Pretending to Sleep
The start of school was closing in, and a scene from some horror movie rose unbidden in my mind—fragile people helpless before a force they could not resist. For a third-grader, going back to school was a cruelty beyond words. I hadn't even gotten to enjoy the whole break. Halfway through, I'd been hauled off to another world and lost nearly half my vacation. It wasn't that I hated school itself. I just hated losing that particular vacation atmosphere.
It was a little wicked of me, but whenever I was resting and caught sight of the office staff hard at work, a guilty thrill would rise from the tips of my toes. The easiest way to picture it was an unemployed layabout at six in the morning, watching everyone else head off to work before crawling into bed. Nothing in the world beat lying down to the sound of car engines starting outside.
It was the same now. I lay in bed listening to the office workers arrive, a sound as sweet as a lullaby—until someone came to ruin my peaceful rest. The door opened carefully, and Maru stepped in.
"Hana, are you asleep...?"
I kept my eyes shut and staged a protest, pretending I hadn't heard a thing. Maru, though, was relentless. Once it was past nine, the day's routine began, which was why she so often came to wake me. During vacation we ate breakfast around nine. Before the break, when I still had school, breakfast had been around seven; now that there was no need to get up early and head off to class, we ate later.
There was no reason to eat early. Dragging myself up around seven to have breakfast had always left me miserable with sleepiness, so I much preferred a late meal. Maru sat down beside the bed and shook me. I ignored her and went on playing asleep. But Maru was strong. She started tickling my armpits. I fought desperately to hold the laughter in, yet I couldn't stop my face from scrunching up. Watching that change come over me, she grinned like a devil and kept right on tickling.
"Ahaha—! Maru, stop!"
In the end I had no choice but to surrender. Some people were born immune to tickling. I was not one of them. The slightest tickle and I would burst out laughing and clutch my stomach, which was probably why I stood no chance against Maru's fingers.
"Why are you pretending to sleep, Hana!"
"Ehh..."
Scratching at hair that had gone wild in every direction, I sat up in bed. As I pushed myself upright, Maru kneaded my neck—a massage meant to shake the sleep off. Under her hands my head felt wonderfully clear. Strange, how rubbing someone's neck could cool their whole head.
"Sleeepy..."
"You have to eat, Hana."
"Okay, Maru."
Maru had come to eat with me, so she must have skipped her own meal. If I refused to eat, she would go off to work on an empty stomach, and the guilt would eat at me. Eyes barely open, I walked to the bathroom. I was too embarrassed to show up for breakfast with my hair a wreck.
I could have just pulled the hood of my dinosaur pajamas up over my head and gone like that, but even that felt like too much trouble. Better to wash my hair and go in comfort.
"Hana, want me to help you wash your hair?"
"No, I can do it by myself, Maru."
Hair that had grown overnight reached all the way to my waist. I was starting to understand why women preferred bobs. Long hair was no help at all. It was uselessly long, and washing it alone ate up so much time. Compared with when I had been a man, it felt like it took ten times as long. Back then I would just splash water on, scrub in some shampoo, rinse, and be done. Being a girl was different.
Just getting every strand wet took forever, and shampooing took forever too. Drying it at the end was an enormous chore on top of that. I could wash it on my own, but drying it was beyond me.
"Maru, help me dry my hair!"
"Okay, okay."
Maru smiled and brought the hair dryer. I surrendered my hair to her hands, and under that gentle touch sleep came creeping back over me. And so I got ready to face another vigorous morning.
"Hana, let's go eat. Your big sister skipped breakfast to come get you, so I'm starving."
"Yeah. Today I'm eating two plates!"
"Eat that much and you'll turn into a pig later, you know?"
"Nuh-uh! I'm not gonna turn into a pig!"
I was still growing, so a mere two plates of rice weren't about to make me fat or turn me into a pig. Of course, if I did it every single day, that might become a problem.
After the Gates appeared, humanity came to enjoy a far more prosperous life. At first there had been no information and no familiarity, and the casualties were heavy, but enough time had passed that the Gates had turned into a gold mine.
Among other things, incurable diseases that had plagued humanity were overcome with materials found inside the Gates. The most famous victory was the conquest of dementia. No one had to suffer from it anymore, and that single fact alone freed the elderly from living in terror of it.
Not everything had vanished, of course. Cancer remained unsolved, and plenty of other illnesses besides. Still, once people saw major diseases overcome with materials that could be obtained inside the Gates, they were able to hope. Maybe the illness they carried would be fully cured someday too—that kind of mindset.
Of course, among all the medicines discovered in the Gates so far, the most popular was something else entirely. The material that treated premature ejaculation and erectile dysfunction was the biggest hit of all. Tied as it was to people's sex lives, its purchasing power was no joke.
The price was reasonable enough, and even though it was a condition only men suffered—only half the potential buyers—it still fought for first and second place in medicine sales. But the situation had changed. Since Tangle launched, it had been closing that sales gap at a frightening pace.
According to the experts, in less than a year Tangle was expected to claim an unrivaled first place in sales among every Gate-derived medical material.
That was how many people were eating it. Thanks to that, Starlight Wellbeing was in the middle of a crisis.
Back when the only baldness drugs merely eased the condition and could not overcome it, people had not hunted for them this desperately.
Taking the medicine did not make hair loss disappear, after all. It was a stopgap—something you took only to halt the progression, or only in the cases where hair actually grew back. In other words, the several million people losing their hair had never kept coming back for the drugs on any steady basis.
But now hope had taken solid form. They could not hold back anymore. All you had to do was eat it and hair would grow, and the moment someone tasted that hope, they were hooked past the point of escape.
In a way, it was more addictive than a narcotic. Quitting Tangle did not bring withdrawal symptoms that felt like dying, of course. Tangle was only a fruit, after all. But if you stopped and then watched your hair fall out in clumps, you would go right back to taking it without a second thought.
"We're short on Tangle stock!"
"Did you already burn through everything we ordered from Starlight Wellbeing? You said you ordered fifty boxes last time!"
"It's all gone. We sent another order to Starlight Wellbeing, but they said production is short and we'll have to wait a little."
The supermarkets were getting headaches. It was a star product, a reliable moneymaker—the problem was that it sold too well. Some customers were even buying it up like hoarders. Starlight Wellbeing had seen the crisis coming, stockpiled an enormous volume, and pushed it out into distribution, but consumption outran even that. The desperate wishes of people losing their hair had simply blown past Starlight Wellbeing's forecasts.
"The Tangle harvest is more than enough. What we're short on are factories to bottle it and sell it."
The yield was staggering. Fruit harvested from the current farmland alone was enough to meet domestic demand. The harvest from a single Tangle plant could cover a month of demand for several hundred people, because once the fruit set, the tiny seeds packed densely inside it were Tangle itself.
But harvesting Tangle was not enough. There were not enough factories to turn it into a product. Fruit piled up while the production lines could not keep pace. Running the factories twenty-four hours a day was barely enough to endure the demand.
At that point Starlight Wellbeing had no choice but to make a decision. Leave things as they were, and they would never withstand the demand. Tangle was the hottest item anyone in the country was looking for.