Taka took a deep breath, turned his head to the side, and said to the recorder, “A new persona has emerged inside 0098. He calls himself the crime novelist, Mr. F.
“Mr. F suffers from the same symptom as the main persona, Hirata Shuichi. He believes that he came from a higher dimension and is currently possessing Hirata’s body.”
Feng Bujue waited from him to finish and tossed the questions that he wanted to ask out. “Doctor, since it is now 2005, Hirata’s case should have closed a long time ago. May I know the verdict?”
“He was charged with two cases of premeditated homicides,” Taka replied. “One of them was a police officer, so his verdict was serious. But considering your motive and mental state, the final verdict was life imprisonment.”
“So, is this a mental asylum?” Feng Bujue asked.
“This is a prison for mental patients,” Taka said. “We conduct a new assessment on the inmates every season. That is why we’re speaking now.”
“How has Hirata performed in the past fifteen years?” Feng Bujue asked.
“Much more normal than you are now,” Taka replied. “When he is in control of his faculties, Hirata told me that whenever he thought back to those incidents, he would fall into a black and white world. No matter how many times it happened, his memories would be filled with monsters and ghosts.
“Sometimes, the personas of Watanabe and Tachibana appeared, and when that happened, Hirata would talk to himself. I’ve tried to communicate with these two personas before, and the criminal events that they described were similar to the ones recorded by the police.
“Thus, I believe that these two personas don’t really know what happened back then. They merely took the information that the police told Hirata later as their own memory.”
He moved his eyes away from the document to Feng Bujue’s face. “What about you, Mr. F? You seem to be very interested in that case, so that means you also don’t know what truly happened back then, right?”
“Yes, that is the question I have. Fifteen years have passed, and since the verdict result is two premeditated homicides, then… Officer Yamada’s body must have been found, yes?” Feng Bujue asked.
“Seven years after the incident, Officer Yamada’s body was found,” Taka answered. “It was about that time that I gained contact with you.”
“Then… this means that even without Officer Yamada’s body, the verdict given was ’two premeditated homicides’?” Feng Bujue questioned.
“Well,” Taka answered, “based on the situation back then, the case couldn’t have been clearer. Hirata-san’s mental state was caving in, and he had no other family and no friends to step forward as his character witness. Even the lawyer assigned to him by the court suggested that he fight the case as a convicted felon, so… basically, the sentence was whatever was decided by the prosecutor. All the evidences pointed toward a single truth, that was killing the police officer, grabbing the gun, killing his boss, and then going insane.”
“Preposterous,” Feng Bujue scoffed. “Before eliminating all the other possibilities, how could you even take that as the absolute truth?
“Perhaps it was Yamada who killed Fukui and then hid the gun at Hirata’s home before strangling Haruko Sato, who was at home, before masquerading it at a suicide… Then, that would be able to explain why Hirata went to work like normal on the morning of the 27th.”
Taka looked at him for two seconds. “Ha ha… Mr. F, if you’d shown up fifteen years ago and represented Hirata-san as his defense, he might have gotten off with a lighter sentence.”
He took up the documents on the table. “Unfortunately, today, at least two pieces of evidence could undo your hypothesis. First, Yamada had no connection with the trio of Fukui, Hirata, and Haruko. The police did a thorough investigation. Be it a flimsy connection between friends or relatives, there was nothing connecting the police officer to them. Therefore, he didn’t possess the motive to do what you suggested he might have done.
“Second, the location Yamada’s body was found was at the ruins of Hirata’s old home that was hit by the tornado. The piece of land was sold by the government seven years ago, and it was when they dug up the foundation that the body was found. The time of death was narrowed down to seven years prior, and even though the body had decayed to bones, there was enough coloration on the bones to discern the cause of death. It was undeniably a premeditated murder.”
“Hmm…” Feng Bujue was silent for a few seconds before shrugging. “Fine, actually, I was merely dissatisfied with the due process and had to come up with a random hypothesis to challenge the verdict.”
“Mr. F, the evidence of Hirata-san’s crimes is undeniable,” Taka said. “Now that I have satisfied your curiosity, how about you cooperate with me and answer some of my questions?”
“As I predicted, you aren’t real either.” Feng Bujue interrupted Taka, thinking, I believe I know what this whole scenario is about now.
Taka’s face was drawn, and he suddenly stopped speaking.
“You mentioned that after Yamada’s body was found, you started to approach Hirata. After hearing that, it dawned on me,” Feng Bujue said, “Seven years after the crime, after knowing Yamada’s body was found, a new person emerged within Hirata, and that… was you.”
Taka chuckled. “Do you mean that I am an existence similar to Tachibana and Watanabe?”
