Window Keeper's Log: The View a Child I'd Never Met Had Seen
The fourth installment of 'Window Keeper's Log': a window keeper who watches that same hillside street every night writes about how it felt to hear of the previously reported briefing over the Fukagawa North Elementary "shared dream" case.
At handover, the next keeper showed me a printed sheet — a child's drawing. A hillside street, stone steps, a row of lantern posts. It looked so familiar that at first I thought it was an illustration from some internal document. "Apparently a kid at an elementary school in Fukagawa drew this," I was told, and only then did I realize it was the same view as the window I work.
A child of maybe ten, someone I've never met, might have seen in a dream the very scene I watch from the chair I always sit in. When I thought about that, what came first wasn't fear, but an odd embarrassment. It felt as if that child had been peeking in on the face I wear here every night, alone, sipping from my teacup where no one else can see.
Hearing that the technician said at the briefing, "it'll be fine if nobody signs up," put me a little at ease. In this job, the moment you rush to understand something is exactly when you miss what matters most. Somewhere along the way, I'd half-forgotten the premise that when we watch the other side, we might be watched too. The child's drawing reminded me of that.
On duty tonight, I counted the lantern posts again — that row where every third one stands a little taller. Whether something was transmitted or nothing was, what I can do doesn't change. Watch, write it down, hand it to the next keeper. Tonight too, I set out the two teacups side by side as always, and left my seat.
