The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (21 page)

But there was one person who didn’t.

You know who—Haruhi Suzumiya.

Once night had fallen, I had dinner, took a bath, and randomly studied whichever words might come up in English tomorrow. Once that was finished, the clock indicated that it was time to sleep. As I lay down in my bed, I perused the novel Nagato had forced on me. I figured a little reading was good every now and then, so I opened up the book. It was unexpectedly engaging as I continued reading page after page. I guess you really can’t judge a book by its cover.

But it was a bit too long for me to finish in one night, so I put down the book once one of the characters finished a long monologue. The demons of sleep were setting up camp on my eyelids. I marked my spot with the bookmark Nagato had written on and shut the book. I then turned off the lights and sank under the covers. Within a few minutes, I was sound asleep.

Incidentally, do you know why people dream? Sleep rotates between cycles of REM and non-REM stages. The first few hours of sleep are deep sleep and spent mostly in non-REM sleep. The brain is in a restive state during this stage. Once the body is resting and the brain becomes semi-active, you’re in REM sleep. This is when we dream. The closer we get to morning, the higher the frequency of REM sleep. Which means that most of our dreams last until right before we wake up. I dream every night, but I lie in bed until the last possible second so once I wake up, I have to frantically get ready for school and end up forgetting what my dream was about. Though on occasion I abruptly recall some dream I’d forgotten about years ago. Yeah, human memory is still an unsolved mystery.

But I digress. None of that really matters.

Someone was slapping my cheek. You’re annoying. I’m sleeping. Don’t interrupt me when I’m comfortably asleep.

“… Kyon.”

My alarm clock hadn’t gone off yet, even though I just turn it off every time it does. I should still have some time before my mother sends my sister to merrily drag me out of my bed.

“Wake up.”

No. I want to sleep. No time for dubious dreams.

“I told you to wake your ass up!”

The hands wrapped around my neck began shaking my head. When the back of my head slammed against a hard surface, I finally woke up.

… Hard surface?

I quickly sat up. Haruhi’s face, which had been staring at me, dodged my head.

“Finally awake?”

Kneeling next to me in her sailor uniform was Haruhi. Her pale face was filled with anxiety.

“Do you know where we are?”

Yeah. School. The school we go to, North Prefectural High. The paved stone between the front gate and the lockers. Not a single light was on. At night, the school building looked like a gray silhouette to my eyes—

Hold on…. There was no night sky.

Just a flat plane of dark gray. A monochrome sky emitting soft phosphorescence. No moon, stars, or clouds. A gray sky that resembled a wall.

Closed space.

I slowly stood up. I wasn’t wearing my sweats that served as pajamas. Instead, I was clothed in my school uniform.

“I thought I had woken up, but then I found myself here, and you were lying down next to me. What’s going on? Why are we at school?” Haruhi asked in an unusually subdued voice.

Instead of responding, I groped around my surroundings. Both pinching the back of my hand and touching my uniform felt far too real for this to be a dream.

“Haruhi, are we the only ones here?”

“Yeah. I know I was sleeping in my bed, so how did I end up here? And the sky looks strange….”

“Did you see Koizumi?”

“No… Why?”

“No reason. Just asking.”

If this is that dimensional fault or closed space or whatever, then the giants of light and Koizumi and his buddies should also be here.

“Let’s leave the school grounds for now. We might run into someone somewhere.”

“You don’t seem very surprised.”

I’m surprised. Especially by the fact that you’re here. Wasn’t this a playground for those giants she created? Or was this just an unusually real dream I was having? Alone with Haruhi in a deserted school. I wonder what Freud would have to say about this.

I maintained a reasonable distance from Haruhi as we stepped through the gate when my nose ran into an invisible wall. I remembered this clammy sensation. I could force my way a bit further but I soon ran into firm wall. An invisible wall stood right outside the school entrance.

“What is this?”

As Haruhi vigorously pushed with her two hands, her eyes grew wider. I walked around the school premises to confirm my suspicions. An imperceptible wall extended seamlessly as far as I could walk.

