Tengo opened his hands and looked at his palms for a while.

“I’m going to go on living one way or another. I think I can do a better job of it from now on, without such pointless detours. I don’t know what you want to do. Maybe you just want to go on sleeping quietly, without ever waking up again. That’s what you should do if you want to. I can’t stand in your way if that’s what you are hoping for. All I can do is let you go on sleeping. In any case, I wanted to say all this to you—to tell you what I have done so far in life and what I am thinking. Maybe you would have preferred not to hear any of this, and if that’s the case, I’m sorry to have inflicted it on you. Anyhow, I have nothing more to tell you. I’ve pretty much said everything I thought I ought to say. I won’t bother you anymore. Now you can sleep as much as you like.”

After five o’clock, Nurse Omura, the one with the ballpoint pen in her hair, came to the room and checked the amount of intravenous fluid in the bag. This time she did not check his father’s temperature.

“Anything to report?” she asked.

“Not really. He’s just been sleeping the whole time,” Tengo answered.

The nurse nodded. “The doctor will be here soon. How late can you stay here today, Mr. Kawana?”

Tengo glanced at his watch. “I’ll be catching the train just before seven, so I can stay as late as six thirty.”

The nurse wrote something on his father’s chart and put the pen back into her hair.

“I’ve been talking to him all afternoon, but he doesn’t seem to hear me,” Tengo said.

The nurse said, “If I learned anything in nursing school, it’s that bright words make the eardrums vibrate brightly. They have their own bright sound. So even if the patient doesn’t understand what you’re saying, his eardrums will physically vibrate on that bright wavelength. We’re taught to always talk to the patient in a big, bright voice whether he can hear you or not. It definitely helps, whatever the logic involved. I can say that from experience.”

Tengo thought about this remark. “Thank you,” he said. Nurse Omura nodded lightly and, with a few quick steps, left the room.

After that, Tengo and his father maintained a long silence. Tengo had nothing more to say, but the silence was not an uncomfortable one for him. The afternoon light was gradually fading, and hints of evening hung in the air. The sun’s last rays moved silently and stealthily through the room.

Tengo suddenly wondered if he had said anything to his father about the two moons. He had the feeling that he had probably not done so. Tengo was now living in a world with two moons. “It’s a very strange sight, no matter how many times I see it,” he wanted to say, but he also felt that there wouldn’t be much point to mentioning it. The number of moons in the sky was of no concern to his father. This was a problem that Tengo would have to handle on his own.

Ultimately, though, whether this world (or that world) had only one moon or two moons or three moons, there was only one Tengo. What difference did it make? Whatever world he was in, Tengo was just Tengo, the same person with his own unique problems and his own unique characteristics. The real question was not in the moons but in Tengo himself.

Half an hour later, Nurse Omura came into the room again. For some reason, she no longer had a pen in her hair. Where could it have gone? Tengo found himself strangely concerned about the pen. Two male staff members came with her, wheeling a movable bed. Both men were stockily built and dark-complexioned, and neither of them said a word. They might have been foreigners.

“We have to take your father for some tests, Mr. Kawana,” the nurse said. “Would you like to wait here?”

Tengo looked at the clock. “Is something wrong with him?”

The nurse shook her head. “No, not at all. We just don’t have the testing equipment in this room, so we’re taking him to where it is. It’s nothing special. The doctor will probably talk to you afterward.”

“I see. I’ll wait here.”

“You could go to the lunchroom for some hot tea. You should get some rest.”

“Thank you,” Tengo said.

The two men gently lifted his father’s thin body, with the intravenous tubes still attached, and transferred him to the wheeled bed, moving the bed and intravenous stand into the corridor with quick, practiced movements. Still they did not say a word.

“This won’t take too long,” the nurse said.

But his father did not return to the room for a long time. The light coming in the window grew slowly weaker, but Tengo did not turn on the lamp. If he did so, he felt, something important here would be lost.

An indentation remained in the bed where his father had been lying. His father now probably weighed next to nothing, but still he had left a clear impression of his shape. Looking at the indentation, Tengo had a strong feeling that he had been left behind in this world all alone. He even felt that the dawn might never come again, once the sun had set tonight.

Sitting on the stool by the bed, steeped in the colors of the approaching evening, Tengo stayed in the same position, lost in thought. Then suddenly it occurred to him that he had not actually been thinking at all but had been aimlessly submerging himself in a vacuum. He stood up slowly, went to the toilet, and relieved himself. After washing his face with cold water, he dried his face with his handkerchief and looked at himself in the mirror. Then, recalling what the nurse had said, he went downstairs to the lunchroom and drank some hot green tea.

His father had still not been brought back to the room when Tengo returned there after twenty minutes downstairs. Instead, what he found, in the hollow that his father had left in the bed, was a white object that he had never seen before.

Nearly five feet in length, it had smooth, beautiful curves. At first sight, it seemed to be shaped like a peanut shell, its entire surface covered with something like short, soft down that emitted a faint but even glow. In the rapidly darkening room, the pale bluish light enveloped the object softly. The thing lay still in the bed, as if to fill the individual space that his father had temporarily left behind. Tengo halted in the doorway, hand on the knob, staring at the mysterious object. His lips seemed to move somewhat, but no words emerged from them.

What is this thing? Tengo asked himself as he stood there, frozen to the spot, eyes narrowed. How had this come to be here in his father’s place? No doctor or nurse had brought it in, that much was obvious. Around it hovered some special kind of air that was out of sync with reality.

Then it suddenly hit him: This is an air chrysalis!

This was the first time that Tengo had ever seen an air chrysalis. He had described some in great detail in the novella, but of course he had never seen a real one with his own eyes, and he had never thought of them as things that actually existed. But what he saw before him now was the very object his mind had imagined and his words had described: an air chrysalis. He experienced such a violent sense of déjà vu that it felt as if a metal band had been tightened around his stomach. Nevertheless, he stepped inside the room and closed the door. Better not let anyone see him. He swallowed the saliva that had been collecting in his mouth, making a strange sound in his throat.

Tengo crept toward the bed, stopping when there was no more than a yard between him and it, examining the air chrysalis in greater detail. Now he could be sure that it looked exactly like the picture he had drawn of an air chrysalis at the time he wrote the story. He had done a simple pencil sketch before attempting to create a description of an air chrysalis, first putting the image in his mind into visual form and then transferring it into words. He had left the picture pinned to the wall over his desk while he rewrote Air Chrysalis. It was shaped more like a cocoon than a chrysalis, but “air chrysalis” was the only name by which Fuka-Eri (and Tengo himself) could possibly call the thing.