Night of the Animals

by Bill Broun

  He made a belching sound, then a set of aggressive chuckles. He ran a few meters, ducking under draping two-inch-thick ropes. He batted at an enormous nylon ball across the cramped, mustard-smelling room. It bounced off the ceiling so hard, it hit the floor once and bounced against the ceiling again; considering the low height of the ceiling, however, the feat was not especially surprising. He scrambled atop a large plywood box in his chamber so that he could peer through a window slit and look out toward the disturbances. He slammed his fist against the wall, and screamed. He felt excited; something was happening, he sensed. He was trying, in his gorilla way, to ready himself.

  At the zoo, his depression thrived. He had begun slapping food bowls away and pushing keepers away with a force that bordered on the dangerous. He interacted less and less with the public and sometimes threw balls and giant toys at them. They bounced off the fencing, and the humans had a laugh.

  Now Kibali’s back was turning silver, but he would never be able to start his own troop. His penetrating, shrewd black eyes mismatched his degraded captivity. He was developing angina pectoris of late, a result of his sedentary life and the chocolate bars and éclairs one errant zookeeper would sometimes give him, furtively. Guests would normally see Kibali through the humiliating window and try to get him to look at them with those eyes; their tapping on the window annoyed him to no end, triggering the ache in his chest and left shoulder.

  The chimps seemed to be laughing at him. Kibali roared. He did not like chimp-noise. It reminded him of humans. He ran out of his night quarters into the tall but narrow outdoor section of his living space. When he saw the man, he quieted for a moment, stifling a groan. This human did not seem to hold much hope for him, but he would wait and watch. It was astonishing to be visited at this hour. Something unusual was afoot, and much like this man, he, too, felt he had nothing to lose.

  “You,” he called to Cuthbert. “You are headed toward the chimpanzees. Do not go there.” But Cuthbert could hardly hear the noble gorilla, for his head was now a proverbial barrel of monkeys.

  tell them the lord of animals comes

  IT NEARLY BROKE WHAT WAS LEFT OF CUTHBERT’S own mangled heart to hear the primates cry to him. “Please now please now please now please now,” the putty-faced rhesus macaques kept hollering. “Now now now now now help!” Five golden tamarins, their elegantly styled red manes puffed with anxiety, crowded onto a horizontal tree limb and simply repeated a mysterious phrase—we promise you—but at wildly different pitches and volumes, and Cuthbert was beginning to feel unable to cope.

  “Hang on then,” he kept saying. He could not stop listening, but the more he listened, the more sure he became that the “monkeys” ought to be freed right away.

  He started with the chimpanzees, who were closest to him, still softly hooing. It was a very bad decision.

  As soon as he stepped with his bolt cutters off the cement apron near the pavilion entrance, and toward their cage, the chimps whimpered a few times, then exploded. LIKE US, NOISY AND SHOWY, read their sign. If they were “like us,” they were a particularly earsplitting example of Homininae. Their screams were like the sound of several children being stabbed to death. Cuthbert gave a stupid grin, and with his wobbly hands got to work on the fence. He dimly sensed that he was facing something bigger than he could handle. The four chimps started shoving each other against the fence. One of them, a dominant male named Buddy, climbed right up the back of a smaller, younger teenager, and grasped the fence. He glowered down at Cuthbert, slapping his hand against the cage. The teenager, Ollie, peered up and barked at Buddy, whipping his head from side to side. Cuthbert wasn’t sure whether the chimps were scared or angry or both.

  The indoor viewing window and the building’s main doors were armed with loud, guardhouse-notifying alarms, but the outdoor cage itself, which served all the different primate exhibits, was not, and Cuthbert’s bolt cutters flew through the fencing with little effort. Within minutes, he had created a rectangular door, loose on three sides, and before he could finish a fourth, the chimps had shoved the door open a few inches.

  Ollie sidled toward the gap and pushed his arm through. He managed to grab hold of the sleeve of Cuthbert’s jumper and tore it asunder as if pulling a tissue from a Kleenex box. The chimps shrieked and passed the sleeve around. Cuthbert was a little shocked and engrossed for a few seconds, but he kept working. With every new cut, he loosened his “door” to the greater structure, and the chimps drove it open more. Finally, Ollie heaved himself nearly through, but just as the young chimp was about to clear the cage, Buddy vaulted down, and yanked Ollie back, jealously. Ollie scraped his forearm badly on the fence’s jagged opening, and screamed banefully.

