The closer I came to land, the more light the waves scattered. The more I layered my imagination onto the boundary between sea and land, the boredom was gradually washed away, and there was no one left to scold me for being morally wrong, even if I was only peeking. No particular memory stood out clearly, yet my mood was strange. Between the sea and the land, there was something else that served as a bridge, much like waves do. A river. A river crosses a far narrower span than waves, standing in orderly formation, moving in a single line. Above all, unlike waves that are sent out from the sea, a river is water sent from the land toward the sea. Though expelled from the earth at every moment, the river, as a lifeline, nourishes civilization, leaves behind abundance, and gives up its own flesh. In the end, it forces its entire body beneath seawater, dragged into the deep abyss of the sea where even light cannot reach, crushed and drowned in silence. And then it becomes a horrific part of the sea that once killed it. After an uncountable amount of time passes and its turn finally comes, it evaporates, falls again, and begins anew… again… again… and again. A river is both the land’s tears and its umbilical cord. And this place was a cold, merciless land that had swallowed all of its rivers.

  Suddenly, hundreds of concentric circles rose up. Trivial yet countless ripples. I was stunned. Not snow, not ice—rain? It made no sense, but it really was raining. In haste, I cupped my hands and drank the rain. My elbows were scraped and peeled, but I was so focused on drinking water without salt for the first time in ages that I felt no real pain. I couldn’t gulp it down greedily, but as my throat was being quenched, an indefinable boundary between river and sea suddenly came to mind. It was clear that the sea assimilated the river, but whether that process was one of embrace or of violent taming was hard to say. That damned salt governed life and death—for people, for land, and for the sea itself. And now, rain completely free of salt was falling. In a region where rain almost never fell, such a sudden downpour was strange. If rain like this could fall, and if the land could hold it, then perhaps there really was a river. Like that elongated body of water around the glass bottle—or rather, around the dome. The taste of a river would surely be different from that of the sea.

  The thought that the water around the glass bottle (or the dome) was a river grew stronger. I felt I had to check whether it truly was a river, whether it really lacked salt. Once I made up my mind, it felt as though all talk of algorithms and wheels spinning in place vanished completely. Nothing whispered strange words into my barely functioning ears anymore. The inflammations that had long since swollen were carved away by the sharp edges of the rock. Each time I adjusted my posture, severed clumps of inflammation piled up and rotted where they fell. The soft, cushion-like material filling the crevices of the rock was nothing but rotten flesh and skin. I shifted my center of gravity back and forth, trying to reforge strength along my muscles, but it didn’t come easily. Unaccustomed to exertion, I struggled even to lower my head properly. Now it was rain, not light, stabbing at my eyes. Ugh… Counting from when I climbed onto the rock—or even from Wilson—it was impossible to estimate how many muscles had melted away. I soothed my creaking neck joints and finally managed to lower my head. Through my nearly torn exploration suit, I could see my chest and thighs. I had expected recovery to be impossible, but it didn’t seem as bad as I’d feared. If I could move, I thought I might still be able to walk somehow. The salt in the seawater had probably slowed the decay.

  My neck still wasn’t loose enough to look all the way down to my toes. As I shifted my body slightly, a horrific stench rose from the crevices of the rock. Would it have been better if I’d injured my nose instead of my ears and couldn’t smell anything? No—then I would have missed the warning and suffocated to death. The flesh torn from my body and the rock itself had clung together, sealing the stench inside, but the moment I pulled myself free, it was released. I was choking. It wasn’t a matter of resolve. If it had been the smell of polluted seawater or corroded machinery, I might have adapted quickly. But this stench was no different from the rot that had driven me to flee Wilson in the first place. I had to get out, immediately. My muscles responded, but not enough. I was finally trying to escape this place on my own, yet such a small thing wouldn’t work. Maybe the fact that I’d never accomplished anything by myself before was holding me back. Even though I needed to leave at once, my muscles remembered only grief, and fear and helplessness surged through my entire body. Was I really going to drown in something as stupid as a smell?

  Resignation pressed down on me, preventing me from doing anything. It was killing me. My vision flickered darkly, and my awareness drifted away from it, growing faint. Strength drained from my body, and I felt sluggish. Was I tired? It was warm. My eyes closed. My heartbeat settled into a steady rhythm. I wanted to see something. It felt like something had happened, though I couldn’t remember what. Was something approaching? It was beautiful. I felt beauty. I could still focus on what I was feeling. My heartbeat sounded too loud, and it clearly wanted more air. With no breath, my chest felt like it was burning. A fading sensation.

