Night of the Animals

by Bill Broun

  When he saw the first animals, he leaped up to his feet and backed against one of the Portland stone columns that helped support the chancery’s facade. He was shocked. There were no gorillas on Zanzibar—the only primates left were a few colobus monkeys tourists paid to see in special reserves he himself had never cared to visit. As a young child, he had seen some of the last of the wild elephants, and like most East Africans, he respected the tembo more than any other creature, even simba, the lion—also now extinct in the wild.

  After a moment, Suleiman stepped forward, toward the tembo. If he could attract the animals’ attention, it might save lives.

  “Fee amaan Allah,” he whispered. “Inshallah.”

  Suleiman was very bright, but in coming to London he had catastrophically depended on someone who turned out to be unreliable, and now he was down to his last £400, staying in a B&B, and filled with anguish. He was supposed to have stayed with a very religious acquaintance from the neighboring island of Pemba, a man named Abbas who lived in Finsbury Park and attended the Aga Khanian mosque there. But Abbas, strangely, had disappeared, and when Suleiman had knocked on his flat door, a bearded young Pakistani man in a long linen prayer shirt answered and smugly told him that Abbas had disappeared into hell. He never explained what that meant.

  “Brother,” Suleiman had said. “I am lost.”

  The man smiled and nodded knowingly. “Come back tomorrow and I will give a new way of life. You need to hear our imam. He’s friends with the Caliph Aga Khan, you know? He’s like no one you’ve ever heard. He will help you, rafiki.”

  A fanatic, Suleiman thought.

  So Suleiman had changed course; all the Africans he had met in London—nearly all from West Africa—urged him to “visit” New York City and simply overstay the “leave to remain” passport stamp. You could hide in Queens or Newark forever. The rest of America could be safely ignored.

  “Go to the Big Apple, my nigga,” a fat path-manager from Lagos had said, laughing his head off. “I’m going back next week just to buy some new shoes. This London—it’s five thousand percent rip-fucking-rippa-dip-dip-rip-off!”

  The elephant very pointedly stopped and faced the visa applicants. Suleiman turned and saw several of them try to squeeze behind the column. But it was hopeless. Too many people, too little protection.

  “Toka, mama tembo,” Suleiman said to the elephant. “Toka, mama lady.”

  Meanwhile, the gorilla regarded the entire scene, shaking his head mournfully. He looked up at the facade’s massive grill-like Eero Saarinen design of reinforced concrete cells. (Its precise, offset rectangles, along with the thirty-five-foot-wide gold eagle above the building, inspired and intimidated visitors—it made America seem like a country of the distant future, a splendid but remote posthuman society, oddly complementing the tidy math of the Georgian buildings around it.) But something about the rectangles riled the gorilla; there was a cold blandness and lack of fire about them, a total ensnaring of aggression, from grid point to grid point, the opposite of animalism.

  Hoping for a closer look, Kibali jumped onto one of the dozens of new, larger stone bollards, ancient tank traps installed decades before in front of the embassy complex. They were ugly, disordered trapeziums, like the reactive-armor bricks on Russian T-120 tanks, and they completely perverted Saarinen’s light touch. Amid this angular clutter sat the ape, perched on one of these stone fists of national fright, hunched in anxiety as the doors of the embassy flew open. Nearby, he saw the giant plane trees, so thickly and horizontally limbed that Kibali felt he had perhaps found a safe, comfortable, murky home in this strange world.

  A spectral being then drifted up and out of the green shadows that Kibali was contemplating. It resembled Astrid, but it was larger, untamed, like a wild, long-limbed yew tree spotted with tiny red berries. Astrid’s long black hair seemed to have turned a golden green, and floated in the air between the embassy and the animals, sparking little fires from which baby kestrels and whipping adders and speeding tiny stoats burst forth.

  “Gagoga,” said the creature. “Gagoga maga medu.”

  And those close to the vernal being, who heard the words, bowed their heads.

  But not Mason Gage. He came out of the chancery building with his arms behind him, his head lowered for other reasons. Such was his focus on the notion of saving the vulnerable visa applicants from the elephant and gorilla, he did not, for quite a while, even notice the being. He’d merely struck a sort of improvised submissive pose, something he remembered in dealing with his sister’s feisty Perro de Presa Canarios; it could not have contrasted more with the imperial golden eagle statute six floors above him, and the gesture looked particularly odd on Mason.

