The Best Horror of the Year – Volume One

Penguins of the Apocalypse by William Browning Spencer

I was watching a nature documentary on the small television I'd taken into exile with me. Several thousand hapless Emperor penguins huddled together on a vast plain of snow while blasts of ice-laden air furrowed their feathers. Tough little birds, sleek little stoics that made my flimsy misfortunes (unemployed, divorced, alcoholic) seem like the hothouse complaints of a pampered child. But wait… perhaps these birds weren't even roughing it. If I could zero in on a single bird amid this huddled mass, if I could read its mind, I might find it thinking: "This is great, the lot of us here, comrades, all for one and one for all. Would you look at the way the sun blazes on the ice! Beautiful! What a magnificent day to huddle together. And there's a nice breeze, too!"

I live over a bar, and when my own thoughts get too much for me, I go down to the bar and Evil Ed, the bartender, draws me a free beer from the tap. This should not be mistaken for generosity. Later, he runs my tab up extravagantly, claiming I've bought beers for people I don't remember and who, I suspect, are the imaginary spawn of Evil Ed's accounting practices.

Evil Ed and I both have apartments above the bar. I rented my apartment through Evil Ed, who was representing our landlord, Quality Rentals, Inc. QR resides, as do we, in Newark, New Jersey, or, at least, that's where QR's post office box is located.

Evil Ed is an ex-con, his muscled arms covered with primitive tattoos, the strangest of which is a heart among many knives with the initials A.B. in the heart's center and a little banner over that with the single word WHITE printed on it. Why a black man would wish to have an Aryan Brotherhood tattoo is beyond me, but I don't know him well enough to ask. Evil Ed keeps to himself, and he doesn't feel compelled to engage in the sort of small talk that passes for social interaction between strangers. I appreciate his self-containment. Surely the virtue of silence, of allowing others their space, should be taught in kindergarten. Such schooling shouldn't have to wait until prison.

Anyway. It was a Saturday, which might suggest a crowd, but this wasn't a Saturday-night kind of bar. This was more the sort of bar you went to because you had gone to it the day before.

The place could get a little rowdy sometimes, and Evil Ed had nailed a holster up under the counter near the cash register. Lodged inside that holster was a Walther P38 that looked old enough to have been pried from a Nazi's cold dead fingers. As far as I knew, no one had ever tried to rob the place. Evil Ed's demeanor did not suggest a man willing to hand over cash without a fight.

This Saturday night, the bar (which, by the way, has no name, being identified only by the vertical neon letters B-A-R) was sparsely populated with regulars (Rat Lady, Freddie Famous-Long-Ago, Bullshit George, and The Nameless Perv). There were a couple of Goth kids, happy to be miserable, and three bulky guys wearing dresses, transvestite empowerment night, I guess, and, somewhere in the shadows, Derrick Thorn, waiting to meet me, waiting to befriend me.

The television over the bar had the same penguin show on, and now a seal was chasing a penguin through the water. The seal, its mouth wide and bristling with pointy teeth, shot through the ocean, shedding iridescent bubbles, its eyes black, demonic, the eyes of some angry ghost-child from a Japanese horror flick. I had never seen seals from this perspective. Scary stuff!

A voice that was not mine seemed to pluck the thought from my head: "It does not seem right, a seal animal to eat a penguins, the both of them slippery, swimmy things that should be happy brothers together in the oceans."

I turned to behold a large pear-shaped man, smooth-faced, hairless as a cave salamander. His face was oddly blurred, and he may have tried to remedy this lack of definition by the application of eyeliner to his forehead, but the eyebrows created in this manner only seemed to emphasize the absence of any assertive facial features. He wore a black sweatshirt with the hood thrown back and pleated black pants. The contours of his sweatshirt suggested lumpy pudding flesh beneath; pale hands, small as a child's, sprouted from black sleeves. I assumed that this much strangeness had to be calculated, that he was some sort of artist.

"Let us make of each other the acquaintance," he said. I'm not the least bit fastidious when it comes to drinking companions, so we moved to a corner booth, and we drank a lot of beer, which he must have paid for, because my bar tab didn't grow at all that night.

It's not clear what Derrick Thorn revealed of himself. I came away with the knowledge that English was not-surprise!-his native language ("It fall down on my tongue, these English"), but if he told me the country he called home, my brain failed to log it. He was in some sort of business requiring a lot of travel, and he lived alone. He must have volunteered this info; I know I didn't ask. A maudlin, drunken state had overtaken me, and at such times a drinking companion is merely an opportunity for a monologue. I told him I was divorced, unemployed, and paying child support to a woman so mean that her death would cause a thousand of Hell's toughest demons to opt for early retirement. I was exaggerating, out of bitterness and an alcohol-induced love of hyperbole.

Derrick nodded as I spoke. At some point during the evening, he took out a handkerchief and mopped the sweat from his brow, eradicating one eyebrow and smearing the other.

I was flickering in and out of a blackout, that alcoholic state in which the mind visits the moment, departs, and returns sporadically, illuminating scenes as might the world's slowest strobe. A moment that my mind chose to save consisted of Derrick, solemn and slick-faced, leaning toward me and saying, "At end times, the penguins will remember those who friended them." I recall this (now) because, in the context of whatever I was saying (and I can't remember what that was), it seemed profound.

It was very late when I found myself back in my room. I turned the television on while waiting for the floor to settle. Another nature documentary was in progress. Monkeys were eating mud.

When I woke in the morning, the television was taking it easy, some people slumped in sofas, talking about social ills with the calm resignation of people who only expect things to get worse.

I can't always tell when I'm ill, because I drink a lot, and the aftermath of drinking has many flu-like symptoms. But I was sneezing in the morning, and my forehead felt as hot as heated asphalt. My thoughts were trying to devour each other, a sign, I've found, of fever.

I thought of calling Victoria and telling her I couldn't make it, but she'd accuse me of being a selfish drunken bastard who cared nothing for anyone other than himself. I hate defending myself against accusations that are fundamentally true, so I made some coffee and drank it and rallied as best I could.

At night, I empty the contents of my pants pockets on the floor, and I was reassigning these items (car keys, lighter, artfully wadded-up bills, sundry coins, pens, et cetera) to the pockets of a clean pair of jeans when I found a business card of the inexpensive thermal-printed sort you might purchase from an Internet site for a pittance. It read:

Derrick Thorn

businesses • helping persons • solving problems

good deals by mutual bargain

friendship and opportunity guaranteed

please be calling at ”

A telephone number was hand-printed on the other side of the card.

