Night of the Animals

by Bill Broun

  He thought to himself, Where are the bloody saints now? I’ve been handed a pitchfork, but no other directions.

  He wiped sweat roughly from his forehead with his arm. He grabbed his bolt cutters from the grass.

  He started back to the zoo’s path, feeling its gravity acutely. He kept rubbing his tongue against a bit of loose skin on the inside of his cheek. It wouldn’t stay in place. It was as if every strand and filament in his body were drooping away, post-Flōt. He stopped at one point until he could scrape the tiny piece away; he rolled it against the roof of his mouth, then swallowed it. He began walking again, stiffly, with the short-legged proprioceptive illusion one often felt in withdrawal. At the path, he tried to orientate himself in the way sloshed people do, cocking his head to the side and squinting through one eye. He only vaguely understood the zoo’s layout, but he could sense that the location and vastness of the breach in the fence held possibilities.

  The zoo seemed far larger than he had remembered it. Outside, in the park, it had always looked compact, like a secret animal-holding cell set behind a hedge or two. Inside it felt bigger than England. He felt a stab of impatience in his stomach. He started to hurry, in a leaning, stiff-legged manner. He decided he might just as well flit from exhibit to exhibit for a while, “regrouping” before the night’s larger, onerous undertakings.

  Again, he heard a voice shouting out, now more distinctly: “Help me!” It was hard to tell if it was a man or a woman. The voice sounded very old, however, and weak. It couldn’t have been Drystan—he knew that much.

  Cuthbert thought for a moment of calling back. But what was there to say?

  The idea that a human being, the night watchman, for instance, could be standing, terrified, atop a picnic table, begging for help, or trying to find a tree to climb—nothing even close crossed Cuthbert’s mind.

  He followed one of the paths and ambled north, past the Bactrian camels. On the path he came upon part of a carcass. It was a hoofed leg, but its thigh and haunch had been shorn away neatly around a bloodied bone. Cuthbert knelt down; he felt he would weep, but didn’t. There was only a stinging rigidity in his throat that soon passed.

  He touched the cloven hoof. Its halves reminded him of a tiny pair of beaten ballerina slippers. He rubbed the pastern and, pinching the hock, he turned the leg over. It felt cool and sticky with blood. He pulled his hand away in a jerk. He could not work out what sort of animal the leg belonged to, but he guessed a deer. He thought momentarily of the roe deer he would sometimes see grazing in the lawns of a ruined castle in Dudley the family had sometimes visited on the way to Worcestershire and the Wyre. But they had short, reddish-brown hair, and this animal’s was blond and long, and as soft as a girl’s.

  When he stood up, he checked around the ground for any other parts of the unfortunate creature. He did not see anything obvious.

  He walked along, using his foot to push aside shrubs that edged the path. He soon came to a place that looked ravaged. There were long smears of red on the pavement, streaking into the grass like the lamb’s blood signs of Passover. In a spray of new grass he spotted something odd. At first, he thought it was a watering jug with a strange pink spout, left by some forgetful gardener. Only when he looked much closer did he see it was an animal head—a goat’s. Its eyes and the sockets around looked vigorously chewed out. The whole muzzle and lips had been removed, giving the skull a teeth-gritting mien.

  “Fuck me,” said Cuthbert.

  He grabbed the head by a horn—it was surprisingly heavy, as heavy as a four-pack of Flōt orbs. He went back and got the goat’s leg and tucked it under his arm.

  He made his way back to the maintenance shed area and the broken-open main fence. Every half dozen yards, he knelt down and daubed the pavement with the carcass remains. A few times, he bashed the head down, splattering bits of blood and brain matter on the walk. He did it calmly and meticulously, like someone trying to get ketchup from a bottle. When he finished marking a spot, he would move on another half dozen meters or so. He used his foot to mush the pieces of goat into the pavement until he could see a distinct mark. When he got to the maintenance shed, he threw the head toward the spot where the fence had been brought down, but it bounced and rolled horribly several yards to the left, its one remaining long ear whipping like a tiny bloody pennant. He was trying to create a system of blood-splattered signposts. He hoped the animals might follow the trail out, like Hansel and Gretel’s trail of bread crumbs. It seemed an astute plan to him, based not in wheat flour, but in gore and death and insanity—things that lasted.

