Chapter 3:

Present, Future, Memory

***

Her eyes snapped open, and stared unfocused at the darkness ahead of her. Even in the deepest folds of her modest futon, it was freezing. Without hesitation, even in her waking delirium, Kaori threw her covers aside and clambered to her feet. She walked a few meters over to the kerosene heater, knelt, grabbed the matchbox lying next to it, and put the flame of a struck match to the wick. With skill and just a bit of luck, the space heater granted her a little motivating warmth instead of a faceful of cold, black smoke. She rubbed her hands together, and gave the heater a slight smile of gratitude.

Breakfast. Spare, bordering austere, with more than a few leftovers thrown in, but enough of it to do what needed to be done today. There was milking, there was feeding and grooming... there was a heifer soon to give birth, she would need special attention and care, she had been seemingly strangely listless these days... they’d need to run and to graze, and she had to bale some hay and...

The sun cycle went in fast-forward, the day slipped by along the ceaseless progression of tasks like these. Kaori--no one called her Kaorin nowadays--shared these duties with ten other women. They all lived in a sort of dormitory that they had customized for their partitioned cohabitation. Kaori was at least cordial and often gregarious among the women she worked with, but she lived alone, in her own separate quarters, a humble and considerably smaller construction.

At the end of a day like today, Kaori was typically achy and sleepy, but despite it she was always eager to engage in some of her cherished hobbies, which were chosen from a limited set and intended to satisfyingly occupy her especially limited free time.

Tonight, she would engage in amateur astronomy, leaving her lily-colored literary fancies aside for the night.

Stargazing was possible in rural Hokkaido to an extent that it had never been in the deliriously light-polluted city where she dwelled for her childhood and adolescence exclusively. The meager lighting in these parts only weakly dimmed the formidable sea of luminous pinpricks swirling through the crowded skies, and there was so much loveliness that Kaorin could see even through her thrifty binoculars and unremarkable telescope.

Tonight was marvelously clear. She had brought along a little flashlight, and a notebook to record her observations and track her progress in. She had packed a little... snack. Yes, a snack, of sorts. A little... brain food, let's say. Some mushrooms in a plastic baggy. They were horrendously bitter, but she still munched on them, slowly, and with great relish.

Her body digested the mushrooms. The mushrooms passed into her, and imbued her with their curious properties. The sky above her was minute by minute becoming more and more beautiful before her scarcely-believing eyes. It was so full of patterns, but not only patterns: *textures*, Kaori thought with inspired delusion, textures and glimmering hues, blurring and sharpening and a deep, thick darkness with immeasurable breadth and no bottom, an esoteric realm of twinkling souls and shimmering wishes where infinite mystery held court in perpetuity, over the gently raised hill she stargazed from atop of. As the wonder of the studded veil above transfixed her, she consulted her references by beam of flashlight, eyes dilated with pure and simple bewonderment while she peered keenly through delicate lenses and recorded artfully meandering notes, recorded the breathless ecstasy of her awestruck mind.

Yes, it's true she was on drugs, yes, this was her favorite thing to do, and it was never a problem for her and it never became a problem, even though psilocybin mushrooms, which can readily be grown inconspicuously by the cleverly industrious, were made illegal in Japan in 2002, the same year that she graduated. (The same year that she first tried them.)

In these reminisces, Kaori thought about the skies she’d seen--the suburban view from her early life which was a meager approximation of the humbling spectacle before her, the empty sky of reflected earthlight that suffocated her in urban Tokyo--and she daydreamed about Chinese constellations and little stories and superstitions associated with the stars, she imagined the luminosity of the stars up close, imagined their raging heat, imagined their spectacular deaths and the clouds of hot rainbow that they leave behind in their rebirth, she flashed back to an old New Year's dream, was confronted by the aggressive presence of a mad feline spirit--and, in a moment of vulnerability and heady, bitter nostalgia, she thought back to the origin of her prized, persistent hobby...

First-year high school, sutaato! She could feel her mom practically *shoving* her out the door. Oh, Kaorin! her mom always badgered her like that, Oh Kaorin, don't forget, Kaorin, you've got to try and be a part of something, make sure you listen to what your teachers and senpais are telling you, make sure to pick a club, you got to pick a club, it just wouldn’t do to join the go-homers club. And Kaorin would always relent... ok mom, whatever you say mom, ill join a club, i dont know what kind of club, i dont even really know what im good at or what i like or what IM like i can’t do sports clubs (not by preference but by inability), i cant do art clubs (not by preference but inability), cant do academic clubs, im not really "student council" and all of this is BORING, boring boring boring, insipid insidious insufferable, better pick something, oh pick anything. oh fine. this one. this whatever. astronomy? is that fine with you mother? does that meet with your approval? does it really? fine. great. okay. okay.