  What happened next came with a grim celerity. The injury somehow turned Cuthbert into an enemy in the chimps’ eyes. All four of the chimps piled out of the cage, and set upon him. They knocked Cuthbert down and Buddy bit him viciously on the nose, tearing a nostril away from his face. Cuthbert barely seemed to feel it; he wisely rolled onto his stomach and balled up. The others made waa-bark noises, as if egging Buddy on, but Buddy broke off the attack and stepped back. He whimpered again a few times.

  There was a comparative silence, and the chimps seemed to be checking each other’s fur for something, inspecting. They began hooing again.

  Buddy finally spoke. He said to Cuthbert: “You stay away from us, geeza, you stay away.” Cuthbert raised his head cautiously. He could barely open his eyes, and blood dripped fast off his face. He pressed the heel of his hand, shaky as ever, against the ripped nostril. It did not hurt, but a squinty feeling filled his eyes.

  Cuthbert said: “A’m not your enemy, I’m not. I’m your ally.”

  Buddy shook his head. “Don’t talk to me. Don’t ever say a word to me, geeza. You are a friend of the otters, and the cats.”

  One of the other chimpanzees grabbed the bolt cutters and jammed them into the ground between Cuthbert’s feet. Cuthbert was astonished, frozen with wonder. The chimps’ dexterity and cleverness were beyond anything he expected.

  Then Buddy and Ollie each took hold of one of Cuthbert’s arms, and he gripped his bolt cutters. They dragged him past the gorilla exhibit, the cutters banging, across a concrete verge, to the macaques, THE ALL-ROUNDERS, according to their sign. They dumped him down in a pile.

  Their strength had given him goose pimples, and he wore a weird smile. It seemed he had always only seen old pictures of chimps in powerless or sweet poses: Ham and Enos strapped to their flight couches on the Mercury test flights; nameless pan troglodytes being given HIV-filled jabs in some Swiss lab; Jane Goodall cradling an infant chimp in her khaki arms, sticking a milk bottle in its mouth; Emily the “Chimp Wife” sneaking into the British Museum. But these London chimpanzees seemed powerful and confident and malicious.

  The macaques were different. When Cuthbert managed to get to his feet, he gazed at them in their cage, still holding his nose, trying to stanch the blood. The three of them gazed back in silence. Two crouched on the floor of the cage; the other was curled in a motorcycle tire that hung from a chain. They were all a long-tailed species from Vietnam, and they had short, bristly hair the color of tropical honey and bright pink faces. They seemed to be waiting for him or the chimps to make a move.

  Buddy told Cuthbert: “Let our friends out, geeza, or we’ll kill you, you cat-fucker.” Cuthbert got to work on the cage with his cutters. When he took his hand away from his face, the blood dribbled again, but less than before. His black jumper camouflaged it a bit. There was a dark, shiny patch across his stomach, and a streak down his leg to his foot. It was as if a hidden rage had burst out of him, messily. Yet he did not mind being told what to do by Buddy—there was a comfort in it, a sense of relief he had heard some of his ex-con acquaintances on the streets of London mention about prison life.

  The black-painted caging was the same as the chimps’. Cuthbert snipped methodically, biting his lower lip and squinting.

  Meanwhile, Kiba
li, the last silverback, had come out of his night room and was observing the whole situation from a few meters away. The chimps always made noises when he looked at them during the day. Once, at night, he had seen them with an unlucky rat that had somehow got into their cage. They passed it around, each taking a bite.

  As Cuthbert snipped away, the macaques began to stir. One of them with especially large red-gold eyes, just inches away, pranced past him with its little chest puffed out, and scrambled away. The one inside the tire had climbed atop it and started to jerk the chain, causing the tire to sway slightly. They all started to make a kind of clucking-chirpy sound; he could see their pale tongues touching the roofs of their mouths. It was a threat-alert, but to Cuthbert it seemed strictly reproving.

  “What are you saying?” asked Cuthbert.

  Buddy punched the back of Cuthbert’s thigh, and this time he could feel the pain.

  “Do not address our friends, geeza,” said Buddy. “You are human waste.”

  Kibali said, “Human. What are you doing? Don’t open that cage.”

