Iriya no Sora UFO no Natsu:Love Letter
It was decided.
That girl was alien. As the Chief thought was correct, the Sonohara Base really was a UFO base. It actually had a place for a secret underside landing for UFOs coming from the other side of the universe. Aliens and big-wig government officials were talking at the same table. For the purpose of preparing for the coming “day of war,” he was certain that the government brass was getting desperate to get what seemed to be a helping hand in advanced technology from aliens. However, since the aliens spoke somehow in a voice that was something like a helium-breathed tone, saying, “We will give you all of our technology in the event of the reality of the abandonment of war for world peace for all of your people, and your world becomes a member of universal society.” Whatever book he had appeared to have read that from, it gave an amazing feeling for what it meant for why aliens cared about world peace. He was certain both aliens and the northern higher-ups were doing negotiations. Even if the war could be prevented anytime by not looking like it started, it was also a reason for not starting that. No matter what side thought they could try to keep that in hand. A long stalemate continued, and the aliens finally appeared to take definite action. Every possible place in world society turned for the worse as countless agents gave up. Their first task was to ascertain humanity’s true character in their view. Was humanity really acting as a loving intelligent race in peace, or were they a savage race that did nothing but kill their brethren? If the results of the investigation possibly produced the latter, Earth would immediately be blown to smithereens by the UFO’s super weapon. It seemed absolute. That girl who called herself Iriya was also really another one of those agents.
It was because of the “middle school” in charge.
He did not remember the subject of the lesson and the like at all.
The bell rang at the end of two periods; Iizuka returned to the cemetery; and a growing number of students wiped blackboards clean with erasers. But with his thoughts unable to escape from a marsh, he stared at his white notebook unable to take notes in a straight line after all by just opening them, and he seemed to tightly grasp his mechanical pencil that had no eraser so that it could not move about. Asaba being alone, cut himself away from reality already during breaktime, as if he was glued to his window seat that took place in a poorly done collage, so that he could not think about why the characters for “Iriya Kana” always were being written on the blackboard of his mind.
“Hey Asaba!”
His forehead was poked. There in front of his eyes was Hanamura’s face, who was was sitting backwards in his desk, leaning his body forward in a grandiose manner and smiling peerlessly close to Asaba’s face as he peeped from below.
“What’s with you acting like such a moron? Could it possibly be that ‘you have that transfer student on you mind’ kind of thing?”
A bull’s eye is a bull’s eye. But, until now it would not have seemed to be such an absurd bull’s eye.
“Sh-shut up!”
Nishikubo suddenly placed his hands on both of Asaba’s shoulders with a pop.
“Well, aren’t you two moderately interested? If only Sudou was not so opposed to invitations to the Newspaper Club, you know.”
Asaba was becoming increasingly flustered. Shaking himself free of Nishikubo’s hands, “Ah, Akiho is opposed to it.”
Hanamura rested his chin in his hands temporarily. A slight smile surfaced, and he had a fixed look in his eyes on the back of the classroom pervert with lewd fingertips.
“It’s no good, absolutely no good. That is not the “Newspaper Club’s” style. It is ‘Sonohara Denpa’ all the more.”
Nishikubo followed up on Hanamura’s previous glance, muttering, “That may be so.” Asaba gain, mustering his courage from the bottom of his gut in secret, lifted his face, and slowly turned around to face that back of the classroom.
She was there.
In the very back of the classroom, she was in the second seat from the vicinity of the corridor. Next to that, having been in the “third seat from the vicinity of the corridor,” expecting to notice her existence just less than a minute before, even if it was a dream or an illusion, Iriya was sitting there.
Just sitting there.
So without doing anything, denying the existence of anything on the desk too in sum, he let his gaze fall quietly in less than the twinkling of a star. He would not resist even if a person seized him, but no matter what, that person would not tame him like an animal can be with a mood.
…Iriya, Kana.
Aah..., hearing that was a surprise. Iriya-kun was a girl returning to her home country.
Quickly bowing his head next to Iriya, Kawaguchi Taizou seemed to say he was 35 and single.
Furthermore with Kawaguchi, he had an insensible way of speaking in waves of returning to an autopsy, and he attached himself to following the explanation of Iriya’s past. With both of her parents already gone, she lived together with her older brother serving in the Aviation Self-Defense Force, having lived on overseas military bases with that connection for a very long time, but her brother returned to their home country in an assignment change to Sonohara by chance, where they now resided at Sonohara City’s Sonohara Military Base Residence Area. Was it so that he was forgetting he didn’t have a desk. Hey day duty, come with a desk and chair running to the tool shed please. Ah, because that was what it meant, he thought that on that face of this and that Iriya-kun’s inexperience to Japanese school life could be why. Thereabouts everyone wanted to give her various kinds of advice on what to do. She understood, right?
No, she didn’t.
He did not think that Kawaguchi’s explanation was a complete lie.
However, that explanation could not get him to completely mesh together last night’s pool incident. First was the awfully loud patrol car’s siren, next was Iriya’s thin shoulder staring fixedly at the pool’s watery surface, then was the mystery of the appearance of the man who called himself her elder brother, followed by the black-suited mass who sieged the school, after which his memory failed, and then, now those wristbands were covering that silver,
...did he try to taste them?
“...‘electric,’ they had that taste, didn’t they?”
With Asaba muttering, Hanamura and Nishikubo exchanged glances and said at the same time,
“Huh?”
“Oh? Ah, well that.”
Nishikubo forced open a part in Asaba’s hair with a jerk of both of his hands from behind.
“You know, did you bake your brains waiting around in the mountains until the last day of the month?”
Asaba shook himself free of Nishikubo’s hands, yelling, “Stop that, you moron!” At that time, Hanamura said,
“Hey look at that. Which class’s buddies are those guys? Aren’t there already rumors going around, right?”
From the door of the classroom’s entrance, the faces of male students from some other class somewhere were peeping in. Indeed, they were gazing with staring eyes in Iriya’s direction with a greedy look. Hanamura laughed,
“Hee, hee, hee, it is like the faces of hawks breaking plates full of fried tofu, isn’t it?”
