"A lowering sky at dawn", Part 8
(8)
He's riding in an elevator. The old-fashioned kind, with brass handrails, and a brass grille accordion door. As the elevator rises, Watanuki watches the floor indicator; antique cast bronze, shaped like a sundial, with an arrow moving clockwise to indicate his progress.
Although progress to where, he can't say, since instead of floor numbers on the indicator, there's only a random-looking collection of symbols around its face. An iris, a Greek letter he can't place offhand, a dragonfly, a skeleton key. Currently the indicator shows him about nine-o-clock on the dial, passing a cast bronze hare, on the way to a curved maple leaf.
The elevator's motion is smooth and soundless, and Watanuki is quite aware that he's dreaming. Given the lack of any apparatus to select a floor, and that the carpeting under his bare feet looks suspiciously like a section of the rug in the rear parlor, he thinks it safe to assume this is not one of those traveling dreams, where he visits a real place. It's just a normal sleeping dream, albeit a fairly vivid one.
The floor indicator passes the maple leaf, goes on to a straw sandal. The next symbol, at twelve o'clock, is a stalk of bamboo. But he doesn't make it there, because less than half past the straw sandal, the elevator stops moving. There's no noise of machinery, no sudden jolt from some malfunction. It just stops.
He tries the accordion door first, but it won't budge. Though beyond it there's a pair of oak panels, apparently the outer doors, with a small square glass window set in the left panel. Standing on tiptoe, he peers through; darkness, until he shades the glass with both hands cupped around his face.
A tatami floor in a dark room, is what he sees. He's just a bit above eye-level to it, and at first the perspective is confusing, until he realizes he's actually standing between floors. The straw sandal floor, and the bamboo floor, to be exact. There's something familiar about that; straw sandals and a bamboo tree, though at the moment he's more concerned with how he's supposed to get out of this elevator.
"Hello?" he tries calling. "Excuse me, is anyone there?"
Nothing changes in the room. He makes out a shaded window, a dark lump on the floor at the far end of the room. Someone's futon, perhaps? "Hello," he calls more loudly, rattling on the accordion door. "Is there anyone who could help me?"
After a long silent moment, he decides there isn't, so he turns his attention back to the accordion door, thinking there's a latch or something he might have missed. He feels around the door frame, inside and out, and is just going down on his knees to see if the latch might be there, when he hears something.
Ringing. A telephone. He tries pressing his ear to the brass grille, near the seam of the oak panels, but it doesn't seem the sound gets stronger there.
ringring........ringring..... It's an old bell telephone, the kind no one has used in forever. Except for him.
That's the ringing of the shop telephone. And the instant he realizes this, he knows that the way out of here is not through this stuck door. It's behind him.
"Of course," he says to the oak-paneled elevator wall, as he turns to face it. He puts his palm to the wood and then, just because he has a feeling about this, reaches down for the brass handrail instead.
"Wake up now," he tells himself, and pushes the rail....
....tilting down for a dizzying second into darkness...
And landing on his back with a distinct thump, wide awake in his own bed. Where he hears the hall telephone, still ringing.
"Hello?" he says, for the third time, standing in his bare feet in the chilly hallway. He hadn't wasted time turning a light on, and he has no idea of the time. Ungodly late o' clock, from the feel of it.
But there's no answer to his greeting; nothing but an open phone line, with some faint unidentifiable sound on the other end.
It's dark, it's cold, and though he seldom receives any phone calls, he still remembers that calls at this hour are seldom good news. He tugs the stray flaps of his sleeping kimono around himself, even knowing it won't do much for the chill he's feeling.
"Hello, is someone there? Can I help you?"
A long silence, punctuated by a sniff that makes him jump a little. "Watanuki-sama?" says a small, whispery voice.
"Yes, I'm sorry but who--Ryou-san, is that you?"
"Are you okay, Watanuki-sama? Has something bad happened to you?" Ryou's voice is still nearly a whisper, but urgent, rough with imminent tears.
"I'm fine," answers Watanuki, baffled. "I was just sleeping. What's wrong, Ryou-san, are you all right?"
Another sniff, and all at once Watanuki pictures the boy vividly, seated on the floor in a dark room, knees drawn up and hunched over the telephone, trying with all his might not to cry.
"I--I just saw something bad, when I was asleep. Watanuki-sama was in a black place, and there was a lady, but she was coming apart, and Watanuki-sama was crying, but you couldn't move.....it scared me, I was scared it was happening, and--"
"Shh, calm down, you don't have to worry. It was just a dream," Watanuki soothes. "I'm here talking to you, and everything's fine, see?"
