by Lewis, D. F.
The entrance to the zoo was not at all imposing and it could have served as the gates of a small factory, where people came and went after spending the rest of their time in terraced back-to-back two-up-two-downs in the less desirable parts of the city. There was a turnstile—just a cover to indicate that this was a place for which you needed admission, as most zoos in other cities would need. No money changed hands and when people had time off from work they came here—all jolly and familified—and entered the place that was hidden by tall grey walls which made them feel they were indeed going to work all over again on their holiday! The turnstile was unimpeded and they emerged into an area around the first enclosure. In the distance could be seen the starts of corridors between lines of cages, the contents of which could not yet be seen, though their hubbub of loud meat could certainly be heard from this auditory vantage point just inside the turnstile. The first enclosure was empty, unlike the other enclosures beyond the cages, which, as visitors who had been here before could attest, were full of living exhibits yet to meet the gaze of greenhorn visitors. Why an empty enclosure was the first exhibit often mystified initial visitors, but this was soon explained as the various themes panned out in interlocking concertinas of myth and logic and as the total exhibition of the zoo revealed itself to the unpaying customers filing past.
The empty enclosure at the start of the tour—it was discovered—was a symbol of the loneliness of life and the even greater loneliness of death. Yet many claimed it was not a greater loneliness in death: for it was a greater loneliness in life. The paradox was not lost on the gaping citizens as they took their time off in the zoo. Many of them peered into the empty first enclosure, the children bawling in disappointment:
“Where are the animals, Mummy?”
“You told me this was a zoo, Daddy!”
The parents tried to pacify their children by pointing to the corridors of cages where the zoo proper, apparently, would start—or so they promised. Meanwhile, it was their beholden duty to pause here a short time to view the empty enclosure in almost religious calm. Nobody, it was clear, took account of the insects that threaded the loose soil of this enclosure. Nobody realised this was an otherwise empty enclosure for insects. They wanted to see big things in a zoo. Life needed big things in the city.
Soon after by-passing the first enclosure, most visitors, in awed contemplation, would enter the first corridor of cages—a silence soon broken by the snorts, squeals and snickers of the first set of exhibits. Kept apart hardly at all by the cages, the exhibited could stretch limbs through the bars towards each other—and even uncomfortably close towards the visitors themselves. The latter cowered from the first cage only to find themselves backing towards another cage where something else was putting out feelers.
The remarkable fact—despite the circumstances—none of these caged creatures were as nightmarish as one might have assumed. Nothing could be nightmarish because this was one hundred per cent not a dream... and only dreams and their like could house nightmares.
Mike turned towards the others and said: “Quite sweet, aren’t they?”
Nobody replied. They weren’t so sure, because these initial cages seemed to house versions of the apes, a baby one of which had indeed featured in a dream dreamed by at least one of the party before entering the zoo grounds. Yet here, the apes could be clearly seen for what they were—apes with no potential to grow into man-mountains like Gulliver. That, Mike assumed, was what differentiated dreams from non-dreams. In the former, anything could grow into anything else. In the latter, things stood still ever as themselves. The status quo. They may be monsters in a non-dream, but they couldn’t transmute into worse or different monsters.
They wandered further into the maze of cages, Mike in the lead. As a hawler, he could see things more clearly than the others, since he had travelled further underground in his consciousness and established fixtures and bases from which all else could be interpreted and evaluated: thus neutralising their ability to terrorize. Terror did not breed more terror, but less. Hence, Mike’s justification in dredging more terror and horror into view, so as to neutralise it. He had not thought these things consciously—but when between bouts of dream sickness outside the zoo grounds, this had indeed been clearer, with the dreams themselves adding a needed logic of their own. Here, inside the zoo, Mike—although an instinctive leader—learned, from this prior in-built experience of dream negotiation outside the zoo, that, paradoxically, he felt himself to be at a loss in the uniform non-dream world of reality represented by the zoo around them.
