The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya (7 page)

I turned back to scanning the bookshelves in silence.

My eyes happened to stop at the spine of a certain book.

The title looked familiar. It was the first book of the long foreign sci-fi series that Nagato lent to me when the SOS Brigade was first established, the book with a scary amount of words. Now that I think about it, Nagato was still wearing glasses when she said, “I’ll lend you this,” and forced the book on me without waiting for my response. It took two weeks to read the whole thing. Feels like it was years ago. Too much has happened.

Enticed by that curiously fond memory, I drew the hardcover from the shelf. I had no intention of reading while standing when I wasn’t in a bookstore, so I just flipped through the pages and was about to put the book back when a small rectangular piece of paper fell by my feet.

“What?”

I picked it up. It was a bookmark with an illustration of a flower. The kind bookstores put in your bag without asking—bookmark?

It felt like the world was spinning around me. Yes… Back
then… I opened this book in my room… And found something just like this bookmark… Then I took off on my bike… I could recite that phrase from memory.

Seven
PM
. Waiting in the park in front of Kouyou Park Station.

I held my breath as I turned the bookmark over with a trembling hand—and saw a message.

“
PROGRAM EXECUTE CONDITION—ASSEMBLE THE KEYS. FINAL DEADLINE—TWO DAYS
”

The bookmark that fell from the hardcover book had a message in Times New Roman print, just like the last one.

I quickly spun around and took three steps toward the table where Nagato sat. I stared into her widening black pupils.

“Were you the one who wrote this?”

Nagato tilted her head as she gazed at the back of the bookmark I was holding out. She then turned to me with a puzzled look on her face.

“It resembles my handwriting. But… I don’t recognize it. I don’t remember writing this.”

“… I see. Thought so. Yeah, it’s okay. I’d be more worried if you did know what this was. I was just a little curious. Yeah, don’t mind me…”

I wasn’t paying much attention as I made my excuses.

Nagato.

You did leave a message behind. I’ve never been happier to see such a cut-and-dried message. Was it safe to assume that this was a present from the Nagato I was familiar with? That this was a hint for dealing with the current situation? I mean, why else would she leave this note here?

Program. Condition. Keys. Deadline. Two days.

… Two days?

Today was the nineteenth. Was I supposed to count two days from now or two days from yesterday, when the world went crazy? Worst-case scenario, the deadline would be the twentieth, tomorrow.

The moment of joyous surprise was wearing off like lava slowly cooling. All I knew was that there was a program, and I would have to assemble the keys to execute it. But what were the keys? Where would I find them? How many were there? Where did I go to trade them all in for a prize?

A flurry of question marks spun above my head before merging into one giant question mark.

Would executing this program return the world to how it was before?

I began pulling books from the shelf and returning them at a fast pace while checking to see if any other bookmarks might fall out. I worked busily under Nagato’s startled gaze for nada. There weren’t any others.

“This is it, huh?”

Well, if I get greedy and ask for too much, I’ll be weighed down and end up right back where I started. It’s a waste of time and your life gauge to run around using whatever you can find without settling on a destination. I have to start by figuring out the keys. I’m still a fair distance from the summit, but I’m starting to pick up on the correct direction to go.

I opened my lunch box and set it on the table, after asking for permission, and ate my lunch, opening my mind to potential ideas while sitting diagonally across from Nagato. Nagato kept glancing my way, but I was busy operating my chopsticks in a mechanical fashion to carry nourishment to my brain cells.

Once I finished lunch I was about to ask for tea when I remembered that Asahina wasn’t here, leaving me dejected but undeterred from my brainstorming. This was the moment of truth. I couldn’t let this hard-earned hint go to waste. Focus on the key, the key. Key, key…

I must have spent two hours in deep thought.

I was growing disgusted with my lack of brains as I began muttering to myself.

“I have no idea.”

