(A/N: I wrote this way back when there were only about four stories in the Yume Nikki section here. It's been collecting dust on my hard drive ever since. Looking around, I guess I'm not the only one who wanted to write something like this! I do want to add more chapters and finish this thing someday; I've got it all outlined. It may take me a while, though! As always, critical reviews are very much appreciated. They keep me going.)
Nexus of Dreams
The accident had changed Madotsuki—that much was exceedingly clear. But no one had ever bothered to try to understand the particulars of it all, nor did they ever imagine it would go this far.
The aftermath of the fateful hit-and-run two years ago saw media hounds flocking to the usually sleepy town in droves. Location, time of death, the victim's identity, and the velocity and tire type of the offending vehicle were broadcast and printed within hours, becoming common knowledge amongst the locals. And oh, the inhumanity of it all, the tragedy, that such a promising grade-schooler could have her life cut so dreadfully short, they whispered.
If only they knew the half of it: The sound of squealing breaks, the gripping sensation of trying to yell but finding your voice inexplicably gone, the way time seems to slow to a crawl as you helplessly watch a tiny body tumble over and over in mid-air, lifeless arms and pigtails flailing at unnatural angles, mouth frozen in an eternal, silent scream. Those were Madotsuki's experiences alone. She had been the only eyewitness.
She didn't remember dialing the payphone; she didn't remember what she had told the police. But she somehow recalled looking through teary eyes at the floor of the phone booth, the marked-up translucent glass walls, and the reflection of neon signs cast across the landscape as her mind replayed the gruesome scene in an endless loop. That was where she had her first panic attack, though it certainly wouldn't be the last.
No, she told the detectives repeatedly, she hadn't seen the license plate and she hadn't noticed anything about the driver. She could barely remember the color of the car, much less the make or model. All she could recall with precise clarity were the little girl's final, horrific moments.
She didn't remember how or why she ended up testifying about it in court when a suspect was put on trial months later, although she was vaguely aware that it was her parents' idea. The lanky, towering woman with a pointed nose, who paced the floor like an awkward, but cunning, bird of prey—the prosecutor, she was told—grilled her mercilessly, twisting Madotsuki's halting words around to suit her own purposes. Nerves turned to fright, fright turned to panic, panic turned to terror, remorse, and rage all at once, and Madotsuki snapped on the stand in front of a hundred strangers.
Some sympathized, calling it post-traumatic stress. Others were horrified, calling it irrational and highly inappropriate. Most just thought the witness had been disturbed to begin with. Though she now wished fervently she could take back her testimony, Madotsuki's breakdown was permanently etched into history, copied down word-for-word by the stenographer.
She never found out if the man on trial was acquitted or pronounced guilty. She never heard anything about the hit-and-run case again after she was escorted off the premises. Upon returning to the confines of her one-bedroom apartment, she canceled her newspaper subscription and her television services. Losing interest in all activities besides sleeping, reading, and playing video games, she became a total shut-in, alienating herself as much as possible from the society that had broken her spirit so thoroughly.
The next time anyone would see her outside was the day they found her body.
Though in hindsight, the young woman's suicide a year and a half later had been the inevitable outcome of the case all along, no one had really seen it coming. Least of all her next-door neighbor, a certain Mr. Sakamoto.
He had never followed the supposedly scandalous hit-and-run case in the news, though he had heard the rumors floating around the apartment complex about the girl who had allegedly witnessed it. He had never been one to believe everything he heard, but there must have been a grain of truth in it. Otherwise, the poor girl wouldn't have been so unhinged.
He occasionally thought back to when she had first moved in. Even then, Madotsuki was unassuming, quiet. Like many of the rickety concrete building's other occupants, she was a ronin preparing for university entrance exams, studying by day and going to cram school by night. They'd never really talked back then. They had no reason to. Sometimes he saw her at the bus stop, commiserating with a bleached-blonde Yankee girl in green over trigonometry problems, or down at the convenience store, stocking up on cheap snacks and magazines. Her silence then was a quiet acceptance, and she seemed content, though admittedly he had never seen her smile back then.
