Night of the Animals (19 page)

SOON CUTHBERT CAME UPON THE LONDON ZOO'S
once-famous Penguin Pool, adjacent to the Children's Zoo. He gazed at the stark DNA-like double-helix of ramps at its center, which many an architecture student in the previous century had observed with an unruffled enchantment. Cuthbert gave a satisfied little chuckle.

“Bostin, that is!” he said.

The birds were not visible.

“Penguin muckers,” he called in his most singsongy Black Country accent. “I'm
heeee
-
earrrrrr
. I can help
yew-oo
. . . es
cape
, eh—from your
noyce
little clink.”

There was no response. At that moment, the zoo's relic collection of black-footed African species—their joints arthritic, their instincts to dive and swim cramped by the unnaturally shallow pool, their hatcheries incorrectly placed—were dozing miserably, slightly offstage, in a High Modernist rookery of iceberg-white cement attached to the main pool and facing into it. These “Jackass” penguins, as they were called in their homeland, had lived up until
their extinction in the wild on the softest of sands, not on icebergs, and certainly not on reinforced concrete.

THE LEGENDARY POOL
had been designed in the early 1930s by a young Jewish émigré from Russia. Berthold Lubetkin and his team of Bauhausers, all of whom ate great quantities of a new white food called yoghurt, had studied the penguins very carefully and very earnestly. Unfortunately, what they mostly kept discovering were artistic-politico devices rather than birds. (This was the politically explosive 1930s, after all.) At the time, this approach excited the zoo authorities terribly, stoking up their worst paternalistic impulses. As absurd as it sounds, it actually seemed to them that the zoo might lead the nation not merely in life sciences, but also in social architecture: if penguins could appear happy in a clean, hygienic, artful domicile, and given proper care and food, it would set a great example for what to do with England's poor in their flea-infested, crumbling slums. Tuberculosis would vanish. Joy would appear. One of the greatest of the zoo secretaries, Chalmers Mitchell, brought in unemployed Welsh miners as laborers to dig out the pool—all part of the example.

“More light!” Mr. Mitchell was to have exclaimed one day while the pool was under construction in 1933. He had stood at the edge of the lovely new hole. It was the happiest day of his life. He had brought a pewter tray of teacups for the workers. They were all full of yoghurt. Personally, he found the stuff nauseating, but it was supposed to be very healthful, according to one of Lubetkin's Bauhauser friends who was selling and promoting it on the side.

“More light! Here's a bit of refreshment—free, of course!”

The pool was completed in seven weeks and the laborers were let go. When all was said and done, the public cared little for the pool. They liked the penguins all right, but they did not properly
rise to the challenge of the pool's Art. In time, various naysayers in the papers began to opine on the pool. It was, among other things, they said, a fantastic failure from a zoological perspective—the penguins would not or could not multiply in it. How, they asked, had Chalmers Mitchell missed this flaw? They declared the pool, literally, sterile architecture, and while its beauty amused champions of High Modernism, the penguins truly suffered.

Cuthbert read the small, polished brass plaque, placed by the Royal Institute of British Architects, that was riveted beside the penguin's information sign:
BERTHOLD LUBETKIN
(
TECTON
), 1901–1990,
RIBA GOLD MEDAL.
He rubbed his fingertip across, down, and then up the tiny engraved
e
in
Tecton
. “There, like a little penguin, up the walk,” he said.

DOLOR HUNG OVER
the pool like faint, gray-green mist, but Cuthbert saw hope there, too.

In his opinion, the pool was certainly a symbol for something, or a sort of trick process, he reckoned, but he needed time to work it out. He felt a vague sanguinity, a feeling that the structure might offer a kind of release of both personal and national power of some sort, a splitting of spiritual atoms. It was often this way when he first gazed at extraordinary public art and architecture in the city: the Centre Point skyscraper seemed a sleek, wafer-windowed version of his own tower block. The half-century-old Westminster Tube station, with its glistening grays and massive grids of escalator chutes and support beams, was a breathing machinery he could inhabit and taste the power of. Even its perforated silver steel claddings, with a trillion dimple holes, made it seem as if the station itself exhaled air from mathematical lungs. But Cuthbert's feelings of awe and inclusion always faded; the red nuplastic half-benches
at Westminster seemed cynically designed to keep vagrants—and he was one, sometimes—from getting too comfortable.

