Like Love in the Movies

It began with the voices in my head. With the second voice in my head, to be specific.

Now, under usual circumstances, the only voice in my head is my own. I think that's fair enough - everyone's entitled to some mental narration. That's perfectly normal. What isn't perfectly normal is when you're locking up your bicycle, ready for the long trek towards school, thinking what a drag Tuesdays are, and then a voice that sounds exactly like yours says, in your head, I'd come to learn that that was the problem with routine. It numbs you.

There were no witnesses, so I cannot affirm whether or not I actually screamed like a girl. What I can confirm is that my school bag slipped from my fingers, hitting the ground with a muffled thud. I considered doing the same.

So it had finally happened: Haruhi had driven me insane. How foolishly optimistic I'd been, thinking that I would emerge from my troubled adolescence with minimal mental scarring and the need for, at most, several years in therapy. The average human psyche just isn't made for dealing with espers and time-travellers and aliens, let alone a girl with the power to warp reality. It was surprising that I'd even lasted so long, I thought, as I reached out for my bag. It was as if I was watching, from very far away, my nerveless fingers stretch tremblingly towards my fallen bag-

Not only was there another narrative voice in my head, but it was speaking in purple prose.

At that point I probably did scream.

First you must understand that despite the conventions of film noir, the phenomenology of thought is very different from that of having a mental narrator. Listen to yourself think, in an everyday situation. Go on, try. When you're staring out of the window during class, perhaps. Maybe you think, Augh, it's hot. It's not even summer yet. I wonder what's for lunch. Maybe you think, that's it, that's it, I've finally gone mad, why did I ever get involved with Haruhi? Farewell unfettered youth. Farewell ordinary life with a wife and 1.25 children and a comfortably dull office job. What you certainly do not think is, The afternoon heat numbs as well as any winter's night. How could I sit there so calmly, so trapped in routine, like a fly fossilised in the amber of unremarkable days? My hours are spent tranquilised. And yet here I am, content to remain drugged on greyness, when the one thing which gives my life colour is sitting just behind me-

It was then that another explanation occurred to me. An explanation possibly more horrifying than any loss of sanity.

Several hours later, said explanation was currently sitting behind the SOS Brigade's illegitimately-procured computer, idly watching as Asahina brought the tea-tray towards me and Koizumi. Just another sweet domestic afternoon in the SOS Brigade clubroom. Except... except that there was something subtly wrong that I couldn't quite place. It was like hearing a familiar song played in another key. I stared at my cup as Asahina filled it, trying to work it out.

And then the piano music started.

I must have visibly jumped, for Asahina looked up in alarm, almost losing her grip on the teapot. I forced a grin onto my face. "I-it's fine, Asahina-san! I just... remembered some homework which I haven't done yet." Yes. Definitely piano music, and it was only playing inside my head. (Another learning point: the phenomenology of hearing music is also very different from that of hearing music inside one's head.) It had no obvious melody; if anything, it sounded a bit like the BGM to an Urasawa Naoki anime, or maybe some obscure German film, the notes spaced precisely the right emotive pauses apart. Films- wait, that was it. What was off about this happy domestic SOS Brigade scene was the colour. It was as if someone had turned up the contrast and fiddled with the saturation settings. The light wasn't falling the same way on Asahina's delicate wrists, on the curves of... of the teapot. Instead it was-

It was shining on Haruhi.

Not like a spotlight, mind. Haruhi is never subtle, consciously or otherwise, but even her unsubtlety has limits. Still, there was definitely something different about the light around her. It was as if the patch of the world surrounding her was trying to win an Oscar for Best Cinematography, while still blending in with everything else.

So on the one hand, Haruhi wasn't trying to introduce a Haruhi-admiring split personality into my mind. On the other, she seemed determined to turn my life into some arthouse indie flick.

No - into some arthouse indie romance.

"Koizumi, I need to talk to you. There's this voice in my head."

I paused to collect my thoughts. That was probably a mistake, for Koizumi took the chance to give me a wide-eyed, pitying stare that was about as infuriating as any of his other false expressions. All compassion is distant. That was what I saw in his eyes-

"No, it's not," I muttered, before realising that talking to oneself was probably another step into madness. Common, everyday madness, mind, as opposed to the sort which was now being inflicted upon me.

