Hitori Nojima - Death Stranding - The Official Novelization, Volume Two

Bridget began to explain.

“This painting is a Da Vinci.”

A man spoke. Bridget was looking at a painting of a woman holding a naked baby in her arms as it tried to wriggle its way out of them.

“It’s called the Madonna of the Yarnwinder . The yarnwinder is the thing the baby is holding. The baby is drawn to the yarnwinder while its mother looks on worried. While her left arm is holding her baby, her right arm looks like it’s about to pull the baby away, doesn’t it?”

“With that horizontal stick, the yarnwinder looks a little like a cross.”

As Bridget pointed out her observation, her father placed a large hand on her head. She may have pouted and resisted because she didn’t want her father to mess up her hair, but in reality she loved receiving his praise. She looked up at the painting hanging next to her father, who smelled of cigars, that had been painted almost five hundred years ago.

“That’s right. It’s a cross. The baby is Jesus. The mother is the Virgin Mary. She was afraid that Jesus would be crucified on a cross in the future to sacrifice himself to save mankind.”

“But how did the Virgin Mary know that was going to happen, Papa? Why didn’t she stop it?” Bridget asked.

“Because we’re only human,” her father replied.

Bridget’s father’s face looked slightly cold. He seemed to smell of sweat. Bridget liked the smell of her father’s cigars, they smelled like dried leaves, but she didn’t like this smell.

“A holy sacrifice must be made so that humanity can keep on living.”

Bridget didn’t understand what those words meant at the time ( I was only five years old ). It took many years afterwards for her to finally comprehend them.

Bridget dreamt of the cross time and time again. For some reason, she always felt like she wasn’t supposed to tell anyone about it, so she remained silent, taking her secret with her to the grave.

—So now I can finally tell you .

The shoreline stretched on for eternity. Bridget walked along it alone, looking out over the sea on her right side. Even if she carried on walking until her dying breath, she’d probably never reach the end. When Bridget realized that, it made her happy. It meant that this world would never end.

The calm ocean surface reflected the light of the sun. It was so gentle and beautiful. Bridget was a smart girl. She knew that all life on Earth came from the sea. The sand on the beach was white and felt good as it poured through her fingers. It was fun to mold the sand and make sandcastles and imaginary towns, too. She even built a breakwater so that her little town didn’t get destroyed.

Bridget knew she was dreaming, but she always looked forward to these dreams so much.

But once she realized that the white sand was made from the corpses of coral and fragments of shell, she became afraid to dream. It became a beach of death.

Bridget didn’t want to have that dream ever again, but she couldn’t pick and choose. Eventually, she came to dream of that beach every night.

That eternal shoreline transformed into an eternal nightmare.

It was sometime afterward when she came to see the Beach littered with crosses. She saw them thrust into the sand, floating in the sea, and disappearing and reappearing on the horizon. Sometimes she even saw them in the sky.

Then, one day, she found a rotten, enormous cross discarded at the water’s edge. It was so big, it looked like it could have crucified a whale or a giant. But all that was nailed to it was a doll of a baby angel that had its wings plucked away. She felt so sorry for it that she rescued it. She washed it with seawater and gently cradled it in her arms. She found it cute, how its eyes opened and closed when its head was tilted. Even after she woke up, the baby still slept within them.

After a while, other things began to appear on the beach. At first it was the carcasses of small fish and birds. They didn’t appear to be wounded, nor did they rot, but they were cold and lifeless, so Bridget assumed they were dead. Those things had already died long ago in Bridget’s world. They were animals that had gone extinct millennia ago. The corpses of extinct species, from ammonites and trilobites to mammoths and dinosaurs, increased and increased. The strangest part of it was how all the animals that washed ashore had umbilical cords.

Bridget was frightened by her dreams, but she couldn’t tell anyone.

All she could do was hope and pray for the destruction of the Beach in her dreams. And it was granted. Although it wasn’t quite destroyed in the way that Bridget hoped for.

When she fell asleep and awoke on the Beach, both the sky and the sea were stained blood red. For some reason, the old Earth that she had only ever seen in picture books floated above the horizon. The world was full of sadness. This time she didn’t feel scared like she usually did, but like she wanted to cry. From beyond the sea, the source of her sadness approached. It was the “things” that had disappeared the moment that this world, and this universe, had been born.

The second those “things” met this world, the sea boiled and the sky fell down. A wave higher than any skyscraper washed ashore, stranding all the extinct creatures. Corpses piled up on top of the white sand made out of more corpses. A young Bridget could only cling tightly to her doll and watch. Nothing lived on that beach.

—Those were the dreams of extinction I had. Even as I grew older, they wouldn’t set me free. In my dreams I watched the world end. So many times. Countless past extinctions that decimated life on this planet again and again and again. I even dreamt of the destruction to come. Human corpses used to wash up on my Beach. They all seemed to look like me somehow. All of them had the same umbilical cord.

That strong and intelligent girl learned to live with her nightmares of extinction. She could never escape from them, but she didn’t let them overwhelm her, either. They never drove her to suicide or madness. Her dreams of extinction made as much sense as living in this world did. That’s how Bridget came to accept them in the end.

Senseless people did things for senseless reasons. They started wars, they hurt each other, killed each other. It was the same as the Beach. Bridget decided that she needed to understand why.

Ever since she had tried to destroy her dream, the Beach had turned into an even more frightening world. She needed to understand why that happened, too.

Bridget devoured knowledge. She learned about life and the universe. She learned about people. About the world. She learned about everything. She strived to understand this world in a human way. Her entry into politics was an extension of that learning.

—It wasn’t quite the right answer for me, but it wasn’t a mistake, either. Then I faced my first hurdle.

“It’s stage three,” the doctor explained, showing Bridget an X-ray. Bridget felt numb. It felt like this was happening to someone else. The doctor cast his eyes downward and cleared his throat. “I’m afraid it’s going to require removal.”

It was just after Bridget turned twenty when the cancer was discovered in her uterus. She’d be lying if she said she wasn’t shocked, but she had no choice in the matter. Bridget obediently accepted the surgery.