She was coasting, like she really always had been, she had coasted along to a seemingly meaningless decision, but at least she’d gone with something. Done slightly above the bare minimum. The club was okay. The work was tedious and sometimes uncomfortable, but at least it was something.

And then, after very little time had passed, in response to the slightest coincidental impetus, that attitude changed. The whole meaning of the endeavor was suddenly transformed completely. Oh, of course it had changed. By the strongest possible means it had been made to change. Everything in her entire life had been made to change, because of one trivial decision and what came of it. Because by chance one night, some forgettable-now-forgotten clubmate of hers had, apparently without even asking, brought along an equally forgettable guest and the sponsoring teacher, who was forgettable, had explained to the rest of the club that it would be okay for them to bring guests who were interested in learning a little bit about the cosmos.

A guest?

Huh. A guest... Who would... Oh.

Somehow she didn't have to puzzle. Somehow she knew exactly who it needed to be.

Her.

HER! HER!! HER!!! THAT GIRL!!! THAT REALLY TALL AND BRUSQUE AND COOL SEEMING ONE FROM MY CLASS!!! said Kaorin's instincts, oh so urgently to Kaorin.

Kaorin, or Kaorin's instincts, rather, had thought of a guest. She wasn't forgettable like all her other clubmates and so many of her classmates and teachers. No, hers was the unforgettable face that had been popping into her mind repeatedly and intrusively since the school year began. She couldn't get her out of her mind. She had to get close to this girl. And so it was that she resolved herself, quite recklessly by her standards, to risk everything and ask mystery incarnate, the raven-haired goddess with ever-distant eyes, whose name was Sakaki, if she’d like to come out for a night of skywatching with the astronomy club.

Oh, Sakaki... majestic Sakaki, immaculate Sakaki, Sakaki, unreachably distant...

Sakaki was, to Kaorin’s self-ignorant eye, everything that Kaorin herself was not and could never be. That which could be desired yet never attained. Athletic, of an imposing height and build, and with a cool, reticent demeanor that seemed to suggest that in her after-school hours she led some obscure movie-like life of sukeban streetfighting and bad-girl acts of valor. Sakaki’s praises were regularly sung in the secret annals of popularity and attractiveness ranking discussions at the school, and not just by the boys (who seemed, not by coincidence as it would turn out, to end up ever distant from her notice or interest, a fact for which Kaorin never once failed to feel gratitude for.) Kaorin herself was only slightly closer than the boys, in this early era at least, still yet firmly situated on the periphery of Sakaki’s awareness or care. She was at least granted that slighter closeness, that cursory admittance--close enough to know she had a small circle of female friends, close enough to glimpse her unspoken, image-compromising affinity for all things cute, but never close enough to know, to bond with, to do anything except passingly admire in the locker room. This was the chance to change that. She had to take it.

It was from this awkward, close-yet-distant kind of position that Kaori found herself posing the question to Sakaki. This was the hardest question that she had maybe ever had to ask in her life.. And when she asked, when she finally asked in the form of a meandering, half-apologetic soliloquy, whether Sakaki would maybe accompany her to an evening field trip to see the stars, when she finally asked Sakaki just stared at her for a few moments in silence. This was terror. What did it mean? Oh heaven, what did it MEAN!? Sakaki’s eyes were so, so dark, and so piercingly direct, and she was so cool, like ice, and smooth, like glass, (and maybe a little soft?) and surely Kaori was disgracefully stepping out of her bounds, and surely Sakaki was... wasn't... I mean there was no way...

In the moment where Kaorin sought to vocalize a readymade excuse to pardon Sakaki from attendance to the event of her surely rude and unsolicited invitation, she felt something very strange inside her. Do you know what a tuning fork is? It's a fork that vibrates. And here she was, indeed vibrating from the intense anxiety placed upon her at one of her life's great forked crossroads. She could feel... her own failure. Feel another Kaorin, another her, spiraling towards the abyss, yowling in misery as she hurtled towards the bleakest, darkest, most Sakaki-less future. She felt resentment. She felt anger, even. Stubborn, unyielding rage. "No! Not me! Not this time! Not this freaking time, Kaorin!" No, no, no! She wasn’t! She was not! She was NOT going to apologize, she was NOT going to hem or haw, she was NOT going to self-deny, she was...

She was...

She was going to *insist* for once.

