Penguin Highway

by Tomihiko Morimi

  “Probably The Sea.”

  “The Sea…? That’s a nasty one. I really don’t get it.”

  “The penguins and your ability both seem connected to The Sea. At least, that’s what I think.”

  “You proceed how you think best. I really have no idea.”

  The lady took a sip of her Coke. Then she looked back along the poolside.

  As I gazed at her profile, I remembered observing her as she slept on the floor the day I visited her in the white apartment building by the water-tower hill. I’d recorded the details of that day in my notebook and would record the events of today as well. That way, no matter how far in the future it was, I would be able to recall the time spent with her in detail.

  But it occurred to me that being with the lady like this and remembering being with her were two totally different things. I felt like being here with her, by the side of the pool, where it was extremely hot, with the sound of the water and people swimming ringing in my ears, looking up at the soft-serve cumulonimbus above us… All of this was vastly different from reading the sentences I would write about it later. More different than I had ever previously thought. Extremely different.

  I thought about this some more, but I couldn’t figure out how to record that feeling properly.

  “Hey, kiddo,” the lady whispered. “If I couldn’t make penguins anymore, would you stop researching me?”

  “I don’t think I would.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you are an extremely fascinating person.”

  I looked out at the sparkling pool. Hamamoto and Uchida had done another loop of the pool and were waving at us. Children and adults were sitting on all manner of floats, the sunlight gleaming on their wet skin. Their laughter echoed all around us, yet it felt like a sound from some far-off realm.

  The lady put both arms on the table, gazing absently at the water.

  “Would be nice if we can go to the beach before summer vacation’s over,” she said. “You want to see the ocean, right, kiddo?”

  We gathered in the clearing to observe The Sea.

  Hamamoto was drawing a graph in her notebook, and Uchida was watching with interest. According to Hamamoto’s observations, The Sea had peaked in size and was waning again. There were occasional waves on the surface but no large-scale phenomenon like the Prominence.

  I was sitting under the parasol drawing a chart in my notebook in an attempt to explain the Suzuki Time Travel Hypothesis. But this was an extremely bold hypothesis. Uchida and Hamamoto had both been skeptical. “I think we need to experiment more,” Hamamoto said. “Yeah,” Uchida said. I thought they were right.

  “We could ask Suzuki to go in The Sea again,” Hamamoto suggested. She seemed to mean it.

  “Suzuki was so scared of it, though. He’d never do it,” Uchida said.

  “Proving this hypothesis will be extremely difficult. And even if we wait for another Prominence and have someone make contact with The Sea that comes flying out, this time, they might get sent back to the Cambrian period. They’d never be able to come back.”

  “Should we use a probe?”

  “Would you be able to throw a probe in when a Prominence occurs?”

  “That would be difficult. And The Sea is waning now.”

  We spent the morning observing The Sea and discussing things.

  At noon, we ate lunch under the parasol, like we were having a picnic at the beach. Hamamoto and I had brought sandwiches, but Uchida used hot water from a thermos to make instant ramen. “Lucky,” Hamamoto said. Uchida seemed proud of himself. Eating instant ramen on the grass made it feel like a real campsite, which was lovely.

  The lady came to help with our research after we’d finished eating lunch. I looked up from the chessboard to find her standing at the border between the Jabberwock Woods and the clearing, holding a parasol. She looked at me, grinned, dipped her parasol, and came toward us across the grass. Maybe it was just the strong sunlight, but she looked more pale than usual.

  “It’s hot. Your research getting anywhere?”

  “It is not making much progress,” I said. “The Sea doesn’t seem very active.”

  “It seems smaller than it was last time.”

  Hamamoto showed the lady her notes. “It’s waning right now,” she said. “I see,” the lady said. Then she looked at The Sea through some binoculars.

  “That’s actually a spaceship,” the lady said. “I came to earth aboard that ship to conquer all of you.”

