Night of the Animals (4 page)

“I've had enough of the Whitt—I've packed it in, in
moi
mind,” Cuthbert said. “I feel, I, I, I really ought to let the poor otters into
the cuts. It's for England.” He gave the doctor a sly look. “And the king could use my help.”

“You shouldn't talk like that, my friend. I mean, Cuthbert. They are utterly merciless.”

There was a long silence. After a while, the doctor wrote in his notepad.

“But, go on. Come. I'm—I'm listening carefully. And when you say otters—you do mean the sort of minky, playful things?”

“Otters,” Cuthbert repeated. A gleam of aureate light radiated through the window. “I know it might sound completely barmy.” It was indeed that, as far as Dr. Bajwa saw it. One surely never heard the word
otter
more than once in a career in a north London GP's office.

“You know my missing brother Dryst? I think he might have sort of become a kind of otter.” Cuthbert nibbled gently at the inside of his cheek; there was a tough little ridge of flesh there that he sometimes liked to worry. “Of sorts.”

Dr. Bajwa said, “I know you feel that loss. And after the challenges you've had, I'm sure you feel it all the more. And after so very many decades of . . . griefs.”

“No, no, no,” said Cuthbert, shaking his head. “He's back, you see? Drystan has returned. And I think 'e's in the zoo. There's more to tell. Much more, doc. But I corr.”
^*

Dr. Bajwa thought for a moment, rubbing his short, graceful beard.

“I want you to stay away from the zoo, Cuthbert. Let's avoid things that obviously upset you. And these zoo voices—they're not your friends.” The doctor coughed a few times. He was coming down with something, it seemed. He said, “You're a very clever man, so surely you grasp that?”

Cuthbert was, but he didn't, couldn't, and wouldn't.

SO IT WAS, AT FIRST, THAT DR. BAJWA SIMPLY
advised Cuthbert to avoid Regent's Park. Anything to de-escalate Cuthbert's obsession seemed a step forward. Keep out of Regent's Park, and these “zoo voices” will fade, the doctor thought. Here was simple, sensible medicine.

“A zoo
can
be a rather intense sort of place, if you think about it,” Dr. Bajwa had said to Cuthbert. “It's no place for you.”

CUTHBERT RARELY MADE APPOINTMENTS;
he would just show up, in all his shabby glory, with a heap of vinegary chips in his arms, or a warm purple sphere of Flōt in his coat. The frowning admins would send him back to the consultation room, holding his own file and wearing his usual shamefaced smile.

“The zoo admission's twenty-five bloody pounds,” he was telling Dr. Bajwa one day. “I saw the sign at the gate.” He clasped his hands together. They were filthy and mottled with white psoriasis and liver spots.

“Hardly anyone goes—that's why,” Dr. Bajwa said.

A few years before, after the closings of both the Beijing and Bronx zoos, a short flurry of patriotic stories about the London Zoo had memed across WikiNous, most along the lines of “the first and last standing,” although the “first” bit wasn't entirely true. Still, almost no zoo animals existed in the wild anymore, and thousands upon thousands of species were newly extinct. Polar bears, giant pandas, as well as most large marine species, wild ferrets, and cranes, survived only as genomic software that the children of the rich used to print miniature cuddle and bath toys as well as living mobiles.

Cuthbert had never been inside a zoo, even as a child, and the doctor wanted to keep it that way.

“But you're still visiting the park,” the doctor noted. “You're asking for trouble. You don't realize. A drowning man isn't bothered by rain. Didn't we say we should avoid the whole of Regent's? I thought we'd got a sort of understanding, my friend.”

“Ar,” said Cuthbert. “But the otters—and the jackals and a few others—they've got their own little ways, haven't they? Where am I to go, if I ignore them?” He averted his gaze and looked through the window. “I nipped into the library at Finsbury Park, but I fell asleep at my table, and this skinny library bloke with one of them fuckin' Eye3 pendants 'round his neck, he said he'd hand me over to the Watch to be nicked if he saw me in there again. At least in the parks, and with the animals, I won't get nicked.”

The threat of the Red Watch was real, Dr. Bajwa knew. Unlike most public spaces, the royal parks normally weren't patrolled by the Watch, but instead by the old, lenient constabulary. Being detained by the Watch could prove catastrophic for someone as powerless as Cuthbert, and the thought of ridiculous, feeble old Cuthbert getting dragged away by the red-suited Watchmen with their neuralwave pikes horrified him. Cuthbert would be warehoused with
other mentally ill Indigents and shoved under a Nexar hood. He'd probably suffer cardiac arrest.

The doctor coughed a few times—a dry, barking hack that surprised him in its power. “Oh,” he said, reeling a little. “This dry air.” He took a deep breath and gulped. “I am just beginning to wonder,” he said, recovering, his voice still croaking, “if a visit to the zoo might not actually calm you down a bit?” He coughed twice more.

