Chapter 3

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 expedition. 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. “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 big 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. “Are you sick?” “Just a little dizzy.” The lady closed her eyes, furrowing her brow. Listening to her ragged breathing, I remembered another time we’d taken a train and gotten off along the way. I felt like something bad would happen if we stayed on this train. “Let’s not go to the sea today.” She looked displeased. “Why? I just need a short rest, and…” “It’s not good to force yourself. I believe we should cancel it today.” I pulled the lady off the train at the station before the tunnel. A train going the other way was idling on the other side of the empty platform. “We don’t need to go back,” she said, but I pulled her right across and onto the other train. And we went home, watching all the same scenery flowing the other way. We got off at the station in town, and while we were on the bus, the lady didn’t say much. Neither did I. We got back to the bus terminal around eleven. The bus did a U-turn to go back to the station, and then the terminal was empty. The lady sat on the bench in the waiting room, resting. I sat next to her drinking tea from a thermos. I offered her some cold tea, but the lady shook her head. I’d never seen her look this bad before. It was extremely hot in the waiting room, and my sweat flowed like water. Eventually, the lady stood up. She staggered and grabbed my shoulder for support. I stood my ground, trying to keep her from falling. “I was feeling great this morning,” she said. “Sorry we couldn’t go.” “It’s fine.” “You’re a real gentleman. But kids are allowed to be more self-serving.” “I’m not a kid.” “You are so!” she said, grinning weakly. “Let’s try again tomorrow.” “I think we should wait a little longer.” The lady bought a can of Coke from the vending machine and held it to her forehead. Then she stood staring absently up at the blue sky like the penguin in the clearing. “Summer vacation’s ending, right?” “No matter how fun something is, it always has an end.” “Truth.” And with that, she started walking away. I hurried after her, providing support. The asphalt was hot enough to fry an egg on. Our shadows were jet-black. When we reached the middle of the terminal, she let go of my shoulder and crouched down. I crouched down, too, rubbing her back. Her body was as cold as the asphalt was hot. Cold like ice. There were drops of sweat on her pale, smooth forehead. Her face down, she groaned aloud. A drop of sweat fell from the lady’s brow, gleaming on the asphalt. The sweat drop stood on the surface of the asphalt like a marble. As I stared, the sweat drop slowly began to move. But that was just an illusion—in actuality, the asphalt the sweat drop was sitting on was moving. My hand on the lady’s back, I looked up. All around us, the terminal asphalt was moving like soft clay—a whirlpool centered on us. It made no sound at all. The speed of the flow created several different rings, like a Baumkuchen cake. In time, these different layers started rising and falling, like waves. The soft, smoothly flowing asphalt was gleaming like it was wet. It felt like we were in a caramel factory. All manner of things began peeking out between the waves of melted asphalt. Some looked like human hands and feet, others like gaping fish gills, complicated branching antlers, or large sets of wings. They joined together, came apart, rising to the surface of the asphalt and sinking again. It felt like something was trying to crawl out of the asphalt, but it couldn’t decide on the form to take. Part of the asphalt rose up, looking like the back of a small whale. Several more appeared, swimming in circles around the lady and me. Horns grew on their backs, wings sprouted, arms and legs popped out. Her voice hoarse, the lady whispered, “Jabberwock.” All I could do was observe this sinister phenomenon. I don’t know how long it took, but eventually, the phenomenon subsided, and the asphalt went back to normal. Leaving almost no trace of any of this activity behind. “What’s wrong with me?” she whispered. She covered her face with both hands. “So many weird things. In the middle of the night, creatures race out of my apartment into the forest. Wet, pattering feet crawling on four legs. They’re so scary.” “Jabberwocks?” “I dunno. I’m always asleep. I just hear them leaving.” “You’re making the Jabberwocks.” “Unconsciously. What does that mean, kiddo?” I couldn’t begin to say. The morning my father set out for France, the town was blanketed by an extremely thick fog. I walked with him to the bus terminal to see him off. He had a new suitcase he’d bought at the mall. My sister was still asleep, so my mother stayed home. The fog made us both wet, and the morning air was cold, like autumn was already here. As we walked down the bus route, the asphalt in the distance vanished into the fog. The trees along the road and the houses and the grass in the vacant lots and the vending machines were all buried in fog. The sunlight filtering through the fog gave everything a golden glow. “How long does it take to get to France?” “I’ll be on the plane for more than ten hours.” “I want to go to France someday.” “What presents should I bring back?” “I’d like a notebook. A foreign notebook like Hamamoto uses.” “Well, I’ll make sure to buy one, then.” We walked on through the fog. Despite the suitcase, my father walked very quickly. It was so heavy, I couldn’t even lift it. My father was extremely strong. “Is your research going well?” he asked. I thought about it. “I know that all the problems are actually one big problem.” “I’m going to be gone for three weeks. If you have any questions for me, you’d better ask them now.” “I don’t know what I should ask.” “Uh-oh, that doesn’t sound good.” “I know everything is connected, but I don’t understand how they’re connected. Everything is extremely complicated, and I can’t form a hypothesis.” “Take a big piece of paper and write down everything you think is connected. Everything that baffles you, all the little discoveries you’ve made. Everything important on one piece of paper. And write it all down in the smallest letters you can.” “Why the smallest?” “So you can see everything important in a single glance. You’ll want to look everything over again and again. Asking yourself which notes are related to which, playing with different structures in your head. Keep thinking. When you’re eating, when you’re walking; make it so your notes all go flying around in your head whenever you need them. And get plenty of sleep every day.” “And that’ll help me figure it out?” “At some point, all sorts of things will suddenly fit together. One note will connect to another note, and then those will pull in yet another note. Then…eureka.” “But what if I still don’t understand?” “Then go have fun until you do. Sometimes you just need to stop and play.” “Then I’ll try that.” We reached the bus terminal. In the fog, the terminal seemed extremely sad. It was hard to make out either the stop itself or the waiting room. I could barely see the trees behind the terminal at all. The road running past had so much fog on it, I was worried that the bus would never come at all. As we waited for the bus, a figure came toward us through the fog. Strolling casually, like she was just out for a walk. “It’s the lady,” I said, surprised. “Good morning,” she said. “Good morning. Out for a walk?” my father asked. “That and seeing you off. Aoyama told me all about his father’s trip to France yesterday. Make sure you look after things while he’s gone, Aoyama.” “I will.” My father took a closer look at her. “You’re looking better,” he said. “I was definitely worried after seeing you in the café the other day.” “Unfortunately, yesterday I tried to take Aoyama to the ocean and got too tired on the way.” “Well, if he’s ever asking too much…” “I never ask too much!” “My son does get a little too absorbed in his research.” “It doesn’t bother me,” she said. “Does he worry you sometimes?” “I’m always worried about him. But at this point, it’s just the way he is, so I can’t really count it among my top concerns. By the way, it seems like he’s grappling with a pretty major problem these days.” “I know.” “But some problems are better left unsolved.” “Really?” “If the problem he’s tackling turns out to be one of those, it could prove extremely harmful. That’s what worries me most.” My father was speaking in riddles. We heard an engine noise, and the lady turned around. A large shuttle bus was slowly approaching down the foggy road. It felt very strange that a bus to the airport came all the way to the stop at the edge of our town. I thought it would be wonderful to someday get on a bus like this that would take me on a journey to outer space. The driver got out and helped my father stow his suitcase in the undercarriage. “I’m off!” my father said. He put his hand on my head. “See you soon,” I said. When the bus drove away, the lady and I walked away through the fog. “It’s like the whole town is the ends of the earth,” she said. Then she saw me fiddling with my loose tooth. “Want me to yank that for you?” she asked. “I’m fine. I’ll get it out myself.” We’d had a very similar conversation once before. It was recorded accurately in my notebook. That was back in May, when the penguins were first appearing, and I first started studying the Penguin Highway. One hundred and thirteen days had passed since then. An extremely large number of things had happened, so I felt as if I had experienced much more than 113 days’ worth of growth. “Kiddo, you still can’t solve the mystery?” “It will take a little longer.” “Well, I’m waiting.” We split up in front of my house. The lady walked quickly off into the fog. I fiddled with my tooth, watching her go. Just after she vanished from view, she said something. “What?” I called after her, but she just kept walking. I don’t know what she said. I stood surrounded by thick fog, wiggling my tooth. Suddenly, it came out, and the taste of blood filled my mouth. I put the tooth on my palm and made observations, then went inside. Summer vacation ended, the new semester began, and immediately, school was plunged into chaos. Why? Because Suzuki had captured a strange creature nobody had ever seen before and brought it to school with him. Kids from other classes kept coming to see it; packs of kids both older and younger all lined up for viewings. Even the teachers came by to look. The teachers examined the creature carefully, but no matter how you looked at it, it was clearly real. “That’s an amazing discovery,” one of them said. Other teachers were creeped out and ran away. Emperor Suzuki lorded it over everyone. He put the tank with the creature in it at the