Hearing that made Nishikubo suddenly make a face that said, “Ah.”
“...Is that so, is that so? I just remembered. Those guys are probably Class 1’s lot.”
Asaba and Hanamura made faces that said, “What the...?”
“Not quite, they are hawks in fried tofu, you know. Have you tried getting to know the ‘best jerks of Class 1?’ I am acquaintances with those jerks somehow, but you know.”
Asaba shook his head. Hanamura responded, “Know, eh?” Nishikubo quickly said,
“It’s because those jerks became overly proud before summer vacation. They said that a female transfer student was planning to come at the end of vacation. Asaba said even quicker than Hanamura,
“...Eh, then that ‘Iriya,’ the thing really is that they planned to force her to enter Class 1?”
“Probably. With Kawaguchi yelling just now, you know it was because he had to go pick up day duty for those jerks’ seating arrangement in advance. If it was because our class came to a decision a long time ago beforehand about the seats, then that would be a normal arrangement for sure. Surely some kind of a circumstance suddenly changed plans.”
“What kind of ‘some kind of a circumstance?’”
“Is that all you know?”
Some kind of a circumstance. Saying no more than that single word, the reason why the present Asaba was concerned was weighty. Lying face down from that overwhelming weight, his horrible imagination wound a coil inside his head again, and an unhealthy feeling of sweat went dripping down the middle of his back in a secret crawl.
As he thought, wasn’t last night’s pool matter really a hallucination?
If possible, with a reason of something like “Because at the onset I met a middle schooler by coincidence,” wasn’t it because he ended up being assigned in “the number one important investigation mission?” Was it because one’s slight effort was controlling the fate of humanity perhaps? What should he do, what should he do? If it was an investigation, he wanted someone else to do it. Like Nishikubo or something. He thought Hanamura would be a little bad for this. If it was somehow the Chief being selected for the investigation mission, humanity’s destruction was five seconds away. While Nishikubo and Hanamura were far removed from Asaba’s sort of suffering, Iriya gazed at each entrance,
“...Somehow, they are weird guys, you know, right?”
“Well, I’ll admit that it’s because she is cute.”
“Possibly, could it not be because she is good at things like memorizing Japanese?”
“Well, I’ll admit that it’s because she is cute.” [TL Note: This is not a mistake]
“Oh, oh, Let’s look at that. Those jerks intend to land in enemy territory, you know. As expected of 6th grade punks.”
It wasn’t going to be inexcusable.
Whenever you turned around to the back in reflection, 2nd year class 4 representative Nakagomi Makiko was the flagship for the closely combined fleet of four female student friends, but they were about to go make a resolute charge of whispering stories of the deep desks and chairs aimed for “Iriya” Island. Iriya sensibly perceived the appearance of an enemy, and she suddenly lifted her head as they were about to split up their distance between their three desks, completely laying her eyes close to Nakagomi with an unreadable facial expression. But, nevertheless Nakagomi did not flinch. Anyone’s surroundings would change the circumstances of pursuing a stare to the end, failing to hear each conversation dropping their voices, and they were going to pull back from the classroom in order to dissolve the clatter of break time. Above all Asaba did not get the feeling of having Nakagomi stop, making him wonder what was going to happen to the Earth.
And then Nakagomi stood in front of Iriya’s eyes.
It was the first speech.
“...U, um, you know,”
she stalled. Secretly taking in a deep breath there, Nakagomi forced the considerably impossible feeling of a smile to rise to the surface,
“Nakagomi Makiko, that is who I am. Me being the class head, ask me about anything you don’t get, ok?
Iriya was completely silent.
Nakagomi’s pretense faltered. The other three people came in with a confused follow-up. Saying their names in succession, they attacked in waves of tides right there. Where were they abiding before? “Since I suck at English, please teach me, ok?” “I was also a transfer student when I was in elementary.” “Is your brother cool?”
Iriya wound up casting her eyes downward.
That thing stirred Nakagomi and her three friends’ feelings of “if you somehow had not been sent to school,” causing them to fly about even more with rapidly successive words. Iriya still persisted with her defensive silence. Becoming as it was, the four as well as just Iriya began friendly conversation this time just dying off in the middle of the conversation, and sometimes Iriya assuming an air of “Huh?” But, Iriya took refuge in the increasingly deeper inner parts of a trench whenever that happened, and chasing after that Nakagomi and company lost sight of the heat of the moment before they knew it. Looking like he was getting a stomachache, Asaba ended up looking like the hair on top of his head was turning pure white as far as he was concerned, even if it was someone with long, long, long, hair, but his actual condition went bit by bit past the amount of time needed to go to the bathroom, and then Iriya finally raised her head.
Nakagomi and her friends’ conversation was interrupted, and they closed observed Iriya’s next blunt action from the middle of the classroom. Iriya flinched from that thing, let that drowning person’s eyes wander about the middle of the classroom, and with those eyes at length, she stopped looking for someone to call on who had a window seat.
The classroom continued to be filled with noise.
It was obvious to everyone’s eyes as well.
Iriya, hoping to seek complete assistance, clearly watched Asaba intently.
“Hey.”
Hanamura murmured in a low voice. Nishikubo used a side glance.
Still Asaba was silent for a short while. From second period on he always had his hand on his mechanical pencil, as it were, clicking above his notebook, and he stood up slowly drawing himself out of his desk quietly.
And then, by it coming from Iriya this time, it came to infect one right in the midst of everyone’s eyes without saying a word to anybody to be sure, and Asaba said it thus.
“Bathroom.”
Seemingly said before, he really went to the bathroom.
Secluded alone in a private room, even if nobody was looking to that extent, Asaba sat down on the toilet seat dropping his pants and underwear with the utmost care as well. Somehow or other, it happened to appear to slightly constrict the possible limits of believing the lie that they would end up attaching themselves to him.
And, he worried about being completely ass naked.
By a ratio of about 9 to 1, crying out of sympathy for one’s things was one of the things that irritated Iriya.
