The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya (6 page)

Evaluating the circumstances would lead to the conclusion that either I was cuckoo in the head or the world had gone out of whack. I was now able to guarantee that the former was out of the question, seeing as I’m always mentally sound as I deliver my witty remarks regarding all of creation. Note how I’m able to make light of the situation with my banter. What the hey.

“…”

I pulled a Nagato and shut up. I was feeling pretty chilly and in more than one way. I can only pretend to be cheerful for so long.

Nagato had turned into a spectacled bookworm, Asahina was an unfamiliar upperclassman, and Koizumi was off at some other school, since he had never transferred to North High.

What’s going on here?

Am I supposed to start all over again? The season isn’t right for that. If this is a reset and I’m supposed to start from the beginning… then I should have been returned to my first day of high school. I don’t know who was responsible for pressing the reset button, but it’s pretty confusing to change the setting without adjusting the flow of time. Just look at how clueless I am now. I thought that was Asahina’s job.

And where is she, anyway? As she goes on with her life without a care in the world while I’ve been hung out to dry…

Where is Haruhi?

Where are you?

Show yourself. This is stressing me out.

“… Damn, why do I have to look for her?”

Or what, you’re no longer here, Haruhi?

Give me a break. I have no idea why I feel this way, but nothing’s going to happen until you show up. It’s unreasonable to leave me by myself to sigh in melancholy. What are you thinking?

I felt like a slave carrying a gigantic boulder up a slope for the construction of a pyramid as I stared up at the cold, overcast sky from my vantage point in the corridor between buildings.

The application form rustled in my pocket.

I returned home to my room to find Shamisen and my sister inside. My sister was smiling innocently as she waved a rod with
a fuzzy head around while tapping at the head of Shamisen, sprawled on the bed. Shamisen’s eyes were narrowed, as though he considered this action an annoyance, though he sporadically reached out with a paw to play along.

“Ah, welcome home.”

My sister looked up at me with a smile.

“Dinner’s almost ready. Time for sup-purr, Shami.”

Shamisen also looked up at me, but he immediately yawned and turned to halfheartedly fight off my sister’s usage of the cat teaser.

Oh, yeah. I still had these two.

“Hey.”

I took the cat teaser and flicked it at my sister’s forehead.

“Do you remember Haruhi? Or Asahina, for that matter. Nagato? Koizumi? Do you remember playing baseball with them and acting in the movie?”

“What’s that, Kyon? No idea.”

I proceeded to lift Shamisen.

“How long has this cat been in our house? Who brought him here?”

My sister’s large eyes widened into saucers.

“Um, last month. You were the one who brought him home? Right? You got him from a friend who left the country. Right, Shami?”

My sister plucked the calico from my hands and began rubbing her cheek against it affectionately. Shamisen, with sleepy eyes, gave me a knowing look.

“Hand him over.”

I took the cat back. Shamisen’s whiskers were quivering with irritation from being treated like an object. I’ll reward him with some dried cat food later.

“I need to talk to this guy. Alone. So get out of my room. Right now.”

“Aw—I wanna talk with him too. That’s not fair, Kyon. Huh?… Talk with Shami? Huh? Really?”

I ignored my sister as I lifted her by the waist and carried her out of my room. After ordering her to stay outside, I shut the door.

“Mom. Kyon’s gone funny in the head—”

It wasn’t long before I heard my sister shouting a potentially true statement as she headed downstairs.

“Okay, Shamisen.”

I sat down cross-legged as I spoke to the valuable male calico sitting on the floor.

“I once told you to never speak again. But you can forget about that now. In fact, it would be very reassuring if you were to speak right now. So, Shamisen. Say something. Anything. You can talk philosophy or natural science or whatever. Doesn’t have to make sense. Just talk.”

Shamisen glanced up at me with a disinterested look. He must have been really bored, since he started grooming himself.

“… Do you understand what I’m saying? You can’t talk, but you can still hear me? Something like that? In that case, stick out your right paw for yes and your left paw for no.”

I stuck my hand, palm up, in front of his nose. Shamisen sniffed at my hand for a bit, but as expected, I suppose, he showed no sign of understanding what I was saying and returned to his grooming.

Well, yeah.

He had only ever spoken while we were filming the movie, and only for a short time. He turned back into a normal cat the second we finished. He can only be associated with the verbs “eat,” “sleep,” and “play,” just like any other cat.

I’ve learned one thing, at least. I’m not in a world with talking cats.

“Duh?”

Exhausted, I fell onto the bed and stretched. Cats weren’t talking. Which meant that the anomaly came when Shamisen was talking. Which meant that nothing was wrong now. But was that truly the case here?

I wish I could become a cat. Then I wouldn’t have to think about any of this, and I could live true to my instincts.

And there I lay, until my sister came to tell me that dinner was ready.

A frozen December eighteenth came to an end, and another day began.

December nineteenth.

Starting today, classes would be shortened for the remainder of the year. This should have happened earlier, but our principal was angry about losing to our local rival in the national mock exam, so he forced the change while preaching about improving academic performance. That part of history hadn’t changed.

The only changes were to my surroundings, North High, and anything SOS Brigade–related, huh? I continued on my trek to school, still caught up in somebody’s arbitrary scheme, and arrived to find that class 1-5 had more absentees today. Taniguchi’s temperature must have finally hit 104 degrees, since he was nowhere to be seen.

And once again Asakura, not Haruhi, was sitting in the seat behind mine.

“Good morning. Are you awake today? I hope you are.”

