CH 2.6

It was nighttime.

The safehouse only had one bed which was in the bedroom, and he decided to let Algernon use it. I’ve no intention of caring for Algernon, I just want to let Sakimi’s body recover properly.

As such, Soji was stuck with the sofa. He lay down and closed his eyes.

He couldn’t sleep.

His body was unmistakably nearing its limit. After all, he had spent the whole day doing this and that, and he’d gone without sleep since the previous night’s furor. Still, his consciousness wouldn’t disperse.

With a sigh, he raised his body.

He recalled that there was wine among the stockpile, but immediately banished the thought. He wasn’t in the habit of having a drink before bed to begin with, and besides, he read somewhere that alcohol sometimes worsened insomnia.

Thus, he reached out for the remote control nearby, and turned on the smart TV.

He called up a streaming service and logged in to his account. Sifting through the sea of titles, he searched for his desired overseas drama series. It was a popular long-running series currently in its sixth season. Soji only watched it on-and-off, so he was still in the middle of the third.

Lowering the volume such that it couldn’t be heard from the bedroom, he stared at the screen absentmindedly.

‘Screw this, I’m not gonna be a part of this farce any longer!’

‘Oh, Tony, please wait! You’ve got it all wrong!’

It seemed they were in the middle of a lovers’ spat. The young man on the screen burst out of a room, and a middle-aged woman​ chased after him. Soji couldn’t recall what happened before that, and was completely lost.

Nonetheless, he could feel the raw emotions of the two characters as they argued fervently. That was enough to satisfy Soji even if he couldn’t catch the finer details of the story.

—I guess I quite like fictional stories like this.

His independent lifestyle had long since fallen apart, and the day-to-day actions taken by Ema Soji hadn’t felt real to him in a long time.

Maybe that was why it felt comfortable when he was watching the lives of others from afar like this.

‘Don’t tell me it’s Jones! That bastard!’

‘Wait, please! Oh, Tony! It’s all a misunderstanding!’

The man was now trying to jump out of the window, and the woman was right at his back.

Soji stared at the screen vacantly. He still had no clue how the situation had turned out like this.

—Suddenly, he heard a door opening.

A faint presence made its way as if sliding across the floor. It approached soundlessly, and sat down on the sofa next to him.

His eyes flit to the side, and sure enough, there she was watching the serial drama on the screen with the same expressionless gaze.

“Didn’t I tell you to go to sleep,” he muttered as if talking to himself.

“Yes,” she muttered as if talking to herself.

“But, I was curious.”

“About what.”

“About, what you are doing.”

What’s there to know— But he didn’t feel like asking anything further, so he said nothing more. The one next to him also didn’t open her lips any further, and their back-and-forth stopped.

‘N-No! Stop…’

‘Ah, I’m so glad, Tony! You finally got it!’

The middle-aged woman on the screen was swinging around an axe, while the young man was shivering in the corner of the room.

Soji watched the scene indifferently.

Next to him, the girl’s motionless profile stared fixedly at the scene.

That look again, he noticed. Algernon’s gaze as she watched the serial drama through the liquid crystal display was reminiscent of the one she had earlier when she stared at the goldfish in the fishbowl.

As a matter of fact, there was a common point linking the two. In her eyes, both depicted living things from another world, separated from her by an invisible wall. She couldn’t reach them even if she stretched her hands out, for she would feel only the cold sensation of glass.

In any case, what Algernon felt as she watched them—setting aside the question of whether or not it even had the machinery of the heart known as emotions—that was something Soji could never know.

‘Oh, Lord—At last, I know now what thy will is—’

‘Wait, please! Oh, Tony! It’s all a misunderstanding!’

It was the middle of the night. The two shared a sofa as they watched the made-up lives of other people.

Gradually, Soji’s eyelids lowered as sleep descended upon him.