The Confession of Usami Renko by taiyakisoba
Smart girls are cool.
-ZUN
My name is Usami Renko and I am in love with my best friend.
It wasn't love at first sight. The first time I saw Merry was not long into my first year at Kyoudai. I'm a student there, studying super unified physics, although recently I've been dabbling a lot in M-theory as well, a result of the various things that have happened to the two of us on our adventures. But I guess I'm getting ahead of myself.
She was standing in the quadrangle outside the cafeteria with a freshman's guide in her hand and a lost look on her face. I was on my way to a lab, but I stopped when I caught sight of her from the corner of my eye. Now, there are lots of foreigners studying in Kyoudai, but Merry, well... tall and slender, with long blonde hair and a face with all the delicate beauty of a porcelain doll, she really stands out. I might as well just come out and say it: she's beautiful. Sometimes I think the word itself was created just for her.
There was nervousness in her violet eyes as she looked up from her guide and asked another student walking past a question. The student was Japanese and she shook her head, made a short apologetic bow, and hurried away. When the same thing happened a second time, the flustered look on Merry's face drove me to do something I wouldn't usually do.
I approached her.
Now, my English is pretty terrible, and I knew all too well the reason the other students had avoided her. There's nothing more frightening to a Japanese person than a foreigner who wants to ask you a question. We all learn English, of course, but when we say we know English, it really just means that we understand it. Speaking it is a whole different matter.
"Can I help you?" I asked, with all the English I could muster.
"Oh, you speak English?" This was in fluent Japanese and I blinked. She had barely any accent. In fact, her Japanese was that of a native Kyoto-ite, and it took me a while to realise she'd actually answered me in my own language. It occurred to me then that she'd probably spoken to the others in fluent Japanese as well, but they'd been as surprised as I was and hadn't even recognised it as such.
I quickly learned that her name was Maribel Hearn and that she was studying relativistic psychology. It was the student administration block she was looking for. I was already running late for my lab, but I told her I'd take her there. I know I could have just given her directions, but there was something about Merry that I liked immediately.
Now don't accuse me of being driven only by appearances! Merry's a beauty, it's true. But it wasn't that that drew me to her initially. I've always being attracted to the unusual and the mysterious and there was an aura about her. Should I call it an otherworldliness? It's the wrong word, though. She is most definitely down to earth, for all her mysterious powers.
But again I'm getting ahead of things.
As we walked together, it was my turn to introduce myself. She seemed impressed by my major and I was surprised and delighted at how much she seemed to know about physics. When I remarked how good her Japanese was, Merry blushed and said that it was nothing at all to be proud of, really, since she'd grown up in Japan. Her family was from England originally, but her father and her mother had moved here while she was a child. They'd since returned to England and she'd stayed on here to continue her studies.
And so on, the usual kind of stuff you talk about with another student when you first meet them. When Merry said she'd lived her entire life, more or less, in Kyoto, and since I come from boring-old rural Tokyo originally, I joked that I was actually more of a foreigner here than she was.
It was a dumb joke, but Merry laughed at it anyway. Her laughter was surprisingly unrestrained, animating her entire face, the sort of laugh that you usually only see from a child. There was so much joy in it that the world seemed a little bit brighter afterwards.
I left her at the student administration block and she thanked me with a bow. I wandered off to my lab in a daze.
I didn't see Merry again for a while after our first encounter. It wasn't from want of trying, though. I found myself loitering outside the cafeteria, as if expecting to see her reappear in her guise as maiden in distress. I also began to make completely inefficient detours from my lecture rooms to the labs by way of the psychology block. At the time I didn't realise I was hoping to run into her.
It was about a week later that I finally ran into her again.
She was sitting at a table outside the university café. I was walking past when I caught a glimpse of sun-gold hair from the corner of my eye and I stopped dead, much as I had the first time I'd seen her.
She was sitting at a table with a young man. A very handsome young man. The two were talking in an animated fashion but I couldn't make out what they were talking about.
I stood and watched them. One of them must have said something funny, as they both suddenly burst into laughter. Then I saw Merry reach across the table and touch the boy's hand.
Panic gripped me. And once again I did something I never usually would. I approached the table and said hello.
