Night of the Animals

by Bill Broun

  And on and on they went, voices from across Albion. The black-eyed ponies of the New Forest wanted larger pastures. The fat gray seals off the Isles of Scilly wanted cleaner breeding waters. That autumn, down from the craggy Black Carls of Beinn Eighe came the angry voices of red deer stags in rut, barking for sex. Then there were Britain’s forty million head of sheep, and each head, Cuthbert suspected, had a gentle idea of its own.

  All these animals didn’t talk to him exactly, not like Virginia Woolf’s Greek-uttering birds or Kipling’s noble, contraction-averse wolves. Words did not pass through snout, proboscis, or mandible. But nonetheless, the animals asserted themselves toward him. They sent messages, some limpid, some inscrutable, but all appreciable. Some were preverbal, others expressive and exact. Most were enigmatic—but they all nipped at him, if only just a little.

  They spoke so tersely, too. Often the zoo animals imparted just one or two expressive words. “Saliq,” the sand cats would whisper. “Murkurk,” rumbled the hippos. “Progress and dominion,” the imperial—and often verbose—lions would intone, and so on. On more and more days, these occult reductions popped into perfect sense within Cuthbert. For example, murkurk, as Cuthbert grasped it, clearly meant “let the hippopotamus make its way to the Thames.” He’d think: how much clearer could it be?

  HE LIFTED UP a tangle of the thin, elastic branches in the hedge with his arm, spun around, and tried backing in. He needed to make sure no one was watching. He felt he could not be more prepared for today, considering his circumstances. He’d put on his black weather-buffer and green trousers for cover. He wore the hood on the buffer, and cinched it tight around his swarthy face. He looked like a big, dark Teletubby from the old TV program—a new one, Boozey, with a smashed television screen on its tummy and two purple Flōt bottle-tops for eyes.

  Getting to this secret spot, a maneuver he had practiced twice that week, seemed far more difficult this evening; he felt as if he were crawling under a duvet stuffed with plaited, stinging sticks. He had ducked and shoved in, stolid and elephantine, but come to a real sticking spot. He must move fast. If a passer-by spotted him—a fat man splayed in the hedges—undoubtedly a commotion would ensue. If that happened, everything ended. His grand plan to free all the animals would die.

  It was with this realization that something truly unaccountable appeared before Cuthbert, within the hedges. All at once, a broad and robust figure, in the shadows of the leaves and branches, crept upon him. A nimbus of golden-green air surrounded him. Cuthbert began to quake in terror, his neck hair standing on end.

  “You!” cried Cuthbert. “You there!”

  The figure seemed to have actually sprouted from the ground within the hedges, a massive yew tree dotted with angry red berries. For a moment, it spumed in all directions, chaotically, a flutter of spinning green boughs with handfuls of black soil and nightlarks and tiny owls bursting from it. A multitude of small, dark animals—they resembled hares made of shadow—poured out from its base and took off into the night air, where they dissolved. The great yew-tree figure moved toward Cuthbert, who could barely breathe, such was his dread.

  “What do you want from me?” he asked.

  The figure replied, “Gagoga.” The voice was unlike all the other animals he had been hearing. This one was familiar, yet oddly muffled. It was like code from some enormous forest, a code spoken from beneath one of its deepest, darkest brooks.

  Cuthbert whispered, “Drystan?”

  the depraved practitioner

  CUTHBERT’S GENERAL PRACTITIONER, DR. SARBJINDER Singh Bajwa, to whom he had grown quite close in the previous months, and who had tried so hard to protect Cuthbert from himself, surely would have started tapping his middle finger on his desk the way he did if he were observing all this.

  Of the small cadre of harried NHS Élite GPs who administered to the poor in the All-Indigent zone around Holloway, the locals considered Dr. Bajwa especially long-suffering and kind, and because of this, he was in mortal danger. When it came to the treatment of Indigents, the new aristocracy brutally rooted out softness. Indeed, compassion (in anyone other than King Henry) was considered a form of depravity.

