The foreman gave Mick the address of the Modern Continental building, along with directions on how you “get theah from heah”. Modern Continental is the construction firm that is in charge of the Big Dig, and its offices are near Boston harbor, one block away from the Aquarium stop on the blue line. The president of Modern Continental is a man named Les Marino. Les Marino is obsessed with healthy living, and he runs a well regarded Italian restaurant in Cambridge called Marino’s. All the fruits and vegetables served at Marino’s are grown on Les Marino’s very own farmlands in Newton. In the morning, after eating breakfast and working out, Les Marino can often be found inspecting his fields. He, for the most part, lets Modern Continental run itself, while he lives simply and peacefully on the profits. The billions of dollars in budget overruns that Modern Continental has incurred over the course of the Big Dig could be attributed, in part, to the fact the Modern Continental’s president is at a stage in life where nothing matters to him more than the quality of the fruit dangling from his orchard branches. When Mick walked up the steps into the late-afternoon sunlight he had no trouble finding the Modern Continental offices, which he approached with a brisk pace. He went up to the sixth floor – human resources - and talked to Trish. “Hello there! I am here to…” “You’re Mick, the giraffe, right?”, Trish interrupted. Mick looked around to see if there were any other giraffes in the human resources office. “I sure am!” The rest of this dialog was pretty straightforward, much like that which occurred between Jet and the receptionist mentioned earlier, at the Genzyme office. Suffice it to say that Mick got the job as a crane, with full benefits and excellent pay, and for this reason felt like he was finally making something of himself as he stepped out of the elevator, rakishly unbent his neck and set out home. Mick didn’t actually feel like going home – he felt too good to feel like going somewhere so charmlessly specific. But it was there he was headed, having no other place to go, and so, Mick walked through the turnstile at the Aquarium station and stood on the inbound platform. There he noticed a penguin struggling beside him, trying to put her briefcase on top of the turnstile. She needed both flippers to retrieve a token from her purse, which she then placed in her beak. Lifting herself up with her flippers, she positioned the token above its slot and dropped it in. She retrieved her briefcase, and walking through the turnstile sighing, saw Mick looking at her queerly. As she half expected the giraffe to say something to her: “What kind of animal are you?” he asked, curiously. “I am a penguin.” “What’s that?” The penguin raised an eyebrow. If she hadn’t thought his ignorance completely sincere she wouldn’t have continued. But she did, and so said: “A penguin is a type of bird. I come from Antarctica.” Mick tilted his head and bent his neck down, smiling, to the supposed bird, to get a closer look. It was then he first noticed the fine feathers on her flippers, shaped like kippers. He tried to understand her petite, delicate bone structure, palliated with blubber, mysterious, compact. He saw her beak. She was clearly a type of bird, but to him something to him seemed amiss. “When you approached the turnstile, why didn’t you simply fly above it? Were you injured in a war with another tribe? Were you struck down with a spear?” The “Penguin” laughed. “No war, no. We penguins cannot fly – we swim around and eat the fish we find under the water. That’s the reason you only see us in cities. Since we cannot get jobs as crop dusters we are forced to work in offices. I work at the aquarium.” Mick unbent his neck and prepared to crack wise – for some reason he felt unusually able to be witty. “It must be hard to resist the temptation to eat your exhibits!” She again laughed, this time more out of charity more than anything else. The penguin and the giraffe heard the train coming, and so knowing that its noise would soon be too loud to talk over, stood silently, each looking at the ground to the left of the other. Together they boarded, small-talking during the lulls of silence while the train stopped, traveling in two minute long spurts under the financial district to the green line, where they then transferred together, eventually parting ways at Park Street, her living on Beacon hill and he living all the way down to Central square on the red line. (add content about how Mick feels more at ease more unusually able to be witty) (what is it like to say a girl’s/boy’s name in bed when you first meet them) (national geographic – fashion magazine in which he sees pictures of a comparable short animal such as groundhogs) (brother was afraid of the short creatures) (brother hated bending neck down to talk) (have him “sweep her off her feet” with hilariously obvious symbolism) (have her say something like she felt like she was flying) The reader must understand that Mick met this penguin at a pivotal period in his life, when what was once foreign and unsettling had then become comfortable and if anything, delightfully exotic. For every bit that he could have felt like a stranger in a strange land, Mick felt like a distinguished and well-informed tourist in a cheerful city, and this filled his heart with what, for lack of a better term, we can call love. He had it inside of him, in huge bags and boxes and buckets, in big pieces and in gaseous clouds, and with it he painted every wall, fragranced every expiration and shone onto each person that his eyes fell upon. If we get married, her name would become Angie Toynbee. That has an agreeable ring to it. Mick had learned, when they parted, that her name was Angie. Angie the penguin. I sure am grateful to have such a distinguished surname. If whoever gave it to me were right here I would shake their hand and say “thank you kindly!” The question we must now ask is this: was Mick at this point struck with love for Angie the penguin? Had his eye become keenly set upon this flower of the Antarctic, whom he had only known for a few minutes? It is very difficult to say. But it is likely. When Mick got home he walked to his room, stood on the threshold and from there threw his backpack onto his bed, thinking it unlikely that he had anything fragile in his bag, or perhaps simply not caring to remember if that was the case. He headed back out the door. For dinner he took the red line to Harvard yard, thinking it likely that there would be a tree there to