“What do you mean, you can’t talk about it…? Are you kidding me right now?” I pressed impatiently, not wanting to accept that she’d been hiding things from me all along. “Great, now you’re making me even more worried. I mean, if something that unspeakable happened, don’t you think I deserve to know about it in advance?”
“Please, just…”
“No, you need to tell me. Or do you just not trust me? Is that it?”
“O-of course I trust you!” she pleaded, raising her voice. “Look, you’ll find out soon enough, all right? Believe me, it’s nothing you need to know right now. So please, don’t say things like that…”
Her voice was cracked and trembling, and her face looked utterly heartbroken. It made me feel downright horrible, and a wave of guilt crashed over me, as though I were a cruel pet owner who kicked a helpless puppy out of the car and drove off.
“…Fine. Sorry I brought it up,” I said. It was a question that needed to be asked, but I conceded that I should have found a better way to go about it. Akari looked down at the ground and shook her head weakly.
“No… I’m the one who should be apologizing.”
“…I said it’s fine.”
I picked my cell phone up off the ground and checked the time. It was already after ten o’clock; we were officially out past curfew.
“C’mon, let’s go home,” I suggested.
Akari reluctantly nodded, her eyes still downcast.
We hardly spoke a word to each other on the way back, and the few brief exchanges we did have were so superficial that I completely forgot what we talked about by the time we said goodbye outside her apartment complex.
Immediately after I made it back to my place, I hopped in the bathtub, submerged myself up to my shoulders in hot water, and let out a weary sigh. I was officially exhausted. Maybe if I hadn’t made an ass of myself by accusing Akari like that, I would still be riding the emotional high of our otherwise incredible evening, but that ship had long since sailed. This icky, grimy sensation I was feeling deep inside could have been completely avoided. I knew that no amount of scrubbing could wash the guilt away.
At least I managed to glean a few new tidbits of information from this unfortunate experience: namely, that Akari was indeed hiding something from me but that it was probably nothing too earth-shattering or dire. She probably felt like she had good reason to withhold that information from me for the time being, although I couldn’t even start to imagine what that reason might be. I resolved to stop being suspicious of Akari and believe in her promise that I would find out soon enough. Obviously, I was still highly curious about what she and I were up to on the night of Akito’s death, but I knew forcing the issue any further would only hurt our relationship.
I pushed myself up and out of the bathwater. Tomorrow, I’d promised I would help Hayase out with her family’s festival booth. I’d need to wake up early so I could head over to the temple grounds by six in the morning, so I decided it would be best to turn in for the night. Time to rest up for what would probably be a pretty physically demanding day.
At about 5:30 a.m. the next morning, Wednesday, April 4th, I stepped out of the house and made my way over toward the big festival, still rubbing the sleep out of my eyes. It was dark enough at this hour to see the stars out, though the sun was just beginning to peek its head up over the eastern horizon.
I made good time, arriving at the temple grounds slightly earlier than six o’clock. There were already quite a few people there getting things set up, along with a couple of apparent event organizers darting around in traditional festival garb. I stood at the entrance to the grounds for a minute, trying to take it all in, when I heard a voice call out to me. I turned to see that the voice belonged to Hayase, who was standing in the middle of a group huddle with adults twice her age. I jogged over to meet her.
“Morning, Funami,” she waved. “Sorry to make you roll outta bed so early.”
“Nah, it’s fine. But, uh…” I trailed off, glancing around at the adults surrounding Hayase. There were four men and women, a couple of whom might pass for being in their late twenties, while the others were clearly in their forties.
“Oh, them? They’re the other helpers you’ll be assisting,” she explained.
“Right, okay.”
For a single booth, this seemed like a lot of people. Was my help really that necessary? I was dubious but introduced myself to the other workers as Hayase instructed anyway. When I finished, they proceeded to give their own introductions to me.
