Monogatari Series - Volume 13 - Chapter 1.05

005

We landed at Naha Airport, and my phone rang the second the doors of the plane were open, as if she’d been watching like a hawk, checking her watch, and watching for me like a watchdog.

There weren’t many people who even knew my phone number─and there was no reason for Senshogahara to have it, even if she was Senjogahara.

That is, she herself had destroyed the number of mine that she’d known─well, strictly speaking, it was the cell phone she destroyed, and I was able to transfer the number to a new phone, but deciding it was too dangerous to continue using a number she knew, I’d canceled my contract immediately thereafter.

…I guess the young lady could get her hands on my contact info if she tried. Whoever she was, in fact, whoever you are, you can obtain a fair amount of info with a modicum of effort.

Not that you can know everything, like a senpai of mine.

But you can find out a fair amount.

If you have the motivation─which most people lack.

People are lazy.

And being lazy is worse than being stupid.

Forget being “bored to death”─it isn’t boredom that kills people, it’s apathy.

“Kaiki? I’m here.”

“Who’s Kaiki? My name is Suzuki, Miss Senshogahara.”

“Drop the act. Please, stop behaving like a kid. Where should I meet you?” asked Senshogahara, uncouth in the face of my feigned ignorance─like she was telling me, playtime’s over.

“Miss Senshogahara,” I continued my act, my childish behavior─a lie, in a way.

In other words, out of habit─a bad habit.

“Actually, I’ve come to the airport to greet you,” I said.

“Oh really.”

“Since my client has taken the trouble of traveling all the way here, it was the least I could do… Let’s meet in the lobby.”

“Well, well. Your consideration is most welcome. Quite the user-friendly swindler, aren’t you. What a laugh.”

Even without a videophone, Senshogahara’s utterly humorless expression came across loud and clear.

Not a glimmer of this new leaf she had supposedly turned over.

The same woman she’d been two years before.

What the hell was Koyomi Araragi up to─not that I had the faintest idea who Koyomi Araragi might be, but seriously, what was that moron doing?

What was he thinking, letting such a dangerous woman out of his sight?

Then again, maybe something had happened to make the reformed Senjogahara have yet another change of heart─could that something be what she wanted to see me about?

If so. If so…

“I thought for sure you’d flown into Okinawa from somewhere else in Japan yourself. That you’d just arrived at the airport too.”

This made it sound even more like she’d been watching me─a “not that you can know everything” type of intel…

She wasn’t in a position to access ANA’s customer data in such a short time.

So it was probably a shot in the dark, or a cheap shot. With that in mind, I responded calmly, “I have no idea what you’re talking about. I just arrived at the airport on the Naha monorail, if that’s what you mean.”

It’s infinitely easier for me to lie than to tell the truth─most of the time my mouth does the lying for me.

Almost like automatic writing. As phenomena go, a natural phenomenon.

Knowing Oshino, who’s a pro when it comes to seeing through people, and Gaen-senpai like I do, being looked at, being watched, doesn’t ruffle me one bit.

Go ahead, get an eyeful.

I’ll just turn everything you observe about me into a lie─because it’s my pet theory that the so-called “truth” is subject to ready substitution by falsehood.

Pet theory? When the hell did I start keeping a pet?

“Sure, whatever. ‘Lobby’ is a little vague. Can we meet in a coffee shop? There must be at least one in the airport.”

“But of course,” I replied, not at all patronizingly, with the utmost courtesy. It would be difficult to keep up the tone once I was face to face with Senshogahara, though. “Please take a seat in whichever establishment you prefer, have yourself a cup of coffee, and wait there for me. I’ll take it upon myself to come to you.”

“…Should I text you the name of the place I pick?”

“No, no. I wouldn’t want my client to go to such trouble. I’ll make the rounds of the airport’s coffee shops and make myself known to you, so please, Miss Senshogahara, I would be delighted if you had some coffee or a nice, refined cup of tea while you waited for me.”

“But we’ve never met before,” she objected. Whether she was playing along or was just fed up with me, I don’t know, but she seemed to have taken up the act again. “Should we decide on some kind of sign?”

“A fine idea. Please hold your iPhone in your right hand, then.”

“…Just about everyone has an iPhone these days. That won’t help at all.”

“Oh, theirs are just early models.”

A joke, a lame joke. At least it wasn’t sinister.

If I didn’t get off the plane soon they were going to start cleaning around me, so this was no time to be making such jokes, but that’s exactly when I make them.

Oshino used to take me to task for it back when we were in school.

Yes, that Oshino, the last person in the world who ought to be lecturing me. But if it was bad enough that he needed to say something, I have no choice but to admit it, galling as it is.

I thought I had become an adult, but if I was operating on the same conversational level as a high schooler, I had yet to shed my boyishness.

“My cell phone isn’t an iPhone in the first place,” Miss Senshogahara corrected me. “I don’t have a computer at home so I can’t even use one.”

“My goodness, is that so?”

“I’m wearing glasses, that’ll be the sign.”

And with that she hung up.

Wouldn’t even more people be wearing glasses than using iPhones? Wait, did she even wear glasses?

Had her eyesight deteriorated since the last time I saw her thanks to all the exam prep?

Though from what I understand, your eyesight is largely genetically determined anyway. However much you dress it up as “burning the candle at both ends,” it isn’t going to get much worse from studying─and in fact, she must not have been cramming for any entrance exams.

I got through them on shrewdness alone, but even such shrewdness wouldn’t impress Senjogahara. We’re talking about a woman who once argued, or joked, that studying lowers your tension and your grades along with it. Goofing off leads to higher marks or something. Even if she was kidding, and while what I know about her grades is two years out of date, if she continued on the trajectory she was on back then, she could get into basically any college she chose without any preparation at all.

In which case, maybe the glasses thing was some kind of joke as well. She, too, was the type who becomes more prone to telling silly jokes the more dire and unsuited to humor the situation.

Well, this may sound overly self-conscious, but she got that way thanks to me… My personality was slightly too strong a poison for a high school first-year, an adolescent child.

Anyhow, I put my cell phone in my pocket and got off the plane─I had no carry-on luggage. It’s my policy never to carry luggage of any kind.

My person is the sum total of my worldly goods.

I don’t like to carry anything I can’t put in my pocket.

Sometimes the nature of my work calls for more, of course, but in such cases I ultimately, and immediately, dispose of whatever materials I acquired for the job.

Oshino once chided me that my lifestyle was a little extreme, or something to that effect, but again, look who’s talking.

Seriously.

My mood tinged with nostalgia as I cast my mind back to college, I disembarked, going from head in the clouds to feet on the ground─though the nostalgia part is a total lie, of course.