You slammed a fist against the bars. “ Goddammit, Whitey! For once in your miserable life would you give someone a straight answer?”
He smiled at “miserable,” then bent even closer. “How very interesting that you chose that word. Tell me: do you have any idea what it’s like to be one of the forgotten, the discarded, the unloved or the damaged? Can you even for a second imagine how it feels to reach a point in your life where the only promise a new day brings is one of more loneliness? And don’t you dare piss and moan to me about the pain of puberty or adolescent angst-those are hangnails compared to what I’m talking about.
“Think about this: a child is born retarded or deformed and knows only the mockery of other children and the embarrassment of its parents; a woman who’s worked for years, worked without complaint or much thought for herself, who’s struggled and sacrificed to build a good home for her family in the hopes they’ll love her as much as she loves them, this woman is rewarded with what?-the disrespect of her children and bruises inflicted on her by a husband whose own life hasn’t gone exactly as he’d planned, so he has to take his aggravation out on someone. Do you think that makes her feel like her life’s labors have been worthwhile?
“Consider people like you, people who grew up in this town, people in their twenties and thirties who were born into this best of all possible worlds to find only poverty, abuse, or sickness waiting to greet them; they grow up afraid, cold, hungry, full of resentment and despair because from the moment of their first breath everything was already ruined for them-what reason do they have to hope for anything? They wander around with no real sense of purpose, going from job to job, place to place, person to person, nothing and no one lasting for very long, so once again they’re left with only their thoughts and a gnawing emptiness and a heart that was born broken. Where can they go to feel wanted?
“And then there are the old farts like me, bone-bags who eventually become a burden to their families and a joke of what they once were or dreamed they’d become. We are asked to pack the whole of our life’s remaining acquisitions into a single bag or box, along with a dusty photo album or two, then are driven to a colorless room and left to sit and stare at a television that gets lousy reception, or old pictures on the wall that some bozo thinks will make us feel all warm and fuzzy and not remind us that we’ve outlived our friends, our usefulness, even the place we once held in our childrens’ lives… so there we remain, sitting, staring, wishing for a visitor or someplace to go, just some little variation in the routine that’s slowly depressing us to death. But there’s never any variation, so our bodies continue to deteriorate and our skin turns into tissue paper as we fill our noses and lungs with the smell of approaching oblivion. Are any of us with our sadnesses, our deformities, our bruises, broken hearts, declining health, the whole index of personal miseries-are we somehow undeserving of consideration? A five-minute call once a week, a kind word or affectionate smile, an understanding touch? What effort does that take? When exactly were we deemed unworthy? Who decided this?”
He was getting more and more agitated as he spoke, shifting his weight from leg to leg, stamping his hooves against the floor or kicking them against the bars, continually shaking his head as if to break apart the thoughts and scatter the pieces from his head, chuffing and snorting to disgorge the bitter taste of the words in his mouth.
Up and down the corridor, the occupants of the various cages began to stir and move toward their barred doors. Their voices and growls and peeps wove a soft, murmuring cloth of sound that spread out between the cages like a picnic blanket over green summer grass.
“Well, guess what, kiddo,” said Whitey. “There is a place for us. A way to be loved. A way home. Not just us, not just people, but any living thing whose existence becomes intolerable. Are you paying attention? There may be a quiz later.”
The music was being turned up in small increments. Whitey craned his horse’s neck up and to the side. “Almost time.”
“For what?”
A smile. “You’ll see soon enough.”
There was a loud buzz, followed by an ever louder metallic click.
“Whitey, what’s going-”
“-wait for it. It’ll come around again in a minute or two.” He winked. “A pro knows when ‘Places’ is being called.” Then he cleared his throat again and said, a bit too loudly: “Shall I tell him?”
The murmuring blanket whispered agreement. Whitey cantered around his cage, his head thrown back. “Yes, yes, yes! ” He stopped, shook himself from head to hooves, then clopped to the bars. “Human beings running the show, kiddo, was a mistake. Got that? Wasn’t supposed to happen like this.
