Night of the Animals

by Bill Broun

  She started sloshing old tea sediment out of the pots. She turned the pots upside down in the sink and looked at the thousands of dark dots that formed a layer on the sink bottom.

  Sykes’s telly was broadcasting the news. Astrid found it hard not to listen. A homemade video of the cult leader Marshall Applewhite was being discussed. Astrid turned off the spigots and stepped closer. She found the Heaven’s Gate business compelling, but in a detached, academic way. She felt a bit jealous of police who got to deal with the suicide cults. She pushed the caretaker’s door open gently.

  “Mind if I watch?”

  Sykes glared at her, fuming, but then he said, “Of course not.”

  A woman with long, widely set eyes was being interviewed. A caption read that she was a cult expert who worked for one of King Harry9’s new mental health institutes. She was saying, with visible anger, “People get drawn into these thought systems a step at a time. The person is never told at the outset what the bottom line is going to be.” One of the cult’s infamous videos came on. Applewhite was dressed in a sparkly silver tunic of sorts, hair shaved short, with a shimmering purple pleated curtain behind him. Total freakstyle, Astrid thought. Her practical-minded mum—who had nonetheless moved earth and sky to send Astrid to independent schools as a child—would have called him a tosser.

  Applewhite was saying, in a silky, unctuous voice: “I feel that we are at the end of the age. Now, I don’t want to sound like a prophet, but my gut says that it’s going to come in the next year or two. I could be off a few years, too.”

  Astrid had read in yesterday’s paper that Applewhite a few years back had gone to Mexico, paid a fee, and been castrated. She found herself respecting the sheer physical courage of the man.

  Applewhite and his cohorts apparently kept an American five-dollar bill in their pockets at all times for some reason. All the cult members did. This seemed like an intriguing fact to Astrid. She watched with Sykes for a few more seconds, then went back to the big stainless sink and jerked the cold water spigot back on. That was the downside of America, the violence bit, with a few people like Applewhite—cloying in their amiableness and yet murderous to the core. But you had them in England these days, too, didn’t you?

  Astrid decided to say something conversational to Sykes, something to demonstrate that she wasn’t insensitive to the spectacle of a mass, stupid suicide, wasn’t below vapid, even prurient interest in it, provided a certain perspective held. She turned two of the stove gas burners on, and they whispered on with a faint “pa” sound. She said to Sykes, gamely, “Never join a religion less than a thousand years old, I say.” She felt a slight pinch in her tummy. “I believe in Buddha, myself.”

  Sykes didn’t say a word or look. He pulled his office door closed. Astrid felt like an idiot. She said, not very loudly, “I don’t mean I believe in him.” But Sykes wouldn’t have heard a thing.

  When the water boiled, Astrid dropped five tea spheres in each pot. She enjoyed watching them float like little scalding suns as the pekoe orange color bloomed around them. She gave each pot a stir with a wooden spoon. It was 7:45—the recovering Flōters of the meeting, mostly first-withdrawal survivors, would be upstairs hemming and hawing by now, asking the same faintly critical question they already knew the answer to: “Who’s the tea-maker this week?” They bloody well knew who the tea-maker was.

  But try to get one of them to volunteer and make tea.

  Astrid felt modicums of pleasure and pride as she delivered the pots of tea. She forgot about the zoo and Atwell’s Opticall text. Serve and recover. She marched each pot upstairs, one at a time, to the room where the meeting was held. When she walked in, a few of the regulars smiled her way.

  “Ah, Astrid, my dream love,” said a homeless man, Burt, speaking in a wry tone made spitty and wet by his missing teeth. “You are one I want to marry.”

  “Hello, Burt,” she said.

  It usually didn’t bug her that the other addicts would do nothing to help her, but today their inaction seemed churlish. Everyone in her FA group knew she was on the cusp of second Flōt withdrawal, a trial few recovering Flōters survived.

  And Astrid made things difficult for those who tried to help her. She would have been bothered had they attempted it, and she would have tried to co-opt every task herself. And by god, if there were lamps on at the zoo, Atwell or no Atwell, she knew now she was going to have to turn them off herself. I’ll do that, as usual. Sure. I always do the bit that needs done.

  Need help, Astrid?