  “Piss off,” Buddy told the gorilla, leering at him. “Fatty.”

  The moment that a square of metal fencing fell away, the chimpanzees trooped into the macaques’ dwelling. What happened next should not have surprised Cuthbert, but the horror of it was unbearable. The chimps seized the big-eyed leader and beat and finally strangled him. The other macaques shot out of the cage and into the darkness. (One of them ended up being attracted by the helium-inflated aerial lens-bots that had been cast into the zoo by autoreporters, and she made a game of popping every single one between her hands.)

  Cuthbert backed away, shaking his head. He began to cry out, again, “DRYS-STAN! DRYS-STAN!” Driven into a terrified passivity, he had regressed pathetically to childhood—lost in the Wyre, unable to find his lost brother.

  As Cuthbert retreated, he noticed that Buddy was looking at him strangely.

  “What is ‘Drys-stan,’ this thing you say?”

  Buddy’s lips were pursed and pushed forward and red with blood. Ollie and the other chimps stepped a few feet away from the dead macaque, making openmouthed “play faces,” and hooing again.

  “He’s the most beautiful thing in the world,” said Cuthbert.

  “He can’t be human,” said Buddy.

  Almost instinctively, as though seeking his protection, Cuthbert went to where Kibali, flat-faced and quiet now, sat watching the devious chimps. Kibali scratched his forearm. He seemed unperturbed.

  “Help me,” said Cuthbert. Without Drystan here, he thought, who else was there to ask?

  Of course, he was speaking out of his hallucination and toward a hallucinated personality he had grafted onto a real gorilla. But a real gorilla really was standing before him, and its name was Kibali. Setting aside all Cuthbert’s delusions, the fact was, whether imagined or not, he had now managed to release four jackals, three wild sand cats, a large leopard, and half a dozen great apes and monkeys.

  The gorilla opened and closed his long, dark hands, as if they were stiff. He nodded, and said to Cuthbert: “This is not as bad as it looks. They have slain a spy, I am sure. They had never trusted the macaque, and neither did I—though I am no friend of the chimpanzees. The macaque was a favorite of the keepers and the other humans. He was, as one might suspect, trying to become human.”

  Kibali leaned forward and looked into Cuthbert’s face. He continued: “The spy did little ignoble tricks for people. He had no shame. He was always being given treats by the keepers—pound cake and treacle and chocolate milk. He would do his lordly trot—la dee da! He would steal the keepers’ sunglasses, and they would find him, later, wearing them, and they would praise him for this, and give him sweet pasties. We got nothing—slices of green nutra-bread. ‘It’s good for you, Kibali,’ that lot would tell me. The keepers, always, keeping us down, making us more animal than animals.”

  Cuthbert shook his head. He said, “The chimpanzees did not need to kill him. There’s a war about to start, there is, and you need friends.”

  “Hah!” said Kibali, rousing out of his chronically depressed torpor a bit. “What planet are you on? Have you forgotten that there is another war going on?”

  Cuthbert considered this. His entire arms were tremoring and his neck ached badly. There was a peculiar barrenness in his head. He felt that at any moment he might flop down onto the ground and convulse, as though he had become unrooted from all concrete things, depersonalized. He watched the police lights, revolving yellow and blue glimmers, and the frantic solarcopter searchlights, hoping they would hook into him somehow, tangle him up in their stabbing points. He turned and glanced around. The macaque cage was empty, he noticed. The chimps had spirited the body away, and vanished. It occurred to him that, indeed, he was losing track of the war.

  “Why do you keep saying this ‘Drys Stan’ thing?” asked Kibali.

  “He’s here—in the zoo. My brother. My poor brother. He called me here, you know.”

  “He is magic, human?”

  “He’s more than that. He’s sacred,” said Cuthbert. “It’s what my gran said—or something like that. ’E’s the Christ of Otters—the Green Lord of Animals.”

  “I want to know him,” said the gorilla.

  He looked at the gorilla, and said: “You will, Kibali. If it’s the last thing I do in my life, I’ll find him. Do you know about Heaven’s Gate?”

  “Yes. Of course,” said Kibali. “They are anyone, anyone, who hates themselves so much that they try to kill off their own nature. Follow them like a doorway to paradise—that’s what they think. But the humans treat us, even in their so-called humanity, with the same contempt and fear. That is your war on us.” The gorilla touched his index finger to the fencing. “It is time that you remove this. The chimps, they will not come back. You are safe, for now.”

