“............”
Gamon sat down on the sofa in the café, clearly upset. Until a few minutes ago, he’d been screaming at me and calling me useless, but he’d finally calmed down.
“Fine, Sarai. I’ll prove you’re wrong. I’ll show my real power as the admin of Kirikiri Basara. My real power!”
Now he was yelling at me. He was trying to sound strong, but I could see a thin film of sweat on his forehead.
He was probably worried.
So was I, But panicking here wouldn’t help anything. This was precisely the time when you needed to be calm, collected, and capable of analyzing the situation thoroughly.
“Poor, poor, Sarai-kyun! ☆”
“........”
There was one girl in the room who was neither calm nor collected, instead dancing around the room singing a weird song. I wasn’t sure if Ryoka Narusawa was actually trying to insult me or not. But the one thing I did know was that it was a waste of time to take her seriously.
I decided to start by talking about what I’d experienced since yesterday. I did this because the best move for now seemed to be sharing information with Gamon—or rather, Miss Sumikaze.
“The first thing that seemed strange to me was the way my mother reacted. I spoke to her, and she didn’t say anything back.”
“Y-You’re sure it’s not a coincidence? Your mom did seem to be pretty tired,” Gamon answered quickly.
“Yes, but she couldn’t have been that tired.”
I’d screamed in her ear and stood right in front of her eyes, but she kept acting like I wasn’t even there. That had never happened before.
“And then there was the TV broadcast.”
This morning, there had been an announcement that they’d found more names of the victims in the Inokashira Park incident. One of the names was mine.
“When I heard my name, I thought it had to be some kind of mistake.”
“That’s the only explanation. Why didn’t you call and find out for yourself? The Sarai I know would’ve done that without needing me to tell him—”
“Of course I called and asked.” I cut him off. My voice was a little rougher than I’d intended it to be.
This wasn’t good. If I lost control here, we’d get nowhere.
“I called the TV station to see if the name on the list was accurate.”
“A-And what did they say?”
“The name list is correct. There was no mistake... They were insistent.”
“.........”
“But that doesn’t prove I’m dead.”
“What?” Gamon stared at me in shock. He didn’t seem to understand what I was getting at.
“For now, I don’t know if the TV station was right when they said there was no error.” It was just a possibility. They might be lying.
“How much evidence do you think the person I called at the TV station actually had? They were probably just saying that because I was on the list. So the next likely possibility is that the list was in error. Perhaps the list contained the names of people who weren’t actually victims.”
TV stations make mistakes all the time. It wasn’t implausible at all to think that they might have the wrong names on a list of victims.
“And if that’s true, there are two more possibilities. Either the police were wrong when they announced the names, or the TV station was wrong when they reported them.”
This had happened recently enough that the papers didn’t have the list of names yet. We could assume that the TV station was the only one that did. Of course, I’d have to start reading the evening paper to be sure.
“Poyah! Messed-up broadcast! Miss Japan! ♪” Narusawa started dancing again. She was sure taking it easy.
“As near as I can tell, my name was broadcast on two stations. That means that it’s most likely that the mistake was on the police’s side. Thus, I decided to call the police.”
“Wh-What did the police say?!”
“The answer was what you’d expect: the broadcast was correct.”
“What...?” Gamon’s shoulders slumped in dismay. Let me finish, I wanted to say.
“The identifications were done by checking their possessions and having their families confirm, so there’s no way it could be wrong. That’s what the police said.”
“S-So that’s how they did it?”
“Don’t jump to conclusions. It just means that one possibility has been ruled out. There’s still a chance that any amount of human error could’ve taken place between the time when the list got to the TV station and when it was broadcasted.”
Only after investigating every one of them and ruling out the possibility of error could we be sure that both me and Gamon, as well as Miss Sumikaze, were actually among the victims of the 256 incident.
But even then, that would only mean that the list was correct. It didn’t necessarily mean that we were dead.
“Oh, wait! Wait a second!” Gamon gasped as if he’d suddenly had an idea, and he grabbed on to me. “You said you called the TV station and the police, right? You talked to them over the phone? That means you were able to talk to them, right? What kind of ghost can talk on the phone?! Okay, Q.E.D.!” Gamon pumped his fists in the air. He was going between depression and excitement in an instant. It looked exhausting. “And when I was on my way here, I picked up this really cute girl’s pass case. Her name was Saeko Kitaya! I was able to talk to her completely normally! You know what that means, right? It means I’m alive!”
“...Saeko Kitaya.” I took out my phone and searched through a list of the people who’d committed suicide during the 256 incident.
“W-Wait, what are you looking at?”
“Saeko Kitaya... Found it.” The name was on the list. “That woman’s name is among the 256 victims.”
“What? But...” Gamon’s eyes opened as wide as they possibly could, and then he froze. “But I... I just talked to her... She was really grateful. She said she dropped it all the time, and that she thought it was really hot the way I’d given it back to her...”
“It’s possible that you were only able to talk to her because she was dead, too.”
That was another possibility.
“But she had legs! She wasn’t floating! I couldn’t see through her!”
He’d probably picked up his stereotypical ideas of what a ghost looked like from watching old movies or something. I went to tell him that, when...
“I actually did an experiment myself.” Miss Sumikaze, who’d said nothing until now, began to speak calmly. “I tried to talk to several pedestrians at random. What I found was that just like Gamon, I was able to talk to some of them. But—”
“Some of them you couldn’t. In fact, most of them you couldn’t. Right?”
“Yes.”
I guess everyone had the same idea. I’d tried the same thing. I’d only been able to get a sample of twenty or so people, but in my case, I hadn’t been able to talk to a single one.
“I was able to talk to two people. The odds that I’d run into two out of 256 people at random in Kichijoji are pretty low, so it’s possible that we can talk to the living as well as the dead.”
“Talk to the living?” I asked. “What would be the conditions for that?”
“Someone with a strong sixth sense, perhaps?”
“.........”
What she was describing was the occult. There was no logic in that.
Toko Sumikaze.
She was an editor at the magazine where my dad’s column used to run. Sometimes she would come to my house, but I couldn’t remember ever speaking with her.
She seemed to be pretty quick on her feet, mentally, but just like you’d expect from an editor at Mumuu, she was the type who really believed in that stuff.
“Um, before we talk about people with a sixth sense, shouldn’t we think about the possibility that they were just ignoring us?” Gamon said, desperately trying to come up with an excuse. “I mean, think about it. If you were walking down the street and somebody came up to you and said, ‘Can you see me?’ how would you react? I’d think they were with some kind of weird religious cult and ignore them.”
“I thought about that, so instead I just asked for directions,” Sumikaze responded.
“Uh...”
“I tried that with about fifty people, and only two of them reacted. The rest ignored me.”
“W-Well, you know. People in Kichijoji have gotten really rude lately...”
“That’s an awful excuse. You know that, right?”
“Uh...”
Debating with him like this was a waste of time. If we couldn’t remove our emotions from this, we’d never get anywhere.
...I needed to tell myself this, too.