The Wavering of Haruhi Suzumiya (14 page)

We split the bill, and today’s SOS Brigade activities came to an end. When I went home, I was greeted by this:

“Oh, Kyon! Perfect timing—there’s a phone call for you!”

My sister smiled, holding out the receiver with one hand while dragging Shamisen around with the other. I took both the phone and the cat and went into my room.

As I’d expected, the call was from Nakagawa.

“This is really hard to say, but…”

Nakagawa had informed me that he was calling from a pay phone at the hospital, and from the tone of his voice, he indeed sounded reluctant to continue.

“Could you give her the message that I’m withdrawing my marriage proposal?”

He sounded like a midsize company president begging for an extension on a loan.

“Want to tell me why?”

Meanwhile, I sounded like an irritated creditor facing a helpless business owner.

“After creating this one-sided fantasy, you’re backing out after one day? What have you been doing the past few months? You meet Nagato face-to-face, and suddenly you’re not interested? Depending on your explanation, I may not have much to say to you.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t really understand it myself, but…”

Nakagawa sounded genuinely contrite.

“When she rushed over to the hospital to see me, I was so happy. I should thank you for that. But when I saw her, she didn’t have that luminous aura. No matter how I looked at her, she looked like an ordinary girl—no, she was an ordinary girl. I just don’t understand what happened.”

I thought of Nagato’s face, with its uncertainty-inspiring expression.

“Kyon, I’ve been thinking about it, and I’ve finally come to a conclusion. I thought I had fallen in love with Nagato, but that feeling’s gone. I can only assume that I was completely mistaken.”

I asked what he was mistaken about.

“Mistaken about love at first sight. When you really think about it, there’s just no such thing as falling in love. I was wrong all along.”

Aha. “So then, Nakagawa, what of your description of being struck dumb at the sight of the angelic light surrounding Nagato? Of being frozen stiff with a single look?”

“I just don’t know.”

He sounded as apologetic as a meteorologist who’d been asked to give a weather forecast for the next century.

“I just have no idea. I can only guess that it was all in my imagination…”

“I see.”

I sounded brusque, but I didn’t really mean to attack Nakagawa. Actually, I wasn’t that surprised. Things had turned out mostly how I guessed they would. As soon as Nakagawa had made me listen to his mad ravings, I’d wondered if this would be the way of things.

“All right, Nakagawa. I’ll pass that on to Nagato. She won’t think badly of you. I don’t think she was that into the idea to begin with. She’ll forget it in an instant.”

I heard a sigh of relief through the receiver.

“Okay. I hope so. Please tell her how sorry I am. There must’ve been something wrong with me.”

Most likely, there had been. Nakagawa hadn’t had any doubt, but something happened to him. And now, he was back to normal—as though someone had cast a restoration spell on him.

I chatted with Nakagawa for a while, and when his phone card ran low on time, we said our good-byes. We’d probably meet again, eventually.

After hanging up, I called another number.

“Can you meet? Soon?”

I arranged a time and place to meet up with the person on the other end of the call, then picked up my scarf. Shamisen was sprawled out asleep on my coat; he rolled onto the floor and gave me an accusatory glare when I pulled it out from under him.

Yesterday had been difficult, and with all the running around, today had been no better, but soon the day would come to an end.

I rode my bike to that mecca for weirdos, the park in front of the station near Nagato’s apartment. This was the place where Nagato had first called me to back in May, as well as the place where I’d first awoken when I traveled back in time with
Asahina to the Tanabata festival three years previous. And more recently, I’d sat here with Asahina the Elder during my second trip back in time. Ah, the memories. They all came flooding back to me.

Sitting on that same old bench waiting for me was a hooded Jawa-like figure. Lit only by the streetlamp, she looked as though she was emerging from the darkness itself.

“Nagato.”

I called to the small figure that was looking right at me.

“Sorry for calling you out so suddenly. Just like I told you on the phone, Nakagawa changed his mind.”

Nagato stood naturally, then nodded.

“I see.”

I looked into her dark eyes.

“Think maybe you could tell me the whole story now?”

I’d ridden over pretty quickly, to keep my body warm. I could withstand the night’s chill a little longer.

“I can understand why Nakagawa might have fallen in love with you so quickly. Everyone has a type, after all. But why would he suddenly change his mind today? It’s unnatural. And with the football game… it’s just too much to swallow that he would get an injury today that just makes him forget about his feelings.”

“…”

“You did something. I know I saw you doing something during the game. You were the one who made him have that accident. It was you. Am I right?”

“Yes.”

Nagato’s answer was simple. She looked up at me.

“I am not the one he saw.”

She sounded as though she were reading an essay aloud.

“What he saw was the Data Overmind.”

I listened quietly while Nagato continued.

“He has the ability to use me as a terminal to access the Data Overmind.”

The cold wind made my ears hurt.

“But I doubt he understood what he was seeing. Mere organic life-forms like humans are on a different level of consciousness than the Data Overmind.”

I saw a radiance shining out from behind her… light as though from heaven itself. That’s how Nakagawa had explained it.

Nagato continued her emotionless explanation.

“What he probably saw was accumulated transcendental knowledge and understanding. While what would have passed through the terminal was insignificant, the information would have overwhelmed him.”

So it was a misunderstanding, then. I looked at Nagato’s tousled hair and sighed. What Nakagawa was sure had been Nagato’s true inner nature had simply been a bit of the Data Overmind. I don’t really understand the details, but Nagato’s boss possesses a history and a power far beyond the reckoning of any human. It’s hardly strange that by accidentally accessing that, Nakagawa got overwhelmed—like a computer freezing when its browser crashes.

“And Nakagawa got confused and thought he’d fallen in love or whatever, then?”