  Cuthbert hesitated for a moment. He was not worried much for his own well-being—after all, his whole life had been about damaging his well-being, and chopping out his own violent inner “gate” to the stars.

  “You must promise me something,” said Cuthbert. “You’re strong, really strong, you know?”

  “I know what you’re going to say,” said Kibali. There was a look of despair on the gorilla’s wrinkly dark face, and he groaned. “You want me to wait. Yes, I will wait here.”

  “No, that’s not it. There will be no more waiting, ode bab.” Cuthbert began to cut the fence open. “Do not hurt any animals, right? No more of that. I can’t take it anymore, right? You are being freed to stop an expected attack from the comet people, so you can protect yourself. You cannot die, Kibali. But you can’t kill, either.”

  The gorilla did not say anything in response at first. After a while, he said, “Hah! Friend! There is blood all over you. I did not cause the deaths. I warned you. And I didn’t hurt you. You’re your own worst enemy.”

  Cuthbert said, “Ah, that’s nothing.” He could not see that he was now badly disfigured, missing one entire nostril, and still indeed bleeding profusely. All he could see, really, was that slick patch on his jumper.

  “Tell any animal you see. Tell them tonight. Tell them no animal is safe. But tell them the Lord of Animals is coming.”

  Kibali nodded and rubbed his chin. “I suppose we would not be talking like this, human, if not for some cause. I want to know this Lord.”

  “You will,” said Cuthbert.

  “I must. Do not years and years of dark gorilla wretchedness add up to something? Is their worth so far below that of human suffering? Shouldn’t animals like myself—I am so alone, in every world on earth—shouldn’t I be allowed to see this Lord just once?”

  “Arr,” said Cuthbert. “Sweet gorilla, yes—but beware of the night. And I have a question: have you heard of the Gulls of Imago?”

  “Ah,” said Kibali. “You’ve been to see the penguins. They are stubborn things. I know nothing about the gulls, except that, I am told they’re white—and not very beautiful, and that the
y like to eat chips and rubbish.”

  When there was a hole of sufficient size in the cage, the animal stepped daintily out and made for one of the lime trees beside the zoo’s perimeter fence. Cuthbert watched the beautiful animal heave itself up to a thick low limb, pull itself across the fence, and drop out of sight. Kibali did not need to be shown the opening Cuthbert had made earlier. Nor had the chimpanzees, who had already crossed Regent’s Park and reached Baker Street. But when Kibali crossed the perimeter fence, the whole night went public. More Met and autonews Skydrones would be dispatched. The Red Watch, undoubtedly, would begin a general crackdown on any nearby Indigent “disorder.” There was now a four-hundred-pound gorilla loose in the city. It was the stuff of King Kong and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Even King Henry would have to be awakened.

  canonization of a drunk

  CUTHBERT DECIDED, AT LONG LAST, THAT HE needed to find the otters, before it was too late, before the dream of finding Drystan ended. The sounds and sights of battle were growing around him. He managed to find one of the pedestrian tunnels that led to the northern areas of the zoo. The green painted line went right into the tunnel. Three strips of tiny blue bioluminescent lights dimly lit the way. Cuthbert felt strengthened when he saw the pastiche of Paleolithic cave art that covered the tunnel’s walls. Rusty orange-colored aurochs—a kind of extinct cattle—trotted along with black hooves high, as though eternally jumping something. The zoo fences—that’s what they were jumping, he thought. They were free, these big orange bulls.

  If things got very bad, here was a good place to hide, he thought. As he exited, he saw one of the ancient red phone boxes off to the side of the path, and he hesitated.

  “OK, Dr. Bajwa,” he said aloud. He went into the box. There were only a few such call boxes left in Britain, and the zoo kept it as a kind of nostalgic throwback for tourists. It was audio-only and featured a real working handset. It offered no WikiNous interface—just direct audio Opticalls to people. The overhead light remained on around the clock. The box was strangely pristine inside—none of the things you could find on the kind of phone box Indigents used for cheap WikiNous interfacing—no stickers or cards for prostitutes, no smell of urine, no chewing gum wads pressed all over the glass panels. It also took coinage, something only older people, like himself, tended to use.