Well, I thought, not a misspelled word in the lot. Not that it made any sense. I tossed the card in the nightstand's drawer, where it would lie with other business cards, many of unknown provenance.

I got dressed, regarded myself in the bathroom mirror, said, "If no one has told you they love you today, there's a good reason for that," and left my apartment. Evil Ed was in the hall, a garbage bag on his shoulder, heading to the stairs that led to the dumpster out back. He nodded to me and I nodded back, neither of us compelled to smile or speak.

It was snowing, slow dizzy wet flakes that turned black in the gutters. Aside from a couple of homeless people hunkered in doorways and a skeletal dog that was tearing apart a black plastic trash bag, spilling empty beer cans into the street, it was quiet the way Sunday mornings are in my neighborhood. The God of Church has either got you, swept you up and dragged you into some storefront salvation shop, or you are lying low, hardly breathing, feeling the oppressive holiness of the day coming for you like a hearse.

We were in the holiday season, almost Thanksgiving, and I could already feel Christmas bearing down on me, a black cloud of obligations and money-draining events. My bank account was no longer being fed by a salary-BC Graphics had fired me three weeks ago for excellent reasons that have no part in this narrative-and I hadn't informed Victoria of this reversal in my fortunes. I couldn't imagine her saying anything helpful.

Victoria, my ex, has never entirely approved of me. She married me, I suspect, because her father

despised me. In marrying me against his wishes, she was getting back at him for being a distant, aloof parent during her formative years. As time went by, the old man warmed to me. I turned out to be his ally in a sea of women-five daughters, no sons, a harridan of a wife!-and Victoria felt betrayed.

I married Victoria because I loved her, and, in the fullness of time, that love disappeared as though a magician had snapped his fingers.

Behold this shiny love. Keep your eyes on it, ladies and gentlemen. Are you watching? Voila! Gone in a flash of smoke, vanished in a whoop, and before I could catch my breath, there it was again, transformed, love sauntering in from offstage, grinning, the magician's misdirection flawless, as good as a miracle, there: Danny Boy Silvers, our son.

He was five now, and I was on my way into the heart of the suburbs to pick him up and take him to the zoo in West Orange.

"Can we stop at MacDonald's?" he asked, looking out the car's passenger window at the falling snow.

"If you don't tell your mother," I said. This was a Sunday tradition, covert MacDonald's, a small father-son conspiracy against a powerful regime that could crush us without raising a sweat.

"I won't tell," Danny said. He waited. Waited and grew impatient. "Why shouldn't I tell?"

"Because she'd slap us so hard our spines would fly out our butts!" I said.

Danny giggled.

"She'd stomp us so hard we'd pop like bugs on a griddle."

My son laughed, leaning forward.

"She'd knock us all the way into next year. She'd whack us till our tongues jumped out of our heads. And once a tongue gets away, it burrows down into the earth, quick as a snake, and you have to get a spade and dig like crazy, and by the time you catch it and put it back in your mouth… well, it doesn't taste very good, I can tell you that."

A stand-up comic is only as good as his audience. My audience was small but enthusiastic, giggling and hooting, his knees bouncing, his nose running, spittle flying.

"She'd shake us until we were so dizzy we couldn't tell up from down, and we would fall right into the sky and keep on falling until our asses hit the moon!"

In the MacDonald's we both ordered Egg McMuffins, hash browns, and chocolate shakes, the major food groups.

"When we go to the zoo, can we see the snakes?" Danny asked.

"This isn't a really big zoo or anything. I don't know if they have snakes."

"They do! Mom went on the Internet and showed me a picture. They have a Reptile House."

"Okay," I said. "Sure." Secretly, I was a little miffed. What was Victoria doing, prematurely unwrapping my gift to Danny,

my zoo? Oh, how petty are the skirmishes of the heart.

From the parking lot, the zoo didn't look very imposing. There were two round towers from which flags fluttered, suggesting one of those Renaissance fair events in which one is harried by costumed jugglers, street musicians, and mimes. Once we got our tickets and got through the gate, jostled by a group of elderly women wearing identical bowling league jackets (

Queen of the Lanes emblazoned on the backs), we consulted the signs and settled on a plan: monkeys to big cats to otters to hippos and rhinos to giraffes to birds and, saving the most anticipated for last, to reptiles. The Reptile House was near the gate and a logical last stop before leaving the zoo.

These things never go as planned.

"Dad! What are those monkeys doing?" Danny was wide-eyed, open-mouthed.

"Fornicating," I said.

"What's that?"

"It's like fighting," I said.

A tall guy next to me, obviously another divorced, weekend-dad with two small, identical girls, each clinging to a hand, nodded his head. "You can say that again."

There were lots of small, fidgety monkeys that seemed completely baffled by their cages, as though they had been caught earlier that day and were still thinking, "What the hell? I'm trapped! I'm getting the hell out of… what's this? I can't get out this way either!

What's going on here?"

In a large cage with black bars, a reddish-brown orangutan slumped in the crook of a tree. His boredom was palpable and made me ashamed of my scrutiny. Forget spying on people having sex or practicing some special perversion. What is sadder, more dismal, than witnessing another person's boredom, the slow, dim-witted crotch-scratching lethargy that is often the existential lot of a person alone? You might note that orangutans are apes, not people, but that didn't keep me from hurrying Danny on to the Lion House, which, if possible, smelled worse than the Monkey House.

And on we went: to the zany otters, the bloated hippos, the absent rhinos (on vacation? escaped? indisposed? deceased?), the really tall giraffes, and into the raucous bird house. As a father and font-of-all-knowledge, I read out-loud the various plaques that described the animals, their habits, their character, their troubles, and Danny listened politely. Other weekend fathers were also reading these plaques to their kids, and I felt a certain disdain for their efforts. As if they knew anything beyond what they were reciting! Pathetic.

We came to a great, curving arc of glass, a vista which promised a view of-yes!-penguins. I had much to say about these amazing birds, the saga of their days fresh in my mind, and was dismayed to find myself gazing at brown concrete curves, blackened and desolate, an emptiness as unwelcoming as some demolished urban block. A sign announced that the penguin habitat was closed for renovation, and my mood worsened, which, I confess, caused a bit of bad behavior. A guard caught me trying to teach an intellectually overrated grey parrot (said to have a vocabulary of over two hundred words) to say, "Kiss my ass"-and Danny and I were escorted out of the building.