Besides, “key” is a really ambiguous term. I really doubt she’s referring to the kind of key that’s used on locks. She probably means key as in “keyword” or “key person,” but that leaves a lot of area to cover. I wish she’d offered the option to choose from some extra hints regarding what I was looking for. Was it an item or was it a spoken line or was it something you could carry around? I tried to channel what Nagato had been thinking as she wrote on the bookmark, but I could only recall the sight of her reading some complicated book or delivering another helpful but tedious explanation, the Nagato we knew and loved.

I suddenly had an urge to look diagonally across the table, and found that Nagato wasn’t moving, as though she had fallen asleep. And it seemed as though she was still on the same page in her book, though that might have just been my imagination. However, as if to prove that she wasn’t taking an afternoon nap, Nagato’s cheeks flushed in response to my absentminded staring. This version of the literary club member Nagato appeared to be extremely shy or unaccustomed to other people looking at her.

It was rather refreshing to see a familiar-looking girl react in an unfamiliar way. I deliberately continued to observe her.

“…”

Her eyes were focused on the text in the book, but it was obvious that she wasn’t taking in a single word. Nagato’s mouth was
slightly open as she breathed without making a sound and the subtle rise and fall of her chest was becoming more pronounced. Her slender cheeks were growing redder by the minute. To be honest, I found this Nagato to be fairly—no, incredibly—cute. For a moment I was almost tempted to just join the literary club and enjoy a world without Haruhi.

But not yet. It was too early for me to give up. I took the bookmark from my pocket and held it tightly while doing my best to avoid bending it. The fact that this piece of paper had been slipped into this world meant that the Nagato with the Santa hat still had business with me. I felt the same way. I hadn’t gotten a chance to try some of Haruhi’s hot pot yet, and I had never had enough time to burn the image of Asahina in a Santa outfit into my eyelids. We’d been busy decorating the clubroom so my game with Koizumi had been cut off at the best part. I probably would have won if we’d kept going, so I’d be missing out on a hundred yen the way things stood.

A westering sun was shining through the window as we approached the time when the sun became a giant orange ball on its way to hide behind the school building.

I was getting tired of sitting still, and I wasn’t going to be able to squeeze any more beneficial output from my head. I stood up and reached for my bag.

“I’m going home for the day.”

“I see.”

Nagato shut the hardcover she was reading or not reading and slipped it into her book bag as she stood up. Had she been waiting for me to say something?

With bag in hand, I turned to the figure that appeared ready to stay frozen in place until I took the first step.

“Say, Nagato.”

“What?”

“You live by yourself, right?”

“… Yes.”

She was probably wondering how I knew that.

I was going to ask about her family when I noticed her subtly downcast eyelashes. I recalled the room that barely had any furniture. My first visit had been seven months ago when her cosmic psychobabble on an epic scale had given me a jolt in more than one way. The next visit had come on Tanabata three years ago, and Asahina had been with me that time. The second visit actually came before the first one chronologically, so I obviously got skills.

“How about getting a cat? Cats are great. They always act lazy, but you get a feeling that they can understand what you’re saying sometimes. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a talking cat. For real.”

“No pets allowed.”

And with that she fell silent with a wistful flutter of her eyes, but then she took a deep breath that sounded like a swallow slicing through the wind before speaking in a weak voice.

“Coming?”

Nagato was staring at my fingernails.

“Where to?” I asked.

My fingernails heard her reply.

“My house.”

After a half rest of silence, I spoke.

“… You’re okay with it?”

What was going on here? I couldn’t tell if she was shy, timid, or pushy. This Nagato seemed to be in an unstable mental state. Or was the mentality of an average girl in her first year of high school supposed to be as irregular as the light curve of Alpha Ceti?

“Yes.”

Nagato began walking as if to escape my gaze. She turned off
the lights in the clubroom, opened the door, and disappeared into the hallway.

Naturally, I followed her. Nagato’s room. Room 708 in the fancy condominium. I should take a peek in her guest room. There might be a new hint inside.

If I found another version of me sleeping there, I’d immediately wake him up.

Nagato and I didn’t say a word on the way back from school.