  No, she always said.

  I can do this. I can do almost anything.

  the problem with people like marcus

  ASTRID CLUNKED EACH POT ON A HEAVY TABLE. She put out the sugar and Smile and milk. She quickly dealt out a couple cylinders of Jaffa Cakes, organizing them in two concentric circles on a pretty, ancient piece of Wedgwood she had found in the basement. In the center of the plate was a bucolic scene of a shepherd and shepherdess cuddling by a brook-side while a dairy cow and two lambs looked on. On the rim of the plate were wildflowers—a light purple marsh-mallow, a butter-colored primrose, tight white coils of Irish lady’s tresses.

  Next, she put out a small plastic tray with a pink and yellow Battenberg. One of the Indigent fellows who still slept rough, Ed, who’d come to London from Galway in the early ’20s and claimed that the homeless were suffering from a contemporary, secret holocaust in London (“the Watch are killing thousands of us, I tell you!”), almost immediately cleared half the plate of Jaffa Cakes, stuffing more than a few into his reeking coat pocket. Astrid said nothing.

  Then she remembered her orange-freq. She’d better find out exactly what Atwell wanted. Must be more than zoo lights. Later though—the moment the meeting ends. The guv wouldn’t mind that.

  THE SUBJECT OF THE MEETING was “honesty,” a standard FA meeting topic. Astrid was glad for the meeting’s start because she actually wanted to tell people about how much pain she was in as the crisis of second withdrawal deepened. Here was one last chance to describe her sense of hollow loneliness, her shameful feeling of not fitting at Indigent-dominated FA meetings, her new cravings. If I let it out, she thought, the monsters would be out and free and down to size. A problem shared is half a problem, promised the old twelve-step adage.

  She found her mind wandering, to the water. How she loved to plunge into the lapping lanes at Highbury, with something nearing desperation. The marks of stress would wash off her back like wet bandages. She swam with power, a salubrious self-centeredness, and a kind of aggression that was very different in tone from anything anyone ever saw at Highbury. She was thirty-two years old, and her arms and legs looked more robust than those of many of the men in the constabulary.

  About a dozen Flōters and addicts were at the meeting now, and most were people Astrid actually felt deep affection for: there was Gerard, the ex–economics professor with a thick accent who had been banned, literally and, somehow, legally, from his hometown in the obscure farmlands of Alsace. The lovely pensioner, Tom P.—the one second-withdrawal survivor she’d met—was on hand, too. He seemed educated, but he wore the torn clothes typical of Indigents. He also claimed to be a former Dominican brother from County Kerry who, having slept in cemeteries during his homelessness, said he pined for graveyards even yet: “They’re the only quiet in London,” he would say, “like gifts from God, and larger by the day.” Astrid liked Tom—loved him even. As with many of the people at the meetings in East London, Tom had little money. But he was no skiver. When he first got sober, years before, he had worked his way up the ladder at a Catholic social services agency. He was handy with wood. He built intricate dollhouses for his granddaughters, and he had one expression he had become locally famous for in FA: “The best is yet to come.” Because he was the only addict at the Seamen’s Rest past second Flōt withdrawal, the adage was freighted with irony.

  An irate Irish single mother named Louisa, whom Astrid felt unaccountably intimidated by, was taking her tur
n to rave about how she wanted to stab a man at another FA meeting who had told her to “work the steps.” With her thick, curly blond hair and freckled skin, she was dreadfully gorgeous. Like Astrid, Flōt-recovery anger was strangling her, too, but unlike Astrid, Louisa was nowhere near second withdrawal, and sometimes Astrid wished she knew what she was in for—an anger that would crush rubies like grapes and stab more than a few errant Flōtheads.

  Louisa said, in a mock ladylike tone, “Oh, I just need to examine myself. That’s right, how could I be so thick?” Then she said, “I’m being honest: I wanted to top this prat.” Louisa was always right up front about people who bothered her, whom she placed in the ignominious categories of “gits” and “prats.” She scared the bejesus out of Astrid, but she often felt she shared her rage, and was comforted that so many others accepted her. Louisa gave her a sense of hope. She wished she would be so open.