“No, you preside at a level of consciousness far higher than them. From how I see it… Hirata should possess four layers to his consciousness,” Feng Bujue explained slowly. “Around November 1990, after witnessing two murders and the suicide of his wife, Hirata experienced a mental breakdown. From then on, his consciousness was trapped inside the deepest layer of his mind, a world built of terror and chaos.
“One month later, as the investigation started to clarify things, and after Hirata went through many interrogations and obtained information from the court, he coped by inventing two new personas—Doctor Watanabe and Officer Tachibana. These two personas successfully rescued him from the chaotic black and white memory world, bringing him to the second layer of his consciousness. Here, he was given a moment to rest. With the two personas’ aid, he sifted through his memory that was characterized by monsters, filing away the parts that were made up by his imagination, trying to reconstruct his actual memory.”
Feng Bujue licked his chapped lips. “When a psychologist attempted to bring forth a patient’s eclipsed memory, they would have adopted hypnosis, not something like a video reel. I should have known the space with Tachibana and Watanabe was a mental space in Hirata’s head… That place is a deeper consciousness compared to here. It is a space wedged between rational thinking and twisted memory.”
Staring into Taka’s eyes, he said, “And you, or rather this cell that we’re in, is the third layer.”
“What do I represent?” Taka asked.
“You are also a memory,” Feng Bujue answered. “You represent the memory that Hirata had for the past eight years… The normal and believable memory that he could trust.”
He leaned back in the chair and looked up. Out of habit, he wanted to reach to his nose but realized that his hands were still cuffed. In any case, he continued. “Time has washed away certain things. After seven years of psychological treatment and the two other personas to help him take away some of the pressure, the confirmed time of death and place that Yamada was found led Hirata to this third layer.
“At this layer, he can speak openly with you, objectively and calmly analyzing the past to help him accept and recognize the present. If Hirata stays with you here and does not return to the previous two layers, even if he does not recover his memory, at least he will be able to recover to become a normal person.”
Feng Bujue’s eyes moved to the recorder. “Inside the recorder, there are conversations between you and him… or rather, Hirata’s own way of rearranging his memory. Therefore, I said, these memories are normal and believable. He doesn’t want them to be mixed with others. But the existence of the recorder also means that the time Hirata can spend here is limited before he moves onto the fourth layer.”
Taka showed a helpless expression. “Mr. F, what you said is basically correct, but I am sorry to tell you that there are only three layers here.”
He sighed. “This place is the layer closest to reality. The recorder and the documents on the table are part of Hirata’s memory. This room is a replica of the cell Hirata resides in, but in reality, there’s no table or lamp in his cell.”
“Only three layers?” Feng Bujue murmured. “How is that possible…”
He showed suspicion and thought to himself, The part of the memory where he gained the murder motive has been recovered. His memory of killing Fukui has been altered, and his memory of witnessing his wife’s hanging was recovered, albeit altered. These should have surfaced after he was apprehended, but why would he have no memory at all of killing Yamada? In fact, it was only seven years later, when Yamada’s body was found, that Hirata knew about the murder. The only information Taka could provide about the murder is also miserly little. It’s like he knows nothing about the murder…
“Impossible. If there is not a higher layer, it can only mean that Officer Yamada’s death has nothing to do with Hirata,” Feng Bujue said confidently. “That part of memory is not lodged in his mind, so they could not be found in any of the layers.”
Taka shook his head. “But the evidence has shown that…”
“Give me a mirror,” Feng Bujue interrupted.
“What do you plan to do?” Taka asked.
“I’m going to leave this place,” Feng Bujue answered.
“At most you’re going to return to your place of origin, and when that happens, Hirata will return to me or fall back to the deeper two layers.” Taka seemed to be advising him.
“I’m not going up,” Feng Bujue explained. “I’m going to what’s adjacent.”
“Adjacent? What do you mean?” Taka asked.
“You’ll never understand,” Feng Bujue said in the tone of a life form that came from a higher dimension. “Just get me the mirror.”
In the blink of an eye, Doctor Taka disappeared, and only Feng Bujue was left in the room. On the table before him stood a rimmed mirror. It stood upright, supported by the plastic stand on its back. It looked upward at an angle.
Feng Bujue dragged the chair forward to where he could look into the mirror. He saw that the reflection in the mirror was not his own. It was a pale-faced man around forty with an unkempt beard.
“Hirata Shuichi, we finally meet,” Feng Bujue told the face in the mirror. He had seen Hirata’s resume in the black and white world, and it came with a picture. Even though the face before him had aged many years, Feng Bujue still recognized it.