LOST Chapter 15: Riku Speaks

Read chapter 15 of LOST by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

I went back to the Shimizu bookshop on Sunday. He was not there. I spent twenty minutes in the shop pretending to look at books, which required less pretending than usual because the Shimizu bookshop has a good secondhand section and I have spent genuine time in it before, but twenty minutes was enough to establish that he was not coming and that waiting longer would shift from coincidence into something that required acknowledging. I went back on Monday after school. He was not there either. I bought a book about coastal geology that I had been considering for a while and that I used as justification for being there, which worked on the shopkeeper and less well on myself. On Tuesday I saw him at the harbor. Not in the market this time. He was at the wall, the long stone wall that runs along the working harbor, standing with both hands on the top of it looking at the water in the way people look at things when they are not really looking at them. I was on my way to the shrine steps, my after-school route, the one that goes past the harbor and up, and he was forty meters ahead of me and I recognized the back of him before I registered that I was recognizing anything. The messenger bag. The way he stood. I slowed down. The thing about deciding to approach someone is that you have to do it before you get close enough that not approaching becomes its own statement. I had passed that threshold with the fisherman in the market, had gotten close and then turned back, and the turning back had felt like a decision but was actually the absence of one, and I had spent the three days since Tuesday noticing the difference between those two things. A decision is something you make. The absence of a decision is something that happens to you while you are waiting to make a decision. I was done waiting. Or I had run out of reasons to keep waiting, which was not the same thing but functioned similarly. I walked up to him. He heard me coming, or felt me stop beside him, and turned. Up close he had the same managed alertness I had seen in the market, the face that was doing several things at once under the surface, and he looked at me the way strangers look at you when you have approached them with purpose and they are waiting to find out what the purpose is. I said: I think I know you from somewhere. He looked at me for a moment. Then he said: I don't think we've met. I said: I know we haven't. That's the thing. I know we haven't met but I know your face. From somewhere I can't locate. He was quiet. Not dismissive, not the polite discomfort of someone waiting for a conversation to be over. Something else. The quality of attention that means someone is listening carefully and not yet sure what they're listening to. I said: I have this thing. I don't know what to call it. There's a version of Misakiura that I know, underneath the real one, like a map that got put in the wrong place. Streets that are almost right. Shops that are different shops. And I know your face from that map. Not from here. From there. He turned back to the water. Not dismissively, not walking away, just turning, and for a moment I thought I had lost it, said it wrong, used the wrong words, and then he said: tell me about the second map. So I told him. I told him about the school trip and the building and the certainty that arrived like something dropped rather than something approached. I told him about the shop that is now a restaurant and about the stone marker I keep expecting at the top of the shrine steps. I told him about the dreams that feel like memories, the ordinary ones, the route to school that is mostly right. I did not tell him about the woman who is mostly my mother. That one I still could not say out loud. Everything else I told him, standing at the harbor wall with the water below and the cold coming in off it, in the particular order that things came when I finally let them come, which was not a logical order but was the order they had been waiting in. He le