“More or less.”

I grimaced as I set my bag on my desk. Asakura rested her chin in her hands.

“But opening your eyes doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re awake. You have to recognize what your eyes see before you can begin to understand. How about it? Do you have a grasp on your current circumstances?”

“Asakura.”

I gave Asakura’s pretty face a hard look.

“Either you really don’t remember, or you’re just playing dumb, so let’s make this clear. Have you ever wanted to kill me?”

Asakura’s face clouded in response. She was giving me that look you would give to sick people.

“… It seems that you aren’t awake yet. I have some advice for you. You should check yourself into a hospital soon. Before it’s too late.”

She proceeded to shut her mouth and ignore me as she began chatting with the girl who sat next to her.

I turned back to the front of the classroom, crossed my arms, and glared at the air.

How does this example sound?

Let’s pretend that there was this very unfortunate person. Unfortunate in every possible way, subjective or objective, to the point where an enlightened Siddhartha in his later years would be forced to look away from this embodiment of misfortune, unlucky to the core. One day he (or
she
would work, but I’m lazy so
he
will do) fell asleep, as he always did in the midst of misfortune, and woke up the next day to find that the world had completely changed. A world so wonderful that calling it a utopia
wouldn’t be enough to do it justice. A world where the misfortune in his life had been swept away, and his body and soul were now filled to the brim with joy. He would no longer suffer any further misfortune. In one night, some unknown person had sprung him from hell to heaven.

Naturally, he had no say in the matter. He had been brought here by a stranger whose identity he couldn’t possibly guess. He couldn’t even manage a guess at the motive. It was likely that nobody knew the answer.

So now, should he be happy about his current situation? The changes to the world had eliminated his misfortune. However, there were subtle differences from his former world, and the cause of the change remained a mystery.

Should he be grateful to the unknown benefactor, after evaluating the situation to determine if he was now happy?

I shouldn’t have to tell you that I’m not the person in the example. This story’s on a completely different level.

Ah… I must say that I used a poor example. I hadn’t felt extremely unfortunate before yesterday, and I certainly didn’t feel very fortunate right now.

However, if you ignore the scope of the matter, that example more or less covered my current situation. My nerves had been on a roller-coaster ride for the better part of this year, courtesy of the bizarre happenings associated with Haruhi, but that would no longer be a concern for me, apparently.

However—

Haruhi wasn’t here, Koizumi wasn’t here, Nagato and Asahina were ordinary humans, and the SOS Brigade had vanished without a trace. No aliens, time travel, or ESP. Forget about talking cats. This is an exceedingly ordinary world.

So?

Which one was a better fit for me? Which one would please me more?

Was I happy right now?

After school, I headed to the literary club room out of habit. If you do the same thing every day long enough, your body will move by itself, a typical example of automatic behavior. The same as how you unconsciously wash yourself in a certain order in the shower, like clockwork.

Whenever class ended I would head for the SOS Brigade and drink Asahina’s tea while playing a game with Koizumi and listening to Haruhi’s incoherent babbling. Habits are hard to break, even the bad ones, or especially the bad ones, I suppose.

But the mood was a little different today.

“What do I do with this?”

I was looking at the blank application form as I walked. Nagato probably gave this to me yesterday as an invitation to join the literary club. But I don’t know why she would invite me. Because there weren’t any other members and the club was in danger of getting cut? Still, it was gutsy of her to ask me to join her club after I came out of nowhere and practically assaulted her. I guess that Nagato is still an oddball in this messed-up world.

“Wah.”

I was on my way to the clubhouse when I passed by the Asahina/Tsuruya combo again. It pained me to see the lovely upperclassman jump and cling to Tsuruya the second she saw me, so I quickly bowed and left in a hurry. I can’t wait to return to drinking Asahina’s delicious tea on a daily basis.

This time, I knocked and heard a soft reply. Only then did I open the door.

In the clubroom, Nagato’s gaze swept across my facial epidermis before returning to the book before her. The act of pushing up her glasses almost looked like a greeting to me.

“Was it okay for me to come back?”

Her small head bobbed up and down. But her eyes remained focused on the open book and she never looked up.

I dropped my bag and began looking around for something to do, but the desolate room didn’t provide much to work with, so I was left to stare at the bookshelves.

They were packed with books of all sizes. There were more hardcover books than paperbacks. I’d have to guess that this Nagato was also a fan of thick books.

Silence.

I should have been used to sitting in silence with Nagato, but under the circumstances it was agonizing. I had to say something or I’d have a meltdown.

“Are these books all yours?”

Her response came immediately.

“Some were here before I joined.”

Nagato showed me the cover of the hardback in her hands.

“I borrowed this one. From the public library.”

There was a bar code sticker to show that it belonged to the city. The laminated cover reflected the fluorescent light and for a second Nagato’s glasses were sparkling.

That was the end of the conversation as Nagato returned to quietly reading her thick book and I was left feeling out of place.

The silence was unbearably suffocating. I grasped for a random
topic of conversation and blurted out the first thing that came to mind.

“Do you ever write your own stories?”

A three-quarter beat passed.

“I only read.”

Her eyes, hidden behind the lenses of her glasses, darted toward the computer for a moment, an action I didn’t miss. I see. That would explain what she was doing before I was allowed to use the computer. I became very interested in reading a story written by Nagato. What would she write? Science fiction, I suppose. She wouldn’t write romance, would she?

“…”

It’d always been difficult to start a conversation with Nagato. I could see that it wasn’t any different with this Nagato.