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Chapter 003. Restart (2)
Modern humans trade time for money.
The reason people strive to attend good universities and get good jobs is simply an effort to increase the value of their time.
Even if they achieve dazzling success, the paradigm of exchanging time for money does not change.
Yet, ironically,
time is the most precious resource humans possess.
Because time is the only resource that becomes increasingly scarce, while at the same time being something that cannot be obtained no matter what price one is willing to pay.
And yet, I had gotten my time back.
A whole ten years of it.
Returning to 1992, at eighteen years old.
It was practically the same as regaining everything.
Of course,
“Damn it!”
There was something I had lost.
The convenience of the 21st century.
“How the hell did I even use this typewriter?”
Back then, personal computers were expensive enough to be difficult even for middle-class households to afford, while their practical uses were limited.
Naturally, as someone who had only just graduated from high school this June, there was no way I could have owned one.
My fingers, accustomed to flying across a keyboard at nearly eighty words per minute, found the old typewriter I had used back then incredibly inconvenient.
“Where did I put the correction fluid?”
The fact that there was no backspace key alone was a major problem.
“Phew. Should I take a little break?”
Struggling because I was stuck on my writing, I used correcting a typo as an excuse to open the window wide and sit on the windowsill.
“Wow.”
The weekend in July 1992 was warm and leisurely.
Vrrrmmm—!
Dad was mowing the lawn in the yard,
while Mom was cooling herself beneath a parasol and drinking lemonade.
It was an ordinary weekend scene in a Boston suburban home.
But that very ‘ordinariness’ was painfully special to me.
“Ernie! Ellie! Good morning!”
“Oh, Charlie! Finally getting around to repainting the house?”
“I thought Karen was going to shoot me if I put it off any longer! This is a secret!”
“Hahaha.”
Our neighbor across the street, who was close with my parents, was also busy with the home repairs he had been putting off.
“Oh, Isaac!”
“Hello, Uncle Charlie.”
“So, you’re heading to New York next month, right?”
“Yes. I’m moving into the dorms at the end of August.”
A mischievous smile appeared on Charlie’s lips.
“Why don’t you take your father with you while you’re going? He worries about you so much every damn day that I’m practically growing calluses in my ears—”
“Char—lie—!”
Dad’s thunderous shout rang out, and Charlie hurriedly disappeared with his paintbrush in hand.
Dad glared after him, his ears noticeably red.
After I had returned to April and prevented the accident,
up until now, in July,
the distance between us that had run in parallel for more than a decade had noticeably narrowed over those three months.
But there was still some awkwardness.
It’ll be resolved with time.
After all, it was unavoidable that doing things we had never done before felt embarrassing and unfamiliar.
Once Charlie had run away, Dad’s grumbling turned toward me.
“Son, are you going to spend your entire vacation glued to that typewriter? You should at least learn how to mow the lawn before you go to New York.”
“I don’t think I’ll have any lawns to mow in New York.”
“That’s exactly why you should learn now, you brat. Every experience is an asset for a writer. You have to experience things while you have the chance.”
At that moment, Mom, who had been reading a women’s magazine beneath the parasol, lifted her sunglasses.
“Ernest, you’ll be out all day.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Dad started the lawn mower again.
But his words lingered in my mind.
An asset.
That was the biggest question I had been facing lately.
Living with my parents and going to college were important, but······
I was a writer, first and foremost.
I had been wondering what kind of stories I would write from now on.
“I thought I kept writing horror novels in my previous life because I had never been able to experience a life like this. ······But maybe that wasn’t it?”
These days, the reason I had been struggling with the typewriter
was because I was trying to write something different from before.
In my previous life, I had lived a life filled with misfortune.
I had nothing, and I was always alone.
But after returning, everything had changed.
I had saved my parents, ate warm dinners every day, and had ordinary conversations with them.
Now, I was living in happiness.
A peaceful suburban neighborhood, the sound of a lawn mower, the glimmer of condensation on a cold glass of lemonade, the friendship between neighbors.
I had tried to weave the happiness I felt into my stories.
But I couldn’t.
My fingertips kept turning toward the darkness.
All the misfortunes I had experienced.
The life in this world that had been like a nightmare.
They had already become deeply ingrained assets within me.
And then there was the sixth sense that had appeared after my regression, a sense that allowed me to feel ‘fear’ beyond the five ordinary senses.
All of it was telling me one thing.
You are destined to write horror novels.
“Well, there’s nothing wrong with that.”
The work that had won the Bram Stoker Award had come from my fingertips.
If the judges had not given the award simply because they saw Sean McKenzie’s name, then I must have been pretty damn good.
“But now······”
This was an era when horror novels were regarded as cheap pulp fiction.
It was a time when they were not treated as proper literature.
I was worried about how my parents would react to the idea of me attending a prestigious university only to write horror novels.
“Hmm.”
As I was deep in thought,
Mom approached the window where I was sitting.
“Isaac, while your father finishes up the lawn, why don’t you come to the supermarket with me for a bit?”
“Yes, sure.”
I put my worries aside and readily stood up.
* * *
I thought we were shopping for dinner.
“Isaac, hurry up and choose the colors you like.”
It turned out we were shopping for necessities I would need while living in the dormitory.
Right now, I was standing in front of the underwear section, being pressured to make a choice.
No matter how much closer we had become, wasn’t it a little awkward to choose underwear in front of Mom with the mind of a twenty-eight-year-old?
“No, Mom······ I can just buy these in New York—”
“If you don’t choose, I’m filling the whole cart with pink ones.”
I quickly grabbed several packs and tossed them into the cart.
Mom walked ahead with a mischievous grin.
“You look like you have a lot on your mind. Do you really think you’ll buy new ones once you get there? Even if they’re worn out and full of holes, as long as the elastic is still there, you’ll keep wearing them.”
