Golden Time:Volume5 Prologue
Status: Incomplete
22% completed (estimated)
Golden Time 5: Prologue
Prologue
That over there, wasn't that the twinkling of a star?
Without even thinking, he knew it was not, but even so, the little flickering light over there in the darkness, to Banri's eyes, of course, looked like a star.
But a star shouldn't be so close to the ground, in a low place. Even under his current circumstances, he understood that much. So he felt it was certainly something man made.
What was it? Some kind of lighting, like a miniature light bulb?
Anyhow, it seemed that whether on purpose, or by mistake, that a little light had been set there. ...Or was it perhaps the light of a firefly? There aren't fireflies in Shizuoka in May. Ordinarily.
A dark night sky, and the inky edge of the mountains.
The flickering was amongst what could be seen during the day as thickly growing trees on the other side of the hospital grounds. The walking path used for rehabilitation went under the trees and continued onwards far up the gentle slopes.
From between the trees and thickets, clearly as if it had a will of its own, the faintly bluish light was even now flickering and turning back.
At that moment, with a light sound, as if one had plucked a bowstring, the short and long hands of the clock on the wall overlapped. The clock was large compared to the size of the room, and Banri thought it was surely so that it could call out "Hey, old man!" "The hour of your death... will be in X minutes..." (fold your hands as if in prayer).
The date changed.
His living flesh still laying down in a bed which had until now sustained many people at the hours of their deaths, Banri opened his eyes. For now, his body didn't feel any more connection with that. Having tasted the signs of death one by one, he did not want to live in a hospital.
The strangely heavy futon bothering his skin, his weakened feet throwing off the loose sheets, he remained unable to sleep as the night deepened. His head cleared.
Flickering on the other side of the hospital room's window, he could still see the mysterious point of light.
Banri thought, really, what the heck is it? While he guessed this and that, however much he strained his eyes towards the distant darkness, he of course could not see what it really was.
The first time he'd noticed it was three nights before.
It was after most things had been turned off. As usual unable to sleep, he had just idly rolled over when on the other side of the window he saw a light, flickering softly. While he gazed at it, thinking it a wonder, at last it disappeared, and he could not see it anymore. The whole incident was all of two hours long.
Morning came, and Banri tried to ask a young nurse about the strange light. But she answered right away "Well, I wonder what it was?" and then said there were more important things.
Why were you up at such an hour? Couldn't you sleep? Did you tell the psychiatrist the last time you talked with him? Did you tell him all about it, clearly? Don't you want to get better? ...No matter what, she couldn't avoid the usual small talk, with the attitude of a 'medical official.' Banri, hiding his expression with an ambiguous smile, said "Enough already" with his mouth shut, tongue firmly stuck to his upper palate.
During the time for his noon rehabilitation, he casually left the walking route, thinking he would check out the area where he'd seen the light. But the moment he went so much as a half step out of the way, a physical therapist guy right behind him would call out for him to watch out.
When he squirmed and tried to give an awful excuse 'It's just that I want to look among the trees for signs of summer coming...', the physical therapist suddenly pulled a wildflower from the ground by his feet and placed it in Banri's hand. Eh... he flinched at the wildness of it. Anyway, he was quickly yanked back to the route he'd followed up to that point.
White, with cute little petals, the leaves and stems had a simple straight shape. The flower people call 'Chinese Chives' --- that's what it seemed to be.
He could not ignore this thing which had been broken from its root and pulled completely out of the ground by his own fault, so putting water in a cup he tried setting it on his bedstand, to see if "Mother" would say to him, "Oh, that's a Chive flower." This time of year, behind the house, it seems many of them were blooming on their own.
Now that he thought about it, there was no need to even think about whether such a pretty thing could be Chive. It was certainly Chive. It simply reeked of the peculiar aura of Chives.
And then the mysterious light appeared that night too.
Around eleven o'clock that evening, Banri noticed the appearance of the light. It had come out again! He watched it for quite a while, and after a couple of hours it suddenly disappeared.
Eventually, towards morning, it started raining softly.
Things were arranged so he could do his daily rehabilitation even inside the hospital, so thanks to the rain, Banri the whole day long was unable to go outside. And of course, he could not go out to where the chive flowers grew.
Nobody could blame Banri for wandering about, even with his luxurious private hospital room, what with coming and going to the bathrooms on the third floor, medical checkups (of course), always going to see the physical therapists and nurses for rehabilitation, between "I don't have that" or "I want this", and his "Mother" always hanging around, looking after his daily needs.
Everybody was so awfully nice.
But he wasn't permitted "freedom", even as the days passed.
Clearly, he was being treated as some sort of monster, kept in a cell, for now not provoking him, as if they'd decided to keep him alive and quiet. It felt like everybody was to some extent keeping their distance and observing his every action. He must've been some really horrible kind of guy. He was receiving help, and receiving such good treatment, and yet he seemed to be awfully ungrateful for it.
Nonetheless, that's what he felt. Passing the days as an in-patient in that hospital was so terribly, terribly suffocating.
In the absence of a persecution complex or something like that, observations… or bluntly, surveillance, seemed to actually be taking place.
Banri, lying down on the cool white sheets, staring at the mysterious light that had appeared again this evening, but unable to confirm what it was, looked back over what had happened to him.
All of one month ago, there was a day in March. It seems he was brought to this hospital in an ambulance. By the time he woke up, several days had already passed.
When he came to, he was throbbing from multiple broken bones, and his head was splitting. He was gasping through an oxygen mask placed on him, his completely naked body being rolled around immodestly.
