Penguin Highway Page 3

  I wrote all this down in my notes.

  At last, Uchida came and sat next to me. We drank some tea.

  There were lots of hills in this area. Like a lot of green breasts rising up under the blue sky. I wiggled my loose tooth, thinking about breasts.

  Lately, I’d developed the opinion that breasts were one of life’s great mysteries. I often found myself thinking about the lady’s breasts, but why were hers different from my mother’s? They were the same physical object, so why was the effect they had on me so dramatically different? I never accidentally found myself staring at my mother’s breasts, but I often caught myself doing just that with the lady’s. I felt like I could never get tired of looking at them. I wondered what it would be like to touch them. The more I thought about it, the more baffling these feelings were. Was this what it meant to observe yourself?

  I talked about all this with Uchida. “What do you think, Uchida?”

  “I don’t know anything,” he said, staring up at the water tower. His ears had turned red.

  Our rest ended there, and we stood up to go explore. But then we heard a sguishguishguish from somewhere. Different from the sound of the wind in the forest. We looked around, wondering what it was, and saw a bunch of penguins walking along one of the paths out of the woods.

  “Hnya!” Uchida choked. A very strange noise.

  The trails in the forest behind the water tower were covered in penguins.

  Some were running about, wings flapping behind them. Others were sunning themselves in the light drifting through the trees. Uchida and I traced the Penguin Highway backward. I was getting quite excited. I thought we had a chance of solving the mystery of where all these penguins came from. Our exploration’s goal had suddenly become investigating the Penguin Highway. We walked on, forgetting all about the wind whipping through the trees, about our map, about the water tower, and about breasts.

  “Seven! Eight!” Uchida yelled.

  “Nine! Ten! Ah, eleven, twelve, thirteen!” I yelled back.

  The number of penguins soon passed twenty.

  We moved faster and faster until we were almost running. We found a place where the path narrowed, and here there were a bunch of penguins, all stuffed together like they were playing oshikura manju, that game where everybody stands back-to-back in a circle trying to squish together. At this point, we gave up counting them. When Uchida and I came running, the penguins scattered, opening a path for us.

  From then on, there were far fewer penguins.

  We’d been assuming the penguin rookery was deep in the forest, and they were entering town from there, but there was no sign of it. The path we were following suddenly turned and passed behind the nets of the athletic field. The field on the other side of the green nets was deserted. There was a single penguin leaning against a tree, taking a nap, but it was all alone.

  “Maybe this is the wrong way?” Uchida suggested.

  We persevered, passing along the back of the field. It was very quiet here. Inside the grove, we found the remains of a small truck. How it got there, I have no idea.

  At last, we came out in a flat clearing covered in thick grass.

  High-tension towers loomed over us, reaching for the sky. The forest deposited us on the east side of the field. We pushed through the grass, headed north, and found a diagonal slope made of concrete. There was a long staircase leading down. At the bottom was a two-lane road, and beyond that was a lot for buses to turn around. This was the last stop on the bus line, the edge of our neighborhood. There were no penguins around.

  We gaped across the field, stunned. We felt faintly silly for having chased the penguins like this. A cluster of clouds drifted across the sun, and it suddenly grew much darker. Uchida and I stood next to one of the towers, discussing our next move.

  “Where’d the penguins come from?” Uchida asked, staring up at the tower.

  I looked back at the forest. “Maybe we stepped off the Penguin Highway somewhere. They might have come from somewhere deeper in the forest.”

  We laid our half-drawn map down on the grass and discussed possible penguin origins.

  We were so focused on this that we didn’t notice Suzuki and his two minions until they had us surrounded. Uchida heard footsteps, glanced up, and immediately looked ready to cry.

  Suzuki came toward us grinning. “Ugh, Uchida’s here,” he said, disgusted. Saying nothing, Uchida just started backing away.

  Suzuki glared at me. “As for you,” he said, grabbing my shoulder. He was roughly the same height as me but a little fatter. “You’re a liar. I oughta kill you.”