“See, way back when before there was a ‘when’ to go back to, when the world was new, there were only the animals, but they weren’t animals as we know them now, nuh-uh: they were capable of abstract thought and speech and all the other qualities we now call ‘anthropomorphic.’ And they were happy, and they gave thanks to their creator-the First Animal, the one from which they all sprang into being.
“But creating the world and the galaxy around it and the universe around the galaxy and all that snazzy razzamatazz, well… it wears out A Divine Being. It’s anybody’s guess what specific whatchamacallit El Heffe was in the process of creating when He screwed the pooch-that’s just one those Great Mysteries that we have to live with, but, again, I digress.
“What happened was: God blinked. Can’t really blame Him, He’d been working without a break for six days and you can only stare at something for so long before you can’t see it anymore… so He blinked, looked away for a moment, and just left this new thing He’d been working on laying around, unfinished.
“During the Big Blink, as I like to call it, certain cells in this whosee-whatsit super-dingus mutated while others fused together, creating metazoans and- whammo! -the DNA dominoes fell into sequence and the double helix did its ninth configuration dance and by the time the Almighty Anybody checked back, an amusing accident called evolution had taken place: here stood Man, effulgent and curious and all starkers, scratching his ass and looking for a good place to build the first mall.
“So He let Man hang around for a while to see what would happen, and of course it didn’t work out, but by the point in the show where the whole Forty Days and Forty Nights production number was to go on, Man had convinced the animals that they couldn’t survive without him. Know how he did that? He whipped, beat, humiliated, starved, and worked them until they were so weary and sad they stopped using speech and abstract thought. With each new generation, they’d become more silent and simple-minded and had no choice but to depend on Man. So God wrote a reprise called Noah-not just because He didn’t much cotton to the idea of expunging this interesting accident called Man, but because, by then, the ‘beasts of the field’ were too stupid to know it was time to pair up and save their collective hide.”
Another loud buzz, followed by another click. Whitey craned his neck once more, shaking off foam. “Shit, I got all caught up in things and lost track-was that the second or third time?”
“Second.”
“Okay, got one more to go.”
Every synapse in your brain was firing at you to get the fuck out of there but you couldn’t; you had to hear the rest of this-if for no other reason than because he still might tell you where Beth had gone.
Appalachian Spring was reaching its most famous movement, and from up and down the corridor, human voices and animal sounds began to merge…
… and sing:
“‘Tis the gift to be simple, ‘ Tis the gift to be free, ‘ Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be, And when we find ourselves in the place just right, It will be in the valley of love and delight…”
It was impossible to tell which voices were wholly human and which were wholly not; and then you thought: Maybe that’s the point.
“I’m hogging the spotlight, friends,” shouted Whitey. “Let’s not be shy here, come on, get in on the fun!”
<
br /> A woman’s voice called out: “There was a beast no one remembered, alone of its kind, who did not have a mate…”
Another voice, this of a child: “… and it was left behind in the storm that day…”
They started coming rapidly after that, maybe human, maybe not, maybe something in between, but their words rang clear and high:
“… but it found a place of safety, another world just beyond the great scrim of this world, and there it waited, and when the rains stopped and the sun shone once again, God asked this creature if it was lonely and it said ‘Yes… ’”
“… so God shared with it one of the secrets of Creation…”
“… and with this secret, the creature was able to use part of itself to create another like itself…”
“… and they were called the Keepers…”
“… and God gave the Keepers a Task, and sent them out into the world, the world of the First Animal, to create their own kingdom, separate from that of Man…”
“Figuring it out, kiddo?” asked Whitey.
“Ohgod…”
“I think it’s sinking in,” he called down the corridor.
A third click, followed a third buzz.
