A Liar and a Little Prayer
When Miyagi first came to the apartment as my observer, I couldn’t help being unnerved by her gaze.
My thought was: “If my observer were the opposite of her - ugly, dirty and middle-aged - I’m sure I’d be able to relax more and think about what the right thing to do was.”
The observer who now stood before me instead of Miyagi was a man rather like that.
He was short, he had unsightly bald spots, his face was red like a drunk’s though lush with whiskers, and his skin was oily. He blinked unusually often, he snorted as he breathed, and he spoke like he had phlegm caught in his throat.
“Where’s the usual girl?” was my first question.
“On break,” the man bluntly said. “I’m filling in today an’ tomorrow.”
I put my hand to my chest in relief. I was grateful observers didn’t take shifts. Miyagi would be back in just two days.
“So even observers get days off,” I said.
“‘Course, gotta. Unlike you, we still gotta lotta livin’ to do,” he replied sarcastically.
“Huh. Well, that’s a relief. And her break’ll be over in two days, and it’ll be back to normal?”
“Yep, that’s the plan,” the man said.
I rubbed my sleepy eyes and looked at the man in the corner again, and saw him holding my album. The album of all my vending machine pictures.
“What the hell’s this?”, he asked.
“Don’t you know about vending machines?”, I joked.
“Tch. I was tryin’ to ask what you’d take pictures like this for.”
“Same as people who like the sky taking pictures of the sky. Flower-likers taking pictures of flowers, train-likers taking pictures of trains. You do it because you wanna. And I like vending machines.”
The man flipped through a few pages in boredom, then declared “Trash,” and tossed the album at me. Then he looked at all the paper cranes strewn around and gave an exaggerated sigh.
“So this is how you’re spendin’ your life, huh. Stupid as hell. Ain’t you got anything better to do?”
His attitude didn’t make me that unpleasant. In terms of honestly saying what I thought, he was easier to deal with. It was much preferable to being stared at from the corner like I was an object.
“I might, but if I did anything more enjoyable than this, my body might not be able to take it,” I laughed.
He continued to find fault in everything in that same way. This observer’s a lot more aggressive, I thought.
I learned why after lunch, when I lied in front of the fan listening to music.
“Hey, you,” the man said. I pretended not to hear him, and he cleared his throat. “You ain’t causin’ that girl any trouble, are ya?”
There was only one person I could think of to whom “that girl” could refer, but I didn’t expect the man to refer to Miyagi that way, so my reply was delayed.
“By that girl, you mean Miyagi?”
“Who else?” The man furrowed his brow as if displeased by me speaking her name.
Seeing that, I felt some fondness for the man. So you’re my ally, huh.
“Let me guess, you’re friendly with Miyagi?”, I asked.
“…Nah. Nothin’ like that. I mean, we’ve never really seen each other.” The man’s tone suddenly got more docile. “Only talked a couple of times through documents, that’s all. But I was the one who bought her time, so I saw her for about ten minutes, long time ago.”
“What’d you think?”
“Poor girl,” he said plainly. “Really, really pity her.”
He seemed to mean it.
“My lifespan was worth the same as hers. Pitiful, huh?”
“Shaddup, you’re gonna die soon anyway.”
“That’s probably the right way to look at things,” I agreed.
“But that girl, she sold the thing she absolutely shouldn’t’ve sold. She was only ten then, you couldn’t expect her to make a rational choice. And now the poor girl’s gotta keep hangin’ around desperate guys like you.”
“…So takin’ it back - you ain’t givin’ her any trouble, are you? Depending on your answer, your last months might get a helluva lot less comfy.”
I was getting increasingly fond of this guy.
“Oh, I think I’ve troubled her,” came my honest reply. “I’ve said things that’ve hurt her, and came close to physically harming her… and a little past that, I almost forced her to the ground.”
The man’s complexion changed, and as he looked like he was about throttle me any second, I held Miyagi’s notebook out to him.
“What’s this?”, he said, taking the notebook.
“You should find the details there. It’s the observation log Miyagi had. But you can’t have the subject himself reading it, right?”
“Observation log?” He licked his finger and opened the notebook.
“I dunno how your job goes, really, and it doesn’t seem to me that rules are too strict. But if it does happen that Miyagi might get punished for leaving this behind, well, I don’t want that. You seem like you’re on her side, so I’ll give it to you.”
The man flipped through the pages, skimming through. He reached the last page in about two minutes, and just said “Aha.”
I didn’t know what was in there. But after that, the man was a lot less aggressive.
Miyagi must have written favorably about me. I was glad to have indirect proof of that.
If I hadn’t had the idea to buy a notebook of my own then, I wouldn’t be writing this now.
After showing the man Miyagi’s notebook, I had an urge to have my own. I went to the stationery shop and bought a Tsubame B5 notebook and a cheap fountain pen, then thought about what to put in it.
I knew that while I had this replacement observer around for two days, it was my time to do things that I couldn’t do with Miyagi there.
At first I considered doing depraved things, but considered that when I next saw Miyagi, even if it didn’t come up, I’d be visibly guilty. So I did things that I wouldn’t want Miyagi to see, but in a healthy way.
