site 10: Miyuu Aikawa

Tuesday, February 16th

I was fine. Even in the cold, my hands weren’t shaking. I could see the visions, too.

“You’re going with your mom. It’s already been decided.”

When I said that, the voice on the other end of the phone was filled with hope. “If I go with mom, I can be happy, right?”

“I don’t know if you’ll be happy, I guess. I’m just telling you what I’m seeing. But I did see you eating cake with your mother. I think it was a birthday cake. Your mom was smiling. She looked super happy, and I felt kind of happy looking at her, too.”

That was the future of the girl I was talking to on the phone. “My parents are divorcing. I want you to tell me who I’ll be happier living with,” she’d said, and that was the vision I’d seen.

“Thank you. Now... I can finally make my decision.” Evidently this particular lost puppy had taken my word as a positive. She hung up, sounding relieved.

I let out a small sigh of relief myself, and looked at the window. The curtains were closed, so I couldn’t see what was happening outside, but the sun must have already set. It was about 6:20 PM.

After the TV spot, my fortune-telling program was getting absolutely crazy numbers. Over 100,000 people were watching. I’d never had so many people come to watch me.

TV was amazing.

The response was so big it actually scared me. Thanks to that, I was more nervous than usual. But I’d managed to make it through my first call, and was starting to feel, like, just a little better.

Last time... that guy made me cry. That made me super-frustrated. The video of me sobbing got spread everywhere. I was so embarrassed that I wanted to scream, “Stop it! Just please, stop!” When I was finally alone in my house, I did.

Chi suggested we stop for a while, but I’d decided myself to do another episode today. The fact that I’d been on TV didn’t really matter. I was doing this stream for the same reason I’d done all the others: to prove that my power wasn’t wrong.

So if I could, I wanted to meet the person who’d called me a liar, and see if I’d been wrong. I’d asked for him to contact me when the broadcast started, but... who knew if he would. He hadn’t so far.

Chi made me some hot milk tea and set it right where I could reach it. I grabbed the cup and took a sip. It was warm, and helped me relax. The cold started to go away. This room only had a single gas stove, so it never got very warm.

I winked a little to Chi in gratitude. Thank you. I could only keep doing this because she was here. That’s how super-important Chi was to me.

“All right, let’s hear from our next little lost puppy!”

The phone had started ringing before I started to talk, though.

“Stop calling before I tell you to! I won’t pick it up!” I waved to the camera as I spoke.

Was I smiling right? I didn’t look tense or anything, did I?

I took a deep breath... and I picked up the ringing phone. I was fine. I was just fine—

“Yes, hello. This is Nicco-Nico Live Fortune-Telling! Welcome, little lost puppy. Can you give me your name?”

I could hear their breathing on the other side of the phone. It was probably a male caller. Were they not talking because they were nervous? Or...

I gulped.

“Sarai.” A calm voice came from the speaker.

Suddenly the screen flooded with comments.

“Sarai’s here!”

“The battle we’ve all been waiting for!”

“No time to eat!”

“Myu-tan, run away!”

“Sarai actually came? Lol”

“Myu, just ignore this guy.”

“Myu, hang up the phone!”

“Huh?” Was this Sarai... that Sarai? I had a bad feeling about this. Did he call just to start a fight, like the last guy? Should I hang up? But then I wouldn’t be able to see if my power worked.

“Do you know why the fortune-tellers you see on the street don’t make any money? Do you know how many of them are poor, Myu?”

“Huh?” Sarai opened up by talking like a teacher at school. I almost began to panic. I had no idea what he was talking about.

This was a fortune-telling stream. People called in, and I told their fortunes. That’s how it always worked. But Sarai started talking about something that had nothing to do with any of that.

“It’s difficult for most fortune-tellers to make their money just by fortune-telling. I personally researched ten fortune-tellers. I’m not including those who use the I Ching here, by the way. And almost all of them said that they do something else in addition to fortune-telling. Do you know what this means?”

“Huh? Wh-What?”

A lot of commenters were telling me to just hang up on him. But Sarai wasn’t creepy or scary like the last guy, and he was talking in a normal tone of voice. He wasn’t just going to start yelling at me. Well, probably. So I decided to talk to him a little more.

“Use of the I Ching is fundamentally unlike fortune-telling. It’s closer to a branch of statistics, actually. They use a vast amount of data to suggest a direction to follow. Fortune-telling is different.”

“Umm... it is?”

“Yes. Fortune-tellers don’t realize the contradiction inherent in their own existence. It’s actually quite jocular, isn’t it?”

“Jocular...” What did that word mean again?

“If fortune-tellers can see the future, why aren’t they able to make a living off that alone? If they needed to, they could just tell their own fortune and choose whatever path would make them successful. They have the power to see the future of others, and change their lives in a positive direction, several times a day. At least, that’s what they tell everyone. So it should be no problem, right?”

At this point, I got what he was trying to say.

“But the reason they don’t is that fortune-telling doesn’t actually reveal the future.”