Nagato looked straight ahead in silence as she descended the hill as though a strong, chilly wind were blowing at her back. I was moving my legs in a businesslike fashion as I stared at the back of her head and the hair that had been ruffled by the gusts of wind. There wasn’t anything for me to say to her, and I had a feeling that I shouldn’t ask why she had invited me.

After a prolonged period of walking, Nagato finally came to a stop before the usual fancy apartment. How many times have I been here? I’ve been inside Nagato’s room twice, I’ve been outside Asakura’s room once, and I’ve been to the roof of the building once. At the entrance Nagato inputted the password to unlock the door and walked into the lobby without looking back.

She remained silent as we rode the elevator up. After inserting her key into the door of room 8 on the seventh floor, she opened the door and motioned for me to go inside before she entered.

I stepped in without saying a word. The layout of the room was exactly as I remembered it. A desolate place. The living room had a kotatsu and nothing else. There still weren’t any curtains.

And there’s the guest room. It should be the room beyond that sliding door.

“Mind if I look inside this room?” I asked Nagato as she walked
out of the kitchen with a teapot and teacups. Nagato slowly blinked.

“Go ahead.”

“Excuse me for a sec.”

The door slid open as smoothly as if it had wheels.

“…”

There was only tatami flooring to be found.

Well, that makes sense. I can’t keep going back to the past…

I slid the door back in place and held out my open hands for Nagato, watching attentively. My actions must have seemed pointless. However, Nagato didn’t say anything as she set the teacups on the table of the kotatsu, knelt down in a formal posture, and began to pour tea.

I sat down cross-legged across from her. It had been like this the first time I came here. I had downed cup after cup of Nagato’s tea for no real reason before listening to her cosmic monologue. That had been back during a particularly hot transition from spring to summer, a world from the current frigid weather. Even my soul felt colder.

We sat face-to-face in silence as we drank the tea. Nagato’s eyes were focused downward behind her glasses.

It appeared that Nagato was hesitating, as she opened her mouth and then shut it. She would appear to reach a decision and look up at me before looking back down, a motion that she repeated many times, but finally she set her teacup down and spoke in a strangled voice.

“I have met you before.”

And then, almost as an afterthought…

“Outside of school.”

Where?

“Do you remember?”

Remember what?

“What happened at the library.”

As soon as she said those words, I could hear the gears in my brain begin to turn. The memory of the time I had spent with Nagato at the library surfaced. The first stage of that memorable magical mystery tour.

“Back in May.”

Nagato was still looking down.

“You helped me get a library card.”

I froze as I was hit by a mental shock.

… That’s right. Otherwise you would have never budged from the bookshelves. Haruhi was chain-calling me to get our butts down there and I didn’t really have a choice if I wanted to hurry back to the meeting point…

“Hey.”

However, as Nagato continued with her explanation, her description of that incident differed from the one in my memory. According to the soft, faltering voice of this Nagato—

Nagato had set foot in the public library for the first time ever around mid-May but she hadn’t known how to get a library card. The matter would have been settled by asking a librarian, but the few librarians around were all busy. On top of that, she was a reserved, poor speaker who lacked the courage. Then a male high school student who happened to see her loitering around the counter was unable to stand the sorry sight and offered to handle the entire procedure in her stead.

And that was…

“You.”

Nagato turned to meet my eyes for half a second before returning her gaze to the top of the kotatsu.

“…”

That particular ellipsis came from both of us. Silence returned to the living room with no furniture as I ran out of things to
say. I couldn’t respond to the question of whether I remembered the incident or not, because her memory was oddly different from mine. I had certainly helped her get a library card, but I hadn’t simply happened to pass by, since I was the one who had taken Nagato to the library in the first place. I had chosen the library as a place to kill time after giving up on the hopeless magical mystery patrol. It wasn’t possible for me to have forgotten the sight of Nagato in her uniform following after me in silence, even when my memory was at the level of an infantile sea anemone’s.