by Bill Broun
He picked up the handset. It felt strangely big and unwieldy. He dug the £1.30 out of his pocket and, unnecessarily, inserted all of it into the Opticall coin slot with a shaking hand. He uncrinkled the piece of paper Dr. Bajwa had given him with his WikiNous cryptograph. He punched it in with shaky hands. The phone rang twice and a woman with a singsongy voice answered, “NHS Élite Doctors’ answering service. May I help you?”
“Ar. Tell Dr. Bajwa I’m . . . in the zoo. I’ve come for the otters and all.”
There was a coughing sound, then the woman said, “Excuse me, sir. What’s your name, sir?”
“Cuthbert Handley—savior of animals.”
“Um, well. Handley, is it? Can you spell that, surname first?”
Cuthbert did.
“You’re Dr. Bajwa’s patient?” she said. “This is an emergency? Dr. Sarbjinder Bajwa?”
“Arr, ma’am.” He was slurring again. “Tell him a’m in the zoo right now. Am yow g’ttin’ this?”
“It’s all going down,” said the woman. “I believe the doctor’s down in Kent for the weekend—flying his solarcopter or some sort.”
All at once, Cuthbert fell backward, pulling the bright yellow handset down with him. Such was his weight that the handset, cord and all, detached like an old banana picked off a bunch. The door of the box flung open and he found himself halfway in and half-out on the ground. He felt dizzy. He threw the phone away and got back to his feet, using his big cutters to help himself stand up, like a crutch.
“There,” he said. “It’s done.”
And then he heard them, reminding him of his task—the otters, surely:
Gagoga maga medu, gagoga maga medu,
Remeowbrooow, Cuthber-yeow,
Anglish water ish arg forever groad,
Cuthber-yik-yik-yik-yik, mray for rugrus!
Gagoga maga medu meant what? He did not know, he thought, and he might never know, but the rest he could work out. It meant, in otterspaeke, Remember, Cuthbert, English water is our forever road, St. Cuthbert pray for us! Three separate thoughts, gurgling and ungilled. It was the end of meaning at the moment just before drowning. For Cuthbert if for no one else, the nonsense meant exactly that there was still reason to hope in Britain in 2052.
“Arr, I’m coming,” Cuthbert said aloud. “Sweet, sweet boys, a’m coming at last.” He started walking again.
A police solarcopter’s spotlight found him and trained its shaky beam on his every move, and with the light from the heavens streaming down, Cuthbert reckoned time was running out.
He began to hobble along more quickly, toward the otters, but after a minute of pressing on like this, he found he was lost and out of the spotlight—his normal state, really. The solarcopter’s pilot was inexperienced and applied too much pressure to one of his rudder pedals, and the spotter lost Cuthbert and couldn’t seem to find him again, for now.
“Shit,” Cuthbert said. “Thank god.”
He wished he could find one of the zoo’s map-signs. He did remember that the otters were located at coordinates “2B,” which Cuthbert interpreted as a kind ontological code.
Through shivering lips, he said, “Or not to be—that’s the palaver.”
The air had turned frosty as a great western fold of stratus clouds finally scudded away for good.
Urga-Rampos had become shockingly visible. When Cuthbert saw it this time, it hit him like a kind of antibeatific vision. Its center showed feathering gradations of light, dozens of overlapping white petals. Its long arms had turned into two pallid, satanic horns. The comet itself seemed to be aiming straight for the ground, tearing the sky open. It looked constitutionally wrong for England. It was too big and showy and nocturnal, a multifoliate rose from an evil galaxy far away from the Milky Way. Nothing very English about that.
With one nostril missing, a body racked by Flōtism, insanity, and poverty, and his clothes in dirty, torn strips, Cuthbert faced the comet with what could be regarded as astonishing courage. He held his blood-caked fists up and shook them at the comet. He screamed, with a hoarse voice, “In the name of Saint Cuthbert! You’ve no right to come here!”
He fell down again, in exhaustion, on all fours, his bolt cutters clanking down, and said, “And we’ve got otters! Good English otters!” He was beginning to suffer acute liver failure. In fact, his skin was turning a sickly yellow-greenish hue, and Cuthbert’s life was ending.