Whitey did a quick canter-dance around his cage, chuffed, shook off some foam, then said (in a dead-on impersonation of Bert Lahr as The Cowardly Lion): “Lemme at ’em, lemme at ’em-it’s showtime, folks!”
From the bottom of the railed stairway someone or something screamed.
An alarm began screeching a staccato squawk.
Bright security lights snapped on, mercilessly illuminating everything beneath.
And the cage doors opened.
Blinking against the too-bright lights, you turned to run but the corridor behind you was already filling with those you’d passed before; the ox, the goat, the teenaged man-of-war, the coelacanth woman and bear and all the rest; they slid, rolled, scooted, flopped, walked, and crawled toward you. Bringing up the rear, hunched over because it was still getting used to walking upright, the dark sleeping thing from the cage across from the ox loped and stumbled forward, slick flesh stretched so tightly over its skull and face it looked as if it might tear at any moment. There was something of the wolf about it, or so you thought, but by then you’d turned and started to run toward the hidden stairs only to find the way blocked by a dapper gentleman who tipped his bowler hat in your direction.
Behind him stood four other well-dressed men with their bowlers pulled down to cover the tops of their ears. And you knew why: the tags. They were hiding the blue tags stapled to the backs of their ears. Whitey had one, the ox had one, the goat, the boy on the cot, everyone and everything had a blue tag stapled in the same place.
Whitey stepped out of his cage, whispered “Follow my lead, kiddo, or you’re toast burnt on both sides before your time,” and nudged you with his scar-knotted shoulders until you were backed against one of the opened doors. He winked once more and stood in front of you.
“See, kiddo, the thing is, the First Animal, he’s figured out a way to reclaim this world, but he can’t do it in one big, grand swoop like God did; no, he’s got to do it a little bit at a time, piece by piece, with whatever materials the Keepers can gather. Raw materials, you might call ’em.
“The procedure takes a while, and it hurts like hell, but it’s getting there. Bugs in the system. Kinks to work out. Luckily, there’s no short supply of miserable, lonely people who wished they’d been born as anything else but what they are.”
He leaned forward, breathing hot, moist breath into your face, breath that smelled of the fields, the sky. “Once the balance has been sufficiently offset again, once there are more animals than people-like it was supposed to be-then the First Animal can step through the scrim and restore this world to its natural order. Maybe by then God will have admitted to the fuck-up.”
Around you, the others were crowding close.
Too close.
“We had an agreement,” said Whitey to the figures and things surrounding you. “I already fulfilled my part, I gave you a possible candidate and she was brought here tonight. So he walks out unharmed, right?”
The first man in the bowler spread his hands benevolently and gave a nod, then snapped his fingers. The four other bowler-men moved forward.
Two were empty-handed.
One carried a package wrapped in brown paper with an address written across the top.
The other carried a syringe.
Whitey turned toward you and offered a sad smile. “Won’t see you again after this, Captain. It’s been a real pleasure. You’re a better man than you think you are. Work on your timing. And that fear of bathing.”
“What are they going to do to me?”
“Nothing harmful. You didn’t come here voluntarily, so they have to let you leave.”
For a moment you couldn’t find your voice, and during that moment two of the Keepers grabbed your arms and pulled them behind you; the one with the syringe took the plastic cover from the needle, steadied your head with his free hand, and slipped the needle into a vein in your neck, sinking the plunger.
The image on the monitor changed; again you were looking at the same downtown corner where you’d encountered Drop-Kick, but this time the film was older, grainier, black-and-white. The face of an old man filled the screen as he petted the dog from whose point of view this had been filmed. Then another old man’s face came into frame, then that of a third. Finally, the dog whipped its head around and started running toward a young boy crossing toward it from the other side of the street. The boy had a comic book tucked under one arm. He was holding a bag of scraps from a restaurant. He offered the dog something from the bag. The dog looked up and the boy who would grow up to become your dad smiled down at it. It was the most wonderful smile you’d ever seen.
This was him.
As a boy.
Smiling, with scraps in hand.