That left the Reptile House, and Danny loved it, loved the brightly colored poisonous frogs (not reptiles at all, but always welcome in reptile houses), the lethal, arrow-headed vipers, the boas and the immense anaconda. And the penguins! I couldn't believe it when we came upon them. But it made sense. They had to stay somewhere, and here's where they were, slumming with the reptiles. Since birds evolved from dinosaurs, it even made some taxonomic sense, I guess.

I was glad to see them, shuffling around in a glass-fronted cage that might, at one time, have housed alligators or crocodiles.

They weren't Emperor penguins. According to the plaque, these were Fiordland Crested penguins, an endangered species, with long, pale-yellow slashes over their eyes, like an old man's eyebrows.

"Danny, did you know-"

"They have captured these penguins! What crime the penguins perform to make them prisoners, I do not know. The snakes! Hah, that is easy, they bite the peoples, and they are, anyway, Satan's spawn, as is said long ago in your Bibles."

I jumped, I think. I turned, and there he was.

He was dressed exactly as he had been last night. The lights in the Reptile House were muted, and his pale flesh seemed to glow with a faint blue sheen. He had restored his eyebrows since I'd last seen him, and he appeared to have added purple lipstick to his cosmetic effects.

"It is good to meet you again, Mr. Sam Silvers. I hope you remember me. I am Derrick Thorn."

"What are you doing here?"

He nodded vigorously, as though I were a good student who had asked a clever question.

"I am enjoying the seeing of the animals that are here for their offenses." He spread his arms and turned slowly to the left and right to demonstrate how his enthusiasm included all the creatures in the room.

Odd didn't begin to describe this guy.

"Did you follow me here?" I asked.

"I am coming after you did. Would that be to follow? You told me you were to come to this zoos with the child person of your support."

"I did?"

"Yes, and I am pleased to be here and to witness the progeny of your troubles."

"Well, fine. Look, I've got to be going. Derrick, you have a nice day."

I grabbed Danny's hand and headed for the entrance. Derrick shouted after me, but I didn't turn around.

"I will be pleased to be having the nice day, Sam Silvers," he shouted. "I will make for you the nice day also. I have not forgotten our bargains."

The temperature had dropped, and the snow was falling with new purpose, frosting the parking lot, glazing car roofs and fenders. I dug through the glove compartment's summer detritus (daytrip maps, sunglasses, suntan lotion, an amusement park brochure) until I found the ice scraper.

I got out of the car and went around to the front windshield where I began scraping a gritty mix of snow and ice from the glass. From within, Danny waved at me, grinning.

Back in the car, I had to sit for a minute, catching my breath, as though I'd been engaged in heavy labor.

"Dad, who were you talking to?"

"Just some guy I met recently," I said. I looked at my son. Danny was frowning, puzzled.

I leaned over and ruffled his hair. "Your mom says you've got a girlfriend."

Danny grinned. "Her name's June. She's got a snake for a pet."

"All right!" I turned the key in the ignition. "My kind of woman," I said, as the car moved slowly forward.

I returned Danny to his mother, the usual sense of loss already rising in my chest like black water.

"I tried to call you on your cell," she said. She knelt down in the doorway and brushed snow from her son's hair and shoulders. She looked up at me. "It's out-of-service. Why's that?"

I shrugged. "I decided I didn't need a cell phone."

She stood up for a better, unimpeded glare. "If this arrangement is going to work, I need to be able to get ahold of you. The roads are bad. I was worried."

"Nothing to worry about," I said, squeezing Danny's shoulder. "We had fun at the zoo, didn't we?"

"It was great!" Danny said, and began to catalog its many wonders. Feeling hollow in a superfluous-dad sort of way, I waved a goodbye and headed for the car.

I stopped at the bar on the way to my apartment. If I was going to quit drinking, it might make sense to move to other lodgings, but I wasn't going to, was I? I dispatched two beers and went on up to my apartment, pleased with my restraint. There were two six packs in the fridge, and I drank them, unintentionally. As I remember it, I drank a single beer and didn't wish to leave an odd number of beers, so I drank another one. After that, my reasoning grew convoluted until it occurred to me that drinking

all the beer in the fridge, thus leaving none to tempt me in the morning, would be a good start on a new, beer-free life.

My phone rang in the chill of the morning, and I burrowed under the covers, a rabbit fleeing the hounds, and I heard my answering machine click on-"This is Sam Silvers. I'm not here"-and Victoria 's voice: "Sam."

I leapt from the bed and snatched up the receiver, hearing the fear in her voice, and knowing, instantly, the precise sound of

this fear, its only possible subject, our only shared and immutable bond. "Danny's gone," she said.

We sat on the sofa while the detectives interviewed us. "On a school day," Victoria said, "Danny gets up at seven. He sets his alarm at bedtime, and sometimes, when it wakes him in the morning, he turns it off and goes back to sleep-not very often, but sometimes-and I have to go in and get him up. This morning the alarm just kept ringing, and when I went in, the bed was empty, and I thought he might be in the bathroom, but he wasn't. He wasn't anywhere in the house."

To someone who didn't know her, my ex-wife might have appeared calm, purposeful, in control, the slight tremor in her folded hands understandable enough. But I could see the care with which she answered every question, as though each word, the order of each word and its cautious articulation, might restore the world to sanity, might, by its intense rationality, restore our son. She would not break down; she would not show emotion. To do such a thing would be to collaborate in Danny's disappearance. She would not, by hysteria, acknowledge its reality.

This I knew of Victoria, and my heart ached for her, as it ached for myself. And Danny? Does a five-year-old get up in the middle of the night and walk out into a snow storm, leaving his winter coat in the closet? Or does someone come for him, silently, in the middle of a ghostly storm, enter the locked house without any signs of forced entry, and walk away with the boy without awakening his mother, just down the hall and a light sleeper, always restless. How often, in our marriage, in the years we lay beside each other, had Victoria come awake at the sound of midnight rain, tree branches shaken by a wind, a car passing on the street at three in the morning? I'd wake, oblivious to the noises that had roused her but attuned to Victoria and called awake by

her wakefulness. That seemed a long time ago, in a distant, implausible past.

When I left Victoria, it was to accompany the detectives back to my apartment. I was aware that I was a suspect-or at least an obligatory part of the investigation-and I wasn't surprised or offended by this. How often had an ex-husband, frustrated by circumstances that kept him from seeing his child, simply grabbed the kid and run? They weren't going to find Danny in my apartment, but I guess, if I had spirited him away in the dead of night, I could have stashed him with a friend.