The next set of cages was frightful and, if it hadn’t been for the certainty of his logic, Mike would have been quite perturbed by the sights as they unfolded. It was as much as he could do to pacify the others in the face of a tentacular monstrosity that even the infinite star-fields (and what potential life they could conceivably hold) would not have been powerful enough to make possible.
Here they found Amy and Arthur whom they had been seeking all night throughout the city. They were pressed up to the cage bars as if in some desperate embrace with the monster that was contained by them.
Yet, nothing, surely, could be nightmarish outside a dream, a nightmare being merely a species of dream. Yet the two children—as Amy and Arthur still were inside the zoo—seemed actually tied outside the cage to its bars not by ropes and bindings but by the long locking claws of the beast that the cage contained. Mike and the rest of the search party quickly shuffled identities between them as none wanted to be responsible for leading a rescue mission towards this cage with a view to releasing the two children. Yet, this cowardly act could not be cowardly for long, because no sooner did one feel the cowardliness coursing through their veins than that same person felt an equal counterbalance of bravery... and they lurched forward to prise the children’s fingers from the bars only quickly to realise that the fingers were not all the children’s own—and cowardliness returned with redoubled force.
Meanwhile, Greg the office worker had rejoined the group unexpectedly—having followed the others after his lunch break into the zoo grounds—and had no time to be infected by the switching identities caused by an alternation of cowardliness and bravery. He had no second thoughts but to rush towards the cage and pulled the children away from whatever it was that kept them bound to the bars. Indeed, there was nothing in the cage... except a threadbare carpet lining the floor, a carpet peppered with indeterminate tiny droppings and sown with holes that needed darning.
The group were pleased to escape the zoo—via the back entrance which was not far from the underground market. They hadn’t paid to get in but, somehow, they needed to pay to get out—as a man stood at a turnstile with his hand out. But the two children went free. All were pleased to escape without having their faith in the clear dream/reality dichotomy of the zoo undermined. They knew, however, once outside the zoo, each and everyone would be susceptible to the dream sickness. They needed a drink, so they sought Ogdon’s pub—but the streets round the market had somehow changed from a negotiable pattern to one of mazy confusion. The two children were no longer children—and, having been rescued from their kidnapping, they returned to a more adult appearance and behaviour, treating Mike as if he were a child. Mike couldn’t see Susan any more—but a certain loyalty to her memory forced him to stick by his promises to protect her against the onset of dreams, giving himself a more steadfast or statuesque image: a landmark around which the dreams revolved but which they could not affect. Susan would soon be able to return to this fixed point of Mikeness given the time and the inclination. He hoped against hope. He still loved her. This facility to be a fixed point amid the whirlpool of dreams that existed outside the zoo was akin to the ability of hawling: reaching to the core of the earth for one’s bearings—and mining them for certainties and immutable compass points of direction.
He looked up into the sky. There was something lovely about a sky that was brightening with the arrival of day dream: dissipating the cloying nightmares that had just star
ted to vanish from within themselves. A good hawler could plumb heights as well as depths for this brand of substance, sustenance and reassurance. Whilst it had been until now mostly land-locked, embedded with stone and grit, the sky (as he watched it) became the underbelly of a huge flying-carpet flowing diaphanously from horizon to horizon. Who flew upon it, he knew or at least he hoped he knew, were the nemonymous ones: angels and finer vessels of thought and spirituality. Beneath his feet, on the other hand, were weirdmongers and others of their name-driven ilk. A hawler, he knew or at least he hoped he knew, was a filter that worked in both directions of flow. But he only knew or at least hoped he knew for a while till he even forgot he was a hawler.
