LOST Chapter 1: The Wrong Side

Read chapter 1 of LOST by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

Ken's hands were on my shoulders before I understood they were there. That is the thing I keep returning to, the order of it, because I have spent most of my life believing that perception precedes event, that the mind registers and then the body follows, but Ken's hands were already pressing, already decided, and my mind was still somewhere three seconds behind asking what are you doing here, why are you in my apartment, I didn't hear the door. His face was completely calm. That is the part that took the longest to process, longer even than what happened after. Not frightened, not apologetic, not the face of someone doing something they hadn't planned. The face of someone finishing something they had planned for a long time. He said my name. Then the floor was gone. I don't know how else to describe it. There was a sensation like pressure inverting, like the air itself turned inside out around me, and my stomach went somewhere my body wasn't, and I had exactly enough time to think this is not falling, falling has a direction, before I hit the floor of my apartment so hard my teeth snapped together and the taste of copper spread across my tongue. I lay there for a while. The ceiling looked correct. That was the first thing I checked, which tells you something about the state I was in, that ceiling correctness was my opening diagnostic. The water stain in the northeast corner from the leak three winters ago. The small crack running from the light fitting toward the window that I had been meaning to report to the building manager since I moved in. Both present. Both in the right place. I sat up slowly. The room was my room. The kotatsu in the center with my notebooks stacked on one end and the empty cup I'd left there that morning on the other. The bookshelves covering the east wall, physics and mathematics on the upper shelves, the observation journals I'd kept since I was seventeen on the lower ones, thirty-one volumes now, every documented anomaly I had ever recorded in Misakiura, every light that behaved at the wrong angle, every collective forgetting, every rupture cluster mapped against weather and tide. The window facing the harbor, the fog already coming in from the water the way it always did by late afternoon. Ken was not there. I looked at the cup. This is the moment I have tried to reconstruct most carefully since, the exact sequence of my attention, because I think the order in which I noticed things tells me something about which part of my brain was still functioning and which parts had gone somewhere else entirely. I looked at the cup first. I don't know why. It was an ordinary cup, ceramic, pale blue, the one I use every morning, and I had knocked it off the kotatsu four days earlier and it had broken, I had swept the pieces up myself, I remembered the specific sound of it hitting the floor, a short sharp crack and then a smaller sound as the handle separated. The cup was not broken. It sat on the kotatsu exactly where I had placed it that morning before it was broken, before I knocked it over, whole and ordinary and the pale blue of it somehow more vivid than I remembered, or maybe that was just my attention, stripped of everything else, landing on it the way attention lands on the thing that is wrong. I picked it up. Turned it in my hands. No crack, no repair line, no sign it had ever been anything other than whole. I set it down very carefully. My mouth was still tasting of copper and my hands had started shaking, not badly, a fine tremor I could see if I held them flat, and I recognized this as adrenaline metabolizing, I knew the physiology of it, which helped and did not help. There is something almost insulting about understanding exactly what your body is doing and being unable to stop it. I stood up and went to the window. The harbor was there. The water the particular grey-green of Misakiura water in late afternoon, the fishing boats in, the shrine visible on the headland, the fog thickening at the mout