Yok

by Tim Davys

  “In the cellar,” she whispered. “We have to help him.”

  I nodded. You might ask how the cockatoo could be asleep on the top floor when her love was most likely being tortured a few floors down in the same building, but I didn’t ask.

  “You have to thow the way,” I said.

  “Thow?”

  “Lead me down to the thellar,” I clarified.

  She nodded. She got up and tied a dressing gown around her that was as thin as her nightgown.

  “But I’m afraid we’re too late,” she said. “Daddy has taken his heart.”

  I had counted on a lot, but finding my friend heartless had not been in my worst nightmares. I sat down heavily on the sofa next to the bed, and was almost swallowed up by its soft cushions and many pillows.

  “What do we do?” she asked desperately.

  And again fate stepped into my life. I had sat on something uncomfortable, and checked under me with my claw. It was yet another little pillow, and I tossed it aside. A moment later I saw: The pillow was shaped like a heart. A red heart.

  “Quick,” I said. “We have no time to lose.”

  The building was quiet and deserted. The last guests had left La Cueva hours before. We sneaked down the steps. The guards were outside, Cockatoo said. One on the roof, one in the alley on the back side, and one outside the front door. Having them stand outside kept them from falling asleep.

  It would have been more dramatic if the stairs had creaked, if my heart had been in my throat, if I had heard a sound from the kitchen. But everything was quiet, and my worry about Fox Antonio Ortega overshadowed my fear of being discovered.

  It appeared that the cellar door was behind a door in the wine storage room. This was a house with many secrets, I was realizing.

  The cellar stairs were long and steep and you were forced to bend down where the ceiling was low. The smell got stronger the farther down you went. It was neither mold nor damp, just cold cellar.

  Light was coming from below, and we stopped on the final stair to hear if anyone was there. But besides our own breathing it was silent, a silence so heavy I knew we were alone.

  Fox Antonio Ortega was on a large baking table. The surface of the table was white laminate, the table legs were metal and bolted to the concrete floor. Fox’s arms and legs were bound, tied to the back legs of the table, and his shirt was torn open. He was staring up at the ceiling, his eyes open, but he saw nothing; he was not conscious.

  I took a few steps into the room.

  Fox’s chest was cut open. Cotton had been scooped out across his shirt. I took a few more staggering steps forward, and saw the hole where his heart had been.

  Behind me Beatrice was sobbing. At the sight of her beloved’s desecrated body her stomach turned in and out, and she threw up. This was no place for her.

  “Run back upthtairth,” I whispered. “Pack a thmall bag with ethentialth, and come back down here again.”

  In a daze she stared at me and nodded. Then she ran up the stairs.

  I had ten minutes, maybe fifteen, that was what I assumed, but there was no promise. I was alive; that was what Callemaro had given me in exchange for the code: my life back.

  After Fox took off from the radio tower with one of the octopus’s arms stuffed into his coat I had considered disappearing. The night was young, and I could go far before Callemaro woke up the next morning. I could hide in one of Yok’s other districts, and perhaps find a way to have an operation; transforming me into a hare or a mink was not impossible for a capable, criminal plastic surgeon, and there were plenty of those. But I thought again, and returned to my original plan.

  I waited until morning, and it took no longer than until the Morning Rain before the furious Callemaro summoned me. I was prepared for the worst. He asked whether I had anything to say before I died, and I answered that I did.

  “I can lead you into Dragon Aguado Molina’th houth, at night and without the guardth notithing anything,” I answered. “I can help you thlay your enemy.”

  It had not been Fox Antonio Ortega’s intention to tell about the greenhouse and the code word on the slate to give me something to exchange with Callemaro. Ortega had told me, because he was always talking about Beatrice Cockatoo.

  It took an hour to convince Callemaro that what I said was true, and all he promised me in exchange was my life. Good enough.

  I took out the pillow heart, and I admit that my paw was shaking. I took a few steps forward and carefully placed it in his open chest. I made room in the cotton and put back the stuffing that was on Fox’s shirt and the baking table. From my inside pocket I took out the sewing kit I had brought along. I had counted on having to sew up the fox, even if I hadn’t foreseen this exact situation.

  Stitch by stitch I sewed, with a black thread that was almost invisible in his red fur. When I was finished I expected that something would happen, but nothing did.

  I had a head start, but at this point Callemaro and his crew were surely on their way through the underground passage from the greenhouse.

  “I’m ready,” said Beatrice Cockatoo.

  I jumped. I had completely forgotten about her, but now she was in the cellar again, with a small bag on her wing.

  “Beatrice?”

  On the baking table Fox Antonio Ortega turned his head, and looked at his beloved.

  “Beatrice?”

  “Quick,” I said, “we must hurry.”

  With the cockatoo on one side and me on the other, we helped Fox up the steps and into the wine storage room. It was still quiet in the house. Beatrice opened the cash register in the bar and took a handful of bills. When we had made it halfway through the restaurant we heard the first shouts, and when we reached the outside door the battle was in full swing. Most of it seemed to be going on one floor up, and the door to Puerta de Alcalà was unguarded.

