Bill Broun - Night of the Animals

“Stop it,” said the doctor. “It’s nothing. And put that away!” For a moment, he felt real anger toward Cuthbert. “Can we just get one thing sorted? If you go, can we keep in mind that the animals really aren’t speaking to you? And you’ll stay off your Flōt?”

Cuthbert gave him a vexed smile, the edges of his lips paled with pressure.

“And you’ll have to pay for it yourself,” the doctor added. “Can you do that?”

“It depends what you mean by ‘pay,’” Cuthbert said. “There’s more than money at stake. There’s the boy.” He spoke with dry matter-of-factness. His eyes, normally a Brythonic russet-brown, and as spongy as Anglesey soil, seemed newly hard and clear. “Oi’ve paid with my heart — for decades.”

The screeching color-charge compressors of a passing bosonicabus — probably the No. 29—could be heard outside in the Holloway Road.

Cuthbert added, sounding distant: “When your brother becomes an animal, it makes you think.”

“Sure, sure,” said Dr. Bajwa. He felt the long blade of pity jab into him. He hated it. He despised pity’s utter uselessness. But there it was — a dolor for the shredded stems of flowers never to touch the earth. Dr. Bajwa puckered his lips a bit, trying to subdue his emotions.

Cuthbert seemed to have sunk down into his chair. He was sniffling a bit.

“Why am I going to the zoo?” There were tears in Cuthbert’s eyes. “What’s the matter with me?” He stared dazedly at the ceiling. He said, “When my mother and father have forsaken me, the Lord will take me up.” He gazed directly at Dr. Bajwa, and repeated, more frantically, “What’s the matter with me?”

“I don’t. know,” said Dr. Bajwa. “Not exactly. But it seems you need these. voices. That’s all I know.” He plucked a sky-blue sticky note from his desktop and wrote his WikiNous cryptograph on it, as he had many times before, and gave it to Cuthbert. “You can message me if anything dire happens. But I really hope it won’t. Just go see those otters. And don’t do anything foolish,” he said, already regretting his advice somewhat.

“I’ll get the dosh,” Cuthbert said, feeling atingle. “Any road up *I can.”

“I know you will. I know it.”

The doctor reached across the desk and squeezed Cuthbert’s hand as hard as he could, and that was very hard indeed. He put a £10 coin in the dry hand — any less seemed cruel, and any more unwise.

“Just take care,” the doctor said. “And at least cut back on the Flōt, you silly old fool.”

IN THE WEEKS THAT CAME, Cuthbert saved his dole, as best he could, panhandled a bit, and combined with Baj’s tenner, he soon pulled together the £24.50 for zoo admission — enough for six liters of the economical, Dark Plume label Flōt, he ruefully noted. It had been the first time he had put anything before a drink of Flōt in years. For a few afternoons, he even stayed sober, though sobriety seemed to increase the animal voices and send his heart into wild palpitations. On one of those sober afternoons, he heard the otters again. “ Gagoga, ” they kept saying. “ Gagoga. ”

Uncharacteristically, Cuthbert had begun to avoid Dr. Bajwa a bit. He wanted to impress him with his independence. At one point, he decided to surprise Baj by sending an Opticall. While most Indigents received and, if literate, read dozens of Opticalls on their retinas a day, very few could afford to write them; generally, to write, you needed a quality digital epidermal aerosol such as SkinWerks and an advanced grade of access to WikiNous, things few Indigents could afford. Even emergency workers labored under strict controls and weren’t normally supposed to use skin aerosols for messages.

“I want you to Opticall my GP,” he was telling a street acquaintance one shaky, sober afternoon. “It’s a medical issue, right?”

This wily man’s name was Gadge, and he possessed a stolen case of SkinWerks, which had made him mildly noteworthy on the streets. SkinWerks was the simplest, if messiest, way to send Opticalls. A bioelectronic emollient sprayed onto the epidermis, always in high demand and pricey, it allowed wearers to read and type upon their own skin (usually, on the forearm), to exchange tactile sensations, and to display digital images on the skin — and, in limited ways, to “feel” them, too.

GADGE’S LITTLE STASH was authentic, too — and that mattered. Dangerous imitations from East Africa’s new factories circulated on the black market, burning digital skin users and, at times, sparking mental illnesses, it was said.

“Yeah, medical, eh?” he asked. “Ha!”

“Tell him, ‘This is Cuthbert, Baj! It’s a miracle of God! I am SOBER — all caps now, that — for two hours now! Saving money for zoo! Sincerely, Cuthbert Handley.’ Tell him that, right? Put exclamation points after everything, please. Please, Gadge, do your friend a favor?”

Gadge smirked and hiked up his greasy suit-jacket sleeve, throwing his head back in a floridly pompous way. He sprayed the red digital aerosol onto his own hairy forearm. He rubbed it around a bit until an ovular WikiNous portal glowed on the arm. Most people sprayed digital skins onto their own body, often for sexual thrills, but they could be applied to any flat, smooth, warm surface.

“This is a big favor I’m doing you, Cuddy,” said Gadge. He had a narrow, angular face with a long, lupine jaw, and dark eyes set close together.

Cuthbert watched closely, squinting, as Gadge typed the Opticall text onto his skin, straining with every punch of a dirty finger.

“It’s done,” said Gadge. “I sent it. You owe me.”

“Yam a fine fellow,” said Cuthbert, after which Gadge released a long, rumbling fart.

WHEN DR. BAJWA got the Opticall text, he felt relief and a nervous joy. Seeing the name “Cuthbert” glide across his retinas struck him as a singular treat. There was also a sense, though much fainter, that he ought not to get enmeshed with an Indigent, but that was more for safety reasons than anything else. As a child, the egalitarianism of Sikhism and importance of seva , or helping the poor, were driven into him. How many daal dishes he’d washed at the gurdwara ! How many golden bowls of dahi yogurt he had set proudly on communal tables! Nonetheless, there was also something less high-minded at work, for Baj simply liked Cuthbert. As much as any Flōt addict could be, he was honest, gentle, clever, reliable, and good — and twice the man that most Britons in Harry9’s dreadful, unpredictable reign were.

ONE CHILLY SATURDAY, at the end of January, three months after the animal voices had begun, Cuthbert finally visited the zoological gardens as a paid visitor. He was, at last, going to observe living otters firsthand, paying for the privilege as other citizens had since 1828.

After passing through the turnstile at the main gate, Cuthbert began to trot feebly toward the otters in the northern part of the zoo. The exertion drove his heart into a jumble of premature contractions, and he had to stop. He stood there, gasping, beside a statue of Tony Blair that had been erected, as a diversionary tactic, during the Second Restoration. The former prime minister’s aged, pinched face held a distant gaze, made all the more disconnected by the lurid bronzecast’s slightly cut-price look.

“Ow am yow, Sir Tony?” asked Cuthbert. He felt he ought to be polite. “You know, I day *always vote, but I always liked your wife — so lovely.” But the stiff party leader, with his hollow mind encased in bargain alloys, seemed nonetheless to look above and beyond Cuthbert.

Once at the otters’ enclosure, at first Cuthbert merely watched the mustelids plunge in and out of their green-water rock pool, yinnying and playing, as he continued to catch his breath. Seeing the otters, in the flesh, wasn’t so much disappointing as unnerving.