PART TWO
POLAR LATITUDE
1. THE BIG CHILL
THE FIRST TIME Buster heard anything about the London Zoo Rebellion he was engaged in a frosty argument with his wife, Sandy.
“Then you explain it to me, Buster.” Sandy was showing him a wooden serving spoon, as if it might end up providing his next meal. “If you’re so high on your big buddy, Whistling Pete, then why don’t you explain his behavior to me.”
This was the part of argument Buster knew he couldn’t win unless Sandy let him–and of course Sandy never let him. So he went directly to the large Philco and turned it on, scanning the knobby serrated dial for anything from the BBC World Service.
“Why don’t you just cool down, Sandy,” he said. “There are two sides to every story, you know.”
He dialed through foreign-language pop stations, Australian radio drama, sonar blips and beeps, and several emergency frequency test broadcasts. Eventually, though, he found something a little more substantial–Paul Harvey on Armed Forces Radio, presenting his daily wrap-up of the news.
“Good day,” Paul Harvey said.
“You want to hear two sides to every story?” Sandy was shaking the wooden spoon even more vigorously. “I’ll give you two sides to every story, Buster. Whistling Pete’s screwed-over wife, Estelle, and his screwed-over kid, Pete Jr. There’s your two sides to every story.”
Buster sat down in his stuffed chair by the Fire and gazed at the polished radio. A wedding present from Sandy’s family, it had turned out to be the most expensive possession in their upper maisonette ice condo on the Antarctic Peninsula.
“Come on, baby. It’s time for the news.”
Then, just in the nick of time, Paul Harvey said, “Dateline London, England. While Americans on the West Coast. Are waking up. To more thundershowers. The English Royal Police Constabulary. Are putting to sleep. A violent rebellion. Within their own borders. I’m talking about the London Zoo. Ladies and gentlemen. I’m talking about lions. Tigers. Elephants. You name it. Taking arms. Against their human. Keepers. And now–page two.”
Even Sandy was drawn by the voice on the radio. After a few moments the wooden spoon hung limply at her side and her black eyes had that faraway look in them.
“What’s a lion, Buster? What’s a tiger? But most of all–what’s a human being?” Sandy came and sat down on the footstool beside him.
Absently, Buster took her stubby wing in his lap and stroked it gently. Buster loved to hear about faraway places filled with strange animals he didn’t know about, because he believed that if he thought about them long and hard enough, they might fulfill all his vague yearnings. Then he would never have to leave his cozy home in suburban Antarctica.
“Who knows, Sandy? Now shh, please. Let’s listen and maybe we’ll find out.”
2. PENGUINS FOR LUNCH
BUSTER ENJOYED DREAMING about strange places, but beyond that he didn’t like to get too involved. Which was probably why he was such good friends with his polar opposite, Whistling Pete, a middle-aged penguin who didn’t dream so much as act. And who subsequently got himself carnally involved with just about every cute penguinette he could lay his flippers on.
Every morning Whistling Pete went to work, punched his time card, and sat in his office stamping requisition forms, acting no different than any other professional, white-collar penguin on Penguin Island. Then, just before the noon whistle blew, he would adjourn to the Gents, apply generous dashes of aftershave to his cheeks and buttocks, and dispatch himself to a series of seedy assignations with various lovely penguinettes from the local business district. Secretaries, account management assistants, receptionists, Gal Fridays, and office temps. For Whistling Pete, lunchtime infidelity occurred as regularly as clockwork. It had become, in fact, a matter of sublime routine.
He met them unashamedly at the Ice Floe Bar & Grill for drinks and quick, hot lunches, while gratuitously proferring flowers, compliments, stockings, and chocolates. Then, as fast as their little legs could carry them, he hurried them next door to the Crystal Palace Motel, where he kept an open account. There they ordered caviar and champagne through room service, sported themselves silly across the taut fitted coverlets, and made the most they could of an hour–sometimes of an hour and a half.
“This is the life,” Whistling Pete muttered every so often. “This is what the All-Mighty Penguin had in mind when he designed such cute little penguinettes.”
Later they would shower, dress, and depart separately, pretending to be discrete. Then, around three or three-thirty, Whistling Pete would return to his office across the road, already in the grip of a postcoital melancholy that wasn’t altogether unpleasant. He felt soft, used, and distinctly unprovocative. He was ready for a long dreamy nap at his desk.
