After a few more moments of the garden tour, he stops talking, and we walk along, silently. A few more moments pass before I break the silence by asking him why they've brought me here.
"Mr. Yamamoto," I say.
He stops walking, and turns to me, placing both of his hands on my arms, sighing.
"Why am I here? Synchro didn't bring me here without a reason. Was I getting too close to figuring something out about the company, and now they're not sure what to do with me? Where are my friends?"
"Let's go back inside and have some tea while we discuss this matter," he says to me, smiling a half-smile that makes me suspect that he could be avoiding the answer on purpose. I can't attribute all of his behavior to mere quirkiness, not when things have been the way that they are for the past week or so. What good is it going to do for him to keep procrastinating talking about it? Synchro's done some pretty strange stuff, and some of it might be blurring the line when it comes to ethics, but I don't think that they're going to kill me at some old man's house up in the mountains.
We walk towards the house, again, arriving a moment later at a door on ground level. He opens it and steps inside, and I follow him back into the house. The door creaks when we close it, as if it's both very old and unaccustomed to regular use.
"I should grease the hinges on that door," Yamamoto says to me, walking towards a raised bar that sits like an island in the center of the room. In the center of the island, there is a teapot, and there are two cups placed on small plates beside it. There is also a bowl with a bunch of bananas in it beside the teapots, and I raise my eyebrows in surprise, but don't comment.
"Would you like some tea?" He asks me, pouring a cup. Steam rises from the surface of the liquid, so I know that someone else has just been in the room to set the beverage out for us. I am still thirsty, so I accept. It's been a long time since I've had tea, anyway. He pours a second cup, walks back over to me with it, and places it in my hands.
"Here you are," he says. "Let's sit by the fire and talk, now."
I follow him over to the fireplace on the back wall of the room, and then we sit in two high-backed armchairs that look like antiques. If they're as old as they appear to be, then I imagine that no one's ever used them and that there are no cats in the house.
There are a lot of books on the shelves of this room, too, and I briefly wonder if he's read all of them or if they're just there for show. I make note of the numerous ball-clocks placed throughout the room, wondering if Daisuke himself is the collector of all of the ephemera or if someone else living in the house is responsible for the wonderful relics. There is a statue of an elephant in the corner of the room - black, appearing to be made of ceramic or porcelain, and a chessboard balances on its uplifted trunk. The pieces are arranged around the board as if someone is in the middle of a game. More clues pointing to multiple residents of the house. God knows that it's big enough in here and would probably be a lonely place to live in all by oneself.
The fire is warm, and I welcome the warmth after walking around outside in the cold, shielded from the wind by the walls though we were.
"Would you like a banana?" He asks me before he sits down, examining the bowl of fruit on the table. He selects a ripe-looking fruit from the bunch and offers it to me.
"No, thanks," I lie to him. It's been even longer since I've seen a banana.
"This might be your last chance to have a banana, ever. At least, a real banana," he says, and I know that he's right. Whoever he is, he's obviously got a lot of money. "And these are from a completely Race-5-fungus free crop. The hybrids just don't taste the same, I'm afraid, and I'd rather not have them at all then bother with something so mediocre." He places the banana back into the bowl, shrugging his shoulders, and then he sits down in the chair across from me. "When you're my age, you have little patience for mediocrity."
"Did you try to kill me?" I ask him, point blank. He laughs.
"When?" He pauses long enough to make me wonder. "I could have, while you were sleeping, or any number of times since then, had I wished it. But no, I made no attempt on your life, and was not responsible for the decision that led to the occasions in which you were endangered."
I think about what he's just said.
"So you know who's responsible for all of the things that I've been dealing with this week?"
"It's been going on for longer than that, I'm afraid," he says, leaning forward.
"What? Longer than that? How much longer than that?" I ask him, setting my teacup down on the floor beside my chair. I don't want him to notice that my hands are shaking, but it's probably already too late. I fear that he's about to tell me things that will shatter my perception of what my life has been lately, and after the past few weeks, I'm willing to believe that such a revelation is possible.
"Will you agree to be silent while I tell you some things that you will probably find very challenging to believe?"
"I have a lot of questions," I reply, not agreeing yet.
"You are a man of many questions. Have you considered why you always question everything? Regardless, you have been wondering who I am, and who I work for, I am sure," he states, and he is correct.
"Yes."
"Most excellent. Primarily, there are events transpiring which have unfortunately required my party's involvement, though we previously had no desire or willingness to have a direct hand in your situation. That stated, you have been a particularly interesting detail to us. Especially notable is your search to find the location of your missing girlfriend. Tell me, what do you think it is that has caused her such distress in her life? Why do you think it is that she left you... vanished, even, as if into thin air?" He smiles at me with a sympathetic look and takes a sip of his tea.
I shiver, but I don't answer him. He's turned the tables around on me, now, hitting me where I am most sensitive, and we both know it. I feel like my stomach's falling towards the floor beneath me.
