by Bill Broun
Flōt’s bell-curved dual-withdrawal syndrome arose from its unique twin-cycle neurotoxic effect on the brain’s serotonergic system. Unlike most abstinence-based drug recoveries, in Flōt recoveries the peril went from bad to better to lethal as years clean passed. The most recovering addicts could hope for were some comparatively peaceful years between first and second withdrawals, typically about ten to fifteen, followed by a dark time of anger, insomnia, and floridly hypomanic delirium that marked second withdrawal’s arrival.
Cuthbert leaned his chair back on its hind legs for a moment, then brought it down. He tilted his head slightly, listening. He crossed his legs and gazed upward, smiling more thoroughly now, as if staring at the credits screen of a deeply gratifying film.
“I wish I could tell you more, but it’s not possible,” he said. “The animals, see. Again. I hear them. Foxes now. They want to say . . . thank you? To all the people in this dirty owd town.” Cuthbert chuckled a bit. “Thank you! Ta! Funny, eh? ‘Cheers!’ What’s there to thank?” Cuthbert’s smile fell. His eyes glistened. “Them foxes are innocent—and foolish. Thoi’ve no bloody idea.”
The doctor noticed a tremor in the aged man’s lips as he spoke. He took a relatively small daily dose of the ancient, crude antipsychotic med Abilify, in a desultory manner, but his massive Flōt intake negated most of its benefits.
“What makes them innocent?”
“They trust us,” said Cuthbert. “They oughtn’t.”
Dr. Bajwa started on the desk with his finger, making tiny circles. Then he began tapping powerfully—hammering, really.
“This is only your brain—and the Flōt.” Tap, tap, tap. “You need to be careful . . . about what you say. You understand?”
“I try to be careful,” said Cuthbert. “But the animals are speaking to me . . . for a reason. It’s something I’ve waited for my whole life. This was supposed to happen, see?”
The doctor’s knowledge of what could happen to Cuthbert in the clutches of NHS’s mass psychotherapeutic division, EquiPoise, made it hard to give him the space he needed to talk freely. He feared openness. Even very casual talk therapy was considered a luxury reserved for the new aristocracy. EquiPoise’s Psyalleviators, or P-levs, whose official role was to battle the era’s viral cults and political radicals on behalf of the king, had convoluted the simplest rites of doctorly care among the masses.
There were smaller, new nuisances in Dr. Bajwa’s life, too. Unusually, lately, he felt easily winded and kept getting bronchitis; his boyfriends kept dumping him for blue-eyed English boys; his family criticized him for not “aspiring” enough; his friends were all moving to the controversial new colonies in Antarctica. But the way Harry9’s government had come between him and his patients—this, more than any other problem in his life, incensed him. Stunningly, despite all the cruelties Indigents such as Cuthbert suffered under Harry9, Cuthbert himself—and he wasn’t alone among Indigents—held the monarchy in the highest regard, and he could be quite jingoistic.
“There’s not one thing on earth that’s not better in England,” he would sometimes slur at Baj. “We’ve got the best cats—and best football. And good ’ole Harry’s the best of all the bloody bunch.”
Such statements quietly infuriated Baj, yet something about Cuthbert’s blend of good-heartedness, reactionary nationalism, and almost artistic grandiosity also, despite his knowing better, mesmerized him. He wanted to understand it.
The doctor one day had looked up from his antique linen-paper notebook and smiled purposefully at Cuthbert in the consultation room.
“O-T-T-E-R-S,” said Baj aloud, writing each letter with a strong hand in black ink with a big gold-plated fountain pen. The pen was inscribed with Sanskrit script that translated as, “Only action will define us.” Unlike most of his colleagues, few of whom knew how to use a pen, he loathed the trendy SkinWerks digital aerosols that let one write and read on the skin.
“Why otters? Why them?”
Cuthbert looked askance. “They’re . . . very godly creatures, too. Do you want to know why?”
“Yes, I do.” Bajwa tried to speak in a friendly but resolved tone, but a trace of irritability crept in. “I certainly do. Now wait just a moment . . .”
He took his stethoscope from his desk drawer.
“Let me,” he said, unbuttoning the top of Cuthbert’s shirt and deftly, with two fingers, holding the stethoscope’s diaphragm against Cuthbert’s chest. He heard the tattered hwoot-dub hwoot-dub of his murmur. The fact was, the fat old man—six foot four and twenty-two stone—could drop dead at any moment.
