Illusion Report

"Chaisi, Chaisi, wake up. It’s time to go home."

A hand gently pushed his shoulder. His dream cracked, the fragments slipping away, and Chaisi opened his eyes.

The evening clouds on the horizon were already a faint purple, the long clouds dyed a deep crimson, as if someone had smeared rouge across the sky with their fingers.

The silhouettes of palm trees stood tall against the sky. In the evening parking lot, dim yellow lights flickered on one by one.

"You were sleeping so soundly. Were you having a good dream?"

His mother stood outside the car. Seeing him awake, she pulled her hand back through the half-open window and straightened up. Although Chaisi couldn’t see her expression, he heard a hint of guilt in her tone. Her voice was very gentle, for guilt is a softener.

Chaisi couldn’t remember. The lights in the dream had been bright, far brighter than the western dusk in the parking lot. He had been tall, much taller than he was now.

But as for what he had actually dreamed, he had forgotten everything.

"Not working overtime today?" he asked, watching his mother open the car door and get into the driver’s seat.

"I begged my manager to let me leave early today." His mother glanced at him, a smile faintly surfacing, but it couldn’t break through some heavy lid and dissipated. "I didn’t even dare tell him you were waiting for me in the car all this time..."

"Why not?"

His mother placed a plastic bag on the back seat; the smell of the food inside was familiar. She always brought home leftovers from the restaurant for their dinner. She started the car and said, "What’s good about that? If anyone found out, Child Protective Services might take you away."

Chaisi didn’t understand what was so bad about him waiting in the car for his mother to get off work—the window was half-open, a soft breeze blowing in, his fingertips sticky with potato chip crumbs, and the storybook on his lap had slipped to the floor while he slept.

"I’m sorry, okay? It won’t happen again. When you grow up, don’t you go complaining about me to a therapist. Buckle up."

In reality, it would happen again. The only person willing to look after Chaisi for a small fee was an older girl who lived nearby, and she wasn’t free every day.

’Later, Chaisi would think that what he really wanted to say back then was, "I like waiting for you," but somehow, what actually came out was a complaint: "I want to go home and watch TV."’

"Okay," his mother said as she drove out of the parking lot. "You can watch after dinner."

By the time they got on the highway, the sky was completely dark. Bright headlights sliced through the night, flashing past their old car. The highway was elevated, with a cliff to the left; looking out, you could see all the way to the distant horizon.

The vast, sprawling Luocheng glittered below with countless star-like lights.

This was a road they had traveled countless times, as familiar as their own kitchen. Chaisi kept his eyes on the Luocheng nightscape outside the window while his mother listened to the radio, the two of them chatting idly.

It all happened so suddenly, it caught them completely off guard. As a heavy-duty truck up ahead suddenly veered, crashing diagonally through the right-side guardrail, his mother was still in the middle of a joke.

Her sharp intake of breath made Chaisi whip his head around, just in time to see the long truck sprawled across the highway in front of them.

The piercing screech of tires filled the car, but momentum kept the vehicle from stopping, and it hurtled straight toward the truck. Pinned to his seat by the seatbelt, Chaisi watched the truck grow larger and larger, like an impending, overwhelming disaster. In that moment, he forgot whether or not he screamed.

He only remembered turning his head and seeing the driver’s seat was empty.

The seatbelt was still buckled, stretched neatly across the driver’s seat as if it were protecting an empty space. The steering wheel, freed from the hands that controlled it, turned slightly.

...Huh?

The confusion lasted only a flash. By the time Chaisi reacted, frantically reaching for the steering wheel, he hit the truck. In that instant, the hood crumpled and buckled upward, filling most of the windshield and his vision. The next moment, Chaisi sank into darkness, knowing nothing more.

’Ah, right. The person named Chaisi Monroe died in that car crash at age five.’

’...He did die, right?’

’Something about that feels wrong.’

’If Chaisi Monroe died at the age of five... then who is this person, recalling things from his perspective, who thinks he’s dead?’

Another voice offered a small protest.

’Does it matter who’s remembering? Whether he died or not doesn’t matter either.’

’The only thing that matters is that if he stops this useless thinking, if he just sinks into the warm, amniotic darkness and closes his eyes to sleep, all his struggles and confusion will be soothed and answered... He’ll never have to worry again...’

’Never have to... worry... again...’

’Absolutely not.’

Chaisi’s eyes snapped open.

He was lying on the floor. The subway car’s lights were so bright they were almost blinding, and for a moment, he couldn’t see a thing.

A sudden, bone-deep instinct suppressed his urge to jump to his feet. He forced himself to remain perfectly still, listening to a rustling sound scrape across the floor, pass by his ear, and slowly recede.

His vision quickly cleared, and he found himself lying in front of a window that had lost its glass.

He still remembered how that same windowpane had just bulged out like a rubber balloon, a few grayish-white fingers prying at the seam between the glass and the frame. Now the window was empty, with only shattered glass scattered across the floor and seats.

’The resident has already squeezed in through the window. It’s entered this world...’

But no matter how hard Chaisi thought, he couldn’t remember why he was on the floor.

When he fell, the back of his head must have hit a seat before landing on the floor. His neck was twisted and ached faintly.

He heard the rustling sound stop a few steps away. A low, trembling groan came from the driver’s throat—but it had barely begun before it was abruptly cut off, as if choked into silence.

’Is he dead?’

Chaisi’s heart sank. ’That Illusion—’

"...So, you have con-," a sticky voice said, with an extremely unnatural cadence, "-sciousness. Ah, that’s good."

’It’s a resident.’

’ "So, you have consciousness. Ah, that’s good." It was speaking to the driver, which means he probably isn’t dead yet...’

Chaisi held his breath and slowly shifted his gaze. He could see a blurry, grayish-white shadow standing on the floor not far away. Although it was hard to make out, he had the feeling that the shadow had its back to him.

His abs tightened inch by inch as he silently, slowly lifted his body off the floor. He saw the T-bar lying next to his feet. He didn’t reach for it.

’From the look of the scene, it seems I was knocked down before I could even do anything...’

The hunched, stooped figure was very short, only reaching Chaisi’s waist. It was completely wrapped in a grayish-white robe, tattered and torn into strips in many places.

From beneath the grayish-white robe, a pale hand larger than a mop head rested limply on the floor, palm up. Its other hand was raised in the air, three long fingers extended, one of which was bending down toward the driver.

"Me-mo-ries... you can die in... three."

Once the cadence was broken, even the meaning was hard to grasp at first. Chaisi was stunned for a moment before he realized it was saying, "three memories in which one can die."

Which meant—

Chaisi understood everything in an instant.

A horrifying realization struck him. He abandoned all pretense of hiding, kicked the driver’s ankle, and roared, "Wake up! Don’t believe it! You’re not dead!"

He had completely exposed himself. Before his next thought could even form, a face on the stooped back swiveled around to look at him.

The moment his eyes fell on that face, the subway car once again blurred, vanished, and slid into darkness. Chaisi fell involuntarily back onto the seat behind him, the resident’s sticky laughter echoing in his ears.

"Me-mo-ries... you can die in... thirty... nine."

’So that’s how it is...’

That mix of indignation, fear, and anxiety dissipated from the edge of his consciousness like gray smoke as he fell back into memory.

If the car crash at age five was the first memory the resident had found where he could die while reliving it, then Chaisi knew what the second one was.

His second near-death experience was on the sixth day after the car crash.

It was also the day his mother returned from the Nest.