I wrote a record of everything that had happened since I climbed the stairs of that old building and sold my lifespan on its fourth floor to the present day.
On the first page, I wrote about the morality lesson I’d received in elementary school. Without even thinking, I knew what I should write on the next page.
The first day I thought about the value of life. My belief at the time that I’d be famous someday. The promise I made with Himeno. Being told about the lifespan dealership at the bookstore and CD shop. Meeting Miyagi there.
The words flowed without stopping. As I smoked, using an empty can as an ashtray, I continued to spin the story.
The fountain pen made a comfortable sound on the paper. The room was hot, and sweat fell and blurred the letters.
“What’re you writing?”, the man asked.
“I’m recording what happened this month.”
“And? Who’s gonna read it?”
“Dunno. Doesn’t really matter. Writing it helps me sort things out. I can move things around to more logical places, like a defrag.”
Even late into the night, my hand wouldn’t be stilled. It was far from being beautiful prose, but I was surprised how smoothly I could write.
After twenty-two hours, I finally came to a sudden halt. I didn’t feel I could write any more today.
I put the fountain pen on the table and went to get some fresh air. The man begrudgingly got up and followed behind me.
Walking around aimlessly outside, I heard a taiko drum from somewhere. Practice for a festival, probably.
“Since you’re an observer, you sold your time too?”, I turned and asked the man.
“If I said yes, would ya sympathize with me?”, the man snorted with laughter.
“Yeah, I would.”
The man looked at me with surprise. “…Well, I’d like to tell ya I’m grateful, but truth is I didn’t sell no lifespan, no time, no health. I do this job 'cause I want to.”
“Bad taste. What’s so fun about it?”
“Didn’t say it was fun. It’s sorta like visiting people’s graves. I’m gonna die someday. Might as well experience as much death as I can so I can accept it.”
“Sounds like an old man’s idea.”
“Yeah, 'cause I am old,” the man said.
Back at the apartment, I took a bath, had a beer, brushed my teeth, and pulled up the covers to sleep. But it was once again noisy next door. Three or four people were talking with the window open.
I felt like there were always guests there, day or night. Big difference from my room which only had observers.
I wore headphones like earmuffs, turned off the light, and closed my eyes.
Maybe thanks to using a part of my brain I didn’t normally, I got eleven straight hours of sleep, not waking up once.
I spent the next day filling my notebook with words too. The radio was going on about baseball. By evening, I had caught up to the present.
My fingers trembled as I released the pen from them. The muscles in my arms and hands were screaming, and I rubbed my sore neck while my head ached.
Still, the feeling of accomplishment from finishing something wasn’t bad. Also, re-explaining my memories through words made good memories easier to savor, and bad memories easier to accept.
I laid down on the spot and stared at the ceiling. There was a big black stain which I wasn’t sure how it got there, and a bent nail jutting out. There was even a cobweb in the corner.
After watching a middle school baseball game at the local field, and going around a fair taking place at the market, I went to a cafeteria and got a leftover-ish dinner.
Miyagi’ll be back tomorrow, I thought.
I decided to go to bed early. I closed the notebook I’d left open, put it on a bookshelf, and got into bed. Then the replacement observer spoke.
“This is somethin’ I ask everyone, but… what’d you use your money for?”
“It didn’t say in the observation log?”
“…Didn’t read it in much detail.”
“I walked down the road giving it out bill by bill,” I answered. “I used a little bit for living expenses, but the original plan was to give it to someone. But they ran off, so I decided I’d just give it all to strangers.”
“Bill by bill?”
“Yep. Just walked along handing out 10,000 yen bills.”
The man burst into uproarious laughter.
"Funny, huh?”, I said, but the man replied through chuckles, “No, that’s not what I’m laughing at.”
It was a bizarre laugh. It didn’t seem like he was just laughing because it was funny.
“…Well, huh. So you ended up giving all that good money you got for your lifespan to strangers for free.”
“That’s what I did,” I nodded.
“No hope for a moron like you.”
“Agreed. There are countless better ways I could’ve used it. Could have done a lot with 300,000 yen.”
“Nope. That’s not even why I’m making fun of you.”
Something about the man’s wording seemed off.
Then he finally said this.
“Hey, you - don’t tell me - did you seriously believe it when they said your lifespan was worth 300,000 yen?”
The question shook me from my core.
“What do you mean?”, I asked the man.
“What else, I mean exactly what I said. Were you really told your lifespan was 300,000 yen, and you were all, ah yes, that’s exactly right, and took 300,000?”
"Well… yeah, I thought that was pretty low at first.”
The man banged the floor in laughter.
“Right, right. Well, I don’t want to say anything, but…” He held his stomach, still keeping in laughter.
“Well, next time you see that girl, you ask her. "Was my lifespan really worth 300,000 yen?”“
I tried to question the man further, but he seemed unwilling to tell me any more.
In my pitch black room, I kept staring up at the ceiling, unable to sleep.
I kept thinking about what his words meant.
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