Penguin Highway

by Tomihiko Morimi

  I’d talked with Uchida about the origins of life before. Uchida had said, “Just thinking about it makes my head spin.”

  How had the Earth’s first, strange child crossed that primordial barrier?

  This was an extremely critical problem, I thought. Perhaps in the future, my research would make it all clear, and I’d win the Nobel Prize.

  I liked looking around my room, thinking about things on a worldwide scale. I could see the half-built space station. I could see all the books my father had given me and a row of notebooks with all my research in them. On top of the bookshelf was a triceratops skeleton made of paper, a Christmas present. On my desk was a globe my father bought me when I started school. The rucksack for exploring and the backpack for school were both next to the desk. I’d put a new notebook on the desk yesterday so I wouldn’t forget about it.

  Downstairs in the living room, I could hear my parents talking. And plates clacking. My father was eating breakfast. I really enjoyed listening to these sounds while forming a plan for the day. This morning, it felt even more fun than usual.

  I wonder why? I thought, and then I remembered the penguins and the lady.

  I had embarked on a research project of great significance.

  That alone made me so happy, I wanted to jump right out of bed. Just then, my sister came running in—rare for her to get up this early—and yelled, “Wake up!” She didn’t know I’d been up for a while now and was all proud of beating me. Even though I’d been here thinking about things of world-scale importance.

  My sister jumped on top of me and bounded around like a baby kangaroo. I fought back, and she got all tangled up in the blanket. When she realized she was stuck, she started crying and yelling, “Let me out!” Feeling sorry for her, I undid the blanket, and she started laughing. “You’ve got missing teeth like an old man!”

  It is very hard to maintain the dignity befitting an older brother.

  Even at school, I continued my research on the penguins and the lady.

  I drew a picture of a penguin in my new notebook and wrote as detailed an analysis as I could of the circumstances under which the lady turned the Coke into a penguin. I thought a lot about what her secret might be, but I had only witnessed the birth of a penguin once. I needed a lot more data. I would need the conjurer’s cooperation for that. I should swing by the dentist on the way home and ask her, I thought.

  During break, Uchida came over and stood silently by my desk. Uchida was the silent type, but this was a much more significant silence than usual. I wondered why, and he asked, “Aoyama, are you mad at me?” which was weird and really surprised me.

  “Why would I be?”

  “Because I abandoned you on Sunday.”

  “I’m not mad at you. I haven’t been mad about anything since I was five.”

  “Still,” Uchida said, staring at his toes. “I did run away. That was bad!”

  “It was the smart choice. If you’d stuck around, you’d just have gotten caught, too. Personally, I think you not getting caught was the best aspect of that situation.”

  “You do? I was being smart?”

  “I think so.”

  “That’s good to hear,” he said, cheering up.

  In the corner of the classroom, Suzuki and his group were standing with several girls, making a racket. “Hamamoto and Suzuki are playing chess,” Uchida informed me. “Suzuki challenged her to a match.”

  “That’s unusual.”

  “Suzuki made fun of her, so Hamamoto baited him into it.”

  “Whatever will we do with him…?”

  I told Uchida how Suzuki and his minions had pissed on my notebook and stolen our exploration map, and Uchida got really upset. “That’s so mean! How could they?!”

  “But I made a copy of the notes. Don’t worry. We can redraw the exploration map. I think it would be more efficient to make a new one than to try to get it back from Suzuki.”

  “You don’t even get mad at Suzuki.”

  “If I feel myself getting mad, I just think about breasts. That always calms my heart.”

  “I admire that about you, Aoyama, but I don’t think you should be thinking about that stuff too much.”

  “About breasts?”

  “I don’t know. I just feel like you shouldn’t.”

  “I don’t think about them all the time. Only about thirty minutes a day.”

