The sky, the land, and the sea ignited at the same time.

  The tik… ting sound of tendons snapping, the chiiik hiss of fat sizzling. Until just moments before, it was startling how many people had still been living on the streets—and then the tsunami erased the scene as cleanly as if nothing had ever happened. Wilson grabbed me. But memory was not erased.

  The first few days alone were horrific. No one was visible, yet the screams did not stop. Bodies tossed beyond the cliff by the blast. Bone marrow boiled by fire popped like firewood at just the right moment, tadak, and melting subcutaneous fat burned cozily, like embers in a hearth. Smoke rose from the sea. Was there a chance then? Should I have gone down? Was someone perhaps on their way? If so, was there any reason to throw myself into a sea that revealed nothing of its nature and only exhaled smoke? In the end, I simply waited. Even if I had gone back—without a protective diving suit—and blindly plunged in, managing to haul up one or two people at best… what came after was unimaginable.

  There was nothing I could do. I collapsed where I was. I stayed inside Wilson, looking out at the beach through the window. Something like a corpse floated up. Before I could bring myself to look closely, wondering if it might be a familiar face, it disappeared.

  —

  That day. The memory up until evacuating into Wilson largely matched what I was seeing now. Except there were no more screams. Random debris lay scattered everywhere, along with carbonized fragments of skin. I didn’t feel like returning to Wilson. In a single moment, the world had changed along the boundary of the cliff. No matter how blurred the line between sunset and dawn may be, there is undeniably half a day between them. Compared to a human’s running speed—some twenty to twenty-four kilometers per hour—it was impossible to describe just how brutal, or perhaps psychopathically indifferent, the speed, force, and scale of the tsunami driven by the nuclear blast had been.

  There was a clear difference between the villagers’ instinctive struggle—those who had run blindly toward the cliff to survive while they could still place their feet on solid ground—and the bodies that, crushed in an instant beneath a wall of water tens of meters deep, could do nothing more.

  Compared to the few seconds in which everyone ran this way to survive, the time during which everyone had been running into fear in order to avoid fear had lasted decades. Longer still, if one were to say it all. Responsibility couldn’t be divided anyway. I couldn’t risk my life to save two people. There was no protective diving suit, and it was already a sealed grave. My body either tensed excessively or trembled, unable to hold any strength at all. There was no helping it. I felt no guilt.

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  After that, time flowed like a river. I had never seen a river directly, but I knew at least this much: it goes to hang itself toward the sea, receives salvation from the sky, and then returns to the land as rain—over and over again. It is an eternal prayer. Salvation, too, repeats endlessly.

  That day, people were a river.

  People were there.

  It will not cease.

  It will not cease.

  —

  Whether everything had vanished, or whether an ancient future had finally come to reclaim us—or how many times this would repeat—nothing could be known with certainty. Everything remained unclear. Was that why I wandered through memory alone, and at the same time drilled into it? Had the past several months been nothing but an extended life-flash? Each time I blinked like a pendulum, the wheel spun again. Why had my ears, once intact, half-melted? Had they broken that day? Had something barely held together collapsed absurdly with a pshht the moment it touched the outside air?

  There was no mirror in Wilson, and I could only guess at my appearance, trusting entirely what Wilson told me. Whenever we staged a fashion show, Wilson always praised me, using a different metaphor each time so it never felt stale. To someone like me, so prone to drifting into dreams and melancholy, each word from Wilson was the show. When, carried away, I deliberately put on dusty women’s clothing, Wilson introduced me under a different name. I knew that name lay half-burned on the beach, but I said nothing and corrected Wilson by giving my own. Wilson carried on with the show.

  —

  Now that I think about it, the sound of the waves is hard to hear. Each time waves brushed perfectly against a perforated rock, a whistling sound emerged intermittently—only a piercingly high note reaching my ears.

  Tik… ting.

  Chiiik.

  Wilson’s voice was a pleasant, low-to-mid-range female voice. Perhaps the “show” had continued even while I could no longer hear. But my body remained stiff, refusing to move as I wished. Stuck to the rock, I couldn’t fall away. With no choice, I barely turned my head to look at the beach. Clockwork springs and rusted batteries, broken loudspeakers and displays. Traces of fat and protein burned beyond recognition. And a gigantic glass bottle—irritatingly emitting light.

  The glare of the glass bottle moved in perfect unison. Following the moon, which issued silent commands, it endlessly traveled up and down the shore. With no proper sound, it felt almost tedious. But here, the only new thing was that glass bottle. Nothing else drew my eyes. If I lost focus, I fell into multiple versions of algorithms. As the algorithms repeated, the past grew faint—while one thing became increasingly clear.

  I exist here now. And everything that could be called you exists nowhere at all.

  Still, night came, so another day has surely passed. Even if time cannot be grasped, it does not stop. As my lost curiosity toward the glass bottle grew, my senses, too, were beginning to return.