At last, Cuthbert had become the Green Saint, just like the statue in the old churchyard where his grandfather’s grave was lost. He held a new power now to bring others, too, into his shimmering faith. He was the al-Khidr, the Mahdi, and now he knew it as much as he could know anything. He grasped, too, that his identity in England had always been written in the water of Dowles Brook, and in the songs of the otters since the Day in 1968 when he left the world and become someone else. Ever since, he had awaited this moment—this canonization.
St. Cuthbert the Wonderworker, the harbinger of a new animal Christ, had arrived.
LIKE MANY OF THE ENCLOSURES, the oriental small-claw otters’ exhibit was deceptively hushed at night. The otters’ nocturnal habits were only in part disrupted by the zoo’s diurnal cycle of daytime visitors and nighttime imprisonment. They remained active denizens of the dark and tended in the wee hours to inhabit parts of their enclosure not seen by zoo guests.
St. Cuthbert’s arrival was anticlimactic—at first. Much like at the Penguin Pool, he encountered no movement, no sound. On the sloped walls of textured concrete that made up the fake riverbank were tarry spraints of the animals, smeared and rubbed in by successive paws into marks that looked like a frenzied Sumerian cuneiform. The spraints released a strong, distinctive smell, like jasmine tea. The dung’s smell of wildness gave St. Cuthbert confidence and calmness, and he was quick to act on it. Gripping his bolt cutters by their foam handles, he bashed beak-like hardened steel blades against one of two thick glass panels, which allowed guests to view the otters’ underwater antics. The effort paid off instantly. A divot of glass popped out and water spouted out onto the walk. St. Cuthbert began jabbing the beak into the hole and easily worked open a gap as wide as a stove. Green water sluiced out in a roar, and St. Cuthbert stood back, staring fixedly and biting his lip. It took about two minutes for the entire enclosure to drain. The California comet aliens were everywhere now, swirling in the sky, screaming through crackling megaphones, roving the zoo to obliterate the souls of all living beings in Animalia. But St. Cuthbert, the water coursing over his feet, stood now in his little islet of English sacred reverie, his psychotic Lindisfarne.
The moment the water stopped rushing, the entire romp of the London Zoo’s small species of otter appeared and leaped down through the gap, pouring out in one quivering, shiny, river-bottom-colored whoosh. It was as though they were, together, the last and most precious thing in England to be emptied from it, a half-water and half-earth being made of golden-brown jewels and smelling of stolen foreign flowers. They were seven animals in all, with the huge and now fully pregnant female at the center of the family, swanning forward with a certain lumpy majesty. Two males, “on point,” as it were, and yikkering softly, fronted the romp, thrusting their noses out to smell for food and danger and water.
The big female turned to St. Cuthbert. He dropped to his knees. He slapped his hands onto the wet pavement of the walk. He thought he heard her say, “Gagoga maga medu,” but he couldn’t be sure, could he, really?
“I, I, I, I, b-b-b-b-b-beg you,” Cuthbert stammered, falling over and curling up. The cold air, combined with his withdrawals, was making his teeth chatter, his tongue turn to fluttering leaves. “Take away my—my—my sick head. It dunna work royt en-nay more.”
You have freed us, the otters said. Look at yourself, St. Cuthbert—and call for the Christ of Otters.
But my Flōtism? What about that?
Go to the lions. They will take away all your misery. You will save England and all its animals tonight.
St. Cuthbert be
gan to weep. It seemed clear the otters were suggesting his martyrdom.
No, he said. I dunna want to see en-nay loyns.
It’s the only way to stop the soul-mongers. Through your salvation alone, St. Cuthbert.
No, he said. Tell me, tell me a different way. Can’t I find the Gulls of Imago? He said aloud, repeating the song of the penguins, “Seagulls of Imago, yow’re song shall make us free . . . from Cornwall to Orkney, we dine on irony . . . along with lovely kippers from the Irish Sea.” He belched.
You will free the lions, and the gulls will come, and they will set right the arts of the world, at least for many years. They will put the machines of evil back to their original, good purposes.
Must I die? When? Why? What do I do?
