Keepers

by Gary A Braunbeck

  You chose to move under your own power; the lack of noise might be disturbing, but at least it wouldn’t betray your presence.

  As soon as you took your first step a light blinked on to the right and a dog leapt at you. Crying out, you jumped to the other side of the walkway, lost your balance, and landed on your knees. Crossing your arms in front of your face, you took a deep breath and readied yourself for the thing to sink its teeth into your arm.

  But nothing happened.

  You looked up and saw that the light was from a 12-inch television screen—the dog was nothing more than an image from a home movie.

  Screens activated by your weight on the tread lined the walls on both sides of the walkway, displaying videos and photographs of dogs, cats, birds, horses, and countless other animals, all of the images underscored by soft music piped through unseen speakers: it took a moment, but you at last recognized the music as Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring Suite.

  You stood up and continued moving down the walkway, looking from one side to the other as the show continued.

  Each video or photo of an animal was displayed for perhaps ten seconds before cross-fading into a video or photograph of a person, then the person’s image cross-faded into a photo or tape of someone else, and this someone else cross-faded into another animal. Once the sequence played through, the screen went black and the words “To Be Loved” appeared before everything started again. The screens on the left ran through a similar sequence, only this began with a person, went to an animal, then another animal before coming back to a person, ending with the words “To Have a Place.”

  You came to the end of the walkway and stepped down to the floor.

  Before you was a set of large swinging metal doors. Over the entrance was a bronze plaque with the words “THERE IS A REASON IN NATURE FOR SOMETHING TO EXIST RATHER THAN NOT.” You stared at the words for a few moments before pushing open the doors to reveal a long hallway with more concrete walls, lighted intermittently with bare bulbs cradled in bell-shaped cages of wire dangling from the ceiling. This, too, was known to you (from the hospital’s sub-basement), but you couldn’t place it just then. But that’s okay—you’ve got me for that, pal.

  Back here the smell of a farmyard was just as potent, but stronger still were scents distinctly, unmistakably human: sweat and strong body odor unsuccessfully masked by perfumes and aftershaves.

  Aware of barred doors on either side up ahead, you moved forward and caught a glimpse of a framed painting hanging on the wall to my right: René Magritte’s The Son of Man. Written on a square placard underneath it were the words “TO BE HUMAN.” On the wall across from it hung an almost exact duplicate of the painting, only this time instead of an apple there was a dove in front of the man’s face, and a small light trained on it from above highlighted the dove; the placard underneath this had a simple one-word statement on it: “OR?”

  You could still hear the richness of Copland’s masterpiece through unseen speakers; the sound quality grew clearer and fuller the farther you moved down the corridor.

  On the left was a large cage with an ox standing inside. It was skin and bones and covered in whip scars, some of them so fresh they were still seeping. Its eyes were a milky red and its lolling tongue was yellow. It stood on trembling legs streaked with dried liquid shit that had squittered from its diseased bowels, not making a sound, turning its head toward you as if asking for help. Its scalp had been peeled away to reveal the skull underneath, a series of red “Xs” decorating the surface.

  Something large, wide, and unpleasant-smelling lay sleeping in the shadows of the cage across from the ox. You began stepping over to see if you could get a better look at it, then decided you didn’t want to know.

  Each cage was separated from its neighbor by about two feet of wall space, and in the center of that space was another 12-inch monitor displaying the same bizarre series of home movies you’d seen in the corridor. You wondered why caged animals would want to watch home movies. Did whoever designed this area think the animals would understand what they were seeing?

  The next cage—cell, cubby, whatever, like it makes a difference—was empty, but the one directly across from it was occupied by Miss Acceleration.

  The sight of her in that cage hit the “pause” button on your entire somatic nervous system; you couldn’t have moved at that moment if someone had been emptying an AK-47 at your head.

  The monitor next to her cage showed the image of a dog jumping around for no other reason than it was happy to be outside in the sunshine.