  “A liar? When did I lie?”

  “That crap at the dentist.”

  “You mean when you started crying at the dentist’s office?”

  “Shut up!” Suzuki turned beet red and punched me in the shoulder. “You’re a liar! Drop dead! I’m gonna kill you!”

  I staggered a little but managed to hold my ground.

  “Do you really hate me enough to kill me? I really don’t think killing me will do you any good. I won’t be easy to kill. Before you manage it, I’ll definitely be able to gouge your eyes out or bite your ears off. I bet that would really hurt. And then you’d be arrested. Your parents would cry a lot. If you hate me so much that you’re willing to lose your eyes and ears and go to prison, then I guess you leave me with no choice. It’s a shame, but I’ll just have to fight back.”

  This seemed to stun Suzuki a little.

  “Shut up,” he spat after a pause. “You sure talk a lot of crap.”

  “I’m just trying to help you understand.”

  “Shut up.”

  “But I definitely did wrong you the other day. So I apologize. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that, and I shouldn’t have done that to Uchida, either.”

  I bowed my head. Uchida looked startled. “What?” he asked.

  “At the dentist, I tried to pay Suzuki back for a few things. You didn’t ask me to, but I tried to get him back for you anyway. Without getting permission from you to act on your behalf, though, it was inappropriate for me to do anything to Suzuki. It wasn’t fair. I should have asked you first, informed Suzuki of that fact, and then gone for payback.”

  “You’ve lost me,” Uchida said.

  Suzuki growled “Shut up!” one more time, but then he started grinning. He had one of his minions hand him a long piece of rope. “I’ve got just the punishment in mind for you two,” he announced.

  Uchida grabbed my arm.

  “No,” I said. “We’re busy.”

  Suzuki’s grin suddenly gave way to a much scarier expression. He jumped toward me. Uchida shrieked and ran away. I tried to run, but Suzuki grabbed my hair.

  “Hey, Suzuki! That hurts!” I shouted. Suzuki was yelling, “You! Little!” If my follicles were ruined and my hair didn’t grow back, it would be Suzuki’s fault. I grabbed Suzuki’s crotch and squeezed, urging him to let go of my hair, and he squealed. I let go and shoved him back. He rolled across the grass yelling, “Dammit! Kill him! Kill him!”

  “Uchida!” I yelled. I shouldered my rucksack, grabbed the map, and ran north across the plain. “Let’s run for it! Retreat!”

  We ran down the long, exposed concrete stairs.

  Normally, we’d have gotten away clean, but I stepped on an empty Coke can at the bottom of the stairs and tripped. Suzuki and his cronies piled on top of me. “You’re heavy!” I complained. Uchida ran off down the deserted road really fast. At least he got away. The one bright side to this.

  They hauled me across the road to the bus terminal. It wasn’t much of a terminal. It was about as big as the park where we congregated on the way to school. There was a single, flimsy covered waiting area in the front and a vending machine selling soft drinks.

  Suzuki brought the rope and tied me to the vending machine, arms at my sides. This was one of the Suzuki Empire’s famous punishments, and boys were often found tied to one thing or another. Suzuki also squeezed my crotch once as payb
ack for earlier, so I grunted.

  Then, he ordered his minions to dump my rucksack out on the road.

  The thermos full of sweet tea was thrown into the forest behind the bus terminal. Suzuki shoved the map Uchida and I had made into his pocket. Then, he put my notebook on the ground, and each of them pissed on it in turn. The notebook was ruined.

  “Serves you right.” Suzuki gloated, and the emperor of the Suzuki Empire went away.

  I waited patiently, trussed to the vending machine. Suzuki’s lackey Kobayashi had done a very good job tying me up, and I was stuck standing at attention. His skills were impressive.

  The sunlight streaming down on the bus terminal was beautiful, but there was nobody there. On a Sunday afternoon, it could be a while before a bus came through. I listened to the sound of the wind and resolved to do what I could while I waited for someone to come and rescue me.