  Every break that day, Suzuki and Hamamoto faced off over the chessboard. Suzuki tried to distract Hamamoto, moving the pieces while she wasn’t looking and generally sabotaging the game, but he couldn’t find a way to beat her. Hamamoto was good. After school, the entire class was gathered around the board. Suzuki was beet red, and Hamamoto was cool as a cucumber. I took a look at the board, and Suzuki’s position was beyond salvation. He thought for a really long time before making any moves, but Hamamoto always made her moves immediately. Her motions were so precise, like a little robot girl lining up pieces of chocolate. I was very impressed.

  At last, Suzuki looked up from the chessboard and yelled, “What?” at me.

  “Nothing. Just watching.”

  “Don’t! Don’t watch!”

  Then he claimed I’d distracted him, and he messed up all the pieces. After that, he stormed out of class, dragging his minions with him. I shook my head, but Hamamoto didn’t seem the least bit upset. She just put the pieces away, muttering “Can’t even call that a match,” like she was singing in a pasture. Both Uchida and I agreed Hamamoto was very strong.

  On the way home, Uchida and I split up, and I went to the dentist’s office.

  I sat on the white couch like I always did, a magazine from the rack spread out on the table in front of me. I’d found one with a feature on cosmology, so I was totally absorbed in reading it. Page after page of beautiful illustrations and text. I definitely think I know a lot about outer space, but even for me, this article was pretty difficult. I have to do a lot more research, I thought. When he was done fixing my teeth, I said as much to the dentist, and he said, “Feel free to take it home.” The dentist was always willing to aid my research.

  “Is the lady out today?”

  “She called in sick,” the dentist said. “You worried about her?”

  “I am.”

  He smiled and patted me on the head but said nothing more.

  I went back to the waiting room, and the receptionist said, “I’ve got a postcard for you.” The postcard had a photo of a penguin standing in the middle of a field of snow. There was an arrow pointing at the penguin and a note that said You are here. In the lady’s handwriting.

  Notes on a dream I had.

  The lady was standing on a rocky shore. Nothing else around. Not a single plant in sight. I somehow just knew this was the Cambrian-period sea. Dreams were strange that way. Across the sea, lightning flashed like I’d seen in a documentary about Africa. The sky was a deep blue but with a pale glow. The same sky I saw through the blinds when I woke up earlier than all the other kids in town.

  I remember the lady’s face as she stood there on that rocky protrusion. She looked very sleepy and somehow sad. She picked up a stone lying by her feet. The surface of the stone was shiny, like it was made of aluminum. She rolled it around her palm, and it gave off a cold, hard light.

  The lady tucked the stone between her breasts, as if to warm it. Eventually, she decided it was warm enough and threw it at the sea. The stone spun in the air, glittering, wobbling like a water balloon…and then inflated. Glowing silver bubbles rose up on the stone’s surface, each pushed aside by the one that came after, swallowed up by it. Like a violent chemical reaction. The stone got larger and larger until it was bigger than me, bigger than the lady. It hit the surface of the water and grew larger still.

  At last, it became a giant, silver blue whale.

  That blue whale had evolved into us—for some reason, this thought made perfect sense to me. The idea that the lady had made us was very pleasing. And yet, she looked sleepy and sad. I wanted h
er to tell me why she looked so unhappy.

  The school grounds were a square, 180 meters on each side.

  When I was in third grade, I spent September and October researching square things. Every time I found something square in town, I made a record of it. I liked squares and thought it was wonderful how the town was laid out like graph paper all the way to the horizon.

  Eventually, I began studying triangles and circles and curves, but even now, I still like squares the best. I like graph paper and still get happy when I find a square vacant lot. The school I went to was a square sitting in the middle of a square plot, so it looked like the katakana ro ().

  Uchida and I had once walked all the way around the perimeter of the school grounds.

  After school, taking care that the teachers didn’t spot us, we’d walked past the schoolyard fence, the empty grass fields, and the parking lot. This expedition confirmed that the grounds were an exact square. Behind the incinerator, we found a second entrance to the property: a small square door in the concrete-block wall. We also discovered an open drainage canal in the field next to the school.