“Hey there, bro,” Buster would say, leaning into the office around five-thirty. “We hitting Happy Hour today or what?”
Whistling Pete abruptly sat up in his spring-cocked office chair. He saw the binders and ledgers, the interoffice memos and desk-supply requisition forms.
(And somewhere else entirely: Melody, Martha, Trudy, Dallas, Pippa, Dolores, and Joyce.)
“Buster, old pal,” Pete said finally, clapping his wings together with brisk authority, “has the sun stopped shining or the earth ceased to spin? Of course we’re hitting Happy Hour. And if I recall correctly, it’s your turn to pick up the tab.”
“DOMESTICITY IS FOR the birds.” Pete pronounced later, walking home with Buster through the starry night. “Sure, it sounds nice and all. Big tract houses, gas central heating, indoor plumbing, and all that. Trade, commerce, low-tech industry, certified schools for the kids, community rep, all the bread in one basket, that sort of domesticity, you know. But basically, man, it’s an idea cooked up by the little girlies. Wives, man. Females seeking security for their babes. Girlies are home builders, but us guys, we’re like home breakers. It’s not our fault, Buster. It’s just our nature.”
The long white road descended into the village, leading them toward the smell of yeasty bread baking.
Whistling Pete put his wing around Buster with a comradely squeeze and gestured downhill. “There it is, buddy. Our little village in the snow. Back in the old days our ancestors waddled around on rocks, man. They starved, hunted, mated, and died without proper funerals or mortgage insurance. And who do you think initiated the idea of houses, man? Why, the ladies, of course. ‘Let’s stack a few ice blocks over here as a sort of lean-to,’ they told their weary, flatulent old husbands. “How about four walls, honey? A roof and a floor?’ Us guys would have lain out there scratching our lice on that stupid rock forever if we’d had the choice. But the choice wasn’t ours, man. And never has been.”
Buster, well oiled with budget tequila, was waddling along beside Pete with uncustomary resolution, gazing dreamily into the illuminated sky: showers of meteors, swirls of galaxies, planets entrained by moons and whorling dust. Buster loved the night when it got like this: vast, unencompassable, and rinsed with sensation.
“Actually,” Buster muttered out loud, “I always kind of dug three square meals, a warm bed, and all that? But when I look out at all those stars, Pete, and all that space, it makes me feel, I don’t know. Kind of homesick, like, for places I’ve never been.”
But Pete wasn’t listening to a word Buster said. Instead he was thinking: Melody, Marianne, Gwendolyn, and Jane. Tomorrow at noon and next Wednesday at twelve forty-five.
“Men may build the cities,” Pete said softly, just before they arrived at his white doorway, his paved driveway, his leaning and personalized mailbox. “But believe you me. It’s the little girlies who make us live in them.”
BY THE TIME Buster arrived home, he found Sandy sitting up in the living room, finishing a tall glass of sherry, and listening to the radio. She didn’t look up when he entered. Sometimes, Buster realized, he and Sandy suffered their worst quarrels when he wasn’t around.
“They’ve been repeating the same words all night, Buster. What does it mean? And who are they?”
Buster took his hot cocoa and stood by the fire while a stern, fatherly voice on the radio repeated over and over: “Animals of the world, put down your arms. Animals of the world, let’s talk things over. Animals of the world, rebellion is pointless. Animals of the world, we’re coming to set you free.”
Buster sipped his cocoa and sighed.
“Radio drama?” he ventured. “Kind of like that famous Orson Welles broadcast–The War of the Worlds? You think?”
“They keep talking about the London Zoo, Buster. They keep promising it’ll never happen again.”
Buster couldn’t look Sandy in the eye. He was thinking how bound up he was by this house, this mortgage, this life. It all seemed so strange somehow. Like a place he had never been.
“Don’t worry too much about what you hear on the radio,” he assured her. “Because radio isn’t real, Sandy. Radio is only make-believe.”
3. MORDIDA GIRLS
SPRING RETURNED AND the squat white sun wouldn’t leave. Time grew increasingly diffuse, gray and immeasurable.