back of the classroom, showing it to anyone who came by. There was a constant ring of children around the case. Suzuki put a cloth over the tank, saying he didn’t want to scare it, and only showed a piece of it at a time. He told anyone who would listen the story of how he’d captured it on the athletic field. We lined up to see it, too, but when it was our turn, he quickly covered the tank and said, “Not you. This is our research.” “Everyone else is looking,” Hamamoto said. “Why not us?” “You wouldn’t share your research, would you? That’s why.” I had to admit Suzuki’s argument was logically sound. The commotion got bad enough that the teacher carried Suzuki’s tank to the faculty office. Even after the tank was gone, kids kept coming to see it and leaving disappointed. Suzuki sulked a bit, since he couldn’t brag about it anymore, but the teacher said, “We’ll have some researchers take a look at your discovery later,” so he got all proud again and bragged about that instead. “The teachers said it would be better to have important researchers investigate the creature,” Uchida reported. “If it really is a new species, they’ll announce it in the journals.” Based on stories collected from kids allowed to see the creature, I drew a speculative diagram in my notebook. It was about the size of a cat. Shaped like a whale, with a smooth, wet exterior. It had strange arms and legs. Like human arms and legs, only shorter. It had bat-like wings on its back. It sounded exactly like the creature Uchida and I had seen swallow a penguin in the forest, only much smaller. Hamamoto took a look at my sketch. “Do you think the lady made this?” she asked. “It’s a Jabberwock,” I whispered. “The lady definitely made it.” News that Suzuki had captured a mysterious creature spread rapidly through our neighborhood. By the time I got home from school, even my mother knew. “I hear Suzuki discovered an unusual creature,” she said as we ate our snacks. “He did. He brought it to school today and caused extreme chaos.” “What was it like?” I showed my mother the sketch and explained it to her. She frowned. “Oh dear. That is one sinister creature. I wonder if this is what was spotted wandering around the meeting hall.” “I don’t know.” “First the penguins and now these. I don’t get why people abandon their pets like that.” Clearly, my mother didn’t think this was an unknown species that couldn’t be found in any illustrated guide. My mother hadn’t read those guides from cover to cover the way I had. I spent the entire day with an uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach, one that left me unable to relax at all. I was usually very calm, so this was a new sensation. Hamamoto called, and we went out to the observation station. I called Uchida, too. We met at the water-tower hill and cut through the Jabberwock Woods. When we reached the clearing, we were so surprised, we stopped in our tracks. The Sea was unbelievably swollen, to the point where nearly half the clearing was covered by The Sea. If it kept expanding at the current rate, in a few more days, our observation station would be inside it. We held an emergency meeting. “The Sea was waxing steadily,” Hamamoto said, showing her notes. “Why did it suddenly get this big?” “I think because there aren’t any penguins. Have you seen any in the clearing lately?” “Come to think of it, no.” “It’s because the Jabberwocks eat the penguins,” Uchida said. “I don’t like them.” “Is the creature you two saw really the same thing Suzuki’s group captured?” “The size is different, but I think they’re both Jabberwocks.” “Suzuki boasting so much about his discovery really got him a lot of attention. And now The Sea is suddenly huge. I’m sure the grown-ups will come and find out about our research.” “The fact that our secret hasn’t already been discovered is just good luck. We’ll have to prepare ourselves to turn our research on The Sea over to other people. It’s very sad, but we should provide them with all our experiment data. That will help the larger research project proceed.” “Do you think they’ll listen to us?” “I don’t know. It’s so mysterious.” “Aoyama, you said all the research was one thing, right?” “I’ve claimed that, yes.” “Then we’ll have to tell them about her, too. It’s the penguins that can destroy The Sea, and she’s the one that makes the penguins. Are you okay with that, Aoyama?” I couldn’t answer. What should we do? Suddenly, Hamamoto turned around, scowling at the forest. Glaring at the shadows of the trees. “Is that Suzuki?” she said sharply. “I don’t see anything,” Uchida said. “Just your imagination?” I suggested, but I wasn’t at all sure. It seemed highly likely that Suzuki would be so excited by his success capturing the creature that he’d come here to research The Sea next. Worried about the future of our research projects, we left the forest. The next day, the chaos was even worse. The creature Suzuki had captured was secured under lock and key at the back of the faculty office, and no students were allowed to see it. Only Suzuki and his minions were granted special permission to go in. After school, a university professor came and listened to their story. There were rumors a TV crew was going to come, too. After meeting with the professor, Suzuki left the faculty room and was immediately surrounded. “What did they ask?” But Suzuki just grinned. “Top secret,” he said. “If I blab about it, it could cause all sorts of problems.” As he tried to leave, we nabbed Suzuki in the hall. “Suzuki, what did you tell that professor?” “Top secret. Can’t breathe a word.” Hamamoto grabbed a fistful of his shirt. “You didn’t tell him about our research, did you?” Suzuki tried to look cool, but when Hamamoto fixed her big eyes on his, he avoided her gaze. “Only our discovery,” he mumbled. “Nothing else.” Then he brushed her hand away and ran off down the hall. “I don’t like it,” Hamamoto muttered. TV and newspaper reporters actually did come. They took pictures of Suzuki and the weird creature together and did interviews with him. Stories about the penguins from the spring were brought up again. Our town was suddenly in the limelight as the place where weird creatures appeared. At lunch, the teacher turned on the TV and showed us the interview with Suzuki. That was the first time we saw the creature he’d captured. It was much squatter and smaller than the one we’d seen in the woods—even a little cuter. Maybe it was a baby Jabberwock. The Jabberwock was on all fours in the tank, sitting perfectly still. After school, the teacher stood in front of the class, explaining, “Starting today, there’ll be a university team investigating the woods behind the athletic field. They’ll be using the athletic field as their base, so you won’t be able to use it for a while. Make sure you don’t get in their way.” I raised my hand. “Why are they going into the woods?” “To investigate the ecology and climate. I’m not surprised you’re interested, Aoyama.” “Is this related to the creature Suzuki found?” “I don’t know all the details, but I’d imagine so.” “When the investigation is over, will we be allowed in the forest again?” “You were never allowed in that forest,” the teacher said sternly. “Even when the investigation is done, don’t ever go in there.” Hamamoto looked at me, scared. Our fears had come to pass. As soon as school was over, the three of us left in a hurry. We didn’t even want to take the time to go home first. We headed straight to the water-tower hill. “Do you think they’ve already found The Sea?” Hamamoto asked. “I think they’ve almost certainly found it. If this was just an investigation into a new creature, there’s no way a whole investigation team would be here this fast. I’m sure they’ve found The Sea. And decided ‘This is too weird and must be dangerous.’ That’s why they’ve acted so swiftly.” We headed toward the hill, feeling anxious. The closer we got to the forest, the more aware we became of the stir running through the town. There were women standing on corners, gossiping about it. At last, we reached the water-tower hill, but there was yellow tape across the stairs at the bottom, with signs saying UNDER INVESTIGATION and NO TRESPASSING hanging from it. When we tried to go under the tape, a young man with glasses came running down the stairs, waving us off. “We have business in the forest,” I said. “It’s under investigation, so we can’t let in any outsiders.” With him watching from the stairs, we couldn’t get into the forest. Thinking we might be able to get into the forest from a different direction, we circled the hill and cut through the residential area, heading toward the athletic field. As we neared the fields, everything got even more imposing. There were a number of white tents in the parking lot and lots of people scowling at monitors, fiddling with instruments, or drawing things on whiteboards and arguing about them. We could hear generators running. Hamamoto peered into the parking lot and then called out, “Dad!” Hamamoto started walking toward one of the tents, so Uchida and I followed her. Professor Hamamoto was with a few others, glaring at the monitor, but he stood up when he saw Hamamoto coming. He scratched his big bearlike face. There was a ballpoint pen behind one ear and a worn-out notebook in one hand. “What are you doing here?” “Dad, what are you researching?” “We’re observing a very strange phenomenon discovered in the depths of the woods. I’ve been abruptly called in to help.” “What sort of phenomenon?” I asked. The professor hesitated. “I can’t tell you. It’s under investigation.” “We’d like to get in the forest.” “Not until we’ve finished investigating and are sure it’s safe. Now, you run along home. Don’t want you bothering anyone.” Hamamoto wanted to keep bugging him, but Uchida and I grabbed her hands and pulled her away. No matter how much we talked with him, he was never going to let us in the forest, and it would never do for him to get suspicious. Hamamoto sulked about it but started to follow us. Then she saw Suzuki and his minions sitting in a tent at the back of the parking lot. “Why is Suzuki here?” “Suzuki’s cooperating with the investigation,” Professor Hamamoto said. “They’re the ones who told us about the phenomenon in the forest. That’s what prompted this emergency investigation. They know a lot about this forest, so we need to hear from them.” At that, Hamamoto shook off Uchida and me. Her chestnut hair streaming behind her, she took off like a rocket. “Wait!” Professor Hamamoto yelled. He tried to catch her, but he moved like a bear waking up from hibernating, and she easily slipped past him. “Catch her!” he yelled. Other investigators tried to nab Hamamoto, but she dodged between all of them and reached Suzuki a moment later. Suzuki and his minions stood up, surprised. Hamamoto hauled back her arm and slapped Suzuki across