  The angry elephant turned its head toward the being, calming for a moment, but it trotted straight through the green fog, and bucked a bit, then squared off against Mason, so close the young man could smell the high, sweet reek of its shit.

  A phalanx of nearly identical-looking men in coveralls the color of yoghurt stood behind Mason, too, emerging from the interior of the chancery, and looking pressed for time. By contrast, Mason had thrown on a simple navy blazer and old black DreamUp jeans, which supposedly could be slightly adjusted through telekinesis (but this never worked, buyers soon learned). He kept a neuralzinger pistol with nonlethal rounds holstered under the blazer.

  Several of the men had their hair cut in the same cropped, androgynous style. Their appearance threw him off a bit, but they’d come from the chancery’s offices, and he implicitly—and imprudently—trusted them as legitimate. There were, after all, a very few tertiary aspects of embassy operations in any major world capital—everything from toilet repairs to heating duct maintenance—that even the chief of security didn’t fully grasp. Mason’s mistake was that he saw these people as one of them.

  “Who are you? What unit?”

  None answered.

  Mason decided that they must be some kind of foreign outside building contractors. He would address the issue of the white-suited caretakers or whatever the fuck they were at the next security team meeting, and they looked funny, didn’t they, and shouldn’t they know some basic English?

  Moving out into the square, toward the elephant, Mason walked right past the black man who had stepped forward.

  “Go inside,” Mason told the man, pushing his eyeglasses higher on the bridge of his nose. He held his hand out toward the anxious, angry pachyderm, behind which the green fog was gathering again. Mason glanced back for a moment at the rest of the visa applicants, and a feeling of protectiveness arose in him—but the elephant’s stolid, fearful gaze preoccupied him more. If pushed to choose between human and animal, Mason was a person who could not be depended on to stand up for his own species.

  “It’s OK, sugar,” he was saying to the elephant. “It’s OK, darling.” Some of the men in the white coveralls leered at the scene, as if they thought Mason must be joking.

  “Thar, thar, sugar,” he said to the elephant, smiling genially. “What’re you all put out for?”

  The men in coveralls began waving the visa applicants inside. Some of them were reading off SkinWerks notes glowing on their hands, in reflexive voices: “Inside! Inside! Welcome! Huanying guanglin! Bienvenue! Welcome! Huanying guanglin! Bienvenue! Inside!” A 3D holographic sign with the same words, in puffy lettering, was, in a flash, projecting from above the doors.

  Suleiman, who had dawdled, and who didn’t like the looks of the men in white coveralls, knew immediately that the navy-jacketed man from the embassy was making a profound mistake by getting so close to the tembo. When Suleiman was a child, his elder cousin, Amani, had been lucky enough to live and work seasonally at one of the game preserves south of the capital. When Suleiman had visited, he saw Amani carefully drive wild elephants away from the touring Land Rovers by smacking their feet—but it was perilous work, and one risked death. But this American man, he acted as if he had never seen a tembo in his life.

  When the elephant
began to charge, Suleiman watched stunned as the man ran toward it. He did not know why, but he too began running toward the animal. There was perhaps a vague sense that he must start acting larger than himself—is this American, this running toward a monster? But mostly, Suleiman simply heeded an innate decency and courage he himself did not know he possessed.

  “No!” he shouted. “Toka!”

  Layang let out a sneezy, squeaky cry—the splurty sounds of a knotted cornet—then knocked Mason off his feet with the base of her trunk. His eyeglasses went flying. Everything happened so fast, Mason was still smiling, still believing, when the animal’s front feet slammed down only inches from his knees. He had made no sound. He felt nothing. He still held his hand out toward the animal and was almost laughing, with a strange sense that his cropped hair had suddenly grown miles long and caught fire.

  “Oh,” he finally said. “Hey.”

  Then there was Suleiman over him, trying to wrestle with one of the elephant’s feet. “Toka! Mama tembo, toka!”