Merry's violet eyes went wide in surprise. "Renko!" she exclaimed, getting to her feet. The boy looked at me inquisitively. He smiled and bowed as Merry introduced me to him and he did a very, very good job at politely hiding his annoyance at my interruption.
I accepted their invitation to sit at the table and I ordered myself an espresso. Merry was impressed by the mature sophistication of my choice, as she put it. It was my turn to blush. Then I looked about in a panic: with the boy there, I was feeling nervous. I'm not usually a very social person, you might have already guessed. I searched around for something I could talk about and my eyes fell upon a book sticking out of Merry's tote bag. It was entitled 'Elements of Parapsychology'.
It was my lifeline. I drew attention to the book and mentioned how I was interested in occult matters as well, which was absolutely true.
Merry's eyes lit up and she expressed surprise that a scientist would be interested in such things.
I explained how there was more than enough space in the universe for alternate worlds and other phenomena to exist. Supernatural was a misnomer, though, since nothing that exists within nature could be said to be beyond nature. It was merely that we were dealing with phenomena that had yet to be explained by science.
And so on. I quickly learned that Merry was at least as knowledgeable in the subject as I was. She was careful to try and include the boy in our conversation, but he rapidly became bored. After a while he made his excuses and left.
As I watched him go I felt a surge of victory. But now, looking back, although I don't regret what I did for a second, I do feel bad about it. I also feel a little bad for Merry, as well. I think, in those early days of her time at the University, I took possession of her, scaring everyone else away, not just that handsome boy.
It's here I should explain something about myself. I am proud to say that never, ever in my life has anyone ever confessed to me or shown even the slightest bit of romantic interest in me, either male or female. A love-note in the locker was something that happened to other girls, or in a TV drama. If a boy ever talked to me, it was to ask me a maths question. Everyone knew I was good at maths.
I was disappointed by this at first, but eventually I got used to it. It wasn't like I was bullied or anything like that. I was just passed over. And I couldn't blame them. I am, after all, staggeringly plain. I'm not saying this to look for pity or to fish for compliments like a lot of girls do, but just as a statement of objective fact. Note I said 'plain', not 'ugly'. Everything is in the right place, and each item is not bad when considered individually. But taken as a whole, I guess the sum of the parts just leaves people rather unimpressed.
Except for my eyes. I'm quite proud of my eyes. They're unusual, and if I have a charm-point, it's most definitely them. Merry has often remarked on how striking they are. But where mine are striking, hers are most definitely beautiful: the beautiful violet eyes of a foreigner that it's hard not to be jealous of. But sometimes they can be unsettling as well...
I realise now that I had more-or-less staked my claim on Merry as my new best friend. She would have other friends in her classes, but no one would ever get closer to her than me. Boys kept away from her - I guess it was a side-effect of my lack of popularity with them, almost as if it had rubbed off on Merry. Like I said, I feel guilty for that now, but back then I didn't. Back then I was overjoyed. I had Merry all to myself.
That first day at the café, as my next lab and the time we had to part loomed, I told Merry that I was a member of a club she might be interested in. It was called the Sealing Club, and I explained that its purpose was to investigate reports of supernatural phenomena.
What I didn't tell her was that I had invented the club there and then. It was just an excuse to see her again without having to orchestrate another accidental encounter.
Merry pleaded with me to let her join. I said I'd bring her a membership form next time I met her. After we said our goodbyes, I skipped my lab and spent the afternoon at the student admin building filling out form 13CA: application for the registration of a student club or activity.
Merry was surprised at the first meeting of the Sealing Club when the only other one there was me. But when I explained I was the club's sole member, she laughed. She seemed impressed, actually. The sort of behaviour that others found peculiar in me, Merry always seemed to like.
Our first field trip was to a nearby temple which was supposedly the centre of poltergeist phenomena - the throwing of stones and unexplained fires and the like. It was merely a coincidence that there was a delicious cake shop just across the road from it that served excellent coffee.
We didn't find any ghost, but there was certainly something odd about the temple. As I picked my way through the moss-covered ojizousan and tried to read the half-obscured kanji of the kaimyou on the graves, Merry stopped and looked out across the grounds. Her eyes were glassy, as if they were focusing on something far away.
I asked her if she'd seen anything. Her eyes came into focus again and she turned to me and shook her head. I sighed and said that since we probably weren't going to find anything we should abandon the investigation and go have some coffee and cake.
