The alternative

Undying love, eternal life-such things could only ever exist in memories and in the heart.

(1)

It was my turn to look after Megumi today.

Sitting in the visitor's chair in the hospital room, I watched the child with his back to me, his head lowered as he fiddled with something. My gaze drifted toward the half-open window, past the fragrant cypresses outside, and settled on the children in the distant garden, cradling little pets as their light, clear laughter rang out.

I had never liked those soft, lovely, fluffy little animals. Because my first lesson in something as bitter and heavy as life and death had come from them.

Yuanyin had once bought me two puppies, one black and one white. I named the white one Pearl and the black one Stone.

One night, beneath scattered stars, with neither wind nor moon, I held them as I sat beside Yuanyin on a knitted floor mat, comparing them to the pictures in a dog breed handbook spread open on the floor.

A floor lamp cast a warm orange glow, standing in for the sun after it had clocked out, enveloping us completely.

"Looks like a Doberman." Yuanyin scooped Stone out of my arms, brought him closer for a careful look, then checked the reference book and delivered her verdict.

I rubbed Pearl, who was still in my arms, and turned the page. The next breed pictured was a pure-white Samoyed, very much like my puppy in both color and appearance.

"Then Pearl is a Samoyed."

"Impossible!" Yuanyin rejected the idea. "These two have the same mother. They're from the same litter."

I gave it some thought in the spirit of scientific inquiry, then said, "Then they have different fathers."

"Pfft. So that's possible too?" Yuanyin laughed, then began telling all sorts of ridiculous jokes without watching her mouth. But halfway through, she would suddenly straighten up and put on a serious face, ruffle my hair, and tell me with mock solemnity that Lili had to be good, that I mustn't learn from her, and that I had to grow up to be a lady.

Back then, I would nod with feigned innocence, savoring those tender moments beneath the warm light.

I wanted those days to be undying, eternal. But they had not continued. They had become memories, just like the two puppies that had filled so many wonderful moments for Yuanyin and me, closing their old, heavy eyelids when they could bear no more, one night as moonlight shone over a mountain stream.

If a puppy's allotted time was fifteen years, then how many years did human affection have? Could it last less than half a lifetime?

Something tugged me out of my thoughts. The child who had kept his back to me turned around.

He held up a small metal plate containing several apple wedges carved into rabbits. These "rabbits" varied in color. Some were gleaming white, while others had yellowed, as if coated in a layer of caramel called oxidation.

"Are these for me?" I carefully took the plate with both hands, picked up one of the "little rabbits," and asked.

Megumi nodded. His fever had not fully subsided, leaving his round little face flushed and his sea-blue eyes less clear than before.

"Yes. They're for Lili."

My hand trembled around the apple wedge. "What did you call me?" I asked, a little urgently.

He tilted his head, his eyes hazy and his words slightly slurred. He looked like a tipsy child, but his tone was exceptionally firm.

"Lili."

(2) Interlude

[Say it after me. Li... li...]

[Yes, well done, little Megumi. Are you pointing at me as you say it? No, I'm not Lili.]

[Look, that's Lili, the one beside the fire hydrant. Do you remember, Megumi?]

-Beside the fire hydrant?

The images played like an old film. Megumi Fushiguro sat in the audience, watching through a shaky first-person perspective as a child stood at the center of the black-and-white frame without being its protagonist.

[...You have to take care of Lili from now on, understand?]

[...Lili likes apples... buy them for her when you grow up...]

[Lili...]

-Lili?

It was like the first talking picture of the eighties, with shoddy images and a monotonous voice-over that felt both strange and familiar. All that kept its sole viewer in his seat was that name, repeated again and again: Lili.

[...Hurry up and grow up, little Megumi. You have to take care of her for me...]

[...]

[...Remember to hug Lili often... she likes hugs...]

The narrator spoke to herself, but the old sense of discussion was gone. Her words had become rigid demands.

When the images stopped shaking, the film ended abruptly, and the audience was forced to leave. An invisible force shoved him along. Just as he was about to fall, a pair of cold hands caught him and held him securely. With her forehead resting against his, Megumi Fushiguro heard Yuanli's relieved voice.

[Thank goodness. His fever finally broke.]

He understood. The person he needed to hold on to, to embrace, to call out to, was Lili, and she was also Yuanli.

"Are you still Megumi?" The apple wedge fell to the floor as Yuanli leaned closer and asked him softly.

He moved toward her of his own accord, relying on the dizziness and courage his low fever gave him. Obediently following the narrator's command as though it were her final wish, he boldly wrapped his arms around Yuanli's neck, buried his face in her shoulder, and answered in a muffled voice, "I'm Megumi."

(3)

The child who had taken the initiative to hug me, carrying the sweet-tart scent of apples, was not fully lucid.

I guessed his memories had unsettled him. Was that why he was comforting me with such a sense of duty?

I raised a hand and gently patted his back, again and again. My thoughts slowly settled after the initial shock of hearing "Lili."

That name, and this embrace, must both have been things Yuanyin had left in Megumi's mind.

I should have been happy-happy that Yuanyin had cared about me after all, that she had most likely been forced to abandon me. But at that moment, I was not happy.

Whether he was Megumi Fushiguro or Megumi Zenin, he should not be controlled by memories. He should not be forced by them to do things he did not want to do. He should not become a plan B whose existence served to prolong a single moment.

The days that had not been carried forward in time had long since become undying memories. They could not be brought back to life, just as Yuanyin could not rise from the dead now and embrace me again.

So how could Megumi be forced to shoulder such complicated, heavy familial affection?

I gently lowered the child's arms from around my neck. I did not push him away; I only stopped us from hugging.

"Megumi, can you tell me what you remembered?"

His face flushed, the child bit his lower lip and chose not to tell me. He seemed to want his actions to look spontaneous, rather than the result of obeying orders.

If I had never seen the resistance in his expression before, and did not know a fifteen-year-old soul lived inside this body, I would certainly have believed him today.

But knowing those things only made my heart ache more for this child.

He was denying his own wishes to obey a mother he had never met, but who was intimately connected to me, then accepting without resistance feelings that were not his to bear.

Then had Megumi Fushiguro's own feelings toward me-gradual, respectful, slowly drawing closer-been silently drowned beneath the enormous waves of Yuanyin's emotions?

No. I didn't want that.

I slowly put some distance between us, then told him plainly, "I don't want this Megumi who comes to me with a mission. What I want is what fifteen-year-old Fushiguro and two-year-old Megumi Zenin truly feel, without anything else mixed in."

"Fifteen-year-old Fushiguro doesn't actually like touching other people, does he? And two-year-old Megumi Zenin isn't suited to looking after me at all, is he? The feelings we had for each other shouldn't become a substitute for another family bond either, should they?"

I took a deep breath, held back the tone that might turn my words into an order, and spoke as calmly as if I were asking a classmate to lend me an eraser.

"So, could you give me back the real Megumi?"

It was a request, and also a chance for him to choose to be himself again.