Night of the Animals (33 page)

The old walkway he had entered, which formed the main route between the eastern and western edges of the zoo, and roughly connected the area where Cuthbert had broken into the heart of the zoo, had long, evenly spaced flower troughs placed in its center, creating a kind of boulevard. It was the zoo's “High Street” and had been in the same location since George IV. Though the stone troughs were empty for some reason, they were newly whitewashed. Each was three meters in length and just broad enough for someone to lie down in. Cuthbert considered this possibility, pausing and setting his knee on one of the rims of a trough, like a diver preparing to jump off a boat. If he was too lucky, he guessed, he would die of hypothermia in the trough, a primate whose time was done. He could be a ghost here, and but for the lack of drink, it didn't seem a bad place at all, not at all. If he didn't die, he might just be awakened tomorrow and a pretty woman who worked for Westminster social services would stand above him, offering a place in a doss house and a hot cuppa—perhaps a prawn curry sandwich? Or a banana? Perhaps Drystan would even find him? Cuthbert was tempted, but he resisted. Who would release the beasts, if not he? There were still the otters to let out—he could not forget his old friends, the otters! There were the poor penguins, and Tecton and the mystery of the gulls. And what if he were, as Muezza said, a kind of holy being, a “harbinger,” with a task in the service of
all
animals? Wasn't he supposed to be on the lookout for the Shayk of Night? Surely he would resolve these matters, provided he stayed awake (and alive) a bit longer.

He focused his gaze on the monument and walked toward it. He felt frightened of the humanoid figures he had seen before. He thought they could rip his soul from his being at the snap of their fingers.

Perhaps, he thought, I have underestimated them. Maybe they were not merely Applewhite followers, but also demons sent by
Satan to capture the Otter Christ. As he got closer to the hexagonal column, he saw it was a cross-bearing memorial of some sort, neatly crafted and built from a fine Portland stone. Six small, old-fashioned incandescent lightbulbs burned under a small, conical stone roof. It was the Lanterne des Morts, inspired by the medieval one at La Souterraine, and placed here after the First World War. The names of a dozen or so men were etched into a bronze plaque, bearing the men's regiments and their jobs in the zoo (menagerie staff, gardener, zoo librarian, et al), along with a couplet, which Cuthbert read respectfully:

        
Till the red war gleam like a dim red rose

        
Lost in the garden of the Sons of Time.

He thought of his grandfather, long ago plowed anonymously under the soil of Worcestershire, and whose place in England was growing over with pink and white campion. He felt an almost practiced bitterness. Where was his grandfather's shrine then? He remembered his father, boasting that his father-in-law was so tough, he walked away from the gas attack that wiped out his Worcester Regiment, smoking a Woodbine.

Here I am, Cuthbert said to himself—the lost grandson of a lost warrior of the Great War, staring down the face of a new war while belligerents gather apace around me. I have no weapon, he said to himself. I have no Woodbine. I have no regiment. I have no cloak against the coming assault.

“But I have the Wonderments,” he said aloud. “And all the voices of animals.”

IT WAS NOT SURPRISING THAT ANYONE, ESPECIALLY
a hallucinating man, might imagine humanlike shadow figures and soulful monkeys in the area Cuthbert had finally reached. He had unwittingly made his way to the geometric center of the zoo, to the core of a long-established district of primates.

Cuthbert came to a set of double doors, the main entrance to the “pavilion,” which seemed no more to him than an ugly black cage that had “caught” a loose brick-pile. Only a few decades old, it was hard to see how it improved much on the poles and pits and cement-poetry of yore. Like many other parts of the zoo, heavy steel grid fencing and red brick predominated. Each species of primate had a sign with a phrase. There were
SPIDER MONKEYS—THE TAIL HANGERS; GORILLAS—VEGETARIAN GENTLE GIANTS; SQUIRREL MONKEYS—SOCIABLE AND CHIRPY
; ad nauseam. Debarked climbing logs and draping ropes crisscrossed each cage, and yellow straw covered the floors. The zookeepers worked hard to make this cramped, leafless penitentiary happy for the animals, but no exhibit at the zoo was so uniquely degrading.