The early expeditions of the Sealing Club usually ended up like this. It wasn't until we'd become closer that Merry told me she could things - the 'borders' between things, as she put it. It was an ability, she told me, that many in her family had. She described it as a 'spiritual vision' that let her see into the dream world, but I hastened to disagree with her.
"I think you're actually seeing alternate worlds," I told her before wandered off into a long-winded and very pretentious explanation of the multiverse theory and how my own theory was that all so-called supernatural phenomena were actually intrusions into our universe of alternate realities.
I remember the conversation quite clearly. It was late at night and we'd stopped off at a little yakitori stand to eat dinner after investigating an old kofun that I'd read some interesting stories about on the net. It had been a washout like usual. The yakitori was pretty bad, even for synthetic, but it was hot and we were ravenously hungry. The sake, served out of a huge 2-litre plastic bottle, was also sub-par, but went down a treat. Merry was drinking half for every one of my drinks and I'd become quite vocal. The guy behind the grill listened politely, but I couldn't help noticing his smile as he turned the skewers over on the charcoal.
I finished my lecture to find Merry beaming at me.
"What is it?" I asked.
"Renko, you really believe me, don't you?"
I blinked at her. "Of course I do."
Her slender hand slid onto mine, wrapped around the glass tumbler filled with cheap sake.
"Thank you, Renko," she said. "I knew I was right to tell you."
I stared down at the hand as she took it away. My heart started beating again.
It was the first time she ever touched me.
Merry went on to explain that her parents long ago had taught her to keep her ability a secret. It was something that made people uncomfortable.
"It doesn't make you uncomfortable?" she asked, with surprising shyness.
I shook my head. "I have an ability too, you know." I pointed up at the stars. "Do you see Lyra up there?"
"Yes."
"If we calculate the angle between it and Scorpio, drawing a vector through Vega..." I went on for a while like this, revelling in my own brilliance. "...it tells me that it's exactly 9.38 and 41, 42, 43 seconds. Look at your phone."
"You're right," she said with a gasp. "How did you do that?"
"As long as I can see the stars, I can tell you what time it is, anywhere on the surface of the earth. Now, if you want Universal Coordinated Time, I need to do a few quick calculations. If the moon was up, I'd also be able to tell you exactly where we are on the surface of the earth." I realised I was boasting and I stopped, embarrassed. "I mean, if we didn't already know exactly where we were."
"That's amazing," said Merry. Her smile was radiant.
We said our goodbyes outside her apartment. It was in a very opulent block indeed. You know, even though Merry's family is incredibly rich I've never detected even the slightest bit of snobbery from her. She's happy to eat at yakitori stands and ramen yatai and beef-bowl places or wherever. I guess it was this strange mix of being so down-to-earth while also being mysterious that was one of the things that made me fall in love with her.
Fall in love with her? Oh, yes. That's right. After the security point had scanned her and she'd waved goodbye, I found my eyes lingering on her back until the gate finally shut behind her and blocked her from my view. I stood there a while longer, feeling suddenly lost and alone.
It was a long walk back to my own modest accommodation. And every step of the way all I could think about was her.
Looking back, I realise now that that must have been the day I truly fell in love with her. I think it might have even been in the moment her hand had touched mine. Stupidly sentimental, I know, but a completely reasonable conclusion based on the objective evidence:
1. The effect on my heartbeat when she touched me, indicative of physical or emotional stress;
2. My sudden melancholia at being separated from her, and;
3. The overpowering desire I had to see her again as soon as possible.
That night I didn't sleep. The next day I was a total wreck in all my labs and I found myself yawning through every lecture. Even if I hadn't been so sleepy, there was no way I would have actually learned anything anyway. At the end of quantum mechanics I found that the only thing I'd written was the title of the day's topic ('Phase Space Formulation') and underneath it Merry's name.
I'd been trying to work out how she'd write her full name in English. Merrybell? Maybury?
I ended up just writing 'Merry' over and over again.
It wasn't until I saw her again that I felt even halfway myself once more.