  Heading north again, toward the majority of the animal enclosures, including the otters’, Cuthbert felt more buoyant. The blotches of the goat’s blood did not strike him as morbid or gory, but momentous. They marked the beginning of the end of a great threat to Kingdom Animalia.

  song of the penguins

  SOON CUTHBERT CAME UPON THE LONDON ZOO’S once-famous Penguin Pool, adjacent to the Children’s Zoo. He gazed at the stark DNA-like double-helix of ramps at its center, which many an architecture student in the previous century had observed with an unruffled enchantment. Cuthbert gave a satisfied little chuckle.

  “Bostin, that is!” he said.

  The birds were not visible.

  “Penguin muckers,” he called in his most singsongy Black Country accent. “I’m heeee-earrrrrr. I can help yew-oo . . . escape, eh—from your noyce little clink.”

  There was no response. At that moment, the zoo’s relic collection of black-footed African species—their joints arthritic, their instincts to dive and swim cramped by the unnaturally shallow pool, their hatcheries incorrectly placed—were dozing miserably, slightly offstage, in a High Modernist rookery of iceberg-white cement attached to the main pool and facing into it. These “Jackass” penguins, as they were called in their homeland, had lived up until their extinction in the wild on the softest of sands, not on icebergs, and certainly not on reinforced concrete.

  THE LEGENDARY POOL had been designed in the early 1930s by a young Jewish émigré from Russia. Berthold Lubetkin and his team of Bauhausers, all of whom ate great quantities of a new white food called yoghurt, had studied the penguins very carefully and very earnestly. Unfortunately, what they mostly kept discovering were artistic-politico devices rather than birds. (This was the politically explosive 1930s, after all.) At the time, this approach excited the zoo authorities terribly, stoking up their worst paternalistic impulses. As absurd as it sounds, it actually seemed to them that the zoo might lead the nation not merely in life sciences, but also in social architecture: if penguins could appear happy in a clean, hygienic, artful domicile, and given proper care and food, it would set a great example for what to do with England’s poor in their flea-infested, crumbling slums. Tuberculosis would vanish. Joy would appear. One of the greatest of the zoo secretaries, Chalmers Mitchell, brought in unemployed Welsh miners as laborers to dig out the pool—all part of the example.

  “More light!” Mr. Mitchell was to have exclaimed one day while the pool was under construction in 1933. He had stood at the edge of the lovely new hole. It was the happiest day of his life. He had brought a pewter tray of teacups for the workers. They were all full of yoghurt. Personally, he found the stuff nauseating, but it was supposed to be very healthful, according to one of Lubetkin’s Bauhauser friends who was selling and promoting it on the side.

  “More light! Here’s a bit of refreshment—free, of course!”

  The pool was completed in seven weeks and the laborers were let go. When all was said and done, the public cared little for the pool. They liked the penguins all right, but they did not properly rise to the challenge of the pool’s Art. In time, various naysayers in the papers began to opine on the pool. It was, among other things, they said, a fantastic failure from a zoological perspective—the penguins would not or could not multiply in it. How, they asked, had Chalmers Mitchell missed this flaw? They declared the pool, literally, sterile architecture, and while its bea
uty amused champions of High Modernism, the penguins truly suffered.

  Cuthbert read the small, polished brass plaque, placed by the Royal Institute of British Architects, that was riveted beside the penguin’s information sign: BERTHOLD LUBETKIN (TECTON), 1901–1990, RIBA GOLD MEDAL. He rubbed his fingertip across, down, and then up the tiny engraved e in Tecton. “There, like a little penguin, up the walk,” he said.

  DOLOR HUNG OVER the pool like faint, gray-green mist, but Cuthbert saw hope there, too.

