8

Humans are such forgetful creatures. The course of normal life makes us forget all sorts of things, regardless of the time since their occurrence. Even events and memories that you’re convinced you’ll never forget are destined to one day be forgotten.

So, although I admit I may simply be deceiving myself, if enough time had passed without incident, I could have been capable of forgetting about that girl.

It was a very shocking memory, not likely to be quickly forgotten, but if it was followed by a long string of my daily, peaceful life, it certainly never would have developed into trauma.

But that was not how the cards fell.

The event was followed by something, but not my daily, peaceful life. In fact, what followed is what we would consider the main story of this book. The event that morning was only the beginning. I know that might sound like I’m downplaying the tragedy of a little girl getting ripped to pieces, but let me be honest: I think that anyone, no matter how noble, would feel more pain from getting a scrape then from another person dying. I don’t think I’m a particularly selfish or self-absorbed person for saying that. I also don’t think it’s hypocritical to be honest about that reality, and although there’s a part of me that sees virtue in such self-sacrifice, I don’t think it’s possible to fully live that virtue out.

It was about a week after the event, or somewhere around then. I don’t remember the exact timing, but it’s frankly not worth expanding on the time in between. What followed was so impactful that it really weakens everything around it, not to mention I’m adding a somewhat intentional blurring of the facts for the sake of this non-fiction narrative.

To put things in perspective, the traffic accident in which the little girl lost her life was a sad tragedy, but was still very much an accident. It was handled with consideration to the Road Traffic Act, and although the sentence was adjusted due to the fact that the girl had crossed during a red traffic signal, due to the severity of the damage alone the driver was incarcerated with other traffic-related criminals. Despite all that, the incident was still ruled as an accident. The lives of the driver, his family, the girl, and her family were greatly altered, but we must consider that there was no hostility, no malice, and no ill will in the incident. It was an accident.

But what followed, what happened to me, was not like that. In fact, I shouldn’t even be wording what followed as something that “happened to” me. It was not a passive “happening”, like a natural disaster or cataclysm.

Yes, it was no accident. It was an incident.

As I’ve said many times already, I need to be vague with the details. You might think I’m overthinking or being too sensitive, but I would run the risk of unintentionally hurting the people involved in this incident. I’m quite certain I was the person who was hurt the most throughout the incident, but I still must be considerate of other people. If anything, my lack of sensitivity to the pain of others makes it all the more important that I stay considerate of them.

If I were to forget my station, that my life is precariously balanced as one among a society, I would bring about my ruin. The curtains would fall on my life. So, even if it may be viewed as excessive, I will take the utmost caution in my presentation.

With all that said (the following sentence may not be entirely accurate, but this isn’t a detective novel, so please don’t overthink it), one week later, I was riding my bike, headed towards university to attend my first lecture of the day.

A week was hardly enough time to forget the girl’s actions from that day, and the memory of her movements was still seared into my brain, but I couldn’t stay a recluse forever (I can’t quite recall if the phrase hikikomori was in use at that time, but either way, I’m just using a turn of phrase). I was still a university student, and couldn’t go on skipping all my classes. Of course, university classes are rather lax about attendance, but I was always a stickler about those kinds of things, and figured that once I applied, I had to earn each and every credit. That streak is still in me, leading to a somewhat obsessively driven life.

But even so, if I was truly trying to ensure safety at all costs, then I could have taken far more steps, such as changing my route to school. The grid-like town I lived in back then would have offered no end of alternative routes. My caution should have extended much further than just checking a few more times to make sure my door was locked.

But it didn’t, so there I was, taking the exact same route to school. Naturally, along the way I eventually came up to the crosswalk. You know which one I mean.

The crosswalk had been cleaned up by the day after the accident, although perhaps not “cleaned up” so much as “dealt with”, and it looked like nothing had ever happened there. Aside from several new bouquets of flowers by the sidewalk, of course. A few messages were scrawled in child-like handwriting, possibly notes from the victim’s classmates. At once, the thought occurred to me that the girl might have written one of the messages, and all of a sudden my feelings towards those bouquets inverted, and I found myself trying to avoid them as much as possible.

I don’t think I’ve ever cursed a red light as much as I did the one that showed up that moment, but given what I had seen happen at that very crosswalk, I couldn’t very well ignore it. Even if I wanted to ignore it, given how many traffic accidents I’ve seen over the years, I’ve gotten to the point of reflexively waiting when there’s so much as a yellow light. Then, of course, I can’t rush it early, so I wait until the crossing light is green, then look both ways, then finally cross.