At the time I thought it was some weird crush, so I was careful not to act all lovey-dovey around her. I mean, there's no way she'd want the attentions of an odd, mousy thing like me. It was pretty stupid, really. Merry made it hard, though. She's a very affectionate person. After that night at the yakitori stand, we ended up on hugging terms. I've never really liked being hugged by people - it's not something I remember my parents doing to me much as a kid - and I think the first time she hugged me I just stood there, stiff as a statue. But it was hard to stay like that with the soft, fragrant warmth of her body surrounding you. And so I quickly learned to hug her back.
I started to hang out for those hugs like an addict. Did I mention that Merry smells really nice? A clean, sweet, wholesome scent - like vanilla, I think. I got the chance to smell real vanilla once, at the botanical gardens in Tokyo. It's the seedpod of an orchid and it needs a beetle to pollinate it. That particular beetle is extinct now, like so many other animals, and they had to make a little robot to do its job for it. You see, it needs to move in just a certain way to make the flower give up its pollen. A bee or anything else just won't do it for this picky flower.
I was allowed to crush the edge of the pod between my fingers. The scent of real vanilla is like 3D to the two-dimensional smell of the synthetic stuff. It's warm and organic, the fragrance of open flowers and warm tropical forests. It was that smell that I associated with Merry. Even after we parted, it always clung to my clothes.
It was maddening.
The Sealing Club became more successful, after a fashion. Now that I knew Merry had this special ability, I was eager to put into action. And with each expedition it seemed to grow stronger. Merry, of course, still didn't agree with my contention that she was receiving information on a quantum level in some way from a real world parallel to our own. No, for her they were always glimpses into a land of dream and illusion.
She called the place Gensoukyou. It was the name, she said, that its inhabitants gave it.
I never got tired of hearing her stories about it. Her adventures in the bamboo forest, the great scarlet mansion on the shores of that lake of mist… but she remained convinced that it was her own dream world she was seeing rather than an alternate dimension.
But it was after she started to bring back artefacts that things really started to get interesting.
When she showed me the cookies, I didn't believe her at first. I thought this was one of her jokes - Merry has an unexpectedly wicked sense of humour, and when delivering a joke she's so good at keeping a straight face that I've been taken in more than once. But there was an eagerness in her face as she showed me the cookies; no, more a need in her eyes, a need to be believed. I guess it was the same look that she must have given me at that yakitori place all those months ago, if I'd noticed it at the time. Even if only one person believed her, she could be happy.
And so of course I believed her.
Now, for my part, you can't bring cookies back from a dream world. Real cookies means a real place. When I told her I believed her, I actually meant that I believed the cookies came from Gensoukyou, not that they'd come from her 'dream world' or anything like that. I was sure that Merry was travelling in some real fashion to an alternate dimension. But it was no use arguing with her. She was convinced that it was all due to her dreaming that Gensoukyou existed.
The cookies, dream or not, turned out to be delicious.
Merry told me all sorts of things about Gensoukyou, so much so that I had become to be a little jealous. Not in the way you might think. I wasn't jealous of Merry's ability or her imagination. No, it was Gensoukyou itself I was jealous of. It had captivated Merry, just as I dreamed of captivating her.
By this time I knew something was up between us. It wasn't something I could explain away as a crush any more. At times the intensity of my feelings scared me. My eyes began to linger on her, and my hand would linger on hers as well. We became so close we even started to sleep together - wait, that's the wrong way to put it. Share a bed, I meant to say, like girls at a pyjama party. Merry had a four poster bed. She was embarrassed to show it to me at first - she said it seemed a bit childish, now she was showing it to someone, to have a four-poster bed in an apartment - but I thought it was charming. There was even a stuffed okapi toy tucked under the covers, his head resting on the second pillow.
Lucky okapi.
After a long study session and some chatting - the usual girlish stuff, like the recent unification of the weak magnetic force and gravity - we'd slip under the covers. Merry would be out like a light almost right away. I'd lay there, her warmth and fragrance beside me, staring at the okapi that always made its way into her arms, wanting it to be me who was being pressed up against her breasts, those surprisingly large breasts that seemed all the larger beneath her rather old-fashioned nightdress. It was an exquisite kind of torture. I could never sleep properly, so I'd just give and watch her sleep instead.
It was actually lot less creepy than it sounds.
The pale light which eased its way into the room from the arched French windows always made her face look like it was carved from marble. I was jealous of her looks: her pale complexion, the pinkness of her lips, the dark heaviness of her lashes. No, not jealous. Covetous. I wanted them. They were mine. She was mine.
