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.