Penguin Highway

by Tomihiko Morimi

  “Why won’t you eat anything?” she said. “Are you sick?”

  “I’m not sick.”

  “You look sick.”

  “Should we take a nap?” my mother suggested. She brought out towels. We put them over our bellies and sprawled out on the floor. My sister grumbled a bit but eventually drifted off. The way my sister was designed, all you had to do was put a towel on her, and she’d nod right off. I usually fell asleep pretty easily, too, but today I was so hungry, I was really struggling to sleep.

  “You sure you don’t need dinner?” my mom said, sounding sleepy.

  “I don’t.”

  “Sheesh. You must be starving!”

  “But I made up my mind to do this experiment, so I’ll endure it.”

  “You’re so stubborn,” she said. Then she fell asleep.

  I stared up at the ceiling, listening to the sounds of the typhoon beating against the entire house. I was starting to feel extremely sad. It was dark inside and outside, and I just didn’t have the energy to do anything. I felt like the world once your belly emptied was a very sad place indeed.

  Even then, it seems I eventually nodded off.

  Someone was shaking my body. I sat up and found the house was even darker. The wind appeared to have died down a bit, but the sky was still overcast, and the rain was pounding down, leaving the back porch soaking wet. My mother was gone, her towel neatly folded. My sister was flopped down next to me, looking worried, her towel wrapped around her.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  My sister suddenly burst into tears.

  “Mommy’s gonna die!” she said, crying. This really surprised me. I thought something extremely bad had happened to her while I was sleeping. I got to my feet. “Where is she?” I asked, but my sister just shook her head. I sat down next to her. “Why is Mom gonna die?” I asked patiently. I soon discovered that when my sister said “Mommy’s gonna die,” she meant “Mommy’s gonna die someday.” My sister had been thinking about the future and managed to scare herself.

  “That won’t happen for a very long time,” I said.

  “But she will die?” My sister was extremely scared. “And you and Daddy will, too?”

  “That’s true.”

  “But why?”

  “Well, we’re all living things. All living things eventually die. Dogs and penguins and blue whales, too.”

  “I don’t want that.”

  “Well, you can’t have everything you want.”

  She pulled the towel over her head, crying even harder. She must have woken up from her nap and found my mother had gone out somewhere, and with the house all dark from the typhoon, she’d felt lonely and started thinking all sorts of gloomy things.

  I understood why my sister was crying.

  Back when I still didn’t know anything and was selfish and spoiled, I’d done the same thing she had and realized that everyone I cared about would die one day, and I would never be able to see them again, and that had come as quite a shock. I’d known that all living things died eventually, but it had never occurred to me that that really, actually applied to me. No matter how lucky you were, no matter how much you didn’t want it, you could never escape that fate. And that fact felt like a huge dark wall looming over me.

  I’d made this realization in the middle of the night, so I’d gone to my parents’ bedroom and tried to explain my discovery to them. But the discovery frightened me so much, I couldn’t say a single word. I felt like if I said a word about it, something extremely bad would happen.

  Even faced with my sister’s tears, I was so hungry my head wasn’t working properly, and I couldn’t think of anything to say that would make her feel better. But even if I’d been full, I might not have thought of anything. I knew perfectly well that explaining that all living things die would never make sense to her. I remembered that night and how awful that fact had seemed.

  So I stroked my sister’s head as she cried.

  That was the only thing I could do.

  Eventually, my mother came home. She’d briefly run out on an errand.

  “Whaaat? What’s going on?” she asked brightly. She drew the curtains and turned all the lights on, and it was like all the anxiety we felt melted like snow.

  I told my mother why my sister was crying.

  “Oh dear, you poor thing,” my mother said, giving my sister a hug.

  That evening, while the others ate dinner, I was upstairs in my room.

  I was feeling extremely sad, both because I was so hungry and because my sister had been crying. I didn’t remember the last time I’d felt this sad, and the sadness was so great, I couldn’t remember anything. I hadn’t recorded anything like this in my notebook, so I had no way to check. I realized I had no way of accurately measuring how sad I felt. Just like I had no way of measuring how hungry I was.

  I had no energy, so I was lying on my bed and staring out the window. The typhoon had passed, and the clouds outside were starting to have gaps between them. My nose was getting really sensitive, and I felt like I could smell all sorts of delicious scents rising up the stairs. I heard plates being laid out on the living room table and my sister calling my name. Until that moment, I never realized how much I loved my mother’s cooking.

  I thought about how much the lady must be suffering. I remembered how pale she’d looked and knew exactly why she’d been so listless.

  I took out my notebook and organized my notes on the lady. Trying to forget how hungry I was, I noted every time the lady had felt good and every time she hadn’t and made a list with dates. Then I made a chart that showed how she was feeling. It looked like a submarine rising and falling. When she was feeling too sick to see me at all I marked it zero; when she was able to call or send messages, one; when she met me but wasn’t feeling good, two; when she was feeling fine, three; and when she could make penguins, a four. I took these values and made a graph with the dates on the horizontal axis. I connected all the dots with curves and got a wave of the lady’s health.