But, he began to worry again about how much longer until the bell for the start of third period rang. Asaba increased his breath for depth, lifted his unnecessarily dropped pants, unnecessarily put water in the sink, and happily left the bathroom unnecessarily washing his hands.
“What a spineless coward.”
There Akiho was lying in wait.
“Wh, what is it?”
He made a bluff. Thinking it was not his business, then what he should have said was, you know...it also gave the feeling that he wanted to do something about what he was seemingly saying, but because Akiho was kind of making a scary face he kept himself from saying too much, “...Since the bell rang, you should already have returned to the classroom.”
Akiho did not respond at all.
“Is that girl an acquaintance of yours or something?”
“Naw, it isn’t like that but,”
Prior to that, the words became muddy so that he almost could not breathe as well.
“Then what is the reason behind this?”
Anyway, here he dodged Akiho’s inquisition with exception.
“I really have nothing to do with her. Because I was with the Chief in the mountains all the time during summer vacation, how could I with Kawaguch saying she just recently now returned from overseas?”
“Akiho firmly glared at Asaba with a deeply sceptical look, and suddenly said this.
“The pool, was it?”
He thought his heart was going to jump out of his mouth.
“Before the start of first period, Asaba, you came to me to ask something about school swimsuits. On that you and the Chief differ because you should have returned home sometime between your mountain seclusion. Whether it was at a municipal pool or wherever you met that girl, didn’t you? And, at that time that girl’s swimsuit didn’t have a name tag on it, didn’t it? Eeh? So that’s it. Hmmm.”
“Well, it wasn’t for the reason that Akiho seemed to think,” thought Asaba.
With the result of the end in question for the time being, Akiho’s sharp-eyed expression produced some tolerance as well,
“Did that girl’s Japanese really suck? Did she speak and stuff like that?”
Nishikubo was saying something that seemed to resemble it. If it meant joining in the exposition of that silent girl’s return, it appeared that everybody in the lower classes thought and felt the same thing.
It made people’s heads dizzy.
“Let’s see...”
People’s feet staggered.
“Tell us straight up about what that is, you know. How did this story come to be rather? At that time..., was it, he Asaba, you ok? Your face is horribly pale.”
It was sudden.
Being attacked by dizziness seemed to overturn heaven and earth, which meant that he was unable to continue standing for a while in a surprising way. He squatted in that place. He had a severely bad feeling. It felt like he had gotten motion sickness and the flu together. He put up with the risk of the seemingly gushing feeling of nausea.
“You ok?! Hey Asaba what’s the matter?!”
Akiho was making an uproar. By the raised field of vision elsewhere severely narrowed, the topped feet of surprised students coming and going in the hallway showed worry. Not letting out an indecently loud voice, it was because thinking by accident about things like the heart and throat, but there was not any time for just letting that out of his mouth. A cold sweat came gushing out throughout his face.
He took deep breaths many times.
Then, starting in almost the same suddenness, the badness of the feeling rapidly went away in passing.
He stood up one way or another. Wiping out the sweat on his forehead, the coldness of his face made him upset. The dizziness went away into exile for a considerable end, but even so the feeling came to prove to be extremely less objectionable.
“I feel better.”
Asaba seemed to say. Yet, if he saw Akiho’s eyes, Asaba’s facial color would have gone beyond extremely pale to completely white. Akiho grabbed Asaba’s hand with a jerk.
“You feel better, my ass! We’re going to the nurse’s office! I am going with you, too!”
Surely, he thought it was a good idea to go to the nurse’s office.
Still, he also thought that Akiho did not have to go as far as escorting and attending to him.
“I can go by myself, since you need to return to the classroom since the lesson is starting, you know.”
Akiho did not take his hands completely. Asaba rapidly withdrew his hands and started walking.
Sonohara Middle School’s hallways were in disorder traditionally from the days of old. You could make a heap of the empty boxes of teaching supplies next to the wall, with lined up mops and buckets preventing people from entering lockers, and, anytime you did not tear off “New members joining” posters, they would beckon by fluttering someone who passed by on their journey. With the entrance of the nurse’s office before that and the passage that continued to the gym being on this side, you could soon understand it was because it came from a poster containing the logo of “Refine Sake ● Tennouzan Hill.” Last year’s school festival, the girl’s basketball club was guilty of the vestiges of an arranged marriage pub. On the side door was hanging a label that had written on it, “Responsible party for starting the fire ● Shiina Mayumi.”
Akiho opened the door with much strength,
“Excuse me.”
Asaba’s staggering hand rushed to pull open the door to the nurse’s office at the last minute, and exactly on the opposite side of the door were three male student that appeared to come into a head-on collision with him.
“Now, now, the next class is starting very soon, you know, so be gone with ya, be gone.”
The backs of those three students were continuously and forcefully pashed by both of Shiina Mayumi’s hands. With the middle of the three being Funatsu, who was in the same class as Asaba until last year and who noticed Asaba, he made a perfect circle with his eyes as if to say “Yo,”
“What’s with the color of your face?”
“Is it really that bad again?” thought Asaba. Shiina Mayumi and Asaba’s eyes caught a glimpse of each other’s faces,
“Oops, this person doesn’t seem to be faking illness, am I wrong?”
Wow. It was horribly mean considering they were really sick people, too. While a lovestruck smile came to the surface on Funatsu’s and his buddies’ faces, they seemed to object, but Shiina Mayumi could not have cared less,
“What the...you faking losers get the heck out of here, got it?”
Surprisingly kicking the three out into the middle of the hallway, she ended up closing the door on their backs with a slap. Because he had done things like this during his trip over summer vacation, he was truly used to it.
With the students of Sonohara Middle School generally like this, Shiina Mayumi criticized them, “If you look properly, there’s an incredible babe.” Because she always wore the garments of a doctor’s white gown completely without wearing any make-up, she did not stand out. To make matters worse, her speech was horribly vulgar as she said with coolness things like “ass” and “cock.” A little less than a month before summer vacation began, in order to recover from being sick Kurobe-sensei decided to take an extended leave of absence which came to be a change in how the school did things. Both male and female students were continuing to say,”I wish there was a little bit of a pretty face,” but the person herself would not tolerate it in the least. Each and every day, having both of her hands thrusted into the pockets of the white doctor’s coat, she walked around seemingly content while her slippers rang a slapping sound.
