Night of the Animals(63)

Then he noticed a dark object floating on the water. What’s that, eh? With a rising horror, he realized it was a penguin, floating grotesquely with beak down in the water, a corona of pink water around it. The animal had been unlucky—smacked unconscious by the falling ramp.

Cuthbert dove into the water and got his hands on the bird.

“Oh bloody Jesus!” he cried. “Oh f*ck me, f*ck me, f*ck me!” With one windmilling arm, he paddled frantically; in the other arm he held the wounded bird—it was lighter and warmer than he expected. He scampered back onto the pool’s apron and lay the penguin down gently. Blood covered his arm. The penguin’s neck was completely slack, its head at a severe, obtuse angle from his body. Its beak was parted open.

“Oh sweet Jesus,” Cuthbert said. He touched the animal. It was already dead, he believed. “A’m a bastard,” he said. He backed away from the bird and fell down on his hands and knees, gnashing his teeth. He started to stand up, then sat down, kicking his heels. He thrust his face into his hands and he wept wildly, his arms flailing, scratching at himself with cold fingers. He reached up crookedly and cried in screeching jags. He was like an old tree scraping its own bark off.

“It was a mistake!” he blubbered. “I’m sorry, chaps!”

The penguins now formed a mottled black and white phalanx around the boxes of their makeshift rookery. Some of them rocked their heads back and forth with taut, beaky aggression. Cuthbert stood up. He said, “I’ll find the Gulls of Imago, muckers. I’ll find them for you, you’ll see.”

The penguins began a furious, rhythmic song—it was a noise unlike any Cuthbert had ever heard, like a tone collage of rusty, clicky kazoos, all insisting on the same note, a note that was equal parts buzziness and sweetness, rancor and innocence. Among their thistly lament was a quiet layer of something far more melodious and soft, a little reedlike slip of music. Cuthbert could see now, inside the middle nesting box, a tiny, fuzzy form that could only be a penguin chick. It was as small as a sparrow and colored a solid, sticky gray.

“Oh god,” said Cuthbert. “Oh bless you all.”

Find the Gulls of Imago, they said to Cuthbert. Find our friends. But you will never be forgiven.

Cuthbert cleared his throat with a harrumph. “I know, I know. I deserve to die.” He wouldn’t mind it at the moment, so awful did he feel. He must help the penguins though, if he could. He owed them that.

“I’ll find a way to get your gulls.” He raised his index finger and gave it a good wag, like some little Mussolini. He said, “Blunky, munky gulls!”

But he didn’t feel very confident.

Never forgiven, they repeated. You are an enemy of penguins. Forever.

“That’s OK,” he said. “I’ll still help you. And I’m certain Dryst will muck in, too. You’ll see.”

Oh, Cuthbert may not have recognized these Imago gulls personally, not off the top of his head, but he could make inquiries.

“I’ve a few notions where to start looking, boys,” he said.

Through the high windows of his flat in Finsbury Park, for instance, he occasionally noted gray-mantled mew gulls. They would float at eye level, on the eastern winds that blew all the way up from the Thames Estuary. These gulls were excellent spotters of discarded chip cones, he had observed, and with so many chippies in Finsbury Park, they were eternally busy. But not too busy to be put a question or two from a certain psychotic fellow.

“I’ll ask ’em when I see them next,” he said to himself. “Which of you knows where I might find your Imago comrades?”

A few times, he had seen his gulls swoop down audaciously and, he believed, snag a hot chip from an Indigent child or lady’s wooden chip-fork. Cuthbert felt that this seemed a kind of torment, did it not? But no, the Gulls of Imago had to be something quite grander. They would not fly in the airspace of north London.

And would they ever appear at night? He had never seen a seagull at night—their whiteness seemed a sort of violation of it. But he determined to keep his eyes peeled. If the penguins seemed to honor them so, surely, from somewhere, they were watching, from above, right now.

Then Cuthbert took a few steps back up the pool stairway and slapped the side of his thigh: “Saft man!” The obvious solution to the problem of the gulls was right under his nose. The long-dead architect, this Tecton fellow, like a great heap of white concrete pushed off the cliffs of Dover, had shattered into a thousand, flying pieces—seagulls. Here were the Gulls of Imago—the “father” of the penguins. They had risen from the scraps of rubbish magazine spreads. They had risen from unbuilt dream cities, from the sad spirit of the man whose greatest architectural success had not been for workers, as he wanted, but for a few displaced, bravely appreciative penguins. If Tecton could not create a comfortable place for the birds, he had at least tried to please the public, truly and deeply and incompetently.

Cuthbert said, to the dark sky above the zoo, “I’ll find them—or him!”

So he left the pool, a guilty servant, a criminal, and a man enthralled to flightless telepathic birds imprisoned in the wrong hemisphere.





popcorn for the lions


AS CUTHBERT HANDLEY TRIED TO DECIDE HOW and where to find the storied Gulls of Imago, and at the same time accomplish his most consecrated task—the freeing of the otters—he got himself rather seriously diverted once again, this time by a religious development among the zoo’s felines.