Then there was the accident, the tidal wave of media attention that swept over the town, and the girl's quiet acceptance became a silent sense of dread. She was seen less and less frequently in the wake of the hit-and-run and the ensuing scandal, and after the fateful trial, she was not seen, period. She had stopped attending cram school, according to her peers. Even the blonde Yankee girl acted as if she had never even heard of Madotsuki when he questioned her in the elevator one day. It was as though she'd dropped off the face of the earth, and everyone was just fine with it.
Her plans of reaching college having apparently derailed, her unwillingness to participate in anything became her only known trait, and the government slapped a label on her without blinking. Not in Employment, Education, or Training; or NEET for short. But of course that wasn't all; society, too, had a name for her kind, and not one spoken without some measure of disdain or pity: hikikomori, acute social withdrawal.
The landlady, saddled with the burden of looking in on her, went so far as to start calling Madotsuki "Her Cloistered Highness." Everyone seemed to find it funny, but stifled their laughter because they knew deep down it really wasn't. In fact, it was downright sad when someone couldn't even muster up enough courage to go outside and buy groceries.
That was how they'd really met, come to think of it. Groceries. Well, that and an overwhelming sense of self-loathing.
The details surrounding the day of their first face-to-face meeting were kind of fuzzy now. He'd forgotten whether there had been a torrential downpour or an excess of sunshine, and what students he had taught that day, what he was wearing, and what he had eaten for lunch. Unfortunately, try as he might, he could not forget even the minutest detail of a long-distance telephone conversation he'd had on that day—in which his (now ex) fiancée, who was still living in his native Hawaii, told him with the utmost fake sympathy that this long-distance relationship thing just wasn't working for her. He also explicitly remembered the four subsequent hours he spent draped over the arm of his couch, weeping into an empty shot glass. There he was, all alone in a country where he had a supposed heritage but nowhere to plant his roots—his music career still hadn't taken off, and he had not a single close friend to speak of on this whole god-forsaken archipelago. And to add insult to injury, now he had nothing to look forward to upon his return home. He had to have been the loneliest being on the planet.
His eyes drifted toward the wall. He could make out the faint sounds of an unbelievably old video game—some RPG he'd played in his mom's basement as a kid. Okay, second loneliest. He resolved to look into this more thoroughly, if only to take his mind off things. A trip to the convenience store ensued.
It was just a small gesture, a blatant show of pity. It certainly wasn't so he could convince himself that there were other people crazier than him, or because he was that desperate for female attention again. Although someone to talk to would be nice.
It was only a bag of snacks, wrapped up in plastic, hand-delivered for reasons ambiguous to even him. He was helping the needy. Nothing selfish about that, right?
When she opened the door to receive them, her eyes were half-closed. He had planned out what he would say, but speech escaped him at that moment, and he worried. Maybe she was only sleepwalking. Maybe he was intruding. Maybe this was the worst idea he'd ever had. Maybe he should turn tail and run.
Or maybe not. She slowly wrapped her bony fingers around the bottom of the grocery bag, and when she saw that he had picked out all of her old favorites, he could have sworn he saw her lips turn up just slightly at the corners.
There had been not a word passed between them during first contact. And so another attempt at communication was made. And another, and then another. Now the snack offering was less of an act of pity and more of an exercise in curiosity. And when she finally uttered the words "Thank you," it became the result of a mutual agreement.
Pretty soon, he was doing all of her shopping by proxy, and found that he really didn't mind. It became a weekly routine. Somewhere between his graduate classes, teaching job, and rigid piano practice schedule, he found time to make the short journey by bus to the supermarket and then deliver the requested goods to her door.
The final outcome of all this was a sort of unusual friendship. Sometimes, they conversed briefly from opposite sides of the threshold. Sometimes, she invited him in for tea. He even had her spare key in his possession, though he had only found one occasion on which to use it.
At first, the fact that she had died did not register with him.
When he had returned from his vacation at the end of Golden Week and heard snatches of the story from the bus terminal's television, he could have sworn they were talking about someone else. When he arrived in front of the apartment complex and saw the police and fire department cleaning the inauspicious red stain off the pavement with a high-pressure hose, he told himself it must be a routine cleaning. When he knocked on her door and no one answered, he figured she must just have been sleeping. But when he turned the spare key in the lock and stepped into her gloomy domicile, looked around and saw very clearly that she wasn't there, he was hit full force with a sickening, heavy feeling in his stomach.
