KAKERU
The transparent world.
He will try to write about it later, many times, in notebooks he hasn't been given yet. The closest he will get is this:
Imagine that everything invisible
becomes visible.
Not the particles —
the relationships between things.
Every choice and its consequence.
Every thread running forward
into what hasn't happened yet
and backward
into what already has.
Time does not move here.
It simply is.
All of it.
At once.
Like a chord
instead of a melody.
Every note sounding
simultaneously.
He stands in the middle of it and his mind does what it always does with something too large for ordinary processing: it goes very quiet and very focused and he simply looks.
The threads are everywhere. Some thick and bright — the threads of certainty, of things decided by the accumulated weight of everything before. Some thin and barely there — the possibilities, the connections that depend on choices not yet made. Every person has them. The full visible structure of a life, past and future and the sideways connections that make you who you are.
Nine years. He has been theorizing about this for nine years and the theory is real. The fabric is real. The frequency is real. All of—
The wormhole opens without warning.
He falls through moments that are not his — a desert village, a burning house, a child with yellow hair, a man at a piano — and then the world solidifies and he lands in a specific moment and the smell of the river is exactly the smell of every spring of his childhood and the quality of the light is the exact blue he has spent ten years trying to remember accurately.
April 2001. Kofu. Twenty meters ahead of him: his family.
✦
His mother is holding a bag of snacks. His father is reading a label with the focused expression he brought to small decisions. Between them, Hana — yellow dress, uneven pigtails, pulling both their hands toward two different things simultaneously.
And off to the side, nose pressed against the store window: himself at seven. Looking at something inside.
The accident is three minutes away. He knows this not from the threads — though the threads confirm it — but from somewhere older. From the body that was there.
He runs.
He grabs his father's arm. Solid. Real. Warm through the jacket.
"The road," he says. "Please. Don't cross it. Not for five minutes. Please."
His father looks at a stranger who is gripping his arm. Begins to pull away.
"Please," Kakeru says, and everything in the word — ten years, the empty hand, the approximate laugh — comes through.
His father stills.
They wait. Hana looks up at the crying stranger. "You were crying," she says.
"I know," he says.
The car comes through at speed. The intersection is empty. The fabric shifts. The transparent world opens beneath him and takes him back.