Chapter 7 : Ransacking the Time Capsule

When I tried to write a will, I soon realized that regardless of what I did write, I could not start unless I had an idea of who my reader would be.

I sat with a pen and a pad of paper I bought from a local stationery store and thought for a long time about what I should write. There must have been a cicada resting on the power line pole right outside my window, because it was as noisy as if the screeching was coming from inside the apartment. I could blame the cicada for my lack of progress in writing, but even after it flew off, I failed to put down a single word on paper.

Who was I hoping would read this will anyway? Words were a means of transferring information. The words I would write had to tell someone else about some invisible thing inside me.

What did I want to say, and to whom? The first answer to that question that came to mind was my childhood friend Himeno. Perhaps this will should contain my gratitude toward her and confess my love for her.

As a test, I took about an hour to write a very careful letter to her. It went like this, more or less:

It's really none of my business what you think of me now, but ever since that day when we were ten, I've been in love with you. The reason I made it to twenty at all was because I had memories of being near you, and the reason I won't live past twenty is because I can't stand a world where you're not around. It took my impending death for me to figure it out. In a way, I think I've been dead for a long time already. Ever since the day we were separated. Good-bye. I hope my ten-year-old self lives on at least a little longer within you.

Upon rereading it, I figured I would never mail this letter. It was fatally flawed somehow. This wasn't what I wanted to say. And it would be impossible to accurately record what I did want to say. If I put it into words, then it would die for certain.

I think the core of what I wanted was in the last sentence of that letter: for ten-year-old me to live on a bit longer within Himeno. And if I wanted this letter to be true to that wish, perhaps it was better that I didn't write it at all. It didn't matter what I did as long as it was something physical. As long as I put Himeno's name on the front of the letter and had my name as the sender, that would be enough. It would offer the least possibility of misinterpretation. If a blank letter was too creepy, then I could just add a single sentence: I wanted to write you a letter. I could also fill it with something completely harmless and ordinary and safe, without including anything about my death.

I tossed the pen onto the table and folded up the paper so Miyagi wouldn't read it, then lay back and stared at the ceiling. When was the last time I had written a letter…?

I searched back through my memories. I'd never kept up written correspondence with anyone, of course, and I didn't have anyone to send traditional holiday cards or summer greetings to since I was a child. I probably hadn't written more than a handful in my entire life.

If you removed that one thing from when I was seventeen, the last letter I'd written was…the summer of fourth grade.

It was the summer when I was ten. We buried a time capsule behind the gymnasium. It was a suggestion from our homeroom teacher, the one who first got me to think about the hypothetical value of life through that morality lesson.

The students all had to write a letter to stick inside the spherical capsule.

"I want you to write this message to yourself, ten years in the future," she said. "It might be difficult for you to come up with something to write about…but you can simply ask questions, if you want. Like 'Has your dream come true?' or 'Are you happy?' or 'Do you remember this?' or 'Is there anything you want to ask me?' Another thing you could do is state your hopes for yourself, such as 'Please try to make your dream come true' or 'Please try to find happiness' or 'Please don't forget about this.'"

Surely she couldn't have failed to foresee the future: that ten years later, half of those children would have abandoned their dreams, lost their happiness, and forgotten all kinds of important things.

Maybe it wasn't really a letter for our future selves, but a letter to us, in the moment we were writing it.

She also said, "At the end of the letter, I want you to write the name of the person you consider your best friend right now. You don't have to worry about what that person might think of you. If you know you like them, but you think they hate you, write their name anyway. We're going to be very careful with these letters so that no one can read them—even me. Don't worry about that."

I can't remember what I wrote to myself.

But I didn't need to remember whose name I wrote.

The time capsule was supposed to be dug up in ten years. That was now. But there was no word about it. It was possible I just didn't get contacted. But what if that wasn't the case? What if the person in charge of reaching out to everyone completely forgot about it? Or what if they were going to reach out, but it simply hadn't happened yet?

I wanted to read that letter before I died. But I wanted to do it all alone, without having to contact any of my old classmates.

"How are you going to spend your day today?" asked Miyagi when I stood up.

"Ransacking a time capsule," I replied.