In the central building, zoo guests could glimpse at the apes through glass windows that looked into the apes' night rooms.

Cuthbert examined a brass, embossed evolutionary tree on the way, showing how
Homo sapiens
and apes shared a common Homininae limb. There was a raised silhouette of a naked man and woman. Someone had rudely stuck a piece of chewing gum on the man's head. Cuthbert pulled it off and scratched it clean with his thumbnail. Below the naked people was a photograph of a prehistoric skull,
Australopithecus africanus
. It was yellow and long, with a tiny brain case and a protruding maxilla with big squarish teeth—it had no mandible. Cuthbert felt as though the human animal in this form could be comfortable—a place for thoughts no bigger than a tea mug.

Nearby, to his right, a brightly painted wood sign bore the message:
THE GREATEST DANGER TO ANIMAL LIFE.
There was a hole in the sign for a human face—unabashed guests could put their heads in the opening and ask a mate to snap a naff “picky” on their retina-cams.

The happiest of the apes Cuthbert could see was the life-size bronze statue of an old dead London Zoo celebrity, Guy “Fawkes” the Gorilla, set near the entrance of the pavilion. Leaning forward on his knuckles, surrounded by leafy vines, and blessed with plenty of room, Guy looked ready to spring downward and away, out of gorilla heaven, to dole out exploding bananas for all takers.

Cuthbert gave the double doors a jiggle. They were locked tight with a key, it seemed. But the noise roused the smaller residents. The monkeys suddenly cried out with a furious astuteness. Cuthbert was instantly animated by the whole, simian keenness of the pavilion; he could feel it, physically. The “monkeys,” he hoped, were doing their part to prepare for the Heaven's Gate war. He would do his.

He was beginning to see much larger numbers of flashing yellow and blue lights blooming in the west, and more sirens. What he thought were the death cult's mini-spacecrafts in the sky—ordinary police and autonewsmedia aerodrone, along with a Red Watch frightcopter, investigating an intrusion and rumored animal release at the zoo—beat their wings of liquid titanium like huge dragonflies. He didn't understand why they didn't begin to attack. The motion-sensitive security lights he had tripped earlier inside the zoo, he noticed, were turning back off, and a pitch darkness enveloped everything near him, except for light beams coming down from the “spacecraft.” A blue-black spindly bird flew past above him; it was enormous, and Cuthbert stood with his mouth gaping. It was one of the famous herons from the park's heronry on the lake.

“You,” he called toward the bird. “You! Get the Gulls of Imago, will you? Can you help, can you?” But the bird was gone.

The greater apes, late to the noise making, started in just then with a fresh vociferousness. First, a cartload of four chimpanzees, already wide awake in their night room, stormed out into the outdoor exhibit area and began hooing at Cuthbert, sticking their golden, soft fingers through the spaces in the grid-fencing. It was as unusual for them to encounter an interested human at night as it was for Cuthbert. Whenever the night watchman, Dawkins, came through—and that was rare—he typically tapped their cage, listened for a moment, and walked on. But like many of the animals, the chimps were no longer confined to night rooms and holding cells after hours. (In the years before all the other zoos on Earth closed down, many had conceded that since nearly all animals are nocturnal, it was inhumane to keep them locked up all night. And no one had seriously worried about the possibility of a zoo invader like Cuthbert.)

The chimps soon roused the nearby, and most rare, mountain gorilla named Kibali, who was living in isolation because of his grouchy temperament. He was the last wild-born mountain gorilla on earth.

He had arrived from the Congo, via Uganda, the year before, all four hundred pounds of him, and he never quite adjusted. His mother and a young sister had been shot to death before his eyes by Interahamwe fighters where he'd lived, up to then, under a canopy of ayous and sapelli trees. He'd been led away from their bodies on three separate leashes.

