by Bill Broun
These days, the Sovereign always made such pronouncements from his bunker at Hampton Court Palace, ten miles west of central London, and far away from his psycho-dungeons like St. Clements, and surrounded by his heavily armed Yeomen of the Guard “Beefeaters.”
In their updated flat black helms and glossy red body armor, all clasping red pike-like medulla wave-guns, which could stop the heart and respiration instantly, the Beefeaters typified the reconfiguring of Britain’s turn-of-the-century Tourist Monarchy into a functional beast. Tudor roses, thistles, and shamrocks in gold paint decorated their breastplates and gunstocks. The Beefeaters no longer bothered to work inconspicuously. HRH Henry IX, long rumored to be responsible for the bombing of his elder brother King William’s personal jet in 2028, which killed the weak ruler and all his direct heirs, was all about aggression.
“Our Realm is compassion, and it is life,” the regicidal king liked to say, “and Nexar is a very clever way to dispense them both—it’s that simple.”
No one, including Dr. Bajwa, would question such notions openly and hope to get ahead professionally in the Britain of the 2050s, where it never paid to question the House of Windsor’s love of manipulating alpha waves. The suicide cults and British republicans were openly hunted, but apart from them, just one infamously rebellious former lord, the erstwhile Earl of Worcester, only nineteen years old and reportedly hiding underground on the Welsh border (he had sent mass Opticalls against the king’s power-grabs, until he was pushed off WikiNous’s optical nerves), seemed willing to risk a public confrontation. The king, for his part, laughed the boy off.
“We need our earls,” he liked to say plaintively. “I can’t be in the business of autocracy. Worcester needs to come out to Hampton for din-dins.”
It was said the young former earl, who had abdicated his ancestral seat, sent word that he would indeed accept a meal, but only “in front of the Banqueting House,” a defiant reference, of course, to the execution site of Charles I.
Hampton Court Palace was no longer home to flower shows and chubby Belgian tourists. The decision to turn it into the Sovereign’s heavily fortified seat of residence, and to give Buckingham Palace over strictly to England’s dying sightseer trade, was all based on Henry’s sometimes paranoid calculations about the exercise of, and defense against, military force. The maze and real tennis court were still there, but the palace’s perimeter was practically upholstered in powerful weaponry. There were advanced neural cannons, blood-gas beams, various sophisticated EMP emitters, and a rumored pièce de résistance—a dangerous, identity-wiping mobile mortar called Æthelstan’s Bliss.
This device, which purportedly resembled a sort of giant sea anemone with pink tentacles and, it was said, screeched like the golden dragons of ancient Wessex, entirely dissolved all traces of one’s existence, in both corporal and digital form.
ST. CLEMENTS’S REPUTATION was well known. Nexar-hooded or not, its patients almost never recovered. It was a grim, yellow-brick house of dread, built as a workhouse, and eventually one of the last Victorian asylums. A passé NHS Trust placard still appeared on its inevitable squeaking iron gate. It was, in Baj’s view, a national disgrace. The last time he had visited, it had been filled exclusively with crazy Indigents.
Out of a sense of responsibility, Dr. Bajwa decided to have another look at St. Clements after receiving Dr. Reece’s report. Perhaps it wasn’t quite as bad as he remembered. From the outside, surrounded by lime trees and pavements heavily trod by all manner of daydream carvers, roast pigeon sellers, house-bot repairers, etc., there was a sense of happy bustle. But once past the iron gate, Baj saw a familiar awfulness he associated with decrepit buildings where Nexar patients were usually warehoused.
An old caretaker with a pinched brow smiled as Baj approached the main doors.
“Lovely day,” the man said.
Baj looked up at a nearly cloudless cerulean sky, as if for the first time that year. Apart from a few cloud-doodles of elongated cats and crooked letters (“mums!”) by children, the sky was a happy blank.
“Yes!” he said. “It is lovely, isn’t it?”
Inside, he ambled slowly along. A few patients with simpering grins came up to him and shook his hand. The main common area of the hospital had a strange, nicotine-stained cornice molding—(yellowed) acanthus leaves and all—along the tops of the walls. Some well-intentioned staff member had allowed one of the patients, obviously, to decorate the molding. In delicate blue, yellow, and red hand-painted lines, all the way around the room, was a constellation of mathematical gibberish—direct sum-of-module symbols, various integrals, Euclidean distance marks—interspersed with the silhouettes of lions and some other, vaguer creature—a weasel or ferret or indeed otter or something?
