The Intrigues of Haruhi Suzumiya (30 page)

“The eye of the hurricane is calm, but all around it rages a terrible storm. There may be someone who looks in on the center from outside. Are you not the one who’s kept so busy by all these events? If you were the screenwriter, would you cast yourself in such a tiring role?”

This kind of vague explanation was Koizumi’s specialty. But I owed him one, so I decided to listen, for once, although it was doubtful that I’d be able to remember everything he said. If I had that kind of memory, my grades would’ve been a little better than they were.

“If I may speak frankly, my current problem is that I seem to be in the minority. If asked which side I belong to, the SOS Brigade comes to mind, first and foremost. My feelings tend toward it, rather than toward the Agency. So this is what I think. If the Agency gave me an order that ran counter to the interests of the SOS Brigade, I might well find myself upon the horns of a dilemma.”

I had prepared myself to listen to another lengthy speech from Koizumi, but just this once, his digression was a brief one. He gave me an easy way and walked away.

I returned home and sat down on the floor of my room, which contained Shamisen and Shamisen’s scattered fur.

My activities with (Michiru) Asahina were finished. Asa-hina the Younger was next. Which meant that I still had work to do.

In my hand was future letter #6.

Since #5 had instructed me to return (Michiru) Asahina to her previous time plane, all that remained was to follow the instructions in #6. But still…

Would everything really be over then? I couldn’t help but feel like there was still something else, though I had no idea why. It was like a tiny sardine bone stuck in my mind.

But no matter how I turned it over in my head, without any new input there would be no new answers, so I reread all the letters I’d gotten from Asahina the Elder. Even now they were still completely incomprehensible, the presumed merits of our actions utterly baffling. Or so they had been.

I was looking at the instructions on the third letter.

This was the only one that was linked with Haruhi’s activities. This was the only place where the entire SOS Brigade had been
involved. The fruitless treasure hunt. We’d found nothing, as I had known we would…

I felt like I was on the verge of figuring something out when my sister came barging in to inform me that dinner was ready, and I wound up leaving my room with a nagging feeling. I took a bath after dinner, and midway through washing my hair I’d pretty much forgotten whatever I’d nearly hit upon. By the time I got into the bath proper and submerged myself up to my chin in hot water, the only thought in my mind was that of an early bedtime.

But then, right at the end of the day, one last order came in. It wasn’t from a time traveler; it was from Haruhi, and it didn’t come via a note in my shoe locker, but instead through my sister, carrying the phone.

“Kyon, phone! It’s Haru-nyan!” she said, barging right into the bathroom and giving me the handset. I waved my hands and shooed her out of the room, then put the receiver to my ear.

“Hello?”

“Hey. Are you in the bath?”

Haruhi’s voice echoed off the walls of the bathroom. I was in the bathroom, but she’d better not get any weird ideas, I told her.

“Like I’d ever do that, stupid. Anyway, we’re meeting up at the station tomorrow.”

Why was she calling me at this hour? She should’ve just told me about this before we split up this afternoon, I said.

“Aw, c’mon. I’ve got my own circumstances, you know.”

Did she ever think about anybody’s circumstances but her own? I asked.

“Oh, whatever! Anyway, we should meet up in the afternoon. Let’s say two o’clock. You don’t need to bring anything.”

And what about her?

“That’s my business. Tomorrow at two. Got it? If you don’t come, rest assured you will regret it. Punctuality above all!”

Haruhi-style phone etiquette involved delivering rapid-fire
instructions, then hanging up immediately. I emerged from the bathtub, handset in hand, and thought it over as I toweled myself dry.

So there was something left, after all. What was it this time? So far this February, Haruhi had started out in ennui mode, then done Setsubun, a treasure hunt, and a two-day search for mysterious phenomena. Would this be the last?

Hold on—why hadn’t (Michiru) Asahina told me about this? She had never said anything about a station-front rendezvous on Monday. Perhaps she wasn’t involved. Perhaps she hadn’t told me because she’d never known herself—or perhaps she
did
know and had said nothing.

I just didn’t want to hear that this part of history never existed.

