And yet no matter the effort he expended in realising it was all some dream, Yaki could not extricate himself from the Stationmaster's makeshift office. Gokushima Station. Wherever in hell that was, he thought, as he again observed the plaque on the desk.
'You appear tired,' the Stationmaster said. 'For now you can retire to bed. Do you have somewhere to stay?'
'As I've repeatedly said, I've no clue where the hell I am. Besides, I still believe I'm already asleep on the train and will wake up soon.'
The Stationmaster powered up his age defying grin. 'Always the easy way for you, ay, Mr. Free Rider.'
'Please, please, don't call me that.'
'What would you prefer?'
Yaki opened his mouth and closed it. He decided, in that moment, against going with his real name.
'Free Rider is fine.'
'Okay, Free Rider. This ain't no dream you can just wake up from.'
A huff of air through Yaki's nostrils mixed with the sea breeze that ran through the station. He glowered but otherwise remained unresponsive.
'I will have you set up with somewhere to stay,' the Stationmaster said, having completed his notes and donning his cap again. 'Of course, the fee will be deducted from the work you perform.'
'What sort of work do you want me to do?' Yaki said, following the Stationmaster as he rose from his seat and walked through the arched entrance. 'You should be aware I have no skills. I mean, I do work part time as a server at a family restaurant, but I wouldn't hire me if I could, cause, well—it sounds like you know but—I don't put in any effort. I probably cost them more money than make for them.'
He couldn't understand why he spilled that about himself so unabashedly, though he reasoned quickly it didn't matter anyhow with the Stationmaster's presumed judgement of him.
'Don't worry about it,' the Stationmaster said, flagging a taxi. 'I expect you will be able to handle these tasks. And you'll have no choice but to exert maximum effort.'
The hairs on Yaki's neck grew prickly, though that might have been attributed to the sweeping wind. The Stationmaster leaned into the window of the first cab in rank. Yaki couldn't catch anything being said but keened his ears to the sounds of revelry coming out of the yokocho. The door to the back seat swung open automatically and the Stationmaster turned and ushered him in.
'When you get there, tell them you work for the Stationmaster.' He rapped on the door of the taxi and the driver pulled out and onto the road.
The driver appeared all of seventy-seventy five years. He fiddled with the thick frames of his glasses as he steered the car onto another road parallel the coast. Soon condensation developed on the windows making visibility near impossible.
'It's like a furnace in here,' Yaki said, out of nowhere and a little too loudly. He could see his flushed cheeks in the rear view mirror.
'The driver turned to regard Yaki with a prolonged look of scorn etched on his face.
'You need to watch where you're going, Yaki said pointing and panicked.
The man somehow kept the car in the right (left) lane even as he continued to look at him. Yaki closed his eyes, fearful at any moment that he'd be crushed in a burning wreck. When no such impact happened, he opened his eyes to see the driver returned to steering with his eyes on the road.
The windshield grew foggier and foggier save for a circular patch through which the driver leaned in and peered through. The driver stopped at a red light and folded his arms. Yaki caught a glimpse of the man's watch, reminding him that he hadn't been able to see the time back at the station.
'Do you have the time?' Yaki said, tapping his wrist with his forefinger. The driver half turned his head as if he was unsure if he had just been hearing things. Yaki repeated the question with an inflated gesture that caught the driver's attention. When the driver blinked repeatedly behind his foggy lenses, Yaki demanded the driver turn around and look where he was going. The light had gone blue but the car remained stationary. Drips of sweat bubbled on Yaki's forehead. It was as if he were being grilled, roasting on a hot, sticky, black leather seat.
'Please, can you roll down a window?' Yaki said between raggedy breaths.
He was well aware old people experienced climate on a whole other incomprehensible level than everyone else, but this was too much. His grandmother had lived with him and his parents all of his childhood and would often have the aircon on in the winter and heating on in the summer. It had been an uncomfortable kind of hell that Yaki would gladly trade for right now.
Another plea went unanswered.
Was the driver dull, deaf, or determined to kill him? If this was some dream as he concluded it must be, then the driver inflicting a torturous journey upon him fit the mould of all his other recent anxiety riddled nightmares—removed from rhyme or reason, aside from Yaki being the target of everyone's antagonism.
For a brief moment of refrain from his delirium, he recalled a car journey he suffered as a kid to Aomori when he ignored his father's warning to desist from reading books in the car. That had been a self inflicted pain he suffered as nausea crippled him the entire way. This pain bore an excruciating resemblance, dialled up to high heat, and ready to explode out of his whole being.
With one final act of desperate struggle, Yaki lunged forward and clung to the driver's arm, expressing a pitiful look. The words of appeal were lost in the back of his throat, dried up and shrivelled in the now oven like atmosphere. He threw everything into a look that communicated how despairing the situation was. The man turned to him in the casual way a dog does when hearing its name. With Yaki still clinging to the driver's arm, the driver removed it from the wheel and adjusted a knob on the dashboard. Actual flames burst forth from the vents. Yaki blasted back onto the back seat, screaming behind a wall of flames that separated him from the driver.
Nothing of this is real. Nothing is real. No matter what the Stationmaster said, this wasn't real.
Then why in the hell does it feel so damn real?!
Without reason or rationality defining his actions, he removed his shirt and wrapped it around his fist. Some resolve of determination, like a released valve, compelled him to reach through the flame aiming in the general direction of the old man. He found him around the collar and tugged and pulled. Death would not come to only him, he vowed. If the driver was the evil doer, then he would share his fate with him.
