LOST Chapter 5: Seventeen, Then Eighteen

Read chapter 5 of LOST by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

I went outside at seven in the morning, which is earlier than I usually go outside, and I went in the direction of the harbor, which is where I always go when I need to think, and for twenty minutes I walked around Misakiura confirming that it was Misakiura. This sounds like a low bar. It was not a low bar. The town is built on a slope between the headland and the water, the shrine at the top and the fishing district at the bottom and everything else arranged between them in the particular organic disorder of places that grew without planning, streets that follow old field boundaries and paths that follow the natural drainage of the hill. I know this town. I have known it since I was small enough that knowing it meant learning it instead of just having it, and in the twenty minutes of walking I ticked things off against the internal map with the methodical attention of someone who is not quite trusting the evidence his own eyes are providing. The fish market: present. The konbini with the damp smell by the entrance: present. The narrow street between the two old buildings that is always in shadow regardless of time of day, where the stone is a different color from the surrounding streets because it was laid in a different century: present. The cat that lives at the base of the shrine steps and that I have named Tensor in my head and that does not belong to anyone and that accepts attention with the gracious indifference of someone who has decided they can afford to be generous: present, asleep on the second step, uninterested. All of this was not nothing. All of this confirmed that I had not crossed to somewhere entirely unlike home. The seventeen differences in the apartment were differences of detail, not of structure. I was in Misakiura. It was just a version of Misakiura with a flowering plant and a correct window latch and a phone number that reached the wrong person. I bought coffee from a vending machine and drank it standing at the harbor wall looking at the water. The water was the right color. The boats were there. Two of the fishermen near the dock were in the middle of what appeared to be a long-running argument about something, one of them doing most of the talking and the other one nodding in a way that suggested he had stopped listening several minutes ago. This felt deeply familiar. I did not know these specific men but I recognized the argument, the shape of it, the way it had the quality of something visited regularly rather than resolved. I thought about what to do. The logical next step, the one I had written in my notebook the night before, was outside contact. Finding whether this world had a version of me, a version of anyone I knew, finding the local network of Threshers if one existed, beginning to understand the structure of this particular deviation from my own world. All of that was correct. All of that was what the situation required. What I actually did was walk up to the shrine. I go to the shrine regularly at home, not from religious habit but because it sits at the highest point of the headland and from the outer terrace you can see the full arc of the bay, and thinking is easier when I can see the full arc of the bay, something about the scale of it, the way it puts whatever I'm working through into a proportion that makes it workable. Tensor was still asleep on the second step when I passed. The stone steps are worn in the center from five hundred years of footsteps and I put my feet in the worn center the way I always do and went up. The terrace was empty. Early enough for that. The water below was grey-green and the fog had mostly lifted and I could see the full sweep of the bay from the northern headland all the way to the fishing harbor and it was exactly the view it should be, deeply and completely itself, and I stood there and drank the rest of my coffee and felt something in my chest unclench slightly, not fully, but slightly. I was still in some version of home. That was real. It was