The first thing he saw when his eyes opened was darkness. In the still darkness, shadows like hazy smoke wriggling in the air, his first thought was "I am seeing darkness." Eventually, the haze wound into a spiral, as if it were threads of white paint dripping and beginning to mix together. The rotation of the marble pattern gradually become more complex, but in the end it came to a stop. On the white ceiling, the rectangular lighting fixtures stood out sharply.
In the moment he took a breath, it all started.
What the... Where am I... It hurts... The agony... What happened to me... Not even wanting to know his situation, he couldn't even move. And then for some reason between his legs it hurt like crazy. He couldn't even cry, but if he moaned somebody jumped into his field of view. A catheter and a breathing tube inserted into him, he couldn't even whisper, and his confusion just grew more and more.
This was a hospital, an emergency intensive care unit, and he had just come to. Even when they explained it to him, he had no idea what they were saying. Perhaps he was too close to the problem to understand. ...He didn't even know who he was.
And this time, they thought it was a case of attempted suicide.
"So, you have no memories, and you've forgotten everything about yourself?" the attending physician boldly declared to Banri, neither beating around the bush nor having any intentions of taking it easy on him. He seemed to have come to ask him, "Are you sure you aren't pretending so you can sweep under the rug the fact that you utterly failed in wanting to take your own life?"
The doctor was wrong. He really couldn't remember anything. Whether it was a simple fall, or an attempted suicide, even he didn't know. There was already no way to verify it. Because the person himself had forgotten completely. Unable to do anything but repeat that explanation, just how much they trusted him was still a mystery to him.
Still, Banri wasn't that sort of troubled child. Though they had determined for sure that he was a guy who'd failed his college entrance exams, yet still had hopes of heading to Tokyo to attend classes in preparation for retaking those same tests, and so it wasn't an attempted suicide, his memories were truly lost, completely and without a doubt, as his family had claimed. Officially, this matter had settled down to being an "accidental fall."
But, the true heart of the matter was, of course, that nobody knew. And so, they monitored him.
In this way, everybody surrounded at a distance, as if he were locked up in a prison cell, the mysterious "something" which had only the appearance of "Tada Banri."
He had no idea just how long he would continue to live like this. Though the necessities of life were guaranteed, that was still all it was: the inside of a jail cell. Banri wondered when the day would come that he could leave this place.
Besides, before long the injuries to this body would be entirely healed, and with the need for him to be in the surgery ward going away, he wondered where in the world he would be sent. He didn't want to think if thinking was going to scare him, but of course, unable to sleep in the night, he thought things out to the max.
Walking around under an ordinary sun, reaching out to ordinary people, he wondered, would he be able to lead such a normal life?
Even without his memories, he understood more or less what was normal. Such concepts he hadn't lost. He even thought, "I want to go back" to that place, oddly enough.
Some day out of the blue, huh!? What was I doing before now!? When he remembered everything, it would probably be very nice. In the end, it would be a perfectly happy ending, with smiles, cheers and flower petals dancing in the air. The doctors and nurses would send him off applauding. He himself would turn and wave his arms broadly to them, and then run back to a circle of family and friends. So it would be, just like waking up from a bad dream.
A nightmare. ...A nightmare, eh?
Without realizing it, Banri was taking short, low breaths in the darkness. Whether it was a nightmare or something else, he couldn't help but live it through, alone in the dead of the night.
Setting one elbow on his towel-covered pillow, posed like a reclining Buddha, he lifted his head. Kicking the futon even further away with his bare toes, he suddenly thrust one hand down into his pajama pants and underwear. ...He wasn't worried about what he might touch. For some reason, simply inserting his hand down in his warm crotch calmed his mind. The rain, which had fallen a bit earlier, finally stopped.
In the darkness beyond the glass, the light was twinkling now too.
(Really, what in the world is that...?)
The day before yesterday, yesterday, and now tonight. This makes three days. How long would he continue to look out like this, of course he had no idea. Since it would be brighter out, he didn't think he would be able to check it out during rehabilitation. It would be impossible to shake off the physical therapist who followed along with him just in case something happened to him along the way. ...Would they rather come along with him? Was it impossible? He didn't think something like “We're in the middle of rehabilitation, but would you like to help me search for a mysterious light I'm confused about?” would be allowed. He might as well be trying as hard as he could to be ridiculous.
When he turned his head a bit, trying to raise his face, the chive flower on the nightstand had withered. Looking sad at having been plucked, the white flower was drooping to the side.
The shape was just like a girl, standing alone and dejected. Of course, it was a poor little thing.
Murmuring silently a tiny apology, he returned to looking out, staring once more at the unidentified light.
(Even if it's... lighting something... it's strange. In a place like that, so small like that, it can't be meaningless.)
For starters, he was the only guy gazing out through the hospital ward's window and able to notice that light. Most of the patients in the hospital, because getting up early was their habit, were probably sound asleep already.
He was an in-patient with a tendency towards insomnia, but with his sanity under question, so he didn't want to be asking for medicine. Such a tiny object... it seemed to be visible only to Banri... being shone towards him, what the heck was it? With what kind of intentions, by whom?
(...Perhaps, it was some sort of sign. Like a signal...)
Hah! As if Banri's heart had been poked by his own thoughts, he reflexively pulled his one hand out from his pants. He touched his mouth with that hand. He wasn't concerned about what he may have touched.
(A signal? What was it trying to let him know? ...Well, but indeed. Indeed... but...)
<~~22% Completed~~>
| Back to Illustrations | Return to Main Page |