  Suleiman had never been so close to a tembo, never touched one. The softness and warmth of the animal’s huge ankles surprised him—he had expected a kind of hard rubberiness. He realized he didn’t know what he was doing, but Layang seemed to respond to him, and backed away, but only for a moment. Suleiman turned toward the man and tried to lift him up. Layang had risen to her hind legs, preparing to pounce down on Mason with a 1,500-pound coup de grâce.

  Suleiman spun around and staggered back, positioning himself between the angry elephant and Mason. The beast moved its head side to side in a brutal fashion, as if trying to shake its own brains out, and glared down at the humans. Suleiman was able to pull the man up to his feet, looping his arm around his chest, and yank him back. For reasons he could not grasp, the man was resisting him, pulling at his forearms fiercely.

  “I’m OK,” Mason seethed. “Let me go!” But Suleiman had no intention of letting him die. He kept trying to heave him away from the elephant.

  Mason, trying to regain his balance, thumping the heels of his own trainers down on a short set of three cement stairs, could see the blaming, sweeping rage in the elephant, its ears engorged with blood, its reddish-brown eyes furious. The unfamiliar tenderness of the man, the unplanned human-to-human connection, was humiliating to him. He didn’t want to be rescued. It was a goddamn elephant, not a suicide bomber.

  Still, as they stood back now, watching, Layang all at once thrust her feet down so hard on the pavement the nearby trees rustled. Then the elephant seemed to back off.

  “Thanks,” said Mason stiffly, gaining a footing, gazing at the small, lean man, who was grinning. The dark blue insulated coat he had been wearing was missing an arm, and all he wore under the coat was an old faded-red T-shirt that read OPERATION GET DOWN—DETROIT, MI.

  “Go inside now,” Mason said. “It’s OK. Just go in.” He wiped some of the dust off his saggy khakis. He knelt down, retrieved his broken spectacles, and reset them on his nose. One of the lenses was shattered; he popped it out and let it fall on the ground.

  The gorilla had moved off the bollard and into the little central garden in Grosvenor Square. He was watching all the people in front of the embassy with a look of unyielding confusion and distress. He kept placing his long hand over his solar plexus—in pain, it seemed. The elephant remained in the street, just beyond the tank traps. She was taking deep breaths, making her curved flanks flare out visibly in the half-darkness under the canopying boughs of enormous mottled plane trees.

  Once again, the trees seemed slowly to exhale a verdant fog that was itself unspooling and forming a larger, and utterly bizarre, tree. It was the great, weird Yew of Wyre, beside which many a local witch had tried, secretly, to raise spirits. It had germinated in deepest Worcestershire, thousands of years ago, and now it thundered up and out into the square as summoned. The vapory limbs began spiraling, too, into various half-human forms of the forest and stream—dryads, wodwos, and sylvan sprites, all made of sand-colored basalts and pink feldspars and river pebbles polished to a shine by centuries of inland flow toward the mighty Severn. When any of the Neuters came near the tree’s green vapor, they would quiver in place until they melted into puddles of white jelly. Amid it all, Astrid’s form emerged, her skin shaggy with lichen, her clothing falling off in tatters, with a set of eyes blacker than a riverbed, and her hair growing into the golden-emerald limbs of a great, tortuous-rooted, ever-spreading tree.

  “Gagoga maga medu,” she began saying, in a voice more plangent and piercing than her own but hers nonetheless. “Gagoga maga medu.”

  Then the yew began receding rapidly again, and Astrid felt herself phasing into reality. She fell onto her knees. A new physical sensitivity, neither hot nor cold, began coursing up and down her limbs. It didn’t hurt, but it forced her to hold her arms out. It was like unripened electricity, budding from the soil and the leaves, and bleeding green from her palms.

  “Please,” she said, moaning. “Please.”

  Astrid was naked, too. She climbed back to her feet shakily, forcing herself to take slow, halting breaths. Her pale, teacup-size breasts rose and fell visibly as she steadied herself. There were green patches of sticky sap dappling her skin, and it trickled down from her head and shoulders, past her glistening navel, down the smooth curves of the middle of her back, then all along the ogees formed by her narrow waist as they broadened out to ample, potent hips. An accidental coronet of holly and ivy ringed her sopping head, and she held a craggy yew stick like a staff. All those in the square who glimpsed her saw an athletic, tall, beautiful woman, emerging like a kind of green Diana birthed from the trees.