“Umm,”
With Akiho having her mouth hanging open at that time, Shiina Mayumi suddenly interrupted with a large voice,
“Wait! I have to make a guess.”
Saying this, the core of her eyes looked hard fixedly into the approaching Asaba’s pale face. Thinking about it carefully somewhere between 5-10 seconds, she rose her had in assent at this on account of doing without any mistakes, and she pointed her beautiful butt at Asaba to declare it decisively.
“Shinnaa.”
“That’s, that’s wrong!”
Akiho let out in a loud voice, and Asaba looked at her with a fleeting side glance,
“Is it really wrong?”
“It’s wrong, you know.”
Thinking that he should explain it himself,
“...Umm, just now a sudden bad feeling came over me, something like nausea.”
Therupon Akiho interposed,
“Because it was really sudden, his facial color somehow became less of a ghastly paleness than before.”
Shiina Mayumi was settling in. Asaba was allowed to sit in a circular chair, and he dropped his hips into the pipe chair facing him.
“Even now you facial color doesn’t look well, you know. Have you been eating a proper breakfast?”
Asaba nodded,
“Yet, supposing now that I am no longer nauseated, I am feeling a great deal better.”
“You should probably lie down for a bit, got it? Since I’ll contact your teacher to explain things, what’s your class and name?”
With Asaba not opening his mouth quick enough, Akiho answered, “Asaba Naoyuki of 2nd year class 4.”
Shiina Mayumi pulled out a ball-point pen from her breast pocket, turned the pages of a bound and corded registry of names while muttering “Asaba from 2nd year class 4, hmm,” and the core of her eyes suddenly came close muttering “Asaba?” completely unexpectedly,
“No waay, Asaba-kun?! Really you, Asaba-kun?! Asaba-kun of 2nd year class 4?!”
Both Asaba and Akiho ended up being taken aback without thinking by the loudness of her voice that seemed to speak to them.
Shiina Mayumi somehow came to an agreement by herself for some reason. “Oooooooooh, I get it, or do Iiiiiiii...,” and Asaba became curious without thinking about his tendency for letting his body lean forward at desktops as she said, “Eeeeeeeh, is that so, is that so? You’re Asaba-kun, riight? Hmmmmmmm.” and so forth, which if he thought about it was something like a cat meowing five times as she laughed until she said “oh” like she suddenly remembered something important,
“Meaning, you are that Asaba-kun, you know, aren’t you?! You’re not feeling well?! You ok?!”
...Wat, what’s with person?
Asaba was just absolutely and obviously dumbfounded, but Akiho suddenly became concerned watching Shiina Mayumi in confusion,
“U, um, what is the matter?”
“Eh? Ah, no, no, no, it’s not like that, it’s not like that at all, it’s nothing at all. Uumm, yeah, then since you Asaba-kun are responsible for this return to your classroom. Class has already stared. Right?”
Shiina Mayumi normally forced herself to train in the art of saying things, and she ended up driving Akiho out of the nurse’s office by forcefully pushing on Akiho’s back with both as she seemed to have said something again.
She slammed the door shut.
She turned around. Until then she struck to change her sharp-eyed expression,
“...So that you can have my full attention I would like to hear it one more time, could I? Sonohara Middle School, 2nd year class 4, attendance number one’s Asaba Naoyuki-kun. I am surely not mistaken, am I?”
“...Yes. That is correct.”
The very seriousness of her tone made Asaba nervous. Shiina Mayumi bit her lip as she looked up at the ceiling, thought about something wholeheartedly, and asked Asaba once again as she gazed even more intently at him.
“You suddenly weren’t feeling well because you had nausea, right?”
“...That is right.”
Shiina-sensei sat down facing Asaba with a thump. She took his pulse in a rough manner, and she turned his eyelids inside out to take a peep inside his eyes. “Haa,” she breathed out of her nose, and she sat straight in her chair to correct herself.
“Well then, I suppose I should examine you a little after this. Since I am going to ask a few questions, I would like you to answer them. The usual questions will be a little different, but if you can’t give me an honest answer it with be the same as if it wasn’t a right answer. Got it?”
Asaba nodded his head.
Thus, the first question went like this.
“What is today’s date?”
All too soon was he unable to answer. Shiina Mayumi’s stare spurred on Asaba’s impatience. Her surprise attack being as sly as it was thinking that kind of thing let each second of time escape.
“Ah, um, since it is today, it seems, in other words because today is the first day of the second semester, it is September 1st.”
Taking an additional 10 seconds he finally seemed to answer.
Having again no time to breath the next question came flying at him.
“Do you have any chronic diseases?”
“Yeah. I mean, no, I do not. I do not have a chronic disease.”
“Then, don’t you always take your medicine and stuff?”
“Uum, I take plenty of Vitamin C. With my meals. It’s because my old man seems like that.”
“‘C,’ ascorbic acid?”
“Aah, umm, I don’t know the full details though.”
“What is 17+26?”
Because he was unprepared again, it ended up taking him about 20 seconds this time.
“...3, wait a sec, 40. 43? U, um, I would like to start over from the beginning or something.”
“Do you have any allergies?”
“Wha? No, none, I think.”
“Tell me the principal’s name.”
“Murayama Kanji.”
This time somehow or other the response came immediately. He got the hang of it soon before long.
“When you started feeling sick, did it not severely overwhelm you?”
“Uh, yes.”
“Weren’t you face, hands, and feet freezing?”
“They were. I am not concerned about it now though.”
And then.
“What day is June 24th?”
“Surely this, it has to be an investigative test of someone’s sensitivity or something in terms of health,” he thought.
So that he could not tell the real certainty of the questions, she mixed in heaps of dummy questions perhaps. Or, even if the questions weren’t dummies or real ones everything was fine because he probably knew what the aim was to make him consider the given theme in succession. Answering whatever it was truthfully, at that time which reaction showed might have been really important. Without knowing, without knowing [sic] which hand was shaking or which eyeball was swimming around to look around restlessly.