"But it was so real. I could--I could see the lady's kimono, she had long, long hair, and she was so sad. And Watanuki-sama had on a school uniform, just like the high school kids. You didn't have glasses, I saw that, and you looked hurt, I was scared you might die...."
Watanuki had meant to stop him, calm him down, but at the mention of the school uniform he freezes stiff, feels all the blood drain from his face.
"What--where was this place, do you remember?" he gets out.
"No. It was all dark. Not like a dark room. Like forever dark. And the dark was taking the lady away, it was eating her up. And--and Watanuki-sama said....I still haven't granted your wish. I promised..."
"...that I would grant it," Watanuki fills in, sliding down the wall next to the telephone table, nerveless, numb, stunned.
"It was real." For all its hushed softness, Ryou's voice strikes the exact note of heartbreak Watanuki had felt on that night, so very very long ago. "It happened, that lady was real and--is she okay? What happened to her?"
"She was real. But she's gone now." Watanuki wipes a hand down his face, and how strange, that after so much time, the memory of that encounter is as fresh a wound as if it had just been struck. "You saw Yuuko-san. And me, a very long time ago. Your dream, that was when she....went away. When me and your great-grandfather were in high school."
"Gone...." says Ryou, with a break in his voice. "I was. I've never been that scared. I wanted to do something. But....I tried really hard, and I couldn't reach you. It's like--like I wasn't there."
"That's because you weren't," says Watanuki gently. "You saw something in the past. And the past can't be changed. But please don't worry, Ryou-san. It was very sad, at that time. But I'm okay now."
He stifles a sigh, thinking he really doesn't want to go back to bed with that memory on his mind. Though more importantly, Ryou himself shouldn't have to be haunted by such a thing.
"Try to put it out of your mind, hm?" he offers. "There's no reason you should be unhappy over it. And it must be too late for you to be up. Your mother would worry, I'm sure."
"That's why I didn't wake her up," Ryou murmurs back. "I just. I had to make sure Watanuki-sama was okay. I'm uh. Sorry I woke you up, too."
Briefly, Watanuki debates over how to respond. On the one hand, if Ryou's dreams are showing him things no normal person could have seen, things serious enough to terrify him to tears, he will need someone to share them with, and help him understand them. On the other hand, if the situation should persist, Watanuki is aware he could be opening himself up for years of late-night phone calls.
Well, he decides. It's not as though he can't afford to lose sleep now and then. And going by Ame-Warashi's recent prediction, he would be wise to stay informed of just these sorts of incidents.
"You don't have to apologize," he tells Ryou. "I understand how it must have seemed necessary. And it was very kind of you, to check in on me. I promise that everything is all right, though...." he pauses a moment, thinking.
"Sometimes people's dreams bring them important messages. I can't say why Ryou-san dreamed about that time, but maybe it would be smart, if you were careful for the next few days. You're good about noticing things, so keep an eye out, okay? Just to be safe."
"Oh. Yeah, I'll do that." There comes a quiet sigh, and then, "Thank you. I'm glad you're okay."
**
After hanging up, Watanuki goes to the kitchen and pours himself a snifter of brandy. He's unsettled, and not at all interested in enjoying a drink alone at the moment. So he sips his drink standing, one arm propped on the kitchen counter, contemplating this space where he has spent so many hours over so many ages.
In the darkest hush of night, with just the light over the oven on, it looks different in here. Like a kitchen in someone else's house, maybe. A normal house, belonging to people with normal lives. Though of course all the fixtures and appliances would look ancient, to average people nowadays. A few years ago on a whim, Haruka had brought him a home decorating magazine from the grocery, and looking at the advertisements for ovens, washers, refrigerators, they looked like things that belonged in space ships, to him.
He lives in a time capsule, in just about every sense of the word. And tonight, for reasons beyond his understanding, that capsule has been upended, stirring up dust and sediments which he'd been quite content to leave settled deep at the bottom of his memories.
Why now, of all times, should he be dragged from sleep to remember Yuuko's departure? What in the world would have put such a thing in that innocent child's head, making him suffer the most painful memory in all Watanuki's recollection?
Of course on this topic, the shop kitchen has no answers. And so, tossing back the last of the brandy for what fortification it might offer him, he heads off for the storeroom.
**
Tonight, the room is clean and absolutely still. He walks down the line of shelves in his cold bare feet, arms wrapped around him. He looks up and down the arrangement of boxes, trunks, cloth bundles, and then he just lets his gaze wander, looking at nothing in particular. Sometimes, this is the best way to find something here, just standing in the middle, waiting, listening.
