Interlude: A time and place that does not exist
Track: strings
“Well?” The man gazes ahead with a keen, inquisitive stare, eager to know your opinion.
“It’s… interesting.” You glance at the cup, thinking about the blend of tea that you have been served. Black tea with sea salt and vanilla extract, chosen to evoke the taste of summer at the beach. “The taste is… not entirely unpleasant…” You leave the remainder of your comment unsaid: even if it is not unpleasant, you can’t say that you like it either.
“I was asking about the end of the second night,” says the man smoothly.
You redden. “A-ah… yes. That.”
This time, your fate is clear. You saw yourself falling from the top of the walkway and landing on your head. The pavement had not been kind; the vertebrae of your neck had snapped and driven shards of bone up into your jaw and head, and your skull’s posterior had cracked open upon impact, allowing your brains to spurt out all over the ground. Thinking about it, you cringe even now, rubbing the back of your head.
When you do not give any further response, the man lets out a little sigh and stands up. His perfectly-tailored clothes are unruffled in the least by his sudden motion. Walking over to the bookshelves lining the room, he begins browsing through the titles, his gloved fingers walking over the spines of the books. You begin wondering what this place is. After what happened in the hospital, you had woken up here, and met the strange but polite gentleman. He had given you a word of advice. Sometime after that, you had a distinct feeling of being in two places at once… no, of being two people simultaneously. When you snapped back to consciousness, you were here again, with the memories of what happened to you. But at the same time, you felt as if you had never left.
The second night, he called it… Which is the dream? The hospital, or this room?
You are beginning to wonder if this is not all a very elaborate near-death hallucination.
“Shinoseki Adachi.”
“Y-yes!” You sit up straight, called to attention.
“You are you, yet you are not yourself,” he says, walking back to the armchair with a book in his hands.
“I… I’m sorry?”
The man flips the book open, casually browsing its pages. “Are you familiar with the works of Sigmund Freud?”
Freud… the man known as the father of psychoanalysis. You nod, noticing that the title of the weathered, blue book he is reading is “Thanatos and the Soul: A Shinto perspective’.
“This book details an interesting approach by a little known scholar, contrasting Freud’s duality of life and death as personal compulsions locked in mutual struggle, with the Shinto concept of death as impurity as well as its afterlife ramifications.” He looks at his antique pocket-watch and murmurs something you cannot make out. “Ah, but it is almost time. We shall have to postpone our discussion to another night... figuratively, of course. In truth, I only brought out this book to occupy myself for the third night. I am sure I will at least manage to get past the first chapter before it ends.” There is a mild air of derision in his tone.
“So… before it begins,
I have a question for you, Shinoseki Adachi. Consider it my way of helping you out... If you are able to understand what you
want, you will eventually come to know what you
need to know."
He asks his question.