The second action involved things. I carefully polished all the shoes in our house. I had chosen to do this after thinking about the way I could always see Chika’s toenails. I was curious what sort of effect this might have on Chika’s world, depending on whether or not they wore shoes there.
Obviously, after trying to affect people and things, my final action should have to do with a place, but I was a little lost on how to handle that. The easiest place to experiment in would be at home, but I wanted to avoid anything that would affect the room that Chika cherished so much. In the end I decided on school for the location, though I knew it might just end up overlapping with my first test. I decided to remain at school for an hour after the final bell.
On the heels of my greeting from before, my seat neighbor Tanaka looked at my unnatural behavior with some suspicion, but we talked more and more during my extra hour, finally wrapping up with a proper, “Don’t get caught,” before we parted. Saitou left the classroom in a hurry, as always.
Putting the matter of Saitou aside, when I told Chika of all the things I had done, she muttered an “I see,” then seemed to be thinking—as far as I could tell from her eyes and nails.
“We do wear shoes too. I don’t do so in here, but of course we do outside, where you might step on something dangerous after things get destroyed in the wars. I’ve never shined my shoes, though. I have had the chance to go some places I normally don’t, but they have nothing to do with school.”
“Such as where?”
“××××××××, which you probably can’t understand.”
“Yeah, why?”
“Because it’s a place that has to do with the wars. It’s where the siren comes from, where they tally the number of the injuries and the rare occurrence of deaths. I was there on duty to report the damages. I have no idea if there’s any connection between the fact that you’ve been greeting someone who you don’t normally and all of the people I don’t know that I was on duty with who I’ve been greeting.”
“Gotcha.”
So she had greeted an unspecified large number of people.
“I was thinking that maybe only things like illness or injury have an effect.”
“What about the umbrella, then?”
“Maybe it wasn’t lending the umbrella that had an effect but the fact that we both got soaked in the rain, which could lead to either of us falling ill. But that can’t be it, since there was the lightning too.”
It was true—that was different. But, well, I guess there was another way of thinking about it.
I hadn’t had the perspective to look beyond the actions themselves to the circumstances surrounding them. It was reassuring to know that the person before me had ideas that I didn’t, but frustrating that I had not thought of them myself. I wanted to be able to provide her with some useful new perspective, whatever it might have been. That was the simplest way for us to have a positive effect on each other without actually crossing the border of our worlds. It was mortifying that I couldn’t come up with anything that easily. I unconsciously let out a sigh.
“We could do so much good for one another if we could figure out the rules that govern the connection between your world and mine,” I said.
For example, if there was something blocking your partner’s path in the other world and stopping them from reaching something important, you could move the corresponding object in your own world and allow them to pass—even that sort of thing would be useful. I had used a gimmick like that to beat a game I played once. If you moved a wall in the other world, you’d clear an obstacle in this one and could get to the treasure.
“That’s true. Like if my being happy could make you happy too, that would be really nice.”
Right. The best possible scenario would be helping each other to live satisfying lives. Though I obviously wasn’t going to expect Chika to single-handedly grant my wish alone on that front. I decided to put aside pondering the rules for now. Instead, I wanted to hear about the special things that Chika had done that week so I could gather more fuel for my thought process.
“First off was food.”
“Food?”
“Yeah. I thought it would be pretty big if our actions could affect each other’s daily necessities, so I wanted to test that. Specifically, I went a day without drinking any water.”
“Er, did you drink anything besides water?”
“Nope. I decided to forgo all liquids. Did you have any days like that?”
“Uh, no, I didn’t.”
“I see. That’s good. At least that means we can still eat as we like,” she said, as though that wasn’t significant at all. Though her diligence in investigating this was reassuring, it was also a bit worrying.
“You don’t need to try anything that’s going to jeopardize your health.”
“Are you worried about me? It was fine. Listen, they say that a person can see thirty sunrises without water.”
“Seriously?”
My reaction wasn’t surprise at learning that people can live a month without water—as far as I knew, humans definitely couldn’t go that long without it. My surprise was more because I was struck once again with certainty that Chika and I were fundamentally different organisms.
“Is it not the same for you?” she asked.
“No, we couldn’t survive that long.”
“Between that and the blood I guess we really are different from each other, huh?”
There was a marked tranquility to both her tone and her words. Perhaps she lacked the emotion of surprise itself, just as she couldn’t comprehend the concept of romance.
“I don’t think the other thing will worry you like that.”
I grew nervous about how upset I must look for Chika to give that preface. Everyone fears others reading them wrong.
I suddenly remembered something rather intrusive, given the moment—something that had happened the day before last. But that had nothing to do with what was going on right now.
“I went to see a friend, someone I hadn’t seen in a very long time because of a fight.”
She looked briefly up to the ceiling and then back to me.
“You recently told me that thing about luhvers, yeah? It made me think of someone who was special to me, but we’d grown estranged, and I wasn’t sure what kind of relationship we might still be capable of. I was hoping we could be friends again. In the end, though, no matter how much time had passed, it didn’t change the way we both think. I was the one who rejected the idea of being friends again. I don’t regret the decision. Still, I got a little scared of that path being closed to me, that our relationship might truly be over.”
Chika had shown me her own fear, over and over. Perhaps that was because she was so brave.
“Um, Chika,” I started. She narrowed her eyes and waited. “I…think that did have an effect.”
Her eyes widened slightly. My eyes were open wide—in shock. Something that I had thought was unrelated had in an instant been upgraded to monumental.
“I…actually did the same thing.”
“You went to see someone who you used to be friends with?”
I would have already mentioned it if it had been an active choice. However, it wasn’t.
“I didn’t go to see her. She called me. Actually, do you all have telephones? You use them to talk to people far away.”
“That’s like a ××××××.”
I couldn’t make out the word, but she caught my meaning. Good.
“Anyway, I got a call.”
I was sure that this word would be enough for her to understand that I hadn’t heard her.