Except that she wasn't.
Stupid okapi.
It was only a matter of time before the Sealing Club discovered a place where the border was weak enough for Merry to pull the two worlds together, and it was in that mist-filled graveyard in Rendaino where the lycoris grew in profusion that we had our first major success. It had started as another likely wild-goose chase, of course: a photo of "the Netherworld" I'd found on a forum I'd prefer remain nameless. But as Merry and I picked our way through the grave markers I couldn't have cared less whether we found anything or not. Being with her was the only thing that was important to me.
When we finally broke through the barrier we were delirious with our success. We ran laughing through the graveyard together, the pink petals of an otherworldly spring falling all about us. I took her hand to help her over a fallen fence, and kept hold of it even after we'd made it across. We ran together, hand in hand, and for a moment I felt overwhelming joy. For a moment I deluded myself that she knew my secret, and that she shared my love as well; that we were together.
When we reached the front gate, my hand slipped from hers. The delusion fled. I felt suddenly desolate, just like I did whenever I said goodbye to her outside her apartment.
That night, alone in my own bed, I dreamed of Gensoukyou.
Was it really a dream? Or some left over power that Merry had granted me? Whatever it was, I walked beside that misty lake she had so often talked about. It was night. There was a moon out, a gigantic silver-blue disk in the heavens. Everything was flooded with glacial light. It was so beautiful.
She had been so beautiful, dancing among those swirling cherry blossom petals.
If it was a dream, it was a vivid, lucid one. Everything had an aspect of hyper-reality about it. I could look down at my feet and see every little blade of grass, individually delineated by that bath of icy light.
I walked beside that lake for what seemed like hours. Eventually a redness appeared across the water as I followed the suddenly curving shoreline. Lights, a habitation: a gothic building with glowing red windows. It was a place Merry had told me about: the mansion of the vampire girls.
I felt no fear. It was just a dream, after all. But I was never to make it to the mansion. The dream fled, melting away as morning daylight swung onto my face from my bedroom window.
I never told her about it. I guess part of me thought of it as just a dream, but that couldn't have been the only reason. I think it was more I didn't want to steal something that was so precious to her. I wanted her to keep Gensoukyou as her own.
I was also worried she'd realise how I felt about her if she knew her world had begun to appear to me in my dreams as well.
I saw Gensoukyou many times in my dreams, but I always kept it to myself. I enjoyed the dreams. They were private jaunts into Merry's reality and I treasured them as much as I did my own waking-life glimpses of the place on our field trips.
I always felt like I had part of her with me, even as I slept alone.
-
When Higan came around I invited Merry to come with me to visit my parents back in Tokyo. She didn't have anything planned for the university break so she jumped at the chance. I was glad for the company. The trip between Kyoto and Tokyo only took 53 minutes by shinkansen, but in that time we talked about a number of things that had started to weigh on my mind: objectivity versus subjectivity, stuff like that. But no matter how eloquently I argued, she remained unshakable from her conviction that what she was experiencing was a dream. Humans, she said, are in essence virtual beings.
To Merry's way of thinking, dreams are just as real as what is usually termed reality.
I don't buy that, though. The multiverse is a big place, after all. It has a lot of space for as many objectively real Gensoukyous as you might like to put in it.
When we changed trains at Bou-Tokyo station we were pretty much all argued out and the maglev suburban all-stations, being much slower, soon lulled us into a strange half-sleeping state. We'd been facing each other on the Hiroshige shinkansen, but here on the maglev we sat beside each other. Merry was soon nodding off ('fishing' is what I call it) and before I knew it she was resting her head on my shoulder.
I think I must have gone stiff, because she lifted her head off with a sleepy murmured apology. Moments later her head was right back where it had been, but this time she didn't wake back up.
I let her keep it there. I read a book for a little while, but I couldn't concentrate on it and ended up staring out the windows on the opposite side of the train instead. Tokyo looked like it was melting in the setting sun. The whole cityscape, so humble compared to the great skyscraper-filled one of Kyoto, was glazed with molten copper. Eventually it cooled to black as darkness set in, and then it sprang back to vivid life again as lights flickered on everywhere - the yellow false-daylight of the office and apartment blocks, the red warning lights at the top of the skyscrapers. The flashing lights of suborbitals coming in to land at Haneda glimmered like fireflies across the sky. I felt her soft breath on my neck, the rhythmic beat of her breathing as it deepened into sleep. I slipped my hand into hers, and she stirred. She opened her own hand and entwined her fingers with mine.
