Monogatari Series - Volume 13 - Chapter 1.10

010

When I got back to my seat, Senjogahara had removed her Groucho glasses. I assumed she’d taken it off temporarily so she could wipe off the coffee that was all over her face, and once it was off, had come to her senses and said no. She maintained her cool, though, giving no hint of any such inner conflict or the fact that she’d had coffee thrown in her face.

“I’ll do it,” I said, sitting down.

Did my voice sound too high, or odd in any way? I was a little worried, but there was no point in worrying, and it might start sounding even odder if I became self-conscious, so I gave up thinking about it. Lazily.

If I was agitated, then I was agitated, no big deal.

I knew full well this was unlike me.

“You’ll do…” Senjogahara eyed me suspiciously. I understood how she felt, all too well. I was flabbergasted, myself. “…what?”

“The job. What else? The god-conning job, I’m doing it.”

“Are you in your right mind?”

This was rude of her, but again, I understood how she felt. No other word for it. I totally agreed with her on the subject.

“I am in my right mind. Now hand over the hundred thou you said you could pay upfront.”

“…”

Senjogahara removed a manila envelope from her bag and laid it on the table, not even bothering to hide her acute unease.

I checked the contents. Ten 10,000-yen notes, indeed. No newspaper or anything mixed in.

…Like anyone would try that in this day and age.

“Good. This will do.”

“No, that’s just the down payment…a deposit─”

“I’m telling you this is enough,” I said. Forcefully. “If I actually demanded a commensurate sum for this job, you’d come up short even if you sold yourself. However gruelingly you toiled. I’m taking this cash just to cover my expenses. I’m resigned to working for free, but I don’t want to take a loss, either. If my expenses exceed 100,000 yen, I’ll bill you for the rest, all right?”

“But that’s… That’s…”

I surmised that Senjogahara’s apparent hesitation came less from a sense of guilt at using me so cheaply, and more from a deep desire not to be in my debt.

Well, she was right to be wary.

But I had no intention of getting into a debate about it. One conversational misstep and there was a real danger that I would change my mind. Despite what I said or how I may have acted earlier, if things went the wrong way I was liable to tell her to get me the money even if that meant prostituting herself.

That’s how little I trusted in my own humanity.

I trusted myself even less than she did.

In order to convince Senjogahara, or rather, to wrap things up quickly, I considered fudging the whole issue and manipulating her emotions with a little lip service (“I couldn’t bear for you two to die”? Or no, something trendier, like “I’m not doing this for you”), but that strategy seemed doomed to fail, so I abandoned it.

This is just my personal opinion, but women tend to hate lip service even more than men do. Probably because women are in a position to be coerced by it more often.

So they know how ugly pretty words can be.

Instead I decided to put the kibosh on any more talk about money. Take a good look because it’s the first and last time you’ll ever see me doing that. “It’s fine, just drop it. It’s settled, end of discussion. All I will accept from you is this hundred thousand for expenses, and nothing more. Should they be greater, I will bill you separately. In the event that some money remains unused after the job has been brought to a satisfactory conclusion, I will keep the rest and not bother you with any detailed accounting. I will accept the job only under these terms.”

“…Agreed.”

Amidst a heady brew of dissatisfied reluctance, Senjogahara ultimately acquiesced─considered apart from any humanity I may or may not possess, these were unmistakably sweet terms.

Hence her caution, I suppose. There was no question she’d been grasping at straws when she’d gotten in touch with me, she’d had nothing to lose─so she should count herself lucky.

Well, whether she had grasped at straws or drawn the short straw didn’t concern me, and either way, I wasn’t guaranteeing success.

Although this flies in the face of my earlier boast, to be something close to honest about how I really felt, I was saying that I would but not that I could─I’d deceived countless people since the day I first pulled one over on my kindergarten teacher, but I had yet to dupe a god.

“Okay then…if I may explain the situation in detail─”

“I’d rather not hear the details from the horse’s mouth, actually. I don’t work like Oshino, you see─taking personal feelings and circumstances into account makes things too complicated,” I said, taking the sunglasses, which I had completely forgotten about, from where they were hanging on my Hawaiian shirt and putting them on again.

I didn’t go so far as to tell her that her take on this case would be too subjective, but it’s my oft-repeated pet theory that a partisan view of things isn’t any good.

This is perhaps another difference between Oshino and me. I’m not saying he’s partisan, but he does value every individual’s standpoint and avoids taking too objective a stance.

We haven’t seen each other in a while, so I don’t know if that still holds true.

“I’ll investigate the details and the particulars myself. I’ve got a general grasp of the situation from the broad strokes you’ve given me thus far.”

In fact I had no grasp of anything, I was fumbling in the dark, but it was better to leave her with this false impression of confidence. Better to make her think I was reliable─I didn’t need her trust, but if I couldn’t get her to leave things to me to a certain degree, I couldn’t do my job.

Having kids underfoot while you’re working is a real nuisance as it is.

“There are a few things I would like to clarify, though─do you mind?”

“G-Go ahead.”

Senjogahara nodded but seemed to have lost some of her composure─she probably felt apprehensive because things were going so smoothly for her. Basically, just like two years ago, she had an extremely low tolerance for happiness and good fortune.

