I reflexively withdrew it. What the heck was that?
I looked at her to see her eyes fixed on me, the nails of what were probably her left hand floating exactly where my right had just been.
“Again, if you don’t mind?”
Nervously, I held my hand out again as asked. Though I had reflexively curled my hand into a fist, this time I felt the cold thing from before gently stroke my palm and the back of my hand instead of gripping it, as though trying to confirm the sensation.
“I can touch you. Do you feel me touching you, Kaya?”
“Y-yeah.”
I could tangibly feel the sensation of something cold and thin, probably a finger, tracing along the surface of my hand. A little calmer this time, I looked to confirm it visually. The sensation of being touched moved in sync with the light. My back was damp with sweat.
This experiment continued for some time. Even after the lights finally moved away, I could still feel the sensation lingering on my skin.
“Thank you. It’s seeming like my second assumption was closer to the truth.”
I looked at my own hand. I realized that I had only been listening dimly to what she was saying.
“Y-yeah.”
“If my assumptions were wrong, then maybe only one of our ×××× was making it across to the other side, and it only looked and sounded like the other was right there. But I don’t think that’s it.”
I focused all my attention on her words, not wishing to lose a single one while she was explaining her logic. I got the sense that once more the word hidden in the noise meant something like “soul,” so it was easy enough to guess what she was trying to say. She’d thought that perhaps I might have been something like an image on a projector screen. However, that didn’t seem to be it.
“After all, I can touch you.”
“Yeah, I could feel you touching me too.”
The ghost of the sensation still remained.
“So, here’s what I think is going on: For some reason, the safe house I’m in and the place you’re in are connected. Despite this, both of our perceptions of this place differ. To you, it looks like we’re both at a bus station, right?”
“That’s right.”
Only her eyes and nails, though.
“To me, it looks like you and I are both in an underground safe house.”
“We’re what…?”
I wasn’t particularly rattled by this—merely surprised. But if what she said was true, then what she’d mentioned before about something being finished up above us was referring to a world other than my own.
“This is my most ×××× assumption at this point. What do you think, Kaya?”
What did I think? Honestly, I thought this was all incredibly inventive. Her theory was like listening to a fairy tale. However, what I had just experienced—something invisible touching my right hand—proved to me that she was very real. Even though, as she said, the feeling of being touched might have been nothing more than my imagination.
“Well, what I’ve been thinking is…”
I had no idea if what she’d said was right or wrong, so I decided to just explain to her what I had been thinking over the past few days. She herself had already thought of the possibility of one of us being a ghost, or merely a product of the other’s imagination, so I floated one of the other various theories that had occurred to me: that she might simply have lived in a time before the name “Japan” was in use.
“I see. So you’re saying that I was assuming that we live in different worlds, but you think there’s a chance we live in the same world but separated by a vast period of time. On the contrary, the world you live in might be the one in the past, and maybe later on there was some huge disaster and the country known as Jappan vanished.”
It was a disturbing thought. It would explain her talk of a war, though.
“The fact that there were no mentions of Jappan in the past when I looked into it could just mean that that information was inconvenient for whichever country won the war, and so they struck Jappan from the ××××.”
“Sorry, struck Japan from the what? Couldn’t hear what you said.”
“Records. Does that work?”
“Yeah.”
“I also had some thoughts about these words that you can’t hear, if you don’t mind. Thinking about it, it’s actually weird that we can talk at all.”
It was true. If we were in different countries, or even just different time periods—let alone if we were in different worlds entirely—incomprehensible words aside, it was bizarre that we could more or less carry on a conversation in the same language to begin with. Even the slightest amount of distance would usually cause a cultural or linguistic clash.
“Now this is just my theory, but consider that maybe of the countless different worlds there are, including differences in time and place, it just so happens that the linguistic structures of your world and mine align. Where I come from, there’s a saying: ‘Words gave birth to the world.’”
“But humans made words…”
“Words must be pretty powerful though, to be able to connect to another world.”
Her voice sounded more optimistic than anything else. She’s a lot more of a dreamer than that laid-back voice of hers would imply, I started to think, then winced at how very basic it was of me to think for even a moment that a person’s personality could be determined by the sound and tone of their voice.
“But then why are there words that only I can’t understand?”
“Because they’re words that don’t exist in your world. The fact that I can understand everything you say either means that you just haven’t said any words I’d be unable to hear or that your influence on this space is stronger than mine. Earlier, you mentioned a vehicle called a bus, which I’ve never heard of, but I could still hear it. I could hear your name too.”
“Oh right, about that universal name.”
“Did you think of one? I’d like something as short as yours, something simple.”
Well, that immediately cut out Satou, the surname. I felt my enthusiasm dying already.
“I looked into it, but I couldn’t really come up with anything like you mentioned.”
“Anything’s fine, really.”
Anything? All that I knew about her was that her eyes and nails glowed, that she had a husky voice, that she lived in a country that was currently at war, that she was in an underground bunker, and that her hands were cold.
“How about…Chika?” I offered. Underground.
“What does that mean?”
“Well, like, ‘underground,’ since you’re in an underground shelter.”
It was a completely silly reason, but most people’s names were given for fairly silly, vapid reasons. She narrowed her eyes slightly and nodded with a simple, “Okay.”
“All right, then. From now on, in your world, my name is Chika. A nice, ×××× name.”
“I didn’t catch that last bit. The word after ‘nice.’”
“Concise?”
“Got it. That’s good, I’m glad.”