“Okay. Go for it, then,” Kanie-kun told us. “Try to get some rest.”
“Leave it to me!” Sylphie gave a thumbs up.
Sylphie was the Spirit of Wind. She was the most mysterious out of all my colleagues, the type of person it was impossible to have a real conversation with. Honestly, most of her behavior was a mystery to me. If you said “Good morning” she might say “Lion Pharmaceuticals!” If you said “Lion Pharmaceuticals?” she would respond “Get some rest!” In the greenroom before performances, she would light sparklers she’d brought in and spin around, shouting “flaming top!” It was seriously off-putting at first. I’m sorry to say that the thought that she was mentally challenged entered my mind once or twice.
The truth, though, was that she was totally smart. She could take part in our daily messages and chats—I didn’t really understand the replies, but they were in proper Japanese—and she knew some pretty difficult vocabulary.
Sylphie was also physically brilliant; she was the best dancer out of all of us, and she could do anything you asked of her. She was always cheerful and bouncy. She had a great body, too; I mean, supermodel-class great. Her hair was a shining platinum blonde, and her breasts were on par with Isuzu-chan’s or Eiko-chan’s. She had pretty decent style, and was always put together in some cute outfit or other.
During break times, I sometimes caught her playing with video editing software in her underwear, and she’d be using the English-only version. Then sometimes, when I glanced at her email, she would be replying in some language I didn’t recognize, but looked Russian.
But for all the things I didn’t get about her, one thing I knew for sure was that Sylphie loved her co-workers. Anytime Kobory, or Muse, or I were cold to her, she’d shrink up and get super depressed. Then, when we’d try to comfort her, she’d cheer right up again. She’d grin and, apropos of nothing, offer us some kind of sweet (these days, it was fresh yatsuhashi from Kyoto).
In the end, I just figured she was the savant type, and a nice one at that. At the very least, none of her behavior seemed calculated; she wasn’t trying to put up a “mysterious” act to attract attention. She couldn’t be.
Um, so, I guess all in all, Sylphie was just a garden variety weirdo. (That was exhausting in its own way.)
That night was another intense experience. Sylphie lived in a cheap old apartment building in Amagi City proper. It was probably over 30 years old, the kind of building with creaky steel-frame stairs, a laundry machine at the end of the communal hall, and each apartment as a one-bedroom deal.
Things got weird when I noticed that the names on all six of the post boxes read ‘Sylphie.’ When Sylphie checked each of them, I asked her incredulously, “Y-You rent them all?!”
“Yep!” she told me cheerfully.
“All six apartments?!”
“Yep! So convenient.”
What the heck? I wondered. Even if they were cheap, given recent market prices, they’d probably run 40,000 yen per room. And if she rented six of them... wouldn’t that be 240,000 yen?!
“You can’t pay that kind of rent!” I said.
Sylphie just smiled. “I got circumstances. It’s just 30,000 pesos for the rent on them all!”
“Pesos?” I asked. How much is that, then?!
“Watch your step inside!”
“Huh?”
Sylphie offered the warning as we arrived in front of the cheap door to the apartment at the far end of the second floor. Quietly and carefully, she opened it. Inside were rows of dominoes. Yes, dominoes. Thousands of them. There was hardly any space to walk. There were stoppers placed every few hundred blocks, but they didn’t seem very reliable.
The kitchen and living room were likewise full of dominoes; the apartments appeared to have been modified to link the neighboring and lower rooms, and the dominoes continued all the way through them, as well.
“Dominoes?” I asked. “Why dominoes?”
“It’s a challenge,” Sylphie told me.
“But why?”
“Heh heh heh. My life is all about challenges. You just don’t get it, Salama-kun!” She held up her index finger and clicked her tongue triumphantly.
“Um, so... it’s a challenge, huh?” I hazarded.
“Exactly!”
“How many have you set up?”
“Thirty thousand!”
She must have spent every night for the past month lining up domino after domino. I did a quick search and learned that the current Guinness record for domino-toppling was 320,000; Sylphie was nowhere close to that, but it was still a pretty amazing feat.
“Yeah, well,” I told her. “Do your best?”
“I will!” She flashed me a v-sign.
We decided to go to bed right away. We’d gone to Sylphie’s favorite okonomiyaki place for dinner and stopped by a nearby communal bath, so there was really nothing to do but sleep. (It turned out the real reason we did all that was that the kitchen and the unit bathroom were full of dominoes.)
“By the way,” I asked, “where do we sleep?” There wasn’t any room to lie down. Even the bed, stripped of its covers and mattress, was covered in thousands of dominoes.
“There,” Sylphie told me. Over the bed hung a hammock, strung between the walls. The idea was to use the minimal available foot spaces to get into the hammock, and sleep suspended in the air.
“Sorry, I think I’ll sleep outside,” I insisted.
Sylphie’s eyes immediately filled with tears. “You don’t like hammocks?”
“It’s not that I don’t like them,” I told her. “I’ve just never slept in one before.”
“Hammocks are fun!” she insisted.
“Oh? Um... I guess they could be fun?” I considered for a minute. “But I probably couldn’t sleep soundly in one. I’m just really tired, you know?”