Chapter 4:
The Mysterious Call and Our Parting
I ONCE ASKED YUKARI if humans looked like robots, then what kind of robot did I look like? She replied that I was a multipurpose robot. Writing it that way, it makes me sound like some sold-by-the-lot goon robot, but the way Yukari described it, I was apparently pretty unique. I looked like I could support all kinds of peripherals and adapt to any situation given the right options.
And as if to prove her words, the cell phone she used as a part to repair my left hand continued to work as a cell phone even after becoming my new limb. It looked like a perfectly normal left hand, and yet I was able to make and receive calls with it.
Nanami’s body had similarly been repaired using a jungle gym, but it didn’t get any features like suddenly turning to steel or being harder than an average person’s body parts, so it seems this phenomenon was limited to me.
By the way, I couldn’t use my ability any time I felt like it. There were a few constraints. First, it had to be nighttime. I couldn’t use it when the sun was up, regardless of how bright it was. It didn’t have to be pitch-black, but it had to be in a relatively dark indoor space. Also, my hand wouldn’t work at all as a phone unless I was all by myself. (Sometime afterward, I lost this restriction, call it evolution or what have you.) But the biggest thing was that it used so much of my energy. Once I even collapsed from hunger while I was talking to Yukari on the phone. I was also watching a Hollywood movie on TV at the time. A cell phone needs power, and in the case of my left hand, its power came from my body, so naturally it used my energy instead of electricity.
It wasn’t originally a cell phone, after all, but my normal left hand. Using it as a cell phone consumed a ridiculous amount of my energy, and not even linearly, but exponentially, it seemed like. I was starving before I knew it. I started shivering when it wasn’t even cold, I got dizzy, I sweated in clammy, cold waterfalls. After using it one night, I weighed myself and found I’d lost a whole kilo in two hours. That was no joke! Yukari ended up coming to save me that time too. After that, I started keeping a supply of honey or sweets in my room for when I wanted to use the phone.
You get the picture.
One of the police got me a new everyday phone. The phone in my left hand was reserved for Yukari only. I didn’t tell my family about it, or even Nanami. So when I got the call, I assumed it was Yukari and answered it without the slightest hesitation. And now, this will sound strange, but I was on the phone before it rang. I don’t know how, but I knew it. I knew the call was coming. It wasn’t as if it made a brief click of a connection like a landline phone being picked up, and yet I felt the call coming and answered it before it rang.
That wasn’t all—I knew who it was before they opened their mouth.
Before I even heard a voice, I realized it wasn’t Yukari. My body froze in the shock of getting a call from someone so impossible. Who knew whether the person on the other end knew this as they croaked as if crying alone:
“Please…Yukari will die if you don’t do something.”
By the time I regained control of myself, they’d already hung up. Even so, I kept staring at the palm of my left hand for a long time. Even after the screen, which glowed through my skin, turned off.
It was easily explained. A hallucination. Yes, certainly, an auditory hallucination. When I thought about it, I hadn’t heard it ring. That meant no one had actually called me. I was just hearing things. Right, I’d been worrying too much about Yukari. I was worn out. I’d fallen asleep for a second, maybe.
Wait. Yukari will die…?
I breathed in through my nose and out through my mouth, trying to calm myself down as I told myself, Yeah, sure, I know I can’t just sit here. Deep down, I know what’s best for Yukari. It’s just that I don’t have the courage to make the choice and it’s haunting me, and that’s why I’m hearing things like this.
Right, it was impossible. There was no way the caller could have been me. There was no way the one at the other end could have been me. The voice I heard from my left hand was different from my own voice as I was used to hearing it. Even so, I knew it was my voice. I realized that the one speaking at the other end was me.
But that couldn’t be true.
It had to be a stress-induced hallucination.
It couldn’t be reality.
I told myself to keep my mind steady until I got there. And then I made a decision.
The next day, I told Yukari. Not straight the way I normally would, but fearfully. I just said maybe she should consider Alice’s proposal—at least as one possible option. I said I’d still be her friend even if we were apart, even if she chose to go to Jaunt.
“We can see each other anytime—well, I guess not, but you should be able to come back on breaks, right? I guess I could even visit. Anyway, I’m saying, even if you decide to leave, I’ll always be your friend. Right?”
Yukari hesitated before replying, “…Mm-hmm. I guess.”
“Well, you know, I’ll still be here waiting for you, as long as it takes. I mean…if you decide to do it, that is…”
It was so hypocritical and stupid. We all know kids’ friendships almost always end after they move away. But I somehow believed that I was different, that I could stay friends with Yukari forever.
In the end, it was my words that made Yukari’s decision. It was my agreement. That’s right: Yukari had no way of deciding differently after I said that to her.
It was me. I was her friend, and I drove her to it.
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Yukari stayed for the closing ceremony of the third term, and then she moved away with Alice. Apparently, Jaunt’s school had a dorm, so her family didn’t go with her; she went by herself (of course, they all checked it out together on winter vacation and finished the paperwork as a family).
✦ ✦ ✦
It was less than half a year later that I learned that Yukari had died.