by Bill Broun
He rotated back around abstractedly. He read part of the short description of the animals printed on a black rectangle. The sand cat’s specialized urinary system allows it to survive long without drinking. It derives nearly all the moisture it needs from food. He tapped on the window of the cat enclosure. A single golden paw extended spectacularly from the shadows. He could not help but smile.
“Wakie, wakie!” Cuthbert said.
Three of the animals came into focus in the dark. They stood up, their backs rising into huge, awakening arches. Their keepers had petted and touched them assiduously since their arrival from Chad, and they were unafraid of humans. They were among the few animals in the zoo not yet extinct in the wild, but they were far from safe.
“Hello, you lot,” he said. “Yam beautiful, yow am.”
Cuthbert liked them immediately. The docile animals’ gold-green eyes were jeweled and soothing. One of them, whose keeper had named it Muezza (after the Prophet’s pet, according to the sign), gazed at Cuthbert. It bucked to the side and puffed its ringed tail. It was accustomed to human contact, but not totally at ease with strangers, and never at this hour.
The sand cats were smaller and stretchier-looking than the mogs Cuthbert saw on the streets of London, but their faces were wide and their ears immense—huge golden triangles that could hear the bellies of desert vipers and the feet of jerboas in the Sahara. The cats seemed wide awake in their glass case; they were pawing the window now, looking into Cuthbert’s eyes.
Come, Seeker, Cuthbert thought he heard Muezza say. Come, Saliq. The cat’s head inclined slightly sideways when it mewled. The attention engrossed Cuthbert greatly. Was saliq a word of blame, or a warm assignation? It seemed a bit of both.
Cuthbert felt he didn’t have time to bother with the fine points of a cat greeting. He still wanted to solve the conundrum of the Gulls of Imago. To him the Penguin Pool remained the most obvious mechanism of an unfathomable, and perhaps good (and perhaps not) sort of power, and he wanted to turn it on.
“Ow bist?* Have you seen any seagulls in the area?” he asked the cats.
If there was one thing Cuthbert knew about the moggies of London, it was that they watched birds gingerly. He touched his forehead against the glass. The cats circled around one another, taking turns rubbing against the pane. There was no other response.
Cuthbert decided to change tack. “If a’m a ‘saliq,’ mates, perhaps you would be willing to lend a hand—I’m officially seeking otters,” he said. “That’s my immediate business. And seagulls—oi’suppose. They’re important . . . to help these penguins out, see? And I’m looking for a sort of ghost—or two ghosts, in a manner of speaking. There’s this fellow, this Tecton—e’s split into a million living bitties. ’E’s a load of gulls these days. And my older brother—Drystan. ’E’s the most important, mind you. I say ‘ghost,’ but it’s only as ’e’s missing. He ain’t jedded.”*
Muezza squeezed his way past the other cats, and as he did, he also seemed to squeeze subtly past Cuthbert’s world of prayers and madness and dreams, and to speak with familiarity and directness: “You free us, brother, and I can tell you about many, many, many small living pests, and perhaps about other things, too.”
“I don’t see how it’s possible, cat. I only have these bolt cutters, right?” He held them up by one handle, and shook it around, as though gripping a great swan or goose by the neck.
“Oh, brother seeker—and ‘brother-seeker’—surely you know that I would also take you, of all creatures, to the sacred path. I am here to tell you that the path leads eventually to the Shayk of Night. Don’t be afraid. I know your purpose. The Shayk has been waiting for you. But I get ahead of myself.”
“That so,” Cuthbert said. He wondered what to make of the cat’s strange ideas. They struck him as no less inscrutable than the penguins’, but this animal had at least alluded to a plan, as well as a quid pro quo arrangement of genuine promise. Given the fact that he’d made a sort of promise to the penguins, he felt inclined to work with this creature.
“Can you help me free the otters into the cut? This is my most important task.”
“Yes, I can help. All things are possible,” said the cat.
“Really?”
“Oh, so much,” said the cat.
Cuthbert thought for a moment. There was no little red emergency box here; there was merely glass. How dangerous could a little cat be? He tried to weigh pros and cons, and it did not take him long to reach a decision.
“Mind now,” said Cuthbert.