But nothing comes forth. All he hears is perfect silence. He turns on his heels to look at that exact spot on the floor, where he'd first picked up Yuuko's kimono; a dead crumpled wrapping which had enveloped something larger than life itself, to him. He remembers when he'd first drawn it over his shoulders, how cold and empty it had felt. There had been nothing at all left of her there. No lingering scent, no hint of warmth, no indication at all of the extraordinary presence once within it.
"Why?" he asks the room. Looking up to the rafters, off to the far wall, staring into the shadows, waiting for anything.
But aside from him, and dozens of lifeless objects, the storeroom is entirely empty.
"I promised," he tells the emptiness, just in case. "And I haven't forgotten. I won't forget."
**
Two days later, a customer arrives, sent from the Doumeki temple. Before stating his wish, he gives Watanuki a tall decorative gift bag, embellished with a floppy hand-tied bow. He was asked to deliver this especially, he tells Watanuki, with thanks from the Doumeki's youngest son.
Upon opening the bag, Watanuki discovers a young bamboo plant, in a rustic pot decorated around the outside with woven straw.
It's a challenge, keeping his focus on the customer's wish after this, and as soon as their business is concluded, the instant after he sees the man out the door and closes it, he hastens off to the storeroom.
There's a book in here, an old folklore textbook that Shizuka had foisted off on him after his third year of college, and refused to take back. In a fit of annoyance (because as he'd emphatically told Shizuka at the time, and on numerous other occasions, he was not a dumping ground for Shizuka's unwanted junk) Watanuki had taken the book to the storeroom, stuffed it on a random shelf, and left it. Following its own capricious moods, the storeroom moved the book around periodically over the decades, and whenever he came across it, Watanuki huffed and dusted around it.
But once or twice, purely out of boredom, he had actually opened the book. And now he remembers, with Ryou's bamboo plant in a straw-wrapped pot sitting in the rear parlor, that there is a significant story in there. A story involving straw sandals and a bamboo tree.
Watanuki's initial plan is to check the story, and then phone Ryou directly and ask him, Did you really know? Because how could he have known what Watanuki was dreaming the other night, before the phone awoke him? Stuck on that elevator, between a straw sandal and a bamboo plant, peering through the little glass window into a dark room.
The fact he'd dreamt of Watanuki's past was potentially serious enough, but only two people had ever been able to enter Watanuki's dreams and see what he saw, and neither of them were actually alive, as it had turned out. If Ryou had seen Watanuki's dream....well, Watanuki has no idea what he'll do, but he'll have to do something.
With this urgent thought, he strides into the storeroom, all business, and stands in the center with his hands on his hips.
"All right, listen," he announces. "It galls me enough to say that Shizuka was right, again, giving me a book I wouldn't need for....eighty-something, ninety whatever, years," flapping a hand irritably. "I know you still have it somewhere, because you love needling me with it, and rest assured I will absolutely tear this place apart for it if I....have....to."
He trails off because the book is already sitting out in plain sight, on a little round accent table, in a helpful patch of sunlight from the nearby window. And there's not so much as a speck of dust on it.
"Right," he says, with no wind at all in his sails. "Well. That was very prompt. Thank you."
**
The story goes more or less just as he remembers. But after reading it over a few times, Watanuki realizes he needs to think about the implications, carefully, before saying anything to Ryou.
It's a variation on the Tanabata legend; the most common version involving Orihime the weaver and the herder Hikoboshi, as lovers who could only meet across the Milky Way once a year.
Only in this telling, it's the farmer Mikeran who was separated from his wife, the goddess Tanabata. She promised the farmer she'd return to him, if he could weave a thousand pairs of straw sandals, and bury them under a certain bamboo tree. Unfortunately, Mikeran could not complete the task before he died and so never saw Tanabata again in his life. Though as legend has it, they could still meet once a year, in the form of stars intersecting in the night sky.
Taken a face value, Watanuki assumes the symbols nudging their way into his dream are fairly straightforward. Like the farmer Mikeran, he himself is in the midst of a seemingly impossible task, waiting for someone he may well never see again. His dream had put him stuck midway, between the straw sandal and the bamboo tree, which he can only conclude signified his current place in his promise to Yuuko.
But the fact that Ryou had called in the midst of that dream, this is where Watanuki senses trouble. Because as he has learned so very well, coincidence is nothing but an excuse invented by people unwilling or unable to unravel the truth in their circumstances.
Doumeki Ryou's call had interrupted his dream. And he had left that stuck elevator, in order to answer it. Whatever this will turn out to mean, Watanuki knows it is not knowledge appropriate for a ten-year-old. For the time being, he cannot burden this boy, with the responsibility which always comes due, when one glimpses their fate. Regardless of whether the fate in question seems unavoidable, Ryou still has the power of choice. And for Watanuki--who in so many respects was never given such a luxury--that choice, that opportunity to live his own life, and grow up unburdened by the darker side of fate's responsibilities, must be guarded as long as possible.