I was so happy I wanted to cry.
The carriage became quieter. I began to see the stops that showed me we were soon reaching the station nearest to my family's home. I woke Merry and as she lifted her head from my shoulder her hand slipped out of mine.
We stayed with my parents for several days. They were as charmed by Merry as I was, and as we sat eating my mother's cooking and listening to my dad pontificating about the state of local politics, I was flushed with happiness. It was as though I'd brought my girlfriend back to meet my parents and everything was going well.
We slept together in my old room. I offered Merry my own bed, as I had a futon on the floor, but she refused to take it from me.
"There's enough space for the two of us," she said.
There was, but only just. During the night, I awoke to find her sleeping face right next to mine. The gentle sweetness of her breath was blowing soft against my own lips. Only her okapi, which she'd brought with her, lay between her and myself.
After that I got no sleep.
The visit to the family gravesite went well. If Merry saw anything, she didn't tell me about it, and I didn't ask her. For once, it was nice to be with her outside of the whole 'Sealing Club' thing. We were on holiday, after all, although there wasn't really so much to do around old agricultural Tokyo except go shopping: and shop we did. Merry revealed herself to be an avid shopper. I personally enjoyed the coffee breaks more. I think I ate more cake on that trip than I ever had in my life up til then. I'm a little too partial to tiramisu and sacher torte. I'll admit it: I have a weakness for sweet things.
Afterwards we went to karaoke and drank too much. I regaled her with my renditions of 20th century anime theme songs. I have a deep voice, so it was more suited to stuff like "Uchuu Senkan Yamato" than "Sailor Moon". Merry, however, preferred to sing enka.
Such a strange girl. Even with her blonde hair and violet eyes, she often seems more Japanese than I am. She sang "Don't Smoke in Bed" and her voice was so sad and sweet that for a moment I felt as though I was the lover she was singing to.
After we left the karaoke place we passed a huge number of couples on the street on our way back to the station. When Merry mentioned the fact, I drew her attention to a neon sign close to us.
It read 'Hotel Starry Night'.
We were walking through the love-hotel district.
Merry blushed. I stifled a laugh and taking her hand made as if to lead her inside. She put up no fight and I actually had her at the automatic doors when I lost my nerve and dropped her hand. She wasn't really serious, was she?
Merry just laughed at my shocked expression and stuck out her tongue.
That Merry! Such a joker.
That night I had another dream.
This time I was walking in a great field of sunflowers, taller than my head. I had to push my way past the great green stalks of the things to make progress and soon I began to panic. I had no idea where I was and the field seemed to go on forever. Maybe it did. And what made it worse was that the sunflowers moved, their faces turning towards me with malevolent intent.
I'd struggled for I don't know how long when I heard a rustling from the sunflowers behind me.
Someone was there, following me.
I swung round in alarm. The wall of stalks before me parted.
It was Merry.
She looked just as she always did whenever we met up after class: dressed in her trademark purple dress and hat. The only thing different was the look of surprise on her face.
Relief washed over me as I ran up to her. "Merry!"
She took my hands in her own, her face a mask of concern. "What are you doing here, Renko?"
I blinked. "I'm sorry, I... Wait. Merry, this is a dream, right?"
Merry chuckled at my question, but then the worried look returned to her face. "Are we really going to get into that argument again?" She turned and began to lead me by the hand back the way she had come. "We have to get out of here. This is probably one of the most dangerous parts of Gensoukyou, you know."
"So this is Gensoukyou," I said. I felt her hand burning into mine as she pulled me along, just like that night at the cemetery.
"What do you think?"
"It's beautiful," I said.
"Beautiful, but dangerous," said Merry. "You shouldn't have come here on your own, Renko."
"I didn't mean to," I murmured, suddenly guilty. There was an intensity in Merry's eyes, an intensity I don't remember ever seeing in them in the waking world.
And the smile on her face as she turned away. Knowing, and also teasing.