*
Susan woke beside her husband Mike in the bed she simply and unsurprisingly recalled falling asleep in. No better reassurance could there possibly be for getting one’s waking feet on the ground. She wondered how—in her dream—she seemed to be named Amy. And Mike had been called Arthur. She wasn’t sure how long the dream had lasted, but the actual reality within the dream had seemed to last a whole lifetime—until she awoke some time during the zoo sequence. Mike (or Arthur) had a role to play that nobody else could. As with most dreams, its sense of reality was fast fading as she continued to reach a full waking state—and the name given to this role tantalisingly escaped her.
She soon saw Mike standing at the open bedroom window watching a jet liner slowly cross from one side of the sky to the other. She left the bed and tip-toed along the carpet so as to give Mike a hug from behind. He would soon be off to the office and she to her barmaid’s job. They had never made love other than at spontaneous moments. No pre-planning, and she reached round his body to see how hard he was. She nestled up to his buttocks, listening to him sigh, as they shuffled their feet deeper into the waking moment of the working day. The city was laid out in front of them like a map, the two of them being so high up as far as storeys were concerned. She yearned for the sea, where she had been brought up—yet the sight of the huge ship in Dry Dock on the city’s horizon was more than just a little recompense. She listened to see if she could hear their daughter Sudra waking. This was her first day back at school. They had decided only to have one child—even though they both knew how difficult it was for ‘only’ children in later life. Mike and Susan both missed their brothers and sisters... almost as if they had once existed. Mike turned round—the sun etching his head like a black hole—and he took Susan in his arms, lifting high the bottom edge of her nightie so that she could snuggle up to him even closer. No fear of peeping toms—because the open window was a good Blackpool Tower or two above the now enlivening streets below. She felt him come inside like a huge welter of comfort—and the friction was just a side effect. It was at that moment Sudra had quietly opened their door—and she was old enough to laugh at her parents’ predicament upon discovering they were being watched.
Sudra watched the city from the window, as if watching through the gaps left by her parents’ clinging, cleaving to each other. It was her birthday today and she was expecting a welcome hug and a bountiful gift—yet all she saw were the bodies of the people she loved dissolving in the growth of sunlight... until even the bones themselves tingled slightly and then vanished. She rushed towards them over the carpet but only gathered curtains to her instead of parental love. Yet, love is invisible—even when the people “doing” the love are there. And Sudra could feel the love around her, even if there were no arms to gather her closer to that love. It would soon be time for school—and she walked off to the fridge to fetch milk and the kitchen cupboard to fetch cereal... yet her feet were becoming more and more draggy as she tried to reach the kitchen, as if the carpeted floor (several storeys up) had a magnetism greater than the earth’s Core. Sudra could not even reach the body that was hers before it disappeared into the kitchen.
Mike turned round—forcing Susan also to swivel from the window in mid love-making embrace. He thought he’d heard a shuffle or a whisper—but there was nobody there. He picked up the freshly delivered newspaper from the table—as if shrugging off the extraordinary with the ordinary—and read the main headline:
MAD WRESTLING BY THE ANGEVIN KINGS
Without thought, he plunged it into his briefcase, and, waving a cursory backward greeting to Susan, he left for the office. Time had crept up on him and he was already dressed in his uniform of three-piece suit and bowler hat. This city lived in the Fifties and bowler hats were still evidently all the rage.
*
Mike had forgotten how he had been described in earlier parts so he assumed he’d always looked like this. Barely close-shaven hair in a crew cut before crew cuts were known by numbers for the respective choices of length. Bill Hayley and Elvis Presley were in the Hit Parade—milk bars full of pre-pubescent teenagers, because puberty was very late in those early days. The office—once he arrived—was full of massive desk-calculators (that, one day, could fit into the palm of your hand), surrounded by pipe-smoking jobsworths rattling at their numbered keys. Mike said a jolly good morning as he took his own seat in front of a calculator that was rare inasmuch as it had a ribbon of paper where his work was printed automatically for future posterity—churning out in endless ticketing spools as from an old-fashioned bus conductor’s hand ratcheter. Still too early for his mind to be on the job—and he thought back to his walk to work, past the covered market, where many office-workers emerged as if they had been sleeping there all night—past the Dry Dock, the pub where Susan worked, the zoo gates—and before he managed to summon up sufficient concentration of will-power to face the calculator keys, he took a quick browse of the newspaper, the main headline being:
CHILDREN STILL MISSING
An all night search of the innercity has produced no sign of the Angevin Twins—so further sweeps are soon to take place in the outer city towards the suburbs.