  Mason Gage, standing slightly back, was spellbound. “Easy,” he said to her, gingerly edging closer. “It’s OK.”

  She herself felt crushing vulnerability and bitter coldness.

  “Oh my God,” she cried, stepping toward the embassy, hands in front of her as if she were blind, balancing the yew stave on her shoulder. “Oh mother Mary. Help me, someone. I’m in Flōt second-withdrawal. Someone.” She could not seem to speak above a whisper. She began waving her hands at the man in the navy blazer.

  “Jesus,” said Mason.

  She wasn’t quite, but she was close.

  the luciferian offensive

  SULEIMAN HAD NEVER SEEN ANYTHING LIKE THE green woman, but he felt her power and her unruliness keenly, and these things frightened him, and the nudity, well, that created a kind of panic in his brain.

  “Allahu, allahu, allahu!”* he kept repeating.

  Suleiman turned toward the glass doors. He saw the gleaming whites and golds of the chancery’s reception area, all pale marble and honey colored. It reminded him of the small, filigreed gilt and ivory jewelry boxes from Oman that one could find in Stone Town on Zanzibar. They were ingenious contraptions made to swallow pieces of sparkling beauty, and they often outshined their contents.

  Also in the anteroom, most peculiarly, was a kind of ad hoc bar set upon a table, with fine orbs of Flōt and an arrangement of top-shelf liquors and red-sashed magnums of champagnes, a spread of crackers and brie and Stilton, silver bowls of grapes and figs. He felt ashamed of his disheveled appearance.

  Mason stood rapt, watching the naked woman, quite unable to move, rubbing his hands together, partly to dust them off, partly to cope with a rising anxiety. It soon dawned on him that the tree-woman was just Inspector Sullivan, and her twisted face betrayed her own terror, and whatever he thought he saw, must simply not have been real. It couldn’t have been, could it?

  He finally trotted toward Astrid, sniffing, trying to regain his prepossession.

  “Inspector? Sullivan?”

  “Not an inspector anymore.”

  Mason put his arm around her paternally, tenderly, but she began to shrug it off.

  “My skin—it’s extra-crazy sensitive. That’s not going to help,” she whispered. She looked up into the man’s eyes. He seemed kind and strong, and she began to weep with relief. “I’m a
recovering Flōter. It’s second withdrawal. The Death. Do you know what that means? You can’t save me.”

  “I don’t know what it means, but I guess it means you are in danger,” he said. “I can help get you warm. I can . . .”

  “You know,” said Astrid. “If you only did what other primates do for each other, that would be great,” she said. She kissed his cheek. “But thank you, kind sir.”

  Suleiman had managed to pull an old Detroit Tigers hoodie from his Ghana Must Go bag, and he and Mason swaddled Astrid in the hoodie, and she accepted this.

  “What happened to you?” Mason asked her. “What’s going on?”

  She said, “I’m afraid I don’t know. But I . . . I felt like I—I feel like I am here for a reasons that goes way beyond myself. I’ll say this, too—I’ve had king’s bulletin Opticalls and black-freqs going off in my eyes like nuts in the last ten minutes. We’re . . . in trouble. In Britain. Something’s going on . . . a kind of attack.”

  Mason motioned toward one of the nearby rank-and-file diplomatic police officers, while nodding toward Suleiman. He said to the officer, “Make sure this gentleman gets his visa—whatever he wants. He saved my life. He’s one of the good guys. Make sure.”

  Mason glanced inside; the sight of the table of Flōt and champagne and hors d’oeuvres startled and disturbed him. “What the shit?” It snapped him out of the reverie he felt toward Astrid, which was making her uncomfortable.

  “Who’s having a fucking party in the middle of the night?”

  Something newly bewildering was unfolding. The officer Mason had ordered, a tall man with red hair, was being led away by one of the people in white coveralls—a Neuter. The red-haired officer was distraught, and so was Mason. Astrid was holding on to Mason’s arm, more from a desire for warmth than fear.