"There are people who thought that the best solution for the problem that you've presented is violence, but you've been surprisingly lucky at avoiding the situations they arranged which could have ended badly for you. We have since revised our approach. After all, you're here now, aren't you? Safe and sound?"
I don't know what he's getting at, but I suspect he'll get around to it.
"Keep talking," I prod him.
"Tsk, tsk," he chides me. "Politeness. Manners."
I can't believe I'm being scolded for being rude in a situation like this, but I let it go.
"As I was explaining to you, the initial attempt on your life was a failure," he says. "Originally, people were sent to remove you from the equation long before you started this futile adventure of yours, but your first stroke of luck occurred when you were not in your apartment at the time that they searched it for any information about what you might know about the company."
He pauses for a moment, looking at the fire. His voice is remarkably good-natured, but there is an ominous undercurrent starting to show through, and I shift in my chair.
"You probably didn't notice that they'd removed all of the evidence of her existence there, anyway. Our people do a good job at erasing things. Unfortunately, the team assigned to you was careless with its equipment, and the explosives designed to destroy your home did not detonate. They had to be removed at a later date, of course, since no evidence could remain once you started uncovering things about the company's research."
"Explosives?" I ask, incredulous. This can't be the truth.
"If you were to return to your apartment now, you'd find that it is completely bare. We are erasing your life, now. The company doesn't like liabilities. We know when someone is more useful to us alive than dead, though, and that's the only thing that saved you, in the end. Keep breathing," he notices that I have grown wide-eyed. "Remember that the decision to let you live won out in the end. You are valuable."
He stares at me. His eyes are cold and completely devoid of emotion. Is he waiting on a bigger reac
tion from me? What does he expect me to do? Run? To where?
"What about the guys in the car behind us? Back when we crashed the RV. Were they your people, too?" I ask him.
"They were contracted labor. A non-issue," he answers. Easy for him to say.
"What do you want from me?"
He doesn't answer for a moment, but he continues to stare at me, as if he's looking right through me.
"I see that your tea's gotten cold. Perhaps you would like a spot of coffee?" He asks, strangely. I put my hands over my face and sigh. This is hard to accept, and he's telling me all sorts of things that I don't even want to believe. The fact is that I do believe him. I don't think that he's lying to me, or that he has any reason to. Nothing makes sense, except that somebody's been trying to kill me, and my search really did endanger Janine, much more than I thought it had.
He snaps his fingers.
"Pay attention to me," he demands. I return my attention to him, as he orders, and he loosens his tie.
"Most people would agree that you are insane," he informs me. "To convince your friend Janine that your cause is worthwhile is one thing, but involving the man who calls himself Hunter was quite an accomplishment. He needed a place to belong to, didn't he?"
Once again, I choose not to answer. I'm sure he has more information about my friends than I do, anyway, and I suspect that this is some sort of shell game, distracting me from the truth. I glare at him.
"Speaking of little patience," he trails off. Is he mocking me?
"In any event, we wondered: who would believe you? If you were to tell them the truth about what you'd discovered, I mean. You're... chance encounters... with former employees of the company, particularly leading up to your meetings with Dr. Evan Partain - they provided much more information to you than you may realize. Information that was never leaked to the press, no matter how much they tried to pry their fingers into the Pandora's Box that the company had been transformed into once successful research had commenced," he pauses for a moment, as if considering how much information he's willing to give to me. It's as if he's second-guessing himself and the information that he's been provided about my case. He doesn't seem to notice that I caught him with a doubtful look in his eye for just that moment, and he continues. "But you know all of that already; I know that you know it.
"However, were you aware that more recent experiments using Synchronicity Drive technology appeared to be moving towards a consistent and stable, predictable result? There has even been some discussion as to administering the drug orally, most likely in the form of a single dose capsule," he says, excitement causing his eyes to glimmer. He can hardly disguise his joy at whatever successes he's lauding to me, no matter how much he's projecting a cool, callous exterior. It's in such contrast to the challenging, blank stare that he was giving me just moments ago that I wonder if perhaps he is the crazy one in the room, or if perhaps we're all mad.
"You're getting ahead of yourself, here, Yamamoto," I say to him, running my hand through my hair. "The Synchronicity Drive was real? There really were experiments on people having to do with memory manipulation?"
"You doubted the truth that had been revealed to you?" He asks me, and then waits.
"I had no reason to believe what anyone was telling me was truthful," I answer him, defending myself. "The only real facts that I have are that she's missing, and everything I've done to track her down has led me to you."
"But you've never doubted that those facts themselves might be deceptions?"
"She was there. Now she's gone. Everything else is up in the air, maybe, and all of this memory manipulation stuff that your company is doing seems to be connected to the reason that she's vanished, though I can't exactly put together how that is yet. I suspect that Synchro's responsible for her amnesia in the first place, and that maybe she's out to get revenge on the company for screwing up and erasing her past. It doesn't explain why she hasn't called, but it makes the most sense to me. Am I wrong?"
He shrugs his shoulders.
I wait for him to answer, anyway.
