Fiction and Drama

Angelo Hernandez Sias

For the penguins it was just a day

Julio (Columbia ’20, English), in the winter of his final year of college, flew to Cape Town to Unmask Historical Legacies. Now, instead of Unmasking Historical Legacies, or as a means thereof, he was at a beach, swimming with a colony of penguins. He was swimming, rather, in the vicinity of a colony, the penguins having absconded to an inaccessible stretch, perhaps unappeased by the colony’s relative health — two thousand since a pair was planted in 1980, the flyer boasted — and aware that, thanks to humans, a measly 10 percent were left of the 1.5 million estimated to have populated the continent in 1910. Numbers had decreased due to the uncontrolled harvesting of eggs, the flyer explained, a peculiar adjective, uncontrolled,for the description of a highly organized system of plunder that involved, the flyer did not say, cooking down four hundred thousand penguins into fifty thousand gallons of oil in 1867. But those had been king penguins, said Sadiya (University of Cape Town ’20, classics), and these were African penguins, and while they shared certain experiences, and while there was value in comparing these experiences, one must not collapse geopolitical difference into a singular, ahistorical logic — You’re right, Julio said, treading beside her, I’m sorry for costing you the emotional labor required to educate me, an American, in geopolitical matters — Is it not enough that I educate you, Sadiya said, must I also forgive you? — If you must, Julio said, is it really forgiveness? Doesn’t forgiveness have to have, like, something volitional about it? — He’s a philosopher, Sadiya said — She’s an ironist, Julio said. They could not touch. Neither knew the distance to ground.

Neither? He did not know what she did not know. He did not even know what he did not know. Probably she knew exactly how deep they were. Probably she didn’t care. She was a better swimmer than he, that was clear. Her tread was even, autonomous. His was sloppy. Serviceable, but sloppy. The water around her was still and flat, until a few bubbles populated its surface. He asked her whether she had pooted. She blushed and declared herself physically incapable. He said he considered it one of his greatest physical assets, the ability to poot at will, and thus contributed a few bubbles himself. It was advanced, avant-garde flirting, a potentially disastrous abandonment of decorum, considering they had met just six days ago, not that anyone who saw them together would have guessed as much. Anyone who saw them together would assume they were a couple (compulsory heterosexuality), when in reality they were friends, colleagues, benefactors of the same dead white man’s coin, Fellows otherwise separated by eight thousand miles of sea. In four days they would say goodbye for forever and in four months he would remember her as that one girl who, in another universe, maybe, and in four years he would see her face when his photos app prompted him to and he would rack his brain for her name and search his diary for the entries about her and remember her fondly for a few minutes and then proceed with whatever he was doing in four years, probably consulting.

That is what this was. It wasn’t anything. It wasn’t nothing, either. Obviously he coveted her, he just wasn’t going to cheat. He wasn’t the sort. He was a gentleman, Sadiya said — A real gentleman, quote-unquote pooting in front of a lady. Already she’d put some distance between herself and him. She was swimming toward one of the boulders, big pink rock jutting from a tangle of seaweed, where that bearded idiot Chuy (UT Austin ’21, ethnomusicology) sat bodying an artisanal cigarette. Nautical engineers were still trying to figure out how exactly he’d carried the cigarette this far out without getting it wet. Julio drifted after her. He coordinated his limbs, tired and numb. The water was cold. Getting out would hurt. For now he waded in her wake, observing the slosh of sea against boulder, the thin faraway brays of those onshore, penguin and human alike. He wasn’t a swimmer, just someone who swam. She was the swimmer; swimming was her mode of Being-in-the-World. Already she had reached Chuy, who was helping her onto the boulder, eager to lend his services. Anything to wrap a hand around her waist. She sat in the wet shadow of herself and accepted the cigarette. Chuy stood now and approached the boulder’s edge as if to dive. Julio called for him to stop, the water wasn’t as deep as it looked. Chuy called him a pinche güey and dove anyway.