How long had I been asleep? Had I slept far too long?
Even when I tried to force my eyes open, they would not open more than halfway—my lashes soaked by waves, then dried stiff by the wind. An uncomfortably warm light was pushing its way between my eyelids. Had I fallen asleep without realizing it? Like in Wilson? My exploration suit, saturated with seawater, weighed heavily on me, and my head felt heavier still. Inside my mouth, dried phlegm had formed stalactites. Just before my muscles could fully contract and seize up, my brain seemed to have barely managed to send out an emergency signal. If I hadn’t woken up, I would have died there. Would that have been better, perhaps?
In Wilson, light was automatically trimmed by the blinds, neatly arranged at the center of the floor like a rug. Here on the rocks, it stabbed at my eyes relentlessly, rustling and harassing me like a mosquito.
When I barely managed to lift my head, the world rushed in white. Before my retinas could adjust, a merciless amount of light poured in; when I shut my eyes, violent reds swirled behind them. And then, again, a red storm. I closed my eyes and prayed—just let the light scrape across my membranes like sandpaper and pass on. Let it exhaust itself into silence. I waited, and waited.
After a long time, the storm raging behind my closed eyes subsided, but the light remained savage. Shattered into fine fragments, it kept shifting its direction, repeatedly bearing down on me. In the brief instant when the waves dissolved the crust in my eyes and the wind hardened it again, I forced my eyes open and shot my gaze back at the light. I couldn’t hold it for long, but for a moment I saw it: a glass bottle, its body smooth and gracefully refined. There was not a single sharp edge. Its surface was so flawless it almost seemed incapable of reflecting light at all. The quiet water around it resembled clear bathwater softened through tenderization, and the bottle appeared to be endlessly adjusting its form, wearing that water like clothing.
The glass bottle kept glancing in my direction. Was it collecting light scattered by the waves and reflecting it back? Or was it emitting light toward me directly? I thought the bottle was strangely similar to a mother’s nagging that used to break into sweet weekend naps, or to my grandmother’s old, dry, cluttered house from childhood—things I had hated then, but missed now. Come to think of it, where had my mother gone?
What fascinated him most, however, was that the water around the glass bottle looked unnaturally elongated—and impossibly clean.
After that day, most of the water on Earth had been contaminated by radiation. Independently of that, the planet had long absorbed every kind of waste and residue without discrimination. The only potable water available had been what passed through capsule filtration systems. The water surrounding the bottle should have been no different from the water here—or anywhere on Earth—filthy with organic and inorganic pollutants swept up by nuclear storms. Even so, could contaminated water truly be that clear? If it were polluted, it should have borne dull hues—moss green, straw yellow.
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It was impossible for such a vast amount of water to exist in so clear a hue when it hadn’t been filtered at all. According to old research that surfaced dimly in his memory, the water sources in this region had dried up long ago. If there truly were a river or a lake—something other than the sea—holding clear water around the glass bottle, then the research must have been wrong. And even if it were wrong, wouldn’t it be more natural for contaminated water to seep underground and share its pollution? He couldn’t tell whether the water merely appeared clear. Having just woken and pushed his thoughts this far, he couldn’t tell whether it was hunger or the light that was distorting his judgment—whether that thing was really a glass bottle at all, or how far away it was. From one to ten, nothing could be properly assessed.
By the time two days had passed repeating the cycle of perching on the rock, lying down, and rising again while thinking about the light and the glass bottle, he realized something else: except for the times he had stepped outside Wilson, he had hardly walked at all. Measuring the distance to the bottle felt difficult—perhaps not because of the bottle itself, but because it had been so long since he had moved around that his sense of distance had dulled. First, he needed to focus on walking again. Still, no matter how he thought about it, he could find no logical explanation for why the water around the glass bottle was a completely different color from this side of the sea, which was little more than liquid trash.
That discrepancy kept gnawing at him. It troubled him even more after he noticed that, as time passed, the light fractured several times in ways that felt unnaturally irregular. Whenever the light stopped stabbing at his eyes, the clear water caught his gaze—and the moment his eyes settled on the water, the light would strike again without fail. It was as if someone were firing the light deliberately, trying to keep him from looking in that direction, from finding their water. And the more that seemed to be the case, the harder it became to resist the urge to go in search of the glass bottle and the water surrounding it.
On a small scale, like waves; on a broader scale, like tides—thoughts of light and the past swelled and receded in a repeating, uneasy harmony. This wave was not the previous one, yet it mimicked it; the next wave, in turn, followed this one, urging him on. Irritated, he forced himself to swallow dry saliva. Overcome with thirst, he reached for the seawater without hesitation. When he clenched his hand around it, the water became a tiny ebb tide, slipping mockingly through the gaps between his fingers. Slowly straightening them, he found a meager pool remaining on the surface of his palm. He swallowed it as it was.
It wasn’t as salty as before. At least now, his body no longer spat it out reflexively. The more he drank, the more moisture drained from him, and the worse his thirst became—but there was nothing else that could wet his throat, even for a brief moment. He lowered his posture completely and began, in earnest, to scoop up the seawater.