  Satisfied that I’d managed to accomplish this research despite being very hungry, I dived back into bed.

  The next time I woke up, it was the middle of the night.

  It was already tomorrow. I’d completed my experiment goal of not eating for a full day. I didn’t think I could stand to wait for morning, so I went downstairs. My sister and mother were already asleep, but the light was on in the living room. My father was watching TV and drinking booze. He turned when he heard my footsteps.

  “Oh, you woke up,” he said. “Bet you’re starving.”

  “Dad. My energy has completely run out.”

  “That’s quite an experiment,” he said. “Wait right there.” He got up and went to the kitchen. He took out some sandwiches my mother had made and warmed up some potato bacon soup in a pot. He put the soup on the table, steam rising off it, and I felt like I was eating the scent alone. When I took a bite, I was so happy, tears rolled down my cheeks. Big lumps of potato in the soup and the cheese in the sandwiches tasted better than anything else I’d ever eaten. I asked for more soup, eating everything he’d warmed up.

  “Good, right?”

  “Very.”

  “So what are the experiment results? You satisfied with them?”

  “Yes. I accomplished my goal.”

  After the typhoon, the heat came back. It was now late August.

  My mother told me about some strange rumors floating around town. Apparently, some mailboxes and vending machines had gone missing. And the row of streetlights along the bus route had vanished into thin air as well. That wasn’t all; there were stories that several large birds that couldn’t be found in any bird guide had been spotted on the high-tension towers, and some sort of monkey had been seen dancing in the evening on the water-tower hill. Someone else had seen a white fish or lizard-like thing walking on the road past the meeting hall.

  “Ever since those penguins showed up, it’s been one strange thing after another,” my mother c
oncluded.

  The mailboxes and vending machines might simply be missing because someone stole them. The birds on the high-tension towers, the monkey on the water-tower hill, and the lizard-like creature on the road all might just be someone’s pet that got away. But I felt like all these strange phenomena were connected to our research. Like my father said, it was quite possible all these problems were actually one problem.

  I wanted to see the lady again, but I had no idea what she was up to since she stopped feeling good. I went to her apartment building once. I rang the intercom, but she didn’t answer. I wanted her to eat something, so I hung a bag with orange juice and soft pastries from her doorknob. I wrote From Aoyama on a piece of paper I tore out of my notebook and put that in the bag, too.

  But from the graph I’d made, I estimated she would be feeling better soon. The graph showed a steady wave pattern, and I could tell the next recovery phase would be starting soon.

  And the graph led me to my next discovery.

  We were headed for the observation station.

  As we stepped out of the Jabberwock Woods, Hamamoto said, “Hmm?” The Sea had been in a waning period, but now it was waxing again and was visibly larger than last time. Sunlight hammered down out of the blue sky, making The Sea sparkle. There were several whirlpools on its surface.

  I sat under the parasol, reading my notes and indexing them. Uchida was flying a kite. Hamamoto sat next to me, making records of her observations of The Sea. She was using fluorescent markers to redraw her graph of The Sea’s radius.

  “You’re really good at that, Hamamoto,” I said.

  “I know!” she said, grinning.

  I took out my notebook, hoping to make a copy of her graph. As I was flipping through it, I found the graph I’d made of the lady’s health. I’d been starving myself when I drew it, so it was a much messier graph than Hamamoto’s. But their actual shapes were extremely similar.

  “Look at this,” I said, putting my notebook on the grass. I lined Hamamoto’s notebook up right underneath it.

  The two graphs showed waves fluctuating at the same pace. When The Sea was waxing, the lady got better. When The Sea was waning, the lady started feeling bad.

  Hamamoto’s eyes widened in surprise, but then she thought about it some more.

  “But it’s a little off. They aren’t precisely aligned.”

  “Changes in The Sea are reflected in the lady a few days later. This peak and that one are the same distance apart. They’re linked.”

  “Aoyama, this is amazing!” Hamamoto yelled. “This is a huge discovery!”

  Hearing us yelling, Uchida came running over. When I explained our discovery to him, he said, “That is huge!” He looked really happy. “But…what does it mean?”

  “It means the lady has a strong connection to The Sea.”

  “So?” Uchida asked.

  “So…”

  I thought about it. What did that mean? The lady made penguins. The penguins destroyed The Sea. The size of The Sea was linked to the lady’s health. But what was that link?

  “We’ve only just discovered this, so I don’t have a hypothesis yet. We’ll need to get more help from her and research this properly. Right now, she’s not feeling well, so there’s nothing we can do.”

  “You’d better be careful around her,” Hamamoto said gravely. “I don’t think you should tell her about this discovery.”

  “Why not?”

  “What if she’s actually an alien?”

  Uchida looked worried. “She said she made that up!”

  “If she is an alien, and The Sea is actually her spaceship, what then? If she thinks we’ve found out her secret, she might just kill us all.”

  “Your idea doesn’t make sense,” I said. “There’s no way the aliens would ever have let us get this far.”

  “They might have let their guards down because we’re children.”