  As we ran through the night toward deep blue Avinguda de Pedrables, where the buses were, I thought about Dad and wondered whether my memory of when he saw me on the ground at Piazza di Bormio would disappear now. The dawn was not far off.

  I remained standing on the sidewalk with the cockatoo’s bag, in which she had packed her diary and a few other things, as the bus drove off. She won’t need it anyway, I thought; she has to start over now. The last thing I saw through the back window of the bus was Fox Antonio Ortega leaning against his beloved Beatrice Cockatoo’s wing. The night had been hard on them both.

  Pertiny

  This story begins with us getting a letter that changes everything, and if that sounds dramatic, it’s because it is.

  Some have it easier than others in Mollisan Town, which is due to circumstances you can’t change. I’m not stupid, I don’t think that everyone can be everything and I could be the mayor if I just believed in myself, but I’m basically a positive lizard (without having any good reason to be), and I still think you can influence your own situation, even if I have sense enough to keep quiet, because among the rats and voles and polecats down by the ovens at the brewery you would get a sound thrashing if you said what you thought—namely, that we all work there because we want to, and at the same time because we didn’t get anything better.

  This is not the first time the tabloid Now! has organized a program-host competition along with Good Morning Mollisan Town. On the contrary, it’s the ninth year in a row, which shows how successful the competition is (and the TV show), and that a lot of stuffed animals want to be program hosts, appear on TV, and smile self-confidently and say what
the next show is about, or read the news, or host a quiz show or whatever. I’m not a devoted TV watcher, because I always fall asleep a few minutes after I sit down on the couch and turn on the TV. It’s not the first year either that my brothers, Leopold Leopard and Rasmus Panther, are applying for the competition. They’ve applied every year since the competitions began, which would certainly surprise almost anyone who has met Leopold or Rasmus in other connections, and there are neighbors and relatives who would laugh right in your face if they saw Rasmus’s and Leopold’s applications, because they are chock-full of lies about what they’ve done and what they can do. But my brothers wouldn’t care. They would just look at whoever was laughing for a long, long time, with their eyes half-closed and their noses wrinkled in an ominous way, and then they would say something crushing about the animal’s clothes or parents or job or something else that would make the animal in question run away with its tail between its legs, if the animal had a tail. Or else the animal in question would get such a beating that it wouldn’t know whether it had a tail to put between its legs. My brothers are stronger and tougher than most, so it’s probably wisest not to joke with them about the program-host competition. Personally I respect them because they’re willing to apply, and they don’t give up even though year after year they’ve sent in their pictures (photographs they’ve had taken in a real studio with a real photographer) and their completed forms without even getting an answer back. I mean, everyone has the right to their dreams, and it’s the ones who don’t dream you feel sorry for.

  On TV the competition is called New Mornings, and the tryouts begin with thousands of hopeful stuffed animals sending in applications—a picture of themselves and a made-up news item—to the tabloid, which publishes the best (meaning the strangest) contributions every Friday. After that a more serious selection is made, and the newspaper calls several hundred stuffed animals to the tryouts in the TV building, where you get to read your made-up news item in front of a TV camera to do a voice test and also prove that you can memorize text and behave in front of the camera without being unnatural. After that you’re called to the program itself, and this is where it starts for the TV viewers; we get to see fifty selected stuffed animals who are voted out on Friday evenings (of which certain ones get to test-read a news item or two on Good Morning Mollisan Town on Saturday morning), so that after a few months a winner can be chosen.

  The chance of being included is like buying a lottery ticket, my brothers always say (but only to each other when no one’s listening), and everyone buys lottery tickets. I don’t know how many kinds of lotteries there are, but every year there’s something new you scratch off or collect or just guess, and every week you hear about someone who becomes a millionaire and can move away. One time, even if it was many years ago, it happened to the cub of my aunt’s coworker, she won thirty-two million, so I know it’s possible, and she moved up to Lanceheim and no one saw her again, which is what I meant when I said you can’t give up. I think it’s possible to change your life, even for those of us who are delivered to Yok and work at Carlsweis breweries. If that cub hadn’t bought a lottery ticket (which she wouldn’t have if she believed that life was what it was and nothing could be done about it), she never would have gotten out of here. I’m not stupid, and I know that the lotteries profit most on all the wretches who buy lotteries with their last money down here in Yok (because around here, dreams are needed more than any other place in the city), and that the odds are like, one in a million, but the moment you win, well, then you’re no longer a wretch, but an enviable stuffed animal, because then everything changes.

  We live in a two-story house with a cellar on honey yellow Carrer de Carrera, which sounds like a privilege, and I would say that it is rather privileged because I know lots of folks who have worse places to live, and who would only get irritated if you complained about the cold at night and how hot it is during the day, if you mentioned that the stairs between the floors are so rotten that if you don’t know exactly where to set your foot you’ll be standing with one leg right down in the wood, or if you said that the water doesn’t make it all the way up to the top floor even though that’s where the toilets are. We live in a white wooden house with a balcony, where I’ve lived my whole life, and I have been proud of the house over the years, and my brothers have chased away lots of stuffed animals over the years who had the nerve to think they can live with us just because we happen to have a few extra rooms. It’s not so strange, if you have something valuable there’s always someone who wants it, and ever since that evening in the fall many years ago when Mom burned up (which is something I try not to think about), and a few months later when the police came and got Dad (which we don’t talk about either), we’ve had to defend ourselves, my brothers and me, against the animals from social services or from the darker places in life who have heard about a house with three cubs alone that you could move into. But it wasn’t just any three cubs, and we’re still living here in our house without anyone taking it from us.