Merry led us on a wide, arcing path. She seemed to know exactly where we were going. Soon she pushed aside a final veil of sunflowers and we came out into a grass-filled pasture. Under the chill glow of the moonlight it had the appearance of a great Antarctic expanse.
I was panting. Even in your dreams you could get tired, I realised.
We walked a short way until we came to a group of large rocks. They were smooth and rounded and shone like mounds of piled-up snow. Merry let go of my hand and sat herself on one and patted the space beside her.
I joined her. The stone was night-cool underneath my bottom and I shivered even though I was wearing my shawl.
"Cold, Renko?" Merry scooshed herself closer. With her warm and fragrant body flush with mine, I soon warmed up. My face grew red, too. I could feel it. "We shouldn't be disturbed here. Youkai don't usually to come this close to the Garden of the Sun since they're afraid of its mistress."
"I'm really glad you found me," I said. "I was totally lost. Even the moon couldn't help me. I guess it's because it's different from Earth's." I gazed up at it glowing in the sky, a pure orb of unblemished yellow light.
"Actually, Gensoukyou and Earth share the same moon," said Merry. "It's just that here you can see its true face."
She leaned closer to me. I was enveloped in her scent and my mind reeled. So the hyper-reality of the dream extended to my sense of smell as well. Merry's voice in my ear was low, conspiratorial. "Renko, do you remember what you said to me just before the shinkansen reached Bou-Tokyo station?"
"About your dreams?" It was hard to think with her so close to me.
"Yes. I asked you to make a choice for me, remember? And you said I should make my dreams my reality." She turned and stared out across the snowy moonlit fields. "But you know what the funny thing is? There's really no difference between the two to begin with. Like Zhuangzi's story about the man who dreamed he was a butterfly and when he woke up he couldn't decide whether he was a man dreaming he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was a man." She turned back to face me. "Renko, now I realise the answer to that puzzle is that he's both."
I blinked. "So all of this is real?"
Merry nodded and the smile on her lips shifted. It was no longer teasing. Heat had kindled in her wide violet eyes.
She leaned over and kissed me.
I was so surprised I made no effort to kiss back. I just sat there, stiff, her lips warm and soft against my own. As she broke the kiss her teasing smile returned.
"Oh Renko," she breathed. "Was it really that bad?"
I started. I shook my head. No, it hadn't been bad. My heart was still shuddering inside my chest, beating so hard that it felt as though it had doubled in size. I brought my fingers to my lips. I could still feel the ghost of hers resting there.
My first kiss. And Merry had taken it. It still counted even though it was in a dream, right?
"Merry, why did you..?"
She laughed. "You're really, really bad at hiding your feelings, you know, Renko. You've wanted me to kiss you for a long time, haven't you? Am I wrong?"
I shook my head. I was doing that a lot, I realised, and so I struggled to get control of my voice. "Merry, I-"
She brought a finger to my lips, cutting me off. Then she ran a hand through my hair, brushing an errant lock back into place behind my ear. Her touch was gentle, but electrifying, and I couldn't stop myself from closing my eyes and leaning into her caress like a cat being pet.
When I opened them again, her face was next to mine. The porcelain beauty of it filled my vision, her violet eyes shining. And once more that teasing smile.
"Want to try again?" she whispered.
I was even more nervous than before, but this time I kissed her back. I wanted to make up for my disappointing first attempt. When her lips parted and I shared the heat and wetness of her mouth, I started to tremble.
Merry murmured in appreciation. She leaned across me, slipping her hands around my waist as the warm fullness of her generous breasts pressed down on my chest. I was surprised at how aggressive she was. I melted, throwing my arms around her neck and pulling her on top of me. Her lips slid from mine and began to make a burning path down my neck.
"Oh Merry," I gasped as I felt her undo the buttons of my blouse and her fingers slip between the material and my skin...
-
I woke up in my bed in Tokyo, my arms wrapped around Merry's stuffed okapi. Merry herself was gone, the only sign she'd been there her gorgeous scent. The whole bed seemed saturated with it.
I lay there, still trembling from that kiss. And I was wet. Soaking.
I clung to the okapi, breathing in her scent, trying to return consciously to the dream until I felt a sudden panic that she'd walk into the room and discover me. So I slid reluctantly out of bed. I found Merry in the living room on the couch, still dressed in her nightdress, reading the book of poems she'd brought with her from Kyoto.