  But Dr. Bajwa loved on—and in so many degenerate ways—and as far as he was concerned, the regime could top itself. He was well known for his adoration of paper and his unnecessary reminders written in ink on passé sticky notes. He was always handing these to his patients, despite the dozens of Opticalls—the catchall name for audio calls, text messages, and Optispam, sent via WikiNous’s neuro-optical interface—his patients automatically received with every consult. Few, apart from Cuthbert, knew that beneath the quiet, tolerant, papyrophilic surface of the doctor lurked a more swaggering personality.

  Over the previous six months, and well before Cuthbert had got himself stuck beside a green phantom in the hedges, the doctor had developed feelings of both duty and bewilderment when it came to the welfare of this particular addict. Here was a tough old Flōt sot who also showed signs of depersonalization disorder as well as, perhaps, a variety of Cotard’s Syndrome (a delusion in which a patient was convinced she or he is dead). He was, among other things, interesting to Dr. Bajwa. And impossible.

  Cuthbert had spoken to him many times about his delusion of animal telepathy, and Dr. Bajwa, or “Baj,” as friends and regulars called him, would invariably fiddle his fingers, grimace, and proffer one of his beloved English idioms. The doctor was quadralingual, with English, as he saw it, the strangest of the four tongues, but he loved how its scores of idioms put splattering city life into tidy, confident boxes. “I see you’ve really grasped the nettle this time,” he sometimes said to Cuthbert, usually with an expansive grin.

  THE REVELATIONS ABOUT Cuthbert’s animals had begun one morning the previous October. He had been telling Baj about a shambling stroll he’d just taken in Regent’s Park, which encased three sides of the zoo. He’d been stoned on Flōt, as usual, walking on skyscraper legs.

  It was, as it happened, the day of the last performance of the season at the park’s Open Air Theatre, and The Two Gentlemen of Verona was being hastily staged despite the outbreak of raucous protests near the theater. The protestors, who struck Cuthbert as far too obstreperous to be Heaven’s Gaters, heckled the wealthy theatergoers by throwing paper balls made of crumpled pages of old mass-market paperback copies of the banned Hamlet. There was a live dog in the production, a badly trained mastiff with droopy flews, and it kept barking incessantly, sometimes nearly howling.

  Wearing tight black garments, keeping hair long and dotted with bioluminescent pearls, and, in a few cases, marking cheeks with tiny black tattoos—like “prison tears” but actually meant to resemble the similarly shaped black warden pears of Worcestershire—the protestors frightened and repulsed Cuthbert, who revered the Crown, but he felt too wobbly to do anything about it, and the dog—those sore-throated, snappy, endless barks!—badly unsettled him.

  Arf! Arf! Arf! Ar-rar-rar-arf!

  “Who’s torturing that wammel?” he asked the protestors, yawning. They smiled and ignored him. “Doesn’t anyone have one bit of respect for God’s creatures?”

  Just as he readied to spread himself along an empty bench for a nap, the mysterious, wild cacophony spoke to him.

  “Eeeeeeegaah raar! Zchaaag!” As he recounted to Dr. Bajwa, the noise actually knocked him onto a bench.

  “Like this,” he said. Cuthbert threw himself back in his chair a bit, as if to demonstrate.

  The animals of the Regent’s Park zoo, it seemed, didn’t care for “any Two Gentlemen,” he said.

  “The dog, and the angry students and all—you see, I think all the noise sort of stirred up the animals in the zoo, you see? That’s my own little theory, that. The theater’s within earshot—of the zoo, right?”

  “I can imagine that,” said Dr. Bajwa. He was convinced, at this point, that Cuthbert was joking with him—and wasting their time.

  “So, one of the otters said,” Cuthbert had blurted,
“they said, well, they said they want to be let up tha’ cuts,* the ones behind Regent’s, right? You know, with those pretty boats?”

  “They ‘said,’ you say? ‘Said’?”

  Cuthbert glanced down, as if mildly ashamed, and added, “I might say ‘yikkered,’ really—that’s a little more like it, actually.”

  “Yikkered. Otters. Cuthbert, I—”

  “Exactly.”

  Doctor and patient sat in a consultation room at the courtyard-facing back of a Victorian office building in north London. A rusty-red and white Afshar rug with boteh leaf designs covered most of the floor. The space smelled of fig leaves and cedar from Dr. Bajwa’s cologne, and were it not all so greatly soothing, Cuthbert might have held back more. A spray of hot green sunlight and a spring breeze trickled through the office’s ancient diamond-mullioned casement windows the doctor always kept ever so slightly open. With one sweet new breeze, Dr. Bajwa’s hope that Cuthbert was winding him up collapsed.