Kibali was hobbling in circles around his night room, fingering his lips with a twitchy boredom. The room served as an indoor presentation area in the day. Its brick walls were daubed a pale green, a lame attempt to simulate “rain forest” tonality from an era nearly gone on earth, but a colossal, eight-foot-long window of toughened glass—for viewing—made Kibali look like a glum man at a bosonicabus stop.

He picked up a bunch of wood wool and shredded, lurid junk-food wrappers, which were regularly given to him for nest-building. He pulled the soft wad apart in his long black-nailed hands, and tossed the pieces away. A food-wrapper scrap, stuck in Kibali's neck fur, bore the phrase
you can see that Lena has the goods to please all “passengers” on Bonk Air . . .
Many gorillas in captivity like to construct messy nests before bedding down each night, but Kibali had stopped making nests. He was just throwing bits around. He received no comfort from the hoots of the chimps; instead, he felt compelled to strike things and to beat his chest.

Not long after he had arrived at the London Zoo, he had been introduced to a group of biosoftware-cultured females—his potential retinue. But the females had recently been sent, temporarily, to an animal shelter the zoo operated in Bedfordshire. The exile was for their own safety. Kibali had bitten one of their scalps, and
nearly broken another's arm. He was supposed to be having a “cool down.”

He made a belching sound, then a set of aggressive chuckles. He ran a few meters, ducking under draping two-inch-thick ropes. He batted at an enormous nylon ball across the cramped, mustard-smelling room. It bounced off the ceiling so hard, it hit the floor once and bounced against the ceiling again; considering the low height of the ceiling, however, the feat was not especially surprising. He scrambled atop a large plywood box in his chamber so that he could peer through a window slit and look out toward the disturbances. He slammed his fist against the wall, and screamed. He felt excited; something was happening, he sensed. He was trying, in his gorilla way, to ready himself.

At the zoo, his depression thrived. He had begun slapping food bowls away and pushing keepers away with a force that bordered on the dangerous. He interacted less and less with the public and sometimes threw balls and giant toys at them. They bounced off the fencing, and the humans had a laugh.

Now Kibali's back was turning silver, but he would never be able to start his own troop. His penetrating, shrewd black eyes mismatched his degraded captivity. He was developing angina pectoris of late, a result of his sedentary life and the chocolate bars and éclairs one errant zookeeper would sometimes give him, furtively. Guests would normally see Kibali through the humiliating window and try to get him to look at them with those eyes; their tapping on the window annoyed him to no end, triggering the ache in his chest and left shoulder.

The chimps seemed to be laughing at him. Kibali roared. He did not like chimp-noise. It reminded him of humans. He ran out of his night quarters into the tall but narrow outdoor section of his living space. When he saw the man, he quieted for a moment, stifling a groan. This human did not seem to hold much hope for him, but he
would wait and watch. It was astonishing to be visited at this hour. Something unusual was afoot, and much like this man, he, too, felt he had nothing to lose.

“You,” he called to Cuthbert. “You are headed toward the chimpanzees. Do not go there.” But Cuthbert could hardly hear the noble gorilla, for his head was now a proverbial barrel of monkeys.

IT NEARLY BROKE WHAT WAS LEFT OF CUTHBERT'S
own mangled heart to hear the primates cry to him. “Please now please now please now please now,” the putty-faced rhesus macaques kept hollering. “Now now now now now help!” Five golden tamarins, their elegantly styled red manes puffed with anxiety, crowded onto a horizontal tree limb and simply repeated a mysterious phrase—
we promise you
—but at wildly different pitches and volumes, and Cuthbert was beginning to feel unable to cope.

“Hang on then,” he kept saying. He could not stop listening, but the more he listened, the more sure he became that the “monkeys” ought to be freed
right
away.

He started with the chimpanzees, who were closest to him, still softly hooing. It was a very bad decision.