There was the barely-functioning copy of Nasu in the FamiGame system he had surrendered to her after she had beaten his high score, and there were the cushions tossed haphazardly on the floor, exactly where they'd been when he had last seen them. The desk lamp was tilted at the same angle as always, the books on the shelf completely unmoved. How could the room feel exactly the same as before if she was really gone? How was it that he had talked to her normally just a week ago, but suddenly this week came along and he could never talk to her again? He knew the truth, but it was too much to process right now, and he sat on the floor doing nothing for a long, long time.
He watched the sun set through the sliding glass doors.
Something surfaced, eventually. A memory.
"Do you think you'll ever give it another shot?" he asked, not sure whether to look down at his steaming cup of tea or up at Madotsuki's face. He tried to do both, with little success.
"Hm?" she responded sleepily.
"I mean, don't you ever want to look at something outside, even if it's just the hallway or the stairs?"
"Sometimes I go out to the balcony," she shrugged.
"That's good."
Silence.
"I mean, but don't you ever get sick of just being in here?"
"Don't you ever get sick of being out there?" It was a rhetorical question, so Sakamoto didn't answer.
Madotsuki searched for a moment, as if looking to the swirling reflections in her teacup for the answers, then expounded a bit further. "If you can get away from it all…and live on your own terms… it's all right."
"I guess." He thought it over carefully. "But it's not all bad, I promise. There are opportunities, too. There's a whole world out there."
"You probably never realized it, Sensei," she smiled mysteriously through the haze of water vapor, "But there's a whole world in here, too."
He wasn't quite sure what she had meant by that. Maybe there was another way to go about this…
"If you could— if you had to do something—just one thing outside your apartment, what would it be?"
Madotsuki took a long sip of her tea. Sakamoto realized with a regretful feeling that she was probably ignoring him. He'd gone too far this time. "Never mind," he said soothingly. The conversation died, and they both found the silence comforting rather than awkward.
Later on, when she had finally gotten down to the last dregs, Madotsuki smiled sadly at her saucer, drooping eyelids still obscuring her irises from view.
"If I had to do one thing…"she began slowly, "I'd want to play the piano with you."
Maybe there was still hope after all.
The night she died, Sakamoto dreamed he was pedaling a bicycle through a sea of empty space, unable to make out any shapes in the darkness except for a solitary ghost.
He attended her wake, signing the registry and paying a larger amount of traditional condolence money than usual without much thought given to anything besides going through the motions.
Attendance was comprised mostly of the girls' parents and former teachers, none of whom he was very familiar with. Only a handful of young people were in attendance. The most conspicuous of the bunch was wearing a snow-white kimono—the kind that were once traditional for this sort of thing, but had been long ago scrapped in favor of darkly-colored suits. On top of that, Sakamoto recognized her bleached blonde hair—it was the Yankee girl, he was sure of it. Once she had gotten his attention, he timidly tried to get hers.
"Excuse me. Aren't you…?"
"Pony," the girl replied. When Sakamoto knitted his brow, she pointed to her hair in reference. "They call me Pony. You know, because of the ponytail and all."
"We've met before. I'm Michael Sa—"
"Listen, Mike. I don't mean to be direct, but we're at a funeral here. It's pretty sleazy of you to try to pick up a girl at a time like this."
"I apologize," he replied, although he really had nothing to apologize for.
No reply, but she raised an eyebrow. Seeing that she still hadn't left, Michael continued hopefully. "Were you…her friend?" he asked, studying her face carefully.
For a moment, she showed no indication of comprehension, and then something came over her—an indecipherable, split-second emotion. Then it vanished, replaced by agitation.
"No," she replied flatly, turning her back to him. Her tone was even, but her shoulders shook tellingly. "I just happened to be passing by and thought I'd drop in, okay? And even if I did know her, it's none of your damn business."
She stomped off somewhere, and Sakamoto didn't make it a point to run into her again.
He spoke briefly with Madotsuki's parents, who thanked him for being such a good friend to their daughter while she was alive. Funny, how Madotsuki had never brought them up in any of their conversations. They seemed like nice enough people, in his opinion.