Showing up at a specified time, in a specified place was fast becoming a conditioned response for me, and arriving five minutes before two and seeing the rest of the club assembled and waiting for me was more normal than spring following winter.

For once Haruhi didn’t berate me for tardiness, nor did she head for the café. Instead we went to the bus terminal, where Haruhi herded me onto a northbound bus.

Asahina, I noticed, was constantly yawning, then hurrying to hide her mouth. When I looked more closely, I saw that Haruhi was rubbing her eyes as though shortchanged on sleep herself. When she noticed me watching her, she gave me a glare and looked out the window as the green of the scenery turned deeper.

Our bus was bound for the mountains, along the same route we’d taken the other day to reach Mt. Tsuruya.

The bus stop we got out at was the same too. And just when it looked like we were going to climb to the summit using the same route—

“If we go this way, it’s the long way around. It was the back way
originally. We’re going to go around to the south side and climb from there.”

Haruhi started striding along, followed by Asahina and Nagato, who evidently had no problem with another hiking session. Koizumi scratched his chin for a moment.

“Well, shall we go? We’ve gotten this far, so neither of us can back out now—we’re alike in that way,” he said inexplicably, chuckling like a pigeon.

Haruhi circled the base of the mountain, making for the south side. I started to get an idea of where she wanted to go. I’d been there a couple of times myself recently. Two days in a row, in fact.

The only things around us other than mountains were dry fields. The first time I’d been here, I’d been climbing up with (Michiru) Asahina. The second time, I’d been descending the mountain with the SOS Brigade.

Haruhi took the lead up the animal path that led to the spot with the gourd-shaped rock.

“Of course, no wonder…”

The day we’d moved the rock, I’d noticed that Asahina seemed to know the way very well. I now saw that it was because she’d been there twice before.

Asahina ascended rather perilously, being forcibly dragged behind Haruhi, Nagato guarding her from tumbling back down.

We soon reached the spot. As soon as Haruhi emerged into the flat clearing on the mountainside, she sat down on the gourd-shaped rock as though it were a favorite chair.

“Kyon, Koizumi, this is treasure hunt round two! When you think about it, giving up after just one day of digging doesn’t show much dedication. Treasure hunting is about keeping at it until you find something!”

Haruhi smiled brilliantly and produced two garden spades from within her coat, offering them to Koizumi and me.

“To be honest, I wanted to use big shovels and dig up every cor
ner like last time, but I’ll let you off the hook this time. You can use those spades and just dig right here.”

Haruhi indicated the spot right in front of her—in other words, directly beside the gourd rock. It was the same spot Koizumi and I had dug fully two meters down. But before I could complain that we’d already dug there—

“It’s pretty common to find lost items in places you think you’ve already looked, right? Well, treasure’s the same way. You’ve got to look over and over again in the same place for it. And if I say there’s treasure, there’s treasure.”

Haruhi sounded more confident than the dog in “Hanasaka Jiisan,” like she was sure we were bound to meet wealth and good fortune. For whatever reason, Asahina just nodded happily in agreement, with Nagato being the only one whose expression was unchanged. There with the spade in my hand for no particular reason, I finally began to understand the meaning of Koizumi’s smile.

The digging didn’t take much time or effort. The soil had already been dug up and replaced once, so it was soft enough that our spades were more than adequate for the task. We hadn’t dug very deeply when our spades’ tips bumped into the edge of something hard.

As Haruhi grinned down from above, I dug the object loose and pulled it out of the ground. The rectangular box did not, it must be said, look like something from the Genroku era. It was more like a tin that cookies or rice crackers would come in. It hadn’t been here three days earlier, when Koizumi and I had been searching. Someone had to have come up here since then and bury it, I was sure of it—no points for guessing who.

“Open it,” said Haruhi, looking like the “Tongue-Cut Sparrow” watching the old man pick the smaller basket. The folktale was about greed and how the smaller basket was filled with treasure instead of monsters, so in this case, she was definitely thinking this was treasure.

I took the tin in hand and popped off the lid.

