The unraveling continued, climbing from my neck to my brain, which was slowly turning to thread. Soon I wouldn’t be able to think—so what should be my last thought?
Of course! A memory. Of someone I loved.
Yoji Kaneda.
I thought about Yoji’s face. When my brain was nothing but a white thread, it would probably fall to the earth in a shape that matched Yoji’s profile.
But, hold on a minute…
Wait!
What?
What did he look like?
No! It couldn’t be!
I really couldn’t remember what he looked like.
Yoji.
Yoji.
Yoji.
Shit no! I couldn’t remember at all.
Yoji.
Yoji.
Yoji.
Nope. I was going to become nothing but thread, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember.
Had every bit of Yoji, every memory, turned to thread?
No, really?
I wanted to see his face one more time.
Yoji!
Pitch black, and I’m still having this nightmare—nothing but the sound of the thread unraveling in my head, and the feeling that it’s being reeled in through the sole of my foot. But when I open my eyes it’s already morning…or later…The light coming in through the crack in the curtains looks suspiciously bright.
Definitely one of the worst five nightmares of all time.
The top of the list, though, the worst one of all time, I was at this funeral with all these people sitting around me, and I realized it was my brother’s funeral. But just as that was sinking in, the guy who had killed him showed up and started attacking all the mourners. I ran off at top speed, but he ran after me. He was catching up with me when I suddenly noticed Miyuki, the little girl who lives next door—she really does, in real life—so I shoved her toward him. When I turned around again, she was all bloody and screaming hysterically, but I kept on running…
That was one creepy nightmare. And even though it was only a dream, I still feel guilty whenever I see Miyuki walking by on her way to school. In the dream I knew exactly what I was doing: I was sacrificing Miyuki to that monster to save my own skin.
I guess I’m just a cruel bitch. Scratch away the surface and you get someone who’d throw her own sister or the little girl next door under the train to save herself.
I lay on my bed and twisted my left foot around so I could see the arch. No thread. Duh. But I was still relieved. There was something too creepy about the idea of becoming just a long piece of string. Spine-tingling, as they say.
I felt exhausted and decided to stay in bed for a while. So as I lay there, I tried to remember Yoji’s face. Bingo! I could see him there in front of the nurse’s office after he’d rescued me from the bathroom, worrying about my bloody knee. I remembered!
But why was that?
How could I remember something when I was awake that I couldn’t recall when I was asleep?
It was all the same brain, but it seemed like a completely different organ when I was sleeping. Maybe it was. Could your brain be one way when you’re awake and then become totally another when you’re sleeping?
Or maybe there were two brains.
One for when you were awake, and another for when you were asleep?
No, that’s too weird.
Your brain—my brain—is probably just a little fuzzy when you’re asleep, so it can do some really weird things but forget how to do the simple, obvious tasks. It can imagine you being stretched out into a really long string, but it can’t remember the face of the boy you like. Love. Which really sucks.
Maybe what I need to do is carve Yoji’s face deeper into my brain so that a little thing like falling asleep won’t make me forget him again. What if sometime something really terrible happens and I’m just about to lose consciousness, or even dying or something, and what if, just as I’m blacking out, I can’t remember how he looks?
I need to be able to remember Yoji easily and quickly.
But how?
Well, you might start by seeing him again, Aiko.
You’ve got a point, Kerstin.
So I grabbed my phone from the table by the bed and checked the time. Ten minutes after noon. Lunchtime. Flat on my stomach, cheek on my pillow, I jot off a text.
Good morning! Just woke up. Eating lunch? Want to skip class and go somewhere? Go where? He’d want to know. “To find out about Sano or something.” Then he’d probably ask how we’d do that. “I’m not sure how, but there must be something we can do. Anyway, we should meet.”
I was pretty sure he wouldn’t refuse. He was a good guy. Sano was an asshole, but Yoji was always nice, even to him. So if there was any way he could manage it, he would try to help. He almost never skipped class, but he would probably even do that if I asked him. Come to think of it, he must have been skipping yesterday when he rescued me. I remember once, in the middle of some class, he stuck his hand up and said he felt dizzy. He ran out of the room and never came back. He’s a serious guy, but he knows how to handle himself when he’s got more important things to do.
I added to the text: I have an idea about what happened to Sano.
And it was true, I did have an idea—sort of. I wondered how much this would interest Yoji.
Akihiko Sano had stayed another half hour after I left the hotel. Then he’d gone downstairs, stopped at the front desk to pay the bill, and had vanished. Nobody knew where he’d gone after that, but he never got home—that much was certain. Though we did know what had happened to his toe. At some point during the night, a package
