“So that’s why, then?”
After several seconds of silence, I asked the question timidly.
“When I said I was wondering if I might be the ‘extra person,’ you flat-out told me I wasn’t. You told me ‘Relax. It’s not you.’”
“…I did, yes.”
“Is that because you knew the ‘disasters’ had actually started in April? And since I wasn’t in the class in April…?”
“That’s part of it…But the main reason is something else.”
I felt as if I’d had some sort of premonition that Mei would answer this way.
“Meaning what?” I pursued. “What was your reason?”
“I…”
She started to answer, but then showed some hesitation. Her gaze slipped away into space and for a long moment she didn’t even blink, her body frozen and doll-like. Then, finally…
She seemed to have come to a decision. She got up from the bed and turned back to face me. She let me see the eye patch over her left eye, which had been turned away from my view this entire time. Then, with measured movements, she uncovered her eye.
“This eye…”
The special glass eye that rested in her empty eye socket. The “blue eye, empty to all” turned on me.
“This ‘doll’s eye’ told me it’s not you.”
I didn’t understand what she meant right away, of course. Still, I felt a vague foreboding somewhere inside me.
“How did it do that?” I asked, yet another question.
This was Mei’s reply, no longer hesitant: “I think I told you this before. This eye can see things that aren’t visible. Things that you wouldn’t expect to see; things that shouldn’t be seen; things that you wish it couldn’t see.”
“Things you wouldn’t expect to see? Things that shouldn’t be seen? Like what?”
“I think it’s…”
Mei lifted her right hand and with it she covered the eye that was not the “doll’s eye.”
“The ‘color of death.’”
She sounded as if she were intoning a spell.
“The color or the tint of something that’s on the other side, with death.”
I didn’t speak.
“Do you understand? No—I can see you don’t.”
To be honest, I didn’t know how I should respond. However—
“Under normal circumstances, I don’t think you could believe me, even after I explain it…But I may as well tell you everything. Will you hear me out?”
When she said that, I nodded deeply without a second thought. And then I looked straight back into the eye she had turned on me. The beautiful and yet utterly vacant blue eye…
“Let’s hear it,” I told her.