She was tough in the face of adversity, but that was as far as it went.

Such people are surprisingly common: they can get by in society no problem, but they’ll never become a success.

I mulled over her future. Even if she survived this, what might the future hold for her? Not that it had anything to do with me.

Not that I gave a shit.

“Are you positive that we have seventy-four days left? There’s that saying of ours about gossip lasting seventy-five days… But that count includes today, correct?”

“Yes─the Naoetsu High graduation ceremony is on March fifteenth. That afternoon, in other words after the ceremony, Araragi and I, and Shinobu Oshino, not even permitted to celebrate, will get killed.”

“This is definite? Absolutely definite? Might not Her Godliness lose patience and decide to kill you right now, for instance?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Why? To put it in stark terms, you, and probably Araragi as well, are attempting to ensure your own survival, whether through me or via some other plan. That must not sit well with a god. You can’t rule out the possibility that she might bring you both to a bad end in a fit of rage before the appointed day.”

I was dubious that this god was going to keep her promise just because she was a god, but Senjogahara declared, “I can rule it out. I can definitely rule it out. Nadeko Sengoku could not be any angrier than she already is─at this very moment. But Araragi and I are still alive. Which means she at least intends to keep her promise. She was at the peak of her anger when she made the promise, to begin with.”

“Okay, that’s what I want to ask you most. It’s the one thing I need to hear from your own lips. What the hell did you, the two of you, do to incur the wrath of Nadeko Sengoku? What did you do to warrant a death sentence?”

If I had victimized her, however indirectly, and that fact had fed into the present situation, shouldn’t she kill yours truly instead? No, if contracting a mysterious ailment and becoming a god, a great achievement you might say, was something that made this middle school kid happy, then maybe she ought to be grateful to me─but I found it a little hard to believe that a god would bother to kill a particular human being, let alone give advance notice.

For instance, destroying the Kyoto shrine I visited earlier that day might invite divine punishment, but surely I wouldn’t be struck dead.

So why?

Why were Senjogahara and Araragi going to get killed?

Killed by Nadeko Sengoku?

“I,” answered Senjogahara─or strictly speaking, didn’t answer─concluding her sentence with, “…don’t know.”

“Hey, hey. How can you not know?”

“I really don’t know. I mean, of course, how can I put this… There were things that might have caused it, failures, misconceptions, misunderstandings, mistakes, but…I’m not sure how we could really end up here because of them… There must be something behind the scenes that totally belies the way Araragi and I see it… I stole that idea from Miss Hanekawa, though.”

Hanekawa again. I tried once more to picture her but only conjured up an image of enormous breasts. Fearsome.

“Anyway, just to give you a jumping-off point, think of it as a romantic snafu. Before Nadeko Sengoku became a god, she had a crush on Araragi, but he had a girlfriend─that kind of thing.”

“…And what a vulgar thing it is,” I opined. I’m not sure if it was my honest reaction. I have a feeling that I did find it vulgar, and also a feeling that I didn’t. “Fine. That’s plenty. I’ll look into it on my own─but just to be sure… This goes without saying, so saying it feels stupid, but this time is an exception, right?”

“Huh? Exception?”

“Come on. I’m asking if it’s okay for me to set foot in your town. You can’t possibly be asking me to do this remotely, like some armchair detective─because I wouldn’t know an armchair if it came up and bit me on the ass.”

“Of course, obviously. This case is an exception, or let’s say, special, so feel free…but be careful. Plenty of people have a score to settle with you. Make sure you don’t end up as a John Doe who got viciously beaten to death by middle schoolers.”

Terrifying words, my lady. I was already leaving beautiful Okinawa for snow country, and her warning did not add to my enthusiasm.

I was relieving my Hawaiian shirt of its post, for sure. Oshino wears the things all year round… Must be the Endless Summer in that head of his. More Brazil, you might say, than Hawaii.

“This is also obvious,” added Senjogahara, “but please don’t let Araragi see you.”

“Hmph…right. Well, I don’t want to see him either. Araragi is one thing, but that loli slave of his is liable to kill me.”

Did I also need to watch out for his little sister? Karen, the girl with the ponytail─though she wouldn’t necessarily have one now.

“Okay. I’ll begin my investigation right away─but I don’t want you thinking this will be over in a day or two, Senjogahara. Not that I intend to take the full seventy-four, but expect it to take at least a month.”

“Sure. I’m ready for a long campaign. Or it’s already been a long campaign. Still, I’ll take the liberty of remaining in frequent contact. I may have commissioned you, but trusting you completely is, for me, an impossibility.”

“That’s fine. Don’t trust me. Be suspicious,” I said, before trying to drain my coffee cup at a gulp. I’d forgotten that it was empty since I’d thrown the contents in Senjogahara’s face. Remembering my claim to be vacationing in Okinawa, I muttered, “I guess my stay here ends today,” as I began to hatch my plans.

Hatch… What was I, a mother hen?

We’ll say a bit of fowl play suited me fine.

“I should be able to catch a flight that puts me in your town before the end of the day…but best if we took different ones. It’d be no joke if Araragi learned we’d been on the same plane.”

“Yeah, totally. By the way, Kaiki.”

“What?”

“Um…think you could lend me the plane fare home?”