Leaving aside for the moment the question of whether it’s crazier to treat people as objects or objects as people, it’s abundantly clear which one is more of a nuisance─so I’ll omit everything that happened after that. And, some time later.
I was in a certain hospital in the Kyoto suburbs. Completely healed in a week─that was the prognosis I’d been given. How this outcome came about, I’m actually not going to tell you. The one thing I will say is that if the weakest wants to roll with the strongest, it doesn’t come for free; there’s a price that must be paid. But if that price is nothing more than a few broken bones, I’d call that a good deal. I’m supposed to go on a trip with Kunagisa at the beginning of next month, so as long as I’m out of the hospital by then, I’ll be happy.
Life in the hospital really isn’t so boring. I’d only just started reading that book Miiko lent me when Aikawa first showed up, and as long as there’s room to stretch out my legs and get some sleep, one place is pretty much as good as another as far as I’m concerned. As long as it’s not, well, an abnormal place.
Aikawa came to visit me the day before I was to be discharged from the hospital. This time she didn’t knock. It seemed her personal knocking craze had come to an end. She was wearing the same bright-red suit as always, but whether she’d had a new one made or just had a closet full of duplicates, I couldn’t tell you.
“Yooo, sorry for the radio silence to keep you waiting! You have but to speak my name and I shall roll over Beethoven! Damn, a private room, huh? Mister moneybags over here.”
“I can’t bear to sleep in the same room as some stranger, that’s all. Just the thought of someone I don’t know watching me sleep gives me the willies. It isn’t cheap, but what can you do.”
“Hmmm. Well then, I’ve got great news for you,” said Aikawa, casually tossing an envelope onto the bed. A fat one. I didn’t need to ask to know what was inside.
“Here’s your piece of the action for helping me out this time around.”
“Thanks anyway, Jun, but I don’t need your money. With Hime-chan the way she is you probably didn’t make much on this job, so this one’s on the house.”
“Aren’t you the stoic one. But this kind of thing has to be done properly. They say a man who has no money might as well have no head, ya know?”
“So? Who cares about a head, it’ll just end up decapitated or strangulated or suspended from the ceiling anyway. I’m pretty sure that expression just means that money’s not all that important.”
“Hanh. Look at you, the humble shepherd.”
Chuckling sardonically, Aikawa sat down in the folding chair set out for well-wishers. I didn’t believe for a second that she was there to wish me well, but I couldn’t tell her not to sit.
“Still, pressing you into service without giving you something in return would go against my moral code. Let’s see. Okay, I’ve got it, I’ll do an impression of Hikari in a compromising position.”
“Please don’t.”
“Ah, no, stop it! Not that! Please, no more! You can’t! Stop, I said!”
“You’re the one who needs to stop!”
“You’re actually pissed!” Even Aikawa was surprised at this, and she put up her hands in surrender. “Wow, that’s a shocker. My bad, I didn’t realize she was so sacred to you…I’m sorry. Please forgive me. I was wrong.”
This apology was delivered in Maki’s voice.
Really got my fucking number, don’t you.
“Why are you really here?”
“No reason. Hadn’t you been hoping I’d come? After all, you’re still just as ignorant as you were at the beginning. So I came to entertain your questions.”
“A-ha… Well, it’s my policy not to get too deep into things that seem like they might be bad news. But I’ll ask anyway.” Still unsure of Aikawa’s true intentions, I began with: “What happened to Hime-chan afterwards?”
“Starting with the hardest question first, are ya, pal? Awright. Here’s what happened to Himecchi.” Without asking, Aikawa took an apple from my basket of get-well goodies and chomped into it. “That stun gun did its work. She lost her memory, and now she’s in a secret hospital.”
“Ah…”
“Her body’s in rough shape, too. It was already starting to wear out thanks to all the training she’d been through in that place, and to sustain that much damage on top of it? Burns all over her body. The fingers directly connected to those lines─particularly nasty. It was mitigated somewhat by her gloves, which had seven layers of insulation, but even if she can hold a pencil, she can’t hold chopsticks. You know about that stuff? Ohm’s law, Joule’s laws, and so forth.”
“So there’ll be some serious lasting effects, huh─” Despite the fact that Aikawa had brought that stun gun for the purpose of taking Hime-chan unharmed. Still, she got off a lot better than if she’d taken on the contractor directly.
