“Wh-What do you mean?”
“I’m not sure.”
“I asked what you mean!”
The reporter shouted, slammed his hands on the table, and sprang to his feet.
How fascinating.
People who felt no empathy whatsoever for the affairs of others became remarkably sensitive when their own lives were involved.
Admittedly, I wasn’t much different in that respect.
Still, I understood how precious a companion animal could be.
I was wondering what answer I should give him when someone flung open the café door and charged inside, as though rendering my deliberation unnecessary.
“Who the hell are you?!”
“What?”
“What gives you the right to harass my nephew?! What news outlet do you work for?!”
“A-Attorney? No, I was only......”
The reporter shrank beneath my aunt’s volcanic fury.
Judging by how quickly he shoved his notebook and pen into his pockets, it seemed this incident would end here.
“Phew, she got here quickly.”
The regular customer pretended to wipe her forehead with the back of her hand, looking as though she had accomplished something impressive.
Her forehead was perfectly clean, without a single drop of sweat.
More importantly, had she contacted my aunt instead of the manager?
My prediction had been wrong.
“Why is my aunt......?”
“Hmm? A lawyer is more useful than a professor when you’re dealing with a reporter like him!”
“That isn’t what I meant. Why do you have my aunt’s contact information?”
“We occasionally drink together.”
“......”
That was news to me.
It felt as though some incomprehensible encirclement had formed around me without my knowledge.
I could even guess why they hadn’t told me about it openly, so I couldn’t exactly complain.
My aunt and the reporter left the café amid her sharp demands for the name of his employer.
Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that my aunt pursued the reporter as he half fled.
“I should go outside and see what happens. I’ll come back for my tarot reading another time.”
“I’m sorry for causing you trouble.”
“Don’t mention it. I’ll come back to ask the same question, so make sure you’re properly prepared!”
The regular customer left the café with a smile.
She would come back and ask the same question......
Whenever she visited this tarot café and requested a reading, she always asked about the same thing.
Her romantic fortune.
Her romantic fortune for today, tomorrow, or the coming week.
She pursued it with the same inexhaustible enthusiasm every time.
From the café’s perspective, customers who paid for tarot readings in addition to their drinks were profitable. But at this point, I was beginning to worry about her instead.
She would probably return as early as tomorrow.
Perhaps even in a few hours.
“......I should have a moment.”
I looked around the empty café and walked toward the back.
After stepping behind the counter and opening the rear door, I found the staircase leading upstairs.
I climbed to the second floor and opened the door, revealing the living room of the home where I had lived for several years.
The presence I wanted to check on slowly emerged.
“Meow.”
The cry lacked much of the strength it had once possessed.
The reporter’s unexpected visit had stirred up the past and made me worry.
The kitten from those days was now old enough that it wouldn’t have been strange for its life to end at any moment.
It moved less, walked more slowly, and ate less than before.
The elderly cat, whose black-and-white fur formed a tuxedo pattern, approached its longtime friend.
Fortunately, I saw no future.
It was a companion I couldn’t bear to lose, despite the complicated emotions it evoked.
The cat was one of the few pieces of evidence proving that, from the days when I was a foolish child prophet until now, I had managed to accomplish something properly.
This cat, and......
***
After finally leaving the hospital, the child began living with his aunt.
He tried returning to school, but it didn’t last long.
The people around him didn’t look kindly upon a child who had spent so much time confined in a psychiatric hospital.
Not the other students, their parents, or even the teachers.
He was aware that he had only increased their anxiety and discontent.
In a place where hundreds of people gathered, it was inevitable that someone among them would eventually brush against death.
If a bizarre boy suffered convulsions, collapsed in the classroom, and muttered strange words of self-reproach, it was only natural that the others would shun him.
The two-eyed boy hid from the gazes of the one-eyed and shut himself inside his home.
For years.
The immature prophet changed nothing else.
Without knowing whether that was good or bad, he tried to avoid contact with the outside world as much as possible.
Then the cat—the only family he had besides his aunt—ran out of food, forcing him to venture outside cautiously.
It was supposed to be a short outing to the nearby convenience store.
He saw a girl wearing the uniform of a local high school.
She was a pretty girl with long hair tied behind her head, walking with a lively spring in her step while wearing earphones.
It had been a long time since he last glimpsed the future.
He knew.
Her end wasn’t far away.
The girl continued along the street with light, bouncing steps.
She entered an area crowded with stores and headed toward a private academy some distance away.
He heard creaking.