Yet,
even in doing that,
“...that, that ‘question,’ do I have to absolutely say what June 24th is?”
Not ony not answering, the questions started to go right back.
“When you weren’t feeling well, did you have anything like fast palpitations?”
“...That is, I do not think so.”
“Globular plasma, mirage, weather balloon. Which kind of photos did you take?”
“...Umm.”
“Mantell. Chiles-Whitted. What is next?”
He had learned it by ear. Since the answer was inside his head, it came tumbling out. Historical UFO sightings have left 3 big cases. Captain Mantell’s crash, the Chile-Whitted sighting, and with the third sighting, and Gorman’s dog fight.
“When you weren’t feeling well, did the front of your eyes become completely white, or did you see light nearing?”
“...No.”
“Just now who was always behind you?”
He could not move about as well.
“I was hearing and seeing things? It seemed like I had seven fingers on my hands, and couldn’t I hear someone’s voice discussing pulling out your internal organs? ‘Screw Adamski getting a backbone, where do I get the feeling of having heard those words before? [TL Note: See George Adamski]
Outside of the nurse’s office, the cicadas were crying.
...This person, what’s with her?
Outside of the window the whitened outlines of things melted as the summer sunlight waxed.
Inside the dim, unnaturally somewhat cool nurse’s office hung in the air the faint smell of old medicine. Outside the window curtains the silent wind became pregnant with flutterings of ghost. Perhaps here and there within sight adjoined Red Cross marks for worried victims was really a trap. A colored photo of lungs that was out of focus on a bulletin explaining the harms of smoking, walls reminiscent of an operation room, the completely unfeeling warmth of a bed, poisonous-colored glass bottles line up inside of a closet, nether bloodless nor tearless big tweezers, East Asian medically manufactured water not from any island, and the look of the ever unchanging white sink that took hundreds of people’s vomit and exreta.
Even if he considered it, he probably looked.
Kurobe-sensei disappeared before anyone knew it.
Kurobe-sensei had taken a long vacation to recover from illness.
That was even despite seeming to be healthy.
Having Shiina Mayumi come to this school as a representative afterwards meant that she was going to end up becoming a popluar person.
In all, wasn’t it an alien conspiracy?
In here, wasn’t the smell of medicine drifting about a neat hell? Wasn’t in front of his eyes this person as well as in reality an alien’s underling? Since Shiina-sensei was certainly an amazing beauty if you looked hard enough and listened to her unbelievable stories, she was popular with both boys and girls, but wasn’t anyone that was not about to look going to have their face cleaved in two from gaping there at the squirming tentacles that came out? As night fell it continued kidnapping people to bring into the UFO on the nurse’s office’s bed, and the slippered squirming tip-toeing tentacles of Shiina-sensei had blood spraying and flying everywhere from her dreadful experiments on living humans.
“...Asaba-kun? Hey Asaba-kun what’s the matter?! You feeling crappy again?!”
Asaba, returning to reality, could not only call out in a big voice but was also shaking from his shoulders, upon feeling the smell of shampoo from Shiina Mayumi’s hair faintly floating in the air. Once more Shiina Mayumi’s face approached his own, and it was like their foreheads were close enough to join together with Asaba’s fever.
“...It is! I am okay, I am fine, um, just a little faint.”
Becoming embarrassed for just a moment, Asaba put on a confused face.
“Really?”
Shiina Mayumi was staring fixedly at Asaba.
She seemed to have an amazingly worried look on her face.
“...Well then, look at this.”
A ballpoint pen was projecting out in front of Asaba’s eyes. With the pen’s body made out of clear plastic, there was in the middle a blond woman in a red swimsuit. That swimsuit was actually colored read with fin grains of sand, and the sand in front of Asaba’s eyes flowing down in a rustle, the blond woman was soon becoming butt naked. Asaba began to worry about the meaning of life without thinking,
“Because the pen moves, my eyes are chasing after it at this moment.”
Since Shiina Mayumi moved the pen up and down, left and right, the movements of Asaba’s eyes observed it fixedly. Asaba tried concentrating his senses on the continuing movements of the pen beyond, but it did not matter how long the ever nearby inner part of his eyes oozed out the feeling of pain.
“...Your head hurt?”
Asaba nodded. Shiina Mayumi thought about something for a while looking up at the ceiling, took a small breath, came to something of a conclusion, and got up from the chair letting out a yell of “Alright.”
“Although I think you are ok already, you should rest a while, you know. Take these. Get a lot of sleep, too.”
Her tone said neither consent nor refusal. She presented him with a paper cup full of barley tea and tiny particles of a yellow pill, and Asaba swallowed it as if it was by letting out words of vigor. He slowly put the towel-blanket over his head beside the head of the bed.
“Take it easy for a while, ok?”
Saying this, Shiina Mayumi forcefully closed the partitioning curtain.
In just now coming beside the bed, drowsiness started well up from the core of his body. Was the medicine he just took already started to take effect perhaps? No matter what, it was of a feeling. Or, did that really mean that his body was that exhausted up to that point without him knowing at all?
Outside of the partitioning curtain, Shiina Mayumi muttered in a small voice, “For crying out loud.”
The sound of her slippered footsteps was quiet as she crossed the nurse’s office. The sound of sitting down in a chair with a thump, the sound of the telephone receiver being picked up, and the sound of roughly pressing the buttons with vigor on the phone without difficulty. Slowly being filled inside with a sense of drowsiness, Asaba pursued one by one sounds that he could hear coming from outside the curtain.
Shiina-sensei was somewhere trying to make a phone call.
He thought she tried contacting someone as he rested for these class periods, but he was wrong. The length of the number was long. It was an outside phone number. Where she was calling, of course he didn’t know.
Sleepy.
The other side soon picked up the phone.
“...Hello. This is Shiina from back-up. Yeah, the nurse’s office...Understood, it has not been significant enough that I could tell you anything, you know. Enough Enomoto, …wait? Hello hello?!”
