Penguin Highway

by Tomihiko Morimi

  “We’ve come a long way,” Uchida said.

  “It certainly feels very far away.”

  “Aoyama, do you still feel like this river flows to the ends of the earth?”

  “I do.”

  “If that was really true, I’m sure it would be scary. That’s how I feel anyway.”

  I thought this old town wasn’t as hot as ours. Probably because of all the rice paddies.

  We’d walked a long way, so we laid out the blanket on the stone steps of a small shrine, making a base. Then we poured out some cold barley tea from a thermos and drank that while eating some steamed cake from the rucksack.

  The wind from the rice paddies dried our sweat.

  A huge old pine tree was growing next to the shrine stairs. This shrine had been here since long, long before we were born, and this pine tree had clearly been alive long before we were born, too.

  “Trees live way longer than people,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Compared to the history of the earth, humans die very quickly.”

  “They really do.”

  I thought about the day my sister cried in the dark living room during the typhoon. That had been an extremely upsetting day, but now I was sitting here with Uchida on the cool stone steps, the heat of the sun shining down on us, and I didn’t feel so upset.

  I told him about my sister crying, and Uchida said, “I know how she feels.”

  “You think like that sometimes, too?”

  “I do that all the time. Especially at night.”

  “Every day?”

  “Every day. I’m scared that my father and mother will die someday, and I’m scared that I’ll die, too. I wonder why we have to die and who decided that we should.”

  “But all living things die. You know that, right?”

  “I know that. But knowing something and being okay with it are two different things.” Uchida spoke very deliberately. “Two very different things.”

  “That’s true. I’ve felt like that, too.”

  “So I understand how your sister felt.”

  After a while, Uchida took his notebook out of his rucksack. The same one he always wrote in at the observation station in the clearing. Uchida flipped through the notebook, his face like a philosopher. Then he said, “I’ve made a very strange discovery.”

  “And you’ll tell me about it?”

  “I dunno if I can explain. Maybe it’ll just sound weird.”

  “That’s okay. I want to hear it anyway.”

  “I’m only saying this because it’s you. Don’t tell Hamamoto or anyone else.”

  “Got it.”

  Uchida had called it a discovery, but he didn’t seem proud of it. It was like sharing this discovery was a scary thing.

  “I’ve been researching what death really means,” he began. “The world after I die. About how when I die, everyone else will still be alive, but I won’t be able to think about how they’re still alive anymore. I’ve been thinking about what that would be like. I thought about it for a really long time, and then I realized something. That maybe none of us actually die.”

  Uchida shot me an anxious glance.

  I listened in silence.

  “When other people die is totally different from when I die. These things are nothing alike. When other people die, I’m still alive. I’m watching death from the outside. But that’s not true when I die. The world after I die isn’t the world anymore. That’s where the world ends.”

  “But to other people, the world still exists, right?”

  “That’s because other people are watching my death from the outside. They aren’t seeing it from my perspective.”

  “So if you suddenly died, to you, the world would end. But I’d still be here, so the world wouldn’t end for me.”

  “Yes…yes, but…”

  Uchida grew extremely uncomfortable. Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything. I tried to grasp what he was saying.

  Uchida had turned red, and his face was sweaty. He thought for a while, then turned to a new page in his notebook and drew a Y-shaped branching line. On one branch he wrote Alive, and on the other, he wrote Dead.

  “For example, let’s say I got in a traffic accident here.”

  “A big accident?”

  “A really bad one. Maybe I’ll die, and maybe I won’t. So this line is the world where I die, and this world is the one where I live.”

  “So this world is the one we’re in right now.”

  “While I’m alive, all kinds of things can happen to me. I might die, and I might not die. Every time, it’s one of those two things, right? And each time, the world splits like this. That means that I, or what I think is me, is always here and goes to the world where I’m alive.”

  “But in the other world, you’ve died. If I was in this other world, I’d think you were dead.”

  “That’s true for your world. But in this world, I’m always alive. Every time it branches, I just stay alive, so I only move forward to the world where I live.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Because I’m always here, alive, to think about it. In the worlds where I die, I can’t think like this. Because the world has already ended.”

  “But…”

  “Maybe I will die in your world. But that’s because you’re watching my death from the outside. I’m not watching myself. I’m over here in this world. See?”

  Uchida looked at me anxiously.

  I felt like I was starting to understand what he was trying to say.

  “In other words, even if I see you die, I have no way of knowing if that counts as death to you. I can’t prove it does.”

  “That’s right! Exactly!”

  I folded my arms, thinking about this. It felt extremely mysterious. I had never thought about anything like it before.

  “And that doesn’t just work for you; it also works for me.”

  “I don’t think anybody ever actually dies. That’s what I meant by that.”

  “That’s an extremely amazing hypothesis.”

  “When I first thought of it, I was really surprised. But I’ve been researching it all by myself all this time because I didn’t think I could ever explain it to you. But it’s just a hypothesis.”