  I managed to move enough to get a hand in my pocket. I had a special tiny notebook there and a tiny ballpoint pen my father had bought for me. I’d practiced for this eventuality, and I could now take notes with the notebook still in my pocket.

  I glanced over at the notebook on the asphalt. Drenched in the empire’s piss, it gleamed in the afternoon sunlight. Relying on my memory, I began transcribing the contents of that notebook. Copying it.

  I looked up at the sky, listening to the soft song of a lark. A warm, gentle breeze ruffled my hair. It was a really beautiful afternoon. With nothing else to do, I became preoccupied with wiggling my loose tooth. It was slightly out of place to begin with, so I started pushing it around with my tongue. The sky was so blue, and here I was all alone, wiggling a loose tooth, climbing the stairs to adulthood. That notion struck me as poetic, so I wrote it down. I’d like to write poetry someday. Maybe I had a hidden talent for it.

  I tried singing for a while, hoping this would help me forget the loose tooth. I couldn’t think of any other songs offhand, so I was singing “Jingle Bells,” totally out of season. “La-la-la,” I sang. “La-la-la.”

  I heard someone laughing. I hadn’t noticed at all, but somebody was sitting in the waiting vestibule next to the vending machine. I recognized her by her laugh alone.

  A minute later, the lady stepped out. She was wearing blue clothes that looked like they’d been cut out of the heavens. She had a purse with her. She seemed sleepy but was smiling. Her hair was a little mussed.

  She came out into the sunlight, almost stepped on my notebook, yelped, and jumped sideways. Then, she pretended she’d only just seen me there.

  “What are you doing, kiddo?”

  “Pretending to be a vending machine.”

  “Is that fun?”

  “It hasn’t been very fun, no.”

  “You are an enigma,” she laughed. “This was Suzuki’s idea of payback? After that lie, you only have yourself to blame.”

  “If you were there the whole time, you could’ve rescued me.”

  “But you didn’t ask me to, right?”

  “I admit you have a point there,” I conceded. “What are you doing here?”

  “I wanted to take a bus to the station, but in the end, it was too much of a pain. I took a rest in the vestibule here and nodded off. It happens.”

  The lady untied the rope. Free again, I inspected the damage. My rucksack had been stomped on and was crumpled but intact. I managed to find the thermos they’d thrown in the woods, but the notebook was soaked and beyond salvation.

  “Don’t know how they think up such nasty stuff,” the lady mused, sounding impressed. “Suzuki’s kinda cute, but he can be pretty nasty.”

  “It’s because he’s an emperor.”

  “A what?”

  My tooth was waggling, so I stuck my fingers in my mouth.

  “Want me to yank that for you?” she asked.

  “No, thanks. I’ve decided to get it out myself.”

  “I won’t steer you wrong, I swear. Think of it as an experiment.”

  “Oh? I do like experiments.”

  The lady took a sewing kit out of her purse, snipped off a piece of thread, and looped it around my loose tooth. The wind caught her hair, and it smelled really good. “Now then, kiddo, I’m going to pull on this thread. Marvel as the tooth shoots right out.”

  But when she tried to tug the thread, I moved with her, so the tooth didn’t pop out. She wound up wandering around the bus terminal, and I followed, circling her like a satellite.

  “Come on,” she snapped. “It obviously won’t work if you follow me around like that. Stand still.”

  I wasn’t scared of having my tooth pulled. My body just moved on its own.

  The lady stopped in front of the red vending machine and said, “I’ve got an idea.” She put some change in and bought a can of Coke. “Take a look at this,” she suggested, tipping the can in my direction. Holding the string taut, she tossed the can in the air above my head. My eyes followed the red speck across the bright-blue sky, but I didn’t move my head at all. This trick would hardly be enough to get my tooth out, I thought.