I answered all their questions. Most of the questions were asked by the shorter cop, a black man with high cheekbones and a formal way of speaking, the word "sir" punctuating his sentences with sibilant force. The other officer was taller, older, white and balding, and I noticed he would occasionally interrupt to ask a question his partner had already asked. I guess he was interested in what my answers would sound like the second time I gave them.

After they had been gone a couple of hours, I glanced out the window and saw three uniformed cops out back. A female officer, dark, Hispanic, held the taut leash of a German Shepard as it nosed around the back of the dumpster and then moved out across the vacant lot that separated the bar from the rest of the strip mall. Only then did I realize that I might be suspected of something worse than kidnapping my own son. They might be looking for his body.

And why not? You read the papers; these things happen. Some enraged psycho wants to make his ex-wife regret leaving him, and he knows the way to her heart, he knows how to do real damage.

I made it to the bathroom in time to vomit in the toilet, retching up Victoria 's coffee, something in my skull rumbling. Something big, monstrous, had broken free and was lurching around on the deck of a world so fucked-up that the worst stuff, the unthinkable, had a hundred, a thousand, precedents.

I lay on the bed for a while, and then I got up and went down to the bar. Evil Ed saw me and brought me a beer.

"You need to lawyer up," he said. I was impressed: advice from Evil Ed!

"Thanks," I said. "But I didn't

do anything. I don't have anything to hide. And Danny-" I stopped. Water rushed into my eyes, violently, as though I'd been shoved under a river and was being held there, breathless. I marshaled my paltry resources, gulped the beer.

Evil Ed shrugged and mopped the counter with a grey cloth. "You notice I don't ever take a drink? Might be you are bringing yourself bad luck, swallowing it right down your throat."

"What are you talking about?"

"They got this old Chinese saying goes like this: 'First the man takes a drink. Then the drink takes a drink. Then the drink takes the man.'"

"I still don't know what you're talking about."

"I guess you don't." Evil Ed slapped his palm down on the counter. Beneath it was a white envelope. He took his hand away, revealing my name on the front of the envelope, printed crudely with what looked like black crayon. "This was here on the counter when I opened this morning. I don't know what's inside it, and I don't want to know, and I should have handed it on to the cops when they were talking to me earlier today, but I didn't. It's yours. You do what you like with it."

I took the envelope and turned it over. It was sealed, and too light to contain anything more than a sheet or two of paper. I looked at the front again. All caps: SAM SILVERS.

I turned away from my unfinished beer and went back up to my room. I lay on the bed, my heart beating fiercely. I was afraid to open the envelope. Should I call the police? Perhaps it was a ransom note, and in opening it I'd destroy evidence. Forensics could do wonders, right?

Should I call Victoria? But that would be the same as calling the police; Victoria trusted authority. And I did not. I was raised on media tales of law enforcement agencies that bungled kidnappings, hostage situations, terrorist confrontations. Too often the innocent died with the guilty.

Hands trembling, I tore open the envelope and pulled the single sheet of paper free. A ball-point pen with blue ink had printed words whose letters jumped above and below the baseline, investing the sentences with a childish energy.

This is what I read:

I have solved your child support! If there is no child there can be no support of a child and no need for these moneys of which your wife makes you pay and pay! Ha! I am very clever you must agree. This is bragging, but it is so. All your worries are overboard! I hope to talk to you sooner. -D.T.

I walked around the room, sneezing. My body ached, an aggressive pain, as though I'd been injected with poison. My throat was on fire. I was not feeling well. But that wasn't the problem, except to the extent that this flu-thing might keep me from thinking clearly. Why, for instance, hadn't I said anything to the police about Derrick Thorn? Did I really think it was a coincidence that he had shown up at the zoo? Did I think he was harmless? Did his crooked diction make him somehow childlike, did an innocence of English syntax indicate moral innocence? Hardly.

I sat down on the edge of the bed and tried to recall what I'd thought and said to the detectives. I shook my head to clear it, which made the room waver like an undulating funhouse mirror. At Victoria 's… the thought of Derrick Thorn had not

once entered my mind. It was as though I'd completely forgotten the man's existence. Surely he was too strange to forget. I tried to picture him now, to bring him into focus by an act of will, but all I could see was his stout, pear-shaped body, a silhouette in the Reptile House, his face in shadow, his words… something about Danny… about child support.

How would I describe him to the police? A fat man in black who might, or might not, be sporting purple lipstick and false eyebrows? Wait, Evil Ed must have seen him. Sure. He brought us drinks. He came to the booth with the drinks.

I ran downstairs, too fast, slipping, saving myself from a sudden dive forward by snagging the wooden railing just in time. I stumbled into the bar. Evil Ed was at the opposite end of the bar listening to Rat Lady, who appeared to be wearing a bathrobe.

"Hey!" I shouted, and Evil Ed looked my way, saw me, and nodded, no doubt pleased to be moving out of the range of one of Rat Lady's monologues.

He drew a beer from the keg as he made his way toward me, but I shook my head.

"I don't want a beer. I've got a question."

Evil Ed raised his eyebrows, set the beer down, folded his arms, and leaned back some.

"You saw him. Could you describe him?"

"Describe who?"

"The guy I was talking to the night before last. Fat guy, really pale skin?"

He shook his head. "Wasn't but you. Sitting in that booth, drinking yourself into a coma, talking to yourself, coming out with a laugh every now and then, nothing happy about it, that laugh."

I kept on: "His name was Derrick Thorn. He was some kind of foreigner, spoke funny."

But no accent, I thought, for the first time. "He paid for the beers."

Ed frowned. "You paid for your beers your ownself."

I had him there. "Then how come I didn't have a tab run up?"

"You did. You paid it at the end of the evening."

"I never do that," I said.

Evil Ed laughed. "That's right. Took me by surprise. You was drunker than usual, which is saying something."

Reflexively, I reached for the beer. This was to be a medicinal beer, a beer for clarity. If I could slow my thoughts down, I could sort them out.

It took more than one beer. A lot more. When Evil Ed came by, he would glower at me, maybe thinking I had more important things to do then sit and drink beer. But I was working, thinking, and finally it came to me: I remembered what I needed, staggered to my feet, and headed back toward the stairs.

Back in my room, I headed straight for the nightstand, grabbed the drawer, yanked it-

too hard-and it flew out, and all the cards and pens and antacid tablets jumped up in the air and scattered over the floor. Shit.