  She was sitting in well-stuffed leather easy chair with her handmade quilt spread across her lap and covering her legs. She held a small book in her hands and was gently rocking herself forward and back, forward and back, forward and back, her faced pinched with intense concentration, as if remaining still would bring some terrible curse from Heaven down upon her head. The framed photographs from her room at the nursing home decorated the wall behind her.

  You gripped the bars and tried to open the door but it seemed welded in place.

  Once the door has been closed, the animal cannot be retrieved from outside.

  She looked up at you, smiled, and said: “It’s all right. Everything’s all right now. Yes.” Forward and back, forward and back.

  You swallowed once, very loudly, and then asked: “Do you know where you are?”

  “I’m home,” she said, her voice cracking on the second word as if it were the most beautiful thing she’d ever spoken. “I mean, I’ll be going there soon.”

  You started to speak again, but then remembered the new security measures at the nursing home. Were you being watched? Were you on camera this moment? Just because you couldn’t see any cameras didn’t mean they weren’t there; and if there were cameras, there were microphones, as well.

  But if you were being watched, if they knew you were trespassing, why hadn’t any of them shown up to stop you?

  “Listen,” you said to Miss Acceleration, “I’ve got to find somebody, and as soon as I do, we’re going to get you out of here. Do you understand?”

  “Is it time for my programs yet? I do so hate to miss them.” Forward and back, forward and back, staring at me. “Are you my son?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure? You look an awful lot like him.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Everything’s all right now. I’ll be there soon.” And with that, she closed her eyes and continued rocking.

  If you saw her out in the world she would have been just another old woman, the type who usually holds up the line in a grocery store, or is waiting for a bus that’s always running late and so wants to strike up a conversation in the meantime; one of those meticulous old gals who knows and cares about the exact type of gift you’re supposed to give on a particular anniversary, who has so many interesting stories to tell but no one to listen to them because you don’t want to bother with a dry, old, used-up little bit of carbon whose hands are arthritic claws covered in liver spots and grotesque, plump purple veins; you would have looked at her and seen only another humorously annoying old woman counting out exact change as if it were a holy chore assigned to her from above. And you wouldn’t have stopped to think that underneath this monumental punchline of dying cells, wrinkled skin, and fading memories there existed someone who’d always been, but now was rarely seen as, a real human being; one with hurts and hopes and lonely places in their life they filled as best they could by standing in the line at the grocery store, or chatting with strangers at bus stops, or endlessly bending the driver’s ear while counting out exact change. You would never see her as ever having been in love, or dancing with her favorite beau to music from the Glenn Miller Orchestra, young and vibrant, with a laugh that rang like crystal and a long, promising, full life ahead of her. You would never wonder or care if she often cried alone at night, or how many times she’d offered her heart only to have it crushed and spat upon, or if her children remembered
to call her on the weekend or visit at Christmas. Maybe there was a Great Love who lay slumbering in some graveyard and she was the only person who took the time to replace the wilting flowers with fresh blossoms—you might have imagined that, maybe, and then smiled at the sad, sentimental absurdity of this image from a fairy tale: There once was an old woman who lived in the past where someday all of us will be.

  At that moment you wanted to know everything about her and her life, every detail no matter how extraneous or trivial. You did not want to walk away from her because she might be gone when you came back; they collected them fast around here.

  A sound a few yards away startled you and you looked in its direction.

  Someone had coughed.

  “Don’t worry,” you said to Miss Acceleration. “I’ll come back for you. I promise.”

  She continued chatting as you walked away: “I think a bunny would be nice, don’t you? A big, round, fluffy gray bunny with great floppy ears. Yes, I think a bunny would be so nice … .”

  You blinked back something in your eyes, swallowed against something vile roiling up from your stomach into the back of your throat, wiped some more blood from your hands onto the sides of your pants, and found the next occupied cage.