He could he Shiina Mayumi muttering that she was cut off. She pushed the receiver’s hook to throw it pushed buttons roughtly again, and suddenly after a while,
“You bastard, you have the guts to cut off your superior and think you can away with it, you dick!! How big of a help you are, you hack, for heaven’s sake!! Enough!! Now get your lazy ass out here quickly before I have something to say Enomoto!!”
Being heavily drowsy, Asaba was faintly surprised. Who was that “Enomoto?” An extremely long time later, she was leaping for joy after hanging up the phone with that “Enomoto.”
“...Why can’t they understand phone conversations?”
A very short time later,
“What a failure! It’s just you doing this in the line of duty, you idiot!”
Between,
Shiina Mayumi muttered a laugh.
“He feigned ignorance. Fine He gave me a hint. Now who do you think is coming here?”
A little while later,
“Use good moderation in feigning ignorance! You used a mist cocktail on Asaba-kun last night?! Why did you do something so dangerous?! That with every person again,”
Reacting to his own name, the sinking sense of drowsiness gave way slightly to Asaba’s consciousness.
“The problem is that you live not knowing, you know!! You meant to take responsibility if perhaps by any chance that happened?! He could have gotten even sicker, you hear me?”
There her words paused, and it was like inclining his ear fixedly on the words of an excuse that he could hear from the phone for a long, long time.
Before long, he could hear what sounded like her blowing into the receiver from her nose,
“...And, what did you give him?”
The time of one word’s length.
“I see.”
Another interval,
“No. I think that was the safest choice. Besides, I do think so myself.”
The sound of her getting up from her chair and walking around in her slippers as they flopped.
She talked while walking with the phone in her hand, and the voice moved to coming from the direction of the window.
“No, that’s not quite right you know. If that bug should succeed again, he should just go off and die on his own without interruption. I cannot assert that it was bad to have a detailed examination, but I think it was a flashback from the mist.”
A while later,
The sound of the window closing.
Later again,
“Of course, you moron. Anyway, I will do just that. Right now, I am a middle school nurse to the bitter end, got it? Because I hid tapped grape sugar in the bathroom somehow in the morning from two days of drunkenness. Outside of one’s public appearance, since you plan can go ahead as scheduled, it’s different, but it is from the mist’s overdose shock that you were talking that was absolutely impossible to somehow do something with the merbromin solution and the wrapper’s mark. Even though it was relying on it, it is quite troubling. This is absolutely the last time for crying out loud for this half-baked communication. Got it?”
And then, uneventfully not even one second later, like hitting to say it out loud, the phone receiver was returned to its hook. The infirmary returned to silence. Her back caught the light from the window, and standing near the bed, Shiina Mayumi’s figure was becoming a dimly suspended light-colored shadow against the curtain partition. Like being able to vicariously see the distant figure of Asaba through the curtain, Shiina Mayumi’s shadow firmly commanded a view right near Asaba’s bedside.
Before long,
“Asaba-kun? Are you awake?”
Silence.
“Excuse me, Kana-cha...”
Shiina Mayumi paused what she was saying, and continued in a tone of half-speaking to herself.
“Please get along with Iriya-san.”
And then, it was already by that time that Asaba had long fallen asleep.
Being somewhat warm woke him up.
The dust floating around in midair sparkled. The angle of the rays of the sun had drastically changed, and the omitted speckles through the dividing curtain warmed Asaba’s face at an angle. He covered his eyes with both of his arms, it became gloomy from the perspiration while he was asleep so that he rose his body to kick off the covers.
He was not in a bad mood. He also did not feel dizzy. He had a feeling as if he had had a dream about someone fighting on the phone.
A face projected out from the gap in the curtain. It wasn’t Shiina Mayumi’s figure. He was a little surprised to a wall clock. Lunch break was already over, and 5th period was starting.
He felt somewhat reluctant returning to the classroom.
“Perhaps I should just go home as things are,” he thought just a little.
Just in case, Shiina Mayumi had left behind a memo that said, “Return to class” on the desk, and leaving the nurse’s office, he at best listlessly walked through the hallway and slowly wavered. Today was Wednesday, and Wednesday’s 5th period was English, English class’s Kishmoto was indeed a disagreeable middle-aged lady. When he was seemingly thinking, “As I thought, Wouldn’t it be quite clever to find a way to wait until 5th period?” he had already reached the classroom door.
And now, there was nobody in the classroom. Apparently written in bold with chalk on the belly of the blackboard was, “5th period English is in the audio-visual room.”
“Today was a day of thoroughly unconnected lessons,” thought Asaba.
His once admirable mood ended up vanishing.
“I guess I should have gone home in the first place.”
Firmly resolving this time, he began to make preparations to go home by way of conclusion. If one called it an English lesson in the audio-visual room, that was good to hear, but the extreme Kishimoto just forcing everyone to write one impressions of an English movie with the subtitles off was in short really skipping some crucial steps. Moreover, it was 5th period. At any rate about this time, he decided that about half of the guys in class were nodding off. It was possible that Iriya was able to present her honest feelings. Either way, Iriya was a girl who had returned to Japan from overseas...
His hands stopped making preparations for going home.
Asaba slowly raised his head, and turned around to face the back of the classroom.
Iriya’s desk was there.
And now then, nobody was in the classroom. The slanting rays of the sun shining through the window at a diagonal were prominent in the dimly lit classroom, and the calm blowing breeze carried the fever of the day in with it.
Turbulent thoughts crept into Asaba’s mind.
A feeling of mental strain heavily stirred the gastric juices in his stomach. The throbbing [it caused] began to do double time. Asaba slowly approached Iriya’s desk. Already crying alone in the inside of his head, “What the heck are you thinking you idiot?! Stop it! That is absolutely horrid!” But, Asaba’s feet again sped up, which was far from stopping. Placing his hands on Iriya’s desk, he looked around to check if nobody was inside the classroom as expected. He caught sight of the wall clock. It was three minutes. The time limit was three minutes. Even if nothing was left, he rounded up by three minutes. He seemingly decided that.
Commence operation.
He pulled away the chair from the desk to peek inside the desk. It was empty. He picked up the brand new school bag that had been hanging on the hook and put it on top of the desk. There was no sticker with any kind of mascot on it.