How very odd, Dr. Bajwa had thought, that Cuthbert also often mentions otters, and here they are at St. Clements? The doctor tried to work out the cornice molding formulae and realized they (or it?) made utterly no sense, unless, somehow, lions and otters were ascribed mathematic value. Perhaps there was, he pondered, to people like Cuthbert, some undisclosed dimension in which otter ˜ 2.98311 or where the curves of mustelid tails followed the precise bends of timespace as they folded upon themselves?
Just then, a short, tubby orderly carrying a Nexar hood greeted Baj in a less than friendly manner.
“I wouldn’t hang around here, mate. All the joy’ll rub off on you.”
Baj started coughing. He felt utterly breathless. He had begun a regimen of light chemotherapy. The bloody coughing had nearly vanished, but he felt weak and sick to his stomach.
Baj said, snorting a bit, “All this—it hasn’t seemed to affect you.”
“No,” the man said bitterly. “I just hoods ’em, and bury ’em in pleasure. I don’t like it, but it’s me job, innit?” He squinted at Baj. “You poorly, man?”
“Just a little. Do they . . . ever get better?”
“Ha!” said the orderly. Then he leaned in, confidentially. There was a stench of eel and vinegar on his breath. “This is a place of where the spirit thrives. And even the ghosts live well.” The man greasily chortled for a moment, then slapped Baj’s shoulder.
“Right, mate,” said Baj.
AS BAJ LEFT ST. CLEMENTS, the injustice of his dismissal from research hit him anew. When he passed through the gate, he turned around to see the old NHS sign bolted to a brick pillar. He glanced around to make sure no one was watching. If he wasn’t careful, he’d end up struck off the medical register—or much worse, perhaps in St. Clements himself, guffawing at nothing, and planted beneath a Nexar hood.
He pulled out his old-fashioned fountain pen and wrote on the sign: “Fuck Harry.” He coughed, and a few pink flecks of faintly bloody spittle landed on the sign. Then he walked away, trying not to look rushed, until breaking into a trot.
“It’s going . . . to get worse . . . and then . . . it’s going to get better,” he said to himself, jogging along, gasping for air in gulps.
THE NEXT TIME Cuthbert came to see him, the doctor observed that, as Cuthbert saw it, the animals were vying for control over him, and the animals wanted out of their cages. He was in full, Flōt-induced hallucinosis. Walking into the consult room, he showed Ingall’s Sign markedly, taking long strides and leaning forward excessively.
“I’ve no say in matters anymore, doc,” he said.
“If you don’t stop the Flōt,” he told Cuthbert, “it is indeed over. And you can’t go around saying you hear animals anymore, my friend. You can’t.”
Cuthbert had looked down at the Afshar rug with its paisley patterns. “The Flōt is one thing,” he said, “but the animals, with all due respect, doctor, I could never just tell them to hush up. It’s not just withdrawal. Even when I drink the Flōt, the voices come on.”
“That’s not a good symptom, Cuthbert. It’s called hallucinosis. It will only grow worse if you don’t stop.”
“But their message is for everyone—for me, for you, for England, for the world. The
re might just be a little white pony what knows yow, Baj.”
With that, Baj at long last lost his patience. All his professional restraint seemed to fly off like a flock of irritable starlings rousted from a tremendous, withering tree.
“Cuthbert! For fuck’s sake!” he bellowed. “Can’t you bloody see, you fool? It’s the Flōt. The Flōt! It’s standard first-Flōt-withdrawal syndrome. There are no fucking animals. There are no voices. You are delusional, my friend. It’s Flōt withdrawal.”
The doctor was almost weeping now, standing up from his seat, and the spectacle appalled Cuthbert, who lurched up and backed away, toward the door of the office, doddering on his old legs, his dry lips moving but nothing coming out.