  Nowadays I don’t miss Mom and Dad. I don’t think about them very often; it was horrible when it happened, and I know I cried at night, but I was little then. Now when I think that they lived here, it’s like thinking about a movie or something: You can picture it, but it doesn’t feel like you have personally been involved.

  A letter arrives, and my whole life is changed even though the letter isn’t even to me. I’m the one who takes care of the mail when we get any, which doesn’t happen every day because no one except the authorities sends us letters; when the letter carriers don’t think they have enough to bother delivering, they skip Carrer de Carrera for a while, and when they come back we get several letters and packages at the same time. I understand immediately that there’s something special about this letter because it says Now! on the envelope, with the tabloid’s familiar logo. I read the tabloids sometimes when stuffed animals leave them behind on the bus or on a bench, and I can see why some don’t bother to take them home. There isn’t much in them.

  Finally it’s happened; year after year my brothers have sent in applications without hearing a word, without getting an answer, but now the tabloid is in touch, and it’s great. I feel how my whole body is tingling; this is not something I expected, but as I lean down and pick up the envelope from the floor in the hall I know that I’ve known, I’ve both expected and waited for this day.

  The envelope is addressed to Rasmus Panther (and not Leopold Leopard), and so I know which of my brothers will finally be rewarded for his persistence and for having dared to resist the pressure from his surroundings which (perhaps) heckled him and called him foolish and vain. In the envelope, I assume, is a summons to a test filming at the TV building, because that’s how it works, I know that and everyone else who follows the program, one of the biggest successes in modern TV history; and week after week we follow the voting, and then day after day at the end when it gets most exciting and only a few candidates remain, all of them smiling with their mouths full of white teeth and a hope in their eyes that always makes me thoughtful.

  As I’m standing there, holding the envelope, and realize that my brother Rasmus Panther is one of those who will be competing to be on-screen, staring right into every single house in Mollisan Town, it feels unreal and amazing at the same time, and I’m certain that he can go far, if you compare him with previous years’ finalists I think there’s a chance he can go the whole way and win it all, but it’s clear that I’m partial and . . . wait, now Leopold, our oldest brother, is coming, I have to run down and open the door.

  “Hi, Leopold. I . . .

  “Sorry.

  “This came for Rasmus.”

  Leopard hits me across the neck and takes the envelope. He often hits me across the neck, he likes smacking me, or else it’s just become a habit, and even though I know the slap is coming I can’t fend it off but instead I fall forward down on the floor where I’ve learned to stay until Leopold has left (othe
rwise there’s a risk he’ll hit me again), but instead of going up to his room like he usually does, he remains standing and looks at the envelope that I gave him.

  “What?

  “No.”

  I remain lying on the floor as I answer him, and I don’t look up.

  “No, I think it’s from the newspaper.

  “I guess it must be . . . about the competition?”

  The kick comes quite unexpectedly; his shoe hits me in the belly and I rise a few inches up in the air and land a little ways off, on our red-and-white-striped rag rug in the passageway out to the kitchen, and I don’t dare say anything, don’t dare move. Leopold remains standing a moment, I think he’s still staring at the envelope. I imagine he’s reading his little brother’s name over and over, and then he screams that I don’t have much time to get the chow ready, and that I’m going to get one hell of a beating if dinner isn’t ready in time, because he has to go out this evening, probably before Rasmus comes home, poor Rasmus who in that case won’t get to enjoy the moment and share the happiness with both of his brothers.

  I get up and go out into the kitchen and boil water. We have a wood stove; most of the wood I carry home from the forest. The city limits aren’t more than an hour from Carrer de Carrera but sometimes I have to search a long time to find anything burnable that can be carried home, and the problem is that I seldom start searching until twilight fills the sky and it starts getting dark (and if you don’t find anything before it’s dark you have to wait for the moon to come out to see at all, which means it’s pretty late before you’re back).

  Just as I’m putting the noodles in the saucepan I hear the outside door open and close. It’s Rasmus coming home. I hear him go up the stairs to the top floor, enter the bathroom, and then change clothes, and the whole time I’m waiting for that howl of joy that has to come when he realizes he has finally taken the first step toward the job as program host on TV, which is what he’s been waiting half his adult life for. But when the noodles are drained and I hear the steps down the stairs and Rasmus still hasn’t called out, I know that Leopold hasn’t shown Rasmus the letter (there are certainly reasons for that), and my brothers sit down at the table at their usual places and I serve the noodles with a mushroom sauce that I made yesterday, and then I do my best to conceal my impatience, though it’s hard and I’m about to explode.