  “You’re hearing animals? In your mind?”

  “What? No.” He scrutinized his doctor’s face for a moment. “In my ears, doc. In my lug’oles.”

  Soon, the particulars came out. Cuthbert claimed that thousands of animals across London—cats, dogs, rats, garden foxes, lab monkeys, hares, pet gerbils, and of course zoo animals—were trying to speak to him.

  “They don’t let up, doc,” Cuthbert said. “It’s quite difficult—to be on the receiving end, as it were.” He said he tried at these moments to imagine his long-dead grandmother’s kind face, with her wispy-white tendrils of hair sometimes falling in her eyes. She would have gently rued Cuthbert’s whining. You didn’t whine about the Wonderments—and you didn’t talk about them outside the line of descent. “And you wouldn’t believe how many cats there are in this city.”

  Dr. Bajwa listened, half shocked, half transfixed, and nodding more out of courtesy than acquiescence.

  “There’s a sort of naffed-off chimpanzee going off on me right now,” Cuthbert had said that day. His eyes darted around the room, as though observing the black-furred words of an ape pummeling the walls. “E’s warning me to leave him alone!”

  The doctor took a deep breath and nodded his head.

  “That sounds like a very sensible approach,” he said, with a note of certified sternness in his voice.

  Cuthbert puckered his lips and grazed his fingertips across his own forehead. “Could do,” he said. “S’pose.”

  “And you remember, you’ve got help, Cuthbert. Help for you, help for your body, help for your mind.” Dr. Bajwa spoke in a slow, soft cadence. “You remember all we’ve ever said, how I’m not going to let anything happen to you, right?”

  “Ar, yam a chum,” slurred Cuthbert.

  reaching for the derelict heart

  DR. SARBJINDER BAJWA WAS A MUSCULAR MAN with a broad neck and great tactile power. He preferred solutions to problems that could be applied manually, if not pharmacologically. In his spare weekends, he had, among other feats, learned to pilot one of the new solarcopters, which could be spun through the most theatrical, thousand-foot-high spirals with a simple kneading motion of the hands. On his consultation desk he kept a chromed fifteen-kilo dumbbell he liked to lift between patients. He could be a touch boastful, but he was always warm, too, with long, clement eyes the burned green of cardamom and a precise beard so closely shaven it seemed more a placement mark for a beard than the thing itself. His physical might, well known to his friends, seemed effortless. At weddings and family celebrations, he’d let three or four of his young nieces and nephews swing like squirrels from his arm.

  Patients would always inspect, with visible appreciation, that gleaming dumbbell on the desk. It made them feel safe—sheltered from disease, protected from themselves, and beside a power more muscular, if not stronger, than King Henry and the Windsor fanatics.

  ALTHOUGH CUTHBERT HAD HIS OWN Indigent block flat, or IB, as one was called, he barely occupied his assigned living-hole. The IBs were so structurally dangerous, depopulated, and crime ridden that many residents in the last twenty years had abandoned them. When he had started reporting the animal voices, he had been officially, off and on, one of Dr. Bajwa’s increasing number of “no fixed address” patients, and he had indeed spent most recent years sleeping rough, mooching sofa space from strangers, moving in and out of TB-filled doss houses, missions, and cacky B&Bs. (The only family listed on his GP records was a cousin named Rebekka, a retired NHS Élite nurse listed as living in Hertfordshire. Her WikiNous cryptograph was Cuthbert’s last emergency contact, but she had moved voluntarily into a Calm House.)

  Baj inhabited a more orderly world, but it was not without its own disjunctions and sudden partings. He was a former top sport-medicine researcher who had been stripped of access to his treasured laboratory under the resurgent monarchy; the doctor was thirty years younger than Cuthbert, but like Cuthbert, he didn’t fit into his country.