“Your cardiomyopathy’s not any worse,” the doctor said. “But you need to take it easy.” He put the stethoscope back in the top drawer of his desk. There were at least two newer cardiac CoreMods™ available for Cuthbert’s type of enlargement, but both were strictly NHS Legacy items, or one had to pay millions on the private mod market.
Thirty years before, Cuthbert had won, through the old BodyMod™ lottery, two lower-cost mods—a cheap ventricle wall panel on his heart and a onetime infusion of pluripotent hepatocytal cells for his liver. He’d also managed, in his early eighties, to get his hands on a spool of crylon body-mesh and a used set of EverConnectors, sized 2XL, and this set had come with cartilage drugs, too, as well as free installation.
“The otters,” said Cuthbert. “They have a message—for all of England.”
“It’s your brain,” he said. “Just your brain. But if you can’t stop spiring* and get through the first withdrawal—listen, Cuddy—you know, it’s a kind place, and they’re brilliant and they’re discreet, Cuddy.” He frowned slightly. “They’ll keep you well away from EquiPoise. There’s a simple and deadly health issue here, my good friend.”
“Oh, Jaysus,” said Cuthbert. “I should’ve kept my gob shut. Not Whittington. I’ve said too bloody much!”
It was at this point that Dr. Bajwa reached across his desk, took Cuthbert’s hands in his, and gave them a firm, tender squeeze. He leaned so far forward that one of the armpits of his blue suit jacket made a little ripping sound.
Cuthbert beamed at him, although his dry lips quivered a bit.
“No, you have most certainly not told me too much,” said the doctor. He felt as if he wanted to reach through a dark blue shell of pathology and grab the great, derelict heart before him. “You must trust me. There’s nothing wrong with Whittington Hospital. But you . . . are . . . very . . . unwell, my friend.”
“You are very decent, sir,” Cuthbert pronounced. “But let go ’o me maulers,” he said, pulling his hands back fiercely. Cuthbert couldn’t remember the last time anyone had held his hands. The doctor’s grip was colder than he’d imagined. Cuthbert could smell the figgy notes of his Diptyque cologne.
“I’ve had enough of the Whitt—I’ve packed it in, in moi mind,” Cuthbert said. “I feel, I, I, I really ought to let the poor otters into the cuts. It’s for England.” He gave the doctor a sly look. “And the king could use my help.”
“You shouldn’t talk like that, my friend. I mean, Cuthbert. They are utterly merciless.”
There was a long silence. After a while, the doctor wrote in his notepad.
“But, go on. Come. I’m—I’m listening carefully. And when you say otters—you do mean the sort of minky, playful things?”
“Otters,” Cuthbert repeated. A gleam of aureate light radiated through the window. “I know it might sound completely barmy.” It was indeed that, as far as Dr. Bajwa saw it. One surely never heard the word otter more than once in a career in a north London GP’s office.
“You know my missing brother Dryst? I think he might have sort of become a kind of otter.” Cuthbert nibbled gently at the inside of his cheek; there was a tough little ridge of flesh there that he sometimes liked to worry. “Of sorts.”
Dr. Bajwa said, “I know you feel that loss. And after the challenges you’ve had, I’m sure you feel it all the more. And after so very many decades of . . . griefs.”
“No, no, no,” said Cuthbert, shaking his head. “He’s back, you see? Drystan has returned. And I think ’e’s in the zoo. There’s more to tell. Much more, doc. But I corr.”*
Dr. Bajwa thought for a moment, rubbing his short, graceful beard.
“I want you to stay away from the zoo, Cuthbert. Let’s avoid things that obviously upset you. And these zoo voices—they’re not your friends.” The doctor coughed a few times. He was coming down with something, it seemed. He said, “You’re a very clever man, so surely you grasp that?”
Cuthbert was, but he didn’t, couldn’t, and wouldn’t.
singled out for otterspaeke
SO IT WAS, AT FIRST, THAT DR. BAJWA SIMPLY advised Cuthbert to avoid Regent’s Park. Anything to de-escalate Cuthbert’s obsession seemed a step forward. Keep out of Regent’s Park, and these “zoo voices” will fade, the doctor thought. Here was simple, sensible medicine.
“A zoo can be a rather intense sort of place, if you think about it,” Dr. Bajwa had said to Cuthbert. “It’s no place for you.”
CUTHBERT RARELY MADE APPOINTMENTS; he would just show up, in all his shabby glory, with a heap of vinegary chips in his arms, or a warm purple sphere of Flōt in his coat. The frowning admins would send him back to the consultation room, holding his own file and wearing his usual shamefaced smile.