  In his opinion, the pool was certainly a symbol for something, or a sort of trick process, he reckoned, but he needed time to work it out. He felt a vague sanguinity, a feeling that the structure might offer a kind of release of both personal and national power of some sort, a splitting of spiritual atoms. It was often this way when he first gazed at extraordinary public art and architecture in the city: the Centre Point skyscraper seemed a sleek, wafer-windowed version of his own tower block. The half-century-old Westminster Tube station, with its glistening grays and massive grids of escalator chutes and support beams, was a breathing machinery he could inhabit and taste the power of. Even its perforated silver steel claddings, with a trillion dimple holes, made it seem as if the station itself exhaled air from mathematical lungs. But Cuthbert’s feelings of awe and inclusion always faded; the red nuplastic half-benches at Westminster seemed cynically designed to keep vagrants—and he was one, sometimes—from getting too comfortable.

  And yet, the Penguin Pool seemed of a different, higher order. It wasn’t mere urban infrastructure. It flabbergasted Cuthbert, more than anything he had ever encountered in the city. It seemed to be trying to delight him personally, like some enormous, fragile toy tied with a white bow. He read the plaque again. He wondered if the pool might “work correctly” if he stopped to eat a bowl of yoghurt. He said the word “Tecton” aloud. He acquired the erroneous idea that it served not as the name of Lubetkin’s architectural practice, but as his professional nom de guerre, as with the forgotten artist Christo or the new “Dead Pixel” sculptor, Pointe.

  “Tecton,” he said, several times. “There’s a clever clogs. Tec. Ton. Tec. Ton. Tec. Ton.”

  He leaned over the rail. He spoke down toward the rippling ovular pool of water. In the day, this water looked blue and aesthetically ingenious; at night, it glowed a sick, radioactive yellow.

  “Hello?” he called. A few squeaky chirps and one morose honk arose from the hidden huddle, somewhere below, but nothing else. Cuthbert wondered if he was irritating the penguins.

  He spoke again, rather nervously: “Hello, you! Come on now, right?” He suspected the birds had been moved, or that they were protesting his presence. He felt frustrated.

  “Say something, geezers!” he blurted.

  What occurred next was important, an unmistakable indication of the new, ever more florid stage of Cuthbert’s Flōter’s hallucinosis. While not dissimilar to schizophrenia, Flōter’s hallucinosis is oddly uniform in how it attacks the mind when it does take root. Nearly always, victims encounter something that is not supposed to talk talking up a storm. It may be a pineapple on a table that grows a face and recites the Book of Revelation. It may be a hundred wicked homunculi hiding in the drunk’s bedroom walls, jabbering about the merits of infant stew. It may be a tree whose wind-blown leaves are calling for better child glider-seat designs. And it may be a jackal or otters at the London Zoo, or the souls of lost brothers. Or a huddle of penguins.

  In any case, if what happened to Cuthbert comes across as too far-fetched, rest assured, it was all too true for him: after he had demanded, in so many words, that the penguins answer him, they finally obliged. The nearly extinct Jackasses, none of whom had ever seen their dinette-size home isles off the Cape of Good Hope, who slept stuck inside a twenty-ton objet d’art, sang these bizarre words:

  Seagulls of Imago, your song shall make us free,

  From Cornwall to Orkney, we dine on irony,

  Along with lovely kippers from the Irish Sea.

  Seagulls of Imago, your song shall make us free,

  Until that day we’ll wait, and watch French art movies,

  Your avant-garde near saved the twentieth century,

  Along with lovely kippers from the Irish Sea,

  We’ll take our daily fill of anguished poetry,

  ’Til the world becomes zoologically arty.

  Seagulls of Imago, your song shall make us free,

  Seagulls of Imago, your song shall make us free,

  Make it new! Things not ideas! Ambiguity!

  And endless lovely kippers from the Irish Sea.

  Whatever did it mean? If all the Nobel laureates in the world parsed such a grandiloquent, rambling statement, they would surely have remained befuddled. It was the essence of obscurity.

  Yet this case could be no plainer to one man, yoghurt in his tummy or no.

  Cuthbert said, “You’re all stuck up, you lot.” He felt piqued by the villanelle the penguins had recited. What he wanted to talk with them about was helping them to escape the zoo, not the mysteries of Imago. Who the bloody hell were the Seagulls of Imago anyhow? He wondered how Drystan might view all this—far more sensibly and clearly than he, Cuthbert guessed. He’d sort these penguins. He’d handle ’em.

  a broken art, a broken neck

  “COME OUT THEN,” CUTHBERT SAID. HE FELT SURPRISED that the penguins still refused to show themselves, even after their paean to seagulls and all. There were unnatural noises elsewhere in the zoo again, and he knew his time to free them was quickly running out.

