After a certain point, the journal entries abruptly ended. I could only assume the last one had been from the night before he had his heart attack. There was no way a man his age could have possibly seen that coming, after all.
I wondered what Uncle Kurehiko had been thinking in his final moments. Or perhaps he’d been in too much pain to think of anything at all. He’d probably just died suffering in solitude, all by his lonesome and with no hope for the future whatsoever.
“…This is too much, man,” I said, hanging my head as my chest felt like it might cave in from the sheer weight of my lament. To think the life of a man I once looked up to had ultimately amounted to almost nothing at all, having been cut so tragically short. I should have talked to him more—should have actually listened to what he had to say.
“Mugino,” said Akira. “Look at this.”
I lifted my head.
Akira had turned the notebook to its very last page, where a single sentence had been scrawled in massive letters from margin to margin. I wasn’t sure how to interpret these words—or even whether they were meant to be taken optimistically or pessimistically. But they resonated somewhere deep within me nonetheless.
LET THE CLOCKS STAY BROKEN
After staying the night in my uncle’s apartment, we stopped by a nearby park in the Adachi ward. Despite being right in the middle of the city, the place was vast and full of nature. Akira and I stopped to sit down for a while on a bench by a large pond.
It was nice and warm out, surprisingly—the perfect weather to make me want to lie down in the grass and take a long nap. But instead, I just sat there a while, gazing listlessly out over the pond as I let the tranquility of its waters slowly fill my heart and mind.
“So. What do you wanna do now?” asked Akira.
“Good question…” I said, rubbing my chin. “Wanna go break into the Imperial Palace or something?”
“Sheesh, kid!” she blurted out. “Now that would be pretty damn ballsy, even with time stopped. You don’t actually mean that, do you?”
“Sure, why not? We’re here now, aren’t we? Might as well give it a shot at least, if this is the best opportunity we’re ever gonna get.”
Akira grinned playfully. “I mean, I can appreciate the audacity, but the Imperial Palace? You’re more of a rulebreaker than I gave you credit for, Mugino.”
We’d stolen far more than our fair share of food at this point and done a whole lot of trespassing. There were probably plenty of other laws we’d broken without realizing it too—and would continue breaking for as long as time remained static.
“Feels like we’re Bonnie and Clyde, almost,” I said.
“Who’s that?” asked Akira, tilting her head.
“This super famous pair of criminals who went all around America robbing banks and stuff back in the 1930s or something. There’s been a few movies about ’em. Always on the lam, trying to stay one step ahead of the law.”
“Dang, that’s cool… Did they get away with it?”
“No, actually, they—”
I stopped short.
In retrospect, maybe it wasn’t the best idea to compare us to this particular couple of criminals, given the grisly way in which they met their end. But now that Akira seemed genuinely interested to hear more, I was in way too deep to not finish the story—and I didn’t feel like lying or glossing over it right now either.
“…In the end, the police caught up with them, and they both got gunned down in the streets,” I said. “They were pretty much the most wanted criminals in the country at that point, so the cops didn’t take any chances trying to bring them in alive.”
“Oh, huh. Well, that sucks.”
She said this completely nonchalantly, like it was neither expected nor unexpected. Like it wasn’t anything at all. I heard a creaking sound as she leaned back against the bench, narrowed her eyes, and gazed up into the sky.
“Can’t just go around doing whatever the hell you want forever, I guess,” she said. “Reality’s gonna catch up with you eventually.”
This last line of hers was so brutally on the nose, I could feel my stomach drop. Yet at the same time, Akira had a point—she knew as well as I did that this journey of ours couldn’t go on forever. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to see that our current way of living just wasn’t sustainable. The way we’d been eating our meals, finding places to stay the night—all of the things we had to do on a daily basis in order to survive inherently required that we continue breaking the law, and probably cause a fair bit of trouble for whoever we were stealing from or imposing ourselves on.
If we knew for certain that the world would stay like this forever, or this were a post-apocalyptic sci-fi novel where time here on Earth had been frozen by some malevolent outside force, then maybe we could justify stealing food from stores and restaurants and sleeping wherever the hell we wanted in perpetuity.
But that simply wasn’t the case.
We already knew how to make the clocks start moving again.
All we had to do was find hope for the future. Not that we knew for absolute certain that this was the exact method, when neither of us had even tried to find said hope as of yet. Far from it, in fact—we were trying to cling to this frozen world for as long as we possibly could, even if it meant we had to inconvenience hundreds or thousands more people in order to support our current lifestyle.
We knew this was wrong, of course.
But that did nothing to make the future more appealing.
Why would we ever want to give up this fantasy? And for what?