Not that time mattered to Whistling Pete anymore–only the quick lapse into timelessness he regained every day in the arms of his adorable penguinettes. Often he trysted two or three on a single afternoon, bang bang bang, beginning each session with a few shots of Jack Daniel’s and a plate of imported caviar. Then, by the third or fourth session, he fell rudely asleep and dreamed of white, sandy beaches and tropical heat. Later he awoke in the dim room alone, saw the windows hung with thick black curtains, and heard the hissing radiators.
Then, out of the blue, hotel personnel would knock summarily at his plywood door.
“Maid service,” said a woman with a heavy Dutch accent. “Should ve clean up, Mister? Or you vant ve should come back later?”
By the time Pete waddled into work, his assistant, Nadine, was in a furious temper.
“Mr. Oswald came by from Marketing, and Joe Wozniak asked about your expense receipts again. I’ve tried covering for you as far as the sales conference, but I’ve got to see some retail brochures pretty damn soon. Oh, and your wife and little boy popped round–seems you were supposed to take your son fishing. They waited nearly an hour, but then they left.”
“Oh shit,” Whistling Pete said, and slumped into his padded swivel chair. He checked both his vest pockets for stray cigarettes, but located only twisted bits of tobacco and one small white business card. The card said:
HENRIETTA PHIILPOTT
PUBLIC RELATIONS CONSULTANT
He wondered if he and Henrietta had spent any time together.
Or if maybe they were about to.
“I knew I forgot something,” Whistling Pete said.
PETE CONTINUED MAKING excuses, but even he didn’t want to hear them anymore.
“I’m going to take Junior fishing.” Pete declared. “It’s just I got delayed meeting a distributor from the Stroud Islands. What do you want me to do–neglect my job?”
“I sure wouldn’t want that,” Estelle said emptily, leaning against the kitchen table. “Obviously neglecting your job’s all you’re worried about anymore. So tell that to your year-old son who adores you.”
“I’ll make it up to you, sport, I really will.” Pete paced back and forth in the living room while Junior lay on the floor perusing his geography homework (Fishing Routes of Our Polar World, Twelfth Edition). “We’ll go camping, that’s it. A weekend on the South Orkneys. Just you, me, and those mackerel. We’ll bring along that new sealskin pup tent we’ve been meaning to try out.”
Junior didn’t look up. He tapped a pencil against his beak, and turned the page of his textbook.
“Like, that’s cool, Dad. We’ll go fishing some other time. When you’re not so busy, that is.”
“I’VE GOT THE expense receipts,” Pete told the Executive Staff in the Factory Green Room. “Of course I’ve got the expense receipts.” The Executive Directors had called him in during lunch break, where they sat around the long black conference table, munching processed-salmon sandwiches and prawn-flavored crisps.
“It’s just that, well, Payroll screwed up the Group Finance Report, and by the time Nadine and I got that mess straightened out with the Commissary, it was time for the Monthly Service Catalog, and, well, I know it sounds like a bunch of half-assed excuses and all…”
A bright cold swat broke out on Pete’s face and he felt a faint dizzying rush, as if he were falling through vortices of warm air.
“…and of course I’ll get the reports to you by Friday, and I don’t like to sound like I’m trying to divert blame or anything, right, ‘cause of course Nadine’s a great girl and all, but she does have something of an attitude problem. I mean, like, she’s always blaming everything on the system, right, and the male-dominated patriarchy and all that, and, well, it’s sort of hard to get Nadine to cooperate so far as her official duties are concerned. I’m not blaming Nadine for all the screwups, understand. I’m just saying there’s only so much I can do about them.”
SOME NIGHTS, FINDING the bedroom door bolted shut, Pete knocked politely like a timid solicitor.
“Estelle?”
“What.”
“Are you in there?”
“Of course I’m in here.”
“Can I come in?”
“No you can’t.”
“I’m really bushed, Estelle. I need to lie down.”
“So sleep on the couch.”
“I feel very strange, you know, all run down and everything. I’ve got stomach pains, my liver’s enlarged, there may even be something wrong with my spleen. I’ve got a rash on my inner thigh that burns like crazy. I’m really beat, Estelle, and I think, well. Maybe we should talk.”
“There’s nothing to talk about,” Estelle said calmly, as if she were slipping a form letter under the door. “I’m afraid the time for talking is over.”