  “If yow don’t come now,” he slurred. “’A corr come back.”

  Unlike most enclosures, the Penguin Pool, sunken about twenty feet down in its Modernist pit, could not simply be sliced open with wire cutters. He could not throw a rope down or wedge open a door or gate. Indeed, he could not determine how the penguins had been put into the pool. The only approach he felt might work was to find a long, flat plank of some sort to tilt down onto one of the pool’s helical ramps. But then what? Short of walking across the plank himself and grabbing a penguin in each arm, he would need to employ persuasion. What would he use to lure the penguins out? He had no kippers, from the Irish Sea or anywhere.

  He examined the little information sign. It read: “The only natural home of the endangered jackass penguin was off the coast of South Africa. Harvesting and eating of penguin eggs by humans was the greatest reason for the species’ extinction in the wild.”

  Penguins from South Africa, he thought. What a marvel!

  Cuthbert had an idea. He felt he knew these arty types well enough to make the plan work. It was luminously simple: he would shame the penguins into action by accusing them of snobbery.

  He said, “Bloody elitist birds!”

  No, answered the penguins. Never. We are . . . artists.

  “Artists? Oh-ho-ho! That’s quite particular, innit?” He mouthed the word like a filthy, oily slur. Gazing into their quiet pool, with its dull green blanket of vapor trapped in white, stiff walls, he could not resist grinning. The birds had got a cob on all right. Surely, they’d come out any second.

  He waited a moment and added: “So come along then. Defend yourselves. Show yourselves—artistes!”

  Nothing. Not the faintest echo of a stirring.

  “You’re going to let the world be destroyed if you don’t come out, little poshies.”

  Seagulls of Imago, your song shall make us free.

  The poetry startled Cuthbert from his thoughts. He looked at one of the ramps. Penguins! He was amazed to see, as instantly apparent as something switched on, a sort of conga line of half a dozen penguins. They looked different than he had imagined—they weren’t robust, tall creatures colored in neat tuxedo panels of black and white. They possessed mottled bellies, very small, delicate frames, and hooked banded beaks.

  “Bostin!” he said. “Oh, I knew you’d come. Some of you, anyway.” He jumped higher upon the wide, shelf-like edge of the pool—the edge with a notor
ious flaw of being too high for most children—and balanced on his stomach. His feet were off the ground. He could see, from this perspective, that he could, perhaps, drop himself onto a set of service stairs, to his right. The stairs led down to the lowest level of the pool platforms, where the nesting boxes were. From there, conceivably, he would pluck the birds out and toss them (gently) over the wall.

  But would it hurt the penguins? They seemed so vulnerable, so diminutive. More of the penguins had appeared on the ramps. They seemed to be engaged in a kind of preliminary procession. It was as if some critical mass of discomfort had ejected them from their nests, and now, once stirred, they all had to leave their nests and prepare for—what? Cuthbert had no idea. Some confrontation between bird and drunkard, sculpture and dissolution?

  “Come along, come now,” he said.

  He felt newly disheartened as well as indecisive. He’d tried so hard to lure the penguins out, and his effort had seemed to pay off, but what did it add up to?

  He saw only one solution. He put his wire cutters on the ground and climbed up upon the Penguin Pool’s wall. He had to heave himself up with a brutal lurch that almost threw him over the edge into the pool itself. He rose for a second, reeling side to side, trying to recover balance, then sunk down on all fours like some drunk, acrophobic infant on a rooftop. He crawled to the service stairs.

  Do not try to touch us, the penguins suddenly said. We go nowhere without the gulls of Imago.

  Cuthbert felt annoyed by all this. Perhaps the penguins were, in fact, snobs.

  He kicked his legs back, dangling them down, feeling for the stairs with his feet, and dropped down onto a small, square landing.

  Leave us, said the penguins. We perform by secret schedule, and not without the gulls of Imago.