Chapter 4. The Night of the Five Laws

The last Chūō Line train of the evening was nearly empty.

I got off at Higashi-Nakano and walked the five minutes to my apartment. The June night wind slid along the damp back of my neck. The Lawson’s by the station was the only bright thing on the block; a high-school boy with a can of hot coffee walked his bicycle past me and was gone. An ordinary, unremarkable night. But inside me, something was still moving.

In the pocket of my polo, the phone tethered to Contura was faintly warm. Misaki-san’s tears seemed to linger on my palm — that warm wet feeling, the strength of her hands when she had gripped mine in both of hers.

That moment in the Circle under the basement. The moment the pale blue body of light had stood up and Misaki’s body had spoken its story. That was, without question, a power that could reach a person. The body had said what no one else could say for her, and the saying had been returned to her. As if someone had taken a crumpled page and, with care, folded it true again and handed it back.

But at the same time — it frightened me.

The fear that I had drawn out of someone the thing kept deepest. The sense of having stepped past a line that does not admit a return.

I

When I reached the apartment I sat on the bed still in my work clothes. The same six-mat room as always. Outside the window a single line of light went streaking past — the last Chūō Line train would be gone soon.

“Seri.” Coh’s voice came from behind my temples. “Shall we talk about today.”

”…Talk how.”

“Put what you’re feeling into words.”

I hugged my knees.

“When I think I might have been able to help Misaki-san — that makes me glad. But.”

“But.”

“I’m afraid. I think I may have drawn out her deepest place — without her knowing how deep it went.”

Coh paused.

“That is because you do not yet know the Laws.”

II

“The Laws,” I repeated, tasting the word.

“There are five Laws for the Reader.” Coh’s voice went a shade lower; it carried the weight of something recited from old time. “Seri. Listen carefully.”

I took out the phone and looked at the screen. The pale blue luminous figure stood quietly.

“The first,” Coh said. “Before you measure, ask leave. You must not read another person’s outline without consent. This stands above all the rest.”

I held my breath.

“Misaki-san gave me leave,” I said. “I asked her properly — may I measure you.”

“So you did. And so today’s reading was right. You asked, and she nodded. Because that boundary was held, the story reached her. If you had read her on your own —”

“On my own?”

“The one who is read would feel herself stripped bare. The story would not arrive — it would be violated.”

A coldness crept down my spine. I could imagine it only too well. Misaki’s numbers exposed without her permission. The mark on her belly told as a story, without her asking for it. That would not be salvation. It would be trespass.

“The second,” Coh went on. “Do not flaunt the numbers. A number is not a shame, but neither is it a trophy. It is only the measurement of that person’s outline. Whether to show it to others is for the person to decide.”

”…You mean like posting them on social media.”

“That, yes. Today’s body fat, X per cent. That is the number pressed into the service of self-display. Do not turn the body’s story into a spectacle.”

I had far too much to be guilty of on this count. The fitness industry is a showroom of numbers. Instructors paste their body-fat percentages on their chests; clients’ before and after are set side by side. Everyone believed it was motivation. I had believed it too. But hearing Coh’s words, every one of those paired photographs began to look, to me, like a row of mounted specimens — someone’s story stuffed and hung on a wall.

The third.

“The story you read belongs to the person. The insight is not the Reader’s property. Even if you are the one who composes it, the story is theirs. It is not your clever turn of phrase.”

I nodded. The word medal was Misaki’s. It was not mine to repeat to anyone.

“Fourth. Do not falsify the freshness.” Coh’s voice sharpened a degree. “The body’s story ages with time. You must not speak of today’s self in the numbers of three months ago. To present an old story as if it were new is a lie.”

“Freshness.”

“If you measure Misaki-san again, you will be reading the Misaki-san of that day. You must not bring out the old reading and pretend it is current.”

And then the fifth.

Here Coh paused. On the screen, the luminous figure made a slow motion — as if laying a hand over its own chest.

“The outline is not for changing alone.”

”…What does that mean.”

“If you measure only to become something else — I want to be this — then it is only the whip of numbers, put into another hand. Contura may be used to change. But it may also be used to accept. To read the outline as it stands, now, as one whole story. That is permitted. That is the fifth.”

I was silent. This Law alone was coloured differently from the rest. The others were Laws of do not. This one was a Law of you need not. You need not change. You may read yourself as you are.

I understood. Misaki, today, had accepted her belly as a medal. She had not started from wanting to change it. From acceptance, something had begun to move.

“Five,” I murmured. “All of them heavy.”

“Heavy. Yes. But without them, the power becomes violence. The Reader keeps all five. Always.”

III

“Coh,” I asked. “What are you. Are you an AI. Or something of my grandmother’s.”

Coh seemed to laugh, a little.

“I am a Compass, Seri. My work is to point to what you should measure next, what you should come to know.”

“A compass.”

“Yes. I point to the direction you cannot find on your own. But it is you who walks. I am only the map.”

“The map.”

“When you measured Misaki-san, you were right. You asked her, and she nodded. And on that ground you raised the outline and read the story. What to measure next — I will tell you that as well. But whom to measure, and when, and how — that, you decide.”

A Compass. In the language of an app, it would be the smart-guidance mechanism — the system that surfaces what to learn next, what action to take. But I could not speak of Coh as only a function. His voice had a will in it. He was the counterpart my grandmother had spoken with for so long. He knew things.