Whistling Pete leaned against the wall. He could detect her warmth in there, like radium. It felt very far away.
“Oh Estelle,” Pete sighed, feeling his entire body slump into itself like an expiring party balloon. “Maybe you’re right, honey. Maybe you’re right.”
LATER THAT SAME night, in another part of the suburb, Buster sat up in bed watching moonlight through the window and hearing engines in the dark. He was sleeping in the guest room, and Sandy hadn’t been speaking to him for nearly two days.
A series of silver military airplanes was flying over Penguin Island, spilling thousands of sheets of white printed paper in its wake. Buster could sense the pieces of paper fluttering high in the air, even without seeing them. He didn’t even need to get out of bed, pull on his robe and slippers, and go outside.
But he did.
He got dressed and went outside.
The moonlight was everywhere, and drifts of white paper lay across the tiny village like weird precipitation.
And each sheet of paper said the same thing:
WE ARE COMING TO SAVE YOU
FROM YOURSELVES
4. THE CRYSTAL PALACE MOTEL
A FEW WEEKS later, Buster sat at the Ice Floe Bar & Grill sipping a strawberry margarita while Al the portly bartender swabbed everything down with a damp dishcloth.
“He’s been over there every night,’ Al said. He shifted a toothpick from one side of his beak to the other, and nodded in the direction of the Crystal Palace Motel. “Every day and night, actually. And when he comes in here, usually for another bottle of Schmirnoff’s, he doesn’t say hi or anything. He just takes what he needs and leaves.”
“No skin off my butt,” Buster said, gargling a shard of ice in his gullet. “He obviously doesn’t need my help anymore. He’s got his little girlies to keep him company.”
“Little girlies,” Al said, and poured himself a soda water from the hand dispenser. “Little girlies and God knows what else.”
It was three p.m. and Buster had just finished a late lunch of oysters in clam sauce.
“And God knows what else,” Al said again.
He refused to look at Buster, and there was something in this refusal that Buster took as a reproach.
AFTER LUNCH AND a second margarita, Buster tried calling Pete’s room at the Crystal Palace Motel, but there wasn’t any answer. When he stopped by the lobby, he found the day clerk playing a new handheld electronic ice hockey game. The day clerk swung the beeping computer toy back and forth, as if he were steering a particularly nasty slalom down the rocky hillside of his imagination.
“Is Whistling Pete still in Room Four-oh-eight?” Buster asked. Buster lit a fresh cigarette off the old one and crushed the old one out in a hip-high, sand-filled aluminum ashtray.
“Ah shit,” the day clerk said.
The computer beeped its tiny contempt.
“Whistling Pete, huh?” He gave Buster the once-over. “He’s not the sort of guy who has many friends. So you must be another customer, right?”
Before he knew it, Buster was lifting the stroppy, bell-batted little penguin up over the countertop and slamming him rudely against the clattery ashtray.
“What’s that supposed to mean, numb nuts?”
“Hey, I was just kidding, is all. Cool it, okay?”
Then Buster heard a tone in his own voice that he didn’t recognize.
“I’ll ask you one more time, and don’t give me any blather. Where can I find my friend Whistling Pete?”
“WELL IT’S NOT paradise,” Pete conceded. “But then, who’s looking for paradise, right?” He was sitting on the edge of his frayed, sunken mattress, scratching his genitals through his checkered boxer shorts. The motel room was littered with bottles, newspapers, and crumpled fast-food wrappers.
“Why don’t you take a shower, Pete? Put on some clean underwear, for godsakes. Then I’ll take you home to your wife and kid.”
“My wife and kid are history, Buster. Estelle took Junior to her sister’s on the Fimbulisen Ice Shelf.”
Buster refused to be deterred. If Pete was to have faith in himself again, Buster would have to teach him how.
“First we’ll get you squared away,” Buster said. “Then we’ll go bring her back.”
“Bring her back to what?” Pete picked a white sticky substance from his ear and wiped it on the mottled sheets. “What’s left of me ain’t exactly a work of art, you know. And you must have heard about the expense money I embezzled. Nadine getting fired for my incompetence and graft. The fact that I’ve lost what little reputation and self-respect I had left. And the funny thing is, I don’t give a goddamn, ‘cause I don’t miss any of it. Especially not the self-respect.”