  The shock of this was so great, we fell silent.

  “Really?” Uchida said.

  “No,” the lady said. She always lied with such a straight face it was hard to tell.

  “What do you actually think it is?” Hamamoto asked.

  “Good question. You’re the ones researching it. How would I know?”

  “What about the connection between The Sea and the penguins?”

  “I dunno.”

  “Why can the penguins damage The Sea?”

  “That was a surprise.”

  Hamamoto peppered the lady with questions like this was an interrogation, but the lady just smiled and answered almost none. Hamamoto chewed on her ballpoint pen, frustrated.

  As an experiment, we asked the lady to make a penguin.

  I got a can of Coke out of my rucksack and had her hold it. She stepped out from under the parasol.

  “Kids, watch this.”

  We held our breaths, and she threw the can, and it did turn into a penguin, which went rolling across the grass. No matter how many times I saw this phenomenon, it remained extremely strange. The penguin righted itself and came walking over to the lady. She stuck out her index finger and drew a circle with it. The penguin stopped, surprised, following her finger with its eyes.

  “The penguin’s getting dizzy,” Hamamoto said.

  “You’re so cute!” the lady said, talking to the penguin. “All serious!”

  The penguin got tired of the lady’s finger and started staring absently up at the sky.

  “I wonder if it’s hot,” Hamamoto said.

  “These penguins seem to be fine with it,” I said.

  I tried coming up with experiments that would tell us something about the connection between the penguins and The Sea. We couldn’t send a penguin into The Sea like a probe. If that broke The Sea, our research would come to an abrupt end. And if the penguin vanished like when we sent the first probe into The Sea, then we’d feel sorry for the penguin. I knew this situation was what they called a dilemma.

  “I suppose we could try just moving it closer to The Sea?” Hamamoto suggested.

  So I ended up holding the penguin as we all walked closer to The Sea.

  As the penguin in my arms got closer, a tetrapod-shaped construct appeared on the surface of The Sea. “Oh!” the lady said. The tetrapod was like hardened blue Jell-O. I walked around The Sea with the penguin, and the tetrapod followed us, sliding around the surface.

  I moved even closer.

  “Careful…,” Uchida said behind me.

  The penguin turned its beak toward The Sea but didn’t struggle. The tetrapod shook, wobbling, and collapsed, forming a mortar-shaped depression on The Sea’s surface. The inside of this depression was wobbling, too. It was like The Sea was afraid of the penguin. The shaking was growing more violent, and the surface shifted, a number of bat-size cones growing out of it.

  “Look out, look out!” the lady said, clearly enjoying herself.

  A moment later, one of the cones stretched out of The Sea toward me. Everyone screamed and ran away. I looked back as I ran and saw a number of cones writhing about, as if searching for the penguin and me.

  We made it back to the parasol and observed The Sea from there. All the cones were slowly shrinking. Soon it was back to normal.

  After that, it was quiet.

  I sat down on the grass, drawing a picture of the cones sticking out of The Sea. Hamamoto sat next to me, with her own notebook open. The lady and Uchida pl
ayed with the penguin. When the lady bent down and clapped her hands together, the penguin would waddle toward the sound.

  “She definitely knows more than she’s admitting,” Hamamoto whispered. I looked up and saw her frowning at the lady. “I’m sure she knows the penguin secrets and The Sea’s secrets.”

  “She doesn’t know. That’s why we have to research it.”

  “You’re too close to her, Aoyama. You can’t think clearly.”

  “That’s not true.”

  Hamamoto looked at me. “Are you mad?”

  “I’m not mad. I never get mad. I’m totally calm 24-7.”

  “I think there are times you aren’t.”

  “I want to know what makes you so suspicious.”

  Hamamoto snapped her notebook closed and chewed on her pen some more, saying nothing.