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  Was it then? Somewhere within the nearly breath-like stench, a sharp, acrid smell slipped in. Looking back, it might have been ammonia—like smelling salts. The moment I inhaled it, my entire body felt as if it snapped together. For an instant, I could move freely. As with my ears, everything that could melt had already melted away, and my battered body was now able to find a new balance. I curled my toes, bracing firmly against the rock, and distributed what strength I had left—without locking up—through my calves and knees, then my thighs and waist. At last, I felt something unfamiliar pulling me upright from behind. I stood straight, supporting my entire body on my spine. Had I narrowly escaped death? In the meantime, the stench was being torn apart by the sea wind. The way it scattered felt almost visible. I had watched so many absurd deaths and thought, That won’t be me. I nearly died an equally absurd death.

  Standing up and walking were different dimensions entirely, but once my body was upright, after falling and rising four or five times, I quickly grew accustomed to stepping forward. After that, I could link step to step and train my gait. If I were an infant, I would’ve been a prodigy—rolling over and walking in a single day. But that was nearly twenty-five years ago. This long-neglected movement, this clumsy walk, must be considered in the context of the extreme terror of knowing that tens of meters behind me lay seawater and corpses. In other words, it wasn’t something anyone could normally do. Still, it felt like I had found the optimal movement to escape this place. At last, I could leave the rock.

  When I came down and examined it, the rock looked strangely out of place against the rest of the shoreline, as if someone had placed it here not long ago. Maybe it was because this place hadn’t originally been a beach. I had seen this rock the moment I escaped Wilson, and I thought I wanted to cling to it once more—the rock that every villager must have climbed at least once. And I had clung to it for a long time. To the people here, the rock was a kind of shrine. It felt as though I had practiced austerities there for years. Everything repeated itself, and death, too, was an unavoidable part of that cycle. As long as land existed, it would continue. But how long it had continued was impossible to tell from the shrine. Despite staying on the rock for so long, once I came down, I felt as though I should never return to it. I went back to Wilson three meters away, took off my torn exploration suit, and changed into other clothes. I grabbed some MREs and a manually operated water filtration kit. Given my condition, I wasn’t sure, but in case I encountered snowy mountains, I also took ice screws and pitons. To make fire, I smashed apart what remained of the collapsed Wilson and took the matches. I wasn’t sure how useful they’d be in the strong wind outside, but I took them anyway. I stepped outside to say goodbye to Wilson and pressed my body against the door. The moment my left chest and ear, both hands, and upper arms touched it, a wave slapped against the rock and made a sound. It sounded like a protocol, or a mantra. As if Wilson had one last thing to say to me.

  I walked toward the dome, and toward the river. The weather was good. Considering the season, days like this would only become rarer, until eventually all light would fade away. Then, nothing could be found. I hurried. My body, as if still carrying traces of radiation, repeatedly malfunctioned. Sometimes my back throbbed; sometimes I stumbled and felt a thud. When that happened, the world fell over. Even when the horizontal world became vertical, there were moments when I couldn’t distinguish the colors of the darkened ground from the sky. Come to think of it, I had never gone beyond this cliff. Beyond it spread a plateau averaging about 3,000 meters in elevation—far higher than where I had lived. In contrast, the entirety of my life lay submerged below this cliff. By international agreement, this place had been off-limits to habitation since 1991, and for that very reason it had been a decent hiding place for refugees like us. How long ago was 1991? It must have been a time when many of the old people my grandmother teased as “20th-century humans” were still alive. Back then, it would’ve been too cold to live here even if you were paid, but my father said the climate had grown much milder since the 2050s. I had lived only here, and didn’t know much else. And now, even this place was gone. I had to go inland, through the dome. And that thing beside it—I needed to check, but it had to be a river. Now, it had to be a river.

  Strange things had happened. Seawater swallowed villages, rain that almost never fell poured down like monsoon season, and there was a dome that emitted light even at night. So perhaps it wasn’t entirely impossible that a river still lived somewhere in Antarctica. The river I was taught did not exist here. River. And that was also my name.