It’s strange how time changes things. Just a few days before, I would have thought it almost blasphemous to walk across the area where that girl’s body and blood were splattered along the pavement. Of course, if I were to strictly stick to such ethics, then there might not be a single place on Earth I could walk where a dead person hadn’t ever been. That might even stretch to say there’s no spot where a person hasn’t ever been actively killed. I suppose if you wanted to be extreme, you could claim that living at all is blasphemy against the dead. But that’s just a reflection of my values at the time, as a witness to so many traffic accidents and fatal injuries. Now being a man of 30 years, I can see some changes in those values, but now’s not the time to expand on that. This is simply the story of a university student and aspiring author who had crossed a crosswalk and was beginning to travel down a hill just ahead. It’s fair to say that he was somewhat relaxed, feeling as though he had crossed some kind of unstable bridge rather than a crosswalk. But even if he had been more alert, I doubt he could have changed what came next.

My road racer bike was forced to come to an immediate halt. I couldn’t have even braked that fast, and naturally, my body was flung into the air as a result.

I’ll take advantage of the time in between being flung in the air and slamming down on the concrete to explain what exactly had happened to my road racer. An object somewhat like an iron pipe had been thrust into the wheel of my bike from the side. It wasn’t some kind of trick shot aiming for the gaps in the spokes, instead being roughly and violently thrown from a short distance away.

I’m sure you can use your imagination to think of what would happen to a bike and its rider under those circumstances. Then again, you probably don’t need to imagine the situation to know that something like that shouldn’t be attempted. Neither the bike frame or the rider will be making it out of that situation unscathed. It’s a rather tasteless prank that should never be pulled off.

Now, some readers might wonder why I would use a word as childish and placating as “prank” to refer to the act I just described. You might think it more appropriate for an author such as myself to denounce it as a criminal act, an intentional assault with the desire to cause harm.

But prank is actually a more fitting word in this scenario. The reason being, as you might have guessed, that the perpetrator was in fact a young child. Such a child could not be charged by criminal law in most circumstances due to age restrictions, providing somewhat shaky ground for officially referring to the act as criminal.

Returning to myself, I flew through the air and slammed onto the concrete on my back. My entire body flared in pain, and I found myself unable to move even a single muscle, feeling somewhat like I was on death’s door. I could have counted myself lucky that I didn’t fall on my head, but I was having too much trouble trying to stay conscious to be concerned with counting anything.

The experience brought to mind the two traffic accidents I had been in prior. I had been rather seriously injured in one of them, so comparatively I was much better off, but this experience took the cake when it came to my general confusion surrounding the accident itself.

I had no idea what had happened. No idea at all.

Now, I just explained that an iron pipe was shoved into my wheel for your benefit, but I personally only found that out quite a while later. I was too busy being flung into the air, getting hangtime, and slamming into the concrete to notice that particular detail.

However, it seemed that all the judo lessons in middle school had paid off, because I had automatically taken a defensive position while in the air. I can’t explain otherwise how I ended up without any serious injury or broken bones. Mentally speaking, though, I probably would have been better off with just a broken bone. My mental state was in shambles from the unexpected fall.

I was practically in a void.

As I lay there in a dazed state, my consciousness flickering as I stared up at the sky, a person suddenly blocked my view, peering into my face.

Calling them a person might even be something of an exaggeration. I’m not sure it would adequately describe what was before me. After all, the person peering with such intense interest into my face was a little girl of such tender years… okay, I’ll stop myself.

Voicing that in such a roundabout and pretentious way makes this read like a novel. Like I’m just telling a story. I pressed beforehand that this was an incident, not a story or a novel, and that I wouldn’t try to drum up melodrama or overexaggerate, and yet here I am, partaking in that kind of fancy offhandedly, like I was forced into it as some sort of occupational hazard.

Then again, when it comes to this specifically, maybe it’s not just a hazard or an accidental happening. Maybe it was always my plan to weave that girl into a fictional world that I created out of that incident, wonderfully dramatizing what took place in my past.

That would be ideal, honestly. The ability to turn that past trauma into a fictional narrative would be more than a little relieving. But I can’t deny how much of that desire stems from a primal instinct of self-defense.

I must reiterate that if this incident had not occurred, I would not be the person I am today. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I couldn’t become a novelist at all, but I certainly wouldn’t be able to spin stories with such speed and precision as I currently do.

So I can’t deny the reality of this incident. I can’t fictionalize it. I just need to accept it and remember it for what it really was.

It’s not worth exaggerating.

So then, in the effort of explaining that the little girl who was peering into my face was actually the same girl I had seen a week prior, the one who made sure to save her game before running over to her friend, I’m not going to resort to strange and poetic metaphor.