  When Louisa finished, Astrid tried to speak up. She wanted to start in with the orange-freqs driving her crazy that week—yes, fucking bloody lights on at the fucking bloody zoo, for fuck’s sake—and the stupid useless constabulary wouldn’t know a terrorist from a hippofuckingpotamus, and the filthy teapots, and Sykes watching her, and his spiteful little skin-screen, and how none of you cunts know a fucking thing about withdrawal because you stupid twats always use before you get within a decade of it, you fucking cunts!

  But it suddenly seemed awkward to talk at all, and Louisa had just sounded so confident, and then Astrid, at that moment, couldn’t see how her thoughts even vaguely related to “Honesty.”

  “I feel a bit off at my job,” she began, “and I’ve these wicked new cravings for the stuff. And I’ve got this naff alarm tonight, again, another naff, time-wasting alarm, and this time it’s at the zoo, right?” She hesitated. “I’m just trying to be honest, right?” It was a moronic beginning, she felt.

  She continued: “See, it’s a bit of a bore, really. I actually feel like I understand why so many people are killing themselves in those cults and all. I’m not doing that, but I understand, right? Again, I’m trying to be honest, right?” She paused and noticed that all the friendly chatter in the room had stopped; when others spoke, people still felt free to carry on a bit in whispers. But Astrid, in second withdrawal, after all, was so serious. It was oppressive.

  “Let me offer a bit of . . . context, first?” she said.

  She heard Burt whisper moistly, “What’s that mean? What’s ‘con-tex’?”

  Right beside her was Tom P., who had been carefully dropping bits of tobacco into his old Golden Virginia rolling machine. Tom put the device on his knee and sat up, as if he had been misbehaving while a schoolmarm intoned facts. Astrid was swept with stomach-churning self-consciousness. Why did she always have to sound so stiff at FA meetings? she asked herself miserably. But she went on, she had to: “Oh dammit, how do I put this? You all know I work for the Royal Parks Police. I have a staff of twelve PCs and three sergeants who cover the Hyde and Regent’s parks. Well, my Opticall panels are going off even tonight and I just can’t answer this time, and I don’t think I’ll ever go back to work again—I’m packing it in. I feel as though I want to act out, if you understand?” She looked down into her hands, and opened and closed them into limps fists. “There are lights on—at the fucking zoo. The zoo! I need to tell you about that. Does that make sense?”

  Tom leaned forward in his chair, and twisted to one side. He looked directly at Astrid with a strange expression, raising his eyes and gritting his teeth, and then it struck: a magnificent, darkly pneumonic, arse-splitting fart. It was loud and proud, though poor Tom instantly turned crimson.

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  The whole room exploded. A few people stood up, slapping their legs and doubling over. The chairperson of the meeting, a wintry-souled Glaswegian named Fred, started banging a tiny wooden gavel. “Oooo-kay! Oooo-kay!” he kept saying. “Let the laaaaaaaay-dee have her say.” But then Fred’s face broke into a helpless grin. He still banged the gavel, but no one, least of all himself, was able to pay attention to anything other than the complete hilarity of the situation.

  Just then, a small, tightly built Indigent named Marcus, whom she didn’t care for, goaded, “Keep talking, Astrid. Keep it up!”

  Astrid was mortified. She pretended to laugh, too, but the impulse had to be entirely, and not easily, faked. Here she had been trying to discuss an important issue in her life, one that involved economic security and moral impropriety and the society of peers and madness and depression, and she had lost the floor to juvenile crudeness. It seemed to her that with the stink had also come a total disillusionment with this meeting. She instinctively blamed people like Marcus—but part of her knew this wasn’t the problem. She was the problem. The zoo was the problem.

  Fred said, “Go ahead, Astrid. You finish what you were saying, lassy.” A rivulet of milky tea had spiked out from beneath her chair; someone had knocked over a cup. She heard Louisa say, “Fuck! Get a tea towel! Get that stuff sopped up now!”

  Astrid said, “I think that’s it. I said what I needed to say.”

  “No it’s not, out with it,” someone said. “Please, Astrid.”

  “Shouldn’t a copper be answering her Opticalls,” another person cracked.

  “Hey, listen,” Astrid said, irritably.

