LOST Chapter 4: The Sign on the Door

Read chapter 4 of LOST by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

The building is on the road between the harbor and the school and I pass it every day. That sounds like it should be a significant sentence and I'm not sure it is, because I pass a lot of things every day. The fish market. The shrine steps. The vending machine outside the konbini that has been out of the grape drink I like for three weeks now and that I check anyway, every time, on the way past, the way you keep checking something after you have fully accepted it won't change. The building is just another thing I pass. Except that it isn't, and I know it isn't, and the reason I know is that every time I walk past it something in my chest does a thing I don't have a word for, a kind of low interior lurch, like the feeling of missing a step in the dark but without the falling. It's a grey building. Four stories, maybe five. There's a sign on the door that I can't read from the road and that I have not crossed the road to read, not because I don't want to but because whenever I get close to actually doing it something finds an excuse. Oh, I'm late. Oh, there's a car. Oh, I should eat something first. My mother says I'm always finding reasons not to do the thing I'm about to do and she says this with a particular expression that is trying not to be amused, and she is usually right, but this feels different from my ordinary capacity for avoidance. This feels more like the feeling of standing at the edge of something high. Not that I will fall. That something will change when I look down. I have been passing that building for two years. The memory goes like this: school trip, year one of middle school, so I was twelve or eleven, a group of us on the coastal road in the autumn, the teacher was talking about the local fishing history and most of us were not listening. I remember the smell of the day, kelp and cold air, and I remember Hiro beside me talking about something, his hands moving the way they do when he's enthusiastic about an argument. And I remember looking up at the grey building on the other side of the road and feeling absolutely certain that I had been inside it. Not certain the way you're certain about things you remember. Certain the way you're certain about the smell of your own house, something that doesn't require memory because it's below memory, it's in the body somewhere deeper than that. I had never been inside it. I knew this. I have lived in Misakiura my whole life and before the school trip I had never been on that road and after the school trip I asked my mother about the building and she said it was some kind of research foundation and that she didn't know much about it and that she had never been inside it either. She said this in a slightly distracted way, the way she answers questions when she's doing something else, and I thought no more about it. Except that I did. Think more about it. The knowing keeps surfacing, the body-certainty of the interior, like a word on the tip of your tongue but what's on the tip of your tongue is not a word but a room, a specific set of rooms, a particular quality of light from windows on the south side of a building I have never entered. I know there is a room on the third floor where the light comes in at a low angle in the afternoon. I know this the way I know the layout of my own bedroom. I cannot explain it and I have stopped trying to explain it to myself, which is a different thing from accepting it, which is a different thing from understanding it. I have three separate and unsatisfying relationships to this fact and I cycle through them depending on the day. What I actually do, in practice, is I pass the building every day and I do the interior lurch and I keep walking. Today I stopped. Not across the road. I stopped on my side, with the building opposite, and I stood there long enough that a man walking behind me had to move around me, and he gave me the look you give someone who has stopped suddenly on a pavement, which is a very specific look, slightly irrita