the cheek. There was a sound like a balloon popping. I think Suzuki must have been so surprised, he didn’t even try to protect himself. If I’d been in his position, I’m sure I’d have just stood there stunned as well. The other investigators and Kobayashi and Nagasaki were all surprised, too. “I’ll never forgive you!” she yelled, so loud that everyone in the parking lot heard. Suzuki’s face twisted like he was about to burst into tears. “Why?” Suzuki wailed. “Why?” Professor Hamamoto caught up and pulled her away, and she just kept yelling, “I’ll never forgive you!” In all my life, I had never seen a girl get that angry. Chased away from the athletic field, we held an emergency meeting at my house. Hamamoto was leaning against the wall, silently making walls out of blue LEGOs. She was furious that her father had scolded her and sent her away. Even the sweets my mother prepared us didn’t cheer her up. I thought odds were high the investigation team had already found The Sea. The “strange phenomenon” the professor referred to was likely The Sea. The investigation team was starting to research The Sea using all the most modern observation instruments. I thought it was a real shame we couldn’t participate in that research. “What are you going to do, Aoyama?” “We’ve been studying The Sea all this time. I think we should turn over our important discoveries to the investigation team. But the lady is at the center of our research. We can’t tell the research team about her. That leaves us with a dilemma.” “A dilemma?” I looked over at Hamamoto. She was focused on her blue walls. “I think we have to call a halt to our research. And forget all about it. We can’t show the results of that research or the records we’ve made in our notebooks to anybody. We have to forget about the connections between The Sea and the penguins, and the penguins and the lady, forget everything we’ve brought to light.” “And you’re just fine with that?” Hamamoto said. “I have a lot of research projects. I’ll just research something else.” “I think we should continue observing The Sea.” “But the forest is off-limits.” “Show me the exploration map.” I took out the map and spread it out on the floor. Hamamoto leaned over the map, studying it intently. She pointed at the final route Uchida and I had followed for Project Amazon. “There are a number of routes into the Jabberwock Woods. If we can’t get there from the water-tower hill, we just have to go in from the other side. You followed this path in from the side of the highway, so I don’t think the investigation team will have closed that off.” I nodded. “Makes sense. There’s no way they could be watching the whole forest.” Hamamoto took a deep breath and stood up. “Let’s go.” “Now?” “I’m angry. This is our research project!” We hastily got ready. It was already getting rather late, so just in case the sun set while we were within the forest, I got a big flashlight from the closet under the stairs and put that in my rucksack. Then we left the house. For Project Amazon, we’d followed the flow of the stream, which forced us to walk through the university campus and the old houses. On the map, this was a very roundabout route. If we followed the overgrown hiking path from the bus terminal, we could reach the highway much faster, and if we followed the highway, it wasn’t that far to the point where Uchida and I had entered the forest. We reached the highway and followed the asphalt road. The trucks whizzing past us kicked up clouds of dust. The forest grew right up to the edge of the highway, so it was rather dark. The sidewalk was narrow, and the wind from the trucks felt like it was trying to knock us over. Each time a truck went past, Hamamoto clapped her hands over her ears. When there were no cars, we could hear the Walker’s cicadas singing their distinctive song in the woods. When we reached the conduit under the highway, we turned off into the forest, following the stream. Inside the woods it was wet and so dark it felt like it was already evening. In the overgrown valley, the noise of the water flowing through the stream seemed extremely loud. When we got through the forest and emerged into the grassy area, there were dragonflies everywhere. The sky to the east was starting to darken, and the sky to the west was turning orange. Lights were on in the windows of the houses in the residential area to the left. Beyond this field was the Jabberwock Woods, and it looked like it was filled with massive black creatures. We turned on the flashlight and stepped into the darkened forest. Just as Hamamoto planned it, we slipped right through the investigation team’s security and made it to the clearing. When we stepped out of the forest, all three of us stopped in our tracks, surprised. The Sea filled the entire clearing. It was so big, it would be difficult to measure the exact size. The lower half of The Sea was now buried in the ground, leaving only the top half rising out of the clearing like a giant breast. We worked our way around the outside of it, looking up. The evening sun hit the top of The Sea’s dome, turning just that section of it red. “It’s still waxing,” Hamamoto said, staring up at it. “This is the biggest it’s ever been.” “If it keeps expanding, our entire town will be inside The Sea,” I said. Then Uchida grabbed my arm. “Aoyama! There’s something here!” We turned, and across the clearing, around the observation station, we saw a number of black silhouettes. They were on all fours, their sleek bodies bent over. Like statues, the silhouettes weren’t moving at all. “Hamamoto,” I whispered. We ducked down low, hiding in the grass. “Investigators? Penguins?” Hamamoto whispered. “Neither. Those are Jabberwocks.” “The thing Suzuki captured? These are much bigger.” “And there are a lot of them.” We stifled our breaths for a while, but the Jabberwocks never moved. Just as we were considering going forward, we saw something stirring at the border between the clearing and the forest. A penguin, waddling along. No other penguins with it. It ran hastily across the clearing, flippers flapping, and stopped right in front of us. It seemed tired. Then a number of Jabberwocks came out of the forest, following the penguin’s path. The way they walked was very clumsy-looking. Human arms and legs were just awkwardly jammed onto the sides of a blue whale’s body, so it looked like they had to work really hard to move at all. “Gross,” Hamamoto said. “The penguin’s in danger.” The pack of Jabberwocks was sliding across the grass, following the penguin. The penguin was seemingly too worn out to notice the monsters creeping up behind it. Uchida started running. It was so sudden, neither Hamamoto nor I were able to follow. He ran across the grass and picked up the penguin. As he did, the Jabberwocks picked up speed, dashing across the grass right toward Uchida. Uchida ran in the other direction, clutching the penguin in his arms. Hamamoto and I got up and ran after him. The Jabberwocks occupying the observation station noticed us. The hitherto immobile silhouettes all turned toward us and started running forward on all fours. Before Hamamoto and I could catch up with him, Uchida was tackled sideways by a Jabberwock. The penguin was flung away and went rolling across the grass. I tried to save the penguin, but a Jabberwock got there first. The penguin was swiftly swallowed up. The Jabberwock’s torso swelled up like someone had added helium. The wind from its mouth shook the grass. “Ah!” Uchida yelled. “You ate it!” Uchida tackled the Jabberwock. Then another Jabberwock threw itself onto the pile. I shoved it off Uchida. Hamamoto turned the flashlight on, lighting up the Jabberwocks. We heard a noise like a bunch of crying babies, and the Jabberwocks scattered across the grass, avoiding Hamamoto’s flashlight beam. “They don’t like the light! This way!” Hamamoto pointed toward the observation station. I grabbed Uchida’s arm, and we ran toward Hamamoto. At the observation station, Hamamoto opened her notebook and quickly took measurements on The Sea. One side of it was right in front of us. If it waxed a little larger, it would swallow up the observation station. Its sides had a cold, silvery gleam, like it was made of steel. And there were a dozen Jabberwocks standing on all fours between us and The Sea. It seemed like they’d forgotten us. They were all looking up, gazing into the distance, not moving at all—like shadow puppets. Looking at them, I remembered how the penguins had stood in this same clearing, staring up at the sky. It was like both the penguins and the Jabberwocks were alien life-forms that had come here from another planet and were lost on Earth. “What are the Jabberwocks?” I murmured. Just then, we heard grown-ups yelling. Powerful beams of light came out of the forest behind us, like searchlights illuminating the side of The Sea. The Jabberwocks scattered. We turned toward the forest and were caught in the lights, unable to see a thing. “The kids are here!” someone called. The investigation team. And that’s how our research on The Sea ended. We were taken back to the base at the athletic field, and all the adults there were mad at us. Professor Hamamoto, bathed in the bright lights inside the tent, was the scariest. He didn’t give us a long lecture like the teachers at school did. He just asked, “How’d you get in the forest?” We admitted we’d gone in from the other side of the woods, and he nodded. “You can’t do that again. Understand?” “But…,” Hamamoto began. “You can’t do that again!” he shouted, his voice like a thunderclap. It was so loud, we all jumped off our seats. Even Hamamoto didn’t say anything more. Still, I thought we should at least explain the dangers of The Sea to Professor Hamamoto. I tried to detail how we’d sent a probe inside The Sea only to have it vanish, but he didn’t give me the time. “Aoyama, this isn’t something you need to worry about,” he said. We were left sitting under the tent. Hamamoto stared at the ground, not saying a word. Uchida cried a little. Someone from the team came and gave him a handkerchief. At last, our parents arrived, and we were escorted home. The next morning, I tried to go to school, but I was too worn out to move. My whole body felt heavy, like it wasn’t even mine. My mother noticed I wasn’t getting up and came to check on me. She put her hand on my head. “You’ve got a fever,” she said. “Punishment for doing something so dangerous. You’d better stay in bed today.” “I’m so busy, though.” “None of that, now.” She brought me a cup of soup and some yogurt with apples in it. I spent the whole day in bed. After my sister left for school, I heard my mother run the washer and dryer and the vacuum cleaner. Bright light shone through my blinds. I was always extremely busy, so it was rare for me to be in bed when it was this bright out. It felt