  Behind these bars a little boy with massive facial deformities lay on a cot, his lower body covered by a sheet. From the ceiling there extended down a pencil-thick cable that spread out at the bottom like the wires inside an umbrella, each one attached to one of the matchbox-sized rectangles implanted in his skull. The skin of his exposed scalp was crusty and red where it fused with the metal. He jerked underneath the sheet as if in the midst of a seizure, arms and legs twitching as the silver matchboxes sparked and faded in a precisely-timed sequence. His eyes were held closed by two heavy strips of medical tape and fresh, glistening stitches formed a “W” across his face from temples to cheeks, meeting above the bridge of his nose. A clear plastic tube ran from one of his nostrils into a large glass jar set on a metal table beside the cot; with each jerk, dark viscous liquid crawled through the tube and oozed into the jar. With each sequence of sparks he bit down hard on his lower lip, breaking the skin and dribbling blood down the side of his face. His skin was red and glistened with sweat and every time he convulsed, he jerked back his head to expose the pinkish-white scar across his neck.

  … when there are this many, they cut out their vocal cords …

  You kept moving; movement was good, movement reinforced the illusion of an assured destination and a guaranteed way out once you reached it, and you needed to believe that you were going to get out of this.

  You passed beaten, bandaged dogs of every shape and size, kittens and cats who had been kicked nearly into pulp or whose fur had been doused in gasoline and set aflame; they lay very still, taking shallow breaths as tubes fed them both oxygen and liquid protein.

  The monitors in the wall showed happy pictures, happy families with their happy pets having happy times.

  A deep aluminum bathtub sat in the center of the next cage. The steady drip-drip-drip of water from the faucet echoed like faraway gunshots. Something splashed around, pounded one reverberating boom of thunder against the side, then rose partway above the lip; it was a woman—or had been, once—with red hair, mottled and discolored skin, and a neck that had been slashed several times in different places with a straight-edge razor; she looked at you through bulbous piscine eyes and brushed a wet strand of hair from her forehead. Then the slashes on her neck opened moistly, blowing air bubbles before contracting again.

  Gills. She had gills.

  You made some kind of a sound, soft and pitiful and child-like, that crawled out of your throat as if it were afraid of the light, and then you backed away, hands pushed out as if holding closed some invisible door.

  Your legs felt weighted down by iron boots. You did not so much walk as shuffle along, periodically looking down at the floor to make sure the earth wasn’t about to split open and swallow you.

  Next was a teenaged boy with dozens of membranous man-of-war tentacles slobbering out all over his body in phosphorescent clusters; in the cage beside him was a shaven goat whose front legs were far too thick and ended in a clump of five toes; across from the goat was a plump Down’s syndrome girl of uncertain age with a jutting facial cleft whose body was sprouting thick green feathers; in the cage beside her, a bear was grooming its fur not with claws but a model’s thin, creamy-skinned, delicate hands; then came a little boy with an impossibly thin neck who smoothly rotated his head so his too-long and thin tongue could snap at the midges swarming around the light; and, finally, a middle-aged woman who might have once been pretty, before the split lip, broken nose, and two black eyes: she squatted on sludgy, misshapen legs that bent outward at incomprehensible angles. Most of her weight seemed to rest on her gelatinous, flat webbed feet. She looked at you first with confusion, then longing, and, at last, a resigned sort of pity.

  You staggered backward, pressing yourself against the bars of the cage behind you in order to keep from collapsing to the floor. You closed your eyes, shuddering, then looked farther down the corridor to where a curved brass railing disappeared into a stairway under the floor.

  “You don’t want to go down there. Trust me when I say this to you.”

  You spun around and saw him standing—standing!—in the middle of the cage, half-hidden in shadows. You could see his face, part of his exposed chest, and a moist, leathery-looking towel wrapped around his waist. You’d never seen him fully upright before; he seemed so tall.

  “Whitey!”

  “Captain Spaulding,” he replied. “Decided to do some more exploring, did you? Hooray-hoorayhooray.”