  The silence came on again. All the snickering ended—it was as if Astrid Sullivan was a scythe of sternness, mowing down every sign of good humor in the room. By the time she felt, after a long silence, that she might start in again about her job, and perhaps broach the more important subject of her deadened emotional life, Marcus jumped in, not even waiting for the traditional “thank you” FA members said after another member spoke.

  Marcus said, “Me ex-wife is trying to keep me from seeing my kid, in little, sneaky ways.” Shaking his long brown hair mullet, and sniffing, he gazed around to see if anyone was paying attention.

  Astrid could almost physically feel the room lighten up and take earnest interest in Marcus’s plight. “I bought the boy a bicycle, a three-wheeler trainer thing, and—I’m just going to say it—the two-bone bitch sold the bicycle on that OpticAuctions business!”

  Everyone seemed stilled by the intensity of Marcus’s words; many bowed their heads.

  “I’m sorry,” Marcus said, his Dublin brogue coming in. “I’m just angry. I know it’s not good but I hate her.” Several listeners nodded. Louisa put her hand on Marcus’s shoulder.

  Astrid felt envious and sad about the Seamen’s Rest lot’s embracing of the hotheaded Marcus over her, then felt angry at herself for her jealousy.

  Tom leaned close to her. He said, in a kind, low voice, “Astrid, I’m so sorry. Don’t mind us. You know an open meeting at the Seamen’s Rest isn’t necessarily the best place to bring up anything too personal; they’ll chew you up here. We love you, Astrid, we do. Let’s go have a chat after the meeting, OK?”

  Astrid usually felt great affection for Tom, but at that moment she wanted to grab one of the pots of tea and dump it on his head. Instead, she smiled. Of course she smiled, and said distantly, “Thanks for the input.”

  Never had she felt so convinced that she was ready to stop attending FA meetings, something she had never dared do since her first meeting in Houston in 2041.

  “Arseholes,” she said quietly, tearing up.

  Tom nodded, and said, “You’re right. But there are other meetings that are much more—you know—civilized and just, er, intelligent.”

  She felt that, at last and unforeseeably, she understood something that had escaped her since 2041: FA’s problem is that it’s full of Flōters.

  “where’s my miracle?”

  ASTRID LEFT THE MEETING EARLY. ASTOUNDINGLY, it was the first time she had ever done this in eleven years of FA meetings. She was going to let the others clean up the tea. Fuck ’em! She heard old Tom calling after her as she walked outside; it was as though he knew something quite awful was happening to Astrid.

/>   “Can I have a word, Astrid?” Tom was saying. “Wait up, girl!”

  She pretended she didn’t hear and walked toward the wobbly old Docklands Light Railway station at Poplar. The rotting elevated walkways toward the crumbling skyscrapers of Canary Wharf, covered in 3D graffiti and louche adverts, always confused her, but apart from Canary Wharf itself—where half the offices were shuttered or tee-hee 5-5* dens—the DLR station was the one place within half a mile where one could find a quiet nook to make a private audio Opticall. An orange-freq’s flames were again whipping across her eyes, and new shrieking had begun. She felt an odd sensation, something new, as if the zoo itself were sucking her in, swallowing.

  The area near the station displayed the usual roaring ugliness of a late midweek evening. Cartons of unsold market produce—brownish clementines, scores of lychees spanned with white mold—overstuffed the rubbish bins along with the day’s discarded food wrappers. She felt compelled to duck beneath a giant, purple holographic penis jutting from the station wall along with scads of other obscene 3D images and tags and Army of Anonymous–UK slogans. Spread around the entrances were splayed drink boxes of Ribena, Cokelager orbs, and Lucozade bags.

  She found a disused, old phone box with broken windows, across from a train ticket window, and she ducked inside and Opticalled PC Atwell, ignoring the video option and sticking to audio only.

  “Hello?” asked Atwell.

  Astrid cleared her throat. “Sullivan here. Hope you don’t mind if I kill the camera.”

  “Oh, no, thank you, ma’am,” said Atwell. “I actually appreciate it. I smoked a cigarette, and I feel like my head’s on Neptune. I can’t believe I did that—a stupid git, I am.” She gave a little cough. “I’m sorry to disturb you, ma’am. Very sorry. Are you all right, guv? It took awhile. You sound . . .”