And yet, the Penguin Pool seemed of a different, higher order. It wasn't mere urban infrastructure. It flabbergasted Cuthbert, more than anything he had ever encountered in the city. It seemed to be trying to delight him personally, like some enormous, fragile toy tied with a white bow. He read the plaque again. He wondered if the pool might “work correctly” if he stopped to eat a bowl of yoghurt. He said the word “Tecton” aloud. He acquired the erroneous idea that it served not as the name of Lubetkin's architectural practice, but as his professional nom de guerre, as with the forgotten artist Christo or the new “Dead Pixel” sculptor, Pointe.

“Tecton,” he said, several times. “There's a clever clogs. Tec. Ton. Tec. Ton. Tec. Ton.”

He leaned over the rail. He spoke down toward the rippling ovular pool of water. In the day, this water looked blue and aesthetically ingenious; at night, it glowed a sick, radioactive yellow.

“Hello?” he called. A few squeaky chirps and one morose honk arose from the hidden huddle, somewhere below, but nothing else. Cuthbert wondered if he was irritating the penguins.

He spoke again, rather nervously: “Hello, you! Come on now, right?” He suspected the birds had been moved, or that they were protesting his presence. He felt frustrated.

“Say something, geezers!” he blurted.

What occurred next was important, an unmistakable indication of the new, ever more florid stage of Cuthbert's Flōter's hallucinosis. While not dissimilar to schizophrenia, Flōter's hallucinosis is oddly uniform in how it attacks the mind when it does take root. Nearly always, victims encounter something that is not supposed to talk talking up a storm. It may be a pineapple on a table that grows a face and recites the Book of Revelation. It may be a
hundred wicked homunculi hiding in the drunk's bedroom walls, jabbering about the merits of infant stew. It may be a tree whose wind-blown leaves are calling for better child glider-seat designs. And it may be a jackal or otters at the London Zoo, or the souls of lost brothers. Or a huddle of penguins.

In any case, if what happened to Cuthbert comes across as too far-fetched, rest assured, it was all too true for him: after he had demanded, in so many words, that the penguins answer him, they finally obliged. The nearly extinct Jackasses, none of whom had ever seen their dinette-size home isles off the Cape of Good Hope, who slept stuck inside a twenty-ton objet d'art, sang these bizarre words:

        
Seagulls of Imago, your song shall make us free,

        
From Cornwall to Orkney, we dine on irony,

        
Along with lovely kippers from the Irish Sea.

        
Seagulls of Imago, your song shall make us free,

        
Until that day we'll wait, and watch French art movies,

        
Your avant-garde near saved the twentieth century,

        
Along with lovely kippers from the Irish Sea,

        
We'll take our daily fill of anguished poetry,

        
'Til the world becomes zoologically arty.

        
Seagulls of Imago, your song shall make us free,

        
Seagulls of Imago, your song shall make us free,

        
Make it new! Things not ideas! Ambiguity!

        
And endless lovely kippers from the Irish Sea.

Whatever did it mean? If all the Nobel laureates in the world parsed such a grandiloquent, rambling statement, they would surely have remained befuddled. It was the essence of obscurity.

Yet this case could be no plainer to one man, yoghurt in his tummy or no.

Cuthbert said, “You're all stuck up, you lot.” He felt piqued by the villanelle the penguins had recited. What he wanted to talk with them about was helping them to escape the zoo, not the mysteries of Imago. Who the bloody hell were the Seagulls of Imago anyhow? He wondered how Drystan might view all this—far more sensibly and clearly than he, Cuthbert guessed. He'd sort these penguins. He'd handle 'em.

“COME OUT THEN,” CUTHBERT SAID. HE FELT SURPRISED
that the penguins
still
refused to show themselves, even after their paean to seagulls and all. There were unnatural noises elsewhere in the zoo again, and he knew his time to free them was quickly running out.