As soon as he stepped with his bolt cutters off the cement apron near the pavilion entrance, and toward their cage, the chimps whimpered a few times, then exploded.
LIKE US, NOISY AND SHOWY
, read their sign. If they were “like us,” they were a particularly earsplitting example of Homininae
.
Their screams were like the sound
of several children being stabbed to death. Cuthbert gave a stupid grin, and with his wobbly hands got to work on the fence. He dimly sensed that he was facing something bigger than he could handle. The four chimps started shoving each other against the fence. One of them, a dominant male named Buddy, climbed right up the back of a smaller, younger teenager, and grasped the fence. He glowered down at Cuthbert, slapping his hand against the cage. The teenager, Ollie, peered up and barked at Buddy, whipping his head from side to side. Cuthbert wasn't sure whether the chimps were scared or angry or both.

The indoor viewing window and the building's main doors were armed with loud, guardhouse-notifying alarms, but the outdoor cage itself, which served all the different primate exhibits, was not, and Cuthbert's bolt cutters flew through the fencing with little effort. Within minutes, he had created a rectangular door, loose on three sides, and before he could finish a fourth, the chimps had shoved the door open a few inches.

Ollie sidled toward the gap and pushed his arm through. He managed to grab hold of the sleeve of Cuthbert's jumper and tore it asunder as if pulling a tissue from a Kleenex box. The chimps shrieked and passed the sleeve around. Cuthbert was a little shocked and engrossed for a few seconds, but he kept working. With every new cut, he loosened his “door” to the greater structure, and the chimps drove it open more. Finally, Ollie heaved himself nearly through, but just as the young chimp was about to clear the cage, Buddy vaulted down, and yanked Ollie back, jealously. Ollie scraped his forearm badly on the fence's jagged opening, and screamed banefully.

What happened next came with a grim celerity. The injury somehow turned Cuthbert into an enemy in the chimps' eyes. All four of the chimps piled out of the cage, and set upon him. They
knocked Cuthbert down and Buddy bit him viciously on the nose, tearing a nostril away from his face. Cuthbert barely seemed to feel it; he wisely rolled onto his stomach and balled up. The others made
waa-bark
noises, as if egging Buddy on, but Buddy broke off the attack and stepped back. He whimpered again a few times.

There was a comparative silence, and the chimps seemed to be checking each other's fur for something, inspecting. They began hooing again.

Buddy finally spoke. He said to Cuthbert: “You stay away from us, geeza, you stay away.” Cuthbert raised his head cautiously. He could barely open his eyes, and blood dripped fast off his face. He pressed the heel of his hand, shaky as ever, against the ripped nostril. It did not hurt, but a squinty feeling filled his eyes.

Cuthbert said: “A'm not your enemy, I'm not. I'm your
ally
.”

Buddy shook his head. “Don't talk to me. Don't ever say a word to me, geeza. You are a friend of the otters, and the cats.”

One of the other chimpanzees grabbed the bolt cutters and jammed them into the ground between Cuthbert's feet. Cuthbert was astonished, frozen with wonder. The chimps' dexterity and cleverness were beyond anything he expected.

Then Buddy and Ollie each took hold of one of Cuthbert's arms, and he gripped his bolt cutters. They dragged him past the gorilla exhibit, the cutters banging, across a concrete verge, to the macaques,
THE ALL-ROUNDERS
, according to their sign. They dumped him down in a pile.

Their strength had given him goose pimples, and he wore a weird smile. It seemed he had always only seen old pictures of chimps in powerless or sweet poses: Ham and Enos strapped to their flight couches on the Mercury test flights; nameless
pan troglodytes
being given HIV-filled jabs in some Swiss lab; Jane Goodall cradling an infant chimp in her khaki arms, sticking a milk bottle in its mouth;
Emily the “Chimp Wife” sneaking into the British Museum. But these London chimpanzees seemed powerful and confident and malicious.