“The zoo admission’s twenty-five bloody pounds,” he was telling Dr. Bajwa one day. “I saw the sign at the gate.” He clasped his hands together. They were filthy and mottled with white psoriasis and liver spots.
“Hardly anyone goes—that’s why,” Dr. Bajwa said.
A few years before, after the closings of both the Beijing and Bronx zoos, a short flurry of patriotic stories about the London Zoo had memed across WikiNous, most along the lines of “the first and last standing,” although the “first” bit wasn’t entirely true. Still, almost no zoo animals existed in the wild anymore, and thousands upon thousands of species were newly extinct. Polar bears, giant pandas, as well as most large marine species, wild ferrets, and cranes, survived only as genomic software that the children of the rich used to print miniature cuddle and bath toys as well as living mobiles.
Cuthbert had never been inside a zoo, even as a child, and the doctor wanted to keep it that way.
“But you’re still visiting the park,” the doctor noted. “You’re asking for trouble. You don’t realize. A drowning man isn’t bothered by rain. Didn’t we say we should avoid the whole of Regent’s? I thought we’d got a sort of understanding, my friend.”
“Ar,” said Cuthbert. “But the otters—and the jackals and a few others—they’ve got their own little ways, haven’t they? Where am I to go, if I ignore them?” He averted his gaze and looked through the window. “I nipped into the library at Finsbury Park, but I fell asleep at my table, and this skinny library bloke with one of them fuckin’ Eye3 pendants ’round his neck, he said he’d hand me over to the Watch to be nicked if he saw me in there again. At least in the parks, and with the animals, I won’t get nicked.”
The threat of the Red Watch was real, Dr. Bajwa knew. Unlike most public spaces, the royal parks normally weren’t patrolled by the Watch, but instead by the old, lenient constabulary. Being detained by the Watch could prove catastrophic for someone as powerless as Cuthbert, and the thought of ridiculous, feeble old Cuthbert getting dragged away by the red-suited Watchmen with their neuralwave pikes horrified him. Cuthbert would be warehoused with other mentally ill Indigents and shoved under a Nexar hood. He’d probably suffer cardiac arrest.
The doctor coughed a few times—a dry, barking hack that surprised him in its power. “Oh,” he said, reeling a little. “This dry air.” He took a deep breath and gulped. “I am just beginning to wonder,” he said, recovering, his voice still croaking, “if a visit to the zoo might not actually calm you down a bit?” He coughed twice more.
“Ar,” said Cuthbert, in an overplayed Black Country dialect he sometimes slipped into when feeling weary, fearful, or especially close to someone. “Now yam onto summat,* cocker. If I could just see the otters—just once. I’d, loik, discuss about a few things, roight?” He pulled out a purple sphere of Flōt and held it toward the doctor, who was coughing again. It wasn’t hotted up, but it would do. “Yow alwroight, mon? Yow want a snort?”
“Stop it,” said the doctor. “It’s nothing. And put that away!” For a moment, he felt real anger toward Cuthbert. “Can we just get one thing sorted? If you go, can we keep in mind that the animals really aren’t speaking to you? And you’ll stay off your Flōt?”
Cuthbert gave him a vexed smile, the edges of his lips paled with pressure.
“And you’ll have to pay for it yourself,” the doctor added. “Can you do that?”
“It depends what you mean by ‘pay,’” Cuthbert said. “There’s more than money at stake. There’s the boy.” He spoke with dry matter-of-factness. His eyes, normally a Brythonic russet-brown, and as spongy as Anglesey soil, seemed newly hard and clear. “Oi’ve paid with my heart—for decades.”
The screeching color-charge compressors of a passing bosonicabus—probably the No. 29—could be heard outside in the Holloway Road.
Cuthbert added, sounding distant: “When your brother becomes an animal, it makes you think.”
“Sure, sure,” said Dr. Bajwa. He felt the long blade of pity jab into him. He hated it. He despised pity’s utter uselessness. But there it was—a dolor for the shredded stems of flowers never to touch the earth. Dr. Bajwa puckered his lips a bit, trying to subdue his emotions.
Cuthbert seemed to have sunk down into his chair. He was sniffling a bit.
“Why am I going to the zoo?” There were tears in Cuthbert’s eyes. “What’s the matter with me?” He stared dazedly at the ceiling. He said, “When my mother and father have forsaken me, the Lord will take me up.” He gazed directly at Dr. Bajwa, and repeated, more frantically, “What’s the matter with me?”