It is for this reason, that Watanuki puts the old textbook back on a shelf in the storeroom, and waits. He waits until the bamboo plant is outgrowing its little pot, and he has to replant it in an open part of the front yard, where he can just see it from his room, with the doors open wide to the spring breeze.
The pot itself, he cleans carefully and puts on his bedroom shelf next to Haruka's book. Unsurprisingly, it looks nice there.
**
One moment it's spring, the next it's bright ripe summer, and on a calm early morning, the phone rings again.
"Watanuki-sama? I'm sorry if I woke you up. I tried to wait this time." Of course it's Ryou, voice as hushed as the dim early light, and Watanuki smiles wryly to himself. Knowing, the way he knows these things, that at some point in the near future Ryou will be the only Doumeki child allowed to have a telephone in his own room. It will cause drama amongst his siblings, which will lead to Watanuki having a drinking visit with their mother, before long.
"Good morning, Ryou-san," he says, still smiling, thinking it's been ages since he'd had really good champagne. "Had another dream, did you? Everything all right?"
"I guess. Yeah," sighs Ryou heavily. "I've had a bunch of dreams. But this one. I couldn't go back to sleep. I didn't want to bother you...."
"Wait," says Watanuki, his smile slipping. "You mean you've had others? Like the one you called about before?"
"They weren't scary," says Ryou. "They were just dreams about you. Last night, though. That one was scary. There was a monster, it was nighttime on this street, and this thing attacked you, like a big, I dunno, a big black cloud. But it was....ugly, and mean. It was trying to eat you up, and choke you at the same time."
Ryou pauses for breath, and Watanuki comments, "That actually used to be common, for me. Things like that used to chase me, all kinds of spirits. That's why I came to work in this shop."
"But that's awful," breathes Ryou. "How come you couldn't make them go away? In my dream, I--I think I was somebody else. I came up on a horse? And I had this big yumi, like the one in our altar-room, and I shot the monster. But you couldn't do anything, it just knocked--."
"I'm sorry," Watanuki interrupts, as soon as he finds his voice. "You said you shot it? From horseback?"
"Yeah, I haven't even started kyudo lessons yet, but I knew how to do it, it was so weird...."
Finding himself sliding down the wall yet again, Watanuki thinks a bit dazedly, that he should really get a chair next to this phone.
"I had that dream. God. So long ago. It was Haruka-san....your great-grandfather's grandfather. He shot the ayakashi. From a white horse--." Watanuki realizes the shock has knocked his composure clean out. He shouldn't be rambling like this, lest he say something too costly.
But then Ryou swallows, audibly. "I was on a white horse. But. How come I had your dream? People can't do that."
Before answering, Watanuki thinks of the bamboo plant, now on its way to becoming a healthy little tree in his front yard. Is it enough? Is it too little? The price of information is so much trickier to calculate than a straightforward wish. And nothing is straightforward about the story of this dream, or why it might be rippling back from the opposite shores of time, now.
"Ryou-san," he sighs. "I'm sorry. Please understand, I would much prefer if I could just give you all the answers to your questions."
For a moment, silence. And then Ryou's tone is flat, quiet. "But there's a price."
"I'm sorry," Watanuki repeats, and he truly, deeply is, knowing too well how powerless Ryou must feel, having once felt the exact same way himself. "These aren't my rules. They're the shop's rules. And I know they seem unfair to you. For what it's worth, it seems unfair to me too."
Ryou's voice remains flat, but what he says surprises Watanuki. "It's not unfair. And Watanuki-sama shouldn't have to pay. I don't want you to get hurt."
Watanuki has no idea what to say to this, but he knows the situation has gone beyond what they should discuss on the phone. Business like this should be conducted in person, face to face.
"Ryou-san. Could you ask your mother today, if she has time to bring you by the shop?"
"My mom's busy," Ryou sighs. "Because my brother is being a jack--uh. Sorry, I mean a hassle. My dad had to ground him, and now they're all mad. But I know how to get there. I mean, if you don't mind, if it's just me."
"Of course I don't mind." Although Ryou couldn't see it, Watanuki is having to bite back a smile at that moment of unvarnished frankness. "Though your mother and I would both appreciate, if you asked her permission. When she's not busy."
"Yeah. I'll ask. Tomorrow's okay?"
"Any day soon is fine," Watanuki assures him. "My schedule is always free."
*****
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