"Have you considered going for counselling?"

"No. Look. This isn't something I often get to say, but I know I'm not going mad. Haruhi's put some sort of... poorly-scripted movie voiceover in my head."

"Suzumiya-san? Is it her voice, then?"

"No," I admitted. "The voice sounds like me, but it's definitely... not me..." Koizumi had now turned the 'pity' level of his stare up two notches, and added a hint of patronising worry for effect; I pressed on, mildly annoyed. "I don't know why she's doing it, but I know it has to be Haruhi. The voice keeps bringing her up, for a start."

Now there was a hint of amusement in those eyes. "Now, now, I can't say I'm surprised. Suzumiya-san is a perfectly attractive-"

"Sometimes there's a minimalist piano-based soundtrack accompanying it!"

"...ah. That does rule out some other explanations, I suppose. But what do you expect me to do? There's been no effect as far as closed space is concerned."

To be honest, I wasn't sure what I'd expected him to do, either. Make an irrelevant and unhelpful speech about obscure European directors and the Dogme 95 movement, maybe. I'd known that Koizumi would be of no help, of course. We know that we're alone, and that's why we try so hard to connect, even when we know we must fail. And now the piano had started up again, slow but insistent, like some sort of arthouse funeral march; it was joined by trembling strings, and the afternoon sunlight fell artistically through the hallway windows, and the chief look in Koizumi's eyes was still one of pity.

"Never mind," I said at last, with the vague suspicion that the voiceover had a point, for once. The background music intensified in sympathy.

"If Suzumiya-san wants a film," Koizumi said slowly, "then there is at least one way to placate her. Give her one."

"What? Like The Adventures of Asahina Mikuru, again?"

"No." He gave me a sudden, sharp smile, very different from his usual bland grins; I had learnt to resent that particular smile even more than his other ones. "Give her the happy ending she's waiting for."

"Koizumi-"

"Before she tries to bring it about herself," he added, suddenly serious. "We don't know the limits to the sort of things our dear leader is capable of manipulating. What if she decides that she would like to be the Ultimate Director in this film as well? And what if she can control actors more, ah, directly than most directors?"

I shivered. That possibility was something I'd thought about before. Ordinarily I'd believe in free will as much as the next unreflecting layman, but the next unreflecting layman has the good fortune not to know Suzumiya Haruhi.

What Koizumi got wrong, of course, was his assumption that Haruhi wanted a happy ending. (You'll forgive me if I feel the tiniest scrap of triumph at having realised something that he hadn't. It's petty, perhaps, but when your life is one long game with weighted dice, you take your victories wherever you can.) If there was one thing Haruhi loathed, it was boring predictability. Engineering some soap opera scenario would be more likely to trigger another burst of world-endangering melancholy than remove the indie-film trappings from my mental life.

So I knew what I shouldn't do, at least. That was a start. It was day two of Kyon's Life, The Movie, and the background music was now some English rock song, driven by fuzzy guitars and a plaintive male voice. Not unpleasant, as long as I ignored the fact that it was playing in my head entirely against my will.

The song faded off as I opened the door to the clubroom. Ironic how the only chaotic element in my life has become part of a routine.

Indeed. (I'd found myself agreeing with the voiceover in my head, from time to time. It was still annoyingly pretentious, rather like Koizumi - except wittier, of course. But it clashed less often with my own thoughts, now, and I'd decided to take that as a good sign: perhaps I would be able to direct this so-called film.) Haruhi had made chaos predictable, almost; I could never know what the next reality-defying effect of her whim would be, but at least I knew that there'd always be something around the corner.

Haruhi herself wasn't looking too much like Chaos personified, today. Her hair was up in an adorably tiny ponytail, and she was - uncharacteristically - setting up a game of chess with Koizumi. I took a seat at the other end of the table and surveyed the room. For once, Asahina wasn't dressed as a maid. More to the point, she wasn't in any sort of bizarre costume. I'd grown so used to her afterschool outfits that school-uniform-clad Asahina looked incongruous in the clubroom, which speaks volumes about how the SOS Brigade members had lost all chance at a normal high school life. I gave her a questioning look as she was pouring out the tea: had she finally grown enough of a spine to protest her maltreatment at Haruhi's hands?

