—Ring.
The soft tinkling of a bell. A faint sound, a mere whisper of a ring.
He opened his eyes and saw three grade-schoolers running noisily by. His sight was drawn to the good luck charm dangling from one of the children’s backpacks. It bounced in an irregular rhythm.
It seemed he had been asleep for quite a while. Nearby, a train crawled forward. The rattling it made on the tracks was the same rhythm as the beating of his heart.
The sound of a train running on a designated track at a designated time. The air that never changed. The sound of laughter that always made him gag. The people who drifted off to sleep, their brows painfully furrowed. The unchanging scenery.
Me, the same as always. I’m used to it. I’ve gotten used to it.
His home was still a few stations away, but an in-car announcement blared that everyone had to get off at the next stop. It was a normal, mundane announcement, yet he wondered how many people experienced the sort of tension that made it hard to even breathe. That was how Ikuma Daiki felt.
The train slowed and entered the station platform. Inertia kicked in and bodies were pushed and pulled, all at the mercy of unseen forces. Daiki stood and approached the door. He could still see light outside, an indication there was still some time left before dusk set in. Inside, the train was heavy with a lazy atmosphere. But when the doors opened, the bracing February air could be felt on one’s cheeks.
How many times have I descended upon this very platform?
He had been here several times now, and each time he felt as if his breath would be stifled. The very first time, he had managed to find the place by following newspaper and magazine articles and photos. It wasn’t very far from the station. Now, just like a local, Daiki easily navigated his way to the right exit. He walked towards his target destination.
After a while, a peculiar-looking building came into view, contrasting somewhat with the quiet surroundings. It was a building that, several years prior, had been abandoned even before construction was completed.
Although it didn’t have a “no trespassing” sign, a chain-link fence encircled the building. Daiki slid his overly thin frame through a small opening and entered the facility. In several places, there was evidence that others had entered in the same manner.
There was graffiti on the walls, but nothing that could remotely be called art. It further heightened the effect of abandonment. It seemed to be some kind of message, but outsiders had no way of understanding its meaning.
The windows on the first floor were all broken; bits and shards were scattered about the ground. Glass crunched under Daiki’s feet as he entered the building. His gaze fell upon a mountain of obscenely discarded trash.
A small path that snaked away from the garbage led to a stairway and the upper floors. Both Daiki and that boy had taken the same path. He proceeded to go upstairs.
Unlike the psychological feeling of suffocation he had felt at the station, this time it was a physical shortness of breath that Daiki felt as he used his legs to go upstairs. No way would there be any working elevators here.
Ninth floor. Most trespassers would never even bother coming this high. So, unlike the floors below, this one was not cluttered with garbage or broken glass. On the other hand, there was a carpet of dust and words written in magic marker.
Those words had remained, without disappearing.
The boy had committed suicide about a year ago. At the time, he had been a third-year student in junior high. He had leapt from the ninth floor.
He had scrawled countless words on the walls of this floor. Words which could have been poetry or could have been his final will and testament.
Crap.
It’s all crap.
Living is crap.
Life has no meaning.
None. Nowhere to be found.
Crap.
Why doesn’t anybody realize this?
That was his last message to the world.
Daiki approached the window where the boy had leapt into the dusk sky. After the boy’s suicide, the police had covered all of the windows on this floor with tape. Daiki removed part of the tape so he could peer outside. He wanted to see the scenery the boy had seen. He forced open the rattling window.
Daiki’s hair had grown irritatingly long, as if to erect a barrier against all human interaction. From between the countless black strands, he viewed a distorted world.
The sun began its descent. The sky would soon be painted a bright Bengal orange.
One year ago, the boy had seen this same view. He had realized he had no wings, yet, still, he had tried to fly.
What had caused him to do so—as he had looked down upon the world he hastily dismissed as crap—Daiki wondered. For one whole year, he thought of it, until he turned the same age the boy had been.
He gazed upon that very same view.
And as he did so, Daiki spat and looked down at the world.
The boy had died. He had taken his own life and ended his path forever. But Daiki was not dead, yet neither was he truly alive. The boy’s poem was one of despair, but Daiki had been strangely touched by it. It was as if he had discovered a “light” amidst his dark despair. And so, Daiki saw the boy as shining brightly.
Suddenly, he felt as if he had discovered something, a simple answer. He might even have known it for a long time now.
“I am… the same as him…
“I want to become ‘light’ just like him. But what must I do to become light?”
The boy, to bring his thoughts to the surface, had left his “poem.”
It was later discovered that he had several other poems and thoughts, scribbled in notebooks he had left behind. Those feelings remained in this world too, as light.
“Then, what should I do?” Daiki asked himself.
He decided that merely standing there, doing nothing, was not an adequate form of acceptance of the boy’s poem. Daiki removed his sketchbook from his bag and began to violently draw on the empty white paper with a piece of charcoal.
“It’s a nonsensical world. So I’ll draw a nonsensical picture.”
Everything is crap. This is my final scene.
“I’ll draw a picture to end it all.”
He scrawled shapes that appeared in his brain, in his retinas—tattered patterns that fell into black lines, surfacing on paper as black and white masses. Roughly, violently, yet at times delicately, the lines began to come together under the influence of Daiki’s guiding hand. Hardly pausing for breath, he drew a world that was utterly dark. Something deeply mad to the point of sadness, steeped in loneliness, a broken world. Although drawn in deep blacks, portions of white jumped out vividly.
“Huff, huff.” Daiki tried to catch his breath.
He closed his eyes and slowly lowered his hands; the sketchbook tumbled to the floor. Shortly thereafter, the charcoal followed—now worn down smaller than his pinkie fingernail—and dropped to the ground with a quiet plink.
A carpet of dust billowed in the air. Only the quiet sounds of his breathing, pumped out by his heaving lungs, could be heard.
“Huff huff. Huff huff… huff… huff… huff… huff…”
As Daiki opened his eyes once more, he saw in front of him the white clouds of his breath and the sky outside turning to dusk. As if to shake loose his thoughts, a strong wind blew forth. His body responded instinctively. Daiki put his hand on the windowsill and leaned half of his body outside.
“……”
The ground below seemed far away. The height was enough to make him dizzy. This was a place cut off from the world.
He had no wings to fly. Scattered tufts of dust drifted in the air like feathers, but they were not his wings. He had no wings. He’d realized that about himself for a long time now.
Crap.
Crap.
Crap.
Crap.
Crap—
Like a chant, the words rang over and over again in Daiki’s head.
Fly. Reach for the sky. You can do it, he thought.
“I’ll never see this warped twilight again… Goodbye, fleeting world—”
Just as he was about to hurl himself out the window, it happened.
—Ring.
The tinkle of a bell. And then, a voice.
“Do you want to fly?”
The voice came from somewhere nearby. No, it was whispered in his ear. Not expecting this, Daiki swallowed hard.
There shouldn’t be anyone else here, Daiki thought.
No matter how focused he was on his task, he would have noticed if someone had come near. His body froze, but he managed to move his eyes towards the direction of the voice.
A face was there. Close enough for him to feel an exhaled breath on his cheek, if there had been any.