and ordered cocktails.
“There’s one thing we can say for sure,” Komatsu said,
sounding like he wanted to
wind things down. “Your hypothesis is convincing. It makes sense. I always really
enjoy having these talks with you. But we’re going to back out of this scary minefield,
and probably never see Fuka-Eri or Professor Ebisuno again.
Air Chrysalis
is nothing
more than a harmless fantasy novel, with not a single piece of concrete information in
it. And what that voice is, and what message it’s transmitting, have nothing to do with
us. We need to leave it that way.”
“Get off the boat and get back to life onshore.”
Komatsu nodded. “You got it. I’ll
go to work every day, gathering manuscripts that
don’t make a difference one way or another in order to publish them in a literary
journal. You will go to cram school and teach math to promising young people, and in
between teaching, you’ll write novels. We’ll each go back to our own peaceful,
mundane lives. No rapids, no waterfalls. We’ll quietly grow old. Any objection?”
“We don’t have any other choice, do we?”
Komatsu stretched out the wrinkles next to his nose with his finger. “That’s right.
We have no other choice. I can tell you this—I don’t want to ever be kidnapped again.
Being locked up in that room once is more than enough. If there were a next time, I
might not see the light of day. Just the thought of meeting that duo again makes my
heart quake. They only need to glare at you and you would keel over.”
Komatsu turned to face the bar and signaled with his glass for a third highball. He
stuck a fresh cigarette in his mouth.
695
“But why haven’t you told me this until now? It has been quite
some time since the
kidnapping, over two months. You should have told me earlier.”
“I don’t know,” Komatsu said, slightly inclining his head. “You’re right. I was
thinking I should tell you, but I kept putting it off. I’m not sure why. Maybe I had a
guilty conscience.”
“Guilty conscience?” Tengo said, surprised. He had never expected to hear
Komatsu say that.
“Even I can have a guilty conscience,” Komatsu said.
“About what?”
Komatsu didn’t reply. He narrowed his eyes and rolled the unlit cigarette around
between his lips.
“Does Fuka-Eri know her parents have died?” Tengo asked.
“I think she probably does. I imagine at some point Professor Ebisuno told her
about it.”
Tengo nodded. Fuka-Eri must have known about it a long time ago. He had a
distinct feeling she did. He was the only one who hadn’t been told.
“So we get out of the boat and return to our lives onshore,” Tengo repeated.
“That’s right. We edge away from the minefield.”
“But even if we want to do that, do you think we can go back
to our old lives that
easily?”
“All we can do is try,” Komatsu said. He struck a match and lit the cigarette.
“What specifically bothers you?”
“Lots of things around us are already starting to fall into strange patterns. Some
things have already been transformed, and it may not be easy for them to go back the
way they were.”
“Even if our lives are on the line?”
Tengo gave an ambiguous shake of his head. He had been feeling for some time
that he was caught up in a strong current, one that never wavered. And that current
was dragging him off to some unknown place. But he couldn’t really explain it to
Komatsu.
Tengo didn’t reveal to Komatsu that the novel he was writing now carried on the
world in
Air Chrysalis
. Komatsu probably wouldn’t welcome the news. And Sakigake
would certainly be less than pleased. If he wasn’t careful, he
might step into a
different minefield, or get the people around him mixed up in it. But a narrative takes
its own direction, and continues on, almost automatically. And whether he liked it or
not, Tengo was a part of that world. To him, this was no longer a fictional world. This
was the real world, where red blood spurts out when you slice open your skin with a
knife. And in the sky in this world, there were two moons, side by side.
