- Double Entendre -

"What are you doing here? How did you get here?" It took me a while to recognize her, her face has been weathered by age.

She says nothing and looks at me blankly, as if drinking in the sight of her son.

"Nao-kun," she says again.

I close my eyes for a minute and when I open them, for a second I think I see Shizuka. I blink and rub my head. Outside the paper thin walls, there's still silence.

"Would you like some tea?" I keep my voice as steady as possible. It comes out almost as a whisper.

She nods slowly, mechanically. She has her hair dyed chestnut, tied up into a ponytail with a yellow hairband, but I can still see the greying strands. Wrinkles adorn her forehead. Like battle scars, as much as she had used anti-aging cosmetics and make up. The make up around her eyes is a little too dark, making the whites of her eyes glow. It's the image of a woman well past her prime but fighting to deny the truth. I feel some sort of sympathy for her. So I boil the water and make the tea in silence.

I place the steaming cup in front of her. "How long have you been waiting?"

"Not too long."

"Who brought you here?"

"A man who said he knows where my son is."

"Which man?"

"Tall guy. He was wearing a suit and a tie, like a corporate executive. He was holding a folder."

Very descriptive. I wear a blank face and watch as she inhales the washed out aroma of an old Itoen teabag.

"How have you been, Nao-kun?"

It takes me a while to respond. If I'm to ask myself how my last few months have been, I would find myself at a loss for words. I can feel the tails of half burrowed memories and half baked emotions swish in the air. They are but hints and remnants of something distant now, but if I grab hold of these tails, the entire root, a wet wriggling mess might be unearthed and cause havoc as they clash and struggle for dominance.

"I've been well. As you can see."

She looks dubious but nods. "This is a nice place in the woods."

"It's quiet and solitary, but I've gotten to enjoy it." I then realize I have no inclination towards finding out the way in or out, or where exactly we are located, relative to urbanized civilization. I'm content with staying here.

"Yes it's peaceful and safe. I would wish to stay here forever too if I were you. Maybe with your father's kimchi."

"He makes excellent kimchi." I parrot her words from what seems like a lifetime ago.

"He does. Too bad he passed away when you were young."

She sips from her tea.

"Do you remember that one time when we went to the flower farm - you must have been six - and you told me you wanted to pick all the flowers there so we could give your father one each day?"

"How can I remember that?"

She looks sad. "Yes, I'm sorry." But she continues, "but I told you the flowers too are alive, so it wouldn't be nice." She says all this with a blank face. "Then you said you would grow a flower farm around the grave instead. Of course, back then, you didn't know what death truly meant."

I grip the edge of the table. "Let's cut to the chase, I'm sure you're not here to reminisce with me - why did you want to see me?"

She looks up. Traces a finger around the rim of the cup. I watch her. "I heard you were in trouble."

"Do I look like I'm in trouble? I'm not in trouble."

"It doesn't seem that way to me. I see a frightened, confused twenty two year old, who is my son. I was concerned, do you know how concerned I was?" She eases guilt into me too effortlessly.

My jaw clenches. "I've been fine for many years, and we haven't spoken for so long. Why now?"

"Because I'm your mother."

"And?"

"I have the right to speak with and see my son."

"Sure didn't seem like you ever wanted to."

I look at her. In her eyes, now that I can see her clearly, is much sorrow and loneliness. Written with total clarity so that I can't miss it, yet inexpressible in words. I begin to regret my own.

"I didn't have much choice," she says finally. But doesn't elaborate.

We sit there in silence. She's looking at me and I'm looking at the table. There's a crack down the middle of the wooden surface, much like the one in my old apartment.

Then something seems to snap in her, a shift in gears deep within. Her voice changes and takes on a different tone. A voice I almost couldn't recognize, with a hidden strength that I had never noticed. "Things are changing. The world is coming to an end. It's not the way it seems anymore, Nao-kun. We may never see each other again."

I don't say anything. I look at her incredulously. Her words ring in the air, like the buzz of a dragonfly.

She sips from her tea. It's hot. I stand up and make myself one too.

"What do you know about me?" I say.

"Enough." She says. "There's something you need to know."

I pour hot water into a cup. I add a teabag.

"This girl you're with, she's bad news." She shows me a photograph. I snatch it out of her hand. It's Shizuka. Light honey brown roasted hair like coffee, brushed impeccably. She's looking straight ahead at the camera, without a trace of a smile.

"I'm looking for her." My voice is a murmur.

"Don't look for her."

"Why?"

"I've lost your father. I don't want to lose you in the same way."

I say nothing. All around silence presses in on us like a wall that reaches up into a cone shaped teepee. Her words rise to the top as if in a single pillar of smoke.

"I'll tell you about the contract."

"Okay, tell me about the contract."

Chitose Maeda takes a deep breath, her eyes seem to simmer with concern. "Listen to me, not as your mother, but as someone who wants to help you."

I sit down with my tea and cross my arms. "Fine."

"You were told that I signed you over to the contract when you were seventeen. Alot was happening at the time. Some things at your school, and other things in the world. Like Black Monday, Bloody Friday, Sichuan Earthquake, Beijing Olympics, stock market crashes and bankruptcies. The massacre in Virginia Tech and later in Akihabara. Barack Obama elected as the 44th President of United States. The inauguration of the Large Hadron Collider. David Foster Wallace committed suicide. The Cause was founded that year. Even now, before I got here, the Cause had occupied the Senkaku Islands attempting to start a war."

There's a deafening silence immediately after. Everything sinks like deposit. I don't know how she could retain such coherence and memory if she had been under Processing. She is nearing sixty, yet her memory is intact it seems.

