“…Hey, wait a minute.”
As I looked down at the diagram, an old question resurfaced in my mind. It was one that I’d tried to ask Eri about the night we were walking to Akito’s wake.
What was I physically doing between 6 p.m. on the 1st and 6 p.m. on the 5th?
If the only part of me that made the quantum leap was my mind, then that would imply that my physical self still experienced those four days in their natural order. In other words, the body I was in right now had already experienced all of the events that I was about to “relive,” but my mind couldn’t remember them because mentally, I was going through them in reverse order.
I grabbed my cell phone, thinking there might be something recorded within it that could give me some hints as to how I’d spent the previous few days. I figured it might be a bit of a long shot, but when I tapped the Memos app, it opened up to a set of notes I didn’t remember taking:
4/2: Found Akito’s body @ 6:30 PM in empty lot behind tobacco shop & called police.
Est. time of death between midnight and 2 AM that morning.
Was drinking heavily earlier that night @ the Asuka Tavern, ~9 PM to midnight.
“The hell?” I muttered incredulously.
It was all specifics related to Akito’s death. The second bullet point I’d already heard from Akari, but the other two were completely new information to me. I scrunched up my forehead and carefully reread each word, and then suddenly it clicked.
“Oh, duh!” I exclaimed as the light bulb flashed on in my head.
I must have typed these notes out sometime between six o’clock on April 1st and six o’clock on April 4th. To put it plainly, this was information that my future self had left for me in the past. That explained why there were details here that I hadn’t learned yet. But with that being the case, I couldn’t help but wonder how accurate this intel really was…aside from the stuff Akari already told me, of course.
For example, the first bullet point seemed to imply that I had initially found Akito’s body in the empty lot behind the tobacco shop and reported it to the authorities. Akari told me the body was found in that exact location, to be sure, but she didn’t say anything about who found it. It seemed like a relevant detail to include if it was me. Still, the fact that it was written here in my own cell phone made me inclined to believe it was true. In which case, there probably would be a record of me calling the emergency hotline around that time. Upon realizing this, I hastily opened up my recent call history.
RECENT CALLS
Akari Hoshina - Yesterday - 7:56 PM
Akari Hoshina - Yesterday - 6:35 PM
Akari Hoshina - Yesterday - 5:32 PM
Dad - Monday - 10:24 PM
Home - Monday - 7:15 PM
119 - Monday - 6:30 PM
Home - Monday - 11:07 PM
Akari Hoshina - Sunday - 9:06 PM
Akari Hoshina - Sunday - 9:05 PM
Home - Sunday - 6:29 PM
Sure enough, there it was: a record of me calling 119 at exactly 6:30 p.m. on Monday, April 2nd. It matched up perfectly with the time listed in my notes, and since you couldn’t really forge your call history, I had no choice but to accept the notes in my phone as the real deal. However, I did find it somewhat peculiar that I had logged so many phone calls with Akari over the past few days—especially “yesterday,” when we’d apparently had three calls within a matter of hours. Let’s see… Yesterday would have been the 3rd, so… Maybe we made plans to meet up or something?
In any case, I now had a much better grasp on the intricacies of Akito’s death. All that remained now was to establish what I’d been doing for the past several days, but I could probably figure that out pretty easily with some carefully worded questions to Eri or my grandmother. As though she’d read my mind, Eri yelled up at me from downstairs that very moment to let me know that dinner was ready. When I stood up from my chair, I heard something crinkle in my left pocket. I reached inside to discover a mysterious, folded-up thousand-yen bill. Maybe I’d been planning to use it to buy a snack over at the festival or something. I unfolded the bill and slid it into my wallet, then headed downstairs.
“Hey, Grandma, can I ask you something?” I asked after we were done eating and she was washing dishes in the kitchen.
“What is it, dear?” she replied without even turning around as she kept scrubbing away at the plate she was currently washing.
“Do you remember how I’ve been spending my time since I came back to Sodeshima?”
I was planning to talk to Eri at first, but then figured she’d probably get suspicious as to why I was asking and decided to ask my grandmother instead. My grandmother wasn’t a very skeptical person in general, and she’d typically answer just about any question in a straightforward manner without questioning the asker’s intent. Unfortunately, it seemed I made a bit of a miscalculation this time.
“I beg your pardon?” she said in puzzled surprise as she turned to face me. “Goodness, that’s an awfully broad question.”
She was totally right. I should have narrowed it down a bit.