“Ar,” said Cuthbert, in an overplayed Black Country dialect he sometimes slipped into when feeling weary, fearful, or especially close to someone. “Now yam onto summat,
^*
cocker. If I could just
see
the otters—just once. I'd,
loik,
discuss about a few things, roight?” He pulled out a purple sphere of Flōt and held it toward the doctor, who was coughing again. It wasn't hotted up, but it would do. “Yow alwroight, mon? Yow want a snort?”

“Stop it,” said the doctor. “It's nothing. And put that away!” For a moment, he felt real anger toward Cuthbert. “Can we just get one thing sorted? If you go, can we keep in mind that the animals really aren't speaking to you? And you'll stay off your Flōt?”

Cuthbert gave him a vexed smile, the edges of his lips paled with pressure.

“And you'll have to pay for it yourself,” the doctor added. “Can you do that?”

“It depends what you mean by ‘pay,'” Cuthbert said. “There's more than money at stake. There's the boy.” He spoke with dry matter-of-factness. His eyes, normally a Brythonic russet-brown, and as spongy as Anglesey soil, seemed newly hard and clear. “Oi've paid with my heart—for decades.”

The screeching color-charge compressors of a passing bosonicabus—probably the No. 29—could be heard outside in the Holloway Road.

Cuthbert added, sounding distant: “When your brother becomes an animal, it makes you think.”

“Sure, sure,” said Dr. Bajwa. He felt the long blade of pity jab into him. He hated it. He despised pity's utter uselessness. But there it was—a dolor for the shredded stems of flowers never to touch the earth. Dr. Bajwa puckered his lips a bit, trying to subdue his emotions.

Cuthbert seemed to have sunk down into his chair. He was sniffling a bit.

“Why am I going to the zoo?” There were tears in Cuthbert's eyes. “What's the matter with me?” He stared dazedly at the ceiling. He said, “When my mother and father have forsaken me, the Lord will take me up.” He gazed directly at Dr. Bajwa, and repeated, more frantically, “What's the matter with me?”

“I don't . . . know,” said Dr. Bajwa. “Not exactly. But it seems you need these . . . voices. That's all I know.” He plucked a sky-blue sticky note from his desktop and wrote his WikiNous cryptograph on it, as he had many times before, and gave it to Cuthbert. “You can message me if anything dire happens. But I really hope it won't. Just go
see
those otters. And don't do anything foolish,” he said, already regretting his advice somewhat.

“I'll get the dosh,” Cuthbert said, feeling atingle. “Any road up
^*
I can.”

“I know you will. I know it.”

The doctor reached across the desk and squeezed Cuthbert's hand as hard as he could, and that was very hard indeed. He put a £10 coin in the dry hand—any less seemed cruel, and any more unwise.

“Just take care,” the doctor said. “And at least cut back on the Flōt, you silly old fool.”

IN THE WEEKS
THAT CAME,
Cuthbert saved his dole, as best he could, panhandled a bit, and combined with Baj's tenner, he soon pulled together the £24.50 for zoo admission—enough for six liters of the economical, Dark Plume label Flōt, he ruefully noted. It had been the first time he had put anything before a drink of Flōt in years. For a few afternoons, he even stayed sober, though sobriety seemed to increase the animal voices and send his heart into wild palpitations. On one of those sober afternoons, he heard the otters again. “
Gagoga,
” they kept saying. “
Gagoga.
”

Uncharacteristically, Cuthbert had begun to avoid Dr. Bajwa a bit. He wanted to impress him with his independence. At one point, he decided to surprise Baj by
sending
an Opticall. While most Indigents received and, if literate, read dozens of Opticalls on their retinas a day, very few could afford to write them; generally, to write, you needed a quality digital epidermal aerosol such as SkinWerks and an advanced grade of access to WikiNous, things few Indigents could afford. Even emergency workers labored under strict controls and weren't normally supposed to use skin aerosols for messages.

“I want you to Opticall my GP,” he was telling a street acquaintance one shaky, sober afternoon. “It's a medical issue, right?”

This wily man's name was Gadge, and he possessed a stolen case of SkinWerks, which had made him mildly noteworthy on the streets. SkinWerks was the simplest, if messiest, way to send Opticalls. A bioelectronic emollient sprayed onto the epidermis, always in high demand and pricey, it allowed wearers to read and type upon their own skin (usually, on the forearm), to exchange tactile sensations, and to display digital images on the skin—and, in limited ways, to “feel” them, too.

GADGE'S LITTLE STASH
was authentic, too—and that mattered. Dangerous imitations from East Africa's new factories circulated on
the black market, burning digital skin users and, at times, sparking mental illnesses, it was said.

“Yeah, medical, eh?” he asked. “Ha!”

