Penguin Highway

by Tomihiko Morimi

  “Suzuki is definitely a mean one,” she said. “I wonder why.”

  “So do I. I’m at a loss.”

  “You’ve been researching it?”

  “Quite a lot. But Suzuki is the emperor of the Suzuki Empire, so it is difficult to get along with him.”

  “Because he’s an emperor.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But…would you want to be friends with him if you could?”

  “I think that would be best, if it was possible. If Suzuki said we should be friends, I am prepared to do just that.”

  “Then that’s fine. Makes sense to me.”

  My mother ate some chocolate. My father had brought it back as a souvenir the other day. It had some peppermint pasted between two thin layers of chocolate. My parents wouldn’t let my sister have any, saying that this chocolate was for grown-ups. But she would let me eat a little when my sister was asleep. I was extremely pleased by this.

  As she ate the chocolate, she giggled like a little girl.

  “I’ll bet everyone was surprised when you hopped out of the pool naked.”

  “The teacher certainly was. She wrapped her shirt around me. Some of the other kids were surprised, but others just laughed.”

  “Be careful not to surprise people too much.”

  “There was no other way. If I’d stayed in the water, I would have gotten cold, and Suzuki would have enjoyed seeing me in trouble.”

  “That’s right. But was there really no other way?”

  “Can you think of one?”

  My mother considered.

  “I can’t think of anything,” she said. “You’re better at this than I am.”

  If she said so, maybe I could have thought of a better approach to the problem. Talking with my mother always made me feel that way.

  My sister started snoring. It was almost nine. My mother took a sip of tea, glancing up at the clock. “Your father will be late tonight. Maybe after midnight.”

  “I’m sleepy. I don’t think I can wait up for him.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “He leaves early and comes back late.”

  “It’s really best if everyone gets a good night’s sleep.”

  “I wish I didn’t have to sleep.”

  I knew my father got on the city bus every morning at the Block 5 stop. The bus took about fifteen minutes to get to the station. Then he took the train across the prefectural line to work. My father always left very early and was liable to come back at all hours. Sometimes, like tonight, he’d be so late I couldn’t stay up. In the winter, he left while it was still dark out and got back after it was dark again. He always had to wait at the dark bus stop with his briefcase.

  When we knew my father would be back very late, I couldn’t wait up for him. I was someone who always fell asleep as soon as I got in bed, but in that moment before I fell asleep, I always wondered where my father was. Maybe he was on the bus, watching the lights of the neighborhood pass by. Maybe he was right outside our house. Maybe he had just gotten off at the bus stop and was walking toward our house. Thinking that always came as a great relief to me. And then I’d fall asleep.

  “Dad says when he’s waiting for a bus, walking through town, or riding the train, he does a lot of thinking. Says he gets a lot of good ideas that way.”

  “He does?”

  “And he gets a lot of good ideas at Seaside Café.”

  “Did you know that place isn’t actually called Seaside Café? I had no idea.”

  “That’s right. The lady gave it that name.”

  As I explained the origins of the name to my mother, the sleepiness got overwhelming.

  Then the phone rang. My mother answered. “It’s the lady,” she said, handing it to me.

  “Hello, kiddo,” she said. She seemed to be doing well.

  “Hello.”

  “You sound sleepy. Oh, right, it’s your bedtime.”

  “I am extremely sleepy today. My brain is tired.”

  “The other day, you said I should make things other than penguins, right? Your hypothesis. That maybe doing that would make me feel better.”

  “The Aoyama Hypothesis.”

  “Well, the Aoyama Hypothesis might just be right. I feel much better.”

  “What did you make?”

  She giggled.

  “…A blue whale.”

  I probably should have been much more surprised, but I was just too sleepy at the time. I was about ready to drop the phone. So I just stood there, phone in hand, saying nothing.

  “Wow, you are sleepy,” she said.

  “I am sleepy,” I said.

  “Brush your teeth, kiddo,” she said. “Bonne nuit.”