  “It’s a good topic for research.”

  Uchida smiled happily, like he’d finally set a heavy burden down.

  We started walking again, leaving the old town behind.

  The highway reappeared. The stream went through a conduit under the highway. Beyond that was a dense forest. We spread out our map at the forest entrance and drew the course of the stream so far. The stream was a long curve starting from where the university faced the highway. The forest in front of us was probably the forest that stretched north and south between our neighborhood and the highway, so we’d never explored it before.

  “We still have time before sunset. Let’s go as far as we can.”

  We applied bug spray and went into the forest.

  Both sides of the stream were steep slopes covered in tall grass. The stream went through the bottom of a damp, dark valley. Cicada cries echoed all around us, as if trying to crush us.

  The forest seemed so deep, I debated turning back, but we came out the other side surprisingly fast. We found ourselves in a broad clearing. There was another forest beyond the clearing. To our left was a long fence, dividing the clearing from a residential area. Beyond that fence were little houses, lined up in rows like they’d been built from LEGOs. This must be the next neighborhood over. To our right was a tall prefab wall. I thought it looked like the Great Wall of China. There was no way we could climb that wall as easily as we could a fence.

  We followed the stream straight across the clearing.

  Uchida ripped up a stalk of grass, swinging it around. “Is the source in that forest?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I wonder what the source is?”

  “This is just how I imagine it. But say there’s a b
ig lake like the Cambrian-period sea, all filled with clear water. And there are all sorts of mysterious things living inside. There’s a little laboratory next to the lake, built to observe the lake. That’s how I picture it anyway.”

  “That would be neat.”

  We were soon through the clearing. The stream ran out of the forest depths ahead.

  As we walked through the forest, I kept checking our direction on the compass and comparing it to the map. I was trying to guess where the stream might be coming from. The river was tracing a gentle curve to the right.

  “Weird,” I said. “This forest is connected to the Jabberwock Woods. It’s like this stream flows out of the Jabberwock Woods. Like we’re on our way back to the clearing.”

  As I walked, I looked up at the sunlight filtering through the leaves. The light was turning slowly red. It was almost evening.

  I looked at the compass again, and Uchida yelped, “Penguin!”

  There was a single penguin on the other side of the stream. No other penguins around it. Seeing a single penguin is a little lonely, like the vending machines at the bus terminal. It seemed fine on its own. Again, like the vending machines. It was just staring straight ahead. Even when we approached, it didn’t budge. Like it was lost in thought.

  “There, there,” we said, passing right in front of the penguin.

  We walked a little ways and glanced back. The penguin was still there, standing by the stream, doing nothing in particular.

  Then we saw something white and blobby crawl out of the stream in front of the penguin. It was about the size of a rather fat grown-up human. It was shaped somewhat like a small blue whale, but there were bat-like wings growing out of its back. And it had arms and legs like a human’s, only much shorter. It walked on all fours. I had spent all day flipping through illustrated animal guides at the library, but I had never seen anything like this before.

  Uchida grabbed my clothes, spooked.

  A moment later, this pseudo-whale attacked the penguin. The penguin let out a squeak. The whale’s mouth yawned open, and it swallowed the penguin whole. Its body swelled up like a someone had pumped helium into it. Its mouth stayed slightly open, and its breath shook the leaves and grass. The creature let out a strange grunt and slithered back into the river.

  “Uchida, did you see that?” I said. “What was that thing? It ate the penguin!”

  “I’ve never seen anything like that.”

  Seeing a penguin just vanish like that made us both highly anxious.

  We felt like if we stayed there, a creature like that strange thing would come crawling out of the river again, so our pace grew faster. Moving through the woods, we remembered the rumors floating around town. The large birds on the high-tension towers. The apelike beast on the water-tower hill. The lizard-like thing walking past the meeting hall.

  We saw a bright light through the trees ahead.

  “We’re almost out of the forest,” Uchida said, cheering up. “Maybe it’s the source!”

  Smacking the tree trunks like drums, we ran toward the light. We burst out of the forest, and a blue sky opened up overhead, the sun shining down like in southern climes. A warm breeze blew past, and the grass around us swayed like waves in the ocean. I realized the sound of the cicadas had died away. I couldn’t hear anything but the wind.

  “Aoyama, we know this place.”

  “This doesn’t make sense,” I said.

  The stream we’d been following traced a gentle curve across the grass to our left.

  In the clearing across the stream, The Sea floated. It was extremely swollen, and the sunlight reflecting off its surface filled the entire clearing. Walking through the dancing lights reflecting off The Sea felt like we were under the shallows of that Cambrian-period sea.

  We sat down on the grass and spread out the map.

  “Suzuki said he followed the river downstream from the school, and it brought them to this clearing the day they attacked our observation station.”

  “That’s the blue line here,” Uchida said, pointing at the map.

  “Meanwhile, we started from the same place Suzuki did and explored the river upstream. It went around the library and the university but ended up in the exact same clearing. So whether you go upstream or down, you get to this clearing. I think that’s completely impossible.”