very odd. I remembered the advice my father had given me before he set out on his trip and put a large piece of paper next to my pillow, writing notes that summarized all the research results so far. The lady makes penguins. The penguins live on Penguin Energy. Penguins evaporate if they ride the train. The lady wants to make penguins if she’s feeling good. If the lady makes too many penguins, she gets sick. If the lady makes Jabberwocks, she gets better. The penguins break The Sea. Jabberwocks eat the penguins. The Sea is linked to the lady’s health. The Sea bends space and time. I was lying on my stomach in bed, glaring at the list. I read it over and over, then let the notes roll around and around in my head. How did they all connect? How could I tie them all together? No eureka moment arrived. Before lunch, my mother came up. “Hey!” she said. “If you don’t get some rest, you won’t get better.” And she took my notebook and the paper away. I was a child made of steel. The last time I’d had a fever was in December of the previous year. I’d made a record of my suffering in my notebook, yet, once again, I was surprised by how awful this was. I’d been running around just fine the day before, but now I was so tired, I didn’t even want to move. It was upsetting to not know what was happening inside your own body. My mother made udon for lunch, and we ate together in my room. There was an egg in the udon. I was in the fourth grade, but eating this with her made me feel like I’d gone back to being a baby who didn’t know how to read books or write notes yet. She went out shopping, and I got the pocket-size notebook and a pen from my desk. I kept it under my pillow where she wouldn’t find it. Now I could finally relax again. Mother didn’t understand that I just didn’t feel comfortable without a notebook next to me. I stared up at the ceiling, all lit up from the light coming through the blinds, thinking about what Hamamoto and Uchida and Suzuki must be doing. Was the investigation team getting anywhere with their investigation on The Sea? I knew for a fact that all sorts of things were happening outside my house, but I was just lying in bed, far away from all of them. It was so quiet here, it was like being inside a cumulonimbus. And I was worried about the lady. She let her guard down a lot, so I believed I had to save her, or she’d be caught by the investigation team. After a while, I nodded off. At first, I kept having a very short dream in which I was sliding down a really, really long pole. For some reason, I was convinced this pole was a space elevator. Before I knew it, I was an astronaut. The spaceship I piloted was just like the water-tower tank on the hill. It was spinning to create gravity inside the ship. I was the only person on board. I’d come a very long way and had arrived at a strange new star. I landed my water-tank spaceship next to a hill like a giant green breast and set out to explore the unknown world. The sky was blue like Earth’s summer. It even had cumulonimbus clouds. From the top of the breast-shaped hill, I noticed vacant lots stretching as far as the eye could see, all separated from one another with concrete blocks like graph paper. There was a row of high-tension towers, so I followed the power lines. There were sometimes vending machines in the vacant lots, and penguins were clustered around them. It seemed like the only thing living on this planet was penguins. To them, I was an alien who had suddenly landed here. I said “Hello!” but the penguins did not seem at all surprised. There were just standing in the vacant lots, looking up at the sky or lying down on their bellies. I walked a long way. The neat rows of well-mowed vacant lots began to thin, replaced with tall grassy plains. At last, I reached a deserted shore. The row of high-tension towers ended there. The sky was blue, but the color of the ocean was extremely cold. At the edge of the horizon, I could see the lights of a shopping mall. I walked along the empty beach and found a large blue whale washed up. I didn’t know if it was alive or dead. I looked up at it, and the blue whale said, “How do you do?” It didn’t seem uncomfortable. It was rather laid-back, really. I felt like I’d heard its voice before. I knew then that this blue whale was actually a Jabberwock. I sat down on the beach, gazing at the ocean. “Welcome back,” the lady said, sitting down next to me. “Why are you here?” “I’ve been here. I mean, this is Earth.” “I felt like I’d gone a long way.” “If you go far enough away, you wind up back where you started.” The lady pointed at the sea in front of us. “This is the Cambrian-period sea, kiddo.” “I thought the Cambrian period disappeared a long time ago.” “If you go far enough back in time, you wind up back where you started.” Some penguins came waddling up the beach. They stopped and stared out at the horizon, not moving a muscle. The blue whale was muttering something. “Jabberwock, what are you saying?” “God makes mistakes sometimes,” the blue whale said. “It’s only natural.” “That’s unacceptable,” the lady said. “All the penguins would agree with me.” “Well, I’m not a penguin.” “The sea is coming! The sea is coming!” the blue whale said cryptically. Darkness was falling out across the water. I couldn’t see the lights of the mall anymore, and dark clouds were gathering. Purple lightning flashed like fireworks in the distance. I was usually scared of lightning, but for some reason, I was totally fine this time. It occurred to me that if this was Earth, then everything here had disappeared. My father and mother and sister and Hamamoto and Uchida and Suzuki and his minions and Seaside Café and the dentist and the school, too. While I was away on my long journey, they’d all disappeared. I felt like I’d done something I could never undo. I was a child who never cried, but there were tears on my cheeks. “Why are you crying, kiddo?” “I don’t know.” “…Sorry.” “It’s not your fault.” “Sorry.” Every time she apologized, I felt even more miserable. “You poor thing. It must be rough.” I heard a voice from somewhere and felt a cold hand on my brow. It felt extremely nice. I opened my eyes, and the lady was sitting on a chair next to my bed, peering into my face. Both her cheeks and her breasts were back to normal. She looked healthy. My room was dimly lit. I didn’t know how long I’d been asleep. My head was spinning. I had tears in the corners of my eyes, and the lady’s face was blurry. “I’m feeling great, and you’re down for the count. Not often the way of things.” “I have a fever.” “I’m well aware.” “I had a dream. You were in it.” The lady smiled, patting my head. “I thought about trying to call you. The university investigation team is in the woods.” “I know.” “So you’d better not make any penguins. It would be extremely bad if they found out.” “That’s right. I won’t make any until you’re better. When will you get better?” “I’m strong, so I’ll be better soon.” “Make sure you get nourishment. Humans need energy.” “You get some, too.” The lady thought for a moment. “Kiddo,” she whispered. “You did an experiment where you didn’t eat, right? I did the same thing.” “You shouldn’t do that experiment. Your breasts will get smaller.” She laughed. “I do experiments sometimes, too.” “Was it hard?” “It wasn’t hard. I didn’t eat anything until today.” The fever was preventing me from thinking straight. “Penguin Energy,” she said. “That’s for penguins. It’s not for humans.” She looked me right in the eye. “I’m not human.” “You aren’t human?” “I made the penguins, but who made me?” “My brain isn’t working. Because I have a fever.” “Sorry.” She knelt down by the bed and put her cold forehead against mine. Why was she apologizing? The tears I’d shed in my dream ran down from the corners of my eyes onto my cheeks. “Don’t cry, kiddo,” she said. “I’m not crying,” I said. In the morning, I woke up. I was lying in bed, looking at the sky through the gaps in the blinds. There were little clouds scattered everywhere. I opened the window, and a brisk wind blew through the room, like fall was here. My fever was totally gone, and my head felt clear, like the blue sky after the rain clouds blow away. I ate breakfast in the living room downstairs. I was extremely hungry. I felt much better. While I was sleeping, my father had called long distance from France. My mother said when he heard I was in bed with a fever he’d been worried and said to make sure I talked to him the next time he called. “Did anyone come see me while I was sick?” “The lady from the dentist came by. Do you remember that?” “I remember that. I thought it was a dream.” As I walked to school through the morning chill, I suddenly started feeling sad. At first, I didn’t know why I felt that way. As I thought about why I was sad, I remembered the conversation with the lady, the one I’d thought was a dream. I took my little notebook out of my pocket. I’d practiced taking notes enough that there was a strong possibility I’d written a few even though I was feeling really out of it. The letters were definitely hard to make out, but I read everything I’d written down on those grid-lined pages. The dream about exploring another planet. Everything the lady had said. I read through it all as I walked. As I passed the dentist, I reached the lot where the penguins had first appeared. A brisk wind blew by, and the grass in the lot—there were no penguins today—swayed. Then, out of nowhere, everything I’d just read and all the fragments of notes I’d written up till now came flying into my head, all slotting together like I was making a beautiful blue wall out of LEGOs. I didn’t have to do anything. I just stood there and watched as they put themselves together. Before I knew it, the blue wall was complete. I stopped in my tracks next to the vacant lot. I had a strange numb feeling in the back of my mind. I couldn’t think about anything else. My sister turned back, calling my name, but I didn’t answer. She just kept following the other children. I was left alone by the vacant lot. “Eureka,” I whispered. My head was full of that morning’s eureka, and I paid very little attention that day. I had my notebook out and was busy writing hypotheses down. It seemed like Hamamoto wanted to talk about our research on The Sea, but my responses were so absentminded, she made a face and went back to her seat. “Aoyama, you’re being weird,” Uchida said. “Am I?” “You aren’t talking at all. You’re just staring at nothing. Are you sure you don’t still have a fever?” “Maybe I do.” Even during classes, I just stared out the window, watching the clouds float by, thinking about the lady. Suzuki was extremely quiet all day. He’d been bragging about the new species he’d discovered every break since summer vacation ended, but today he didn’t say a single word about it. He kept glancing at Hamamoto, but she