Rusted metal bolts and frayed cables broke apart.
A heavy metal sign tilted before finally plummeting, dragging everything connected to it down like a lightning bolt.
Straight toward the high school girl walking through an ordinary day like any other.
That was her end.
Her skull would be shattered, the bones throughout her body crushed, and her flesh mangled beneath the cascade of metal as her body slowly turned cold.
The immature prophet saw it all.
At the end of the prophecy, he hesitated.
What should he choose?
Would it be safe to change the future?
His deliberation didn’t last long.
Before he could consider the consequences or what might follow, desire surged within him.
Suppressing the pain reverberating throughout his body, he approached the girl and grabbed her arm.
He endured the cold sweat running down his body and tightened his grip as the startled girl recoiled.
“Eek?! Wh-What is it? Wh-Who are you?”
The foolish child had grown into an immature prophet, but he was still naive.
He had acted before realizing that he had no idea what to do next.
All he could do was hold on to the girl as she tried to wrench her arm free and flee.
It was an idiotic thing to do.
A disheveled teenage shut-in, known throughout the neighborhood as someone who had been confined to a psychiatric hospital, had suddenly seized a high school girl’s arm and refused to release her.
Naturally, it caused a considerable uproar.
He couldn’t explain himself.
He would be sent back to that stark white room, and his aunt would be devastated.
But he didn’t know how long he needed to hold the girl there.
Perhaps the time he spent restraining her would be added to the sequence of events and cause her to reach the accident at precisely the right moment anyway.
Still, he only needed to keep holding on.
As long as she avoided that single instant, everything would be fine.
That was what he believed.
“Let go! Let go of me! Wh-What do you want?! S-Somebody help me!”
“What the hell are you doing?!”
It was an idiotic act.
Enough of a disturbance to cross well beyond the boundaries of a minor incident.
Enough to make his aunt, an attorney, clutch her head and rush from place to place dealing with the aftermath.
Even though his actions forced his aunt to move yet again, he still felt an arbitrary sense of satisfaction when he saw something through the window while packing.
The high school girl was walking through her ordinary life.
He deliberately ignored the way she anxiously glanced around her.
“You truly don’t think things through.”
That was what the café manager said when they first met.
He was a man introduced by the child’s aunt after she finally gave up on hospitals.
More precisely, she had once denied that anything was unusual about her only nephew and tried to have him treated. But after her suspicions shifted until she was half convinced, she chose to bring him to this man.
“It’s been years.”
“......Quiet. I’m still not sure about any of this, but...... you’ve always been interested in this sort of thing, haven’t you? Please help him.”
“Of course.”
The man had delicate, gentle features and wore dignified glasses.
He was a psychologist who would abruptly take leave from his teaching and research to operate a tarot café, only to return just as suddenly to the lecture hall.
Once the two of them were alone, the man offered the child a faint smile.
“Apparently, while that commotion was unfolding, several storefront signs fell—perhaps because of the strong winds. I heard several passersby were seriously injured.”
The man, who had been his aunt’s classmate, smiled.
“You were far too careless.”
The child’s satisfaction was plunged into the mud, and he learned something else.
“You don’t yet seem to understand why successful prophets never reveal themselves to the world, or what problems can arise from interfering with a prophecy however you please.”
A prophet must always live in hiding within this world.
“Don’t draw unnecessary attention by causing an even greater disturbance. Come work at my café instead. I happen to need a part-time employee.”
And a prophet who lived in such secrecy was standing before him.
“There are many things you need to learn.”
The café manager continued.
“How to observe your surroundings. How to maintain an appropriate distance. Most importantly...... how to fabricate a plausible explanation.”
The child had been naive.
If he had possessed the ability to invent such an explanation, the incident would never have grown so serious.
“You would have been far better off claiming that you’d fallen in love with her at first sight and asking for her number.”
That was the advice of a café manager who enjoyed overwhelming support from his female university students.
“At least at that moment, the people around you would have watched fondly, and the girl could have spent the day flattered and proud.”
Of course, after learning about the past of the boy who had abruptly confessed to her, she might have felt somewhat unsettled.
“Still, that alone wouldn’t have been enough. How far did you think before making your choice?”
He pointed out the shallowness of the child’s reasoning.
“That girl survived. She appears to be a good student. As time passes, she’ll eventually take the university entrance examination. If she had died, another student who would otherwise have been accepted might now fail.”
Perhaps that other student would have attended university and grown into an outstanding individual.
