LOST Chapter 10: The Boy Who Remembers Wrong

Read chapter 10 of LOST by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

The harbor market on Saturday runs from the fish stalls at the water end all the way up to the street where the old covered arcade begins, and the middle section, where the produce stalls are, is always the most crowded because the fish stalls smell like fish and the arcade end has nothing interesting, and so everyone converges on the middle at roughly the same time on Saturday morning and the result is the specific controlled chaos of a market that has been running long enough to have its own logic, its own flow patterns, the regulars moving through it the way water moves through a known channel and the visitors moving through it the way water moves when it hits something unexpected. I was there because my mother had asked me to get daikon and something for dinner if anything looked good, which is the kind of request that sounds simple and requires more judgment than it implies, because something for dinner is a category with infinite options and my mother's something-for-dinner instincts and mine do not always align. I had been standing in front of the fish stalls for four minutes trying to decide whether the mackerel counted as something for dinner or whether it was too obvious, and I had just decided it was probably fine, mackerel was fine, when I saw the man. He was moving through the produce stalls about twenty meters away. Medium height, a messenger bag that looked like it had been everywhere, wearing the expression of someone navigating somewhere slightly unfamiliar and not wanting to appear to be navigating somewhere slightly unfamiliar. Not a tourist exactly. Not quite local either. Something in between, someone who knew the general shape of where they were but not the specific texture of it. I knew his face. This is the part that is difficult to explain without sounding like something is wrong with me, which I am aware is a risk I take every time I try to describe the second-map experience to myself, let alone to anyone else. I knew his face the way I know the layout of the room on the third floor of the Kankyō building. Not from a photograph. Not from having seen him in the town before, because I was fairly certain I hadn't, Misakiura is small enough that a new face in the harbor market on a Saturday registers. I knew his face the way I knew the stone marker that should be at the top of the shrine steps and isn't. The way I knew the shop that is now a different shop. Body-knowledge. The second map. He stopped at the daikon. Of all the things to stop at he stopped at the daikon, which was where I was heading, and I thought about the mackerel in my hand and about the fact that I had been standing in front of the fish stalls for four minutes making a decision that did not require four minutes and whether this was connected to the fact that I had been looking at something across the market without quite registering that I was looking. I put the mackerel down. The fish vendor gave me the look vendors give you when you put something down after picking it up, which is not an angry look but has an opinion in it. I went toward the daikon. He had moved by the time I got there. Picked up something, put it down, kept moving in the direction of the covered arcade. I got my daikon without looking at it properly and followed him. Following is probably too strong a word for what I was doing. Walking in the same direction. At a distance that was maybe twelve meters, maybe fifteen, enough that if he turned around I was just another person in the market going the same way. This is the kind of reasoning that sounds more thought-through than it was. Mostly I was walking toward him the way I walk toward the Kankyō building, without fully deciding, the body making the choice before the mind catches up to ratify it. He was moving slowly, the way people move when they are looking at things rather than going somewhere. He stopped at a stall selling pickled vegetables and spent a while reading the labels, and I stopped and pretended to look