Zero History

In Basel, they had questioned him closely, during early withdrawal, about
hallucinations. Had he been having any? No, he’d said. No … bugs? No bugs, he’d
assured them. They’d explained that a possible symptom of his withdrawal might be what
they called “hallucinations in a setting of clear reality,” though he’d wondered how they
could assume that his reality, at that point, was clear. The bugs, whatever those might
have been, had never come, to his considerable relief, but now he saw, however briefly
but with peculiar clarity, an aerial penguin cross the intersection ahead of him.
Something wholly penguin-shaped, apparently four or five feet long, from beak-tip to
trailing feet, and made, it seemed, of mercury. A penguin wrapped in fluid mirror,
reflecting a bit of neon from the street below. Swimming. Moving as a penguin moves
underwater, but through the Latin Quarter air, at just above the height of second-story
windows. Moving down the center of the street that crossed the one he walked on. So
that it was revealed only as it crossed the intersection. Swimming. Propelling itself, in a
gracefully determined but efficient fashion, with its quicksilver flippers. Then a bicycle
crossed, on the street, going in the opposite direction.
“Did you see that?” Milgrim asked the cyclist, who of course was already gone, and in
any case could never have heard him.