  There was a blue whale in my dreams that night.

  I insisted it was a bad idea, but the lady made a blue whale in my house. “It’ll be a baby, so it’s okay,” she said. But it was not okay. The baby blue whale filled the living room and couldn’t move. It looked extremely sad. I was worried it had crushed the lady. I searched for her as best I could, but she was nowhere to be found. And while I was in a panic, the baby blue whale made an amazing poop.

  I couldn’t believe it. What a scary dream.

  After school the next day, we went through the Jabberwock Woods to the clearing.

  A warm, wet wind was blowing across the grass, and cumulonimbus clouds were piling up in the sky. I spent a while walking around the grass alone. I had something extremely important to think about, so I must have looked like a Greek philosopher. Moving away from Uchida and Hamamoto, I felt like I really was standing at the ends of the earth.

  I looked back, and Hamamoto was kneeling down on the grass. She was tying a kite string to the probe I’d made of LEGOs.

  Uchida was under the parasol writing in a notebook. Like Hamamoto and me, he’d started taking notes. He wrote in a different way than I did. He spent most of his time thinking hard with the notebook lying next to him. Eventually, an idea would come to him, and he’d write a few words down. And he never let us see what he wrote. So I didn’t know what kind of notes he was taking.

  The Sea floating over the grass had swollen up quite a lot, and the current diameter set a new record, the largest recorded since we established the observation station. And it was still expanding. A number of different phenomena had appeared on the surface of it. We’d given the different phenomena names: Triangle, or Hula-Hoop, or Mobius. But giving them names and taking notes on them did not clear up the mysteries of why these phenomena occurred or what they were for.

  Walking around The Sea, I was thinking of nothing but the blue whale. What the lady had told me on the phone the night before. Even if the lady had made a blue whale, was there anywhere in town capable of hiding it? The penguins could hide in the woods. But you couldn’t have a blue whale just wandering around in the forest. They were huge. The more I thought, the less it made sense.

  “Aoyama!” I heard Hamamoto yell. “We’re ready!”

  I stopped mulling things over and joined her. Uchida came running over, too. Hamamoto had the probe dangling from the kite string and was swinging it back and forth. The probe was about the size of a softball. There was a thermometer inside, and the tip of a penlight jutted out of it, set up to flash at us. We’d also attached a small red flag so we could get an idea what forces were at work within The Sea. I’d tried to make it like the space shuttle, but as I was improving the sturdiness of it, it had grown short and stout, exactly like a penguin.

  “Not the best-looking thing I’ve made.”

  “That’s not true. It’s a probe!” Uchida said. “It’s amazing. Like a real experiment.”

  Hamamoto seemed pleased with it, too. “This is a real experiment.”

  “Aoyama, I think we should give the probe a name,” Uchida suggested.

  “Right… It looks like a penguin, so let’s call it the Penguin I.”

  “Cute!”

  The probe was officially christened the Penguin I.

  But o
nce it came time to launch the probe, we all fell silent. The Sea was just hovering there without a sound, all swollen up. There were several white ringlike things floating on the surface of it, spinning and moving around it. We’d named this phenomenon Hula-Hoop.

  “I’m not scared,” Uchida said. “But what if putting a probe in it makes The Sea mad? I’m not scared, but…”

  “Will it get mad?” Hamamoto seemed worried, too.

  “We’ve still not determined if The Sea is a living thing or not,” I said. “But if The Sea is alive, then having a probe suddenly inserted in its body will definitely make it angry.”

  “Let’s stay as far away as we can!” Hamamoto said.

  We walked across the grass away from The Sea. Hamamoto unrolled a lot of the kite string. I took the Penguin I in hand, measuring our distance from The Sea. We were about fifteen meters away. Uchida held the end of the kite string, and Hamamoto peered through the binoculars. “Ready, Aoyama,” she said.

  I swung my arm back and threw the Penguin I.