“Which is exactly what makes it so tough,” Aikawa said. “Losing her memory means she’s probably forgotten about killing Noa Origami and the rest of the staff, not to mention Shiogi Hagihara and Tamamo Saijo… And it may even mean that she’s forgotten all about Hang ’Em High itself. And as long as her injured fingers haven’t healed, she won’t be able to use Zigzag. You know what that means, right?”
The thought flashed through my mind that that must’ve been why she took the limiter off the stun gun: to temporarily seal away Zigzag itself, along with the abhorrent memories of it. That may’ve been nothing more than my own narrativistic sentiment, though.
“It’s gonna be hard,” Aikawa went on. “It doesn’t make the things she’s done go away. The people connected to the ones she killed aren’t gonna stand for that. The Origami family, Rule, they’re falling all over themselves to find the person behind it all.”
Just because the culprit forgets the crime doesn’t make it go away, and it doesn’t mean she can get away without being punished. Whatever the whys and wherefores, she has to take responsibility for her actions. Of course.
“Plus, if I were to ‘pretend this never happened’ and let Ichihime off the hook, I have a feeling you’d lose respect for me.”
“That’s not something I ever expected to hear you say. Do you even care about how other people see you, Jun?”
“Qua? If you were just another person, I wouldn’t care at all.”
She grinned an unpleasant grin. I don’t really know why, but I felt like she was making fun of me, so I just shrugged my shoulders and asked a different question.
“How did things all fall out in the end?”
“Hang ’Em High is now effectively shuttered. Just as Ichihime hoped. The students…I wonder what’ll become of them. That still seems to be up in the air. And it hasn’t come out yet that the three of us were the perpetrators.”
I’m an accomplice now?
“Don’t worry about it, I’ve got a few irons in the fire… The Origami family owes me, so no worries on that front. That still leaves the problem of Rule. Nothing you have to worry about, they’ll leave you alone. Ichihime, though… I wanna keep them off her scent, but I also wonder if I should.”
“So even you have moments of doubt, Jun.”
“Sure. Not like I want ’em, of course. Her memory might return, and her finger might heal up again. I also figure it’s not a good idea to stick my nose in too far. It’d be one thing if she’d actually asked me to conceal the murders.”
She hadn’t─probably because she couldn’t fully trust Aikawa. Which was neither Aikawa’s fault nor Hime-chan’s, it was just one of those things. Like me, I imagine Hime-chan just fundamentally couldn’t trust other people. But she still looked to them for help─and as in this situation, she cooked up a half-baked plan and ended up caught in her own web. Though maybe that’s less fear or trepidation─than vanity and yearning.
“But why did Hime-chan want to kill the Director…no, want to shut down the academy in the first place? What was her initial plan?”
“First, there’s something I wanna apologize for.” Aikawa moved her chair closer to me and leaned in close. “In the beginning I told you something like, ‘Ask Ichihime for the details…she’ll be able to give you a proper explanation.’ That was a lie, sorry.”
“It sure was.”
You only had to talk to her for a minute to know that. Hime-chan was totally incapable of giving a decent explanation of anything. Whatever lies and false fronts she may’ve used to mask her true self, that at least I could say with certainty.
“Her Japanese wasn’t very good, to begin with. No way she was going to give a proper explanation.”
“I figured you’d do a better job if you didn’t know the particulars. I never expected Ichihime herself to actively deceive you… Did she tell you why she’s so bad with words?”
“Let’s see. She said she was raised in America.”
“Yeah? That’s not why, though.” Aikawa tapped my temple with her finger. “Her frontal lobe. An a posteriori injury to her language center.”
“…”
“You know what the frontal lobe does? It’s the part of the brain that controls personality, the ego, and our ability to communicate with others. That part of Ichihime’s brain was damaged. Which is why she has problems with language. She doesn’t even recognize it when it’s happening.”
“Recognition…”
Language recognition.
Or no, was it her word recognition circuit?
“Because of that, conversations with her always go off the rails somewhere. It’s kind of like a Japanese person and a Chinese person conversing in Korean, somehow it never quite comes together.”
Kind of a zigzag feeling, chuckled Aikawa.
“Which is why─I’m pretty sure we’ll never find out Ichihime’s true motivation, even if we ask her. Since any kind of mutual understanding is difficult in the first place. What she was thinking when she abandoned herself to those acts will remain an eternal mystery.”
“That’s true of everyone, though, isn’t it?”