Bill Broun - Night of the Animals

And the king wonders why the suicide cults grow? he thought to himself.

He did not feel sad about the cancer — not yet. He felt unholy rage, and this, in turn, drove him to tamp down the full range of his emotions, as if intense feelings and the confusing thoughts accompanying them were cellular mutations to be understood, controlled, and dissolved. He felt a sudden, fierce urge to get to the Philip K heliport in Kent where he took, as time permitted, Saturday solarcopter lessons. If he could get above the earth, he imagined, and get strapped into a copter’s fleshy bio-seats, he would shoot through Britain’s raw blue air, working his thoughts and his hands at the solarcopter controls, and maybe, just maybe, he would begin to rule this new foe.

Cuthbert, on the other hand, seemed to have no interest in regulating his mind or body; Baj felt he needed to do it for them both.

For as long as he could, Baj told himself, he would try to keep Cuthbert and his bright blooms of psychosis from EquiPoise, whose psychologists showed little patience for good-hearted GPs or citizens carrying what it termed “unhygienic content,” a phrase kept menacingly vague by His Majesty’s Government. (Flōt was legal, but EquiPoise’s functionaries were well known for their special hatred of Flōters, who were viewed as little more than socioeconomic parasites.)

He would not give up on this old man. Here was a chance to bring back, in some tiny measure, a simple faith in the goodness of the world that his own brother Banee’s overdose and the regime had stolen.

And was Cuthbert really so far off? Everyone thinks about animals, Dr. Bajwa told himself. He himself greatly admired tigers. He still remembered a story told to him as a child about a Brahmin who spoke to jackals, buffaloes, lions, and even peepal trees. Do not half the books of little ones, he mused, contain talking animals? On any given afternoon, does Hyde Park not contain at least one old man who speaks to his terrier with verbosity, real intimacy, and even erudition?

“You aren’t,” the doctor was saying to Cuthbert, a few days later, “quite as mentally off as I think you want us all to believe, are you? You’re a Flōter who likes animals. That’s the overview, innit?” He’d sunk into his chummy Bethnal Green tongue.

Cuthbert smiled dejectedly. “But I’m not ‘on,’ at least not to you, am I?”

“You just need to stop drinking Flōt. That — and stubbornness — is ninety percent of the problem. Please, man.”

Dr. Bajwa began coughing uncontrollably, this time with horrifying, papery wheezes and rales. Cuthbert toddered to his feet, trying to force himself to put his arm around this man who was, after all, his only human friend in the universe.

“I’m OK,” Dr. Bajwa protested, clearly not, trying to smile in abject denial. A few tiny dots of blood spattered onto Cuthbert’s forearm. “Come on, man. I’ve just gone for a bloody burton.”

IT WAS A WARM, DARK, DRIZZLY AFTERNOON IN late February, a February oddly free of the winter tornadoes that had stalked England in recent years. It was still two months before the comet Urga-Rampos appeared in the Northern Hemisphere and the zoo break-in, and Dr. Bajwa still felt he could (just) manage Cuthbert’s illness. He was leaving his office in the Holloway Road for the day. He noticed the dim purple glow in his peripheral vision that indicated a new Opticall text (flashing purple signified incoming audio calls). There were two Opticalls — one with happy news, and the other devastating.

He blinked three times, and the texts began to crawl across his eyes as he walked down the pavement, wading through a red and blue sea of the rain spheres people wore.

First, he learned that the neoplasm in his right lung was, so far, isolated and “eminently treatable.” The fancy Legacy oncologist he’d seen wrote with the tired, all’s-well tone of one who had simply chosen white and blue instead of red and black for their new yacht spinnaker and jib sails. “Long story short: you’re absolutely fine, etc. etc., and I’ll see you next month for a routine follow-up. And there’s a pill, as you must know.” Dr. Bajwa laughed aloud at the news. He had been quite worried.

A great number of Indigent children dressed in dirty T-shirts and denims, all sopping wet (none ever wore rain spheres), seemed to be jostling around him on the pavement.

“Spare a fiver, sir,” they kept asking.

As he tried to read the next Opticall, and shove his way toward the Underground entrance, he managed to pull a few pounds from his pocket.

“You’re a great man,” a little girl with an eye patch told him. She looked thin, with a pasty-gray pallor. “Truly, sir.”

“No I’m not,” he said, leaning down and scrubbling the girl’s thick black hair. “But I am happy, sweet one.”

When he opened the other Opticall, his happiness collapsed. As the awful words passed over his corneas, he began, instantly, to weep. It had been years since he had cried, and it strained his body. He crossed his strong arms, trying to stifle the hurt, and keep quiet. The little Indigent girl hugged his legs.

“Don’t cry,” she said.

His salty tears played havoc with the electro-photoreceptors in his corneal readers, turning the message script into tall, reedy, scary lettering. Nonetheless, the distressing bit was clear enough, and Dr. Bajwa scrolled it over his corneas a few times, taking it in: NHS Élite Patient No. 87229109, Handley, Cuthbert Alfred. Arrest Notification. Offence: Drunk (Flōt) and Incapable, High Street, Camden Town. Result in Lieu of Fine and/or Detention: Compulsory Form B-810 Report, Mental Hygiene Exam, Ministry of Mind. Date: 1 March 2052 via SkinWerks Bond. Examiner: Dr. George Reece, 2nd Viscount Islington, 1st Psyalleviator (EQUIPOISE), Home Counties Region.

It was all that Baj had been fighting to prevent, and it almost certainly meant that his elderly patient would end up institutionalized — and, soon enough, dead.

“You can come home and live with us,” the little girl said. “You won’t be sad with us. I’ve got a mother, you know.”

Baj leaned down, and kissed the girl on the forehead, and walked away. He smelled the street in her hair — rain, spit, the earthy acridity of coal dust from a century ago.

He realized at that moment that he had no choice but to cooperate with EquiPoise when it came to Cuthbert, or risk his own medical registration. While the Watch might not have been unleashed on Cuthbert yet, one deviation from the Ministry of Mind’s examination procedures and detention was inevitable — should he survive the arrest itself. The next day, he was able to break the news to Cuthbert, who seemed completely and rather pitifully unfazed. It was the one reaction Baj feared most.

“You need to respect EquiPoise,” he pleaded with Cuthbert. “Oh god, Cuthbert. You don’t understand. They will want everything from you.”

“I’ve no worries,” he answered. “There’s a ‘force that through the green fuse,’ Baj, drives everything, and it’ll never let us down. And no EquiPoise will get their grubby donnies *on my otters, I’ll tell you that.”

Cuthbert had just as well, the doctor thought bitterly, handed his pureed brain to EquiPoise in a disposable jar. It was over.

CUTHBERT’S FATEFUL EXAM with Dr. Reece lasted forty-five seconds, over a scent-enabled SkinWerks screen, during which Reece put a mere two questions to Cuthbert: Do you hear voices? and Do you dedicate yourself to the King? Cuthbert answered, respectively, “ Of course, don’t you? ” and “ More than you’ll ever know .”

Dr. Reece didn’t like him. Reece’s rather minor new Islington viscountcy, for which he outbid a few B-list media celebrities and paid the Windsors £130,000, hadn’t quite bought him the respect he felt he deserved.