Embarrassed, Buster looked away. He saw the messy bathroom; the broken, dripping toilet; towels on the floor; stains on the drapes.
“We’ll find you a new job,” Buster said. “With Estelle and Junior’s help we’ll get you back on your feet again. Hell, buddy, I can loan you a few bob till you get yourself straightened out. What are friends for?”
“Oh Buster,” Pete sighed. “Wake up and smell the coffee, will you?” Pete indicated his entire body with a small ironic flourish. The high strain of ribs, the frazzled patchy feathers, the haunted and thinning gleam in his eyes. “All my nice sleek body fat has melted away. No job, no family, no savings to speak of. It’s quite ironic, really. Because civilization has given me the luxury of thinking, I’ve had time to disrespect all the comforts that allow me to think.”
“Don’t,” Buster said. He knew he was in trouble if Pete started talking. “Stop it, Pete. Stop winding yourself up.”
Pete was on his feet again, waddling back and forth in front of the bed. “But that’s the point, isn’t it? What do you build when you build yourself a civilization? Nice warm houses, nice warm restaurants, nice warm places to go to the bathroom. What does civilization give us, Buster? Temperature. Heat. Oxygen. Light. And what do we do with all this, this energy, this year-round fat and reserve? We burn it, pal. We use it to stoke the fire of our own bodies all day and all night. We are burners of hard fuel, Buster, and thinkers of hard thoughts, and we can’t ever rest until we die. Civilization doesn’t solve problems, Buster. It reminds us of all the problems we haven’t yet solved. What we don’t have. Who we haven’t been. How much we haven’t spent. How many little girlies we haven’t plugged. It doesn’t end, Buster. I keep thinking it will end, but it never does.”
“Don’t do this to yourself,” Buster said desperately. “Turn it off, man. Shut your damn brain off.”
Pete’s eyes were lit with a fire that burned themselves as much as the things they saw.
“But Buster,” he said. “The only way to turn off who you are is to pretend not to be.”
At which point Whistling Pete fell to the floor with a terrible crash.
THEY BURIED WHISTLING Pete in the pond where he first went fishing with his father. A lid was cut in the ice and Pete’s naked body inserted into the frothy, secret currents beneath. On the fringes of the small crowd a few lonely, heavily veiled penguinettes sobbed quietly into black satin handkerchiefs.
Once the lid of ice was refitted into place, a few words were said by each of Pete’s surviving friends and relatives. Usually they offered slow, awkward condolences, like “He will be missed,” or “He was always a hard worker and good provider,” with a dull casual flourish, as if they were signing a form letter. The last person to take the mound was Pete’s father, who had swum in that morning from his retirement village on Canary Island. (Pete’s mother had died two years previously in a freak skiing accident.)
“Whistling Pete was a good boy,” his father said in a cracked, halting voice, trying to read from a sheet of foolscap in his trembling hands. He wore a faded gray flannel shirt, a black wool stocking cap, and wire-rim bifocals. “He was always polite to his parents, did well in school, and helped his mother with the housework. Now maybe he exaggerated the truth every once in a while, but that’s just the way he was. He found the truth a little boring, so he tried to embellish it a little, it was kind of like generosity. Maybe some people considered it selfish. But I always thought he just gave life everything he had because he loved it so much.”
Abruptly, Mr. Pete began to sob, and a hush fell over the mourners.
Buster stepped up and whispered something in Mr. Pete’s ear.
“No, no, I’m okay,” Mr. Pete declared, and shook his sheet of foolscap at Buster as if he were shooing flies. Then he wiped his glasses with the end of his stocking cap, folded the foolscap in half, and slipped it into his vest pocket.
“I just wanted to say that Whistling Pete was always polite to his mother and father when he was little, and that’s how I’ll always remember him.”
5. THE LAND OF THE MIDNIGHT SUN
IN THE RENEWED silence of their coop-duplex apartment, Buster and Sandy maintained a tender, almost obstinate parity.
“No, sweetheart,” Buster would demur, learning to grant her a kiss behind each ear. “This is my night to do the dishes. You washed up two nights in a row last week.”