There were a lot of business cards. And, of course, amid this ridiculous surfeit of self-advertising, there wasn't,

of course, of course, any card bearing the name Derrick Thorn and promising "good deals by mutual bargain" a phrase goofy enough to lodge in my mind even if the creator of that inanity was as elusive as truth at the White House, even if-

I let out a whoop of triumph and pounced on the card. I turned it over, saw the number, and without consulting my fever-riddled and almost worthless mind, I ran to the phone, snatched up the receiver, and made the call.

The phone rang and rang. Having no alternate plan, I was willing to sit there with it ringing. Maybe it rang for thirty seconds, maybe thirty minutes, I don't know. Then the ringing stopped and static rushed in, like an ocean wave over the sand.

I thought I heard a voice. I shouted, "Hello! Hello, Derrick Thorn!"

The tide of static ebbed. "Yes," the voice said.

I couldn't speak.

Who was this? But then: "Hello Mr. Sam Silvers. You are calling with the congratulations! Yes. Ha, Ha! No more the child support, no more the, how did you say, blood from the turnip!"

"You son of a bitch!" I screamed. "Where's Danny? Where's my son?"

"Do not be worried. I will take the care of it. Trust me, like money in the bank!"

I was squeezing the receiver as though it were Thorn's throat. "I need to see you," I said. That was better, much better than saying I intended to kill him.

Oh, I am clever in a clinch. There was a long silence, in which I thought the phone might go dead. But some urgent certainty told me I couldn't speak again; I had to wait.

"Yes. Sure. We make the bargains," he said. "Now you help me, one hand scratching the other. I will meet you tonight. Look at your watch and I will look at mine. Just us to meet, no body elses. At ten of the watch tonight. At the zoo."

"What?"

"At the zoo. To bring justice to the penguins."

"What?"

"The penguins, they do nothing wrong. They are good birds. But they have the enemies just the same, the seals and others. I think they are political. I am sure they are prisoners of the government."

I wasn't following this. "I will be there at ten tonight. Is Danny there? Let me talk to him," I said.

He hung up.

The zoo's parking lot hadn't been cleared. The unseasonably nasty weather had closed the zoo for the day; temperatures were supposed to rise tomorrow, and, despite the desultory falling snow, I could see stars sprinkled between the clouds.

The parking lot was a white expanse, blue in the shadow of a bare-branched tree, gold under the single street lamp. I looked at my watch. It was ten minutes to ten. The tracks of my boots were all that marred the lot's smooth surface, which meant that Derrick Thorn hadn't arrived yet.

I waited, shivering with fever and the chill air, my breath coming out in white clouds. Ten came, and 10:05, and 10:10. I could feel the gun in my coat pocket, its weight both threat and reassurance. When Evil Ed's back had been turned, I'd leaned across the counter and retrieved it. I had to hope that Evil Ed wouldn't notice its absence. And if he did? He wouldn't report a missing gun to the cops. But he might figure out who took it, and Evil Ed could be scarier than any cop I'd ever met.

In my room, I'd confirmed that the clip was full, and on my way to this rendezvous, I'd stopped the car along the highway and walked off into a patch of evergreens and indulged in some target practice, sending a bullet into the trunk of a dead pine tree. It worked, and the seven remaining bullets were seven more than I'd need, unless he'd harmed Danny, in which case all seven slugs would be residing in Derrick Thorn's flesh.

I am not a fan of guns, but I know something about them. My father had been a collector, and, when I was young and under his spell, we would bond at the shooting range. I lost interest when he left my mother to run off with his secretary, an ancient, dishonorable tradition (my father's dad had, incredibly, done the same thing). I was fifteen when Dad left.

So here was my legacy: I knew how to shoot a handgun.

At 10:15, I was getting restless, panicky. I walked up to the gate, gripped the bars and peered in at the animal statues and kiosks. The gate swung open, taking me by surprise, and I slipped, falling forward, banging my head against the gate. My knees skidded on the snow-covered ground, but I managed to get my hands in front of me in time to prevent my face from colliding with the icy bricks. I knelt there on all fours, dazed, and then I saw the small blue-shadowed footprints that marched between my hands: the bare footprints of a child. The snow was wet and preserved the imprint of each toe. Were these my son's footprints?

I followed the footprints, moving as fast as I could but not running for fear I'd fall and break something. I looked up, and the Reptile House loomed in front of me, more imposing than I remembered it, its crenellated towers given authority by the night. The footprints were farther apart as they neared the steps leading to the door; Danny had been running-and, yes, I was certain it was Danny now, for no reason except that I knew it to be so.

The footprints climbed the steps and ended at the door. I gripped the door's handle and pushed.

Locked. No, it moved, but there was resistance. I leaned into the door with my shoulder, and it moved reluctantly. There was light from within, gleaming on the blue marble floor, and black, no red… There was a great smear of blood-another thing I knew with a certainty beyond logic; blood!-curving away, under the door, behind the door. I entered the room and closed the door, and the body lay revealed, up against the wall, where I had shoved it with my shoulder against the door.

The security guard had been a small man, but bigger than my son, much bigger than Danny, and he lay curled on his side, oddly crumpled as though thrown there by some vast malevolent force, and in my horror and fear I felt a rush of relief because that's the way our hearts are made and this was not my son.

I turned away from the body and saw Derrick Thorn across the room in front of the glass cage where the penguins resided. Danny stood on his right, and Thorn had his right hand resting on my son's shoulder, a companionable pose. Danny was wearing his Harry Potter Order of the Phoenix t-shirt and bunny pajama bottoms. His feet were bare.

"Hello Mr. Sam Silvers!" Derrick shouted, raising his left hand as though hailing a taxi, his voice reverberating in the high-ceilinged room. "I have been worrying of your coming, thinking you did not keep your bargains."

"Move away from my son," I said, walking toward him. I had my hand in my pocket, my fingers already around the pistol grip, my forefinger on the trigger. Waves of dark power rushed up my arm, filling my heart with rage.

Thorn lifted his hand from Danny's shoulder and waved an admonitory finger at me. "You are angry because the child of your support is still here and you think, 'We had a bargains but it is broken because, before my eyes, the boy is still here.' Do not be full of the worry, Mr. Silvers. I, Derrick Thorn, have always the keeping of my word through time longer than you know."

"What do you want?" I asked.