Perhaps that student might even have accomplished something great enough to change the world.
But that future had been twisted.
“Perhaps that other student was originally destined to succeed after several attempts. Now that fate has been altered, they might fall into despair. The possibility that they might become despondent and take their own life isn’t zero, is it?”
It was an extreme example.
An unlikely possibility.
It sounded absurd and could have been considered excessive criticism.
But at the same time, it was possible.
The child felt offended, yet listened quietly because the man’s tone wasn’t accusatory. He spoke calmly, as though merely listing possibilities.
“I have no intention of preventing you from making choices.”
As he listened, the child realized something.
“But you must think before you act, whether you choose change or preservation.”
The man before him was a prophet whose desires were the exact opposite of his own.
The café manager was a prophet who chose not to interfere with the futures he saw.
“Your circumstances differ from mine, so I can’t tell you which choice is right. But at least until you understand the weight of making such a choice, I want you to learn how to keep your distance. Until then, stop making choices.”
At least until the two-eyed person could understand the society of the one-eyed deeply enough to assimilate into it.
***
“Damn it. When things go wrong, they really go to hell.”
His plan had been to bypass the troublesome guardians, extract an interview quickly, and leave.
He had assumed he could manipulate some brat who had barely attended school and immediately taken a leave of absence after entering university, wasting his life ever since.
Instead, the situation had become troublesome.
The reporter climbed out of his car with a violent motion.
He slammed the door and stormed out of the parking lot.
He was walking faster than usual.
Because he couldn’t stop thinking about it.
He had finally uncovered a story he could spin into all manner of gossip, yet the subject of his investigation had left him in a foul mood.
He didn’t actually believe any of it.
It would sell well, but common sense dictated that the story was merely the combination of severe mental illness and coincidental accidents around the child, arranged in a way that made it appear convincing.
The young man himself was simply a deranged idiot.
Or perhaps an aspiring con artist who had prepared his act well.
That had to be it.
“Damn it.”
Then why couldn’t he shake this ominous feeling?
“That creepy bastard.”
It was because of his eyes.
The eyes of the young man who had watched him with that faint smile.
The reporter didn’t believe in the occult in the slightest, yet merely meeting those eyes had sent a chill through him and made him feel as though he had encountered something incomprehensible.
That strange gaze.
Goosebumps rose across his skin.
An irrational sense of unease swelled within him.
He stepped out of the elevator, hurried down the corridor, and opened the door to his home.
The family member who should have come running to greet him with a wagging tail was......
“T-Ttori?”
Ttori lay curled up in a corner of the living room without moving.
The reporter rushed forward, his body trembling violently, without even taking off his shoes.
There was still warmth in Ttori’s body, and the dog seemed to be breathing faintly, so he hurriedly gathered it into his arms.
He retraced the path he had just taken, rushed back into his car, and started the engine with trembling hands.
Then......
A ringtone sounded.
He recognized the number.
It was one he had discovered during his investigation and saved on his phone.
The number of the interview subject from earlier.
The man who had made his skin crawl.
And......
“You bastard! If anything happens to Ttori—my Ttori......!”
......That accusation is somewhat unfair.
“Sh-Shut up! You—you did something......!”
I thought you didn’t believe in the occult. I haven’t done anything in particular. However......
Your reaction leaves me wondering which choice I should make.
“......”
He felt it again.
That inexplicable chill and the goosebumps spreading across his skin.
Even though their eyes weren’t meeting now.
“Wh-What the hell are you......?”
BOOOOM—!
A deafening crash erupted.
Beyond the parking lot entrance adjoining the road came the sound of something being smashed apart.
Screams followed.
The reporter flinched, and a voice reached his ear.
May your family member rest in peace.
Countless thoughts flashed through his mind.
What was that?
Had there been an accident on the road?
If he hadn’t answered the phone, would he have driven straight out of the parking lot?
Would he have been caught in it?
Then had answering this call saved him?
What had the man meant by a choice?
Only belatedly did the reporter realize that the call had ended. At the same moment, he understood the meaning of the final words and leaned toward the passenger seat.
The brown-furred family member who had been losing its warmth had already gone cold.
Fear smothered the grief rising inside him, leaving the reporter unable even to shed tears.
***
Which choice had been correct?
“As I forced myself to ignore the pain slicing through my body and took stock of the situation, a question occurred to me.”
Looking at the consequences of the choice I had already made left me dissatisfied.
If I had simply left things alone, everything would have been resolved far more cleanly.
A one-eyed bastard like him.