A chill ran down my spine.
She was astonishingly accurate to how I had behaved in my previous life.
“So······ what have you been thinking so hard about while writing these days? You won’t have to submit another essay for your admission.”
In the past, I would have brushed it off and claimed it was nothing important.
But now I knew clearly that my parents’ love was genuine, and over the past three months, I had become somewhat accustomed to conversations like this.
“I told you that my dream is to become a writer, right?”
“Of course! I think it’s a wonderful dream.”
“Even if the genre I want to write is something that ends up on shelves like those?”
As I pushed the cart behind Mom, I pointed toward a book display near the checkout counters a short distance away.
Cheap genre novels printed on low-quality pulp paper were scattered across the display.
The way those books were handled was itself evidence of how they were regarded by society.
“······A-are you planning to write adult novels?”
It seemed the adult romance section had caught Mom’s attention first.
Books like Summer Heat and Midnight Desire······
Thank goodness.
Compared to those, horror novels were practically innocent.
“No, it’s not that.”
The American publishing market was broadly divided into three categories according to binding format and distribution channels.
The most prestigious and highly regarded books were hardcover editions.
Next came trade paperback books with thinner covers.
Books in these two categories were high-quality works supplied to bookstores for sale.
Below them was the mass-market paperback market.
Small, cheap books printed on inexpensive paper and sold in large quantities at supermarkets, pharmacies, airports, and similar places.
Unless you were a giant like Stephen King or John Grisham, most popular fiction fell into the final category.
In short, they weren’t treated very well.
Of course······ as time passed and the 2000s approached, the cheap market would almost disappear, and popular fiction would become integrated into the bookstore market.
Readers’ perceptions would improve as well.
I was about to reassure her with something like that.
“Isaac.”
“Yes?”
“No matter what you write, the fact that you’re my proud son will never change.”
“······.”
The support Mom gave me was firm, making all the worries I had been agonizing over alone seem meaningless.
Instead, I felt as though I had been struck over the head.
Right. So that’s how it is.
I still hadn’t completely escaped my previous life.
I had thought I must never become a burden to my parents, and that to avoid doing so, I needed to do something they would approve of.
But Mom’s support had nothing to do with what I chose to do.
“Dad······ feels the same way, right?”
Mom approached and placed a hand on my shoulder.
“Of course. He’s not good at expressing himself, but you have no idea how proud he is of you.”
Right.
Then.
I don’t need to worry about what my parents think.
I’ll write what I want to write, what I’m good at writing.
All right.
I had made up my mind.
In this life too, I would sharpen the axe called fear.
I would publish a book under my own name,
and stand proudly on an awards stage on my own two feet.
Just imagining it made my chest burn with excitement.
Then Mom continued.
“So, Isaac.”
“?”
“You······ can be honest with us. You can tell us that you want to write an R-rated novel. Even if nobody at your university recognizes you—”
“Ah, no. I told you it’s not that kind of thing!”
Mom shook her head as though she couldn’t help it.
“All right, all right. I’ll wait.”
It was enough to drive me crazy.
* * *
Eventually, August arrived.
“Are you really sure you don’t want us to come with you?”
Dad drove me to Boston South Station and carried my huge trunk, yet even after all that, he still asked again.
“It’s a four- or five-hour train ride. It would be too much trouble.”
“Why? We could look around your dorm while we’re there and attend the entrance ceremony too.”
“Come on, do you think I’m a little kid?”
I had never actually experienced a college entrance ceremony before, but I knew that American parents showing up dressed formally was not exactly the usual scene.
“All right, my son. You’ve grown up.”
As he said that, Dad held out his fist.
“Don’t lose to those New York guys. Show them what you’re made of.”
In 1992, the Boston Red Sox had been absolutely terrible.
They finished last in the American League East, and Dad’s anger was directed toward the New York Yankees, who had crushed the Red Sox repeatedly at the beginning of the season and destroyed their momentum.
Perhaps that was why.
Dad seemed unable to fully grasp the fact that I was about to become a college student in New York.
Smack—!
“Gah!”
“Ernie! What are you saying to a kid who’s going there to study?”
Mom smacked Dad on the back before straightening my clothes.
“You’re going to miss your train. Go on.”
“Yes. I’ll go. Take care of yourselves.”
“Yeah······ Don’t skip meals, and call often. All right?”
I hugged both of them one after another for the last time,
remembering the time when I had been left alone in the world and had begun putting my affairs in order.
It had been summer then, too.
But it hadn’t been warm like this.
“I’ll call you as soon as I arrive.”
The ordinary, completely ordinary farewell I had longed for so much.
I waved to my parents, picked up my trunk, and passed through the gate leading to the platform for New York.
The moment I left the warm shield of my family and stepped into the crowd,
all the fear in the world came crashing into my mind like a tsunami.
“――――――――!”
A horrific cacophony so terrible that I wanted to cover my ears.
The raw screams of hundreds of people filling the platform.
I’m late··· I’m going to miss the train···
What if he doesn’t love me?
Could the cancer have come back? It can’t happen this time···
Please, they can’t find the ledger!
No one understands me···
I’m going to ruin everything······
I looked around.
Businessmen, travelers, couples and families, students······
They all stood there wearing masks, but to my ears, the fears lurking in the deepest parts of their hearts came through with perfect clarity.
“Haha······.”
In my previous life, I had squeezed the misfortune and suffering I experienced out of myself and turned them into stories.
But not anymore.
Now, the entire world was a novel walking around on two feet, a living, breathing horror.
To anyone else, it would merely be a terrifying noise that shattered the mind, a curse.
But to me, who had decided to write horror novels—
The greatest blessing and asset.
The train bound for New York slid smoothly into the platform.
Without hesitation, I boarded the train.