It had been a year since I last returned to where I grew up. The train station was like a miserable little prefab bungalow, and everything outside of it was familiar scenery. It was a green, hilly town. The sound of the bugs and the thick smell of plants was overwhelming compared with where I lived now. Even if I concentrated, the only thing I could hear was birds and insects.

"You aren't going to sneak into the elementary schoolyard and start digging in broad daylight, are you?" asked Miyagi, who was walking behind me.

"No, of course not. I'll wait until night."

I'd gotten myself here on sheer momentum, but this town had almost nothing in the way of recreation facilities or restaurants. I hadn't thought about how to spend the hours until the sun went down. There wasn't even a convenience store within walking distance. At this rate, I should have taken a moped here; at least that would have eaten up a lot of time.

But although I had plenty of time to kill, I wasn't going to return to my parents' house. I didn't want to see anyone I knew.

"If you don't know what to do with yourself, why not visit some places from your past?" Miyagi asked, seemingly aware of exactly what I was thinking. "Somewhere you went all the time as a child but haven't visited in years, for example."

"Places from my past? The only memories I have of this town are bad ones."

"Aside from the ones relating to Himeno, you mean?"

"I'd appreciate it if you didn't bring up her name. If there's anyone I don't want to hear it from, it's you."

"I see. I'll be careful about that in the future… But if you'll pardon my intrusion, I would recommend you do not go to see anyone."

"I wasn't planning to."

"That's good," she said, her expression cold.

The sunlight seemed to pierce through skin. It was going to be a hot one. I sat on the bench outside the station and thought about what to do.

Nearby, Miyagi was applying some kind of sunblock to herself. I knew she was pale from the first time I met her, but now I was learning that she was careful to keep it that way. She was so dead serious and seemingly uninterested in appearances that this came as a surprise to me.

"No one else but me can see you, right?" I asked.

"Basically, yes."

"Is it always like that?"

"Yes, no one aside from the observation subject can see me. But as you know, there are exceptions. You probably noticed that, when I am not on monitoring duty, those who come wishing to sell their life, time, or health can see me… Why do you ask?"

"No reason. Just wondering why you care about how you look if no one can see you anyway."

To my surprise, this appeared to touch a nerve with her.

"It's just something I do for myself," she said, seemingly offended. "You take showers even when you don't have plans to meet anyone, don't you?"

I had hurt her feelings, I guessed. If she were any other girl, I would have apologized right away, but because it was Miyagi, I actually felt a bit delighted, like I'd finally gotten back at her. I wanted to praise myself for that thoughtless comment.

As I wandered, thinking, my feet took me toward the woods near the street where Himeno and I lived as kids. We played there often as children. I was a bit frustrated to realize I was doing exactly as Miyagi suggested. She had proved just how simple and predictable my actions were.

The trip took quite a while because I avoided passing near my house. I stopped by the candy store I spent a lot of time in as a kid, but the sign was removed; they had gone out of business.

I went down the road through the woods, then strayed off into the trees, until I reached my destination about five minutes later.

The abandoned bus there had played the role of a "secret fort" for Himeno and me when we were young. It was rusted over on the outside, with only a tiny bit of red paint still remaining, but it was fairly clean on the inside as long as you ignored the dust piling up on the seats and floor. You'd think there would be plenty of bugs, but there were hardly any to be seen.

I walked throughout the bus, looking for traces of our presence. But I didn't find anything of the sort. I was ready to give up and leave when I happened to glance at the driver's seat—and I saw it.

Something was written on the side of the seat in blue permanent marker. I got closer and squinted; it was an arrow. When I followed the direction it pointed, I saw another arrow.

Through a series of six arrows, I reached the back of the seat, where one of those "love umbrella" diagrams was drawn. It was the kind of thing you did as a child, where the people whose names were beneath the umbrella were meant to fall in love. When you were a kid, you put other people's names in as a prank, or your own with the person you had a secret crush on.

Of course, the names written there belonged to Himeno and me. I didn't remember drawing it, and only the two of us knew about this place, so it was obvious Himeno must have drawn it.

It put a smile on my face. She never seemed like the type to engage in these girly things.

I stared at the umbrella drawing for a while. Miyagi looked at it over my shoulder, too, but she wasn't offering any snarky comments.