“If yow don't come
now
,” he slurred. “'A corr come back.”

Unlike most enclosures, the Penguin Pool, sunken about twenty feet down in its Modernist pit, could not simply be sliced open with wire cutters. He could not throw a rope down or wedge open a door or gate. Indeed, he could not determine how the penguins had been put into the pool. The only approach he felt might work was to find a long, flat plank of some sort to tilt down onto one of the pool's helical ramps. But then what? Short of walking across the plank himself and grabbing a penguin in each arm, he would need to employ persuasion. What would he use to lure the penguins out? He had no kippers, from the Irish Sea or anywhere.

He examined the little information sign. It read: “The only natural home of the endangered jackass penguin was off the coast of
South Africa. Harvesting and eating of penguin eggs by humans was the greatest reason for the species' extinction in the wild.”

Penguins from South Africa, he thought. What a marvel!

Cuthbert had an idea. He felt he knew these arty types well enough to make the plan work. It was luminously simple: he would shame the penguins into action by accusing them of snobbery.

He said, “Bloody elitist birds!”

No
, answered the penguins.
Never. We are . . . artists
.

“Artists? Oh-ho-ho! That's quite
particular,
innit?” He mouthed the word like a filthy, oily slur. Gazing into their quiet pool, with its dull green blanket of vapor trapped in white, stiff walls, he could not resist grinning. The birds had got a cob on all right. Surely, they'd come out any second.

He waited a moment and added: “So come along then. Defend yourselves. Show yourselves—
artistes
!”

Nothing. Not the faintest echo of a stirring.

“You're going to let the world be destroyed if you don't come out, little poshies.”

Seagulls of Imago, your song shall make us free.

The poetry startled Cuthbert from his thoughts. He looked at one of the ramps. Penguins! He was amazed to see, as instantly apparent as something switched on, a sort of conga line of half a dozen penguins. They looked different than he had imagined—they weren't robust, tall creatures colored in neat tuxedo panels of black and white. They possessed mottled bellies, very small, delicate frames, and hooked banded beaks.

“Bostin!” he said. “Oh, I knew you'd come. Some of you, anyway.” He jumped higher upon the wide, shelf-like edge of the pool—the edge with a notorious flaw of being too high for most children—and balanced on his stomach. His feet were off the ground. He could see, from this perspective, that he could, perhaps, drop himself onto a set of service stairs, to his right. The stairs led
down to the lowest level of the pool platforms, where the nesting boxes were. From there, conceivably, he would pluck the birds out and toss them (gently) over the wall.

But would it hurt the penguins? They seemed so vulnerable, so diminutive. More of the penguins had appeared on the ramps. They seemed to be engaged in a kind of preliminary procession. It was as if some critical mass of discomfort had ejected them from their nests, and now, once stirred, they all had to leave their nests and prepare for—what? Cuthbert had no idea. Some confrontation between bird and drunkard, sculpture and dissolution?

“Come along, come now,” he said.

He felt newly disheartened as well as indecisive. He'd tried so hard to lure the penguins out, and his effort had seemed to pay off, but what did it add up to?

He saw only one solution. He put his wire cutters on the ground and climbed up upon the Penguin Pool's wall. He had to heave himself up with a brutal lurch that almost threw him over the edge into the pool itself. He rose for a second, reeling side to side, trying to recover balance, then sunk down on all fours like some drunk, acrophobic infant on a rooftop. He crawled to the service stairs.

Do not try to touch us,
the penguins suddenly said.
We go nowhere without the gulls of Imago.

Cuthbert felt annoyed by all this. Perhaps the penguins were, in fact, snobs.

He kicked his legs back, dangling them down, feeling for the stairs with his feet, and dropped down onto a small, square landing.

Leave us,
said the penguins.
We perform by secret schedule, and not without the gulls of Imago.

Cuthbert sucked a bit of mucus from the walls of his mouth, and spat down into the pool.

“Bollocks,” he said.

The gesture had an immediate effect, causing a streak of chit
tering up the conga line. He noticed for the first time a few little wooden hutches, like red taxiglider shacks, set poolside, a few feet from the water. They didn't match the crisp style of the Penguin Pool in any way. They looked like hovels, sloppily nailed together.