There was a heavy garden hose and squirter looped around its portable, wheeled spool a few feet away, propped against the back wall of the lion terraces. The apparatus was made of a heavy, galvanized alloy. He heaved up the entire assemblage, took a few steps back, and ran forward, ramming it into the glass. As he ran, he began to think of his brother, as if Drystan himself were helping him to push forward. There was a loud knock, oddly attenuated and resonant, as if the blow had come from beneath the sea. The force of the impact threw Cuthbert back. He toppled over. He was in great pain.
He screamed, “Drystaaaaaaaaan!” What he would give to see him tonight, even under these embarrassing circumstances. How he missed Dryst!
He sat on his arse for a few seconds, catching his breath.
“Drystan,” he groaned. “Jesus, help me. Jesus Drystan. Jesus Drystan. Help me, help me, help me, help me. Don’t I have a mucker somewhere? St. Cuthbert? Christ of Otters? Someone?”
The air had grown colder and he was shivering, his teeth chattering occasionally. He lurched up onto his knees and steadied himself. He felt dizzy and self-conscious. “I’m really doing it,” he whispered to himself. Kneeling made him think of prayer, but he felt unsure of what to do about it just then. “Bloody help me, someone,” he said. Here he was, a first-class social disaster on one hand, and on the other a supplicant to Family Felidae of Order Carnivora—all he needed was a rosary of fangs.
A huge triangle of the glass pane, half the size of a newspaper page, had broken off and tilted into the tank. Cuthbert got up and approached the opening—there were the three cats, lumped into a little cave made of artificial, flat rocks; their ears were pulled back in terror. After a little while, seeing Cuthbert and hearing a few soothing words he remembered his granny using (“Kitty-kyloe! Kitty-kyloe!”), their giant ears pricked up. The one named Muezza stepped forward first. Felis margarita are known for their gentleness, their sweetness of temper—provided you aren’t a snake, chicken, or rodent. Cuthbert simply pulled them out, like free kittens, and dropped them onto the pavement.
the green line to allah
THE SAND CATS STARTED TO KEEN AWAY, STRETCHING their legs into grand, picky steps, then pushing themselves into low, predatory crawls. This, evidently, is what a little imprisoned meat-eater does when it suddenly takes its place at the top of the local food chain. The killing of natural prey, which the zoo hadn’t allowed for decades, had to be eased into; it was like crawling beneath a tender belly—the animal looks for teats, and failing that, goes for the heart.
Watching them, Cuthbert was rapt. He felt that cats were healing, almost magical, and in a funny way, a force stronger than Flōtism.
His grandmother Winefride, among other things, was one of those great cat-loving women one encounters in the world, from Alabama to Zanzibar, the sort who, if given the opportunity, would keep a dozen in the house and feed a dozen more strays under the back porch. Removed from her Clee and Wyre environs to West Bromwich, she had turned to cats and birds as signs of wildness.
In her later years, Cuthbert’s father forbade all pets, but Winefride always talked as though cats were, apart from otters, the most perfect of God’s creatures. If otters brought miracles to the dying and to saints, cats helped the living. She often employed the word useful to describe them, though Cuthbert never understood just what that implied. She was always putting out saucers of milk and the occasional kipper for the moggies in the neighborhood.
> “They deserve it,” she would say.
In his mind, he could still hear her calling “Kitty-kyloe! Kitty-kyloe!”
Cuthbert watched the sand cats begin to relax and stand taller. In London, a cat could command a certain respect. He remembered the prancing cat logo one saw when visiting the A&E at the Whittington Hospital, up the Holloway Road, where he had regularly shown up in recent years for neulibrium and a hot meal and Flōt detox.
You again, Cuthbert? his favorite nurses would say. After your jabs again? Going to hospital used to be a relief for Cuthbert; he had been welcomed at Whittington for a long time, and the staff never minced words: Keep it up, Cuthbert, and you’ll be dead before you’re a hundred. He had been placed in the hospital’s large psychiatric unit seven times for chronic Flōtism, with stays from three days to nine weeks, typically signed off by Dr. Bajwa. He never stayed away from Flōt more than a few hours after his discharges, but he felt a temporary relief—he saw that, in theory at least, it was possible to stop drinking.