  The Penguin I flew through the air, landing on the northern surface of The Sea. It easily slipped inside, as if inhaled. From the point of impact, ripples ran across the surface of The Sea, making it wobble like Jell-O. We could see the penlight moving inside. “Contact successful,” I said.

  “I knew it wasn’t water,” Hamamoto said. “More like gelatin. All wobbly.”

  Suddenly, the kite string snapped taunt. Uchida yelped and started trying to unwind it, but he couldn’t keep up. Trying to keep hold of the end of the string just led to him being dragged toward The Sea.

  “Aoyama! Help! I’m in trouble!”

  I grabbed onto Uchida. Hamamoto let go of the binoculars and grabbed Uchida, too. We put our combined weight into it, but it was like playing tug-of-war against our entire class. All three of us were dragged across the grass on our behinds.

  “Eep!” Uchida screeched. He let go of the kite string.

  A second later, the kite string was swallowed up inside The Sea. The flash of the penlight inside disappeared.

  Hamamoto stood up and peered through the binoculars.

  “Penguin I’s disappearance observed,” I said.

  “Did The Sea get angry?” Uchida said, flinching.

  Hamamoto lowered the binoculars and whispered, “Prominence!”

  As we observed it, the phenomenon occurred.

  The surface of The Sea moved violently. White-and-navy patterns flowed past. On what would be the southern hemisphere if this was the Earth, what looked like bluish-white walls rose up. If you were in space and a really huge tsunami happened on Earth, it might look like this. The walls moved slowly to the north, and as they did, they joined forces, forming large lines. If they really were the waves of a tsunami that could be seen from space, then they were really big ones. Big enough to swallow up Japan and China and Russia.

  Cautiously, we moved closer to The Sea. Other than the strange phenomenon on its surface, everything else about it was the same as ever. The Sea reflected the sunlight, shining on our faces like we were standing near water.

  “It’s moving slowly.”

  “This is a Prominence?” Uchida said.

  Hamamoto shook her head. “Not yet. This is the preliminary phenomenon.”

  As the tsunami-like constructs on The Sea’s surface reached the northern hemisphere, they all joined up, forming a single straight line. That line slowly started to bend, as if trying to wrap around something. Finally, the two ends of the tsunami joined up, forming a large ring. The tsunami rose to greater heights, the circle jutting out like a smokestack. The outside of the circle was generating a lot of airy white stuff, like when you’re whisking whipping cream. Inside the circle, it was totally different, a dark navy blue like a gouge running all the way to the deep sea. The changes happened slowly but precisely, as if the movements were calculated; it was impossible to get bored watching it.

  Hamamoto suddenly grabbed our hands.

  “Come on, we need to move back!”

  “Why?”

  “The Prominence is starting!”

  We did as she said and ran away.

  When we reached the observation station, we turned back and saw the circle on The Sea’s surface reaching toward the sky like a bluish see-through tube. Shortly after, the entire surface of The Sea seemed to pulse. The echo of it ran across the entire clearing. The tip of the tube swelled up like a trumpet and fired a small sphere. This new sphere traced an arc through the sky above the clearing, flying off into the forest.

  This was the phenomenon Hamamoto had named Prominence. The Sea bore children this way. Hamamoto had seen one of these tiny Seas drifting through the Jabberwock Woods.

  A lukewarm wind blew, making the Jabberwock Woods rustle. The air smelled like rain, and my hair was curled up tight. The sky was heavy with storm clouds, the bottoms of which looked like they’d been dipped in ink. Like if you ate them, you’d get sick. A flash of lightning ran across the clouds, and for a brief moment, their insides lit up. I saw what looked like blue fireworks burst across the sky. A few moments later, there was a low rumble.

  My stomach started to hurt, and I had trouble staying calm.

  “Thunder!”

  “That cloud just lit up!” Uchida said, pointing at the storm cloud. It was like a giant peering down at us.

  “Aoyama, are you scared of thunder?” Hamamoto asked.

