Then I suddenly remembered. Something similar happened in an old comic book series I used to read as a kid. Doraemon, Tentomushi Comics, Vol. 4. That’s the time one of Doraemon’s secret gadgets, the pebble hat, is introduced.
The story goes like this:
As usual, Nobita Nobi (the kid who’s the main character in the series) has been told off by his parents. Nobita goes to Doraemon for comfort, complaining, “They don’t need to watch me so carefully all the time. I just want to be left alone.” Then Doraemon pulls a gadget out of that fourth-dimensional pocket of his: the Pebble Hat.
Doraemon explains: “When you wear this hat, you’ll be like a pebble on the ground—unnoticed.” In other words, you’ll still exist, but no one will notice.
Nobita is thrilled and puts on the hat. For a while, he enjoys being left alone. But then, he starts to get lonely. And when he tries to take off the hat he can’t. It’s stuck on his head, so he starts to cry. It’s his tears that make the hat come off, and Mama and Papa start to notice him again. Then Nobita says, “I’m glad people care about me,” and that’s the end of the story.
Well, I went off on quite a tangent there, but to get back to what I was saying, I guessed that the system Aloha had made worked something like Doraemon’s Pebble Hat. In other words, phones hadn’t really disappeared from the world. It’s just that nobody noticed them anymore. People had fallen into a collective trance. The Devil was in fact “pulling a Doraemon.”
As the long months and years go by, phones will gradually cease to exist completely. Like pebbles on the roadside, they will start by going unnoticed—until they disappear completely.
When you think about it, the 107 people who met Aloha before me must have made something disappear, but the thing is, the rest of us haven’t noticed. It’s as if without you realizing it, things you use in your everyday life, like your favorite coffee cup or the new socks you just bought, could disappear. And if you did realize, however much you looked for them, you wouldn’t be able to find them. For all we know, there may be all kinds of things that have already disappeared without our having noticed it, things that we’d assumed would always be around.
The green tram climbed two hills and finally reached the town next door. The station I got off at opened out onto a large square. From there I headed for where we’d arranged to meet.
At the center of the square stood a clock tower. We used to meet here when we were in college. There was a roundabout that circled the clock tower, and nearby lots of restaurants, bookshops, and those old shops that sell odds and ends.
I was fifteen minutes early. Normally I would have checked my phone at this point, but instead I pulled a small paperback out of my pocket and began to read as I waited for her to get there.
The time came, but she didn’t show up. Then half an hour went by and she still hadn’t arrived.
Damn.
Without thinking I put my hand in my pocket in search of my phone. It wasn’t there. Phones had disappeared from the world.
Had I gotten the place wrong? Or were we supposed to meet at a different time? I started to despair—all of the information I needed was in the phone I’d been using when I made the deal with the Devil. There was a good chance I’d got the time wrong.
“Damn. What a pain in the ass,” I muttered out loud.
I was supposed to have been liberated from my phone, but as it turned out, I needed it after all. There was nothing I could do. So I just stood there shivering under the clock tower.
Come to think of it, back then I often found myself muttering the same words. That was back when I was going out with her in college. She was from the big city, but came to this small town out in the sticks to go to college. She was majoring in philosophy. I remember the house where she lived all alone, the electric fan and the small space heater. And all the books. She had lots of books. Even in those days everyone had a mobile phone, that’s how we got in touch with each other and communicated—everyone except her. She didn’t even have a landline at the house she rented. When she called me it was always from a pay phone.
Whenever I saw the words “telephone booth” light up on the screen of my mobile phone, I would be beside myself with happiness. I would always pick up quickly and talk to her no matter where I was—in class or at my part-time job.
The worst part was when I missed a call. All I could do was stare helplessly at the incoming call history. I couldn’t even call back because it had come from a public phone. I had nightmares about empty telephone boxes where the phone rang forever and no one ever answered.
After a while, I started sleeping with my phone, holding it tight against me so I wouldn’t miss a call from her. The warmth of the phone I held close to me in bed reminded me of the warmth of her body. I always slept deeply that way.
After we had been seeing each other for about six months, I finally managed to convince her to get a landline installed at her house. So she hooked up one of those old vintage rotary phones in classic black.
“I got it for free!” she bragged to me as she demonstrated the dialing action, which made a loud sound.
I called that old phone so many times the number was seared into my brain. It was like it became part of me.
It’s strange how that works. Out of all the numbers stored in my mobile phone I never memorized even one. I can’t remember the numbers of close friends or colleagues, or even my parents. I had left the work of memory and even my ties to other human beings to my mobile phone. I no longer bothered to memorize anything. When you think about it, mobile phones have done something pretty scary to the human brain.
Yesterday as I was sat on the stairs, I tried to think of any number that my memory had held on to tightly enough for it to have become part of me, a physical part of me. Naturally it was her number that came to me. It seems that in the end, I had instinctively relied on my own memory.
It had been seven years since we broke up, but there was still something I needed to ask her.
She answered the phone—I couldn’t believe she actually still had the same number. She was working at a movie theater in her hometown and the next day just happened to be her day off. I thanked God for this coincidence, and arranged to meet her.
“OK. See you tomorrow.”
Her voice hadn’t changed at all since we were in college. I felt as if I’d gone back in time.
I waited for an hour below the clock tower until my feet got so cold I thought they had become a part of the pavement. Then she finally arrived, marching toward me.
She hadn’t changed a bit. How she dressed, her walk… it was all the same. The only thing that was different was that she had cut her shoulder-length hair and now wore it short.
She noticed how pale my face was and seemed worried.
“What’s wrong? Are you OK?”
It was kind of disappointing being asked if I was OK instead of something like “how’ve you been” or “long time no see,” having not seen each other for such a long time. We talked a bit and it turned out that I had arrived an hour early. When I said, “Damn. What a pain in the ass,” she replied, “Oh really? Why?”
“I’m probably going to die soon.”
I told her about my predicament in a nearby cafe.
She remained silent for a while, sipping leisurely on her cocoa. Then looking up at me she said,
“Is that so?”
This took me by surprise. Her response seemed a little glib to say the least.