Almost as if it were trying to trap us inside.

“It doesn’t look like we can get out from here.”

There wasn’t even a breeze. The air was totally still.

“Let’s try circling to the back.”

“Shouldn’t we try to contact someone first?” Haruhi asked. “If there’s a phone, at least. I don’t have my cell on me.”

If we were in closed space, then according to Koizumi’s explanation, a phone wouldn’t do us any good, but we still went into the school building. There should be a phone in the faculty office.

None of the lights were on. The dark school building was pretty creepy. We walked past the rows of lockers and headed into the silent school building. On the way, I flipped the light switches in the first-floor classrooms and the fluorescent lights flickered on. It was just cold, artificial light, but it was enough to make the two of us exchange relieved looks.

First, we headed for the night watchman’s office. After confirming that it was empty, we headed for the faculty office. Naturally, it was locked, so we pulled out a nearby fire extinguisher, smashed its bottom into the glass window, and broke into the room.

Haruhi held the phone out to me. “Doesn’t seem to work.” I took it and put it to my ear. No sound at all. I tried pushing the buttons a few times but nothing happened.

We left the faculty office and headed up, turning on all the lights in the classrooms as we went. Our classroom was on the top floor. If we looked down from there, we might learn something about our surroundings. At least that’s what Haruhi said.

As we walked through the school, Haruhi tightly clenched the sleeve of my blazer. “Don’t expect much from me, Haruhi. I don’t have the power to do anything. But if you’re scared, just cling to my arm. It creates more of an atmosphere.”

“Idiot.”

Haruhi glared at me with upturned eyes, but her fingers didn’t release their grip.

Nothing looked different about classroom 1-5. Looked just the way it did when I left it that afternoon. The eraser marks on the chalkboard. The thumbtack-filled mortar wall.

“Kyon, look….” Haruhi said after rushing over to the window before falling silent. I stood next to her and looked down at the world below.

The gray world extended as far as I could see. Our school was built on the side of a mountain so you could see the shoreline from the fourth floor. I looked 180 degrees to the left, then 180 degrees to the right. Everywhere I looked, I saw no light suggesting human life. All the houses were plunged in darkness. Even the ones covered by curtains didn’t have any light spilling out. As though every last person had vanished from this world.

“Where are we…?”

It wasn’t that everyone else had disappeared. We were the ones who had disappeared. In this case, we would be the intruders who had slipped into this deserted world.

“This gives me the creeps,” Haruhi murmured as she hugged her shoulders.

We didn’t know where to go. And so we made our way to the club room we had just left that evening. We had swiped the key from the faculty office, so we had no trouble getting in.

Under the fluorescent lights, we sighed with relief at returning to our familiar headquarters.

I turned on the radio but there wasn’t even any white noise. Without the slightest hint of wind, the only sound in the club room was the sound of me pouring water into the teapot. I didn’t feel like bothering to change the tea leaves, so it was just diluted tea. I’m the one who brewed it. Haruhi was just half-dazed, staring at the gray world outside.

“Want tea?”

“No.”

I carried my teacup and pulled out a metal chair. I took a sip. Asahina’s tea is a hundred times better.

“What’s going on? What is this? I don’t get it. Where are we? Why am I in this place?” Haruhi said all this without turning around, still standing at the window. From behind, she looked really thin. “And why is it just you and me?”

“Hell if I know.” Haruhi flipped her skirt and hair and looked at me with a pissed-off look on her face.

“I’m going to go explore a bit,” she said as she headed out of the room. I began to stand up.

“You stay here. I’ll be right back.”

And with that, she left the room. Hmm, I guess that’s typical of her. As her lively footsteps faded into the distance, I sipped my unsavory tea. That was when he finally showed up.

A small red ball of light. At first, it was the size of a ping pong ball. Then its outline gradually grew in size while flickering like a firefly before settling into the shape of a human.

“Koizumi?”

Though it had a human shape, it did not look human. No eyes, nose, or mouth. Just a shining red doll.

“Why, hello.”

An optimistic voice broadcasted from within the red light.