"I have been thinking of the penguins and our agreeable conversations," he said. "We like the penguins. But they must do something wrong these penguins to be in jail, I think." He lifted his right hand this time and waved it toward the penguin cage.

"Danny," I said. "Come here."

Danny looked up, but his eyes failed to focus. There was no glint of recognition within them. Was he drugged?

"I think," Derrick continued, "that the government does not like the penguins, and I ask myself why this is so, because the penguins are good birds who have only, for enemies, the seals who are hungry to eat them, which is sad but is Nature's Law. 'Why,' I say to myself, 'is the government hating of the penguins?'"

"Danny," I said. "Come to me."

And Danny's eyes widened, and he took a faltering step forward, then stopped again, as Derrick continued, "And then I think of the canaries, the little yellow birdies, and how, in a coal mine, the canary dies and everyone says, 'Oh, the canary has died and we must run away,' and so they all run away and the bosses say, 'The canary is bad. She dies and no one will work. Stop looking at the canary,' but peoples look at the canary and say, 'I quit!' and run away and business is bad."

Danny began to walk again. He raised his arms and walked toward me, arms out, and I walked to meet him. I took my hand out of my pocket, and I lifted him in my arms and hugged him. He pushed his face against my neck and made a small, muffled noise, a child's displeasure at being jostled in his sleep. "It's okay," I said.

"The penguins," Derrick said, engrossed in his rant, "they are birdies like the canaries. They die and people say, 'This is of the global warmings! Stop the global warmings of the factories and the cars and the coal that is burning! The penguins are dying!' And the government says, 'Pay not the attention to these stupid penguins! Don't look at them! They are trouble makers!' And so the governments are putting the penguins in the prisons, you see?"

"Derrick," I said. "I don't know who you are or

what you are"-I could admit this, to myself, at least-"but I am taking my son and leaving. If you attempt to follow me, I will kill you."

"But we have the bargains," Derrick said. "We must set the penguins free, and I will save you the child support."

"No," I said. "We have no bargain."

I expected some reaction, but my words seemed to deflate him somehow. His hands dropped to his sides and he stared at the floor.

I turned away and walked back toward the door of the Reptile House. When I reached the door, I looked back. He was gone.

The security guard's ravaged body no longer lay in the shadow of the door.

I carried my son out of the building and past the statue of a smiling hippopotamus and out the gate. I unlocked the car door and put him in the passenger seat. I pulled the seatbelt across his chest and snapped it into its latch. I got the scraper out of the glove compartment and scraped ice from the windshield. I noticed that the sky was full of cold light, but finding myself in what appeared to be the afternoon of a different day did not strike me as remarkable.

Danny was waking up when I climbed into the driver's seat. One of his shoelaces was untied, and so I tied it. Something seemed wrong with those shoes-and his winter coat, which, I noticed, was buttoned wrong. I re-buttoned the coat. For whatever reason, the image of Harry Potter, famous boy wizard, flashed through my mind.

"Dad, who were you talking to?" Danny asked, still woozy.

Victoria was angry. She'd tried to call me on my cell, and when I told her I'd discontinued the service, she said, "If this arrangement is going to work, I need to get ahold of you. The roads are bad. I was worried."

And for a time, I remembered none of this. And why should I remember a thing that never happened? Had it happened, had my son actually disappeared, Victoria and Evil Ed would certainly have refreshed my memory.

I drank more, every day, sometimes passing out in the afternoon, and then getting drunk all over again in the evening.

Evil Ed told me about a drink taking a drink, and it sounded familiar. One time, I woke to find the television on, not unusual in itself, but this time cartoon penguins were tap dancing, and I was filled with improbable terror, caught in the sheets, falling out of bed. Unable to find the remote, I crawled to the television and slapped the power button, saving myself from… from what? Not for the first time, I thought, "Maybe I need to stop drinking."

In the newspaper, a photo of someone named Calvin Oster surprised me with another frisson of déjà vu. He had been a security guard at the Hillary Memorial Zoo in West Orange and, it appeared, a victim of gang violence. That explained it: I had, no doubt, seen him at the zoo and-what an amazing magpie, the mind-recorded his image without knowing it. That did not, however, account for my certainty that no inner-city gang had killed him.

Then, one day, somewhere between Thanksgiving and Christmas, somewhere in a stew of bad weather and strangers and a mugging (my own) that I tried to prevent, being too drunk for discretion's better part, I woke in a hospital ward with a bandaged arm and an I.V.

"How am I doing?" I asked a large, truculent nurse wearing green scrubs.

"Depends," she said. "That cut on your arm ain't nothing. But you got bad alcoholism. You been thrashing around considerable, plain out of your mind, and there's an orderly here name of Joshua, real big boy, six feet ten inches. He don't want to come round you. He says you got a demon, need to be exercised."

"What do you think?" I asked.

"I think I should have learned computers, stayed clear of all the misery and blood of this here nursing profession. An alcoholic ain't nothing but a sorry tale unfolding, lessen he gets sober. There's a fellow came in asking about you. I see him sometimes at the meetings they bring here on Tuesdays and Thursdays. He says he'll be back. Hope you don't owe him money."

"Why's that?"

"I wouldn't want to be crosswise of him is all. He got an evil eye on him."

Sure enough, Evil Ed visited me. We went down in an elevator to the second floor and listened to some guy tell his story, how drink had ruined him but then he had embraced the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, sobered up, and was now the president of a bank.

"What did you think about that?" Evil Ed asked.

"I don't know," I said.

"You could do a lot worse than that answer," he said. He said he'd come around some more.

When the hospital discharged me, I started going around to AA meetings with Evil Ed. I drove. Evil Ed said he didn't want to take his car; it might get stolen, whereas no one would covet my ratty Escort, which was true I guess but hurt my feelings.

We went to a lot of AA meetings, traveling around to church basements and storefront clubs. Some of the neighborhoods were rough, and the AA meetings reflected that, with drunks sleeping it off on ratty sofas and old winos trying to steal a couple of bucks from the coffee-money can. One time a furious fight erupted between two members over which of the AA founders was wiser, Dr. Bob or Bill W. Sometimes I was the only white guy in the room, which didn't bother me particularly since I often thought I was the only guy on the planet. There are levels of alienation, and mine was way beyond racial.

I wanted to drink, but I didn't. Evil Ed couldn't always make it to a meeting, and I started going to meetings by myself. I went to a meeting every day, sometimes two, sometimes three. There was a club called "The Into Action Group" that was within walking distance of my apartment, so I went there a lot.