refused to look at him at all. After school, he came over to my desk. “Hamamoto said she’d never forgive me,” he said. “I didn’t mean to tell them so much.” “But you did.” “They kept asking things. Some were acting like I was lying, and I got mad, and while I was talking about one thing or another, I ended up saying everything. I didn’t mean to tell them about your research…” “What research?” “Your research. The weird thing in the forest.” “We don’t know anything. We weren’t researching that.” “Don’t lie!” Suzuki said, baffled. “Why would you say that?” “Suzuki. We’ve decided to forget everything. Our research is over. The investigation squad will research everything properly.” “Are you mad?” “I never get mad. But that may not be true for Hamamoto.” “Is it my fault?” “I hate to break it to you, but it is.” “Please, say something to Hamamoto for me. Tell her I really didn’t mean to.” While Suzuki was still clinging to my desk, the loudspeaker came on, and the principal’s voice made an announcement. “Everyone, there’s been an accident nearby. Do not leave the school until the teachers tell you to. It’s safe inside. I repeat. Until the teachers give the go-ahead, you are not allowed to leave the school grounds. Stay safe inside the school.” The broadcast ended. Suzuki frowned. “What kind of accident?” he muttered. There was a brief silence around us, but it was gradually replaced with a rising commotion. “Everyone, sit down,” the teacher said. “Quiet!” The teacher from the class next door came over and talked to our teacher at the door. They both looked worried. I watched the teachers’ lips closely but couldn’t tell what they were saying. I took my eyes off them, looking around the room, and my eyes met Hamamoto’s. She was looking right at me, her face really pale. I gave her a questioning look. She stood up and walked over to the teachers. The noise in the class died down. Everyone gulped. The teachers looked like they weren’t sure how to answer Hamamoto’s questions. Suzuki was watching her, too. Uchida looked at me, mouthing “What?” I mouthed “I don’t know” back. Hamamoto went back to her seat, looking even worse. She buried her face in her hands, sitting perfectly still. I stood up and went over to her. “What is it?” I whispered. “I don’t know. But there was an accident with the investigation team. Five people are missing.” “Missing?” “My father’s missing, too.” “How do you know? Did the teachers tell you?” “They didn’t say. But I can tell from their expressions.” “The Sea?” “What else?” She looked up. Her eyes were wet. “Are you really giving up on researching The Sea? What can we do? How much have you figured out?” I thought for a moment. “All I know is what we should do.” “And we’re going to do that?” “Aoyama, sit down,” the teacher said. I turned back to the teacher and raised my hand. “Teacher, Hamamoto’s not feeling well. Can I take her to the nurse’s office?” We talked quietly so the school nurse couldn’t hear us. “We’ve got to get out of this school.” “And do what?” “We need the lady’s power to resolve this situation. I don’t know if we can save your father or not. But there’s no other way to do that.” The door to the nurse’s office opened. We heard a student talking to the nurse. Hamamoto and I perked up our ears, listening to the voices on the other side of the curtain. After a while, Uchida poked his face through the curtain. “If you’re going somewhere, I’m coming, too,” he said. We slipped out of the office while the nurse was in the bathroom. We ran down the empty hall and soon reached the shoeboxes. We put our shoes on and hid behind the shoeboxes, watching the front gate. We could see teachers patrolling through the glass. And we could see evacuated townspeople coming in. They were all headed toward the gym. Everyone looked scared. My mother might be among them. We’d planned to slip out the gates when the teachers weren’t looking, but with this many people, there was no way we’d ever get a chance. Then Suzuki, Kobayashi, and Nagasaki came running up. “What are you up to?” Suzuki said. “None of your business,” Hamamoto said. “How’d you get away?” “If you’re leaving school, we’ll help,” Suzuki said. I looked at him, surprised. “This accident has something to do with that thing in the woods, right?” he said. “I had no idea you were capable of deductions, Suzuki.” “I’m not stupid.” “But there’s a lot of people out front. We can’t leave.” “Go around by the rabbit cages and climb over the wall. Will you forgive me now?” “I don’t know yet,” Hamamoto said. Suzuki led us through the courtyard. I guess the principal was really flustered, because the chime signaling an announcement went off twice but was followed by silence. According to Suzuki, they’d used the wall behind the rabbit cage to get off school grounds any number of times. There was a mound of earth there, and if you jumped just right, your hands would reach the top of the wall. There was no need to go over the wall when you could just leave through the front gate, but at times like this, his knowledge proved unexpectedly useful. I was impressed. We slipped around the back of the rabbit cage. Suzuki went up first, showing us how. He sat astride the wall and whispered, “Hurry.” Uchida took a short run and scrambled up the wall. Hamamoto couldn’t quite make it. “Kobayashi, make a step for her,” Suzuki said. Kobayashi scowled but got down on his hands and knees. “Sorry,” Hamamoto said, stepping up on his back. Even then, she only just got her hands on the wall but couldn’t manage to pull herself up. I put my hands on her butt and pushed. “My butt! You’re touching my butt!” she yelped. “I have no choice.” “Shhh! They’ll find us!” Suzuki was right. Just as Hamamoto finally managed to scramble up on the wall, we heard teacher’s voices. Suzuki, Uchida, and Hamamoto quickly jumped down the other side of the wall. I hurriedly jumped at the wall myself. The only reason I didn’t get caught was because Kobayashi and Nagasaki tackled the teachers, buying me time. On the other side of the wall, I could hear the teachers yelling, “Come back here!” “So what now?” Suzuki said, gasping for breath. He was rather overweight and not good at running. “We need to see the lady from the dentist’s office,” I said. “Won’t she have evacuated to the gym?” “She wouldn’t do that.” If the lady had figured out her own nature, I thought she’d be sitting somewhere, perfectly calm. Fortunately, we were able to move forward without running into any evacuees. We did see an old man walking alone, but it didn’t cause a problem. I just said, “There’s an evacuation warning out, so you should go to the elementary school.” “I see,” the old man said. “Thank you.” We followed the narrow roads cautiously and poked our heads out on the main road. There wasn’t a single car driving anywhere. It was very quiet. Like the world had ended while we were at school. There was a row of fire trucks, more than any of us had ever seen in one place, dividing our town in half. Where had all these fire trucks come from? The silent neighborhood had a bright-red line drawn across it, big trucks and smaller fire department vehicles, all spaced out evenly like a diorama. Men in blue uniforms were gathered around the trucks, talking. There were two ambulances parked a short distance away and some cop cars, too. It was all so quiet, it was hard to believe there was anything dangerous going on. But there was a giant, glittering silver dome over the forest behind the water-tower hill, and from the depths of the forest, we could hear a strange rustling sound. “Wow,” Suzuki said. It was definitely an exciting spectacle. “The town’s on lockdown,” I said. “If we don’t get through that line, we can’t reach the dentist’s office.” “Proceed with caution.” Everyone there was staring in the direction of the water-tower hill, so we crossed the main road like marbles rolling across a carpet. We took the alley between the stationery supply store and the dry cleaners into the residential area. I’d hoped it would be a clean run from there to the dentist, but we were spotted by three uniformed firemen on patrol. “What are you doing here?” one asked nicely. “There’s an evacuation warning…” “Ready! Go!” Suzuki shouted. At his signal, we all broke into a run. The firemen spread their arms, trying to catch us, but we scattered, and they couldn’t catch us all. I saw Uchida and Hamamoto get nabbed out of the corner of my eye, but I got past the firemen safely. Suzuki was running ahead of me. “They got the others!” I shouted. Suzuki looked over his shoulder, still running. Someone grabbed my shoulder from behind. “Hey!” an angry voice shouted. Suzuki spun around, came running back, and grabbed the man who’d caught me by the side. This allowed me to slip free of his grasp. “Run! Run!” Suzuki yelled behind me. I ran like I’d never run before. I was so fast, I thought it was a shame no one was recording my speed. I ran down a deserted tree-lined road. When I passed Seaside Café, I saw the lady sitting in a seat at the window. She had her elbows on the table and was nodding off. The lights in Seaside Café were off, and there were no other customers. Yamaguchi wasn’t there, either. Everyone else had evacuated. I went inside and sat down opposite her. Her eyes opened. She didn’t bat an eye at me being there. I was glad I’d found her. “Hello,” I said. “Hello,” she said, yawning. “You feeling better?” “I am. I thought you’d be at the dentist’s office.” “There’s an evacuation warning out. The office is closed today. But I didn’t feel like evacuating. I thought you might come by, so I waited here.” “You knew I’d come?” “I know exactly how you think.” The lady looked out the window. “Ah,” she said. The fireman had come chasing after me. We hid until he passed by. Under the table, the lady put her forehead on mine, smiling. “So, kiddo. You’ve solved the mystery?” I nodded. I sat under the table, reviewing my notes, organizing my hypothesis. “You aren’t human,” I said. “Right, I’m not human.” “Because you told me that, I was able to formulate the Aoyama Hypothesis. If you’re not a human, but something more like the penguins, then your No Food Experiment makes sense, and it explains why you got sick on the train like the penguin did. You survive on Penguin Energy.” “Where does Penguin Energy come from?” “I compared the charts of your health and The Sea’s size. Your health is linked to The Sea’s diameter. When The Sea gets bigger, you get better. And when it gets smaller, your health deteriorates. You and the penguins are both living on invisible energy radiating from The Sea. If The Sea gets bigger, it gives off more energy, so you get better. This also explains why you and the penguins got sick when you rode the train. Because the train took you too far away, and energy from The Sea could no longer reach you.” “No, that doesn’t make