  We’d recorded these findings on our map. Suzuki may have stolen it, but our discoveries were still etched in my brain.

  School let out early on Wednesday, so Uchida and I decided to follow the drainage canal. An investigation into where the water came from—its source. I had dubbed this expedition Project Amazon, which Uchida really liked. It was a shame I couldn’t continue my Penguin Highway research, but I was juggling a lot of different research projects. If one reached an impasse, I figured it best to work on another.

  After school, we went out the secret door behind the incinerator, climbed the school fence, and cut across the grass. It was cloudy, but I could tell we didn’t need to worry about rain. Every now and then, the sun peeked out from between the gray clouds, lighting up the grass field as if we’d been underwater and suddenly breached the surface. The sun would only stay out for a moment, though, and our surroundings would quickly grow gloomy again. Like someone was flicking the sky’s light switch on and off.

  We walked forward, keeping an eye on our compass. Uchida was waving around a stalk of grass he’d yanked up.

  “Apparently, they were gonna build a kindergarten here,” he said.

  “But there’s nothing here.”

  “I wonder if they canceled construction. Or decided to build it somewhere else.”

  “I wish it was a train station,” I said. “If there was a station right next to our school, that would be extremely convenient.”

  The canal we were exploring ran from east to west. It was about a meter wide and made of concrete. The water itself was deep, probably able to reach up to our chests. The far side of the ditch was covered in broad-leaved bamboo. Searching for the source, our party set out to the north.

  “Uchida, make sure you don’t fall in.”

  “I wonder what it’s like where the water starts? Is it like a spring? Or a well?” Uchida speculated. “Aoyama, have you ever seen a well?”

  “I’m familiar with the concept.”

  “A really deep well would be scary. It would be like a black hole.”

  The underbrush got thicker and thicker, making it hard for our party to progress. We tried walking on the edge of the canal, but it was so overgrown that we had to push the foliage away to make any progress. Every now and then, we could see fish in the water. I looked back and found I could no longer see the school. Only the fence around the schoolyard.

  Eventually, we came to a fence covered in arrowroot leaves. The ditch continued past it, so we hesitated awhile but eventually hopped it. After all, the source of the stream might have been waiting beyond.

  The fence surrounded a square piece of land about 250 meters on each side. There was a reservoir shaped like an upside-down pyramid. The drain connected to it. The water was only at the very bottom, so we didn’t need to worry about falling in. The slopes leading to the reservoir were shored up with concrete blocks. There were green plants sprouting from the gaps, and in the water grew what looked like space plants with sausage-shaped bodies. Grass grew thick around the reservoir’s edge. I didn’t think anyone ever came here. It felt like we’d discovered a ruin from ancient times.

  Inside the reservoir was a small gray tower. A narrow bridge extended to it from the bank. We went to the end of the bridge, but there was a lock on it that kept us out.

  “Does someone live here?” Uchida asked, getting nervous.

  “I don’t know, but I think that’s just for storing equipment that measures the water volume. With the grass this high, I bet even the waterworks people have forgotten about this place.”

  “Does the water come from here?”

  “I don’t think so. There’s another drain over there, right? I think water flows here from somewhere else and then collects here for a while. That way, the river water doesn’t overflow.”

  “Aha!” Uchida said, impressed. “Makes sense.”

  I spread out the blanket at the edge of the reservoir.

  Uchida and I called this blanket our base. My sister had drooled all over it when she was a baby, but having been washed often by my mother, it was safe now. It was far more useful than a hand-me-down from my sister had any right to be. It was bright pea green and square. It could fold up very small, and we could set up base anywhere we liked. Absolutely a necessary item for any expedition.

  Sitting on the base, I jotted down some notes on the reservoir. Uchida whistled.

  It was quiet here. The school was far enough away that we couldn’t even hear the bell ring.

