Chapter 17 - Clues from Mecchen House (cont.)
Carolyn set the broom aside. “It works for some people. But I always felt out of place. Do you feel out of place with it?”
Kimi let her palm slide through the locks and brought them in front. Both her hands wrapped around the other. “I loathe it. I feel uncomfortable, wrong, and violated by what happened to me. I’ve given up fighting and yelling about it until I can find the right place to strike. That doesn’t mean I’ve accepted it. This form is not me. It’s a grotesque perversion of me. And all signs tell me that it’ll get even worse…”
Carolyn plopped down on a barber chair, his hair jostled like a settling octopus.
“Which signs?” He took a few pieces of colorful gum out of his pocket and popped them in his mouth.
I decided it wasn’t worth it to hover around, since our feet would be tired by the end of the day. So, I sat. Kimi soon settled into the chair next to me a moment later.
I brought up the figurines, one of the most vivid memories I had left of our ‘home’ world, along with the desolate streets before the path.
Carolyn seemed to understand where I was leading this and remarked, “If you have some evidence that this world is the same one we all remember, please say.”
“I don’t exactly have evidence but I had this vision, and we’ve had experiences and little clues along the way which seem to be pointing in that direction,” I replied.
I took time to detail the vision for Carolyn. He listened carefully, only turning the barber chair a little. Kimi listened as well. I went into more detail than I was allowed when Ms. Ishida was near. I slipped in mentions of new events and a little bit about the dark ‘meanies’ and finished with our speculation on the bookmark recipe.
Coincidentally enough, as soon as I was done, a new patron entered and asked for a trim. His hair already looked like a close-cropped buzz-cut with Nana’s coloration. Kimi flashed him a glare and folded her arms.
The man seemed stern and serious. He asked for a trim. Carolyn appeared confused but polite. The scissors snipped along his head in a few places. Carolyn sprayed a little and, almost as soon as he’d started, it was done. The man didn’t seem particularly happy or upset, the drawn lines of his face did wrinkle like he’d smelled something unpleasant. He merely paid with a fair tip and left.
Carolyn walked around the chair. He didn’t seem much interested in the sparse, web-like hairs the man had left behind. He held the back of the chair and turned to look at us.
“I considered that particular theory. I actually had a dream once which… I suppose it could be related, depending on how you look at it. I mean if dreams could be significant now, it’s possible there was warning of what was about to happen. You wanna hear it?”
Neither of us gave any objection.
Carolyn began, leaning his head against the back of the barber chair, “It happened… at least a week ago. But then… who knows what time is in this place? I was getting an ice cream. I didn’t have a particular gender in the dream. I felt somewhat androgynous. There were a lot of cute boys around though, and I sorta blushed when I passed them by. I didn’t get to the ice cream shop because I turned this one corner and saw a girl with raspberry-toned hair hugging a tall, brown-haired boy. He shivered and squirmed in her grasp. When she released him, they were both a little different. She had lighter hair, and he had become a girl with dark hair and quite a figure. The girl with pink hair led him away, and the new girl didn’t seem to object. I looked around. There were girls everywhere.
“Some dove for boys. Others chased after them. And the amount of girls rapidly increased. This one, far back, looked strange and blurry. It’s like when you quickly turn a kaleidoscope. She looked like about ten different girls at once. Most of them were shimmering-white. She looked tired, but she still zipped along. The trees seemed to curl and shudder around her like she was moving at high speed. The girls froze as she passed them by. She darted around, keeping them from advancing.
“I tried to work my way around the exuberant crowd. I came to the ice cream shop, opened the door, and realized it was full of those cute girls. They turned to look at me. They had this predatory glint in their eyes. I held my hands up, and the window behind me exploded. That’s when I woke up.”
He swiveled the chair around when he was done and glanced at us. Kimi slapped her knees and remarked, “Before it gets forgotten, could you try cutting my hair again?”
A flash of sly Carolyn peeked out of his wistful mood. “Want something fashionable, missy? A pretty look for a new guy in your life? Personally, I think you look really nice with what you have. I’m truly surprised it wound up so long.”
Kimi stood. “My name is Jamie!”
Carolyn spun the chair. “Which is still a girl’s name.”
“What’s it to you?”
Carolyn stood from the chair and let it spin a little on its own. “Nothing. Just testing your reactions.”
Jamie stood with her back straight. “As you can see, I’m still the manliest one of all. Arisu there and Keiko may have given in to the softer side, but I will never relinquish myself to whatever it is that presumes to call us its sisters. Screw that! Though it may tempt me, I will never concede defeat!” Her voice just got squeakier and squeakier as she spoke.
Carolyn put a few combs away in a wooden drawer. “So, the three of you all have girlie names now? Who gave you those?”
Jamie answered for me, “Some crazy, lesbian weirdo girl named Katsumi Something at Mecchen House. But that geek girl Nana told her what to put. I’m convinced she’s somehow at the center of this. Either this whole ‘Hitomi’ business is some sort of extension of herself or someone who talked to her through all those crazy contraptions she has. She may not be the one pulling the strings, but I figure she’s a willing pawn!”