Once I'd committed the sight to memory, I left the bus and, as I did when I was a boy, climbed up onto the roof of the vehicle via a fallen tree trunk. I cleared away the leaves and twigs from the top and lay down.

I remained there until the evening, when the cicadas began to buzz.

After a brief visit to my grandfather's grave, it was night when I headed for the elementary school. I borrowed a shovel from the toolshed, picked out a spot in the ground behind the gymnasium that seemed right, and began to dig. The green color of the emergency exit light cast a glow around the area.

I figured I would find what I was looking for right away, but either my memory was wrong or it had already been dug up long ago, because after an hour of sweaty digging, I had not found the time capsule.

My throat was parched. After the batting cage trip yesterday, my hands were destroyed. Miyagi was jotting something down in her notebook as she watched me dig.

I stopped for a smoke break, at which point my memory returned. Yes, we had originally planned to bury it next to the tree behind the gym, but they said a new tree might be planted there soon, so the spot was changed.

Instead, I started digging behind the backstop, and within ten minutes, my shovel struck something hard. Carefully, I dug around the spherical object to avoid harming it, then pulled it out and brought it into the light. I figured it would be locked, but a simple slide opened it right up.

At first, I was just going to pull my letter out and put it right back. But after the lengths I'd gone to get it, I might as well take a look at all the letters. I was going to die in a few months; surely this was a forgivable transgression.

I picked out one at random and checked out the "message to my future self" and "best friend" parts of it.

Once I was done, I put it back, got out my notepad, and wrote the name of the person who penned the letter, then an arrow, and then the name of their "best friend." As I continued through the letters, the list of names and arrows grew, until a kind of diagram began to form of who liked whom and who was liked by whom. Which ones were paired up, and which were one-sided?

As I suspected when I started doing this, when I finished reading all the time capsule letters, the only name that was isolated among those on my chart was my own. Not a single person chose me as their "best friend."

And no matter how closely I searched the time capsule, I could not find Himeno's letter. Perhaps she just so happened to be absent from school on the day they buried it.

If she was there, she would have written my name, I suspected. She drew a secret love umbrella for us in our hidden fort. She would have written my name and probably added a heart or two for good measure.

If only Himeno's letter had been there.

I stuck my own letter into the pocket of my jeans, then buried the time capsule again, returned the shovel to the toolshed, washed my hands and face carefully from the faucet there, and left the school grounds.

On through the night I walked, my body ragged. From behind me, Miyagi said, "Have you figured it out by now? You aren't meant to cling to your connections from the past. You've completely ignored them until now, for one thing. After Himeno transferred schools, did you ever send her a single letter? After you graduated high school, did you contact Naruse even once? Why did Wakana give up on you? Did you bother to attend your class reunion? I know this sounds harsh, but…don't you think it's awfully presumptuous of you to look to the past now?"

That pissed me off, but I had no response.

Miyagi probably had a good point. I was acting like an atheist who traveled around to different shrines and temples praying to whatever god would listen to me as soon as I found myself in need of help.

But with my past and my future both shut off from me, what was I supposed to do?

When I got to the station and looked at the timetable, I doubted my eyes. The last train had left hours ago. I rarely had to make use of the train when I lived here, but it was a shock to me that even out in the countryside, the rail service could end so early in the day.

I could've called a taxi, and there was nothing preventing me from going to my family home, but in the end, I chose to spend the night at the station. At this point, I wanted physical pain that was greater than my mental pain. If I was the right amount of sore, I could dedicate all my attention to that.

So I sat on the hard bench and closed my eyes. The sound of bugs hitting the fluorescent lights was constant. I was exhausted enough to get some sleep, but the inside of the building was surprisingly bright, and there were insects crawling on my legs, so it was not going to be pleasant.

From the bench behind me, I could hear Miyagi's pen scribbling. She was tough, I had to admit. Based on what I'd experienced in the last few days, it didn't seem as if she'd slept much, if any. At night, she apparently slept one minute, then woke for five. That was probably what a monitor had to do, but it seemed like a harsh job for a young woman.

But I wasn't sympathetic. I was just glad it wasn't my job.