And if I got restless, I could always go down to the bar and talk to Evil Ed. He was almost chatty on the subject of alcoholism.

"Drinking has got consequences," he said. "You get a tattoo when you're drunk, it's still there in the damned morning. I been sober nine years, and people say, 'You should get that tattoo removed or inked up so it's different,' but I say it's a reminder of the consequences of drinking, and anything that reminds me why I don't want to go drinking again is a good thing."

One day I saw a help-wanted sign on the door of a print shop, and I walked in, talked to the manager, and got a job on the graphics side, not quite the art director position I'd left at BC Graphics, but it paid the rent and required me to get up in the morning.

A couple of days before Christmas, Evil Ed's sponsor was celebrating at a big speaker's meeting, and we went and listened to him tell how he'd wound up in AA and how come he hadn't had a drink in thirty-two years. He was a small, India-ink-colored old man with white hair, and he wore a three-piece suit. After the meeting, Evil Ed and I went to a party someone was throwing for him.

I was feeling my usual alienated, awkward self, so I found a place on the sofa, out of the way of all the hilarity. The television was on, and the station was showing an old Jimmy Stewart movie called

Harvey. It was about this sweet-tempered alcoholic who is befriended by a giant rabbit that only he can see. I watched the movie with more interest and trepidation than it warranted. It was a harmless, mildly amusing piece, but I was so caught in its spell that I jumped when Evil Ed's sponsor sat down next to me.

"Still a little jumpy!" he said. He squeezed the back of my neck and laughed.

He leaned forward and peered at the television set. "Well no wonder you're jumpy. You're watching a movie about a

pooka! That's what they call that invisible bunny in the movie, say it's a mischievous spirit. They got that right! But mischief isn't a strong enough word. A pooka can do a world of harm. They are entities that attach themselves to alcoholics, and they can do more harm than a rabid dog. I've seen them destroy a man. They have great power to shift time and space. They can bend reality like a pretzel. It's not uncommon for a drunk to have acquired a pooka or two. Used to be, when I'd go see an alcoholic in detox, I'd get old Sally LaBon to come along with me, and she'd pray and work her potions, and once-you don't have to credit this-I saw a dog-like creature come howling out of a poor fellow's mouth and fly right through the ceiling. No one holds with praying out demons anymore. And I guess the program itself can rid a man of his demons, but I've seen times when some of Sally's righteous magic would do a world of good."

A pretty young woman came up and hugged the old man; such women have the power to dominate an elder's mind, and he forgot I was there. They got up and went off, to dance, I think, and I finished watching the movie. Despite its happy ending, I felt a sense of deep disquiet.

Christmas day didn't go well. I'd bought Danny some stuff that I knew he'd wanted, and he'd been really excited and happy with his presents, but I thought Victoria was acting odd, and when her friend Julie arrived with her husband, I figured it out. Julie and her man had brought another of Victoria 's office mates with them, a big-smiling, handsome-and-he-knew-it guy with carefully tousled, jet-black hair.

His name was Gunther, and when he walked in the door, Danny looked up and grinned and said, "Hey, Gun!" and my mood deteriorated. I decided not to stay for the meal, and Victoria accompanied me out the door to tell me that I needed to reflect on my selfishness and think of my son for a change, and Gunther came out, asking if he could be of any help. By throwing the first punch, I may have managed to break his nose, but I didn't win the fight. When I came to, I was lying in the snow on the front yard, a couple of yards away from my car in the driveway. The car's driver-side door was open, suggestively, and I got up, collected myself-no large bones broken-and drove away.

"What happened to you?" Evil Ed wanted to know.

"Christmas dinner with the ex," I said.

"Looks like the turkey got the stuffings knocked out of him," he said.

It took a week of stewing, of feeling ill-used and done-wrong, of wallowing in self-pity, but, finally, I picked up a drink. There was this little well-lit delicatessen with a liquor license, right next door to the print shop. It wasn't some dive filled with comatose barflies. It was clean and bright, you might even say wholesome. I drank a couple of beers there before going home one evening. It didn't seem like such a big deal.

But it's the first drink that gets you drunk, even if that first drink takes a few days to really kick in.

So I was drunk in my room in my underwear. I hadn't gone to the print shop for a week or so. After the second day, my boss had stopped leaving messages on the answering machine. My guess was I didn't have that job anymore.

The television was on, as it often was, babbling away in its news voice, a serious Iraq-Darfur voice over a blighted greyscape, muddy video-people moving around, digital zombies. I wasn't watching closely, but the voice droned on, the non-stop monologue of a demented relative. Then the voice turned hearty, and I looked up for the good-news segment, some cheery thing about toddlers helping the homeless or octogenarians climbing a mountain, human

interest as opposed to the tedium of human death.

A reporter was standing in front of the zoo in West Orange (I recognized the crenellated towers and little flags). I tapped the remote's volume control, raising the volume in time to hear her say, "… going home. That's right, these penguins, extremely rare, are on their way back to New Zealand where they will be re-introduced to their native habitat. The Fiordland Crested penguin's numbers have been reduced by… "

I stared at the full-screen close-up of this endangered penguin as it tilted its head back and forth, flashing those familiar eyebrows. I reached for the remote and punched the power button.

Where did this penguin dread come from? Penguins were not, generally, considered creatures capable of inspiring much in the way of horror and loathing. Was I losing my mind?

That was a question I rarely asked myself. I knew where my mind was. All right, in the years I'd had this mind, I hadn't always used it carefully, hadn't checked off every single 5,000-mile oil change, hadn't even done a crossword puzzle or read a challenging novel in the last ten years, but was there anything fundamentally wrong with my mind?

There

was this penguin glitch. But I could work around that. How hard was it to avoid penguins? And the zoo was sending those penguins back to New Zealand, in any event, so I could even go to the zoo with Danny… go again, that is.

I was starting to panic. My heart shivered, like some small bird in an ice storm. I heard a sudden loud, thumping sound, and I looked to the door, but the sound was behind me, coming from the kitchen. I got up from the bed; my legs felt boneless but, by an effort of will, I was able to walk.

I reached the doorway to the kitchen and leaned against the frame. The sound was coming from within the refrigerator, a muffled, booming sound. The fridge rocked from side to side, and half a dozen cockroaches skittered out from under it and shot across the dirty linoleum.