“Took you long enough. I was expecting you to appear in a more tangible form.”

“Regarding that, I need to tell you a few things. No beating around the bush. I’ll be frank. This is an abnormal situation.”

The red light flickered.

“With normal closed space, I am easily able to gain entry. However, that wasn’t the case this time. I could only appear in this incomplete form after borrowing the power of all of my colleagues. And it probably won’t last very long. The power that rests within us is beginning to disappear.”

“What’s going on? Are Haruhi and I the only ones here?”

“Precisely,” Koizumi responded. “In other words, what we feared has already begun to happen. Suzumiya has finally given up on the current world and decided to create a new world.”

“…”

“As a result, our superiors are in a state of panic. Nobody knows what will happen to our world once it has lost its God. If Suzumiya happens to be feeling merciful, our world may continue to exist without change. But it could also return to nothing in the next second.”

“Why did this happen?”

“No one knows.”

The red light faltered like a flame.

“In any case, you and Suzumiya have completely vanished from our world. You are not in ordinary closed space. It is an entirely new dimension created by Suzumiya. Perhaps all the previous instances of closed space were merely practice runs.”

“Funny joke. Tell me which part I’m supposed to laugh at. Ha. Ha. Ha.”

“That wasn’t a joke. I am dead serious. The world you are in is probably the manifestation nearest to the world Haruhi desires. Though we aren’t sure what it is that she wants. Indeed, who knows what will happen?”

“Setting that aside, why am I here?”

“Do you really not know? You have been chosen by Suzumiya. The only person from the old world Suzumiya truly wanted to be with. I thought that you had realized this long ago.”

Koizumi’s light was about as dim as a flashlight running out of batteries.

“It would appear that I’m almost out of time. The way things look now, I probably won’t be seeing you again, but I suppose I’m rather relieved, for I will no longer need to go hunt Celestials.”

“Do I have to live in this gray world all alone with Haruhi?”

“Adam and Eve. If you reproduce enough, it’ll work out, won’t it?”

“… Don’t make me hit you.”

“Just a joke. All kidding aside, I would assume that this closed area of space will only last momentarily. It should soon turn into a familiar-looking world. However, it probably won’t be entirely the same. You could say that the world you are in is now the real world and the former world would be closed space. It’s a pity I won’t be able to observe the differences between the worlds. Well, if I happen to be born into the new world, please treat me kindly.”

Koizumi was turning back into a ping pong ball. His human shape collapsed and shrank like a burned-out star.

“We can no longer go back to the old world?”

“If Suzumiya desires it, then perhaps. The possibility is slim though. As for myself, I would have liked to spend more time with you and Suzumiya, so I regret this turn of events. I enjoyed being in the SOS Brigade. Oh, that’s right. I forgot to deliver the messages from Mikuru Asahina and Yuki Nagato.”

Koizumi said the following words before completely disappearing:

“Mikuru Asahina wanted to apologize. She said, ‘I’m sorry. It’s all my fault.’ Yuki Nagato’s message was ‘Turn on the computer.’ I’ll be going now.”

The end was quite quick. Like a candle being blown out.

I pondered Asahina’s message. Why is she sorry? What did Asahina do? I decided to think about that later and turned on the computer per the other message. As the hard drive produced sounds of seeking, the OS logo showed up on the monitor… except not. The OS screen, which should have booted up in a few seconds, didn’t show up. The monitor remained black. There was only a blinking white cursor on the left edge of the screen. The cursor began moving soundlessly to spell out a curt message.

YUKI.N> Can you see this?

After a brief period of bewilderment, I pulled the keyboard towards me. My fingers began typing.

Yeah.

YUKI.N> The connection has not been completely severed with your spacetime. But it is only a matter of time. The connection will be closed soon. That will be the end.

What should I do?

YUKI.N> Nothing can be done. The eruption of abnormal data in this world has completely vanished. The Data Overmind is in despair. The possibility for evolution has been lost.

What was that whole possibility of evolution thing anyway? What part of Haruhi could possibly be considered evolved?