And this sense of a reprieve was what he associated with Whittington and felines. He always felt charmed by the hospital’s logo of a black silhouette of a cat standing upon a W. It reminded him of his grandmother and her earthy strength, a power he tried misguidedly to tap by going to the hospital, where decisions, it turned out, were made for you. But he had trusted the Whittington deeply, and now, he was sure, the Red Watch would be all over it, hunting for him.
In the days before Calm Houses and the Red Watch, he’d known friends from the streets or marginal housing who would, every few years, deliberately smash a storefront, or give some stranger a bad lampin’, solely for the privilege of being arrested and sent to the Whittington. Cuthbert especially loved how you could look out many psych ward windows at the Whittington and see, in the distance, the bright beech trees and glowing stonework of Highgate Cemetery, where a few blokes he knew from panhandling and sleeping rough sometimes slept at night in the company of Douglas Adams and Karl Marx, both of whom, one imagines, would sympathize.
CUTHBERT FELT MESMERIZED as the sand cats made themselves, second by second, freer before his eyes. He felt a strong urge to cuddle one, and he stepped closer to Muezza. Unlike the jackals, the cats did not mark their new territory, but there was a pause. The other cats seemed reluctant to part from one another, but at the same time instinctually compelled to do just that, their noses thrusting ahead. They each gradually slipped into tentative stalks, in three different directions. They were solitary at last, but nearly flattened by a flood of need to stalk blood.
What Cuthbert did not perceive was that the sand cats were also enormously preoccupied with Norway rats. These were the “pests” Muezza spoke of. The cats had heard, smelled, and sometimes seen these rodents near their enclosure since their arrival. Now they could perceive them directly, rustling in innumerable shrubs, in service drains, in zoo stores where dingo kibbles and bolts of dehydrated bananas for the monkeys were kept. Aside from human beings, the rats were the most common free animals in the zoo. And now something beautiful was out to devour them.
One of the cats scrammed madly up a very tall plane tree and disappeared. Another was tooling around inside a black plastic bucket that stood near the door of an adjacent maintenance shed.
Muezza rolled onto his back, right in the middle of the path that led, eventually, toward the monkeys. Although Muezza was real, Cuthbert’s hallucinosis enriched the cat’s movements, giving each paw a winged grace and fluidity. The cat, freed by a mentally ill man’s delusions, was still acting a cat, but even more utterly so than the lions; he seemed a being more animate and sentient than anything Cuthbert had seen in the animal world. Cuthbert’s hallucinations were growing more elaborate, and the animals more garrulous and complex: he was imagining versions of the very “souls” that Heaven’s Gate claimed all animals possessed. But whereas the death cult saw these souls as crude, infantile demi-spirits, Cuthbert saw whole, mature psyches. He felt deep wonder before Muezza.
Perhaps this Muezza, he thought, if he couldn’t help find Drystan or the Gulls of Imago or the Christ of Otters, could at least absolve him, somehow, of his lifetime of guilt and shame.
The cat froze for a moment, upside down, and extended his pudgy legs to a startling degree. It was as if he were trying to make himself as long as a leopard.
Cuthbert had never seen a cat so desperate to be larger. Muezza sprung back together, a recoiling bungee cord. Then he did something Cuthbert had never seen a cat do: he ran around and around in a tight circle, around and around, chasing his tail, almost ecstatically, until he fell and rolled and stopped himself. The cat turned his head toward Cuthbert as warmly as a fellow sleeper in bed. Cuthbert saw something very odd; it seemed to him that the cat was smiling at him. The expression didn’t last long—it was not sewn to his muzzle. The cat stood up, shook its golden ears, and gazed at Cuthbert circumspectly.
“Shukran!” said Muezza. “As-salamu alaykum!” The cat trotted up to Cuthbert, and peered into his face with what appeared to him utter sentience. “Whoever is kind to the creatures of God is kind to God also. Whoever imprisons a cat will imprison himself.”
“Oh,” Cuthbert said. He had to think about that one. It was a daunting notion, implying that a controlling relationship with animals was like trying to control God. He’d certainly been evil toward animals as a child. But did he ever want to control God?