The refrigerator's door banged open releasing billowing clouds of grey mist that blew over me, soaking me, plastering my hair to my forehead. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them, he was there. He was wearing a tuxedo, and his eyebrows were now complete circles around his eyes. He'd drawn a small purple patch of mustache above his purple lips. These embellishments still failed to define him. He was a sort of manic blur, a creature my mind refused to bring into focus.

"Derrick Thorn," I said.

He clapped his white-gloved hands. "Yes. I think sometimes you forget me, but then I come back because you remember me, you remember me and you keep your bargains!"

I did remember him. It wasn't like remembering, though. It was like entering a room that held stuff you'd lost, stuff you'd completely forgotten about, and now, here it was. You recognized it immediately, and that was the word, really,

recognized.

I recognized the bloodstains on his white dress shirt and on his gloves.

"What did you do?" I asked.

"We have the bargains, you remember? You say, 'Forget the bargains. I take my son of the child support and I leave, and no more bargains.'"

He shook his head ruefully, studying the floor. "That is the rule. Is up to you. No bargains? Very well, no bargains, and I go away."

"And now? Why are you here now?"

"Ha, ha! I am always around, but you cannot see me, and so you must drink the alcohol and then-ha! ha!-I am clear as sunshine."

"You came because I started drinking?" I was talking to a supernatural creature, a

pooka. Or maybe I was talking to my hallucinatory self. Did it matter?

Derrick shook his head. "No, I come because you of the slyness are. You say, 'No bargains!' but then you be the clever one and go through the channels! Yes, the channels! The penguins at the apocalypse they will be of rejoicing and singing your name 'Silvers! Silvers! Silvers!' They will say, 'We be always holding for you gratitude and love!'"

"I don't understand," I said.

"You be joking all the way through, I see. Okay! But the penguins, you give them the freedom! You get them out of the prison and to going home! Hooray!"

I remembered. "No bargain," I had said, and this creature, this pooka, had let Danny go. And now this creature thought that I had set the penguins free and-

"So I keep the bargains!" Derrick shouted. "We make the deals! Is done! Done deal! I see you at the Christmases with the ex-wives of your anger. I confess, I be the spy on the wall. I see your

true wishes, and I obey them. And no troubles for you, be so assured of this."

"What have you done to Danny!" I screamed, and I lunged forward. Maybe I expected my hands to slide through him; I don't know what I expected, but my hands found his neck, and his flesh was cold and boneless, and I squeezed, and his neck, like some balloon thing, no, like paste in a tube, his neck collapsed beneath my fingers, and his head swelled, seemed to leap at me like a child's toy, his head round and smooth and big as a basketball and growing bigger, tongue out-

bright blue!-and teeth every which way like a ragged shark's mouth and, from this mouth, a high, keening sound that was, I'm sure, laughter.

Derrick's head exploded with a bang, so loud that my eardrums seemed to have burst in sympathy. I fell back and watched as Derrick, headless, ran in circles, making a

huh, huh, huh, sound, flapping his arms like some big water bird slowly building for take-off, before he came to rest with his back to the wall, and slid down the wall, legs straight out in front of him, convulsing briefly, and finally growing utterly still, above him a great swatch of bright red like a thick exclamation point ending in his body.

I went back into the bedroom. I didn't have any plan, exactly, but I didn't need one because the phone rang. I answered it. It was Danny asking if I still planned on taking him to the ice skating rink next Sunday, and I said sure. He wanted to know if I could pick up June too; she lived close by, and it was okay with her parents. "Sure," I said.

Danny said goodbye, and I put the phone down, got up and went back into the kitchen. Derrick Thorn was gone, it seemed, leaving nothing but a lot of blood. On closer inspection, I found a tiny, balloon-like skin. I was able to make out the bowtie, even the tiny, polished shoes. I carried this deflated cast-off to the sink, turned the garbage disposal on, and dropped it down. The disposal made a stuttering, chugging noise, as though gagging.

I walked to the refrigerator and opened the door. The fridge was empty except for a six pack of beer and Gunther's head. I poured the six pack out in the sink, and went back and regarded Gunther's head again.

I don't feel good about this. I mean, I'm not a complete asshole, and I realize that my problems with Gunther weren't Gunther's fault. I could have explained that to that stupid pooka if he'd taken the time to ask.

I do have to say that even in death Gunther had managed to hold on to his deeply refined, disapproving air. He wasn't wearing a horrified grimace; he seemed sort of serene. I guess I'm saying that he didn't appear to have suffered. I double-bagged him in black plastic trash bags and took him down to my car.

They never did find Gunther's body. They won't find his head, either.

I know I had a part in Gunther's demise, but it would be hard to explain the nature of my involvement to the police, and I'm not going to try. You're my sponsor, and I trust you. This is fifth step stuff, and I know it won't go any further.

I know one thing: I'm done with drinking. I'm back to a meeting a day, two-a-day on weekends. I know I'm powerless over alcohol. And I know I don't want to ever see Derrick Thorn again, and I'm pretty sure I won't. Oh, I don't think he is dead. In fact, I'm certain his departure was just another one of his jokes.

Remember that hospital meeting you took me to last week? There was this guy sitting across the room in a hospital gown. He stared at me throughout the meeting, and he headed straight for me when it ended. He looked bad, the left side of his face scraped raw and something seriously wrong with one of his legs so that he moved up and down and left and right like some busted wind-up toy. The worst thing, when he got up close-and he got

close, his face six inches from mine-was the death in his eyes, the cold-water craziness at the bottom of those muddy, red-rimmed pupils. Or maybe the phlegmy sound of his voice was worse, I don't know. Maybe it was the sum of his infirmities, the weight of ruined days, the dank reek of his breath. No, probably the worst was what he said: "I know you. We got a friend in common. He says, 'Don't be a stranger.' He says maybe he'll see you around, and you can share a few beers and have good times." He shambled off, just another wretched, booze-ruined derelict. But I had to sit back down in a chair and ride out the vertigo, because I didn't think it was a case of mistaken identity.

If I take a drink, he'll be waiting. I'll walk into a bar somewhere. I'll sit down on one of the bar stools. I'll look up at the television, and I'll see a lot of penguins tobogganing on their bellies down an ice slope, and behind me, I'll hear his voice. "Oh, the happy penguins!" he will shout.

Pookas are called up by alcohol, by the darkness that blooms in an alcoholic's soul after that first drink, and with AA and these steps I think I can avoid that drink.

Maybe I'm arrogant, but I'm honestly not that worried about my sobriety. I am, I guess, still a little worried about global warming, and I still wonder what we'll say to the penguins when the end times are upon us.