  I mentioned the dentist had given me a magazine about space, and Uchida was jealous. Then he started explaining the theory that “Space was born from nothing.” I remembered the same magazine mentioning that.

  “I wonder what nothing is like,” I said.

  “I think it’s different from just empty. If your stomach is empty, you don’t say ‘My stomach has become nothing.’”

  “It’s a much bigger kind of empty—like, so empty our stomachs no longer exist, either.”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s pretty incredible.”

  “Definitely. The idea of no time or space.”

  “What’s it like having no time or space? That’s a very difficult concept to grasp.”

  “If there’s no space, then there’s nowhere for us to sit, and if time isn’t flowing, then we can’t even think, ‘There’s no time here.’”

  Uchida considered this for a minute. “Kinda scary,” he concluded. “I wonder if that’s where we go when we die.”

  “Maybe that’s where we were before we were born.”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “But I don’t remember it at all.”

  Uchida screwed up his face. “Thinking about this stuff makes my head spin. Like it’s just going round and round.”

  While we were sitting on the blanket, the underbrush on the opposite side of the reservoir started rustling. That wasn’t the wind. There was an animal of some kind in the brush. I looked up, closing my notebook. Uchida grabbed my arm, frightened.

  There was a squeaking noise, and a penguin appeared. It didn’t seem to care that we were there; it just waddled toward the edge of the reservoir. Then it stood there like a Greek philosopher.

  “What’s it doing?” Uchida asked. “Where’d that penguin come from?”

  “I dunno,” I said. I was lying to him.

  Only I knew where the penguins came from, but I’d decided not to share this discovery with anyone for a while yet. Not even Uchida.

  If they found out the lady had the power to create penguins, government laboratories or universities would send all kinds of investigators to our town. They’d study her, uncover the means to create infinite penguins, and inform the world’s penguinologists. If that happened, I’d never be able to see the lady. I wouldn’t be able to research the Penguin Highway anymore. And that would be a real shame.

  I didn’t want
to lie to Uchida, but this particular research had to be conducted in secret.

  We stayed sitting on the edge of the reservoir until the penguin wandered off into the brush again.

  Seaside Café had a big skylight, and the owner, Yamaguchi, used a special long pole to open that window. There was a large model of a whale hanging next to the skylight. Sunlight would shine in through the skylight, giving the whale a dull-silver gleam. Its spindle-shaped body would sway from side to side, its wide mouth grinning cockily. It looked like a spaceship from the distant future, so I always paid my respects to the whale.

  I asked Yamaguchi what kind of whale it was once, and he just said, “Look it up.” He would let me look through his telescope, but other times, he just gave me homework. I observed the model carefully, took copious notes, and compared those to an illustrated book at the library. Once I’d determined that it was a blue whale, Yamaguchi let me have a cream soda.

  Blue whales were of the infraorder Cetacea, the family Balaenopteridae, and their scientific name was Balaenoptera musculus. All whales are large, but blue whales are especially large. They could be longer than thirty meters. It was astonishing that there were animals in the ocean so big they wouldn’t fit in the twenty-five-meter pool at school.

  I was very impressed by big things. After all, I was very small.

  Even blue whale babies are born seven meters long, and they weigh two tons. A baby whale rolling over in its sleep could easily flatten me. I imagined these babies must have very big poops. Far larger than mine. Everything about them was impressive.

  I often talked about blue whales with the lady at Seaside Café.

  She always smiled when I talked about baby blue whales.

  I woke up early, filled my rucksack with experiment equipment, and set out for Kamonohashi Park.

  The neighborhood was always quiet on Sunday mornings.

  As I passed Seaside Café, Yamaguchi waved at me through the window, so I waved back. I followed the bus route. A warm breeze blew from the southwest, making the leaves sparkle. The sky was dotted with white clouds, like little sheep. I plucked the stem of a plant from a vacant lot and waved it like a conductor’s baton as I walked.