“…”

I saw neither jewels nor gold coins—but I doubted anyone would dispute me were I to call it “treasure,” nonetheless.

There were six small boxes delicately wrapped in beautiful wrapping paper—and tied up with ribbon, obviously.

Finally—finally, was all I could say.

I remembered what day it was. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say I realized. It was a day even more important than July seventh, Tanabata—at least it was for high school guys.

Today was February fourteenth.

In other words: Valentine’s Day.

“They’re handmade,” explained Haruhi, looking askance. “We worked from noon to nightfall to make them. Mikuru, Yuki, and I pulled a late shift for you guys! A late shift! Originally I wanted to make them from pure cacao, but then it was like, ‘Let’s not get too crazy.’ So we went with chocolate cake.”

Each of the three girls had written our names on the labels that adorned the wrapped packages—both of us got a cake from each of them.

Koizumi put down his spade, and after carefully brushing off his hands, he picked up one of the packages. “To Koizumi, from Mikuru,” it said. Asahina had made treasures just for us.

“You bet she did!” Haruhi fired off like a machine gun. “We all did! It was pretty fun, and we really gave it our all! But whatever, I was just worried that everything was going to get out of hand, and it was making me space out all the time, and to be honest I was sort of worried I was just falling into society’s trap, but so what? It’s such a broadly accepted tradition; I feel bad for the people who think it’s just a conspiracy by candy companies! It’s fine! Yuki and Mikuru and I had fun; that’s what’s important.
We were thinking of putting hot peppers into them, but—Hey, Kyon, what’s that look?”

It was nothing. I was just—grateful. It was true. I’d forgotten entirely that today was that day that made men the world over nervous. If I’d remembered, maybe I would’ve prepared an appropriate reaction, but having weathered this surprise attack, I had nothing to say to the three brigade girls. It was hard to ad-lib clever words to hide your embarrassment. I doubted I had enough life experience to pull it off.

The strength drained from my body. All the riddles had been solved. Haruhi’s strange mood and behavior starting in February. Asahina traveling back in time but finding it difficult to talk about the treasure hunt. Taniguchi’s sulking and insistence that he envied me.

Haruhi had been thinking about this all along—how to give us chocolates on Valentine’s Day. She seriously couldn’t get over herself, not even a little. How twisted did someone have to be to make us go on this treasure hunt, dig all these holes, then fill them back up again, instead of just giving chocolate to us in the clubroom? Wait, that meant—ah ha. Tsuruya was in on it too. The treasure map had been a pack of lies. The reason Haruhi had given up on the treasure hunt was because she already knew there was no treasure. The treasure Haruhi had in mind had yet to be buried at that point—the chocolate cake of which Koizumi and I now each had three pieces. That had been the cause of the weeks of uncertainty on Haruhi’s part. Nagato and Asahina had gotten dragged into it as well.

What fools we were—both Haruhi, for coming up with such a plan, and me, for not seeing through it.

“These are just friendly chocolates, though! Just friendly. I don’t actually want to have to say stuff like ‘just friendly,’ though. And chocolate cake counts as chocolate, right?”

Haruhi’s voice echoing in my head like insects chirping in a thicket, I summoned my strength and looked up.

Haruhi glared at me with an angry face. Asahina wore a gently teasing smile, and Nagato regarded me expressionlessly.

“Thank you very much. I will savor every bite.”

Koizumi beat me to the punch.

Haruhi’s lips twisted into a smirk. “I recommend eating them as soon as you get home. Just gobble ’em down in one go—don’t leave them on the family shrine for your ancestors to eat, got that?” She turned her head away hurriedly, then stood. “Okay then, let’s go home. The event’s over, and if we don’t leave right away, we’ll get stuck in traffic. I’m sleepy. We worked on those until sunrise, I’ll have you know! And then we came up here in the morning and buried them, and I only caught a couple of hours of sleep at Yuki’s place. The same goes for Mikuru and Yuki!”

We were on our way home. As we stood waiting at the bus stop, Haruhi stood as far away from me as possible, gazing off in the distance, avoiding my eyes.
Oh, brother.

I whispered to Asahina, who stood next to me.