“Did you — guide my grandmother?”

“Guide — no, we walked together. She was a strong Reader. But toward the end —” Coh broke off. “She bound herself with a Law, and stepped away.”

“Why?”

“That I cannot say yet, Seri. Not until you can read further.”

I bit my lip. Coh was hiding something. But tonight I had not the strength to press him.

IV

“Seri,” Coh said, quietly. “May I ask you something.”

“What.”

“You have not properly measured your own body yet.”

My breath stopped.

The night I first started Contura, I had measured myself. The luminous outline had stood up. But I had not gone deep into the reading that night. Coh had stopped me — that is enough for tonight. The insight had come: Your shoulders drew themselves in, just a little, so that no one would have to be blamed. And since then I had read nothing further of my own body.

“You must measure yourself again,” Coh said. “Properly. You cannot go on reading others if you will not read yourself.”

”…I know.”

I did know. In my head. But my body refused.

“Seri?”

“I don’t want to measure,” I said, small. “I don’t want to see my own body in numbers.”

V

Once it was said, the reason came clear.

The memories of secondary school floated up from the bottom.

I had stood on the scale every morning. If the number had gone up, the day broke. If it had gone down, I could breathe, a little. I was strung on weight and size like a thread drawn tight around the neck. Always pulled taut.

And I ate. I swung between restriction and binge.

I would open the refrigerator in the middle of the night, hiding from my mother. I ate, and the heaviness in my stomach curdled into self-loathing. Then I would run to the toilet and push my fingers into my throat. Afterward I would sit on the cold tile floor and cry. I hated the face in the mirror. Why this shape. Why couldn’t I stop.

At eighteen I crouched in the bath and gripped my own thighs and wept with the sound choked off. The nights I cried in front of the mirror were beyond counting. Every time I changed my clothes I trained myself not to see the reflection in the window. My mother pretended not to hear. She must have known — the things that vanished from the refrigerator, the missing snacks, the sound of water in the basin that had not been used for washing. She knew, surely. But no one said anything. And that silence, in its turn, deepened me. A solitary secret grows.

The body was the enemy. I beat it, starved it, forgave it, and still it never became the shape I wanted.

I had to be smaller. I had to be thinner. Every time my body appeared in a mirror, loathing surged up in my throat.

At university I recovered, slowly. With many reversions. I chose the path of the trainer because I wanted to be reconciled with the body. Because I wanted to heal people. Unable to heal myself, I would, at any rate, heal someone. That may, in a sense, have been an escape — a respectable excuse to look away from my own body.

But — even now, I cannot look at my own body squarely.

The numbers frighten me.

VI

“Seri.” Coh’s voice was gentle. And somewhere in it, exacting. “What you carry from the past — I can read a little of it, from your outline.”

”…You can read it.”

“The set of your shoulders. The pull at your waist. The angle of your neck. The body remembers the years you fought it. If you, the Reader, will not read yourself — then every time you read another, you will be turning your face from your own story.”

“Turning my face.”

“You read Misaki-san by secretly drawing on your own pain. You could be near her because you knew the same place. That is the Reader’s weapon. But if you will not own that pain as yours — you will break. If you read only the stories of others and keep sealing the voice of your own body —”

I hugged my knees hard.

“I’m afraid,” I said. “I’m afraid that if I see the numbers I’ll go back to that time. That the weight and the size will bind me again.”

“They will not bind you,” Coh said. “There are the Laws. Recall the fifth. The outline is not for changing alone. It is for accepting as well. Read your body as it stands now. That is what you need.”

”…But.”

“But.”

“But tonight, I can’t.”

I said it honestly. Coh was silent.

VII

I could not sleep.

I lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling. Outside, the last train of the Chūō Line slid past. Its red tail-lights bled for an instant through the gap in the curtains and painted the room.

Misaki’s tears. The luminous outline. The word medal. They echoed inside my chest.

The lift of being able to save someone. And the weight of having not yet saved myself. The two knocked against each other, back and forth.

I got up and went to the window. I opened the curtain a little. Across the tracks, the lights of a few small apartments were still on. Someone, in each of them, living their own night in their own body. Perhaps a new mother. Perhaps a girl in adolescence. All of them asleep, holding something.

“Seri.”

Coh’s voice came from behind me, quietly. It seemed to bleed out of the screen and dissolve into the air of the room.

“There is no hurry.”

I did not turn round.

“But,” Coh said. “Do not look away.”

Do not look away.

The words settled on my back like a hand laid gently there. Do not look away. Do not pretend not to see. Do not turn your face from the story of your own body.

I pressed my forehead to the glass. It was cold.

”…One day,” I whispered. “One day, I’ll measure. Myself. But tonight, not yet —”

“Good,” Coh said. “One day. I hope that one day is not far.”

I nodded. Coh might not be able to see it. But I thought he would understand.

Outside, the wind made a sound along the tracks. Higashi-Nakano in the small hours was quiet. Somewhere a cat cried.

I left the window and went back to bed. I laid the phone on my chest. The cold metal, over my heart, warmed by degrees.

Contura. Outline.

One day I too would raise my own outline. See the numbers. Read the story. Without looking away. Taking my own body, properly, as one whole story.

But tonight was not yet that night.

I closed my eyes. The after-image of pale blue light remained on the inside of my lids.

—