They sat in the living room every evening after dinner sipping Darjeeling, nibbling oven-hot gingerbread, and listening to the BBC World Service. Old empires disintegrating in the Baltic, the Adriatic, the Sahara, South Africa, Taiwan. Currencies crashing and stock markets rocketing. The pose and strut of presidents, businessmen, pretenders, and kings. “Before civilization,” Whistling Pete used to say, “we never had time to realize how much we didn’t have. Now we’ve got all the time in the world to worry about what we’ll never keep.” Ever since the funeral, Buster often felt Pete’s voice sneaking up behind him like a simple memory of resonance.
Some nights he lay awake in bed and listened to the jets passing overhead. Every so often the apartment shook with the reverberant clap of the sound barrier being broken one more time.
“They’re building up the McMurdo naval base,” he told Sandy while she snored, “arriving on massive flagships and aircraft carriers. They’re installing nuclear waste dumps, oil refineries, radio stations, and military barracks. They’re going to keep coming even when they don’t know what’s out here. They’re going to keep coming until there’s nowhere left for them to go.”
IN THE MORNINGS before work Buster took long aimless walks into the wilderness, wrapped tightly in his sealskin parkas and scratchy woolen underdrawers. He knew this was the dream Pete had died trying to realize, and that if he tried to realize it himself, then he would have to die, too. Not a dream of comfort or plenitude, but a sort of homeless insufficiency. Buster ascended mountains and forded rivers. He skated across plains of ice and refraction, hopping from one jaggedy landmass to another. Some mornings he got lost and arrived late for work, eventually receiving three unofficial warnings and one official reprimand. One more tardy report or no-show, they told him, and he would be fired. No explanations asked.
That night at home, Sandy tried to understand.
“Do you know what you’re doing?” she asked. Sandy had lit soft candles and was preparing a cheese soufflé. She was wearing a string of pearls, rubber pedal pushers, and a Dacron shower cap–a combination she knew looked really good on her.
“Not really,” Buster said. He sat beside the fireplace and waited. He didn’t know what he was waiting for; he only knew it would be here soon. “I try not to worry too much, though. If it happens, it happens.”
“I’ll do the shopping again tomorrow if you like. Is there anything special you need?”
Buster thought about this for a moment as if it were an especially tricky parable.
“Not really,” he said again. “These days it’s hard for me to think too much about what I’ll need tomorrow.”
THE FOLLOWING MORNING the troops arrived like a benediction.
Having ascended a large rocky summit of ice, Buster stood alone above the village with shy and awful grace, watching the planes spill men in white Arctic uniforms from their shining steel bellies. White, seamed parachutes blossomed, and the storm paratroopers landed running, disengaging themselves from their deflating nylon envelopes with adroit little tugs and zips, pulling pistols from their holsters and releasing well-trained battle cries into the gray air.
Dazedly, in dribs and drabs, the penguins waddled from their homes, rubbing their sleepy eyes against the harsh glare of searchlights and flash grenades. They raised their flippers in the air even before they knew who they were surrendering to, or why. Just some force of nature, they suspected. Some part of the world they never knew they didn’t belong to.
Within moments they were herded into wire compounds wearing nothing more than their pajamas and stocking caps. They never fired a shot in self-defense, or uttered a word in anger or reproach.
“It’s not fair to blame it all on testosterone,” a voice told Buster from out of nowhere. “Because it’s not men against women, you know, or even human beings against animals. It’s animals against animals, and that’s the scary part. It’s animals against themselves, trying to conquer the deepest assumptions of their own bodies.”
“The voice had arrived on the wings of a crisp morning breeze, whipping up clouds of frost and ice. Buster had been expecting something like this for weeks.
Buster watched the distant jeeps and tanks assemble in the tiny village. Workmen in orange parkas were hanging klieg lights from high wooden poles.
At this point, Buster thought, a real hero would be planning brave insurrections and mutinies.
“There’s only so much you can do in a given situation,” the voice behind him said. “All you can do is the best you can. You do the best you can and then try to be kind to yourself afterward.”
Buster turned. The large black crow was perched on a leaning iron pole.
“What’s a black crow like you doing at the South Pole?” Buster asked.
The black crow was watching soldiers form ranks in the village below.
“What do you think I’m doing? I’m freezing my pimply little butt off, that’s what.”
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