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Carolyn shrugged and asked Jamie, “How can you tell if I’m any less a pawn than her? I mean if there is a force that can utterly control the structure of this universe, then it can do anything it wants, at any time.”
I pointed out the recipe. “It seems that it needs to do things in a particular order, in a particular way. It needs to work carefully and lightly. Like how you can’t force a stew to cook just by turning up the heat. You have to be patient and add the right ingredients to bring about the right results.”
Carolyn tapped his lip. “So then… maybe whatever this thing is… it can control the major factors, but it can’t control where anything and everything will go. Same as you can’t control which way ingredients will move in a pot. Sure, you can dip your stirrer in, but you can’t say ‘Meat! Stay here!’”
His eyes looked a little brighter. “Do you know what this means?”
I had an inkling, but Jamie made his feelings clear. “No. Can you cut my hair now?”
He smirked and said, “As soon as you tell me what name your renaming duo picked out for you, blondie.” He turned to me. “I figure you’ll appreciate this more. But that means, as things stand, most of the people around you aren’t necessarily under the control of this supposed presence.”
It was supposition to be sure but it made me feel a little less suspicious of everyone around me. Jamie fanned her locks in irritation. Carolyn did acknowledge that it was a tenuous claim at best, but told me, “Let us assume for a moment the recipe-maker is like a whisper or a gentle push. Oh! Like blowing on it!”
Something clicked for me and I said, “Nana makes me think of a whisper. And… there is this strange wind that comes and goes. Could it be… somehow… that the wind is an outlet for this presence?”
Carolyn shrugged. Jamie had given up on trying to get Carolyn’s attention and just took a pair of shears from the counter and tried to snip off some of her hair. The hair only crinkled under the force of the sharp metal.
Jamie growled, “And yet it keeps our hair from being cut!”
Carolyn barely seemed to be listening to what Jamie said, as he added, “I have a theory for that as well. But yes, something has to work carefully. It is a recipe after all. It can control some aspects. But the rest is planning. You plan and prepare a recipe as much as you can, with expectations of what will happen. But there will always be factors you can’t control. If there were no outward signs of mysterious intrusions, I’d say that everything was prepared. But, since there are, it must be that it can’t control everything. Or it… because of how everything is set up… has to give up some control for what it wants. And what it wants… seems to be, the reincarnation of its siblings through you, Jamie, and Keiko. Mmm, I still love that name. It fits… Keiko.”
Jamie huffed and folded her arms. “That doesn’t mean whatever higher-being has things right!”
Carolyn shrugged. “Does it matter? All that seems to matter to it is the result. And it seems, one way or another, you three will become its sisters, whether you were meant to or not.”
We stood in silence. The wind wasn’t blowing. If something was guiding us through the force of the wind, then I would expect it to want to do something about all these revelations. It would shut up Carolyn or prevent us from speculating. Unless…
I had to say it.
“Then how do we know that what happens isn’t just part of some plan? What if it wants you to say all this… or it doesn’t matter to it if you say things, because it knows that won’t affect the final result?”
Carolyn snapped his fingers and pointed at me with a wry grin. “Clever girl. I think that is exactly the case. Now, if you want to wreck this recipe, you have to find something it really doesn’t want you to do and do that a lot. Assuming you want to wreck it.”
Jamie tossed the shears down on the table. “Of course, we do! I don’t want to be the brainwashed, crazy spirit kin of some crazy spirit! I want to be me! I want my home back. It can’t take it away from us.”
Something tumbled on the other side of the counter. Jamie jumped away.
Carolyn sighed. “You always did have a knack for making a mess of things.”
I mused on Carolyn’s idea. Would whatever this was allow us to do something to wreck all this? How would we know which things it didn’t like? Would the wind tell us? But what if the wind used some sort of reverse-psychology to make us want to do the opposite when we were really playing into what it wanted?
I held my head.
“How can we possibly know what will upset the recipe and enable us to put the world back the way it was?”
Carolyn leaned over an empty, off-white package. “Well, that assumes what the recipe-maker is going to do is bad. I consider myself rather well-off. I’ve found most people in this world to be happy. Sure, we still have wars and violence, but I’ve never seen anything bad happen around here, so I’ve always sort of wondered if it was only on TV to keep up appearances. Humanity is imperfect and therefore expects an imperfect world. Or at least the appearance of one.”
Jamie tugged a bit on her hair, trying again to pull from the roots. “Humph. Synthetic worlds… I only liked the first movie in that series. Besides, The Matrix didn’t have any cartoon girls. And I don’t see any creepy Agents. Thank good… OW!” She had no success with pulling this time either.
Carolyn seized hold of something from behind the box and pulled out a brown turtle. It looked like a dirty tank with splayed legs. Carolyn turned it over in his hands and remarked, “I don’t remember ever buying this. Do you think it could be some sort of clue?”
Before he could say anything else, Jamie took it from his hands and turned it over a few times. “If it’s a clue then it’s the second ugliest one I’ve seen since…”
She didn’t say anything else. Her eyes glossed over.
I yelled, “KIMI!,” without even thinking about it.
Her feet crumpled from under her, and she slipped to the ground in an unconscious heap.