sense,” the lady said. “The penguins destroy The Sea, right? Isn’t that a contradiction?” “The penguins do break up The Sea, making the pieces of it smaller. That’s why the more penguins you make, the more The Sea gets broken, and the more it shrinks, and the less energy it gives off, and the sicker you get. But in return, the penguins have their mortal enemy, the Jabberwocks. The Jabberwocks eat the penguins, there are less penguins, and The Sea starts waxing again. And you feel better.” “Like the food chain.” “I’ve named this the Penguin System. The penguins and the Jabberwocks are opposites, and The Sea’s balance is maintained by the two of them. So what exactly is The Sea? I’ve been thinking about that for a while. We’ve discovered a number of strange aspects to it. It bends certain kinds of light, causes people to travel through time, and can change the shapes of clouds in the sky. For Project Amazon, we followed the stream that runs through that clearing but discovered that it flows forever in an infinite loop. That’s physically impossible, but The Sea makes it possible.” “If it’s physically impossible, then it’s still impossible.” “It’s impossible in our world. That’s why I’ve spent all this time thinking The Sea was something unbelievably strange. But then I started to think that The Sea was actually something that shouldn’t exist in our world. All along, I thought of The Sea as a physical object. But what if it was a hole? What if it’s a tear in our world, a mistake God made, and The Sea is just how we perceive the resulting hole?” “You’re losing me.” “We said the penguins destroy The Sea. But that isn’t accurate. The Sea is already broken. The penguins are repairing it. We only thought their actions were a contradiction because we didn’t know that the entire reason they exist was to repair the broken spot we called The Sea.” The lady raised a hand, thinking about this. “Then by making penguins, I’m helping to seal the hole in the world?” she said. “I think so.” “But I haven’t made any lately.” “At night, you make Jabberwocks. There were lots of Jabberwocks in the forest. The thing Suzuki caught that caused such a commotion was a Jabberwock. I gave you some advice, saying that you’d feel better if you made things other than penguins. But if you make things other than penguins, they become Jabberwocks and eat the penguins. The Sea gets bigger, and you feel better, too. You kept making Jabberwocks so you could avoid feeling awful. But as a result, the tear in our world grew larger and larger. Which brings us to right now.” We looked out the window. We could see the clouds above the Jabberwock Woods being twisted into funnels. We could see the top of The Sea rising above the forest. The Sea was swallowing the woods. “Wow. You really thought this through,” the lady said. She put her hands on her hips, staring out the window. Her face had a healthy glow. According to my hypothesis, she wasn’t human…but I found that hard to believe. Forming a hypothesis and believing that hypothesis were two different things. Eyes on the window, she said, “Let’s go, kiddo.” The lady and I left Seaside Café and walked through the deserted neighborhood. We were spotted by a patrol car once and yelled at through a megaphone, but we were able to hide successfully the rest of the time. From the park where the summer festival was held, we looked toward the woods and saw the massive dome of The Sea peeping over the top, rippling and reflecting light like the real sea. “It’s almost swallowed the entire forest,” the lady said. “The investigation team is inside The Sea.” “What happens if you go in?” “I don’t know. The probe we sent in never came out.” “I hope the penguins can help.” On our way through the neighborhood, the lady made penguin after penguin. The bulbs in the streetlights turned into penguins, falling down and swelling up like mochi cooking on the pavement. Penguins poured out of the vending machines. Everything turned into penguins, even empty cans and abandoned motorcycles in the vacant lots. The lady whistled, raising her hand, and the newborn penguins straightened up like British gentlemen and followed after her, shoving against one another. By the time we reached the parking lot at the athletic field, we were leading an army of penguins. The lady stopped at the lot entrance, and they stopped, too, all bumping into one another. She peered into the lot. “No one here.” “I think they all ran away.” There was a horrible sound coming from the forest. A sound like tree trunks splitting and leaves thrashing. The Sea was rising up beyond the trees at the back of the athletic field. The sound from the forest was the noise of The Sea shaking the trees as it passed. I narrowed my eyes, trying to observe it, but I couldn’t make out what was going on inside The Sea. All I could see was a bright sea-colored gleam in the depths of the forest. The investigation team’s base was already deserted. They’d left the tents and their equipment standing there. I wasn’t sure exactly what had happened to the team, but something bad had happened to Professor Hamamoto and the others, and the rest of them had beat a hasty retreat. The lady, the penguins, and I went into the parking lot. The equipment in the lot started swelling up, all of it turning into penguins, which waddled off in every direction. This phenomenon carried on the entire time the lady was walking across the parking lot, and the new penguins joined forces with the ones from the residential area until the lot was buried in penguins, like the shores of Antarctica in winter. The lady whistled, and the penguins started moving toward the forest. “It’s like you’re the ringmaster of the Penguin Circus,” I said. “That’s lovely. I should have done just that.” Beyond the base, we found a tall fence between the forest and the lot. It seemed like the investigators had gone in and out of a locked gate near the edge of the fence, but we didn’t need to. The wave of penguins hit the fence, shoving against it. The lady climbed over the fence, so I followed suit. The lady straddled the fence, looking back at the lot. “Whoa,” she yelped. “The penguins are breaking through!” As we stepped into the trees beyond the fence, we heard it come crashing down. A wave of squeaking penguins came rushing over it. The wave caught us and swept us both deeper into the forest. “Uh-oh, kiddo!” the lady yelled. “The Sea is right there!” The Sea was coming up fast. The border between it and the forest was like a wall of water, glittering with a blue-green light. There was a faint light on the other side that made the forest glow. A dodgeball-size ball of water popped out of the wall, rolling through the trees, and the penguins surrounded it, breaking it to pieces. I saw a number of Jabberwocks coming through the trees. There was no expression on their blue whale-like faces; the sheer quantity of penguins didn’t seem to surprise them at all. They opened their mouths wide and swallowed up some penguins, but there were just so many penguins that they hardly made a dent. In moments, the Jabberwocks were caught by the black tsunami of penguins and swept away. The penguins in the lead leaped into the wall of water one after another. Inside the wall, they spun once, tracing spirals in the glowing water, then took off like rockets toward the sky. Moving out of sight. Stuck between The Sea and the penguins, the lady and I had nowhere to run. The lady grabbed me and pulled me to her. A moment later, the penguin wave crested, shoving us into The Sea. There was a strange, soft light filling the space inside The Sea. I thought the shores of the Cambrian-period sea must be just like this. The lady had her face pressed against mine, her eyes screwed tightly shut. It felt both cold and warm. A few dozen penguins that had come in with us took off like space rockets, leaving trails of white bubbles in their wakes, darting in and out of one another’s paths as they headed up toward the sky. The next thing I knew, the lady and I were rocking on the surface of the water, gazing up at the blue sky above. A single vapor trail cut across the sky. The lady sat up. “Are we in The Sea?” she murmured. I sat up and looked around. There was a bright ocean as far as the eye could see. I looked down and saw that we were sitting on a giant black kickboard made of penguins. Every now and then, a large wave would come by, lifting the penguins and us. I decided the SS Penguin was a wonderful ship. On the horizon, there were very summery cumulonimbus, but the clouds were rapidly changing shape, like time-lapse photography. Like somebody was playing with cotton candy, changing its shape. But then I looked in the other direction, and that horizon was dark as night, with purple lightning flashing. “Well, seems like we’re still alive.” “I wonder where the investigation team is?” “Penguins,” the lady said. “Bring us to them.” We moved slowly through the ocean. There were all kinds of islands scattered across this strange ocean. It was like the entire earth had been covered in water, and only a little land remained. The first thing we noticed was a large shopping mall. It was half underwater. It was a ruin, overgrown with ferns, but it was definitely the shopping mall from our town. There was nobody there. It was like an abandoned shipwreck. There was a mass of large birds on the roof, watching us as we floated by. “Seems like the ends of the earth,” the lady said. “I may be the first person to ever set foot on the ends of the earth. That means I’m humankind’s representative.” “One small representative.” “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” There was nowhere to land at the mall, so we sailed on. We passed a row of high-tension towers rising out of the water’s surface and a savannah-like grassy island with zebras running across. Far in the distance, on the horizon, I saw a single line rising to the heavens. I thought that must be the space elevator. “Look there,” the lady said, standing up and pointing. The island had houses on it. Cute little houses, like the ones in our neighborhood. The island was divided into a grid with concrete, but only two houses were built on it. The lady and I landed and walked across the island for a while. Most of it was grassy lots. There was a single vending machine sitting all alone. As we walked, I remembered what our town had been like when my family first moved here. It was like our town back then, in miniature. “This is a strange island,” I said. The lady leaned against the vending machine, looking up at the sky. “It’s a mystery,” she said. Not far from this island was an even bigger one. A continent. Long before we landed there, we saw a huge crowd of penguins on the beach. Some were standing in the surf, doing nothing. Others were waddling along the beach. The lady and I stepped onto the