examines the possibility that this is what has happened to her. But she cannot believe that she is dead. Nor should the afterlife be like this. If dying meant being shut up alone inside a vacant room in an isolated office building, it was too utterly lacking any hope of salvation. Could this be a dream then? No, it is too consistent to be a dream, the details too concrete and vivid. I can actually touch the things that are here. She jabs the back of her hand with the pencil tip to verify the pain. She licks the eraser to verify the taste of rubber.
This is reality, she concludes. For some reason, a different kind of reality has taken the place of my normal reality. Wherever it might have been brought from, whoever might have carried me here, I have been left shut up entirely alone in this strange, dusty, viewless room with no exit. Could I have lost my mind and, as a result, been sent to some kind of institution? No, that is not likely, either. After all, who gets to bring her own bed along when she enters the hospital? And besides, this simply doesn’t look like a hospital room. Neither does it look like a prison cell. It’s just a big, empty room.
She returns to the bed and strokes the quilt. She gives the pillow a few light pats. They are just an ordinary quilt and an ordinary pillow. Not symbols, not concepts; one is a real quilt, and the other a real pillow. Neither gives her anything to go by. Eri runs her fingers over her face, touching every bit of skin. Through her pajama top, she lays her hands on her breasts. She verifies that she is her usual self: a beautiful face and well-shaped breasts. I’m a lump of flesh, a commercial asset, her rambling thoughts tell her. Suddenly she is far less sure that she is herself.
Her dizziness has faded, but the rocking sensation continues. She feels as if her footing has been swept out from under her. Her body’s interior has lost all necessary weight and is becoming a cavern. Some kind of hand is deftly stripping away everything that has constituted her as Eri until now: the organs, the senses, the muscles, the memories. She knows she will end up as a mere convenient conduit used for the passage of external things. Her flesh creeps with the overwhelming sense of isolation this gives her. I hate this! she screams. I don’t want to be changed this way! But her intended scream never emerges. All that leaves her throat in reality is a fading whimper.
Let me get to sleep again! she pleads. If only I could fall sound asleep and wake up in my old reality! This is the one way Eri can now imagine escaping from the room. It’s probably worth a try. But she will not easily be granted such sleep. For one thing, she has only just awakened. And her sleep was too long and deep for that: so deep that she left her normal reality behind.
She lodges the silver pencil between her fingers and gives it a twirl, vaguely hoping this thing she found on the floor will evoke some kind of memory. But all her fingers feel is an endless longing of the heart. Half-consciously, she lets the pencil drop to the floor. She lies on the bed, wraps herself in the quilt, and closes her eyes.
She thinks: No one knows I’m here. I’m sure of it. No one knows that I am in this place.
We know. But we are not qualified to become involved with her. We look down at her from above as she lies in bed. Gradually, as point of view, we begin to draw back. We break through the ceiling, moving steadily up and away from her. The higher we climb, the smaller grows our image of Eri Asai, until it is just a single point, and then it is gone. We increase our speed, moving backward through the stratosphere. The earth shrinks until it, too, finally disappears. Our point of view draws back through the vacuum of nothingness. The movement is beyond our control.
The next thing we know, we are back in Eri Asai’s room. The bed is empty. We can see the TV screen. It shows nothing but a sandstorm of interference. Harsh static grates on our ears. We stare at the sandstorm for a while to no purpose.
The