“That’s right, right?! I mean, that’s totally what’s going on!”
“Hm?”
“My thread’s all messed up. And it’s not my fault, it’s—”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I closed my eyes with a sigh. Then I opened them again. That was close. It was a good thing I realized I shouldn’t be with him.
“This is wrong! You can’t do this! I won’t let you do this! I won’t!”
“Where’s this coming from? Look how far we’ve come.”
“Please breathe! I know you can!”
“I can’t go back.”
“Yes! Yes, you can!”
“I don’t want to.”
“You have to!” I cried, trying to force the mask back on him. “Breathe! Please… Please just breathe!”
He was still glowing blue as, facing me, he fought back against my attempts. He wasn’t saying anything anymore. There was a question I had to ask him.
“Can you…”
Can you…
“…breathe here?”
I knew what the alien was going to say. He’d already said it, just not with words. This conversation was going to finish us. I didn’t know which route we’d go down after I took the first step, but I knew where we’d end up. That was what my words meant.
“I can breathe.”
No, he couldn’t. That was the correct answer. He and I were different. As different as it was possible to be. We needed to live in different worlds. If I could breathe, he couldn’t. That was how it had to be. He was nothing but a…
“Liar!”
I pushed him to one side, reached for the handlebars, and grabbed them. I yanked them this way and that, making the motorcycle wobble. I leaned my whole weight to one side.
“What are you doing?! Stop it!”
“You’re a liar, and that means you’re not an alien! You pretended to be someone I trust so that you could trick me into thinking this is right! I bet that beam never even hit you! Because the alien who came to tell us the world was ending was—”
“Let go! We’re gonna fall off!”
I shoved him as hard as I could.
“Rara!” His left hand lost its grip, and he reached it out toward me instead. But he was too slow, and that hand—those fingers—scrabbled fruitlessly through space.
The motorcycle flipped over, and all three of us turned into a single mass of light that started to fall like an arrow.
I knew where we were gonna fall. There was a voice calling: “Over here!” We would crash, destroy and erase everything, and then we’d wake up somewhere else entirely. It wouldn’t be X; it’d be the continuation of actual reality. We were going to be torn apart.
“That alien was me! And Kengo’s human!”
“Goodbye.”
I already knew it was going to happen.
Okay, sorry everyone. Can I talk about the knot again? No? C’mon, please? I’ll keep it as short and sweet as possible. I need to explain, otherwise you’re gonna struggle with what happens next and you’re probably not gonna understand what’s up with everything that’s just happened. (If you’re still not feeling it, just skip forward to the # symbol.)
So. The knot. My knot was a bit like the ones you can make if you wrap thread around your finger and pull one end through. Only it was huge, more complicated, and definitely not made deliberately. There was a spot on the timeline where past and future got tied together, creating a ton of loops. That was why I kept going back to, and waking up in, the same spot over and over.
Everything was that fake, lying alien’s fault. You guys already know all about him, right? Hagio Kengo. My first and last lover. I wanted to go eat ramen with him. I accepted the restaurant might be busy. I knew we might have to give up on it. You guys get that too, don’t you?
We drove that dull-silver CB400 off into the night, but we stopped when Kengo got a phone call. And you all know what the call was about. The truth was that I chose to go to the school with him. On our way, at 8:36 p.m., something happened. I’m gonna call that something “P.” I’ll explain what I saw in a bit. Anyway, P happened, and then Kengo and I were ripped apart into different worlds. My thread ended there. It was simply too short, and I arrived at its end. That was the spot I saw the future from.
Kengo’s gonna come look for me.
I saw it happen with my own eyes and clear as day. After we got separated, I made it rain. Kengo came to look for me. Somehow, he was able to step through the boundary between worlds to enter mine. My thread had ended, so my world sat outside the constricts of time, everything completely still. My world had come to a complete stop, and there was no progression of any kind. All that was left was for me to forget who I was and contract within the constantly expanding universe, decay, and then disappear. It was only natural. Every living thing was born with that same end waiting for them in the future.
But Kengo tried to set time into motion again. He invaded my world, shook me awake just as I was about to forget everything, wound time back to a previous spot in my memories, intervened and changed things, then tried to create a new world with a different ending—a world without P. Every time he tried again, a new branch shot off from my thread just before its end. That was how Kengo messed up my thread, turning it into a complex knot that couldn’t be undone.
He pretended to be an alien because he thought it’d mean I’d go along with his attempts. He thought it symbolized truth to me—that an alien was a being I’d place absolute trust in. Just like my mom. My mom, the alien. He used my dependency on my mom to stop me from accepting my ending. But no matter how many times he tried, I wasn’t ever able to make that different choice. The outcome never changed, because I always followed the same track. P was unavoidable. The endless branches just followed the same path before returning to the original start point. They got refastened to the exact same spot. Every single attempt meant restarting from that one point.
But Kengo didn’t give up. His attempts numbered in their tens, their hundreds, their thousands, their millions… They might as well have been infinite. Until finally, there was a tiny change in just one of them. And that change led to a different event.