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The music that had been playing in my head has vanished, leaving behind some faint white noise like a taut white sheet on a huge bed. I touch that sheet, tracing it with my fingertips. The white goes on forever. Sweat beads up under my arms. Sometimes I can catch a glimpse of the sky through the treetops. It's covered with an even, unbroken layer of gray clouds, but it doesn't look like it's going to rain. The clouds are still, the whole scene unchanging. Birds in the high branches call out clipped, meaningful greetings to each other. Insects buzz prophetically among the weeds.
I think about my deserted house back in Nogata. Most likely it's all shut up now. Fine by me. Let the bloodstains be. What do I care? I'm never going back there. Even before that bloody incident took place, that house was a place where lots of things had died. Check that-were murdered.
Sometimes from above me, sometimes from below, the forest tries to threaten me. Blowing a chill breath on my neck, stinging like needles with a thousand eyes. Trying anything to drive this intruder away. But I gradually get better at letting these threats pass me by. This forest is basically a part of me, isn't it? This thought takes hold at a certain point. The journey I'm taking is inside me. Just like blood travels down veins, what I'm seeing is my i
Like I'm being shoved from behind by some huge heartbeat, I continue on and on through the forest. The path leads to a special place, a light source that spins out the dark, the place where soundless echoes come from. I need to see with my own eyes what's there. I'm carrying an important, sealed, personal letter, a secret message to myself.
A question. Why didn't she love me? Don't I deserve to have my mother love me?
For years that question's been a white-hot flame burning my heart, eating away at my soul. There had to be something fundamentally wrong with me that made my mother not love me. Was there something inherently polluted about me? Was I born just so everyone could turn their faces away from me?
My mother didn't even hold me close when she left. She turned her face away and left home with my sister without saying a word. She disappeared like quiet smoke. And now that face is gone forever.
The birds screech above me again, and I look up at the sky. Nothing there but that flat, expressionless layer of gray clouds. No wind at all. I trudge along. I'm walking by the shores of consciousness. Waves of consciousness roll in, roll out, leave some writing, and just as quickly new waves roll in and erase it. I try to quickly read what's written there, between one wave and the next, but it's hard. Before I can read it the next wave's washed it away. All that's left are puzzling fragments.
My mind wanders back to my house on the day my mother left, taking my sister with her. I'm sitting alone on the porch, staring out at the garden. It's twilight, in early summer, and the trees cast long shadows. I'm alone in the house. I don't know why, but I already knew I was abandoned. I understood even then how this would change my world forever. Nobody told me this-I just knew it. The house is empty, deserted, an abandoned lookout post on some far-off frontier. I'm watching the sun setting in the west, shadows slowly stealing over the world. In a world of time, nothing can go back to the way it was. The shadows' feelers steadily advance, eroding away one point after another along the ground, until my mother's face, there until a moment ago, is swallowed up in this dark, cold realm. That hardened face, turned away from me, is automatically snatched away, deleted from my memory.
Trudging along in the woods, I think of Miss Saeki. Her face, that calm, faint smile, the warmth of her hand. I try imagining her as my mother, leaving me behind when I was four. Without realizing it, I shake my head. The picture is all wrong. Why would Miss Saeki have done that? Why does she have to hurt me, to permanently screw up my life? There had to be a hidden, important reason, something deeper I'm just not getting.
I try to feel what she felt then and get closer to her viewpoint. It isn't easy. I'm the one who was abandoned, after all, she's the one who did the abandoning. But after a while I take leave of myself. My soul sloughs off the stiff clothes of the self and turns into a black crow that sits there on a branch high up in a pine tree in the garden, gazing down at the four-year-old boy on the porch.
I turn into a theorizing black crow.
"It's not that your mother didn't love you," the boy named Crow says from behind me. "She loved you very deeply. The first thing you have to do is believe that. That's your starting point."
"But she abandoned me. She disappeared, leaving me alone where I shouldn't be. I'm finally begi
"That's the reality of it. It did happen," the boy named Crow says. "You were hurt badly, and those scars will be with you forever. I feel sorry for you, I really do. But think of it like this: It's not too late to recover. You're young, you're tough. You're adaptable. You can patch up your wounds, lift up your head, and move on. But for her that's not an option. The only thing she'll ever be is lost. It doesn't matter whether somebody judges this as good or bad-that's not the point. You're the one who has the advantage. You ought to consider that."
I don't respond.
"It all really happened, so you can't undo it," Crow tells me. "She shouldn't have abandoned you then, and you shouldn't have been abandoned. But things in the past are like a plate that's shattered to pieces. You can never put it back together like it was, right?"
I nod. You can never put it back together like it was. He's hit the nail on the head.
The boy named Crow continues. "Your mother felt a gut-wrenching kind of fear and anger inside her, okay? Just like you do now. Which is why she had to abandon you."
"Even though she loved me?"
"Even though she loved you, she had to abandon you. You need to understand how she felt then, and learn to accept it. Understand the overpowering fear and anger she experienced, and feel it as your own-so you won't inherit it and repeat it. The main thing is this: You have to forgive her. That's not going to be easy, I know, but you have to do it. That's the only way you can be saved. There's no other way!"
I think about what he's said. The more I think about it, the more confused I get. My head's spi
"Didn't she tell you that theory is still functional?" the boy named Crow says. "So that's the answer. It's still a functioning hypothesis. That's all I can tell you."
"A working hypothesis until some good counterevidence comes along."
"You got it," Crow says.
"And I have to pursue that hypothesis as far as it'll take me."
"That's it," Crow replies pointedly. "A theory that still doesn't have any good counterevidence is one worth pursuing. And right now, pursuing it's the only choice you have. Even if it means sacrificing yourself, you have to pursue it to the bitter end."
"Sacrifice myself?" That certainly has a strange ring to it. I can't quite grasp it.
There's no reply. Worried, I turn around. The boy named Crow is still there. He's right behind, keeping pace.
"What sort of fear and anger did Miss Saeki have at that time?" I ask him as I turn back around and walk on. "And where did it come from?"
"What kind of fear and anger do you think she had?" the boy named Crow asks in return. "Think about it. You've got to figure it out yourself. That's what your head's for."