A few moments pass, and he closes his eyes. I keep waiting, wondering about that coffee, wondering if he's even directly connected with Synchro Systems, and if so, how deep that connection runs. I wonder if he's really just a very wealthy old man who somehow found out about my situation, and if this is all just a game to him. I wonder who else lives in the house, and I think about the possibilities. I wonder where Janine and Hunter are, and I wonder if they're doing anything to try to track me down. I wonder if they're even safe.
Without opening his eyes, Daisuke speaks.
"Have you considered it a possibility, as well, that you might have been one of our patients, and that your memory has been tampered with? That an error lies in your own mind's arrangement of events, and that error has created a tidal wave of questions that you can't answer?"
I imagine how a tidal wave of memories and questions would look, sucking up parts of my past, pulling the water away from the shore as the wave rises, higher and higher, far out at sea. The coast is destroyed by everything pulled away from it just moments before. Everything comes falling into place. In the case of a tidal wave, anyway, and that's not happening for me.
Nothing is falling into place, really. I've considered what he's asking me, of course; just as I've considered the possibility that I truly am insane. Less than a day ago, I decided that I couldn't trust myself anymore, since I was suffering from mild memory loss that was apparently selective. Could that really be a symptom of something much worse in my mind? I've heard that crazy people never think that they're insane, and that's how I should be able to gauge my own sanity.
But what if Yamamoto is right? What if it's not insanity or neurosis, but instead that I've been dosed with one of Synchro's formulas without my knowledge (or recollection, at least)? The sleeping medicine was too recent, wasn't it?
He asks me another series of questions.
"In a society like ours, do you really think that it's possible for someone to have no past at all? Do you really think that your girlfriend can just appear in your home one day, completely fail to recall a single personal detail about her life prior to you, and despite all reasonable efforts and even exhaustive searching, fail to uncover a single shred of evidence that her own past even exists? There are records for everyone and everything. Why didn't you ever question that? No one is invisible anymore," he opens his eyes and looks at me. I see what I interpret to be sadness there, but I do not know why the emotion is able to leak through the wall of his face, momentary lapse though it is.
He continues. "That probably contributed to the information leaks that led to the federal investigations of Synchro, anyway, though the work goes on even while injunctions are filed and inquiries are conducted."
Is he sad because his company is folding up beneath him? Or is he sad because there's something wrong with me, and I'm just too close to the problem to see it? Is he sad because there is nowhere else that we can hide?
"But you already said that your people are good at what they do. That you're erasing my own life, even as I sit here with you," I counter. "With money like yours, and it does appear that you've got a pretty fair share of it by the way things look around here, why isn't it possible for you to erase what you consider to be a mistake? She might have been a mistake, and then my friends and I got involved, just like you said, and we found out too much for whatever reason, and now we're on the list of messes you have to clean up since you're trying to salvage your company before the government shuts you down. If we spread our information into the proper outlets, it only speeds up the investigation process, halting your research."
"We want to help people," he says, defending the research.
"I want you to help me," I insist.
"You're here, aren't you?"
"Why do you talk in circles like that?" I ask him, growing more and more exasperated by his and everyone else's endless avoidance. Did I take a dose? Is he trying to tric
k me? Does he know where she is?
"What's her name?" He asks me, finishing the last drops of his tea. He turns the cup over so that it is upside down on the saucer and leans forward, placing it on the floor beside him.
"What?" I ask.
"Your girlfriend. Her name. What is it?"
Breath: in.
Breath: out.
I can't remember. Wait. It's right there, so why can't I remember?
"I... I..." I stammer. I tilt my head to the side, as if trying to dislodge the memory of her name.
"Is it so hard to believe, now?" he asks me. It isn't so hard to believe now. It hasn't been so hard to believe since things stopped making sense. Nevertheless, that doesn't provide an explanation for everything that I do remember. Where did all of the times that I'll never forget really come from? The best and then the worst times of my life, once she was gone - are they all just tricks of my mind brought on by clever machination inside of my head? How could I forget her name? I've forgotten other things, haven't I?
He sighs.
"Did she ever have a name?" He asks. "Admit that it's possible that she never even existed," he says, as if he's demanding a confessional for a crime that I've never committed before he passes judgment on me and then murders me in cold blood.
"But," I say. "Janine. Janine knew her. Janine knows. You're tricking me. You dosed me with the Synchro medicine, didn't you? The woman back at the labs gave me a shot of your treatment, or the dose was in the water that I drank when I woke up!"
"You might be correct," he replies. "You might be mistaken. Janine might not know what you're talking about. Janine might be working for us."
"This is completely insane. What kind of experiment are you doing with her? Am I a part of it? Just another test subject, tested to see what happens when you manipulate every variable to the point that not even the truth makes sense anymore? You made me forget her name! This is all part of it, just to see if the treatment really works!" I stand up and take a step, closing the gap between us by half. I lean forward, and I'm yelling into his face. "Tell. Me. The. Truth."
"The truth is subjective. Always. You can decide the truth for yourself, anyway."
I shake my head. "How can I do that? You have all of the information, here."