  Fewer and fewer did. With the introduction of the Baronetcy Alimentation Act of 2025 and Positive Disenfranchisement Act of 2028, many of Britain’s most cherished social reforms passed under Victoria had been obviated. National devolution fell out of favor, and the Scottish and Welsh national assemblies lost key powers. A new Orangeman Army sprang up in Belfast. Stunningly, across Great Britain, thousands of urban laborers willingly gave up their rights to vote in exchange for secure jobs on the new soybean farms outside the cities, along with housing in family dormitories, free basic meals, and free access to mind-numbing Nexar hood treatments.

  (Electroencephalographic headwear made of fibronic cloth, Nexar hoods—of a pyramidal shape and in ubiquitous NHS Élite blue—were fitted on people, often but not always voluntarily, and usually at government-operated Calm Houses, and used to send soothing signals down their neuronal axons. The signals could also be “read,” monitored, and manipulated. Over the course of sessions lasting from hours to days on end, the hoods would smooth and desplinter brain activity like a kind of mental wood plane. The effects lasted for weeks.)

  With the new Acts, the old National Health Service had also split into the tiny, private NHS Legacy (for hereditary or purchased peerages, certain public workers, and the thousands of hangers-on in the vast new aristocracy), and the ragged, more and more depleted free NHS Élite (for Briton’s seventy million Indigents and a handful of others from the shrinking lower-middle class). Many middle-class Britons not crippled by various WikiNous distractions had already been decimated by the popular suicide cults, which attracted them in droves. Millions of the rest in the middle, having lost suffrage with the Positive Disenfranchisement Act, fell to official Indigent status during the so-called Great Reclamation of the 2020s, when trillions of pounds of value were written off financial markets.

  As a physician under the Baronetcy Alimentation Act, Dr. Bajwa would normally be accorded a nonhereditary peerage, but he hadn’t saved nearly enough money for even one of the new “baby-baronetcies,” as they were known, and the Bajwas lacked connections. (The physician’s own younger brother, Banee, a former republican activist, had overdosed on heroin years ago, despite all his family’s effort to “sort Banee out,” as their father put it, and this had marked the whole clan as rather dubious.) Moreover, Baj far too often spoke his mind and showed benevolence for the poor—ruinous habits under Henry IX, or “Harry9,” as Indigents called him.

  Baj’s casual denunciations, spoken among supposed friends, of NHS Élite’s emphasis on palliative neurology—in which the relief of pain supplanted research and one-on-one care—had got him assigned to an NHS Élite surgery in offices across the Holloway Road from a betting shop and a Szechuan masturbation stand. It was a far cry from the wealthier central London districts, where serene greens for spawn-ball—a slow-paced kind of tennis with genomic, hour-lifetime lagomorphic spawn-balls carefully “played” across a grassy court—art galleries, duty-reduced luxury shops, and some of the new schools for women’s etiquette had all taken root.

  “Your misappr
ehensions,” he said to Cuthbert one day. “Listen. If you don’t take your meds as prescribed, and you don’t keep off the Flōt—Cuthbert, listen, you listen to me—this is the price. That’s one thing I must say. And that’s just one. You know what I mean, surely. If you do something foolish, in public, you’re going to find yourself wearing a hood, my friend. Or going for a burton.”*

  “I don’t care,” said Cuthbert. “At least it’s not Whittington.”

  “You have no idea what you mean. There is . . . nothing . . . really . . . wrong with Whittington,” the doctor said, wincing a bit. As the last decent free hospital in London, and the only remaining NHS Élite site for addiction treatment, the Whittington Hospital, close by in Archway, was scandalously overstretched.

  “Whittington doesn’t work. It’s hopeless. I can’t understand why King Harry’s let it go this way. It’s not much better off than banjaxed in a Nexar hood, is it?”

  “You are. The hood is . . . the end. Of everything. Whittington can be a start. There’s an effort there. There’s hope. A hope and a prayer.”

  Cuthbert blinked a few times and smiled in a strange, sour way. “The most I’ll ever do is get a few days past the first Flōt withdrawal. I admit they’re very clever at the Whit, I s’ppose. And I feel like that lot . . . loiks me. In their way.”

  “See? You have friends there, thank you,” said the doctor. “You go to Whittington. I’ll get you in, fast-tracked. Anytime. At a moment’s notice. And why worry about the second withdrawal? That’s years away.”