But Asahina just gave me a sad, lost stare, and then glanced fearfully over at Haruhi. Aha. So Haruhi wasn't just directing this film in my head, but changing the cast in reality as well, albeit unconsciously. I hoped. If Haruhi was making a conscious effort- but no. I knew Haruhi, and she'd have too much pride to do something like that. Besides, it was still entirely possible that my ego was at work. Perhaps this wasn't an indie romance at all. Perhaps it was merely an indie film about the anomie faced by teenagers in a loveless and stiflingly dull society, and I was reading too much into the script of my personal narrator. I never was very good at Literature classes.

At least Nagato had a book in her hands, as usual. Thankfully, my inner voiceover did not choose to make any Weltschmerz-laced remarks about how the habits of an alien humanoid interface had become a comforting sign of normalcy. Bereft of a board games partner, I sipped my tea and wondered if I should start on the week's math homework. Half an hour passed, gently. The sequel to that half-hour was much the same. We were coming up to the mid-point of the third instalment when Haruhi stood up, the legs of her chair screeching abruptly on the floor.

"That's it!" she announced, tossing her hair - when had she undone that ponytail? - and giving the room one sweeping, imperious glance. "We might as well become the Go Home Club if we waste all our activity hours playing games. SOS Brigade, dismissed!"

Asahina all but fled. Nagato closed her book and gathered her things. So this was it, then. Time to advance the narrative. I took a deep breath, converted it into a sigh, and made my move.

"Haruhi! Hang on, I've- got something to talk to you about."

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Koizumi elegantly raise an eyebrow before slipping through the clubroom door after Nagato, the suggestion of a smirk on his face. This was the way it was supposed to be, right? I was predicting the script correctly, surely?

Haruhi was sweeping the chess pieces back into their box. I wondered if she'd been bored while beating Koizumi; he couldn't have posed much of a challenge. She looked up as I approached, a pre-emptive unimpressed look already on her face. Clearing my throat, and hoping that I was not about to doom myself to a fate worse than living with my own personal narrator, I stepped forward and laid my hands lightly on her shoulders.

"Haruhi."

Too close! My self-preservation instincts were tingling, or perhaps those were my danger-sensing instincts - well, something was tingling, at any rate, but I fought the urge to flee. Her shoulders felt oddly delicate beneath my fingers. I knew they weren't, of course. Haruhi is deadly on the baseball field and judo mat alike, and I'd been dragged around by those formidable arms often enough for my neck to recognise the choking embrace of a tugged school tie. Still, with my hands on her slim shoulders, I could almost forget that she wasn't an ordinary high school girl. That is, if not for the background music that was still playing in my head.

"K-kyon?"

I swallowed. What would Sofia Coppola do? Directors have the luxury of fading to black or cutting to another scene. They don't have to deal with the pesky business of following up on what's happened. Even the voice in my head had gone quiet, providing no clues. Desperately, I cast my mind over the few non-blockbusters I'd ever watched. Voiceover narration, certain styles of background music, cynically witty dialogue... Haruhi had supplied the first two, and I didn't think that I'd be up to the last. Quirky side characters? Bleak plot twists? Ah - there was always the wordless montage sequence! Relieved at the prospect of an escape, I put on my best sincere-lead-character face and met her gaze. In the afternoon light, her eyes were a clear, almost golden shade of brown, a shade brighter than her sun-gilded hair. Strange, how the most dangerous person I knew could be so captivating. Maybe it was Stockholm syndrome. I didn't even know if the cinematography effect was at work, for surely Haruhi had always been like this...

But wait. Surely wordless montage sequences require some sort of scene-switching? Maybe they only applied to bicycle rides, or long walks. I blinked, throat strangely dry. The background music had grown faster, its strings more urgent. Urgent and almost ominous.

Haruhi was frowning.