But the otters weren’t stopping to chat. Long used to the hundreds of incongruous scents in the zoo, they nonetheless sensed the great disturbances in the night. They were keen listeners, and the sounds of the solarcopters and the screaming chimps particularly terrified them. They moved as one, first west, then south toward the unmistakable smell of the dank water of Regent’s Canal. Before St. Cuthbert could lift his head, they were out of sight.
He felt mournful and newly devastated and very tired. He could see, indeed, that his skin’s color had darkened to a distinct green. It may have been magic, but it was also multiple organ failure.
As he stumbled south, through the cave-art tunnel, keeping off the paths now, and made his way toward the area of the big cats, he stopped at every enclosure, paddock, and cage he could, releasing as many animals as opportunity afforded. He swung open the great rear gate of the elephant paddock, and Layang, Dilberta, and the fierce Mahmoud came lumbering out. The giraffes and nervous okapis proceeded from their large faux-African diorama gingerly. A threesome of yipping fennec foxes from Algeria came out in a playful sprint, tumbling over each other, ready to cavort with any creature that was game. The shy black-and-white tapir named Gertie, from Malaysia, had to be pushed along from its leafy pen by St. Cuthbert, then shoved, but it soon returned to the safe-smelling imported plants, cowering. The cow-like anoa from Sulawesi, a pair of Andean pudús, and a quintet of pert peccaries from southern Mexico—all of them trotted out quite happily and expectantly, as if their enclosures had merely been expanded.
As the saint walked on, freeing all manner of mammal, reptile, marsupial, and bird, a question he hadn’t counted on began to trouble him: had all these animals really ever spoken to him?
Yes, answered the lions. Don’t be a fool, for at the sound of our roars, sorrows will be no more.
But he wasn’t so sure. For a few moments, he began to suspect that his mind, under the influence of decades of abuse, had been playing an extraordinary, elaborate ruse. There was a strange feeling of unreality almost suffocating him, as if every part of the whole crazy night itself had been thrown into outer space, and all he had left was a dark, unbreathable vacuum in every direction for a trillion miles.
BY THE TIME St. Cuthbert had reached the Asiatic lion compound, the London Zoo was being overrun. Because much of the hubbub from the police and autonewsmedia was near the northeastern end of the zoo, the animals naturally fled in the opposite direction, toward its southern tip, where St. Cuthbert had so effectively created his huge hole in the main fence. It was a funnel, and through it the screaming beasts were about to spill into London like unruliness itself, in scalding streams.
At the same time, in St. Cuthbert’s mind, there was another, even scarier presence invading the zoo. More and more, he could see flashes of white-bodysuited Luciferian Neuters, gliding unnaturally, as if on wheels, and drawing silver quantum contra-fluxal staves that popped out of their wrists like long daggers. St. Cuthbert knew they were coming for the animals, and that both he and the Red Watch must do everything to try to stop them.
His nemesis, his abuser, his pursuer—the thuggish Watch—now shared the same enemy as he.
“The Watch and I—on the same squad,” he said, snickering. “That’s not on, not on.”
father drury and his “dogs”
AFTER LEAVING REGENT’S PARK, THE JACKALS RELEASED earlier snouted around for a long time in a shadowy rubbish collection point behind a gastropub on Marylebone Road. They scrounged among lemon rinds and stale loaves of pain de campagne, and licked sweet dark oil leaking from a broken deep fryer. The canines would dart away whenever any of the workers came outside to dump bottles and cans or to take cigarette breaks, but always drifted back, more nervous and irritated. Eventually the jackals managed to tip a giant blue recycling bin filled with lager cans and the huge clatter scared them away. But the pack was in a bit of a state now, a peculiarly canine blend of curiosity, fear, and bloodlust.
They ran south, into Marylebone proper, staying close together and attracting almost no attention. It was May Day. An emaciated young hedge fund trader who normally monitored the Asian markets at night was crouched, wide awake, in his new red Bayerische glider outside the famed London Clinic. He had taken off work to wait for an appointment at 7:00 A.M. He had been unable to concentrate on his accounts. He was trying to eat a carton of Kung Pao Prawns and crab puffs picked up in Chinatown. It wasn’t going well. Like Dr. Bajwa, he had metastatic lung cancer, although he had never smoked, yet unlike Dr. Bajwa, his had been discovered cruelly late. It seemed to be in the air, like radon gas. His appetite had been absent for weeks. He kept putting prawns to his mouth and taking them out. When he saw the jackals, he rolled down the window and clicked his fingers to attract them.