“Yes.”

“And then you… corrected his feelings?”

The messy bowl-cut hair nodded.

“I analyzed, then deleted, his powers,” answered Nagato. “Human intellectual capacity is insufficient for interfacing with the Data Overmind. I projected that eventually he would suffer adverse effects.”

I could believe it. One glance at Nagato had been enough to send Nakagawa into a daze, making ten-year plans a few months later. I shuddered to think how crazy he might have gotten if he were left alone.

But there was still one thing I didn’t understand.

“Why did Nakagawa even have that power? Has he always had the ability to see the Data Overmind through you?”

“He probably acquired it three years ago.”

So it all goes back to that again, eh? The reason Nagato, Asahina, and Koizumi are all here can also be traced back to something that happened three years ago. Or rather, something Haruhi made happen.

That was when I realized it.

The ability Nagato had mentioned—I understood now. Nakagawa might very well have been a candidate to become an esper like Koizumi. Haruhi had definitely done something three years earlier. Something unimaginable, to create a temporal rift, to create an explosion of data, to create espers. So it was entirely possible that Nakagawa could be something like Koizumi. Koizumi’s strange statement made sense now. Whether he knew all along or just found out in the last couple of days, he must have known about Nakagawa’s power. That’s what he meant by “mysterious friends.”

“Possibly,” agreed Nagato.

Or it might be… I felt a shiver that wasn’t just because of the cold. There was no reason that such events were limited to three years ago. Was Haruhi still giving people supernatural abilities? Just like she made cherry blossoms bloom in autumn or turned shrine pigeons into doves? Like that, but with humans?

“…”

Nagato stood and began to walk away, not answering—or perhaps she’d said all she came to say. I stood still as she passed by me, beginning to fade into the darkness like a wandering spirit about to ascend to the Buddha.

“Wait. Can I ask you just one thing?”

I called out to her form, feeling something I couldn’t put into words.

Nakagawa had fallen so deeply in love with Nagato that he’d entrusted an incredibly embarrassing love letter to me. To my knowledge, no one else has ever confessed their love to her so directly. What did she think when I read the proposal to her the next day? What did it feel like, hearing someone say, “I love you; I want to spend my life with you,” only to find out it was all just a mistake?

The question spilled out of me:

“Were you disappointed?”

In the months since I met her, we’ve done a lot together. That’s true of Haruhi, Asahina, and Koizumi too, but nearly all the incidents involved Nagato somehow, and you could say that she makes my internal pendulum swing the farthest. Haruhi will always get by on her own power. Asahina is fine the way she is, and who cares what happens to Koizumi? But Nagato—

I had to ask. I couldn’t help myself.

“When you found out his confession was a mistake, were you a little disappointed?”

“…”

Nagato stopped, then turned her head just enough that I could tell she was looking back. A sudden wind blew her hair across her face.

The night wind was bitterly cold as it sliced over my ears. I waited for a bit, and eventually these small, quiet words were carried to me on the chilly air:

“… Just a bit.”

The middle portion of the winter break crept asymptomatically toward the new year; originally we had been looking forward to the mystery that Koizumi and his comrades had set up for us, but the day we arrived at Tsuruya’s vacation house, we found ourselves wandering within its daydreamlike interior, and to make matters worse, Nagato collapsed out on the ski slope, which got even Haruhi freaked out.

Fortunately, upon returning to normal dimensionality, Nagato soon recovered, but no matter how you figure it, it was a crazy New Year’s Eve Eve—or December thirtieth, as the calendar figures it.

The next day. New Year’s Eve.

We had finally come to the brink of a project that had been in the planning stages for some time—the winter version of the mystery game that that overachiever Koizumi had set up when we’d visited a remote island during summer vacation. Of course, this time we knew it was a game, but it was still the main event of this whole excursion. As for the disaster on the snowy mountain;
the phantom villa; the nude, fake Asahina; Euler’s theorem (or something); the feverish Nagato fainting—those were all unanticipated and undesired incidents. They weren’t Haruhi’s style, and I’d like to tell whoever or whatever was responsible that they’ll get what’s coming to them. Although Nagato was incapacitated, Koizumi and I (it’s hard to say how useful Asahina the Younger was) managed somehow. And now in the same villa that housed us, we had Tsuruya as well as Koizumi’s associates, none of whom should be underestimated. It would be stranger if something didn’t happen.

So.

With the preparations completed, things could now proceed in an SOS Brigade–style—or should I say Haruhi-style—fashion.

I had lingering doubts about whether this was the right way to end the year, but since I was the only one who seemed to hold such doubts, I kept my own counsel.

Just to be clear, the dramatis personae of this episode were: me, Haruhi, Nagato, Asahina, Koizumi, Tsuruya, my little sister, Shamisen the calico cat, Mori, and Arakawa, along with brothers Keiichi and Yutaka Tamaru, who arrived that day.

At Haruhi’s urging, Koizumi’s Mystery Tour Part Two began.

The morning of New Year’s Eve. After polishing off the breakfast that Mori and Arakawa prepared for us, we assembled downstairs in Tsuruya’s villa. The first floor was an open common area. The floor consisted of around twenty tatami mats arranged upon a Japanese cedar base, almost like a stage for performing Noh or Kyogen theater. In the middle of the room was a sunken hearth table that could easily seat eight people. The space seemed designed for letting guests relax and make merry to their hearts’ content. The floors were also heated, of course, and a quiet heater fan in the corner blew a warm breeze through the room, so both the common area and the hallway were kept effortlessly warm.

Through the windows, the clear blue of the sky above the ski slope was perfectly smooth, as though airbrushed onto a smooth acrylic board—but there would be no snow sports today.