  “Over there!” Uchida called, pointing to the stream running through the clearing. Some penguins appeared at the border between the grass and the forest, all clustered up like just before they started jumping into the ocean. The penguin with the lady started flapping its flippers around. I couldn’t tell if the penguins in the forest noticed it or not.

  But I noticed the lady was a little unsteady on her feet.

  On Saturday evening, I walked over to Seaside Café.

  Cumulonimbus clouds were piled up over the mountains on the border. They were colored like they’d been splashed with strawberry syrup, so the clouds looked like a delicious dessert to me. I knew that clouds were clusters of water droplets. So why was it that every time I looked up at the clouds I wanted to eat them? Was it just my sweet tooth? As I walked along, imagining how sweet they’d be, the clouds changed shape, growing rounder. They reminded me of the lady’s breasts.

  The lady waved at me from her seat in the window of Seaside Café.

  It was nice and cool inside. The air felt sleek. The silver blue whale dangling from the ceiling swayed in the wind from the air conditioner. The lady had her chin in her hands, frowning as she wrote in her notebook. I hadn’t seen her in a few days, and she looked like she’d lost weight again.

  When I sat down opposite her, she closed her notebook and grinned at me.

  “What were you writing?”

  “My secret diary.”

  “It’s a secret?”

  “That’s why I’m not showing it to you. Diaries are inherently things you never show anyone else.”

  “Are you observing yourself objectively?”

  “There you go with the tough questions. Objectively?”

  “Are you writing about me?”

  “Of course I am,” she said, smiling. “I’m researching you.”

  “I don’t think you’ll make any discoveries researching me.”

  “That’s not true.”

  It had been a long time since the two of us played chess. As she glared at the chessboard, her face looked pale, and when she moved a piece, I thought her fingers looked frail. Her breasts seemed like they’d shrunk, too.

  “You’ve lost weight,” I said.

  “I can’t eat.”

  “Why can’t you eat?”

  “I dunno. Just no appetite.”

  While we played chess, all she drank was water. Could drinking too much water make you feel full? “Water is the source of life,” she said, but the fish in the sea didn’t live on water alone. Animals like us needed energy. I insisted she needed to eat some bananas or meat or an oyakodon soon for nourishment.

  I won three games of chess in a row. “I give up!” the lady said. “No children are better at chess than you. I can’t compete!”

  “You aren’t thinking clearly because you haven’t eaten anything.”

  “But I don’t want to eat.”

  “While I get hungry so easily.”

  “You get hungry easily and fall right asleep at night. That’s a good thing!”

  “You still can’t sleep?”

  “Not a lot, no.”

  She stared at the darkness outside. In the window, her reflection looked even thinner.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t make any more penguins.”

  “But then you couldn’t do any more research.”

  “But I’m worried that you making penguins is making you unwell. And if your power gets discovered, people from the government and TV will come. And university professors who want to experiment on you. Maybe even people from NASA. It will be a huge mess, and you won’t have time to play chess with me anymore. And wouldn’t that make you sad?”

  “That’s not gonna happen. No grown-ups would ever believe this.”

  “I think you can’t be too cautious.”

  “I mean, you could try telling your father about it. I’m sure he wouldn’t believe you.”

  “You’re right. I don’t know if he would.”

  “See?” she looked pleased. “And even if it does cause a fuss, I’d disappear before I ever let anyone experiment on me. So that’s not a problem.”

  I thought it was a problem.

  That evening, we worked up a plan to visit the seaside town. Once the lady’s appetite came back and she was feeling a little better, we’d go together. If we took the train my father rode every day and changed trains twice, we could get to the coastal town where the lady used to live. I wrote the names of the train lines down in my notebook. It was much farther away than where my father worked. We would have to ride trains for three whole hours.

  “There’s a church next to the house where I used to live.”

  “Is it like the church here?”

  “Even bigger.”

  “You used to go there?”

  “I didn’t. Back then, I only ever looked at it from the outside.”

  I didn’t know if there was a God or not, and I didn’t really get why she went to church.

