That said, seeing all these working people in their suits made me feel out of place, like I was the only one not pulling my weight. Now that I was here, I couldn’t wait to be home. Perhaps the whole reason people pursued careers was to avoid this sort of feeling. Or perhaps not.
Once I’d finished shopping at the grocery and general stores, I decided to head straight home.
The shopping mall also leased out space to a few other small stores, such as a clothing store and a furniture store that sold stylish desks and chairs. None of them caught my interest. I had more than enough clothes and furniture, and I had no real desire to upgrade to anything better. I passed them by and left the shopping mall, by which point I was unusually exhausted. It was probably the result of seeing so many people hard at work.
There was a time when I’d worked at least five days a week, sometimes staying overnight at the college for several days when I’d risked falling behind. There was no sickness preventing me from working. If I hated feeling like I was letting myself decay, I could just get a job somewhere, or maybe even start a business based on my own ideas. I had the free cash. It was something I thought about occasionally, but it never led to any action.
I knew why: it was because I had no motivation. I felt no urge to be useful to strangers, nor did I want to use my earnings on material possessions like fancy cars. I’d also stopped caring about appealing to the opposite sex. Having savings meant that there was also no incentive to earn money to pay for food—in other words, I didn’t need to work to stay alive. Perhaps I’d grow tired of feeling this way someday, and that would create enough of a push to spur me into action.
Alternatively, there was the possibility that I would put an end to it all once I figured out an easy way to do it. But it felt like a waste to die while I still had my savings, and the idea of dying after my money had been used up was a horrible thought. Choosing death while carefree enough to make that choice was one thing, but I suspected it was something else entirely to die while feeling I’d been backed into a corner.
With these negative thoughts running through my mind, I was about to cross a bridge spanning a river near my home when I saw something happening that I couldn’t make sense of.
There was a girl—a child of early elementary school age with a mysterious sort of air about her. What baffled me was where she was walking. She wasn’t on the sidewalk or the road—she was walking on the bridge’s guardrail.
It was highly unlikely that she was deep enough in debt that she might be killed over it, so I couldn’t understand why she was reenacting the steel beam crossing from a certain gambling manga. There were no sadistic millionaires around to enjoy the spectacle of some poor soul desperately trying to get rich. The girl couldn’t have given up on life, so I was at a loss to explain why she was doing such a thing.
It was then, with perfect timing, that the rail she was standing on shook.
Maybe an overloaded truck had just passed by. Whatever the cause, I couldn’t look around to investigate. My eyes were fixed on the girl as she lost her balance and looked as though she would plummet into the river.
The bridge shook vertically, her body seemed to float, and then she took three small steps along the railing in an apparent panic. By that point, her body was tilted toward the river while her feet were still planted in place. It was clear to anyone watching that there was no recovering from that pose. She raised up her other leg in the direction of the bridge in an attempt to shift her center of mass toward the other side of the railing as much as she could. It looked like a desperate bid to beg the laws of physics to show mercy on her. Then, after striking a pose with her limbs outstretched and body tilted, the girl disappeared from my view.
I ran to the railing and looked down into the river, which had swelled due to the time of year. There, I saw the girl being swept downstream, and it looked as though she couldn’t swim.
I could save her, but I might die. I hesitated for a moment, but then quickly made my decision. Well, that wouldn’t be such a great loss. It’s not like I’ve got anything in particular I want to do before I die, and no one would miss me anyway. What would it matter?
I took off my jacket to strip down to my shirt, then jumped over the railing. After a three-meter or so drop, I plunged into the river. When my body hit the water’s surface, I was struck with an incredible coldness, as though my blood vessels were all constricting at once. The shock made me feel like my whole body was a rag being wrung dry, but I endured it and started swimming.
It had been about four years since I’d last gone swimming, since neither the beach nor the swimming pool were part of my daily life. I swam and swam, the flow still carrying me, until I finally reached her.
Once I’d caught up to the exhausted girl, I grabbed onto her clothes and headed for the shore while I struggled to keep my head above water. I could feel my body’s warmth rapidly draining away, and my strength was fading. It was then that I realized I hadn’t eaten that day because I’d planned to grab a bite while I was out.
After just barely reaching the river’s edge alive and somehow getting the girl ashore, I didn’t have enough strength left to drag myself out of the water. The river swallowed me up and carried me away.