“She doesn’t know,” he had said, standing on the school roof, in the light of the setting sun. “If something threatens to erode her foothold of ignorance, she instantly ceases to know that as well. To erase the anomaly caused by not meeting you yesterday, she will have deleted all memories of the date from her mind.”
“Deleted?” I said, still reeling, barely keeping up. “You mean, she’s forgotten that we were supposed to meet?”
“Precisely. But this is assuredly not because she doesn’t take you seriously. Quite the reverse. I imagine she loves you quite a lot. Which is exactly why she needs to forget so thoroughly.”
“How so?”
“So that she doesn’t feel guilty. She doesn’t want to even think about you being mad at her. But that is something beyond her control,” he said from her very own lips.
“What exactly are you? How long have you been…possessing her?”
“Possessing? Can’t say I like that choice of words. It’s not like I chose to appear.”
“Then why do you?!”
“Because danger is upon us,” he said, gazing at me levelly.
I flinched. His gaze held daggers.
“I am automatic. When I detect adversity approaching, I float up out of Miyashita Touka. That’s why I am Boogiepop—phantasmal, like bubbles.”
“Adversity? What kind of…?”
“There is a devil nesting in this school.”
I know that sounds absolutely nuts coming from me, but when he said it, the look in his eyes was unmistakable—he was completely serious.
The setting sun sent long shadows across the roof. Boogiepop’s black clothes made him look half invisible and he virtually faded into the darkness.
“It’s hidden among you now, but it poses a very real threat. It has barely begun to stir, but once it does, it will mean the end of the world.”
His words were the ravings of a lunatic, but if you actually looked at him and heard his voice, they were horribly convincing.
“Are… Aren’t you the same thing?” I asked, resisting him with everything I had. For me, this man taking up residence in Touka’s body was pretty much the same as the end of the world.
Touka’s other personality replied calmly, “I’m aware of that, which is why I never come out for long. This is also automatic. The rest of the time, I live peacefully as Miyashita Touka, gazing at you with ardor.”
“Ardor? Hey…!”
There was something antiquated about his manner of speaking. He even called me “kimi,” like a scholar from the Meiji era.
“My time today will shortly end. There is little meaning in my keeping watch like this, once school is over. Everyone has already gone home.”
“…So this dangerous being you’ve been going on about is one of the students?” I found myself asking.
Boogiepop nodded, “Most likely.”
“What is it, exactly?”
“It is better if you don’t know.”
“Why?”
“Because it is too dangerous. If you know more, something might happen to you. I would prefer to keep Miyashita Touka’s lover out of harm’s way.”
I know I’m repeating myself, but he really does keep saying this with her face and her voice.
“If it’s that dangerous, I think I should know. That body doesn’t belong to you alone, you know.” Even as I spoke, part of me was arguing that I shouldn’t take this guy seriously. Clearly, this was all just a paranoid delusion, caused by some bizarre psychological disease, brought about by an instability in Touka’s mind—yet the creature before me was Touka and not Touka at the same time. I couldn’t think otherwise.
Boogiepop sighed. “All right, but don’t tell anyone else.”
“Right,” I replied, swallowing hard. I steeled myself for anything.
But his words were too simple, and caught me by surprise.
“It’s a man-eater.”
✦ ✦ ✦
After I called Touka’s house, I slumped dejectedly on my bed.
My head was a mess.
A split personality?
The school—no, the entire world was in danger?
What the hell?!
As delusions went, it was pretty damn delusional. It was like one of those crazy school-bound RPGs.
(But I don’t want to exactly go and drag Touka off to some psych ward…)
Boogiepop had said Touka forgets everything. So, in a worst-case scenario, even if we went to a hospital and had a doctor look at her, Boogiepop might never even appear. That would make her seem like the sane one, while whoever took her would come off looking like a complete idiot.
On the way home from school, I had bought a paperback called The Scream Inside - Multiple Personality Disorder, so I decided to delve into it then. I’d just grabbed the easiest looking one, but to my surprise, there had been an entire section in the bookstore on psychological disorders. Surely, the world was crazy enough already without all these diseases, I thought.
The writer wrote in a very conversational tone, so it was readable enough, but the sentences were filled with difficult words that left my head spinning. I did catch the phrase, “This disease is exceedingly rare—if not almost unheard of—in Japan.”
As far as I could tell, multiple personality disorder generally arises when someone is trapped in an oppressive situation and unable to cope with reality, shifting their emotions onto another personality in an attempt to create a new life. “The human psyche is open to the possibilities of both good and evil. In my opinion, multiple personality disorder occurs when one of these possibilities, suppressed by societal pressures, declares independence and begins to fight to exist. Regardless of how diseased the result or how destructive it is on the host body and those around it, the possibility makes no distinction between good or evil.” There was a lot of stuff like this where I kind of understood what I was reading, but at the same time, didn’t. Apparently in Japan, the basis for this type of action usually didn’t have a clear form, which meant that the vast majority of incidents would result in schizophrenia rather than multiple personality disorder. To me, it’s like talking about the difference between “God” and “The Universe.”
The author’s name was Kirima Seiichi. There wasn’t an author’s profile attached to the book, so I had no way of telling who he was or what his credentials were. But somehow, what I’d read just felt right.
(Then what sort of possibility was Boogiepop? What had suppressed him?)
I flopped back onto bed and stared at the ceiling.
Do you think to do nothing when you see a fellow human crying?!
Those words rang through my head again. For some reason, I just couldn’t stop thinking about them.