“Allo,” he said. “Come on, busters, let’s have a pet.”
The jackals at times showed few inhibitions around people if it served their purposes. One trotted up and began licking the traces of sweet, peanuty sauce off the trader’s bony fingers. The man was lonely. He had faced his disease, so far, with great valor, but he was far away from his family and friends in Yorkshire. He thought of his small collie, Barney, from his childhood—a loyal little animal, who used to chase hares in the beetroot field across the lane. He wondered if he ought to move home to die.
“You’re right good sorts,” he said. “Right good tykes.”
The other dogs surrounded the hand and the good smell wafting from the Bayerische.
“That’s it,” he said. The trader looked around the street. He saw no one. He turned the carton upside down and let all the food fall on the pavement. One of the jackals lunged forward, snarling at the others, bullying them back, but they resisted, and every jackal managed to get at least a mouthful. The viciousness of the animals took the trader aback.
“Steady,” he said. “Steady, boys.”
Then the jackals ran off, south again. Their loyalties were only to the pack.
Humans were one thing, but as the night wore on, the roars of cars and lorries were making them increasingly angry and jittery. The pulsing thrums of internal combustion engines were shocking to them, like a distant background noise they had always heard in their captive lives suddenly turned up to maximum volume. Eventually they fled over to Harley Street, which was relatively quiet at this hour—nearly 4:30 A.M. The unseasonably cool, dry air of the night, passing over the warm, damp streets, had created a thick layer of fog. They stayed on the wide, clean pavements, which had none of the Mars bar wrappers or the scraps of the Sun found in most London byways. The place smelled of old, strange human skin to them, skin rinsed of the body odor and sex and food scents they could detect on their zookeepers. They had made fast work of the goat from the petting zoo, but they hadn’t been able to eat much. They felt more relaxed and hungry for blood again, and they were yipping faintly, happyfury, happyfury.
The iron fence fronting the doctor and dental offices on Harley Street had all been painted recently in the same glossy black enamel. The consistency and predictability of the fence bars gave the jackals confidence. They had latched onto a kind of geometry that fit the canine mind. In their color-blind vision flashed steady ticking of bars, like the demisemiquavers of thirty-second notes
. And what was that music? It went like this: find-kill-find-kill, trilling in the speeding heart of dog-time.
They ran faster now, a bit furiously, down to New Cavendish Street, where the fence bent perpendicularly to the right. Tick tick tick tick, flashed the fence. A black cab clattered into the road and down a very narrow lane toward George Street. They gave chase. They had lost all their caution. Eventually, the dogs came to the High Anglican Church, St. James, an exquisite neo-Gothic structure built on the site of a chapel where Spain had, four centuries before, tried to organize a coup d’etat against Elizabeth I. The doors were wide open, strangely, and alive with human scents.
A very old eccentric priest, one Father James Drury, had risen early, as was his custom, to pray for all airline travelers in the night skies. He knelt with difficulty near the altar. At age eighty-six, he had been under persistent pressure from the bishop to retire, but Father Drury felt pride in saying the occasional liturgy he was permitted to lead, and he had strongly resisted moving from the rectory, to the point of frank irritation among his younger colleagues. He had just unlocked the main doors and flung them open, as he always did. Often, at this hour, one or two rough sleepers would find their way up from the maelstrom of Soho and enter the church for a kip in the pews. Father Drury never asked them to leave. Tonight, he knelt down near a man bold enough to use a sleeping bag. He had started his long prayer, asking for those ten miles up in the sky, who hurtled at the speed of sound while watching edited versions of Dreams of Antarctica and Bone Arrow 2, to be protected “from all danger of collision, of fire, of explosion, of fall and bruises, and evil, through Jesus Christ, our Lord, Amen.” Who knows how many souls Father Drury’s intercessions vouchsafed for that morning meeting in Brussels?