sup on. He was right, and it is likely that as he nibbled with neck outstretched on the branches of a mighty oak, he was thinking about more than his dinner, or how silly he thought it was that the scholars passing below him never walked under his legs, for fear of it bringing bad luck, or so he would have thought, had he thought this. But it is not likely that he did. It is considerably more probable that he was thinking about Angie. If this is the case, it is extremely likely that as he walked with the sun setting at his back towards his apartment, he continued to do so. He wondered if, at work the next morning, if he craned his neck up high enough, he could perhaps see this “Penguin” waddle to work. If he did see her, he wondered what his chances of his catching her eye were. He knew that it was highly unlikely, of course; but it is just as unlikely that anyone could have, at this point in time, convinced him otherwise. The substance of what Mick knew of Angie was scant, but it was enriched by his imagination. He learned that Angie worked at the aquarium, which was only a block away from where Mick had that day had his interview at Modern Continental. She was one of two principals who ran the aquarium. The other principal, a polar bear named Pedro, handled the business of the organization, tending its connections to the world, while she was more concerned with the education of the public and the morale of her staff. She used to work at the Guggenheim in New York, but decided that she preferred working at the Aquarium with fish to working in New York with paintings, if for no other reason than because at the Aquarium she was amongst her people. Even if she could only talk to them before and after business hours, her interaction with the other penguins in their dressing room was the highlight of her day. “By now you’ve all met Candy. Today is her first day, I’m sure you’ll all do your best to make her feel welcome.” The girls brush their feathers, nodding and smiling at Angie in their mirrors. “Now Trixie, are you planning to lay around on the small rock all day again?” “No Miss, I feel great today and will swim around a bit.” “Wonderful. By the way, everybody, the fish man will be coming late today, so be sure to try to hide your disappointment. Perhaps instead of pretending to not be hungry, we could dispense with the guilt trip. Or here’s an idea - why not act even more enthusiastic about being fed?” Yes Angie! The penguins, in chorus, responded, each looking at her reflection in the mirrors around the room that they were using to apply lipstick, mascara, or if they had arrived late, a hurried layer of pale penguin foundation around their beaks. When they have all finished their makeup, they walk to the center of the room to receive their instructions from their acting coach: “Let’s get this show on the road, shall we!?” Craig Fairchild, a garter snake, is the only male allowed in the dressing room. He holds a clipboard and a pen. Every morning he goes over the roles each would be playing throughout the day. “Listen up!” Craig’s job was to maintain the fantasy that his audience already had about penguins – that they were all playful, that they loved nothing more than swimming and squawking and that they lived their lives unburdened by burden, or, put more simply, happy. He preached to the girls every morning about how they had to believe in this fantasy for it to be believable, and with this he had considerable success: he had observed that his performers were playing the roles that they had been assigned for the work day before it started and after it ended, and that, furthermore, their lives outside of work seemed every bit as blissful as their audience imagined it was as they worked. “Trixie, you will be swimming for most of the day. Maybe you could try doing a backflip every once in a while?” Trixie bubbles: “I’ve been practicing at home in my bath!” “Fabulous! Josephine, I was wondering if you and Sandy couldn’t maybe pretend to play hopscotch on the fifth rock today?” In unison: “Whatever you say Craig!” “Raven, Robin, Kandice, keep on doing what you’re doing!” More nodding, grinning. The girls are excited, or as they would say, psyched, which is to say, totally stoked. Angie notes that the clock in the dressing room has struck ten: Showtime. “Good luck girls!” Thanks Ms. A! Angie walks over to the new girl, puts her wing on hers. “If you have any questions, just ask one of your sisters here.” I sure thank you, Miss! “Please, call me Angie.” Candy follows the rest of the girls through the door that leads to the penguin pool. Angie turns and takes the door leading out to the ramp. The New England Aquarium was designed by the Cambridge 7, a firm founded by Serge Ivan Chermayeff and six other people around 1970. Being an architectural practice in the 1970s it is exceedingly likely that their staff had several men with beards, perhaps even bearded Italians. Their offices occupy the top two floors of a building on Massachusetts Avenue that is equidistant from Harvard square and Central square. They are world specialists in the design of aquariums. In the 1930s, Chermayeff was one of the foremost proponents of the International style in Britain, and later in the United States. It is in this manner that the New England Aquarium was designed. Oh, you might not think so looking at from the front. But Frank Gehry’s newly added façade, like the vast darkness inside, cannot hide the true nature of this monster. The impression one has after visiting the New England Aquarium is that all the fish in the fucking world couldn’t make up for the remoteness, the claustrophobic loftiness of the building inside. Truly experiencing the New England Aquarium is like paying Walter Gropius to let you walk around in his throat while he drinks two-hundred euro bottles of Gewü rztraminer. Now, this simile makes more sense if one keeps in mind that Walter Gropius was a utter bastard. His only saving grace is his irrelevance today - his whitest designs now stand unwanted and rust- stained all over suburban Germany. To tour the New England Aquarium, one must walk up a ramp that spirals around a plexiglass cylinder, the largest saltwater tank in the world, for about 4 storeys, in complete darkness, until you get to the top, where you then take another ramp down, unless you are trying to get to Angie’s top floor office, the door of which she has hidden with a large matte black painted panel, so as not to distract the guests from the undersea fantasy world that they paid 15 dollars apiece to see.