Bill Broun - Night of the Animals

The iron fence fronting the doctor and dental offices on Harley Street had all been painted recently in the same glossy black enamel. The consistency and predictability of the fence bars gave the jackals confidence. They had latched onto a kind of geometry that fit the canine mind. In their color-blind vision flashed steady ticking of bars, like the demisemiquavers of thirty-second notes. And what was that music? It went like this: find-kill-find-kill , trilling in the speeding heart of dog-time.

They ran faster now, a bit furiously, down to New Cavendish Street, where the fence bent perpendicularly to the right. Tick tick tick tick, flashed the fence. A black cab clattered into the road and down a very narrow lane toward George Street. They gave chase. They had lost all their caution. Eventually, the dogs came to the High Anglican Church, St. James, an exquisite neo-Gothic structure built on the site of a chapel where Spain had, four centuries before, tried to organize a coup d’etat against Elizabeth I. The doors were wide open, strangely, and alive with human scents.

A very old eccentric priest, one Father James Drury, had risen early, as was his custom, to pray for all airline travelers in the night skies. He knelt with difficulty near the altar. At age eighty-six, he had been under persistent pressure from the bishop to retire, but Father Drury felt pride in saying the occasional liturgy he was permitted to lead, and he had strongly resisted moving from the rectory, to the point of frank irritation among his younger colleagues. He had just unlocked the main doors and flung them open, as he always did. Often, at this hour, one or two rough sleepers would find their way up from the maelstrom of Soho and enter the church for a kip in the pews. Father Drury never asked them to leave. Tonight, he knelt down near a man bold enough to use a sleeping bag. He had started his long prayer, asking for those ten miles up in the sky, who hurtled at the speed of sound while watching edited versions of Dreams of Antarctica and Bone Arrow 2 , to be protected “from all danger of collision, of fire, of explosion, of fall and bruises, and evil, through Jesus Christ, our Lord, Amen.” Who knows how many souls Father Drury’s intercessions vouchsafed for that morning meeting in Brussels?

When the jackals came into the church, they scampered right up the nave toward the chancel, their tongues hanging out. The nave’s pale colonettes of Purbeck marble and the faultless groining of its arches again gave the jackals a feeling of calm.

Another homeless man, one Father Drury hadn’t known was present, had seen the animals. He arose from a pew and simply left the church, carrying a small red rucksack and saying nothing.

The sound of the man caused the priest to look up. He doddered carefully up to his feet, gripping one of the marble altar rails, and the jackals immediately surrounded him, sensing weakness and his rich, salty skin.

“Brothers,” said Father Drury. “I suppose you have done harm in the world. But you also will be forgiven.” He began walking down the main aisle, toward the door. “Now get along.”

The jackals followed along. When Father Drury reached the narthex, he felt a great fatigue grip him. He sat down on an oak bench beside a silver dish of holy water set into a carved font, and he sighed.

The jackals crowded around him.

He could see them panting rapidly, and he felt pity. “You’re thirsty,” said the priest. “You mustn’t irritate others now — do I have that promise?”

He worked the silver dish out of the font as he did every Tuesday to gather it up for cleaning, carefully avoiding spills. It looked like a simple mixing bowl. With some difficulty, which made his ribs and back ache, he hunched over and placed the bowl on the stone floor.

The jackals lapped the water greedily.

Father Drury made the sign of the cross five times, once over each animal, blessing it. When the jackals finished drinking, they ran out, excited, and finally traveled in separate directions to join London’s thousands of strays. It was the last time wild jackals were seen on earth.

MEANWHILE, JUST NORTH OF THE ZOO, a ginger-haired autoreporter and his corpulent fotolivographer neglected to turn left on the Outer Circle road, and instead came to a bridge over Regent’s Canal. Moored below them were some of the long canal boats that plied the old waterway for recreation in the day. The only aspect of the zoo still visible was the boxy concrete zoo administration and research buildings of the quiet northeastern quadrant of the complex.

“Oooo, good,” said the fotolivographer. “We ain’t getting an establishing shot over here, are we? We can shoot pretty boats, fuckall. Let’s go back. We need that entrance, Jerry.”

Just as they turned around, the otters scampered out in front of them. The autonews crew was slightly interposed between the zoo and set of concrete stairs that went down to the cut, and the otters could not see any way past. They were squeaking and mewling loudly, running forward and back in narrow, angry loops.

“Holy fuck, shoot them, shoot them,” said the reporter named Jerry.

The fat man with the camera said, “What? Who wants to see this?” He hoisted the 3D camera onto his shoulder and trained it on the otters. Jerry dropped a few lens-bots to “capsule” footage behind the otters.

“Shoot ’em, you ninny,” said Jerry. “Shoot the fucking things.”

When the fotolivographer switched on the powerful lights of his camera, a great bloom of light appeared over the whole area.

“Oooo, now we’re doing vérité,” said the fotolivographer. “This is bollocks. Don’t we want tigers or hippos or something — something not like rats in Southwark?”

“They’re not fucking rats.”

But then Jerry saw, down the stairs, the real source of the otters’ disquiet. The big female had given birth. He could see at least six naked little otters in a makeshift den, like pink fingers, and the mother licking and licking them. He slapped the camera operator’s shoulder and pointed toward the bridge.

“Let’s get up there. We need to get out of the way. The other otters, they’re protecting her. It’s beautiful. It’s horrible,” he said.

“It’s bollocks. No one wants to see this.”

“I don’t really bloody care,” said the reporter. “Shoot the damn thing. It’s what we’ve got.”

The light shined down like an exploding star. Christmas brought Christ, but May Day delivered otters — six of them.

LIKE MANY OF THE RELEASED ANIMALS (MOST OF which were moving south, toward central London), Buddy and Ollie, the two chimpanzees who had killed a fellow ape, quickly reached Marylebone Road and crossed it, attracted by the green dome of the London Planetarium. When they reached the venerable building, they almost immediately lost interest since, as they stood close to the structure, the dome vanished from their meter-high view of the world. But there was much else to pique their curious minds.

They began pummeling the doors of the attached Madame Tussauds building, screeching loudly under an enormous T banner, which might as well have stood for Trouble .

Ollie, smaller and more compact than Buddy, smacked at the glass with his sweaty long hand, hooing lightly. The loudness of his pounding despite the weakness of his effort testified to his muscularity.

The whale-bellied night security guard, sitting inside at his kiosk with his shirt open, startled to attention. He’d been looking at a WikiNous stalk called “Peaches,” using a SkinWerks screen sprayed onto his stomach, flicking numbly through thumbnail fotolives that showed naked women, in a range of ages, all in Venetian masks. Most of the women were expertly inserting sliced pieces of fruit into their own vaginas. The guard’s SkinWerks panel was delivering the sensation of a massage, but his free hand was on his penis; he let go and tapped around the desk for his torch. He grew instantly incandescent, toward himself and at the kids outside.