  “Is there a God?”

  “Good question,” the lady said, tilting her head. “I don’t know.”

  “Even though you go to church?”

  “You should ask your father if there’s a God or not,” the lady said.

  Eventually, I started getting sleepy, and then my father came to get me. He noticed she’d lost weight, too. “You don’t look so good,” he said. “I hope he didn’t wear you out.”

  “He was fine.” The lady smiled and waved at me. “Good night.”

  I walked home through the darkened neighborhood with my father. The air at night soon grew cooler. There were a lot of stars in the sky. I was sure we could see even more stars from the camp in the clearing in the Jabberwock Woods. If we had a telescope, maybe we could see Saturn’s rings. But thinking about being in the dark clearing surrounded by the dark forest with The Sea floating nearby was enough to scare even me. I wondered what The Sea looked like at night. Did it give off a silver light?

  “The lady didn’t look so good. She’s clearly lost a lot of weight,” my father said, sounding concerned.

  “She said she’s got no appetite.”

  “You shouldn’t make her play with you when she’s tired.”

  “I thought the same thing. I think I’ll do that next time.”

  I thought about telling him about the penguins, but I just didn’t feel like talking about them with him. Part of me wanted my father to believe me, but part of me hoped he wouldn’t.

  I woke to the sound of wind rattling the windowpanes. It was six thirty, so the sun should have been up, but it was as dark as a winter morning. What I could see of the sky through the gaps in the blinds was murky, like it had been dipped in ink, and the branches of the dogwoods in the garden were thrashing in the wind. A typhoon had arrived.

  I sat in bed, observing the sky. Downstairs, I heard my mother seeing my father off for work. I looked through the water streaming down the glass and watched my father’s back as he headed for the bus stop. The wind was pulling his umbrella everywhere. I was worried it would blow him away. I opened the window a crack, and a warm wet wind blew in, flecks of rain spraying my face.

  I got myself ready. The hall
and stairs were dark, too. I could hear windows rattling all through the house.

  My mother was getting breakfast ready in the living room, but I explained the day’s experiment to her. I was going to study the lady’s condition by experimenting with not eating anything myself.

  “So I won’t need any meals today.”

  “I’m against this experiment.”

  “I’ll eat twice as much tomorrow, so I should be fine for today.”

  “Moles will die if they don’t eat once a day.”

  “I’m not a mole.”

  My mother reluctantly agreed.

  “At least drink some orange juice.”

  This was an experiment, so I had to follow the same conditions as the lady.

  “I’ll drink some water.”

  “Lord!” my mother said, shaking her head. “Do what you like, then.”

  The rain and wind were too strong all day, so I couldn’t leave the house. I cracked the window in my room and measured the strength of the wind blowing in with an anemometer I’d invented myself. My stomach was a constant distraction, even doing experiments like that. I tried to write an objective record of my hunger levels in my notes, but I wasn’t sure how to measure exactly how hungry I felt. I tried thinking of ways to compare how hungry the lady felt to how hungry I felt, but all I could think about was the demands of my own belly. If I’d had a stash of candy in my desk drawer, I’m sure I’d have gobbled it right up.

  I didn’t eat lunch, either.

  Once I passed through the extremely painful period, it got much easier. I made a lot of walls out of LEGOs, like Hamamoto did. Then I was lying in bed for a while reading an illustrated guide to animals, but my stomach started rumbling again, and I couldn’t concentrate on the book at all. I hadn’t eaten breakfast or lunch. Thinking about skipping dinner made me want to cry.

  In the afternoon, I went downstairs and drank some water.

  My sister was plastered to the glass, staring out at the yard. A particularly strong gust of wind rattled the glass and scared her. “Whoa, that was scary!” she said. “Are the windows gonna break?”

  “They won’t,” I said.

  I didn’t feel so great, so I decided to lie down on the floor in the living room. My sister sat next to me.