Overhead, the squawking alarm sounded in time to the music, one of the figures began whispering something in your ear, and the things assembled in the corridor sang a lullaby while your brain and body melted into something light and shiny and unbound:
“When true simplicity is gained, To bow and to bend we will not be ashamed To turn, turn, will be our delight Till by turning, turning, we come round right…”
You dreamed you were a man who believed no one loved or cared about him. Your hands were scarred from a lifetime of hard labor. You had once dreamed of raising chickens for a living, but the war and your injuries and family demanded otherwise. Now all of it was gone, and you stood alone in a dark hallway. A thin mist swirled around your feet and began to rise, and when this mist filled the room, it was light again. A man stepped out of the light and fog and tipped his bowler. He asked you what you wanted to be. “An eagle,” you said. “Eagles are free and admired. Eagles are loved and respected.” He said that was good, because an eagle is what you were supposed to have been in the first place. He asked if you knew someone else who might like to be something else. You said yes and told him a name.
We’re putting things right for Long-Lost, he said as he pointed the way. It’s taking longer than we’d planned, but we’re getting there .
Then he took you to a place where they changed your body and gave you feathers and flight. It hurt, but it was worth it.
You were loved. Admired. Your heart knew no pain or sorrow. The sky had no place for such things.
You rolled over and opened your eyes. You were back in your house. On the floor. Your clothes were fresh and clean; your skin was creamy and smelled of soap. You wondered if you’d come home drunk. Mom and Dad would be very upset with you. But they were dead, weren’t they? Yes. That was right. They were gone and the house was yours. Only you were leaving soon, weren’t you?
You tried to sit up but your limbs were rubber, so you stayed on the floor.
It seemed to you that there was someone else you should say good-bye to, but you couldn’t think of anyone. That bugg
ed you. You didn’t have so many friends that you would forget one. That was rude. Thoughtless. You weren’t that geeky little four-eyed dweeb anymore; you had friends. Didn’t you?
Did you have a girlfriend? It seemed to you that you did, but you couldn’t picture her face or remember her name.
Foggy dream remnants, that’s what it had to be; foggy dream remnants. You lay back down on the floor and closed your eyes.
You dreamed that you were a dog sitting out in the rain. You were tied to a post. Your sides hurt because you’d been beaten because you had soiled the carpeting. It wasn’t your fault-there had been no one home to let you out. But now you were in the rain and it was cold and you wanted to be lying near the hearth in front of the sweet-smelling fire inside. They beat you a lot, even when you didn’t soil things. You wished they wouldn’t do that. You loved them and wanted them to love you. But some people can’t love a dog. The rain beat down very hard. Mist rose up from the ground. A nicely dressed man came out of the mist and tipped his bowler hat to you. He asked if you were lonely and you said yes. You were surprised that you could talk; you’d never done it before. The man said it was because you’d been made to forget that you could. He asked you what you wanted.
“To be human,” you said, speaking clearly and with ease. “So I can know how they feel and why they put me out in the rain.”
“ Come,” he said, freeing you from the post. “ And remember to think as much as you want and say whatever you wish. Things have been mixed up for a while, but we’re putting them right.”
You trotted beside him-the pain in your sides slowed your progress, but he was patient and kind-and you asked, “How?”
He stopped and pointed back toward the house. “ Someday, he said, “all of these people will be as you were, and all of you”- he knelt down and stroked your back- “will be as they are. Then things will be right again. As right as we can make them.”
“Can I have a family?” you ask.
“Yes,” he said. “Long-Lost would like that. He needs someone to claim and protect one of his… I guess you’d call them ‘angels.’ So you shall have a sister when your parents are no more, and no one-including you-will question this reality. To the world, you will have always had a sister. Your sister will have a son. He will love you very much. And he will have a gift. He will be one of those who will help lift the Great Scrim so that Long-Lost can step through.” Then he shrugged. “Sometimes, a god has to be sneaky.
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