The macaques were different. When Cuthbert managed to get to his feet, he gazed at them in their cage, still holding his nose, trying to stanch the blood. The three of them gazed back in silence. Two crouched on the floor of the cage; the other was curled in a motorcycle tire that hung from a chain. They were all a long-tailed species from Vietnam, and they had short, bristly hair the color of tropical honey and bright pink faces. They seemed to be waiting for him or the chimps to make a move.

Buddy told Cuthbert: “Let our friends out, geeza, or we'll kill you, you
cat
-fucker.” Cuthbert got to work on the cage with his cutters. When he took his hand away from his face, the blood dribbled again, but less than before. His black jumper camouflaged it a bit. There was a dark, shiny patch across his stomach, and a streak down his leg to his foot. It was as if a hidden rage had burst out of him, messily. Yet he did not mind being told what to do by Buddy—there was a comfort in it, a sense of relief he had heard some of his ex-con acquaintances on the streets of London mention about prison life.

The black-painted caging was the same as the chimps'. Cuthbert snipped methodically, biting his lower lip and squinting.

Meanwhile, Kibali, the last silverback, had come out of his night room and was observing the whole situation from a few meters away. The chimps always made noises when he looked at them during the day. Once, at night, he had seen them with an unlucky rat that had somehow got into their cage. They passed it around, each taking a bite.

As Cuthbert snipped away, the macaques began to stir. One of them with especially large red-gold eyes, just inches away, pranced past him with its little chest puffed out, and scrambled away. The
one inside the tire had climbed atop it and started to jerk the chain, causing the tire to sway slightly. They all started to make a kind of clucking-chirpy sound; he could see their pale tongues touching the roofs of their mouths. It was a threat-alert, but to Cuthbert it seemed strictly reproving.

“What are you saying?” asked Cuthbert.

Buddy punched the back of Cuthbert's thigh, and this time he could feel the pain.

“Do not address our friends, geeza,” said Buddy. “You are human waste.”

Kibali said, “Human. What are you doing? Don't open that cage.”

“Piss off,” Buddy told the gorilla, leering at him. “Fatty.”

The moment that a square of metal fencing fell away, the chimpanzees trooped into the macaques' dwelling. What happened next should not have surprised Cuthbert, but the horror of it was unbearable. The chimps seized the big-eyed leader and beat and finally strangled him. The other macaques shot out of the cage and into the darkness. (One of them ended up being attracted by the helium-inflated aerial lens-bots that had been cast into the zoo by autoreporters, and she made a game of popping every single one between her hands.)

Cuthbert backed away, shaking his head. He began to cry out, again, “DRYS-STAN! DRYS-STAN!” Driven into a terrified passivity, he had regressed pathetically to childhood—lost in the Wyre, unable to find his lost brother.

As Cuthbert retreated, he noticed that Buddy was looking at him strangely.

“What is ‘Drys-stan,' this thing you say?”

Buddy's lips were pursed and pushed forward and red with blood. Ollie and the other chimps stepped a few feet away from the dead macaque, making openmouthed “play faces,” and hooing again.

“He's the most beautiful thing in the world,” said Cuthbert.

“He can't be human,” said Buddy.

Almost instinctively, as though seeking his protection, Cuthbert went to where Kibali, flat-faced and quiet now, sat watching the devious chimps. Kibali scratched his forearm. He seemed unperturbed.

“Help me,” said Cuthbert. Without Drystan here, he thought, who else was there to ask?

Of course, he was speaking out of his hallucination and toward a hallucinated personality he had grafted onto a real gorilla. But a real gorilla really
was
standing before him, and its name
was
Kibali. Setting aside all Cuthbert's delusions, the fact was, whether imagined or not, he had now managed to release four jackals, three wild sand cats, a large leopard, and half a dozen great apes and monkeys.

The gorilla opened and closed his long, dark hands, as if they were stiff. He nodded, and said to Cuthbert: “This is not as bad as it looks. They have slain a spy, I am sure. They had never trusted the macaque, and neither did I—though I am no friend of the chimpanzees. The macaque was a favorite of the keepers and the other humans. He was, as one might suspect, trying to become human.”