  The cylinder spun as it arced across the horizon, like a spaceship using centrifugal force to create internal gravity. But just as the red can was about to vanish from view, something white covered it, like it had suddenly frozen. Huh, I thought.

  This phenomenon started from the la in Coca-Cola and spread up the side of the can like a tsunami crossing the ocean. The white parts seemed to foam and then turn black. The whole thing swelled, as if it had taken a deep breath. Two black wings seemed to erupt off the sides. At this stage, the Coke had turned into a black-and-white unidentified flying can (large). It continued to expand, still spinning as it began losing altitude. Its tip stretched out, transforming into a beak, and flapping its wings, it landed in the middle of the bus terminal, rolling across the ground. When the Coke can righted itself, it was no longer a Coke can.

  Awkwardly flailing two black wings, the former Coke can waddled a few steps before stopping and staring up at the sky as if asking “Where am I?”

  I had witnessed the birth of a penguin.

  I stared at the penguin a while longer until I tasted blood in my mouth. I turned back to the lady. She was standing in front of the vending machine, drinking from another can of Coke, and holding my tooth between her fingers. “See? It popped right out,” she said. I spat some bloody saliva onto the asphalt. She bought me some mineral water, so I swigged at that a little at a time, washing the blood out of my mouth.

  “What was that?” I asked.

  “A penguin, obviously,” the lady declared. She plopped the freed tooth in my palm and walked over to the penguin while sipping her Coke. The penguin waddled toward her, almost tackling her legs, then wandering around them.

  There was a gust of wind, and the lady put her hand on her forehead, as if warding off the sunlight.

  “I’m an enigma, too,” she said. “See if you can figure this mystery out. Think you can do it?”

  That evening, I went to Seaside Café.

  Sunlight streaming from the mountain on the prefecture border turned the clouds in the dome-like sky above pink. It was like the whole town was inside a giant planetarium. Seaside Café sat on the side of the road like a mysterious laboratory sparkling near the shore.

  My father was working at a table by the windows, documents laid out in front of him.

  I felt bad for interrupting, but eager to talk to him, I sat down in the seat opposite. I really wasn’t confident in my ability to explain the phenomenon I’d witnessed. The moment I sat down, I felt like maybe it should stay a secret between the lady and me—and that I shouldn’t talk about it with anyone else, even my father.

  It was rare for me to sit in silence, so this may have surprised my father. He was busy drawing a diagram with a fountain pen in his grid-lined notebook, but after a while, he looked up, his eyes staring at me through his glasses.

  “What? Something happen?” he asked.

  “Dad. I’ve witnessed an astounding phenomenon,” I c
onfided. “But I have no objective evidence to prove it was real, so I can’t say anything more. I believe I need to investigate this further before I do.”

  “Can you give me a hint?”

  “It involves the lady from the dentist’s office.”

  “A little more.”

  “I don’t know how to put this, but she’s very strange. Fascinating. I am curious to know more.”

  “I see,” my father said, nodding. “It seems you’ve found a worthy subject.”

  He gave me some chocolate. It was on the bitter side.

  I use my brain so much at night that I end up getting sleepy before my little sister. I make up for that by waking up earlier. Sometimes even before the sun starts rising. I’m sure I get up earlier than any kids in my neighborhood.

  There’s a large window on the right side of my bed, with an azure blind. In the morning, the sunlight filters through it, creating soft beams of light.

  When I woke up that morning, the light in the room was a chilly blue, like I was underwater.

  I was lying in bed thinking about what it would be like to be a newly born life-form in the surf.

  The first life-form had come into existence four billion years ago in a puddle on the rocks. It had floated there, in that water. The new being was really tiny, but life gradually grew bigger, more complex, and while some creatures went extinct, others flourished, until we got the world we have today.

  I was born to my father and mother. My father and mother were born from their fathers and mothers. Blue whales, zebras, and penguins were, too. All living things were born from other living things. But a dizzyingly long time ago, somewhere, a child was born of no father or mother.