She looked up. "Good morning. Did you sleep well?"
I searched her face. Her gentle smile hid no secrets I could see.
So it had just been a dream after all.
At breakfast, as Merry ate her usual toast and honey and I lingered over my coffee, I stole glances at her, struggling to think of a way to broach the subject. But how could I? I mean, even as a joke it was beyond the pale: "Hey, Merry. Want to hear something funny? Ha ha ha. I had an erotic dream about you last night. You rescued me from a field of scary sunflowers and then we made out in the light of the moon. Ha ha ha."
I chickened out of course. Even so, I couldn't stop from grinning like a secretive lunatic all throughout breakfast.
That day we went shopping again. We'd planned to go to the movies after lunch, but I'd read the session times wrong, so we ended up having to see a different movie to the one we'd wanted to.
A student of unified field physics and unable to read a simple list of movie session times. I plead the excuse that I was thoroughly distracted.
It was a stupid romantic drama set in the post-war period. In the darkness of the theatre my wandering mind quickly slipped back to the dream. It had seemed far away in the light of day, but here, with Merry sitting next to me in the darkened theatre, the light of the holograms gleaming across her face, I was reminded of the light of that alien moon.
I had no eyes for the movie, and instead stole glances her way as the different coloured light played across her skin. Pale, like the screen itself, it was the perfect canvas.
Her arm was lying on the arm rest. With my heart beating so hard I was worried she might hear it over the soundtrack, I slid my hand into hers, casually. Casually, like it was the most natural thing in the world to do.
Merry's face was still as a painted icon. She made no move to look at me, her eyes remaining focussed on the screen. Then she squeezed my hand and held it there in her own. I turned back to the screen, seeing nothing, all of my senses honed in on the warm tenderness of her hand surrounding mine, my heart filling to overflowing.
When the movie finished I had to let go of her hand, but as we left the movie theatre I felt as though I was drunk on joy itself. The light, the subdued grey light of Tokyo in September, seemed like a divine wash of brilliance to my heart. Everything was beautiful, so suddenly beautiful!
Especially her.
As we walked down the street, discussing the movie, I resisted the urge to start skipping. With Merry at my side that same feeling as before, that mixture of pride and covetous delight I'd felt when I introduced her to my family, took hold of me. It seemed as though everyone was looking at us. I know it was partly my imagination, that probably the real reason for all the glances our way was the huge grin on my face and our animated conversation. It was the sort of attention I would have fled from usually. At that moment it delighted me.
Yes, I thought at them, grinning all the while. Yes, that's right. She's mine. This beautiful girl is all mine!
We joked about how cheesy the movie had been, especially the heroine's dialogue, and Merry performed such a hilariously over-the-top rendition of her confession of love during the liberation of Berlin that we both burst into peals of laughter. We had to stop and hang off each other as we laughed and laughed until we were almost out of breath.
When we started walking again, I let my hand drop from where it had been resting on her shoulder and slipped it into hers.
Merry stopped. She gently removed her hand from mine and turned to me. The expression on her face was a mixture of awkwardness and embarrassment.
"Uh, Renko? Do you mind maybe not doing that? It's kind of... embarrassing."
I think I must have just stared at her a while before finally nodding. Even if I'd had something to say, I don't think I could've got it out anyway. All the joy I'd felt spilled out of me in an instant, leaving me shocked and numb.
We walked in silence for a few moments, but then Merry drew my attention to the intersection and remarked how surprised she was that Tokyo still had them, even though there were barely any cars anymore.
I took hold of the lifeline she'd offered me and threw myself whole-heartedly into the conversation that followed.
As I babbled on and on about everything I knew on the subject, I was worried I'd start crying, but I didn't. I felt dried-up inside, as if the unwarranted joy that had filled me before had left me hollowed out. There was nowhere for the tears to spring from.
I didn't much enjoy the rest of our time in Tokyo. When we took the shinkansen back to Kyoto, we spent those 53 minutes in almost total silence, Merry engrossed in her book and my eyes glued to the Kaleidoscreen. The images that played across it were beautiful, but somehow empty too. I was reminded of how Merry had called it a waste of time and what she'd said about dreams.
In the end, hadn't I just made the same mistake she had and confused my dream with reality?