“I’ve wandered the world like a dead creature for many years,” he told the cat. “When I was young, even after being blessed by the otters, even after my gran’s Learning, even after I knew the truth, after Gran died, I was wicked to other animals—and to dogs, in particular. It has spoiled me. It has destroyed my soul, and damned me to alcoholism, then to Flōtism. I thought that by letting the jackals out and whatnot, and then you, too, it might help. Just a little bit of help.”
Muezza began to sniff at a hessian mulch mat set along a trail to protect grass seedlings, then at a long, outstretched hornbeam limb.
“So good, so moral, saliq,” said Muezza. “What you fail to understand, perhaps because you are too English, is that all are welcome on the Green Path. We say, ‘Come, come, whoever you are, no matter how many times you’ve broken your vows.’ The blessing of the otters—oh, you will see. It never ends.”
“I did not take vows, Muezza.”
“No need to complicate matters, saliq. What I mean to tell you is that there are no restrictions now, not even past sins. You’ve been forgiven long ago. But you must take the sacred path, the Tariqat. This, this is the great beginning. You do not understand who you are, do you?” He spoke with an abstracted air, and without looking away from his plant explorations.
“I don’t feel forgiven,” said Cuthbert. “I need help.”
Muezza said: “No one can help you now if you are truly ready. We cannot make you more ready. Your ‘help’ is the droppings of depraved sand mice beside my golden, jeweled ‘This.’ The Tariqat awaits you.”
Then the cat added: “Yet, I must say, if you don’t mind, that though you may follow the Green Line to Allah, the dogs you have mentioned, saliq, I do not understand how you could not see that they are of little importance anyway, in the scheme of things. To kill a dog is no great sin—you know that, don’t you? They are not allowed to set a single paw on the Green Line. And most dogs are dirty idolaters, you may have noticed. They worship lowly human beings. Forget your jackals. Or are you a dog? Of course not!”
Cuthbert didn’t understand Muezza fully, but he knew he didn’t like the cat’s slerting on about dogs or people. His own guilt—for his childhood abuse of a dog, for hurting the penguin tonight, but mostly for nothing at all—stung him hard, goading his indignation into something quite ferocious.
“Are you a dog?” the cat asked again, needling.
He said: “Oh, shut it. That’s ronk, you, and quite hateful, really. To injure a dog is cruelty, plain and simple.” The image of the injured penguin came to mind. “To injure any a
nimal,” he said. He felt angry and charmed and abashed by the cat. “Why don’t you look at me when we’re having a word?”
“I smell you.” Muezza laughed. The cat pushed his snout deeper into the grassy weeds. “Regardless of what you say, it is very bad that the jackals have been released. They are ruthless. The Shayk of Night, I have heard, has had to end the lives of many of them in the old land. But if you released them, that must be correct, brother.”
“Are you just saying that, then?”
Muezza didn’t answer.
Cuthbert felt baffled—and impatient to go. It seemed to him that the cat was either barmy or ill behaved. He stammered, “I don’t know about any Shakey-Fakey-Half-Bakey of Night. But you’re getting on my pip, cat,” said Cuthbert. “I said, it’s rude not to look at someone when they’re speaking. I’ve got to go. The otters—they’ve got to be let out of here. Soon.”
The cat seemed to ignore him—like, in fact, a cat.
Then he said, “Saliq, let me accompany you, for as long as I can. If you will have me? I can show you, as I said, the Green Line, the One True Path, that leads to the Shayk of Night, and from the Shayk you can find the way to . . . a cure, before Allah. If you really want the cure.”
A feeling of sadness pushed up from Cuthbert’s belly, into his throat.
“I think I am beyond a cure. A’m the worst on earth. If it weren’t for my brother, Dryst—and ’e’s gone missing, as I said—I wouldn’t exist at all to any being, apart from my GP a bit.” At that moment, he felt for the first time sure that he would not survive the next twenty-four hours. He had not wanted this, not tonight, not death.
He said, “The soul-grabbers, they are coming to destroy us all. I’ve failed miserably, cat. I was thinking—was it thinking or was it something else?—that if I could let you all out, there might be a way to prevent the cult freaks from wiping out all the animals.”
Muezza paused for a moment, twitching his ears and glancing at Cuthbert, then returning his attention to the weeds.
