One night, as Ryo and I gazed down at a railroad junction during our search for the suitcase, he randomly opened up to me. He spoke about his own inner turmoil in a much more candid way than he ever had before.
“Y’know, looking back on it now, it’s hard not to feel like my life didn’t amount to anything at all,” he said. “I mean, I was born, got to be alive for all of a split second, then disappeared just as quick, like a damn soap bubble—never leaving my mark on society or anything at all. But I figure if I can help solve the mystery of the Summer Ghost’s missing body, then I can at least say I accomplished something before I died, you feel me? I dunno, maybe I’m just still not over having to quit the basketball team before I ever had a chance to really shine. I’m pretty jealous of those guys, to be real. They’ve all got futures ahead of them that are theirs for the taking. Honestly, I feel like I’ve been getting more and more petty and jealous toward people who get to live full, long lives lately. Like, if I was doomed to just kick the bucket before the age of twenty without leaving anything behind worth remembering, then why the hell was I even born, y’know? In the grand scheme of things, what impact did my life have on the universe, really?”
I didn’t have answers that could allay any of Ryo’s inner doubts and misgivings, so all I could really do was keep quiet and hear him out. I knew that acting like I understood his pain and trying to assuage his fears with pleasant-sounding but ultimately empty reassurances would only earn his contempt.
We had now scoured through more than 80 percent of the total area we originally outlined for our search, but still there was no sign of Ayane’s body. It was entirely possible that we overlooked something somewhere, as we were moving through the earth rather quickly to cover as much ground as possible. The notion that we simply flew right past it without noticing and crossed that area off the list was not a pleasant one.
“I’m sorry, you guys,” said Aoi. “If only I were better at flying, we could be doing this so much more efficiently.”
She had indeed never really gotten the hang of flying and was still going around hand in hand with Ayane as a single unit.
“There’s really no special trick to it, Aoi-chan,” said Ayane. “You only have to tell your soul where you want it to go. Just calm your mind and picture your destination in your head. You can go anywhere your heart wants to.”
Occasionally, Ayane would attempt to take off the training wheels like this and let go of Aoi’s hand to see if she was finally ready to fly on her own. But every time, Aoi would just start spinning in midair, unable to make progress moving forward in any direction. The few times it did seem like she figured out how to move toward a given point, she ended up zipping off at some obscene angle in the opposite direction just moments later.
“Sorry! I guess I just suck at picking one direction and sticking with it…” said Aoi. “Maybe it’s my lack of self-confidence. I just shrivel up and get cold feet, and then I can’t move forward no matter what I do. Then, I start spinning in place, and eventually I lose control and go flying off like a bat out of heck in some random direction I didn’t ask for.”
Perhaps this was a manifestation of the same sort of escapism that led Aoi to become a shut-in truant just to get away from her bullies at school. I had no doubt that she didn’t want to be cooped up in her room like a hermit all day.
“It’s okay,” Ayane reassured her. “We can just keep holding hands, then. I’ll keep my eyes peeled moving forward, and you can take a closer look at things from behind as we pass them by. Just having another pair of eyes to help me find my body is all that’s important to me. That alone more than doubles our chances of success.”
And so we soldiered on, scouring through the underground like scuba divers investigating an old shipwreck—or like jungle expeditioners carving our way through an undergrowth of urban infrastructure—all in search of one irksomely elusive suitcase.
Whenever we stopped to take a breather, Ayane would ask us all the same question: “Why are you all so intent on helping me find my body anyway?”
Why indeed. At first, it had certainly been for her sake—I wanted to unearth her buried remains and give her soul a chance to finally breathe again. But now? I wasn’t so sure anymore. Maybe we were all just trying to grow more acquainted with death in our own ways, so we’d be ready for it ourselves when the time came. Perhaps the corpse we’d find upon opening that suitcase would be not just Ayane’s, but the final nail in each of our own coffins as well—a representation of death we couldn’t deny.
The four of us flew through the night sky.
The city lights burned bright beneath us. In every lit window of every home was a living person—or a family.
It was almost too much to take in, trying to imagine them all at once.
And then, before we knew it, it was upon us—the last night of summer vacation.
Granted, it wasn’t as if the end of August marked the end of summer itself—it simply meant it was the start of the second semester at school. If we weren’t able to find the suitcase tonight, we could still keep coming back and looking for it until autumn truly came, or so I tried to tell myself. But I knew that being back in the swing of things academically would limit our availability quite a bit—even if Aoi still wasn’t planning on going back to school, apparently.
“It’s not that I don’t try,” she said. “I still put on my uniform in the morning and try going to school sometimes. Heck, I even want to go there and learn. But as soon as I walk up to campus, I just get so nauseous that I want to puke. I’ll curl up in a little ball on the roadside, and I literally can’t move a muscle until I wait it out.”
Her parents also didn’t seem to have any intention of forcing her to go.
“Oh yeah, no. My folks couldn’t care less,” she explained. “My dad just thinks of me as some baggage he was forced to bring along from his first marriage. There’s no emotional or blood connection between me and my stepmom either.”
We’d decided to spend that night searching along a stretch of railroad that ran from the edge of the city’s residential area right up to the prefectural border. We skimmed along the tracks as they shined beneath the cool moonlight, dodging the occasional train carrying tired salarymen home from work as we dipped down beneath the earth in search of our quarry. After an hour or so of searching failed to turn up anything, we moved on to the next location and picked up from there.