  You gripped the bars. “Jesus Christ, Whitey, what the hell is this place?”

  “Be it ever so humble, there’s no place—goodness gracious me, what a mess you are. Been waltzing with fresh carcasses through a slaughterhouse? I trust it was a Strauss—one should never waltz to anything but.” He blinked, then made a disapproving tsk-tsk. “You are not at all presentable, dear boy—not that you were a breathtaking heartthrob to begin with, but the importance of good grooming and careful hygiene cannot be overrated. Soap and water are our friends. You may quote me on that.”

  “Whitey, for chrissakes! What is this place?”

  “Hark—what’s this I see? My goodness, the programming schedule around here never gets boring, I’ll give ’em that. You ought to take a look at the screen there, Captain. Required viewing.”

  The scene on the monitor changed from the home movies of before to a close-up of an asphalt alley floor. The camera seemed to be hand-held because the image jerked and shook but, after a moment, things settled down and the camera did a slow turn to the right. The face of a border collie filled the screen. The silver tag hanging from its collar caught a glint of sunlight and threw a bright spot into the lens, but then the camera turned forward once more, catching a fast glimpse of the top of a cat’s head, tilted upward a few degrees, and focused on something in the distance.

  It took a second for you to realize what you were looking at.

  A man with his back to the camera was running down the alley toward another man who looked as if he were doubled over in pain or looking for something because he was kneeling. Then the running man pulled back his leg, did a half-pirouette, and kicked the kneeling man in the ribs.

  You stood there outside Whitey’s cage and watched a film of yourself attacking Drop-Kick that afternoon after Dad’s funeral.

  “Didn’t think you had it in you to do a Bruce Lee like that,” said Whitey. “You have good form, by the way.”

  The scene had been filmed from two different angles, one from each end of the alley. What struck you as odd about it—aside from its existing in the first place—was the angle from which it had all been filmed; it was very low to the ground, as if the camera operator had been lying on their stomach so as to—

  —no.

  You remembered how the face of the collie had
filled the screen. You remembered how the animals had sat so unnaturally still that afternoon. How the sunlight glittered off the tags hanging from some of their collars.

  This had been filmed with the cameras held at about collar height.

  “Technology’s a wonderful thing, isn’t it?” said Whitey. “A camera no bigger than a tag on a collar. Been around for a while, from what I hear. I mean, just look at that.”

  The alley scene was gone, but the camera remained just as jerky as it had been before. A shadow passed over the lens, leaving a smear in its trail. This kept happening for several seconds until, at last, the blurry image of a face could be seen forming. The face bounced up and down, as if it were looking down into the lens of the camera it was carrying while trying to clean something off the lens and—

  —“Oh, no,” you said.

  Your thumb passed over the lens one more time and you then were looking into the face of your fifteen-year-old self. You were crying like a baby, lips moving, forming words that could not be heard but you didn’t need to hear them, you knew damn well what you’d said to that poor cat as you stood there by the trash cans in back of Beckman’s Market.

  The image of your bawling face was very clear, indeed; you’d wiped more blood from the tag on its collar than you’d thought.

  You shook your head. “I never was able to make out its name.”

  The image faded back into the home movies of before.

  “You got a good heart, Captain,” said Whitey. “That counts for something in the end. Or so goes the rumor.” He jerked his head down and to the left once, twice, three times, then made a chuffing sound as he kicked at the thick layer of straw covering most of the floor. “They’ve been aware of you for a long time now, Captain. They’re very good at keeping track of folks who interest them.

  “To answer your question about what this place is: It’s sort of their version of Ellis Island—and don’t ask me—” He chuffed once again, shaking his head. “—who ‘they’ are because you have to know at this point and, besides, a pro never wastes time repeating a gag that everyone in the peanut gallery has heard a dozen times. But I digress. Do me a favor—there’s a bag hanging on the wall to your right. Be a splendid fellow and get it for me, will you?”