“Okay, now that you’re all acquainted, you can help us start raising the canopy tents. Here, put these on,” Hayase said. She was already walking away as soon as she passed a pair of work gloves to me, so I slipped them on as quickly as I could while trying to keep pace with her.
She brought us into a large storage shed on the temple grounds, from which we hauled out the long metal framework pieces that would form the skeleton of the booth. It took several trips back and forth to get all of the hardware to where it needed to be, but less than an hour later, we had three canopies set up side by side, complete with triangular white polyester tent covers. From there, we started unloading folding tables, cookware, and signage from a van parked nearby. By about half past seven, the booth was more or less finished. I walked out a short distance to marvel at our handiwork from afar.
“Man, this thing’s huge…”
It looked less like what you tended to envision when picturing a festival food stand and more like it could serve as the central HQ for the entire event. Hayase apparently heard me gawking and walked over to where I was standing.
“Yeah, my family goes big every year. Didn’t you know that?” she asked.
“Not really,” I admitted. “I don’t usually take part in the festival, to be honest…”
“What?! Well, you should! I expect to see you here every year from now on, bub! But for today, I need you to work your butt off!”
She clapped me hard on the back and walked off. I was beginning to feel like I might have gotten myself in a little over my head. Hayase soon called another group huddle where she doled out tasks to each of us helpers: Some would be doing food prep, while others would be taking orders and running the cash register. I was assigned to work the back, where I would ensure ingredients were well stocked, handle plating and packaging, and tend to other odd jobs like that. This was, admittedly, not how I imagined I’d be spending my precious spring break…especially not when I should have been focused on saving Akito.
At around nine o’clock, the customers had started rolling in, and things gradually got much more hectic. Now it was almost noon, and the temple grounds were packed to capacity. The Ocean’s Bounty Festival was Sodeshima’s biggest annual event, to the point that even people from outside the island knew about it, and so a huge influx of mainlanders would take the ferry over each year to take part in the festivities. The festival’s main attraction was the grand cavalcade of boats, which would leave port in the early afternoon and circle the waters surrounding Sodeshima. At the center of the procession was a magnificent replica of a mythical treasure ship that was said to be piloted from the heavens down into the human world by the Seven Gods of Good Fortune. It offered its symbolic blessings unto the sea and prayers of bountiful harvests and safe journeys for the local fishermen. It never seemed all that cool to me, personally, but there was obviously some sort of novelty appeal to the many festivalgoers.
More than anything, though, I wanted to be done with this massive “favor” I’d signed myself up for. Ideally, I’d at least like to be home before six, so that the next Rollback wouldn’t happen in the middle of a bunch of confusing action again… Wait a minute. I recalled the previous Rollback, when I found myself here at the festival and realized that was exactly what was going to happen. That drunkard was going to try to pick a fight with me, and then Hayase would swoop in to the rescue. I still had no idea why that guy got so angry at me, but I assumed I’d probably find out soon enough. I never thought of myself as the type to go pissing off random strangers, but…
“…Hang on.”
A new hypothesis floated its way into my brain. What if I made a point of being somewhere far, far away from the festival when the next Rollback occurred? There was no way I could get accosted by that balding drunkard if I wasn’t even there in the first place. Then again, that would change the future, and thus everything I’d already experienced in the previous Rollbacks. It would essentially create a time paradox.
Was that something I wanted to attempt, though? There were plenty of books and cartoons in which people went around changing the past all willy-nilly without a care in the world, but the rules of fictional universes like that didn’t always apply to the real world. In a certain sense, that was already what I was trying to do here. My aim was to alter the past to prevent Akito’s death, thereby creating a future in which there was never a necessity for me to go back and try to prevent it, thereby creating a world in which I didn’t prevent it, and so on, and so forth. This cyclical pattern of contradictions was the very definition of a time paradox, but I was in too deep now to get cold feet. I would have to give my best effort and hope that was enough. I decided I’d give my hypothesis a try and see what happened if I left the festival grounds prior to six o’clock. Until then, I had work to do.