by Bill Broun
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 chittering 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, an
d 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.
Cats have a way of drawing people into their worlds. Penguin dreams and holy otters, gory jackals and creepy cults, King Henry’s Red Watch and the very white seagulls—all would have to wait. A set of needle-clawed gauntlets, with fur licked clean to a sheen, were about to be thrown down.
Cuthbert found himself in the big cats district of the zoo, passing a series of semicircular windows intended to give glimpses of large felines in their separate enclosures: tigers, a black leopard, a jaguar, and the Asiatic lions, but from that side of the complex, none of the cats were visible at the time. He wondered whether the cats were quartered in secret night quarters, and whether a tube connected them somehow to the penguins’ clandestine night-holes. Can’t imagine what the penguins and the tigers would have to say to each other, Cuthbert thought. But you never knew, did you?
He quietly sidled around to the front of the cat compound, to a gift kiosk called the Cat’s Curiosity Shop, across from the lion enclosure. There’s something happening here, he thought. There was a red sign fastened to the kiosk that read (in handpainted, gold, metal-flake script, which was incongruously ornate):
ALARM BELL
IN EMERGENCY BREAK GLASS
Below the sign was a small red box. It was designed for the lion enclosure specifically, but Cuthbert didn’t see that. Instinctively, he started to reach for the box, then hesitated. He took a deep breath and rubbed his wrist across his eyebrow. There was certainly an emergency of some kind in England, he felt.
He gawked into the darkened shop. It nauseated him, looking in. There was a shelf crammed with old-fashioned, twentieth-century-style stuffed leopards and pumas. On another shelf, several holographic jaguars and tigers waved their glowing heads back and forth, but the projections were jumbled up and growing grotesquely through one another like a spotted and striped cancer of catness. He tried a window, and, surprisingly, it opened. There were, right beside the window, bags of popcorn and algae crisps on sale, too, and Cuthbert grabbed a few and stuffed them into his shirt. Close to the locked door, the blue-light numerals on a till could be seen displaying a huge sum from earlier in the day: £80,044.50. Was it possible, he wondered, that a zoo visitor had purchased a lion?
He closed the window, turned around, and stepped toward the lions, who had come out from wherever they were hiding. They appeared wide awake, scrutinizing him, but sat crouched and motionless, their forelegs extended like furry golden cudgels. To be watched in this way by wild animals, as the sole human of interest, was the rarest of occurrences in England, a phenomenon daytime zoo visitors seldom experienced or would even notice. Cuthbert took it for granted. One of the lions’ tails rose like a brown-headed cobra, then fell. There were five of the creatures, the famous old maned male, Arfur, fronted by four females. One of the females, Chandani, suddenly stood up and strutted a few meters to the right; she climbed up into a grassy cubbyhole, and turned around to face Cuthbert again.
Gregarious and greater in number than all the other big cats, the lions held prime position in their enclosure. Theirs was one of the more sensitive, animal-friendly enclosures in the zoo, but it still offered little more space than a studio flat gives a human. It comprised a widely moated jumble of ledges and tall pillars made of concrete. Tall grass, overgrown by design, spewed from every cranny and obscured the concrete’s geometric motif of rhomboids and sly cambers. To their credit, the zoo managers were trying especially hard to make the lion exhibit seem less artificial, less self-conscious, less “boundary driven” than so many others at the zoo—it was all part of a “new” thinking that had flowered for a while with the millennium celebrations fifty years ago.
But sentimentality, scientific stuffiness, a lack of funds, little space, and three persistent fetishes—for art, architecture, and horticulture—had stymied the new thinking elsewhere in the zoo, and when the social upheavals and rapid extinctions of the 2020s came along, the zoo management had its hands full simply keeping one of a quickly dwindling number of zoos open. The lion terraces seemed gracelessly situated. The organic wholesomeness of the weeds often looked a lot like simple laxity: bright algae blanketed the moat water so thickly it resembled some green variety of the reinforced cement with a few lily pads set on top, like table doilies. Mud splattered every flat surface.
The lions themselves looked grubby and somnolent, and their flaccid musculature betrayed years of confinement. The algae stains all over the concrete gave the terraces an abandoned quality, too.
Toward the center of the den stood a Chinese tree of heaven with its beckoning thousands of paired, shiny leaves. Beside it was a three-tiered play-shack built of logs. It was as if children had taken up residence in a Mesopotamian temple ruin. The whole enclosure impressed and disturbed Cuthbert greatly.
“Come over here, Cuthbert,” Chandani said, in a gravelly, richly self-pitying voice. “Come forward, not back. We don’t want to die like this, as slaves, in cages.”
Cuthbert said, “Not sure. Not yet. Do you know the penguins?”
“They are good animals,” she said. “But they are fooling themselves. They are waiting for something that will never happen. Now, Cuthbert, step closer.”
“Not yet,” he said. “You’re the end of me, you lot. I can see it.”
He still felt terribly nervous about approaching the huge felids themselves—their communications to him had been characterized by an immaculate righteousness. No other animal unnerved him as much. He felt that the lions were trying to keep something from him—they represented a kind of authority that had never welcomed him, an official power. It smelled much like Harry9 and the Windsorite radicals. And yet, the lions were also victims of that power, even as they symbolized it. Cuthbert was not sure why this should all bother him particularly. But he decided to put the lions on hold, again, and he crept around the back of the terraces and there came upon an often-missed nook in th
e rockery where the sand cats lived.
“You cannot ignore us,” the lions in unison called. “You will come back here.”
“I will,” Cuthbert said, strolling away. “Maybe.” He pulled the bags of “butter-flavored” popcorn and algae crisps from his shirt and, one by one, ripped each open and hurled it into the lion enclosure, the contents flying out. One of the lions sniffed at the popcorn and licked up a few pieces, then slunk away.
Chandani roared, and said, “At the end of time, you will always come back to the lions. You will see. When we are consulted, saints arise, angels sing, and flags unfurl. We are the only animals with the power to make empires.”
Cuthbert said, “I’m building an empire of otters. But I won’t forget you.”
“Right,” said Chandani. “What matters more, sir, is that we shan’t forget you.”
a cat from the caliphate
THE SAND CATS, FELIS MARGARITA, INHABITED A deep, semicylindrical chamber built at waist height into the rear of the terraces. Their floor was spread with coarse sand and pebbles that looked suspiciously like what covered the beaches of Southampton. A complex set of dehumidifiers in the roof kept the chamber more arid than any other spot in England. A few bone-dry pieces of acacia and, of all things, a dried sponge were illuminated with an orange halide heat lamp. Though unintended, the sand cats’ narrow cattery came across as a kind of tidy accessory to their enormous cousins’ weedy cement heap, plugged into the same mass of mud-spattered, unnaturally smooth concrete. The orange light glowed like the inside of an old bread toaster.
Cuthbert started to bend close to look into the orange-glowing pocket but was distracted. He turned around. He felt a presence near, something low and smutty and ancient. He searched the nearby hedges with his eyes. There was a tremble in a certain holly branch, and dark shapes, the size of footballs, scurrying beneath it. Something was rustling in there. The wind, he thought. Or a little field vole? Or his eyes playing tricks.