“What's in there?” he said aloud.

He took a few steps down, but all at once began to fall forward. He reeled back, and nearly tumbled straight down the stairs. He grabbed hold of the edge of one of the wide, spiraling ramps and flumped in its direction with his whole body. Almost falling against it, he felt the ramp's corners jab hard into his side.

“Oi, Christ,” he said. “Ow!” He needed to get onto the ramp. With great difficulty, he managed to get one fat leg, then his fat middle, then his other fat leg up on the ramp. At first, he didn't try to stand up. He could feel that the ramp was slick with fish-slime, and at this point, it was crowded with little penguins. He thought, If I let go, I'll slide right down to Penguin Hell. And a slip might knock a dozen penguins down, he thought, like bowling pins. So he edged down, carefully, first one butt cheek, then a foot, then the heel of his hand, then the other butt cheek, and so on. The closest penguins, no more than a meter away, turned around and began waddling away from him, crowding each other. Suddenly, first individually, then in twos and threes, gaggles of them started sliding down the ramp, zipping along expertly. A few birds made stiff little leaps off the ramp and plummeted down into the pool water with plunking splashes.

Cuthbert said, “Oh, damn it, wait now then. I'll find your blunky gulls.” He commenced to shimmy forward hastily. He approached the place where one ramp crossed the other—if he didn't mind himself, he was going to slam into the other incline. As often was the case with Cuthbert, he was the last person whom he protected.

“I'll find them, all right! I'll promise you that much. I'll get my clever brother, Drystan, too, and 'e'll get to the bottom of all this.
You need to get moving now, out of the zoo, see? This American chap, Applewhite, he aims to obliterate you, see?”

When the Gulls of Imago return.

“You're yampy, you lot!”

Cuthbert asked: “What have these fucking Imago chaps done for you? For fuck's sake!” He felt frustrations cutting through his chest like an opening and closing fan of blades.

So he tried to stand—a huge mistake. Not more than a few seconds passed before, unable to grip the slick concrete ramp, his feet flipped out from under him, and he was swiftly the very description of the term “arse over tits.” He seemed to rise up a few inches before all twenty-two stones of him crashed hard. A deep-reaching, snapping noise sounded out. Cuthbert bounced up, and when he hit the ramp again, he knew something strange had occurred. He was still plunging toward the water, almost flying.

The force of his tumble had been so severe it broke one of the two ramps off. Down went Cuthbert and ramp. In a matter of seconds, Lubetkin's fanciful “DNA strand” was forever unstrung, and a new mutation born. It was as if a new epoch, when all art was to be broken and imperfect and free, had been signaled, and Cuthbert was playing the role of unknowing situationist. After he smacked the water and sank, he felt, perhaps for an entire half minute, fixed in serene suspension. He was unable to breathe, lost to time, place, direction. He felt euphoric. I can die now, he thought, and I'm not afraid. He recalled thirty years before, submerged in Dowles Brook, where an otter had looked him in the face and spoken to him.
Ga go ga maga medu
. The otterspaeke sang in this head, a lovely death hymn. The animals will leave the zoo on their own. But what of the aliens and their Californian proxies? He shook his head, underwater, and said, “nooooooo” with a burbling seriousness. The salty, bitter birdwater finally flooded his nostrils and mouth, and he panicked. He threw his head back and arched out of
the water. He swam, coughing, to the poolside and flopped up onto a sort of performance platform. He lay there for a few minutes, recovering, but blankly staring at the penguins.

The penguins were terrified. They had crowded by now on the opposite side of the pool to guard the red nesting boxes, those huge eyesores of rough-daubed wood that had been added to the architectural masterpiece to make it more livable. Indeed, there were four live eggs in the boxes (and two infertile ones).

Cuthbert pulled himself up and sat forward and stretched his legs out, letting the water run out of his trousers and shoes. He felt more sober than he had in months. He wanted to stand up and cheer. It was all a big laugh—the busted pool, the penguins stirred from their torpor.

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 fuck me, fuck me, fuck 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.