shore, and the line of penguins stretched along the beach, far into the distance. At the end of this penguin highway, the beach suddenly gave way to a town. A town built on the slope of a hill. “There’s a town on the coast,” the lady said. “See?” We began walking along the beach, following the penguin highway. Listening to the sound of the waves. As we walked, the lady pointed out across the ocean. “Look there,” she said. A strange phenomenon was happening across the water. One section of the ocean was churning violently. Round, balloon-like things were rising to the surface, splitting apart and fusing together again. From the beach where we stood, the bubbles looked to be the size of balloons, but they were likely much larger than the lady. At last, we saw a blue whale’s head emerge from between the bubbles. It hadn’t surfaced from deeper in the ocean. A blue whale was being created on the surface of the water. Its body was made of seawater, so it appeared transparent against the blue sky. The giant see-through whale twisted its body, leaping into the air. Then it dived back into the water. It did this over and over. The whale’s body slowly disintegrated, its head growing narrower and narrower. I thought it looked like a long-necked dragon, and as I watched, it sprouted wings, the head and neck melting away, growing smaller. Or it grew horns, like a unicorn’s, all over its body. Or we caught glimpses of a long elephantine nose through the waves. This stunning phenomenon went on and on. Over and over, one thing after another was created, like something searching for a form it liked. When it didn’t like the results, it destroyed its creations. It was as if a giant child our eyes could not perceive was playing with LEGOs. I could have watched it change form forever. “God’s doing experiments,” the lady said. At last, we reached the end of the beach and the start of the coastal town. On the slope leading from the water up the hill were rows of foreign-styled houses, a maze of streets running between them. No sign of anyone living in them. Just penguins lined up in neat rows on the narrow paths. We walked through tunnels made of buildings and alleys with benches next to trees. At the top of the hill was a house with white walls and open windows, curtains fluttering in the breeze. It seemed like at any second someone would lean out the window, reaching both arms out toward the ocean. “If I’m not human, why do I have memories of a coastal town?” the lady said as we walked through one alley. “I remember my father and mother and have memories of a life leading up to this point. Are those all fake?” “I couldn’t say.” “But hey, at least we made it to a coastal town.” We took our time climbing up the hill. I glanced back and saw the alley full of penguins diligently chasing after us. “Are the penguins waiting before they destroy The Sea?” “If The Sea we’re in is destroyed and the world is permanently repaired, what happens to me?” “I don’t know.” “…You do, don’t you?” “If my hypothesis is correct, the penguins will vanish.” “And me?” I didn’t know what to say. “Is that your answer, kiddo?” the lady said gently. “This is merely a hypothesis.” “So there’s a chance you’re wrong.” “A significant one.” We saw black smoke rising from the peak we were heading toward. On the slope ahead of us, we saw a man sitting on the stairs. He looked like a college student. The man who’d brought Uchida a handkerchief after the investigation team had scolded us and made Uchida cry. He saw the lady and me coming up the hill and was so surprised, it took him a while before he could say anything. Then he turned around and yelled, “Professor! Professor!” There was a small stone-paved square in front of the church, and all the investigation team members The Sea had swallowed were gathered there. They didn’t know how to get home, so they’d lit a fire there, like Robinson Crusoe when he reached that deserted island. Professor Hamamoto came running over to us and stared at us in silence for a long time. He seemed entirely at a loss, like a kid my age had grown a massive beard. “Aoyama,” Professor Hamamoto said. “What are you doing here?” I bowed. “We’ve come to rescue you all,” I said. The penguins were piling up behind us, crowding together until they filled every inch of the narrow slope. When they found a spot to stand, they stood at attention, staring up at the sky. “Is it about time to go?” the lady said, looking up at the sky, just like the penguins. “Can you leave just a little bit of The Sea?” “Why?” “If you leave a little bit, some Penguin Energy will remain, and you can stay healthy.” “I dunno if it’ll be that easy.” The lady hopped up on the wall by the alley at the top of the hill and looked down at the sea. The town was completely covered in penguins. All the penguins seemed to be holding their breaths, waiting for her signal. “Then let’s all go home,” she said. She raised her hand toward the sky, blue like the Cambrian period. A stir ran through the assembled penguins, like ripples running across them. Staring up at the sky, one after another, they took off, flying straight up. So many of them that it grew dark around us. The penguins flew in all directions, and everywhere they flew, they left trails behind, like the ones planes leave in their wake. It looked like these trails were dividing the blue sky into pieces. And The Sea crumbled. The cracks in the sky joined together, forming one big tear, which came down on us like a giant whip cracking… And then suddenly, we were standing in the parking lot near the athletic field. The Sea behind us was collapsing, and Seas of various sizes were rolling away into the neighborhood. We all fled to the stands on the side of the field to avoid contact with those remnants. The investigation team still seemed unclear as to just what it was they were seeing. We watched as The Sea crumbled, flowing out of the forest and sweeping through the neighborhood like a tsunami. It made no sound at all. We could see penguins swimming across The Sea’s waves. Countless small rainbows appeared and vanished on the surface of the flow. The waves broke apart, Sea spheres rolled across the field, and the penguins swarmed around, breaking those apart. “What are the penguins doing?” Professor Hamamoto asked. “I’m not entirely sure,” I said. “What is this water-like substance? Aoyama, do you know what’s going on here?” “Maybe I do. But this is my research project. I can’t tell the secrets of my research to anyone.” Professor Hamamoto scowled at me. I met his gaze. He didn’t say anything else. I looked over at the forest and saw a group of Jabberwocks clustering on top of the water tower. When they got to the top, they stopped moving altogether; one after another, they burst like water balloons, vanishing entirely. Eventually, The Sea’s collapse ended, and the force of the tsunami running through town subsided. “Let’s get going,” the lady said, holding out her hand to me. I took it, and we clambered down off the stands. The investigation team stayed frozen on top, watching us go. Professor Hamamoto took a step forward. “Wait!” he said. “It’s dangerous! Stay here with us!” “Professor, have a nice day. Good-bye!” the lady said. “I said it’s dangerous!” “But, Professor, we have urgent business.” Hopping off the stands, the lady and I waved at the team and left the athletic field behind. There were still shattered fragments of The Sea rolling through town, but the penguins following us took care of them one at a time. There was no one in town. The sad squeaks of the penguins echoed through it, a lonely sort of sound. We’d returned from one end of the earth, but it was like we’d found ourselves in a different one. I glanced back as we walked, but The Sea’s dome could no longer be seen over the Jabberwock Woods. Instead, the remains of The Sea were racing freely through town. By the time we reached Seaside Café, it had reached the vacant lot by the dentist’s office. The lady stood by the surf, kicked The Sea, and it shattered into marble-size balls that danced through the air. They soon faded to nothing. We stepped into the deserted Seaside Café. The lady went behind the counter and made some coffee. “You drink this, right?” she asked. “Sure,” I said. We sat at our usual seat by the window. She brought two cups over, steam rising off them. I was all wet and starting to feel a little cold, so the warm coffee was very welcome. “Want some sugar?” “No, thanks.” “Don’t force yourself.” I drank the coffee, staring out the window. Outside, The Sea’s level was subsiding. The rainbows it had kicked up here and there were fading out. Penguins were gathering in the lot by the dentist. At first, it was just a few here and there around the empty lot, but soon they started flowing in endlessly. I couldn’t begin to count them. It was like every penguin in Antarctica had decided to move here. Penguin after penguin came diligently waddling in, joining the flock that already had the entire lot buried. Then they stopped, looking relieved. All the penguins looked up at the sky like they were waiting for something. The lady and I put the chessboard on the table. But we didn’t play chess. “Kiddo, The Sea seems to have been entirely destroyed.” “There were a lot of penguins.” The lady appeared to be at peace. She was watching the penguins through the window. There were so many penguins now, they were spilling over the edges of the vacant lot. Staring up at the sky, they slowly started disappearing. Several small tornados sprang up, shaking the windowpanes. The penguins didn’t panic, just waited for their turn to disappear. The lady put her chin on her hand and looked at me. “So my memories and I were all created.” “Does that feel right to you?” “It doesn’t.” “It doesn’t seem right to me, either.” “Aoyama, why do you think I was born?” “I don’t know.” “Do you know why you were born?” “Uchida and I have talked about that before. But it’s a difficult topic for us. Uchida said thinking about it makes his head spin.” “Hmm. I don’t blame him.” “But maybe someday I’ll know why I was born.” “If you do, will you tell me?” “I will.” The lady stood up and sat down next to me. She put both her arms around me and hugged me tight. I’d thought her breasts were like hills, but they were extremely soft and warm. Her breath on my ear was warm and moist, like a sea breeze. It tickled. How could anything so warm and moist come out of someone who wasn’t a creature of this world? It didn’t make sense. “So I’m not human.” “I can’t believe it.” “And you’re humankind’s representative.” “Yes. Someday I will become humankind’s representative and go to outer space.” “If you become that important, I bet you’ll be able to solve the mysteries around me. You’ll be able to find me and come see me again.” “I’ll definitely come see you.” I’d once sat staring at her