However, if I’m going to be honest and factual, I must admit that I did not recognize the girl peering into my face as the girl I had seen one week ago.

For one, I was confused from all the commotion surrounding my fall. For two, I was very dazed. But well, even without those two elements, I’ve always been horrendously bad at remembering faces.

This will only serve to show how much of a social misfit I am, although it fits quite perfectly as a boast for someone like me who wants to be seen as an oddball. The fact is, to put it somewhat dramatically, I have never remembered anyone’s face. It might be more accurate to say I can’t remember them, but that would imply some kind of inherent memory problem, when I am rather confident in most general memorization. However, no matter how great my memory may be, I cannot remember faces. The best I can say is that I don’t understand the process behind how someone consciously remembers a face.

Surely I can relate to everyone who’s thought all TV celebrities looked the same, or all the women on magazine covers blend together. You might remember something more with a name, but at a glance, they just melt into the crowd. That exact phenomenon happens with those who are closest to me.

From what I can tell, this type of behavior occurs when someone is faced with a general concept that they are uninterested in. To use novels as a simple example, I am a rather emphatic mystery novel enthusiast, and can divide all sorts of mystery novels into several subgenres and divisions, while someone uninterested in mystery novels would rather lump them all together as one same group… Then again, maybe color would serve as a better analogy. A painter can appreciate the differences between green, dark green, viridian green, light green, and emerald green, but to a layman, they would all just be green… I feel like the metaphor is breaking down a bit, but either way, I can’t remember people by their faces. I can recognize a person when I get to talking to them, but if I was shown a photo of someone who wasn’t there, I wouldn’t be able to tell you who was in the photo. I couldn’t understand if it was or wasn’t somebody on any level. I can’t connect a picture of a face to a person that I know.

The obvious criticism would be, “So what you’re saying is you don’t care about people? And with that kind of personality, you so shamelessly wanted to become an author?” All I can do is bow my head in apology. But if it helps make my case any, that’s why I wanted to become an author. I wanted to become a novelist so I could know people. It’s a rather unconventional dream, but I think that if you can live your life through your work, then you absolutely should.

I’ve digressed quite a bit… What I was getting at was I couldn’t recognize the girl looking at me as the girl from a week ago, and there was even a part of me that half-thought she was a kind, concerned passerby.

Now, I can’t tell people apart, so all children just look like children to me, but I resolved not to give away any specific details in this narration anyway. I will leave her appearance up to your imagination as the reader, although perhaps this might help your general picture: She was a very childlike child. Which is to say, there was nothing immediately strange you would think from looking at her.

She had no characteristics that you might find in a fictional narrative. She was just a normal kid, a normal human being.

And of course she was.

“…”

I thought the girl might have muttered something, but I was far too dazed to understand it. That and her voice was very soft. She hadn’t been talking to me. She wasn’t asking me if I was okay or trying to make any life-saving effort. She was just mumbling to herself.

I will never know exactly what the girl said in that moment, but my best guess from recalling the movement of her mouth brings me to the assumption that she said something like this:

“I wonder if he’s okay.”

I’m going to repeat that I am only assuming she said that. I formed that guess by considering what I learned about the girl later and the situation I was in. It’s possible she didn’t say anything quite so significant. For all I know, she could have just been remarking that she was hungry. But the thing is… I get the feeling my guess is on the mark. It wouldn’t have been weird for her to say that, even in that situation. It would have been more normal for her, actually.

For the reader, this is probably stating the obvious, although I couldn’t have known lying down there on my back, but that girl was the one who had shoved the iron pipe into my bicycle wheel.

She had committed such a barbaric act, and yet still was naively concerned for me, her victim that she had flung to the ground, wondering if I was okay.

If my guess at her remark is accurate, then the situation had taken a rather horrifying turn. Earlier, I mentioned that you could use your imagination to think of what an act would do to a person, and even without imagining it fully, you could understand that such a thing shouldn’t be done. But this girl did it without a lick of understanding what her actions would cause, and still didn’t fully appreciate the aftermath of her decision.

She was off. Something fundamental inside of her was way off.

Of course, at the time I couldn’t understand her at all, so I didn’t feel particularly frightened. The main thing I felt was back pain. Actually, I even had a spark of gratitude towards the girl, who I assumed was concerned for me, as I blacked out.

Also, it’s worth correcting one detail.

My road racer had been totalled, but not by an iron pipe in its wheel. The damage had been done by a vertical flute, the kind handed out to every elementary school class. What you would call a soprano recorder.