“Please, even though it’s a huge imposition, Sakaki-san, the night sky is actually pretty amazing and, to put it bluntly, you’re denying yourself a part of our... our um... our celestial birthright if you deny yourself an experience like this!”

Sakaki was silent for a moment more. Kaori writhed in pure agony while also standing still and forcing a friendly slightly eager smile.

“Celestial birthright...? Ahh. Sure, Kaorin.”
“Haha, that’s fine, I’m sorry to have bothered y--” Ahh...??

Her hair started frizzing up. Her eyes went pure white. Her mouth expanded to unknown frontiers of awestruck wideness as realization inexpressibly dawned.

Sure?? As in, surely? As in, YES?!

Sure, Kaorin?? Sure KAORIN?? Not Aida-san, not Kaori, but Kaorin?? Sure, her friends called her that, but to speak with such familiarity, and at such a critical juncture...
“C-Come again?”
“...I want to go.”
Sakaki’s eyes were inscrutable still, but they yielded what Kaori was somehow certain was a crucial and unmistakable clue: She wasn’t kidding. She was serious. She was genuinely interested in sacrificing time and sleep and going to a meeting of this stupid club with this weirdo who was having a full-blown internal meltdown in front of her.

What was the event itself like? Life-changing? Was it really okay to say that about a few hours standing shoulder to shoulder, excitedly indicating star-patterns and speaking of distance, heat, magnitude and luminosity to her handsome, taciturn companion? Yes, it must be okay to, because it was.

Life-changing. The sporadic shining holes in the mild darkness above had never looked so lovely. Kaori would, from that day, never again be anything but a fervent lover of the twilit sky, an avid quaffer of infinite draughts from its bottomless well of sheer wonder.

Sakaki...

She tried not to think outside of this memory too much. There were some bright points, but no happy endings. Letting her mind wander unchecked through her memories was especially dangerous in her current state. If she thought about it too much, thought too much about her high school days, and her old friends, and the girl she would probably always love but never be close to... then she'd remember all the painful parts, she'd remember the fear and the loss, she... she couldn't...

She couldn't be bothered to deal with all that. She had made love to and dated several women since her high school days of antiquity, thank you very much. Just because she had been single for years and was still heartbroken over a dumb high school crush, didn't mean it was all bad. Here was her universe. Here was infinite beauty, here was peace and comfort. Tonight she would sleep well, and tomorrow she would show her co-workers her brightest smile.

Her writing hand cold and cramping, Kaori withdrew from her scribbling and her lenses and spread out face-up on the blanket beneath her. The undulating vision of the heavens wavered before her silently for what seemed like forever and ever.

Then a feeling of ill omen came sweeping in like an unpleasant chilly wind.

The cows were lowing. Their voices were filled with agitation and sorrow. Something was wrong at the barn... Kaori snapped instantly out of her warm fugue and back into cold reality. She scrambled to her feet. Leaving her setup entirely behind, she rushed to the barn and hurled the door open.

That chorus of distress coming from the cows amplified, and she stepped into the midst of it. Gazing up and down the aisles of pens, she saw a cow head in every expected place, bobbing and ebbing with every emotive emission it produced.

Except one.

When she saw the collapsed middle-aged heifer on the floor of her pen, a complex mixture of emotions bubbled up from the depths of her heart. One part of the mixture was empathy. She’d had more than her share of rough times on the farm, and cows were like people, in that many of them were difficult, willful, capricious, and hard to handle, but after putting in her time on the farm, she’d gone from regarding the creatures with a mild distancing disgust to loving each and every cow that came to be on the farm. There were fifty heads of cattle to love, and the sight of even a single one in pain or danger rent her heart to shreds.

The other ingredient, however, was different. Was a cold, economic, self-centered feeling. This feeling made her calculate. Living was very tight on the small cooperative amongst far larger rivals. It is not like the indie milk game in Hokkaido was ultra hot in this era. So the health and well-being of each and every cow, the assurance of its steady and abundant milk production throughout a long, fruitful lifespan, these made the difference between survival and complete destruction. What then? Work on another farm? Could all eleven of them even get hired full-time somewhere else? Could Kaorin get hired full-time and support herself alone on the wages into retirement?

It was a panic-driven decision, then, but it was the only decision to make. Kaorin went into the cow's pen, tended to the cow, listened to its laborious breaths, sought some intuitive assurance that the cow she loved, and the asset her survival needed, would not slip away in the time it took to go do what she needed to do.

She scrambled back to the dorm, she woke everybody up and had a few go tend to the ill. She had a couple make breakfast and tea for everyone, since urgency demanded the day begin.

She went to go make some phone calls.

Life is but a long sob story.