"You probably forgot it all. That year, some poor kids at your school had been bullied and killed. They were intentional."

I nod. "Kozue Sato," I say.

She nods too, but looks surprised. I clutch Shizuka's handwritten note in one of my pockets. It's a little damp, maybe from the sweat in my palms, or the sweat through my pants. "If she hadn't killed herself, it would've continued. She was on the list." She pauses half a second. "You were also on the list, right after her."

"How did you know?"

"They knew you were all different. No matter how hard we tried to go unnoticed. It worked for a while but not in high school."

"Who's they?"

"The school you could say, they didn't want exceptional students. They want to create workers, slaves, robots. You know I work for a government office. The school system is designed to do that. It's an extension, a manufacturing factory for the capitalist system."

"That sounds illegal."

"It should be."

"It's legal only because that's the standard everywhere in the world. If enough influential people root for something, it becomes right," I say.

"It's always been that way. Criminals are only criminals as they don't have enough capital or connections to do what they want."

"Why haven't you told me all this earlier?"

She doesn't reply to my question and continues, "there's no way out of something, if the entire system, the entire world, and its society goes along with it. So I had run into a corner. I knew, it doesn't matter how I know, but as a mother, I couldn't just watch you die."

"I wouldn't die so easily. I think I have enough determination to survive."

"Do you really? Do you truly think so?"

I have nothing to say to that.

She goes on. "When you were sixteen, I met a man who worked for a research company at the time who was selling insurance plans to government workers. It was nothing special, just your ordinary insurance. But in secret, I met with him for a second time in an izakaya - I clearly remember the pouring rain in the middle of June, the sound of thunder and the damp smell of rotting leaves. It was there he disclosed the insurance company is only one of their various fronts for finding potentially interested clients to sell them intellectual property for research. By signing over our intellectual property to this research company under the table, it provides temporary asylum of some sort for the length of the contract."

I drink my tea.

"Provided you don't violate any laws," she adds, "for six years you never once broke Etiquette. You probably forgot about the contract, and had no interest in being any different. You tend to forget a lot of things. You come up with new things and forget whatever is in the past."

"True enough."

"You forgot about me too. But it doesn't matter anymore. All that matters to me is that you're okay."

"Talking to me like this, wouldn't you get into trouble as well?"

"It doesn't matter." A weak smile forms on her lips.

I swallow and set my cup down. "So you're saying I've broken Etiquette so They're all after me?"

"They've always been after you. But they were waiting for when the contract would expire. They were waiting for when you would violate the terms."

I ponder over her words. "What's wrong with my girlfriend?"

"She doesn't know all of this and barged in on it. She's not what she seems like."

"What do you mean?"

"To you, she seems to have saved you. But to me, she was the one who put you in danger in the first place, back then and now."

"I don't understand. True, she did help me break Etiquette but I had seen them with my own eyes. They were waiting and watching for me-"

"She's not there to help you. She was sent by Them."

"What?"

"She's one of their surveyors, sent to locate the exceptions in society so they can take them in, re-condition them or eliminate them."

I sit dumbfounded in silence. I stare at her, and she looks at me. I can't read her face. It's draped with shadows. I can't tell if she's telling me the truth or just another version of a story. Her skewed misconceptions or delusional rant. Or is mine the corrupt perception? I cut a slice of bread for something to do.

"I know you don't believe me," my mother says, "but I've told you what I can. It's up to you. If you'd rather believe your girlfriend, there's nothing a mother can do."

"Why didn't you tell me earlier?"

"They're always watching, the System is watching. I had to watch my step. I couldn't directly contact you without raising suspicion, nor could I take time off work to come find you. My job is risky. I should've quit a long time ago, but someone had to pay the bills, right?"

I say nothing.

"When I go back to the city, Nao-kun, you don't need to worry about me. You need to worry about yourself. You live under constant surveillance and right in the heart of the city. Tokyo, Nao-kun, Edo, it's the central hub of the system. It might have been a little easier in Chiba. In any case, things had to happen all in order, and you and I had to make it out here, in one piece."

I rub my forehead. I look over at my coffee plant. The jar is sitting on the bedside counter, forlorn and dirty looking. A layer of dust has collected. Probably the entire week's worth. It is incredibly dusty out in the wilderness, sand and soil, wind, things kicked up by my feet. But inside, the plant is safe and secure. I haven't even watered it - and yet it's been growing. It has the tenacity of a cactus. It has well defined pointed green leaves now, like pieces of plastic laminate attached to a straight stick. Though small, it has begun to resemble a real coffee plant. Curiously, now that I'm looking at it, I realize there's something strange. There is a second pink gooseneck feeler, awkward and naked looking beansprout, that reminds me of a mole rat. It's so small I must have always missed it, hiding under the shadow of the existing leaves. I don't recall a second bean. I had planted only one and they had only given me one. I had turned it over in my hand a few times trying to decide whether I had another option, instead of doing something so stupid. Then I decided I might as well plant it anyway. It had only been one. But now it's blatantly obvious. The seed below had split into a second plant. Like the Kaneko woman had said.

I contemplate whether I should root out the second bean and dispose of it. Surely two plants growing side by side and in such a small jar must not be healthy. One of them would strangle the other.

"I know I must be too late. She's gotten into your mind and heart," she says, searching my eyes.

I turn back to Chitose Maeda and feel nothing. There is an infinite sea of nothingness welling up inside me and outside. Instead, she's the only intruder to this stability. Her words pass by like a breeze.

"I need some time to think this over."

She sighs once and sets down her cup. She nods. I get up and look out the window. Outside, the rabbit is gone and the trees look darker and more brooding. The sun is darkened, ready to set but a layer of rain clouds settle in from the west.