  This really was extremely puzzling.

  Uchida and I stood up, not saying anything else, and walked across the clearing.

  As we got near the observation station parasol, we saw Hamamoto sitting in a chair. She’d seen us, too, and was looking at us through the binoculars. She raised a hand and called out to us.

  We waved back.

  “Hamamoto would say we can’t prove it. That it’s not scientific.”

  “We’ve observed the light-bending phenomenon on The Sea. We’ve observed the clouds in the sky above this clearing forming strange shapes. And we have a time-travel hypothesis to explain what Suzuki experienced after coming in contact with The Sea. Space and time are distorted around The Sea in ways our common sense can’t predict. So the fact that the stream we followed leads back into itself may be caused by The Sea as well.”

  “A new hypothesis.”

  “If my hypothesis is correct, this entire clearing shouldn’t exist. Why? Because light bending like that, time operating like that, and rivers flowing like that all work against the laws of our world.”

  “What is The Sea? Have you figured it out, Aoyama?”

  I turned around and looked at The Sea looming over the clearing.

  I remembered what my father had told me in the café on the hill.

  The ends of the world were inside the world when it folded in on itself.

  I needed to review my notes thoroughly.

  Project Amazon was done. It was now a part of our research on The Sea.

  Previous discoveries had indicated that research on The Sea was the same as research on the Penguin Highway.

  And research on the penguins was research on the lady.

  It was all one problem.

  The lady called.

  “Yo, kiddo. I’m better.”

  “I knew you would be better soon.”

  “How?”

  “I am your researcher. I know more about you than anyone.”

  I heard her laughing.

  “Wanna put that research on hold and go to the beach? Summer vacation’s almost over.”

  “Yes.”

  And so we agreed to go to the seaside town.

  On the day in question, I woke up earlier than usual. I am already an extremely early riser, but that day, I woke up before the sun rose. I opened my window and took a breath of morning air. I observed the glass-like deep-blue sky, considering whether it was appropriate weather for my first trip to the ocean. I waited at the windowsill for morning. The sun soon rose, turning the sky from dark navy to a pale blue.

  I imagined what morning was like in the seaside town. The house where the lady was born was high up, with a great view. An old house covered in ivy. Her father and mother lived there now. You could always smell the sea on the breeze. There was an old church at the top of the road next to the house.

  I went to the bus terminal where we’d agreed to meet. The lady was wearing a big white hat, looking at the bus schedule. “Been too long,” she said, grinning. I was glad to see her looking well.

  “Thanks for the orange juice and pastries,” she said.

  “Did they give you nourishment?”

  “They did.”

  “I did an experiment in which I didn’t eat anything. Like you.”

  “Hoo, boy. Why would you do that?”

  “It was extremely difficult. I definitely won’t do that again.”

  “Well, naturally.” She pointed at my baggage. “What’s all that for? You going on an adventure?”

  “I have prepared many things. You can never be too prepared.”

  We got on a city bus and rode it toward the station.


  If the train line was built out to our neighborhood as planned, we’d be able to ride it directly to the lady’s town without taking the bus or going the long way around. I hoped that day would come soon. But it would still be several years before the new train reached our town. It might not happen until I was a grown-up. I definitely couldn’t wait that long.

  This was the first time I’d gone anywhere far away with the lady, so I was a little nervous.

  “This your first time to the ocean?”

  “It is a day to remember.”

  “Tell me who you know who’s nice enough to take you there.”

  “That would be you. And I’m very grateful.”

  While the bus swayed, the lady talked about the seaside town. It was all built on the diagonal slope of the mountain, so when it rained, water would rush down the road outside her house like a waterfall. When she’d ridden the train home after dark from her school in the next town over, the lamps on the side of the hill had looked like scattered jewels.

  We reached the station, and I bought tickets to our destination, following the lady’s instructions. The station was so far away, I had to search to the very end of the railway chart. We sat on a bench on the platform waiting for the train.

  “My father’s going to France tomorrow.”

  “Wow, that’s really far.”

  “He’s going to be doing major research in France on company business. I’ve never been to any other countries. Have you?”

  “I haven’t, no. But France sounds nice. Is he gone long?”

  “Three weeks.”

  “Then you’ll have to look after the house for him.”

  “I’ll do that. I know how to lock up. Once my father leaves tomorrow, I’ll have to make sure I wake up early every morning.”

  At last, our train arrived, and we got on.

  Outside the windows, the station building and houses and rice paddies flowed by. The sky was blue like the sea. I wondered why both the sky and the sea were blue. I took out my notebook and wrote that down.

  If we took the train through the tunnel at the prefecture border, we could go all the way to the seaside town. But as we passed the next station, the lady started looking sick. She leaned against me, breathing heavily. Startled, I looked up, and her eyes were closed, sweat streaming down her face. Her cheeks were as white as a penguin’s belly.