face as she slept, wondering why the lady’s face had been made to look this way. In the same way, I could ask why I was here. Why was I here, why was she here, and why was she so special to me? Why could I never get tired of seeing her face, of seeing how she put her chin in her hand, of the light in her hair, of the sound of her sigh? I knew that life was born in the primordial sea and, after a dizzying length of time, evolved into humankind, and eventually, I was born. I knew that I was a boy and the genes in my cells made me predisposed to like the lady. But I didn’t want a hypothesis or a logical explanation. That wasn’t what I wanted to know. The one thing I did know for sure was that those things weren’t the answers I sought. “Well, I’d better be going,” she said. She let go of me and started walking away. I tried to stand up, but she turned away at the entrance to Seaside Café. “You stay here,” she said. “It might be dangerous.” She saw me sit back down and grinned. “Don’t cry, kiddo.” “I won’t cry.” And she left Seaside Café. The sky was bright and clear, and the wind had kicked up. The wind caught the lady’s hair, and it gleamed in the light. She walked slowly down the road and into the lot by the dentist’s office. The same lots where the penguins had first appeared and where they’d disappeared. It was really quiet in Seaside Café. I could imagine the sound of her footsteps on the grass and the feel of her hair in the wind. She was growing unsteady on her feet. She stopped in the middle of the lot, turned toward me, and waved. A moment later, a huge gust of wind blew by, and all the glass in the café windows rattled. I’m sure that wind swept all the way through town, making the trees on the breast-shaped hills sway with a noise like a waterfall. When the wind died down, the lady was gone. I sat there alone for a while. I made a record in my notebook of how it felt sitting alone at that window, but reading it over now, I don’t feel like it captured those feelings at all. I wasn’t able to reproduce it accurately. I’ve only ever felt like that once in my entire life. I have learned it is extremely difficult to write a proper account of once-in-a-lifetime experiences. After a while, I left Seaside Café. I walked through the deserted neighborhood, soaking in the warm sunlight. I listened closely to the sounds of the town, but nothing seemed out of place. Just a brisk breeze blowing and the grass rustling in the vacant lots. The water tower on the hill and the vending machines by the side of the road and the empty asphalt pavement and the high-tension towers behind the forest were all just as they’d always been. I walked past the zelkovas and saw the red row of fire trucks up ahead and a large crowd gathered around them. The ambulance lights were flashing. The investigation team was sitting with blankets around them, surrounded by firemen. Professor Hamamoto was hunched over like a bear, his arms around something. It was much smaller than the professor, so at first, I thought he was just crouching down alone. The firemen noticed me coming toward them. There was a commotion and a lot of yelling. They started running to save me. Then Hamamoto came flying out of the professor’s arms and ran toward me, reaching me before anyone else had a chance. When she threw her arms around me, I saw that she was crying and realized just how tiny and frail she was. We stood perfectly still for a while. Then Hamamoto spoke, her voice almost a gasp. “Is she…?” “The lady left.” Hamamoto’s big eyes stared into mine. “Aoyama, are you crying?” “I’ve decided not to cry.” I told the lady I wouldn’t cry. When my father got back from France, he saw the coverage of our town in the papers and on TV and was very surprised. The phenomena in our town were far too strange, and important people all across Japan attempted to offer explanations, arms folded. One insisted it was an earthquake; another, a tornado. Someone else combined the two, attaching them to something about viscous clouds. Then, someone else showed up, claiming it must have been a mass hallucination. As one person after another proposed different hypotheses, it all got too hard to follow and everyone forgot about it. Naturally, no one was arguing for the Aoyama Hypothesis. At last, the helicopters circling the sky and the news vans went away, and the town was quiet again. I went to school every day, just as I always had. I remained busy, with a number of different research projects on my plate. Professor Hamamoto made no official statement about what had transpired inside The Sea, and he didn’t tell Hamamoto anything, either. Less and less people talked about it. The creature Suzuki caught had vanished, and all signs that The Sea had flooded town were gone without a trace. It felt like a dream to most people, and that made them not want to seriously talk about it. I avoided talking about The Sea or the lady or the penguins myself. One day, Uchida and I were researching magnets at the library when we realized Hamamoto was sitting on the couch next to us. We talked about magnets for a while. Eventually, Hamamoto said, “Aoyama, what do you think The Sea was?” It felt like it took her a lot of courage to ask. Uchida gave me a long, searching look. “I’m still thinking about it.” “You have a hypothesis?” “I’m not sure. I don’t like the hypothesis I came up with.” “Will you tell me about it?” “This research is going to take a very long time. I have a long road ahead of me.” “Fair. I understand.” Hamamoto nodded. “I’m sure you’ll figure it out,” Uchida said. “I know you will.” On weekdays, I went to school, played chess with Hamamoto, and played with Uchida. I was glad that Suzuki had stopped being mean to us. Sometimes we even played games with Suzuki. On weekends, I went to the library or explored the town with Uchida and Hamamoto. We discussed the theory of relativity and the origin of life. I went to the dentist, too, and to Seaside Café. It was mostly the same, but there were a few differences. No matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t find our way to the clearing in the Jabberwock Woods. That clearing had never existed, and with The Sea gone, it had vanished from our world. Part of the stream we had followed for Project Amazon was gone, too, and part of it had dried up and was no longer a stream at all. And I could no longer see the lady. When I went to the dentist or Seaside Café, she was never there. Late in fall, I went out for a drive with my father. We went extremely far. The car traveled beneath wispy clouds, like stretched-out cotton balls. We crossed a number of rolling hills and arrived at a town far from home. There was a café in a small station even my father had never heard of. We drank coffee there. Ever since he got back from France, my father and I had never once talked about the lady. Until now. “You miss her?” he asked. “I do.” “Did she say anything to you?” “We said good-bye.” “I see. It was awfully sudden.” For a while, we drank coffee in silence. “You once said there were problems in the world that shouldn’t be solved. That if the problem I was working on was one of those, I’d end up getting hurt.” “I did say that.” “I think I know what you meant now. But I had to solve the problem.” “What I meant was cases where not solving it is best for the people involved. But sometimes that isn’t true for everyone else. That’s what you mean, right?” “Why did the lady have to leave?” “You think it isn’t fair?” “I do.” My father put his cup down on the table, looked out the window, and thought about it. Both our notebooks were lying on the table. They were new notebooks he’d brought back from France. Both covers were shining in the light. “That’s where the ends of the earth are,” he said. “Where?” “The place you think isn’t fair. You can’t do anything about it, right?” “I’m interested in the ends of the earth. But they’re extremely frustrating.” “But everyone wants to see them.” “Why do they?” “Good question.” I thought about it. My father’s answer was extremely difficult. When he said mysterious things like this, it sounded like the lady. “Seeing the ends of the earth can be sad.” “Of course. That’s why people cry.” “I haven’t cried since I started elementary school.” “Do what feels right to you.” “I always do.” I drank my coffee. I didn’t put any sugar in it, so it was extremely bitter. I didn’t really think it tasted good, but it did warm me up. Every time I felt coffee sink into my belly, I found myself feeling better but also a little sadder. “Dad, I was extremely fond of the lady,” I said. “I know,” my father said. I live in a suburban town. There are lots of rolling hills and little houses. The farther you get from the station, the newer everything is, and you get more cute little bright-colored houses that look like they’re made of LEGOs. On sunny days, the entire town sparkles like it’s stuffed full of sweet treats. There’s a shopping mall, some high-tension towers, a dentist, Seaside Café, a hill with a water tower that looks like a spaceship, a vacant lot that looks like a savannah, the elementary school I go to, and the house I live in. I wake up extremely early and go explore the town at dawn alone. At that time of day, there’s no one else around, and I feel like I’ve reached the ends of the earth. I run extremely fast toward the ends of the earth. I run so fast, everyone would be surprised, and no one could catch up with me. The road that leads to the ends of the earth is called the Penguin Highway. I believe that if I follow that road, I can see the lady again. This isn’t a hypothesis. It’s a personal belief. I did the math today, and there are 3,748 days until I’m a grown-up. Every day I learn more things about the world, becoming better than I was the day before. I can’t imagine how great I will become. I’m sure that I’ll become a great grown-up who doesn’t need to sleep and who has shiny white permanent teeth. I’ll grow much taller and have plenty of muscles. Perhaps lots of girls will ask me to marry them. But I already know who I’m going to marry, so I’ll have to turn them all down. I’ll be able to stay up all night with the lady and carry her when she falls asleep. If I become important, I’ll be able to do lots of things that impress her. Maybe she’ll say “Wow.” But even if she just says “Hmm,” I won’t mind. I think I’d like to hear her say “Hmm” again. This time, we’ll finally take that train and visit the ocean. I plan to tell her about a lot of things while I’m on the train. I’ll tell her how I ran down the Penguin Highway. About all the places I’m going to have adventures, the people I’m going to meet, the things I’m going to say, and the things I’m going to think about. I’ll tell her how much I’ll grow up before I see her again. And then I’ll tell her just how much I love her. How much I want to see her again.