“No. Stay!” cried Baj as Cuthbert opened the door. “You’ve got to listen to me. I don’t want to lose you, my friend. The Red Watch will be after you, you know? They’ll beat the bloody fuck out of you and drag you half-dead before an EquiPoise P-Lev, and it’s St. Clements after that. Please, Cuthbert. Please. Let’s try the hospital—just one last time! Just one—”
But before he could finish the phrase, Cuthbert was gone.
pentecost in the trees
THUS IT CAME TO PASS THAT, ON THE LAST DAY OF April of 2052, as an enormous comet began to smear streaks of light above the Northern Hemisphere, the aged Cuthbert found himself stuck in the zoo’s boundary foliage beside a floaty green blob of trouble.
For the six previous months, Baj had tried to protect him from the Watch and from EquiPoise, but the doctor had been no match for Cuthbert’s drug addiction (nor for talking otters), and now Cuthbert had a case of Flōt withdrawal shakes in his muscles, a bizarre plan in his head, and an arboreal phantasm beside him. He seemed, to all appearances, beyond human aid.
The yew creature, a kind of botanical steam, was soaking into his very skin, and Cuthbert felt himself breathing in sweet fogs tessellated with long green leaves. There was still fear, but the sense of shock had passed. His pulse puttered in his ears. There was a minted, pennyroyal scent and a whiff of roses, and a wildness and warmth, like an unexpected kiss from a dodgy stranger. He’d encountered, over the years, many figments in the tumbling-down experience of Flōt withdrawal, but none that felt so intimate or so peculiar.
The closeness came with strange timing. The Red Watch was now quite actively looking for him. In the last weeks, Cuthbert had more or less abandoned his IB flat to avoid detention and gone back to his old habits of sleeping rough, panhandling, and thievery. His dole payments, of course, had stopped, as had his meetings with Baj, whose perceptions of the old man’s perils had been, after all, quite accurate. Cuthbert had rarely felt so vulnerable and lonely.
But not alone. As the yew tree covered him with its sparkling emerald plasmas, Cuthbert sensed that the being (him, her, it?) knew him deeply—too deeply. He wanted to crawl away, into his grotto, but his sore limbs wouldn’t budge from their integuments of age and exhaustion.
“Wha . . . what do you want?” Cuthbert asked it, his teeth a’chatter. “You want me to get caught? It ain’t even dark yet, is it?” His heart began palpitating oddly—flipping over, trotting, bursting into double beats. It felt like a broken propeller in his chest. His lips and hands went numb. If he could just reach his grotto, he thought, he would get his Flōt, and all would be OK.
“You do not need to do this, Cuthbert,” the being said, in a nearly melodious whistle, a sound like the breeze being inhaled by all the trees around him through mouths the size of flute holes. “You will never be the same if you do.”
“Not topple the zoo, you mean? Bloody no way,” Cuthbert slurred. “Oi won’t be packing it in now. Oi’m here for the beasts. They’re what’s called me. And my brother.”
Cuthbert squinted. He made out a kind of mouth, opening and closing in the vernal vapor, blowing lunar moths from lips as tender as a small boy’s. Is this me, he wondered, from half a century ago? Was it Drystan? One of the green moths fluttered above him, then flashed into a little pentecostal flame over his head.
“Gagoga,” he said. “Gagoga.” He tried to touch the flame’s fern-colored cloves, but they stung his hand. He jerked it away. His heart suddenly galloped a few times and settled into its normal, pulpy hwoot-dub hwoot-dub. The haze was beginning to thin, and the simple, pinnately veined leaves of the hedge itself were reemerging. It was nearly dark.
“Drystan?” he asked.
“No,” said the creature. “But he is part of me, as are you, and you are blessed, Cuthbert. Before this night is over, you will see him. But there is great danger now . . .”
The old man’s arms were beginning to shake in mild fits. He was sweating badly, and his aged Adidas weather-buffer made it worse.
“Are you . . . an animal, at all?” he asked. He felt starved for air. “Is you the one that’s called me here?”
There was no reply, yet the breezes he’d felt before suddenly seemed to puff out from everything around him in a plangent gaaaaaagooooooogaaaaaaa! The wisps of minty green vapors grew as thin as hair. When he looked for the astonishing yew tree in his midst, he saw nothing but the usual hackberry leaves.
The yew was gone.
“Jesus,” he said. “Jesus fuck.”
Something was jabbing his kidney now, and it wasn’t the finger of common sense. It was the broken spoke of a hackberry shrub, of which there were thousands in and around the zoo.
“Shittin ’ell,” he whispered. “That one hurts.” His heart started a new round of scary, trilling beats. The Flōt half-life was only a few hours, and the withdrawal for someone as old and long-addicted as Cuthbert could be lethal.
“This is it,” he said, panting. “This is how I go winkers.” Darkness suddenly encroached on his peripheral vision. He felt broad, crushing chest pain, a python coiling around his chest, and the classic proprioceptive sensation of falling, literally, down from on high.
If he didn’t get Flōt, he was going to die, and he could not allow that.
ROLLING TO THE side a bit, still held up by the hazel branches and a few tough hackberry boughs, Cuthbert put his hands over his eyes and bulldozered deeper yet, shoulder first. All at once, a thick mat of branches that had been impeding him came apart, and he crashed a few paces farther in. He was just a foot or two now from his grotto, but knackered. He turned again and lay with his back against a new layer of branches, allowing all his weight to be supported. He was hidden now, at rest, gazing again back out into the park. His legs ached and felt stunted—another symptom of Flōt withdrawal—and he was banged up a bit, but he felt a little better, for the moment.
I will stay off the Flōt, he said to himself halfheartedly, even if it kills me. But Cuthbert’s body screamed for it—that purple orb of relief, concealed somewhere in sedge-grass in his grotto. Cheap enchantment. He could nearly taste its smooth, oak-charred flavor of rum and licorice, and the secret ingredient that gave it all a peppery edge: a set of alkaloids, derived from the white larvae of England’s leaf-miner moth.
“Canna I have one last moment of my life without spiring?” he asked aloud. “If I’m a dead man, let me die sober with my eyes upon Drystan and animals and lovely trees that smudge* my skin.”
He shook his head. “No, I won’t touch it!” he cried.
Oh but yes, he thought, I bloody must. It will calm matters. Even as he fidgeted there, caught in the hedge and vacillating about Flōt, he could hear the zoo’s animals again, pulling him into their own more unruly set of traps. And while he still didn’t know what they meant, he felt compelled, once again, to say aloud, in a voice as tremulous as dreams written on clouds, “Gagoga.”
He closed his eyes. He burrowed now into this last, densest part of the shrubbery, grabbing at and deflecting branches like a blind man under attack by hornets. He ducked down to the right and felt the blunt, hard top of his liver nosing up inside him like a shark. He jerked back in agony.
“Fuck me,” he said. Need to keep my back straight, he thought. He knelt down and sunk hi
s fingers into the loose, mulchy loam.
Just then, not unexpectedly, a very familiar voice snarled at him.
“Mr. Handley!”
“No, I don’t want to talk,” muttered Cuthbert. “You canna see I’m bloody busy?”
It was one of the zoo’s Asiatic lions, an old male, Arfur, from whom Cuthbert had been hearing quite regularly that week. Of all the zoo’s denizens, the lions were without question the most articulate and provocative, especially in the last few days. They growled at Cuthbert in tones simultaneously bellicose and hard-done-by, arguing impatiently for justice, and, naturally, for release from their cages.
“You really do need to free us first,” rasped Arfur. “Failing in that would be . . . well, it would be immoral.”
“Rubbish.”
“That old French writer Camus, you know he thought a man without ethics was a wild animal, ‘loosed upon the world’? And if you don’t let us out, you stand convicted of the gravest indifference, old Cuddy.”
“But I’m not indifferent,” he said. “Look at me!”
These lions could cleverly walk a line between sounding confident and subtly mistreated at the same time, thought Cuthbert. Arfur made him think back to long ago, to the pushy assurance of the once-fresh “New Labour” party chap, Tony Blair, but a version of him like the statue he’d seen during his first zoo visit—elderly, wizened, skin burnished like a body from a peat bog.
“Taking Britain forward is really the only choice, and lions simply must lead the way!” Arfur said to Cuthbert, groaning slightly, and goading, goading, goading. Panthera leo had given more to Britons than any other species, Arfur claimed, and “never once” complained or demanded reward.
Cuthbert countered: “Well, what . . . what about, say, England’s field voles? They’re far more common than you, these days. They’re millions and millions of souls. And they’re not mithering at me like dying ducks in a thunderstorm—no, not that lot. The voles ’ave no, like, program as you lot’ve got.”
