Valeria's embrace was not an end; it was the eye of a different hurricane. Being knelt on her floor, her warmth and scent enveloping me, anchored me to reality. But reality was unbearable. My brain, which had gone through fire, psychological torture, and conceptual disintegration, could not bear the simple, overwhelming stimulus of compassion.
The broken dam not only released pain. It released chaos.
My body began to tremble, a violent, uncontrollable tremor that started from the center of my chest and spread to my fingertips. My sobs turned into dry gasps, the desperate, useless struggle for air of a man drowning on dry land. The images of my personal hell, which had been contained by my confession, now spilled out unfiltered.
"The stairs..." I gasped against her lap, "they always go down... always..."
I saw the forest of tendons, felt the prick of thorns on my skin. "The trees bleed, Vale, they bleed..."
"Kenji, look at me," her voice tried to be firm, but I could hear the panic growing in it. "Breathe with me. Come on, breathe."
But I couldn't breathe. I was choking on the smoke of my city of lies, with the taste of ash in my mouth. "The mirror lies," I whispered, my eyes unfocused, looking through her, through the walls of her apartment, into the hell burning behind my eyelids. "Its smile... it was laziness..."
My muscles stiffened. I pulled away from her with a spasm, falling backward and hitting my head against the kitchen table leg. The dull ache was a momentary blessing, a point of clarity in the storm. But then the storm returned with greater force.
I started seeing things. Not as memories, but as overlays on reality. The walls of her cozy kitchen seemed to drip the dark blood of the wounded trees. One of the fetal forms, bright and translucent, floated lazily above the ceiling lamp. Valeria's face flickered, shifting between her own scared face and the smiling porcelain mask from the feast.
I screamed. A long, sharp scream, the sound of a mind tearing at the seams.
"They're here!" I shrieked at her, pointing into the empty air. "All of them! The whispers! Don't you hear them?"
I curled up on the floor, balling myself up, trying to protect myself from the phantoms only I could see. The sound of the subway bell, the sharp echo of the beginning and end of my time travel, reverberated in my ears, over and over. Ding-dong. Ding-dong. It was the sound of madness knocking at the door.
Valeria acted. Through the haze of my terror, I saw her stand up, her face pale and filled with a determination born of fear. I saw her grab her phone, her hands trembling so much she almost dropped it. I heard her speak, her voice tense and urgent.
"Sofía, it's me, Valeria... Yes, Sofía, Kenji's mom... You have to come. Something's wrong with Kenji. I don't know what it is, he's... he's really bad. No, he doesn't seem drunk, or high, he's... he's having some kind of attack. Please, hurry."
I heard my name, my mother's name, but the words made no sense. They were just sounds, white noise beneath the subway bell and the whispers of the smoke demons.
After that call, she made another. To a number I didn't recognize. "Akari, it's Vale... Yes, Kenji's sister... Your mom's on her way, but I think you should come too. Yes, it's serious."
And then, a third call. The hardest.
"Mr. Tanaka? It's Valeria... Yes, Kenji's girlfriend. I'm so sorry to call you at this hour, I know you're working, but... it's Kenji. He's at my apartment and he's not well. His wife and sister are on their way, but I thought you... you should know." There was a pause. I could imagine my father's silent, controlled reaction on the other end of the line. "I don't know, sir. He's yelling things that don't make sense. He's... scared. Very scared."
After the calls, she knelt beside me, keeping a safe distance. She didn't try to touch me. She simply spoke to me.
"Kenji, help is on the way," she said, her voice an anchor in the ocean of my chaos. "You're safe. You're in my house. Nothing's going to hurt you here."
But I wasn't in her house. I was in the forest, in the landfill, in hell. I was looking at her, but I was seeing the maître d' figure with her face, pointing at the katsudon plate.
The wait was an eternity and an instant. My crisis ebbed and flowed in waves. There were moments of terrifying lucidity where I realized what was happening, the image I was projecting, the fear in Valeria's eyes. And those moments were worse than the madness itself, because they were filled with a shame so deep that I wished the madness would return to drown it. And it did. It returned with the cries of the babies from the garden, with the creak of the rusty swing, with the weight of grudges.
The first sound was frantic knocking at the door. Valeria jumped up to open it. My mother, Sofía, entered like a whirlwind, her face a mask of panic. Behind her, my sister, Akari, eyes wide with fear.
"My son!" my mother cried upon seeing me on the floor, curled up. She lunged towards me, but Valeria gently stopped her.
"Wait, Sofía. I don't think we should touch him. I don't know how he'll react."
"What happened to him?" Akari demanded, her voice sharp with anxiety.
"I don't know," Valeria replied, tears now streaming down her own face. "We were talking, and suddenly... he broke."
My mother began to weep, an inconsolable cry. "Kenji, my love, it's me, Mom. What's wrong? Please, talk to me."
But her voice was being drowned out by the whispers of the shadows. You never came back... you never came back...
I tried to answer her, tried to tell her I was there, but only senseless gibberish came out of my mouth, a mix of broken words and random letters. "T̷h̸e̷ ̷p̶a̸r̶k̴... Y̷u̶k̸i̸... I̵ ̷d̶i̵d̸n̷'t̷ ̵g̵o̵...".
The next arrival was quieter. The door opened again, and there was my father. Haruki Tanaka. He wore his work suit, but his tie was loosened, and his face, normally a mask of stoic calm, was pale and tense. His eyes, the same as mine, swept over the scene: Valeria crying in a corner, my mother sobbing, Akari paralyzed by fear, and me, his son, a babbling wreck on the floor.
He said nothing. He walked slowly, with a calm that seemed out of place amidst the chaos. He knelt down, not close to me, but at a respectful distance. And he simply observed me.
In his eyes, I saw no panic, no anger, not even the disappointment I had so greatly feared. I saw the same thing I had seen in the landfill hallucination. I saw a deep pain, the pain of an engineer facing a broken machine whose parts he doesn't understand, the pain of a father seeing his son's suffering and not having the tools to fix it.
"Kenji," he said, his voice quiet, but it resonated in the room, cutting through my internal chaos for an instant. "We're here. We're all here. You're not alone."
His words, so simple, so direct, were the first thing that made sense in hours. You're not alone. It was the lesson Koro had taught me. It was the truth my father, in his language of actions and not emotions, was trying to communicate.
The cavalry had arrived. Not with swords or magic solutions. They had come with their presence, with their fear, and their imperfect love. My family. They were all there, gathered by my crisis, a circle of protection against the demons only I could see.
I looked at my father. I looked at my mother. My sister. Valeria. I saw the terror on their faces, a terror caused by me. And the flame of my oath, the one that had been born in the void, burned with a new, painful intensity. I have to fix it.
But before I could fix anything, I had to survive. And for the first time, I realized that maybe, just maybe, I wouldn't have to do it alone.