Kibali leaned forward and looked into Cuthbert's face. He continued: “The spy did little ignoble tricks for people. He had no shame. He was always being given treats by the keepers—pound cake and treacle and chocolate milk. He would do his lordly trot—
la dee da!
He would steal the keepers' sunglasses, and they would find him, later, wearing them, and they would praise him for this, and give him sweet pasties. We got nothing—slices of green nutra-bread. ‘It's good for you, Kibali,' that lot would tell me. The keepers, always, keeping us down, making us more animal than animals.”

Cuthbert shook his head. He said, “The chimpanzees did not need to kill him. There's a war about to start, there is, and you need friends.”

“Hah!” said Kibali, rousing out of his chronically depressed torpor a bit. “What planet are you on? Have you forgotten that there is
another
war going on?”

Cuthbert considered this. His entire arms were tremoring and his neck ached badly. There was a peculiar barrenness in his head. He felt that at any moment he might flop down onto the ground and convulse, as though he had become unrooted from all concrete things, depersonalized. He watched the police lights, revolving yellow and blue glimmers, and the frantic solarcopter searchlights, hoping they would hook into him somehow, tangle him up in their stabbing points. He turned and glanced around. The macaque cage was empty, he noticed. The chimps had spirited the body away, and vanished. It occurred to him that, indeed, he was losing track of the war.

“Why do you keep saying this ‘Drys Stan' thing?” asked Kibali.

“He's here—in the zoo. My brother. My poor brother. He called me here, you know.”

“He is magic, human?”

“He's more than that. He's sacred,” said Cuthbert. “It's what my gran said—or something like that. 'E's the Christ of Otters—the Green Lord of Animals.”

“I want to know him,” said the gorilla.

He looked at the gorilla, and said: “You will, Kibali. If it's the last thing I do in my life, I'll find him. Do you know about Heaven's Gate?”

“Yes. Of course,” said Kibali. “They are anyone,
anyone,
who hates themselves so much that they try to kill off their own nature. Follow them like a doorway to paradise—that's what they think. But the humans treat us, even in their so-called humanity, with the
same
contempt and fear. That is
your
war on us.” The gorilla touched his index finger to the fencing. “It is time that you remove this. The chimps, they will not come back. You are safe, for now.”

Cuthbert hesitated for a moment. He was not worried much for his own well-being—after all, his whole life had been about damaging his well-being, and chopping out his own violent inner “gate” to the stars.

“You must promise me something,” said Cuthbert. “You're strong, really strong, you know?”

“I know what you're going to say,” said Kibali. There was a look of despair on the gorilla's wrinkly dark face, and he groaned. “You want me to wait. Yes, I will wait here.”

“No, that's not it. There will be no more waiting, ode bab.” Cuthbert began to cut the fence open. “Do not hurt any animals, right? No more of that. I can't take it anymore, right? You are being freed to stop an expected attack from the comet people, so you can protect yourself. You cannot die, Kibali. But you can't kill, either.”

The gorilla did not say anything in response at first. After a while, he said, “Hah! Friend! There is blood all over you. I did not cause the deaths. I warned you. And
I
didn't hurt you. You're your own worst enemy.”

Cuthbert said, “Ah, that's nothing.” He could not see that he was now badly disfigured, missing one entire nostril, and still indeed bleeding profusely. All he could see, really, was that slick patch on his jumper.

“Tell any animal you see. Tell them tonight. Tell them no animal is safe. But tell them the Lord of Animals is coming.”

Kibali nodded and rubbed his chin. “I suppose we would not be talking like this, human, if not for some cause. I want to
know
this Lord.”

“You will,” said Cuthbert.

“I must. Do not years and years of dark gorilla wretchedness add up to something? Is their worth so far below that of human suffering? Shouldn't animals like myself—I am so alone, in every world on earth—shouldn't I be allowed to see this Lord just once?”