“I don’t . . . know,” said Dr. Bajwa. “Not exactly. But it seems you need these . . . voices. That’s all I know.” He plucked a sky-blue sticky note from his desktop and wrote his WikiNous cryptograph on it, as he had many times before, and gave it to Cuthbert. “You can message me if anything dire happens. But I really hope it won’t. Just go see those otters. And don’t do anything foolish,” he said, already regretting his advice somewhat.
“I’ll get the dosh,” Cuthbert said, feeling atingle. “Any road up* I can.”
“I know you will. I know it.”
The doctor reached across the desk and squeezed Cuthbert’s hand as hard as he could, and that was very hard indeed. He put a £10 coin in the dry hand—any less seemed cruel, and any more unwise.
“Just take care,” the doctor said. “And at least cut back on the Flōt, you silly old fool.”
IN THE WEEKS THAT CAME, Cuthbert saved his dole, as best he could, panhandled a bit, and combined with Baj’s tenner, he soon pulled together the £24.50 for zoo admission—enough for six liters of the economical, Dark Plume label Flōt, he ruefully noted. It had been the first time he had put anything before a drink of Flōt in years. For a few afternoons, he even stayed sober, though sobriety seemed to increase the animal voices and send his heart into wild palpitations. On one of those sober afternoons, he heard the otters again. “Gagoga,” they kept saying. “Gagoga.”
Uncharacteristically, Cuthbert had begun to avoid Dr. Bajwa a bit. He wanted to impress him with his independence. At one point, he decided to surprise Baj by sending an Opticall. While most Indigents received and, if literate, read dozens of Opticalls on their retinas a day, very few could afford to write them; generally, to write, you needed a quality digital epidermal aerosol such as SkinWerks and an advanced grade of access to WikiNous, things few Indigents could afford. Even emergency workers labored under strict controls and weren’t normally supposed to use skin aerosols for messages.
“I want you to Opticall my GP,” he was telling a street acquaintance one shaky, sober afternoon.
“It’s a medical issue, right?”
This wily man’s name was Gadge, and he possessed a stolen case of SkinWerks, which had made him mildly noteworthy on the streets. SkinWerks was the simplest, if messiest, way to send Opticalls. A bioelectronic emollient sprayed onto the epidermis, always in high demand and pricey, it allowed wearers to read and type upon their own skin (usually, on the forearm), to exchange tactile sensations, and to display digital images on the skin—and, in limited ways, to “feel” them, too.
GADGE’S LITTLE STASH was authentic, too—and that mattered. Dangerous imitations from East Africa’s new factories circulated on the black market, burning digital skin users and, at times, sparking mental illnesses, it was said.
“Yeah, medical, eh?” he asked. “Ha!”
“Tell him, ‘This is Cuthbert, Baj! It’s a miracle of God! I am SOBER—all caps now, that—for two hours now! Saving money for zoo! Sincerely, Cuthbert Handley.’ Tell him that, right? Put exclamation points after everything, please. Please, Gadge, do your friend a favor?”
Gadge smirked and hiked up his greasy suit-jacket sleeve, throwing his head back in a floridly pompous way. He sprayed the red digital aerosol onto his own hairy forearm. He rubbed it around a bit until an ovular WikiNous portal glowed on the arm. Most people sprayed digital skins onto their own body, often for sexual thrills, but they could be applied to any flat, smooth, warm surface.
“This is a big favor I’m doing you, Cuddy,” said Gadge. He had a narrow, angular face with a long, lupine jaw, and dark eyes set close together.
Cuthbert watched closely, squinting, as Gadge typed the Opticall text onto his skin, straining with every punch of a dirty finger.
“It’s done,” said Gadge. “I sent it. You owe me.”
“Yam a fine fellow,” said Cuthbert, after which Gadge released a long, rumbling fart.
WHEN DR. BAJWA got the Opticall text, he felt relief and a nervous joy. Seeing the name “Cuthbert” glide across his retinas struck him as a singular treat. There was also a sense, though much fainter, that he ought not to get enmeshed with an Indigent, but that was more for safety reasons than anything else. As a child, the egalitarianism of Sikhism and importance of seva, or helping the poor, were driven into him. How many daal dishes he’d washed at the gurdwara! How many golden bowls of dahi yogurt he had set proudly on communal tables! Nonetheless, there was also something less high-minded at work, for Baj simply liked Cuthbert. As much as any Flōt addict could be, he was honest, gentle, clever, reliable, and good—and twice the man that most Britons in Harry9’s dreadful, unpredictable reign were.