“Tell him, ‘This is Cuthbert, Baj! It's a miracle of God! I am SOBER—all caps now, that—for two hours now! Saving money for zoo! Sincerely, Cuthbert Handley.' Tell him that, right? Put exclamation points after everything, please. Please, Gadge, do your friend a favor?”

Gadge smirked and hiked up his greasy suit-jacket sleeve, throwing his head back in a floridly pompous way. He sprayed the red digital aerosol onto his own hairy forearm. He rubbed it around a bit until an ovular WikiNous portal glowed on the arm. Most people sprayed digital skins onto their own body, often for sexual thrills, but they could be applied to any flat, smooth, warm surface.

“This is a big favor I'm doing you, Cuddy,” said Gadge. He had a narrow, angular face with a long, lupine jaw, and dark eyes set close together.

Cuthbert watched closely, squinting, as Gadge typed the Opticall text onto his skin, straining with every punch of a dirty finger.

“It's done,” said Gadge. “I sent it. You owe me.”

“Yam a fine fellow,” said Cuthbert, after which Gadge released a long, rumbling fart.

WHEN DR. BAJWA
got the Opticall text, he felt relief and a nervous joy. Seeing the name “Cuthbert” glide across his retinas struck him as a singular treat. There was also a sense, though much fainter, that he ought not to get enmeshed with an Indigent, but that was more for safety reasons than anything else. As a child, the egalitarianism of Sikhism and importance of
seva
, or helping the poor, were driven into him. How many
daal
dishes he'd washed at the
gurdwara
! How many golden bowls of
dahi
yogurt he had set proudly on commu
nal tables! Nonetheless, there was also something less high-minded at work, for Baj simply liked Cuthbert. As much as any Flōt addict could be, he was honest, gentle, clever, reliable, and good—and twice the man that most Britons in Harry9's dreadful, unpredictable reign were.

ONE CHILLY SATURDAY,
at the end of January, three months after the animal voices had begun, Cuthbert finally visited the zoological gardens as a paid visitor. He was, at last, going to observe living otters firsthand, paying for the privilege as other citizens had since 1828.

After passing through the turnstile at the main gate, Cuthbert began to trot feebly toward the otters in the northern part of the zoo. The exertion drove his heart into a jumble of premature contractions, and he had to stop. He stood there, gasping, beside a statue of Tony Blair that had been erected, as a diversionary tactic, during the Second Restoration. The former prime minister's aged, pinched face held a distant gaze, made all the more disconnected by the lurid bronzecast's slightly cut-price look.

“Ow am yow, Sir Tony?” asked Cuthbert. He felt he ought to be polite. “You know, I day
^*
always vote, but I always liked your wife—so lovely.” But the stiff party leader, with his hollow mind encased in bargain alloys, seemed nonetheless to look above and beyond Cuthbert.

Once at the otters' enclosure, at first Cuthbert merely watched the mustelids plunge in and out of their green-water rock pool, yinnying and playing, as he continued to catch his breath. Seeing the otters, in the flesh, wasn't so much disappointing as unnerving.

And he began to doubt, freshly, as he often did, whether he possessed the so-called Wonderments or not. It was easy to believe
that Drystan had got them. “If I'd really got them,” he ruminated, “I wouldn't have ended up a sot who can't put down the bottle, would I?”

“Is that yow, trying to gab?” he asked the otters. “Or just my brain, like Baj says?”

It was right before a feeding, so they were frisky. One of the otters, a big female, as if responding to his query, regarded Cuthbert specially, standing still while another female and her whelps smashed up against her. The big female was in a delicate state of “almost pregnancy,” filled with implanted sperm. Embryos would begin to gestate in a month or two. Meanwhile, the whelps kept trying to bite the other mother's neck. They wanted to nurse.

The otter habitat seemed too small, Cuthbert thought. It seemed little more than a couple of store-bought aquaria set into a mortar-and-rock faux riverbank. The otters' hair was a rich sludge color, yet iridescent, too, smoothed back by the force of a thousand dives, with light sloping off at all angles. Cuthbert had only seen such a fascinating creature once before. The female was like all the muddy moisture of England gathered into one supermuscular cat shape. She was a Sufi creature, he thought to himself, reaching back to his cannabis and acid-addled days of bad dabbling in sophomoric esoterica which began years ago at university. Neither wholly of earth nor of water, neither entirely real nor imagined, the otter occupied an eerie in-betweenness, one of the Sufi dimensions between the Absolute of the Absolute and Cuthbert's ugly life.

“'Ello, muckers,” he had said. “Am I safe now, am I? Do you remember me? From back in the
owd
days? With Drystan and what?”

He felt a sudden stab of longing for Drystan.

“Are one of you Drystan? Are you?”

No spoken word, per se, emanated from them, but Cuthbert was emotionally and mentally overwhelmed with a sense of being
singled out for otterspaeke. He still felt unsure if it was the Wonderments at work, but he felt Drystan's minty presence.