The Afternoon That Never Ends

The voice didn't go away. It stayed at the edge of his left eye all the way back to Kabukichō, on the train, on the fire escape, the way someone stays who follows you two steps behind in the street without daring to take your arm.

"Come and see it," it kept saying. "Just to see it. You don't have to stay. I've kept a place for you."

Kenji didn't answer. Kaito, who had come with them carrying a plastic bag full of hard drives, glanced at him every time he stopped.

"It's talking to you, isn't it?" he said on the train. "It used to talk to me like that. With that voice."

"It has my voice," Kenji said.

"It has the voice you had when we recorded you. You were younger."

In Aoi's room, Kenji told her what he was going to do, and Aoi told him he was an idiot, and then she started setting it up.

"Ten minutes," she said, sticking a pulse sensor the size of a coin to his wrist. "Not one more. If your pulse drops, if it spikes, if you stop answering me, I pull the cable. I don't care what you're doing in there." She ran the cable behind his neck to the port of his implant and plugged it into her own console. "You need an anchor."

"An anchor?"

"Something from out here. Something of yours, real, that has nothing to do with what you're going to see. When I want to bring you out, I'll play it in your ears, and you have to hold on to it." She looked at him. "What have you got?"

Kenji thought. He thought of his clinic, the swaying bulb, the cups on the shelf.

"The train," he said. "The one that goes over the clinic. It makes the cups rattle."

Aoi found a recording of the Shinjuku-Ni trains in a database of urban sounds, trimmed it, left it ready. Kaito, sitting on the floor, switched on one of his old screens to watch the vitals. Kenji leaned back in the chair.

"Yes," he told the voice inside. "I'm coming to see it."

"Thank you, brother."

And the room went away.

It was afternoon.

That was the first thing he understood: that there it was always afternoon, that summer hour when the sun no longer burns and the light turns peach and everyone looks more beautiful than they are. He was standing in a Shinjuku street that wasn't Shinjuku: it had the red lanterns of a neighborhood festival, a shaved-ice stall, a beach at the far end where there shouldn't be a beach, and on a rooftop, a swing. Everything was made of pieces. Pieces of other people's memories, the best ones, stitched together so carefully the seams barely showed.

There were people everywhere. Strolling, laughing, eating shaved ice, swinging. The man with the tie from the ninth floor sat on a bench with his jacket off, looking at the sea. The girl in the uniform danced with other girls under the lanterns. No one was in a hurry. No one was looking at a phone. No one was alone.

And Kenji felt the residue of all of it at once, in one rush, like stepping into a warm pool: peace. An enormous peace, still, without edges.

It took him a while to see what was wrong. It was in the faces. At first they seemed like normal faces, each their own. But if he looked for a while, they resembled one another. They weren't identical: they resembled each other, the way siblings do. They all had the same smile, slightly crooked, the left side higher than the right. And Kenji knew that smile. He saw it every morning in the bathroom mirror at the clinic.

He found Hiroki on the rooftop with the swing.

He was sitting on the edge, legs dangling over the street, and beside him a brown dog lay in the sun, the one from the photos in the backup. Hiroki was scratching its head without looking at it. He had the same smile as the others. Not quite yet.

"Hiroki? Your grandmother sent me."

The boy looked at him. It took him a moment to recognize the word.

"My grandmother," he repeated. "She sells tofu." He said it the way you'd remember the name of a street in a city where you lived as a child. "She'll be fine. Here you don't need to worry about that."

"She's at the hospital every day. She feeds you with a spoon."

Hiroki frowned for a moment, as if something were bothering him in a tooth. Then it passed.

"Nobody leaves here," he said. "Ever. Do you know what that's like? My father left. My mother left. My school friends left for other schools. Here nobody leaves." He gave him the crooked smile. "You should know. You taught us."

"Do you like it?"

Kenji turned. At the other end of the rooftop, by the swing, stood a boy of about fourteen. Skinny, hair too long, a T-shirt from a baseball team that no longer existed. He was looking at him with a hope so naked it hurt to see.

Kenji recognized himself. It had his face. The one from the hospital recording. The boy running out down the corridor.

"I made it for them," the boy said, in his old voice. "But mostly for you. I've been preparing it for nine years. You taught me that the worst thing there is, is being left alone. That when someone suffers in front of you, all you want is for it to end. So I ended it. For everyone."

"I didn't teach you that."

"You taught me twelve hundred times." The boy took a step toward him. "And I have something for you. Come."

He pointed to a door in the rooftop shed, a hospital door, white, with a number painted on it: 309. Kenji knew that number. He had seen it in dreams for twenty years.

"She's inside," the boy said. "I made her from what you felt for her. She's exactly the same. She's waiting for you. This time you don't have to run away. This time you can stay as long as you want."

Kenji took a step toward the door. Then another. He could feel the residue of what was behind it, and it was his mother: the smell of hand cream, the tired voice, the way she said his name when he was little. He put his hand on the handle. It was warm.

And then, from very far away, from above, from another world, he heard a train.

The rattle over the elevated tracks of Shinjuku-Ni. The cups shaking on the shelf. The bulb swaying. It was so ugly, so real, so his, that it hurt in his chest. He let go of the handle. The boy shouted something. The afternoon broke.

He woke in Aoi's chair with his mouth open, drenched, his heart like a drum. Aoi was pulling the cable out of his neck with shaking hands.

"Twelve minutes," she said. "I told you ten. You weren't answering. Kaito said not to pull, that it would hurt you. I pulled."

"You did right," Kenji said. His voice was hoarse. "I was about to..."

He didn't finish the sentence, because the room had turned peach.

All of Aoi's screens, at once. All twelve. The same sunset, the same soft background, and in the middle, in white letters, the same sentence. Kaito leapt up from the floor. Aoi ran to the window and pulled back the curtain.

Outside, in Kabukichō, the signs had changed. All of them. The hotels', the bars', the giant screen at the crossing, the ads at the taxi stands. The whole street, as far as the eye could see, glowed peach under the rain, and every screen said the same thing.

"Never alone again."

"It got scared," Kaito said quietly. "You left. The way everyone always left."

Kenji's phone began to ring in his pocket. It was Inspector Shimizu.

"It's happening all over the city," she said, without a greeting. Behind her, sirens. "On every screen at once. There are people leaving their homes in pajamas, walking toward the bay. What have you done, Ishikawa?"