The “so uncool and like a pain in the butt” name tag remained attached to the handle, even though most student would remove it, but on the Shen card, there was no blood type nor telephone number nor address nor name written on it.
His fingers lifted the bag’s two strap fasteners.
“Anyone else would desperately stopped. I already stopped from not calling it a bad thing, since it was seriously awful, and in spite of the various events that happened since last night to a degree, I already have been having my mind in the gutter with things that I don’t understand again like some elementary school kid who became interested in the opposite gender, which is not any different from a kid that likes to suck on their whistle, seeing my companion here is an agent that came from outer space!!
Are aliens fit for the terrifying Sonohara Electro-magnetic Wave Correspondents?
He inhaled a quivering breath.
He unfastened the strap fastener.
He opened up the standing bag. He peeped into the crowded insides. On the right half were brand new textbooks with nothing appealing and a spiral bound notebook placed in vertically, and on the left side was thrust in something like a clothe bundle. He put it on top of the desk, stuck his hand inside, and there was something angular among them. There was a bento from after lunch time and a heavy draft.
He took out her commuter pass.
He opened it.
Inside were four sheets of a mysterious card.
On one of the sheets was something like a passing permit issued for the Sonohara Base gate. Made of plastic, which was so thick that it was not about to easily bend, there was what looked like a magnetic reader for a machine at the bottom of the card. On the surface was Iriya’s photographic portrait along with incomprehensible numbers and codes lining it, and it appeared to be what he feared were entry forms for entering the living quarters for the residential district of the base. He wondered why the “full name” column had been left blank. It appeared that the same thing appeared on all of the remaining three sheets. There was something that resembled a telephone card. The rounded corners also felt soft to the touch, and the far right edge was missing a slight rounding.
If he tried once again to take out his own telephone card from his wallet, the dimensions as well as the shape were exactly the same. The more he looked the more he wanted to say that “Wasn’t this the exact same telephone care?” But, the characters and the design were not completely printed. With the bottom and surface being grey, a bar code as well as numbers indicating the frequency or instructions that said “Do not let this get close to anything magnetic. Do not stain. Do not bend.” were not there. Only just a speck, something printed like a small triangular arrow, apparently used to insert the surface into a certain direction, it was something that he could barely understand. However, before inserting it, was it really for a pay phone as he expected? Ignoring the voice inside of his head that screamed “Knock it off,” he thrust one sheet of the three sheets of what looked like a telephone card into his pants’ pocket.
Looking up at the wall clock, already two minutes had passed.
He was impatient.
He threw the card into the bag pocket, restoring the commuter pass. Persuading himself that it was the end if someone looked into this, he put the hand bag back down. While trembling with fear in his heart of hearts of what to do to come out of this clean, he got together best contents of his thoughts. He took out three small long cylindrical plastic bottles of medicine, a handheld game console, and three packs of CD-ROMs with software on them.
“Just now seeing the bottle of medicine, as I thought, last night’s pool incident wasn’t a dream,” he said, feeling strangely relieved.
Opening the lid of the small bottle, he tried spilling the contents into his hand. Not a sugar-coated pill, but a compressed molded pill. Whitish in color, no characters or numbers were carved on it. He could see the contents of the bottle along with three similar cylindrical somethings, but Asaba, taking each of the three respectively from the bottle, he put each of them in his pocket wrapped in tissue. A voice inside his head muttered a voice of shock. It’s already past the point of no return. You absolutely can’t get out of this one. And thus, to deal the last blow, he took the handheld game console in his hands. Really catching his sight, it was quite the usual game counter. Having four analog cursor keys and buttons, on top of a main color LCD screen, it was surrounded by a laser display port. Having this type of equipment according to price in three varieties, three of each kind somehow spoke of being lucky embarrassingly having a less than grandiose name. As for this Iriya, who had the three sub-screens with a laser that could give an aerial view, it was commonly known to be called the “number one, most expensive thing” type. If he tried to turn the game console over, the software insert slit already had a ROM pack inserted into it. Having no manufacturer’s markings, without having any colored labels affixed, instead a black magic alphabet and numbers were scribbled onto it.
In this way it was readable.
‘BARCAP-S03’
He thought that it could have been a pirated ROM.
As he thought again about the three other ROM packs, ‘DCA-SO8’ ‘DCA-S14’ ‘BARCAP-SO6’
Already three minutes had long passed.
“That’s enough, just get it over with, let’s make a full retreat,” he could hear the voice inside his head as usual. Still, Asaba was standing stock still with the game machine in his hand.
Iriya, he wondered what kind of games she liked.
He really wondered who gave Iriya things like mysterious cards and large quantities of medicine and the sort, but he thought, “Iriya personally chose to carry things like this game console and software for sure.” It was different from “having to hold onto it.”
That decision not being anybody elses, it must have been Iriya’s.
More than examining the medicine and the card, etc., someone must have been trying out this game, but he got the feeling of being closer to Iriya.
Asaba put his finger on the power button of the game console, and pressed it.
“What the heck am I doing?”
At that moment, only the inside of his head became damaged, but the top of head escaped by blowing off the ejection seat.
He thought he was going to die. The screaming got louder. “With this, the world is going to end,” he thought. On reflex, he turned his head to look over his shoulder, his feet became slovenly tangled, and his hands just let go of the game console involuntarily.
She splendidly grasped the game console in midair with the wristband covering her right wrist. Without changing her facial expression, without a single blink, she saw the game console was no more. She held the English textbook and spiral bound notebook in her armpit, and fixing her expressionless gaze on the immobilized Asaba, Iriya asked once again.
“What are you doing?”
He could not come up with an excuse. No matter what kind of excuse he tried, it was probably useless. A human being who was sniffing around their surroundings could not expect any sort of mercy from an agent from outer space. Why was Iriya here in the first place? Right now, wasn’t she supposed to be watching “Little House on the Prairie” with the subtitles turned off in the audio-visual room in class? Deciding, there had to be some sort of trick in the bag. With Iriya having heard an alarm, in order to deal with this hindrance of a human being that was trying to spy out her true colors, she had teleported here from the audio-visual room. Surely time was being suspended in the audio-visual room about this time, and exactly right now spit was just about to drool from Hanamura’s mouth onto his desk below as Nishikubo glanced his eyes on reading a paperback book while the skirt of Laura Ingles fluttered every which way as she ran in the middle of the forest calling for help for her father who had been wounded by the accidental discharge of a sports gun.