  “I’m not scared of it. If I hear thunder at home, I’m comparatively calm. But we’re in a grass field with nothing around us, so the chances of lightning striking here are quite high.”

  There was another rumble. I flinched.

  “Is that cloud coming this way?”

  “If you hear thunder, you shouldn’t go near tall trees, big trees, train tracks, cars, or iron towers. You also shouldn’t be out in the open like this. And you shouldn’t have anything metal on you.”

  I folded up the umbrella and ran off toward the Jabberwock Woods. Once I was in the woods, I felt safer, but Uchida said, “Where’s Hamamoto?”

  I looked back at the clearing from inside the woods, and she was still standing in the clearing. She was an extremely logical person yet did not seem aware of the dangers of lightning. “Hamamoto, it’s dangerous!” I yelled. “Come on! Hurry!”

  A strong wind raced across the clearing like a wave in the grass. Hamamoto put a hand on her hair, staring at something across the field. The clouds were like soft-serve ice cream with ink swirled in, and they were getting closer.

  “There are penguins here!” she shouted.

  Somehow, there was a group of penguins over by The Sea. Their beaks all pointed at the gray sky, swaying rhythmically. Maybe the electricity in the atmosphere was charging the Penguin Energy. They surrounded The Sea, at a set distance from it. Like space pilots around the mothership. I wondered why it had never before occurred to me that the penguins and The Sea might be connected.

  “You’ll be struck by lightning!” Hamamoto yelled, addressing the penguins.

  “Hamamoto, you really should get in the forest!” I yelled. Then I saw something moving out of the corner of my eye. On the stream that meandered out of the Jabberwock forest and across the clearing. A silver thing was moving along the surface of the water, kicking up foam.

  Hamamoto had seen it, too.

  When the silver thing in the river got near The Sea, it jumped high above the surface of the water. It was extremely small, only about the size of a dog, but I could tell it was a blue whale. And when the whale made a big splash, the penguins waddling around The Sea scattered in all directions, squeaking.

  Once it had chased the penguins away, the blue whale dived to the bottom of the stream.

  “Hamamoto! Lightning!” I yelled, clinging to a tree.

  At last, she turned and ran into the woods. She was out of breath and nearly ran right into me. A moment later, there was a huge crash of thunder, and I ducked my head. Hamamoto laughed, not seeming to mind.

  “You saw that
, Aoyama?” she said. “There was a weird fish in the river!”

  “I saw it. An extremely big fish.”

  “That was weird!” she said, looking back out at the clearing.

  I added the following phrases to my notes:

  The penguins are afraid of the blue whalelike creature the lady made.

  There seems to be a significant connection between the penguins and The Sea.

  EPISODE 3

  The Forest Depths

  I often write down plans in my notebook to methodically work through later.

  Plans for exploring with Uchida. Plans for books to read at the library. Plans to construct a space station out of LEGOs. Plans for practicing chess. Plans to go to the seaside town with the lady.

  The notebook’s grid allowed me to make nice-looking time schedules. Dividing big plans into several little plans. Dividing the big blocks of time into smaller ones. Time worked like LEGOs. It all neatly fit together into one big plan to turn myself into an important grown-up.

  I didn’t hate school, but it offered no way to determine my own schedule. If I could plan out the time allotment for school at will, that would be extremely fun.

  As summer vacation approached, I made a number of plans in my notebook. I divided up the time, making a number of different bricks, and fitting them together. All so I could accomplish as many fun things as possible.

  On the last day of school, we all went to the gym, listened to a speech from the principal, and then helped clean everything. I helped wipe the windows so clean, you couldn’t even tell they had glass in them. While I was furiously cleaning, Hamamoto came by carrying a broom.

  “Aoyama, are you going to the summer festival tomorrow?” she asked.

  “I believe the chances of me going are quite high,” I replied.

  Suzuki came over spinning a rag around his finger. “L-O-V-E!” he said.