His voice was calm and steady. He was the exact opposite of the guy who called in last time. I looked down at my hands. I’m fine.

“I’m... fine,” I whispered to myself. My hands balled into tight fists. I acted like I wasn’t scared.

I looked at the screen and saw that the commenters were starting to get pissed off.

“Sarai can suck it.”

“Let somebody who actually wants their fortune told talk to Myu.”

“Some people believe in fortune-tellers, you know!”

“Shut up, faggot.”

“Don’t be mean to Myu!”

“No one gives a shit.”

“Go back to Kirikiri, shithead.”

“Nobody wants to see a farce where you fight Myu. Leave!”

I was glad they were on my side, but... maybe I should tell them not to fight? At this rate, they were just going to provoke each other, and things would only get worse.

But before I could say something, Sarai responded to the comments from the other side of the phone. “Yes, that’s right. This is all a farce. I didn’t want to make a big deal out of this, but the commenters at Kirikiri Basara provoked me until I had no choice but to call. But what Myu’s doing is no better. Anybody who truly believes that fortune-telling is real should change their mind.”

There was too much distracting noise. I bit my lip and gazed at what was going on in front of me. The screen was filled with comments attacking Sarai for his response. There were so many scrolling across that you could barely see my face on the stream.

And Sarai was no better. He was still picking fights with individual commenters. What was going on? I couldn’t stop the comments from going out of control. It felt like this was out of my hands now.

Several months ago, when I’d started this stream, there were barely any viewers. I loved that easygoing, relaxed atmosphere. There was nobody to tell me how great I was, or to insult me. People would just watch me, listen to my fortunes, and tell me what they thought.

Was there no way to go back to that now?

But...

But, you know?

“I’m sure—” I opened my mouth. I took off my hood. “I’m sure you’re a little lost puppy too, Sarai.”

I started to line up my cards like usual. I wasn’t even sure what kind of fortune I was trying to tell.

“Hmph. I’m... I’m not lost.” I could hear him laughing at me. That pissed me off!

But... did his voice change a little? Is this the real you?

I put the ten cards down in the shape of the Tree of Life.

“Open, Yesod!” I flipped over the ninth card.

What did I see?

Suddenly the screen in front of me seemed to fade away.

Everything went black. For a moment, I didn’t know where I was. I heard a voice in my head that wasn’t mine.

“Why did you have to get killed? Who did this?! There was so much I wanted to tell you, and I didn’t get the chance. I haven’t even talked to you for months. Why did I hate you so much? Come on, say something! Dad...”

That was... Sarai’s voice, wasn’t it?

“Hurry...”

I thought of my father’s face. My father, not Sarai’s. He was lying on the ground, his eyes closed and his face pale. He was so thin. He was almost nothing but skin and bones.

I couldn’t save my mom, and I couldn’t save my dad, either.

Even my friends at school thought I was creepy. Dad was the one person who accepted me. He’d taken pictures of the paintings I’d drawn for me.

He’d been told that he had cancer, and only had six months to live. I didn’t want to accept that, and so I’d used fortune-telling to learn his future. I don’t remember which of those two events came first. I just wanted to see a future where he was still alive. If I could, I believed that he would survive.

I did my fortune-telling hundreds of times over a period of days, without eating or even sleeping. I always got the same result. I couldn’t save Dad.

Maybe he died because I’d kept seeing that future.

—It’s because of your fortune-telling!

That wasn’t true. Dad wouldn’t say that. It was just a delusion I’d created from my own guilt.

“Please, Sarai... You need to talk to your dad. Now.”

“Wh-What? Why are you talking about my dad?” The tone of Sarai’s voice changed.

“If you want to make up with him, listen carefully to what he has to say.”

I want to keep telling fortunes. For my father, who believed in me. For my father, who told me that I had the power to see people’s futures, and that it wasn’t wrong for me to have it. So no matter what they said about me, or how many times they told me I was wrong, I had to keep doing it.

“There’s things you want to say to your dad, right? Now’s your only chance! If you don’t do it right away, you’ll super regret it!”

“Y-You’re just saying the same thing all fortune-tellers say. It doesn’t mean anything. Or is this a threat? You’re trying to make me think about my relatives dying to put me at a disadvantage, aren’t you! I... I won’t give in to threats!” It was no good. No matter what I said, it wouldn’t work unless people believed me.

What was I supposed to do at a time like this? We were connected by the phone, but there was a rift, deeper than the sea, between me and Sarai. Maybe no matter how much I reached out my hand, he wouldn’t take it.

Even after I’d been able to see it, too. Even though Sarai had the chance to make up with his dad right now. It was so frustrating that he didn’t understand.

It hurt so much.

It was so sad.

“I don’t have the power to change fate. You have to do it yourself.” Oh... I can’t stop crying.

I was crying again. I looked at the card in my hands through blurry eyes. The Dog-Covered Tower, reversed. In the language of the tarot, that meant...

“Erase everything, and look at yourself.”