“They ought to try under the city,” said Mike to himself. The Angevin Twins were the first-born of an important city family that had first grown rich over the generations by means of coal-mining on the Northern edge of the city. Mike had seen photographs of that area—big towers with turning wheels threaded by clunking chains, silhouetted against a sky that was more often as black as coal as it was ever blue. The prevailing weather thereabouts had made sure of that. Most citizens travelled south on their holidays and not even the weathermen could explain why it was generally brighter in that direction. Nothing concerning geography or science could justify such differences—almost as if the city seeped darkness towards its head... bearing in mind that its map was a direct representation of a human body: either purposefully or purposelessly reflected by the evolving architecture, town-planning and urban scrawl set in motion by the founding fathers all those centuries ago. On that symbolic template, Mike knew that before one reached the holiday areas surrounding the city’s feet one needed to cross the standing water of a waste reservoir.
He looked into the mirror of the office toilet to remind himself of how he should have been described as a person—if anyone needed to describe him to any people who did not know him. He had just physically added to that standing water (of which he had just unaccountably pictured) and he smiled a smile which he decided was uncharacteristic of him when viewed in a mirror. He wiped his hands on a paper towel. Was this how hawlers were meant to look? A strong personal face with deep lines and searching brows. Black looks offset by sweet smiles? Only the nemonymous ones had tantamount to the blank expressions of those bodily projected ghosts on TV dramas—so he knew exactly what he was, down to the chipped toenails, even if he hadn’t yet dared tell Susan and Sudra.
The office work had taken a backseat ever since the news broke about the Angevin twins. Nobody had given them a second or second’s thought beforehand and maybe many of them knew nothing of their existence at all. The tea lady—pushing her steaming urn—had nothing else in her new gambits of conversation. Not long ago she had been on about the wayward progress of the latest evictions on ‘Big Brother’. N
ow it was whether the Angevin twins had been kidnapped or simply run away like the Famous Five had to Kirrin Island.
None had been prepared for the startling information—and how important it would be for the city and its life—until the population had woken up to such breaking news: hearing of the twins’ existence for the first time followed a few seconds later by more data upon their mysterious non-existence. The twins, before this extreme metamorphosis, had been surprisingly old for their age, so nothing was ruled in, nothing ruled out.
Mike tried to concentrate on his paperwork—without much enthusiasm—occasionally glancing up at his colleagues to whom he often remembered talking when times were more ordinary. It had indeed been a job where office politics often took sway—with alternating recriminations and reconciliations. Corporate entertaining of clients at sport and art arenas. Hitting the knuckle of the business with sensitive tweaking of figures and projections.
“How’s your wife doing at The Third Floor?”
Mike’s colleague—what was his name?—had actually spoken to him. The first attempt at conversation for several days.
“OK. Do you know her boss? Ogdon he is. He often serves behind the bar. Strange bloke.”
Mike had answered, as if he had learned his lines parrot-fashion. Ogdon was known to most people. He used to run a pub near the office to where everyone had resorted at lunchtime for a boozy crush and exchange of business gossip. More was gathered at such gatherings... than gathering the proper statistics back at your desk. Life was human. Life could not be contained within restricted socks. Booze loosened the tongues and then facts flowed, too.
“Yes, Ogdon. I know him. In fact, I knew him before he was a pub landlord. He used to sit for days in a square between tower-blocks, by a fountain, writing novels…”
Mike’s colleague might have continued, had not Mike himself brought the contrived conversation to an end with a throwaway line: