Night of the Animals

by Bill Broun

  Arfur retorted: “You make our point, actually, Cuddy. You can’t be tiny and common and very well stay regal, can you? The English aristocracy do things—obstinately. A field vole sounds like something from Siberia.” But to Cuthbert, Arfur seemed less obstinate than pigheaded.

  A few nights before, Cuthbert had admitted to the lions that he feared them. The aggrieved tone of their thoughts had unsettled him. Gravel-voiced and glottal, they were among the first creatures (perhaps because Cuthbert feared them most) to send messages to him, no matter where he went in London, no matter the time. They seemed to be able to reach out and finger him.

  “You’re really not much of a being, are you?” Arfur once observed. “We could master a whole country of Cuddies.”

  Cuthbert didn’t like that. “You canna even master your cage. I’m the free one, aren’t I?”

  “Ha!” said Arfur. “Thus speaks the Solunaut. You wait. You haven’t even visited us, have you? Let us out first, Cuthbert.”

  “I was preoccupied. There were otters . . . I . . . I needed to see.”

  “Nonetheless, we require immediate release, my friend. Otters! Who cares about otters?”

  Cuthbert sighed. “I do.”

  “But mark my words, we lions are going places—you’ll see.” Arfur added, “I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if we”—he cleared his mucky voice—“if we reclaim Alexandria someday.” Arfur coughed, clearing his throat with a rumbling grunt. “Soon. And we’re not really in a cage, are we? Just undo our enclosure. It’s more a kind of moated theater of sorts.”

  “It’s still a cage. And you’re in one because you’re dangerous.”

  “Dangerous?” Arfur whined. “We’re the last lions in the last zoo on earth.”

  As bedraggled and amusingly haughty as Arfur could sound, lions nonetheless, as a group, still terrified Cuthbert. In childhood, he would see David Attenborough on the telly, explaining how lions used group-hunting tactics. He still recalled one program in which a lioness plunged its entire head into the open skull of an elephant. When it pulled out, Cuthbert recalled, it bore the wet-haired, sated look of a swimmer who’d just swum a dozen laps.

  “You’re bloody war beasts,” Cuthbert said to Arfur at one point. “You’re walking terror. I think it’s best to let the jackals out first.”

  “No . . . first!” Arfur spat. “We’ve kept this island safe. We’re ‘lionhearted,’” he added with a soupçon of mockery. “Don’t blame us for defending national interests.”

  For a moment, Cuthbert pictured his father, swilling lager in the old sitting room, raising his battered Spode mug from the queen’s coronation, and belting out the words never never never never shall be slaves as the Proms blared on television. So much for lionhearted.

  Still, Cuthbert felt a serious sympathy for the lions. Their images still ennobled pound coins, chocolate bars, passports, treacle tins. He himself knew every detail of the three Plantagenet lions passant on England’s football jersey. Then there were Landseer’s pigeon-shite-speckled quartet of bronze males at Trafalgar Square, supporting Great Britain’s public imperial phallus. A thousand drainage-spigots shot through lion mouths on churches. Countless misericords, crests, hallmarks on wedding bands—the country was overrun by an animal which had not been native to its soil since the Pleistocene. Dar es Salaam, Johannesburg, and even Tehran, one might argue, held legitimate claims on the image. Rome could offer a certain logic for leophilia, perhaps. But London? Since Henry Plantagenet had housed his lions in Tower Menagerie, in 1235, the lions had lent England muscle it could not find in itself, at least not until the massive remilitarization under Harry9. And in the country’s last zoological project, its lions lived in a cramped, bewildering terrace covered in dirt. The case for change was strong.

  “In one way or another, we have been the clawed scepter of all your kings and queens, and surely, with the great King Henry, our time has come.”

  “Oi’m mulling it,” Cuthbert had told them. “If it’s good for the king and country, and all that. You do sound like you’ve been . . . in the wars,” he said, echoing his doctor, whose ministrations seemed so far away now. It was all he knew to say. The lions just seemed too large a problem to deal with, for now.

  “Where would you go, if I was, somehow, to let you lot out?”

  “We’ll go to war for you,” Arfur said. “Against the republicans, against the religious fanatics, against fallen demons from the sky. We’ll fight in the streets, in the hills, in the fields. We’ll never surrender.”

  “Oh, that’s bloody innovaytive, that,” said Cuthbert. “But let me think about it all. Do you think King Henry would approve?”

  “We are King Henry, and he is us. But this is no time for ease,” he answered. “It’s time to dare.”

  “Get off my wick.”

  Cuthbert felt hard-pressed to make a decision, or at least to tell Arfur what he had long planned.

  “I supposed I might as well say that I’ve mostly made up my mind. It’s going to be the jackals first. They’re the closest things to dogs, aren’t they? And I owe the dogs of this world, for my evil to them as a child. I owe ’em. Then we’ll . . . see.”

  “Jackals?” gasped Arfur. He guffawed showily in Cuthbert’s ears. “Starting on a rather tenuous note, if you ask me. Good god, man. How will you save the English?”

  “But my mind’s made up, and I won’t change.”

  With that, Arfur and the other lions let out a loud and most pained chorus.

  cuthbert’s grotto

  CUTHBERT NOW LOWERED HIMSELF TO THE ground and moved toward his grotto, dragging his stomach over the damp soil. A foot or two more, that was all. Hazelnuts from last summer, now brown and soft like tiny rotten cabbages, rolled under his big abdomen. He stuck his head into the small cavern in the vegetation he had chosen so capably. Years of sleeping rough had given him an intuitive skill at finding hiding places in the midst of the metropolis. The city possessed countless nooks, hanging flanges, recesses in Victorian brick, but almost none went unused or uninspected, if only by other rough sleepers. You had to know what you were doing to find a quiet, safe, free place to sleep in London.

  At last, his head ruptured one final net of twigs, and he poked it into his grotto. It was a perfect if messy lacuna, rounded and silent as an egg. He crawled forward on his hands and knees. He collapsed in fatigue. He was a very old man—far too old and too fat for this.

  The grotto was like a zoological exhibit of its own—the parkland lair of an unhoused English urban Homo sapiens. There was an air of disgrace and commercialism about it. Weathered debris—soft-drink bottles, Flōt orbs, silvery torn-open Hula-Hoops, and Golden Wonder and Alga-Bite bags—lay on the ground and jammed into the branches of the shrubbery. Dark, shiny garden snails clung to the leafy walls of the space. They were the same sulfurous yellow-brown as the decomposing leaves on the ground from last autumn. A slight depression in leaves and embankment, formed only by Cuthbert’s recent sometime habitation, made it look like a one-man version of some Iron Age hill fort.

  He lay still for a while. Thin strands of thought unreeled in his head—foamy blue grips on my bolt cutters . . . this foamy stuff, something new, isn’t it? was one bit; my trazzies are too tight was another. He tried to sort one thread from another, but they diminished in thickness the further he pursued them until they became a fine mist of confusion.

  He sat up and frantically dug out an old, enormous two-liter orb of Dark Plume–label Flōt in the dirt of his grotto. He’d kept it hidden beneath the back of a round-collared shirt he had found in someone’s rubbish and ripped into useful pieces. One of the hardest things he had ever done in his life was to leave this bottle here not completely unemptied. He popped off the cap. For all his efforts to stop drinking Flōt, when presented with an orb, Cuthbert displayed no resistance whatsoever. He lifted the huge bottle high and took a few long, tense swigs. He repeated the procedure again. He lifted the orb again, and he drank again.

  �
��Thank bloody Jesus,” he croaked. It hurt to swallow. It felt as though something were growing in his throat, but whenever he looked in a mirror, he saw nothing but his tongue, as well as his slightly sunken right cheek, from an old street injury. (Up until just a few years ago, women would still compliment him on his high cheekbones, a feature that distinguished both him and his lost brother Drystan.)

  The old man started to feel a bit calmer, physically, and his heart slowed down. It never took much these days, such was the weakness of his heart and liver.

  Apart from the animals, there was plenty else to drink about, as far as he was concerned, wasn’t there? It had been a strange week, even by Cuthbert’s forbearing standards. (Much of his news came by word of mouth or the lurid reports glimpsed on fast-food packaging, and the raucous public video screens around Camden Town. He only had access to WikiNous’s free, advert-saturated basic Opticall service, which allowed for reception but very limited transmission of messages.)

  In Los Angeles, principally, nearly sixty thousand members of one of the most infamous and oldest cults—Heaven’s Gate—had poisoned themselves along with nearly a million animals in what was being called the largest mass suicide and act of animal cruelty in history. Enormous outbreaks of self-murder and animal sacrifices among the same cult members had also occurred in Britain, Germany, and Japan. With souls “released” from what they called their “vehicles,” the cultists intended to travel astrally into outer space and meet a god they believed resided on the comet everyone was talking about. The animals, according to the cult’s beliefs, were being helpfully “voided,” as they put it, as means of travel for souls, too. It was all over the public screens. Harry9 had long ago recriminalized “self-murder” as a psychological tactic against the cults, and the Red Watch had recently begun another of its roundups of suspected cultist cells, and they weren’t too particular about whom they jabbed with the neuralwave pikes.

  News of the suicide cults always deeply disturbed and absorbed Cuthbert. For complicated reasons, his own views fell much in line with Harry9’s virulently anticultist propaganda. He despised everything about the cults. They apparently liked to watch the antiquated 1990s program Star Trek: The Next Generation, a fact that ruined the show for him. They always claimed they were “transiting” between the “lower” Animal Kingdom and what they termed “the Evolutionary Kingdom Level Above Human.” An enormous secret machine, built decades ago in London on two great sites, would come to life one day, and the machine, “The Gate,” would begin to suck in and dissolve all the souls of animals on earth, except for those humans who suicided themselves. It terrified Cuthbert.

  Behind much of his odium was a fear that he, too, could on any day be contaminated, as millions of others on earth had, with an urge to exterminate himself and to “void” as many “lower” animals as he could poison. He could not allow this. He already owed the animals his heart. And what would become of the Wonderments if he were dead? What would become of Drystan? What would become of England?

  He patted his hands around in the debris. When he felt what he was looking for, he lifted up a sleeve of the ripped-up shirt and found his pair of heavy-duty, twenty-two-inch bolt cutters. He had first spotted them—they were cut-price returns—in a B&Q DIY store while ducking out of the rain, and blagged the money the same day. He poked his little finger between the hardened blades, which were concealed in a blunt plastic green housing that looked, in profile, like reptilian jaws.

  He heard voices from a squawky loudspeaker. He turned toward the park. An approaching patrol from the Red Watch, out on the Broad Walk, was calling rough sleepers out of Regent’s Park. They did it every night, but Cuthbert had completely forgotten. He held still, trying not to breathe. In the grotto, he was well camouflaged, but if a Watchman or his array of peripatetic Eye3’s on his mantle gazed carefully in this direction, or used their infrared screeners, he might be caught.

  “Watch, here! Indigents have five minutes to leave! If found in the park after this reasonable deadline, Indigents will be referred to EquiPoise.” Cuthbert’s hands shook with fear; finally, he could see their red and gold mantles, through the shrubbery. He held his breath.

  There were two—very close. They were laughing, distracting themselves.

  “Fucking beautiful, I tell you,” one was saying to the other. “Really, very loovly.”

  After a few more minutes of anxiety, they ambled away. Cuthbert felt he would start crying with relief. The bolt-cutter handles were slippery with his sweat.

  The cutters were in fact monsters—large, awkward, and horrifically powerful. He found himself imagining how all the small work-related apparatuses normally carried by London’s dwindling middle classes—face-adjusting discs, energy satchels, Vespa hand-scooters, rain-sphere sticks—could be sliced apart by the cutters, like crepes.

  The cutters seemed wonderfully industrial to him, from a fading world of huge, steaming engines and sweating, hammering men. The B&Q clerk claimed they could exert two thousand pounds of pressure onto a fine point, and handle high-tensile steel up to 9 mm thick. Cuthbert had drawn a black line on his index finger with a permanent marker, to denote 9 mm, and he meant to check it against a few different fencing gauges he might run across.

  Because its space was initially fixed, the zoo’s landscape architects had at first been partial to mild-steel mesh-fencing and glass rather than seminatural barriers, and the material had propagated across the zoo like a kind of mold for more than a century. The inflexible, unnatural steel mesh was one of a long list of stupidities that had hastened the zoo’s decline in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Unlike later zoos, there were few faux rivers, moats, or invisible barriers at the London Zoo. Steel mesh bounded most of its various strolling spaces and animal enclosures. For that reason, the zoo was a bolt cutter’s paradise, and Cuthbert was about to become its most faithful angel. Feigning a limp, he had taped the device to his leg a few days before and stowed it in the grotto. As an Indigent, getting caught with them would have been considered incriminating ipso facto, and the Watch would have hauled him before an EquiPoise committee. Risks aside, for Cuthbert, bringing bolt cutters to the grotto had felt like returning some arcane healing object to its rightful place, like a key brought to the door of a sacred labyrinth.

  He quickly dusted off the implement. He liked it and felt competent with it, a feeling he wasn’t used to.

  He took a deep breath. That walking-on-silken-stilts feeling and the usual quivers in his cheeks and eyelids, all telltale signs of Flōt withdrawal, had stopped. He felt a comfortable buzz, and the wonderful elongation of his legs. How much patience and, for himself, discipline he had shown these past few days, he thought. A spark of dignity flashed inside him, and he tried to get his head around it like a child cupping a firefly with bare hands. But just as he reached for it, it fizzled out.

  I can’t stand much more of this, he thought to himself. He grabbed the orb again, and the Flōt glugged into his mouth violently. A wave of disgust hit him, and it wasn’t because the Flōt was cold. He felt sick, instead, at himself. He should have contacted Baj, he thought. He shouldn’t have come here.

  “I wanted to be sober for you,” he said aloud, to no one in particular.

  But how tall he felt! As ever, Flōt shot you up to the stratosphere where you strode like Atlas with wings of a giant purple moth.

  what the jackals said

  A FEW TROPICAL GENOMIC COPIES OF EXTINCT birds—hyacinth macaws—were now visible in blue snatches through the bushes. Lined up in their long, grid-lattice cage, motionless and imperious on a thick perching rod, the clones seemed devoid of wildness or even natural agitation. He felt he knew these birds intimately; each time he’d come to his cave in the hedges he watched them purposefully. They never spoke, never made any sound. Their long sapphire tail feathers hung down as smooth and poised as the Italian silk ties he saw sometimes when wandering near Savile Row. A dozen or so London pigeons roosted atop and around their cages,
and the more Cuthbert rustled in the bushes, the more they began to coo. But the few people he could see passing by in the zoo—it was twenty minutes before closing—had no sense of being watched from beyond the perimeter fence.

  A single golden jackal just then trotted toward Cuthbert. They were normally the only animals visible from outside the zoo, but from his grotto, he was less than five or six meters from them.

  “Almost time,” Cuthbert said to the animal. “I am coming for you—just minutes now.” Zero hour, when the zoo closed, was near. The jackals weren’t otters, but they also intrigued Cuthbert, if only because they were the animals he saw most. Our names are lie, they would call to him, over and over. Let us free just one just two just three just one. Lie, our names, lie, lie. He did not understand what the jackals meant by all this, but he had a guess: they were always being told to “lie,” like dogs, by a certain ilk of self-amused bystander outside the zoo, and the poor jackals had come to think of the intransitive verb as their collective name.

  “You can find new names,” Cuthbert had answered. “Anything you want.”

  We’re lie, they said.

  Cuthbert admired their humped, scruffly backs, angular faces, the brown swabs of tails—all tangible dog-pieces darting about a sparse pen like small rages on legs. There was a dark energy in them that made him feel stronger.

  Still, he would forsake jackals in a second for a chance to visit otters. Neither he nor the public at large could get even a glimpse of otters from outside the zoo. To Cuthbert, they were the most English, most sacred, most miraculous wild animals still on earth (he didn’t realize that the zoo’s Asian species actually came from an annoyed flax farmer in Thailand who had grudgingly decided not to poison them).

  CUTHBERT’S PLAN, IF one could call it such, was to set free a single jackal at first, then go from there. The lions and the otters could not be first, as they presented many logistical challenges. The idea of releasing other animals tantalized him, but even for Cuthbert, that also seemed, as of now, a bit crazy. He was no activist, no animal sentimentalist, no mere vandal. He was not trying to “make a statement” but to let select animals craft their own.