Enmity at his own powerlessness paired with an abhorrence of his everyday, gifted him enough strength to reel in the old man out from the front. By some miracle, Yaki and the man came out unscratched from the flames. The man displayed no discernible reaction to his circumstances; it was only as Yaki moved him off him that he contacted the icy coolness that emanated off the man's body. A small surface touch was enough to cool his whole system. It offset the shock of the blow he received from the blast and the exertion of effort he performed. It felt like a wet blanket soaked up the fire in his body, seeping into his pores. He allowed his body to absorb every and all ounce of moisture, failing to notice the cool had become frozen cold.
Is he dead?
Yaki, still unaware of the change in his environment, looked at the old man slumped against the back of the driver's seat. He somehow calmed his breathing until he could see it rising before him—the flames now replaced by a hardened layer of ice that coated the interior of the car—and registered that the car continued driving, even as the driver remained out.
It was then he recognised the inside of the taxi was like an igloo hut. He could still not see through the windows; now frozen over. He shivered, teeth chattering, and put back on and buttoned up his shirt.
A spark of realisation flashed inside his brain, causing him to ignore any rational sense at needing to keep as far away from the driver as he could. He reached over him and the icy front seat to grab the wheel in an attempt to steer the car. How the car was even moving was a question he had no space to entertain. How flames and now ice materialised was another question with no apparent answer.
No sooner had he had the wheel in his grip that he released it. He rubbed his raw and red hands together. There was no doubt the car was moving, but also somehow steering itself and following the rules of the road. The panic of the situation then solely rose from the frigid conditions inside the car. His hands burned from the exposure to the ice and he saw no recourse than to plant them on the face of the man beside him. Heat at once regulated his temperature, his hands toasted as if before a warm fire.
The man burst to consciousness; his expression inhuman, comparable to a parasite sucking the life out of its host. Yaki released the driver with more force than he intended. The driver, however, elicited no effect to anything that had happened.
The driver settled casually in the backseat with a daily racing form from a newspaper pulled from who knows where. He turned the pages without a semblance of worry.
'What?' Yaki said, still shivering. 'What's going on?'
The man turned on him and lowered the frames of his glasses. He reached out his hand to pick up the payment tray.
'What? Take me to the hotel that the Stationmaster told you to take me.' Yaki tried to peer beyond the ice thickened shell for a glimpse of where they were.
The driver tapped the tray again.
'Where are we?'
Yaki bobbed with the bumpy motion of the car going over what he could only assume were planks of wood. Were they driving on a pier? He knew they were near the ocean.
The driver tapped repeatedly on the tray, folding the paper. The pinky of his other hand buried deep in his ear.
'I'll pay, I'll pay,' Yaki exclaimed. 'Just get me there in one piece.'
The taxi driver, in one quick blast of motion, cracked the ice shell that plastered over the door. With a spryness that defied age or even sense, he fell out of the car, the rear door flapping in the wind. To Yaki's horror, the car did appear to be driving right off into the sea as he inhaled the ocean before the door somehow slammed shut on its own.
Yaki swallowed his panic, reasoning that in death he'd wake up finally. The ice scaffold melted but the freezing conditions remained just the same. It froze Yaki in place as he waited out the drop. He shut his eyes; an ironic act he figured, given he was sleeping on that train at this very moment. He couldn't recall ever actually dying in a dream so this would be a first.
Without warning, the doors opened again as the car continued to race at great speed. Yaki opened his eyes just as a force of wind swept through and tossed him out the car. He carried on a breeze that dropped him light as a feather on the pier. Bright headlights blinded him as the car tore down the pier—toward him. Presented a brief opening of sight beyond the lights, he spotted the taxi driver somehow back behind the wheel, crazed look in his eyes. He had little to no time to grasp the situation.
Yaki braced, hearing only the the clack clack clack of the wood being run over and the vroom vroom vroom of the car gaining acceleration. Perhaps this kind of death would provide the kind of jolt he needed to wake, he reasoned, again shutting his eyes.
Another breath of ocean breeze, perhaps the very same that had gently put him to the ground, whipped up again and lifted him. Then a crosswind launched him toward the car, rivalling its speed. He opened his eyes just as he came crashing through the windshield. Shards of glass exploded, crisscrossing his uniform to pieces. He had raised an arm at the last moment to protect his head but received cuts across the back of his hand. He landed hard against the back seat of the car; glass bits hailing all around him.
A blazing inferno rose up around him.
'No more, please,' said Yaki, wincing as he sat up. 'Just drown me and wake me up.'
Through the flames he could see the driver handling the taxi unaffected by the broken windshield, the fire and his very reemergence in the car.
To Yaki's surprise, the car was somehow off the pier but not in the water. The ocean was parallel as the taxi followed the curve of the road. It then turned through a gate and pulled up before the portes-cocheres of a hotel.
At the turn of the ignition of the car, the flames disappeared. The driver pressed the button that automatically opened the back door.
'You're crazy if you think that even if I had the money I'd pay you,' Yaki said, sweating into his eyes.
The driver nodded his head as if accepting thanks and returned to his racing form.
The man was evidently insane but Yaki didn't need any more of an invitation to exit the taxi, hauling himself out along with bits of glass.
The driver was deep in his form as the doors automatically shut and the taxi moved off.
Yaki picked out bits of glass embedded in his arm and hands before wiping them across his sweat slick brow. He noted in spite of everything he no longer felt fatigued. A fact he couldn't help but record always happened when he arrived somewhere to rest.