  “You are very suspicious, Hamamoto.”

  “Why is it you trust her so much, Aoyama? Try to be objective.”

  “I am being objective. I wish you’d look at this logically.”

  “I think you’re the one not being logical.”

  Hamamoto and I glared at each other.

  Uchida waved his hands. “Don’t fight,” he said. “I don’t think either of you is being logical right now!”

  Hamamoto snorted.

  “Aoyama, you only like the lady because you like boobs.”

  “I admit I do like breasts. But that’s unrelated to why I like the lady.”

  “But the lady has boobs.”

  “That she does.”

  “Enough!” Hamamoto yelled.

  Uchida and I both jumped.

  I was thoroughly lost now. Hamamoto just bit her lip and refused to say anything, even if we tried talking to her. She sat under the parasol, her expression as frosty as an Ice Queen, building LEGO walls in silence. It was really uncomfortable to be around her, so Uchida and I took a walk across the clearing.

  Once we were a safe distance away, Uchida turned around.

  “That was a surprise. Didn’t think she’d get that angry.”

  “It’s a mystery.”

  “I don’t always understand her,” Uchida said. “But I think I do know why she got so angry this time.”

  “You do?”

  “But I can’t tell you. I don’t know if I’m right or not.”

  “It would really help if you tell me anyway.”

  Then we heard squeaking coming from the forest.

  And what sounded like a bird screaming in pain.

  Uchida grabbed my arm. “What was that?” he said. The sound came from the forest on the south side of the clearing. Something big hit a tree, and all the leaves rustled.

  We saw something white moving through the darkness of the woods. There were too many trees to get a clear look, but it was about the size of a dog, with smooth white skin, and it glistened like it was wet. The arms and legs looked like a human’s. It was such a sinister sight none of us dared move a muscle.

  After the white thing vanished into the depths of the forest, we heard the bird scream again.

  “What was that?” Uchida said.

  “Something very strange is going on,” I said.

  I recorded this significant discovery in my notebook.

  When The Sea waxes, the lady gets better.

  When The Sea wanes, the lady gets worse.

  EPISODE 4

  Penguin Highway

  Project Amazon Final Report.

  Uchida and I decided to continue exploring the river. Hamamoto was still angry, and the lady was still not feeling well. If one research project was at an impasse, we had no choice but to advance another.

  Our last expedition revealed that the stream running through the vacant lot behind our school also flowed behind the university. So our plan this time was to start from that location.

  We met at the bus stop on the main road and took the bus bound for the university. We passed the city library, and the bus went onto the highway. From the windows, we could see the rice stalks growing high, like fields of overgrown grass. The sky was dotted with sheeplike clouds. Other than the loose tooth I had dangling by a thread, it was the perfect day for exploring.

  As the bus rocked, I said, “The two of us haven’t gone exploring together in ages.”

  “Yeah,” Uchida said happily.

  We got out at the university stop on the side of the highway, and the heat made our heads spin. The sunlight made the university gate glitter. We could hear the rhythmic cries of the cicadas in the woods across the highway. The passing trucks kicked up a hot wind, hurling dust around. “The air’s filthy,” Uchida said.

  We walked through the silent campus. Stepping through the passages between the buildings made it feel like we were in a labyrinth. The lights in the cafeteria were out, and there was a CLOSED sign hanging on the glass doors.

  We reached the back of the campus, the spot we’d ended our previous exp
edition. The grass was high, and there were bugs flying everywhere. There was a fence on either side of the stream. We knelt down on the ground and spread out our map. We confirmed the direction with our compass.

  The stream flowed around the exterior of the university campus grounds. Beyond that were neatly divided vacant lots, dry earth divided into squares by concrete. Not all the lots were empty; some had strange buildings that looked like spaceships had landed.

  “Are these research labs?”

  “It’s like the future.”

  But we didn’t have time to investigate those buildings further.

  When we reached the back of the divided lots, there was an asphalt road running through the woods, and the drain ran along the right side of the road. I remembered seeing a road running through a forest like this before. It was a road I’d taken on a drive with my father. There were bamboo groves on the far bank of the drain, and the air felt cool.

  There was a fork in the road ahead. The road to the left was the one my father had taken on our drive. The road to the right went into an old town. That’s where the drain went.

  “I went down that road recently in the car with my father.”

  “Where does it go?”

  “I didn’t draw an accurate map, so I’m not really sure. But we ended up in a town built on the side of a hill. And we drank coffee in a café there. I always drink coffee when my father and I go exploring in the car.”

  “You drink coffee? Like a grown-up!”

  “But I don’t at home.”

  “I do like coffee jelly.”

  “Coffee jelly is way better. But it makes for good training.”

  We walked between the old houses. These weren’t made of LEGO blocks like the houses where we lived. They had big stone walls and old tile roofs. Some had machines parked outside for plowing the fields. There were fields and paddies here and there, as well as a whole lot of dragonflies. An old woman working in the fields looked up, and I saw her wiping the sweat from her face with a towel. We could hear the jingling of some wind chimes. It was like we were at my grandparents’ house.