May 2 Kimihiko Kimizuka
“Danny, where are you?!” I yelled into the phone when the call finally went through.
It was late at night. Except for me, there was nobody outside.
“…Hey, you sound pretty stressed.”
On the other end of the line, Danny sounded like his usual easygoing self, but his breathing seemed a little ragged.
We’d talked before, just after midnight, and had planned to meet up that evening. I waited and waited, but Danny never showed up. I’d called his phone again and again, and this was the first time he’d picked up.
“—! What are you doing?! Why didn’t you come?!”
“Ha-ha. I warned you. You can’t let con men fool you, Detective.”
Who’s a detective?! I wanted to shout back at him. My fingers tightened around my phone.
Every so often, I heard something that sounded like a groan. Was he hurt? “I’ll be right there. Danny, where are you?” Even as I asked, I was racing toward the spot on the coast where we’d planned to meet earlier. The black ocean spread out in front of me, unchanging and endless.
“…There’s one thing I need to tell you.”
“The only thing you need to tell me is where you are right now!”
“There’s bound to come a day when you wonder why life refuses to go your way, why it’s so cruel. You’ll lose hope.” Danny didn’t answer my question. He seemed to be speaking from experience. “It won’t matter how happy you were up till then. Maybe you had the best horoscope in the paper that day; maybe you were just picking out a cake for a beloved member of your family. None of that will matter. The devil of misfortune never gives a shit about how it’s supposed to go.”
“…I didn’t know you’d been married.”
“Ha-ha. You never asked.”
It’s not like you would have told me if I had.
“—! When despair comes on the heels of tepid happiness, it hurts like hell.”
Danny’s voice was trembling, but not from emotion. There was something physically wrong with him. Even so, he kept talking.
“You’ll think, ‘I didn’t know life could get so ugly.’ You won’t feel anything as simple as anger or sadness. All you’ll feel is…futility. Emptiness with nowhere to go.”
I’d been running without a break, and my chest was starting to hurt. My legs were still moving, and I could still swing my arms, but my heart and lungs couldn’t keep up, and each breath was a choking gasp.
“Humans are funny, though. When night falls, we get sleepy, and then we wake up in the morning with our stomachs growling. We think, ‘So, what, was that despair even real? Was I just faking? Huh. My body’s still trying to live.’ It’ll make you think survival instincts are a royal pain in the butt. Even so,” Danny went on. “That’s what humans are. No matter how reality refuses to go your way, you’ve gotta keep on living.”
His rant might have been directed at himself or at the world, but in the next moment, his usual dauntless optimism was back.
“Even if you’ve lost one way of life, you can choose a new one. We have to. That’s how we keep living. You get it, don’cha?”
He sounded as if he were lecturing a kid.
“…No, I don’t. I don’t get it.” I was out of breath. My feet caught on the sand, and I finally collapsed.
“Ha-ha. Well, you don’t have to understand right away. Remember what I told you earlier, though. Someday, you’ll—”
Just then, I heard other voices on his end of the line. One woman, and a man who wasn’t Danny. Who was it? Who was there with him?
“…Sorry. Time’s up, I guess.”
“What are you talking about?! Danny!”
“Listen up, Kimihiko.” For the first time I could remember, Danny said my name. And then…
“You…live on.”
Live on.
Right after that, a gunshot rang out.
That was the last time I heard Danny’s real voice. Three days before my birthday.
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