Perhaps I'd got this horribly wrong, and it wasn't an indie film. As if in agreement, a menacing bassline surfaced in the soundtrack. What if Haruhi was actually aiming for singing hermit crabs, or menacing black-suited men who would force us to flee together, or the sudden appearance of letters in shoe lockers and love-rival duels on the school roof? None of those things would be within my control, but at least powerlessness is something I've grown used to - and, more to the point, something I don't have to do anything about. What genre should I be playing to? Tragic doomed romance, shoujo comedy, action thriller?

"What is it, Kyon?"

She had her hands on her hips, now - though she hadn't shrugged my hands off - and her voice was mildly annoyed. If there had been any softness in it earlier, any hint of schoolgirl-esque uncertainty, it was gone now. You're not exactly making this easier, so-called Ultimate Director! If you want an indie romance, why don't you play along?

But there was a feeble protest stirring at the back of my mind. Haruhi wasn't playing along, no. And yet. And yet, that was fine, wasn't it? That was Haruhi. I couldn't imagine her as the blushing heroine of a shoujo manga, or the cute and quirky female lead of a banter-driven film, or even the femme fatale of a neo-noir thriller. Haruhi was Haruhi, and even if she'd unconsciously tried to recast herself as the female lead in this movie, the role wouldn't stick. No, that's inaccurate: the role would be too small, too confining.

Indie films don't often have triumphant orchestral flourishes a la John Williams, but the background music was definitely taking a happier tone. So. Which genre? The answer was obvious: the same one we've been stuck in for ages.

"Haruhi! Let's-"

Her eyes were bright and compelling and exactly the same as they'd always been, cinematographical effects or not.

"-let's go searching for aliens living among us in human disguises!"

The music stopped.

Greek tragedy or the bildungsroman are all very well, but I prefer the narrative conventions with painless happy endings. So here it is, the Happy Ending: me, with sanity restored at least to previous levels; Haruhi, as content as Haruhi ever is; and a world that hasn't ended yet. It's sunset, and we're on the gently-sloped side of the school field, where the hill overlooks the city - yes, yes, one of those shoujo anime clichs. But there aren't any unseasonal cherry blossoms about, so I can be fairly sure that this clich, at least, isn't one of Haruhi's making.

Anyway, it's not even a spectacular sunset. Quite run-of-the-mill, as sunsets go: no flares of deep red and gold, no dramatic salmon-bellied clouds. Just a warm glow on the horizon as the sky fades into a deeper blue. The search for aliens had officially ended half-an-hour ago, though it had petered out a good few hours beforehand. We'd made a thorough search of the streets near the base of the hill. As far as we could ascertain, there were no aliens in most of the shops; none in two of the cafs there; none in the games arcade; probably no aliens in the park, though there had been a suspicious-looking white cat with odd-coloured eyes. No part of our SOS Brigade expedition had been a date, of course. Definitely not. Even more definitely not the sort of date one sees in movies. And it hadn't been wordless, and there hadn't been any background music, so it couldn't have been one of those sequences.

I looked at Haruhi, who was making a daisy-Mobius-strip with ruthless and terrifying precision while staring out over the city. This girl could unmake the world. I was sitting next to a girl with the power to unmake the world, or force it to obey the laws of narrative causality, or remake it any way she saw fit. The thought should have terrified me. The absence of said terror should have terrified me even more. But I kept coming back to the same thought: Haruhi was Haruhi. Irascible, irrational, selfish, headstrong, driven, bold...

The phenomenology of free will is part of the "hard problem of free will", as they call it in academia. If it feels very much as if one has free will, can we still argue that free will might be an illusion? And if we cannot, does that mean that we do have free will?

Frankly, I don't care. I'm a high school student, not a philosopher. Koizumi's creepy theories notwithstanding, this feels enough like free will to me, thank you very much.

Arthouse films don't get proper endings. So here's all you get instead: two people on the crest of a hill, watching a sunset that isn't cinematographically flawless. Let the non-existent camera pull back. Note the blessed absence of background music. This is very definitely not an indie romance; but then Haruhi turns suddenly to me, and smiles, and the only voice in my head is mine as I think And despite everything-

But that's quite enough. Fade to black. Let the credits roll.