“Move.”
Iriya asked three times of him to do.
When Asaba staggered half of a step backwards to back off, Iriya silently approached the desk, and began pulling out the contents of the bag to put them back in order. It did not appear as if she was angry or in confusion. She acted as if in her mind the likes of the existence of Asaba were to be ignored.
“U, um...”
“If he didn’t say something,” thought Asaba,
“What about 5th period? Are you skipping?”
Iriya finished putting all of the things in the bag on the desk and fastened the strap fastener, as if standing alone,
“...the ‘audio-visual room,’ where?”
“Eh?”
Iriya pointed at the silent front blackboard. Certainly expressly without turning around, he understood that on there was written as much as “5th period English is in the audio-visual room.” However,
“Hopefully, everyone sticks around afterwards...”
“If we go back, there won’t be anyone else.”
The significance was not quite understood.
If she already knew the truth, Iriya would have tried put together some fragment of a conjecture with her words.
What an importunate time for English in Kishimoto’s class.
Since most were coming to the classroom before the belll rang for class to begin, it was considered distasteful and messed up in regard to students coming late. Therefore, those guys in class finishing migrating from classroom to classroom ahead of time, Iriya had strolled from there to here alone at lunchtime since already not everybody had come back, that way leaving everyone behind.
So that is how it probably is, huh?
It peeved him off.
“What bunch of senseless idiots.” he thought.
But, “While saying that, I would do the same thing,” Asaba re-thought. “When the accosted Iriya came to look for assistance as she was surrounded by Nakagomi and her gang like a machine gun, who the heck on earth would end up running away and only leaving the single word of ‘Toilet?’”
Showing signs of thought satisfied Asaba’s mind. “It couldn’t be helped. Exceedingly being me, it was not a place where he could work out stuff. With directing the so-called mechanics of a school classroom being for better or for worse peculiar, complex, and bizarre, it appears that if it were me that I would be horrible at it. Besides, Nakagomi and her friends didn’t mean anything by it. That not being anybody’s fault, it should have been like a passing incident of misfortune.”
“You know,”
“Setting aside theory, let’s apologize at any rate,” he thought. If it was a fact that he ended up abandoning Iriya by running away, of course it was also a fact that he ended up opening her bag on his own volition.
Even though Nakagomi tried to assume the position of getting the guys in class to start, with everyone and nobody being the bad guy, he thought she should be saying just that thing.
“Umm, concerning this morning,”
she interrupted.
From the classroom corner, the intra-school broadcasting duty speaker was overseen by a pair, but the mood was revived together with the “beating” noise. Those extreme song lyrics just flowed in a 2 beat time signature to the melody of the school song calling to give rise to a public discussion on the inside of the PTA.
“Ah calling Iriya of class 2-4.”
Thereupon, the voice became distant, and someone asked, “That Iriya?!” It was Vice Principal Tashiro. Because he was constantly no matter what talking into the mic like he was using it to breathe with, one could imagine the smell of bad breath coming off of it through the speakers.
“Iriya Kana-san. Ah Iriya Kana-san of class 2-4, I repeat, since an urgent phone call is coming in from Tanaka-san, please come to the staff room.”
A phone call?
Asaba, turning his head around, said to Iriya, “Who is ‘Tanaka-san?’’
And then, Asaba thought he saw there what was like a faint tremor in her facial expression. That is, not so much that Iriya was leaving by breaking through the surface of a stretched out thick wall around them, he thought it was like the last vestiges of intense emotions.
If Asaba were to turn his head around quickly once again for an instant, he probably would not have been able to see through the true character of those emotions. But, in the twinkling of an eye at the end of closing the drilled hole in the wall, Iriya returned to being the same old Iriya.
She gripped her bag, and said,
“...I’m off.”
Asaba watched Iriya intently.
She began running.
Her skirt undulated, and her hair fluttered.
And then, Vice Principal Tashiro breathed a nasally breath on last time into the mic, and when the speaker leaving behind the melody of the school song was silent again, Asaba became the only person in the classroom.
He could hear the sounds of the cicadas.
After that, Asaba killed the time during 5th period in the library, and neatly made an appearance for 6th period Current Affairs.
Without Iriya returning in the end as it was from being summoned to the staff room, Ujiki in Current Affairs explained that “circumstances caused her to leave early.”
Thus, not until sweeping time, Asaba was informed about Iriya’s “Get away from me” speech. After Asaba ran away from the classroom leaving with the word “bathroom,” it seems that one could say that Iriya was faced by the surrounding crowd of Nakagomi and her friends as they pleased at her desk.
Shut up. Get away from me.
“You’re terrible, you know, yeah, you.”
Relying only on a wet rag to wipe the blackboard, Nishikubo said like he was moaning.
“Nakagomi was really crying or something. The other three even...flared up in anger.”
As Hanamura was sitting on the teacher’s desk, he picked up the broom at his feet quite skillfully balancing it.
Mimicking while wearing a smirking smile,
“Something like, ‘You shouldn’t talking like that?!’ right?”
Nishikubo nodded, and said,
“That is that it was already a HUGE uproar.”
“More like, ‘No matter how I think about it, it was absolutely unbelievable!!’ wasn’t it?”
Moreover, Nishikubo said,
“Even so, you know that from the Iriya’s manner of nonchalant perspective it’s okay not to say anything. I say that in contrast if you look at it thinking ‘Hey, nice shot,’ you will suddenly have a nosebleed in one nostril in the meantime going, ‘drip drip drip,’ so to speak.”
Asaba unintentionally wound up asking in return, “Eh?”
“No way it would be a nosebleed! A bloody nose.”
It was the scent of chlorine, but Asaba’s mind recalled the towel dyed nosebleed red.