Of course, he had learned over the course of time that first impressions are rarely accurate.
Later that night, when the funeral was over, they called him all the way from their vacation home in Hokkaido and asked if he wouldn't mind terribly getting rid of her things for them, as they were so very busy.
The same night, Sakamoto finally fell asleep after a tremendous amount of effort, and he dreamed he was trudging through a blizzard, led on by the ghostly apparition of a yuki-onna. He finally came upon an igloo with a sleeping girl inside. Though he tried for hours, he could not awaken her.
A month went by: four empty, uneventful weeks characterized by a growing twinge of distress. Just as the textbooks and TV shrinks predicted, Michael Sakamoto's numbness had gradually replaced itself with crushing pain and a nagging sense that he could've done something to prevent all this.
It did not slow the process of packing away her things, which had been moving at a snail's pace to begin with. Every trinket of hers was a precious artifact; each object had a history that was somehow deeply connected with its previous owner. Sometimes the meaning of a thing was easy to divine. Sometimes, it was impossible.
He smoothed down a dog-eared page of My First Song Book and placed it gingerly in a cardboard box labeled 'Donate to School Library.'
"A present…but it's not my birthday…"
"It's nothing special. Just a little bonus."
Her hands inched like eager spiders over the wrapping paper, separating the folds neatly at the top and pulling out the long, clear pouch containing a plastic recorder.
"My students use them when they start learning music. When you get good, I'll let you accompany me."
"…I don't deserve it," she said, but her eyes seemed to say, 'Thanks for still believing in me.'
Sometimes, when he practiced piano, he could hear the faint sounds of an improvised harmony part coming through the wall.
Other books lay in piles on the floor, neat but out of place when not in their comfortable homes on the shelf. He organized them by subject: Peruvian art, human anatomy, and Japanese folklore seemed to be the most abundant. On the other hand, 10 Steps to Conquering Panic was quite the oddity, being the only book of its kind.
He knocked on the door in the usual way, waited thirty seconds, and tried again. He looked at his watch. Madotsuki was usually awake around now. Maybe she had gone out somewhere, he thought optimistically.
He had just decided to try back again later when the sound of a panicked sob reached his ears from beyond the door. With due speed, he dropped the groceries he was holding and fumbled for her key, trying several others on his key ring before he discovered which one was hers.
"What's wrong! Are you hurt? Did something happen?" he asked all at once as he stumbled over the forgotten groceries and through the door.
He found her in the corner between her bed and the balcony, palms against the wall, hyperventilating. He turned her around gently, asking again and again what had happened. But when she shook her head and started breathing even more heavily, he let up on the barrage of questions.
Instead, he emptied the contents of a small paper bag full of apples he had brought. "Come on. Come on. Calm down. Here, breathe into this."
He helped her hold the open end of the bag up to her gaping mouth while she shakily gripped the front of his black button-up shirt for balance. At first it seemed like nothing he did helped to suppress her escalating terror, but eventually her breathing slowed, the bag was lowered, and she let go of the fabric to scrub her eyes dry.
"Tried to go outside…" she mumbled into her hands. "The doorknob …that face…"
"Are you all right now?" he kneeled down, but she refused to meet his gaze.
"…I never wanted you to see me like this."
Michael buried 10 Steps to Conquering Panic deep in the 'Donate to Public Library' box, wondering somewhat sulkily how many steps Madotsuki had ever gotten through before giving up.
The next book he found himself holding had no title. It was cheaply made, bound with cardboard and canvas, with solid-colored edges. It was only about 13 centimeters in height, and opening it revealed pages of lined paper filled with the handwriting he recognized so well from Madotsuki's shopping lists. This one did not evoke a memory. He had not even seen it when he'd removed the books from the shelf.
Had she kept a diary? His stomach gave a nasty lurch as he scanned the first page. It was dated April 28 of this year.
Beyond the front door lay a nexus of dreams. There were many paths to choose, but I would have to traverse them all. All this to find the missing pieces of myself that I had scattered here in the world of dreams before. If you're reading this, I've already succeeded. Good luck to you, too..."