Bill Broun - Night of the Animals

“I’m OK,” Mason seethed. “Let me go!” But Suleiman had no intention of letting him die. He kept trying to heave him away from the elephant.

Mason, trying to regain his balance, thumping the heels of his own trainers down on a short set of three cement stairs, could see the blaming, sweeping rage in the elephant, its ears engorged with blood, its reddish-brown eyes furious. The unfamiliar tenderness of the man, the unplanned human-to-human connection, was humiliating to him. He didn’t want to be rescued. It was a goddamn elephant, not a suicide bomber.

Still, as they stood back now, watching, Layang all at once thrust her feet down so hard on the pavement the nearby trees rustled. Then the elephant seemed to back off.

“Thanks,” said Mason stiffly, gaining a footing, gazing at the small, lean man, who was grinning. The dark blue insulated coat he had been wearing was missing an arm, and all he wore under the coat was an old faded-red T-shirt that read OPERATION GET DOWN — DETROIT, MI.

“Go inside now,” Mason said. “It’s OK. Just go in.” He wiped some of the dust off his saggy khakis. He knelt down, retrieved his broken spectacles, and reset them on his nose. One of the lenses was shattered; he popped it out and let it fall on the ground.

The gorilla had moved off the bollard and into the little central garden in Grosvenor Square. He was watching all the people in front of the embassy with a look of unyielding confusion and distress. He kept placing his long hand over his solar plexus — in pain, it seemed. The elephant remained in the street, just beyond the tank traps. She was taking deep breaths, making her curved flanks flare out visibly in the half-darkness under the canopying boughs of enormous mottled plane trees.

Once again, the trees seemed slowly to exhale a verdant fog that was itself unspooling and forming a larger, and utterly bizarre, tree. It was the great, weird Yew of Wyre, beside which many a local witch had tried, secretly, to raise spirits. It had germinated in deepest Worcestershire, thousands of years ago, and now it thundered up and out into the square as summoned. The vapory limbs began spiraling, too, into various half-human forms of the forest and stream — dryads, wodwos, and sylvan sprites, all made of sand-colored basalts and pink feldspars and river pebbles polished to a shine by centuries of inland flow toward the mighty Severn. When any of the Neuters came near the tree’s green vapor, they would quiver in place until they melted into puddles of white jelly. Amid it all, Astrid’s form emerged, her skin shaggy with lichen, her clothing falling off in tatters, with a set of eyes blacker than a riverbed, and her hair growing into the golden-emerald limbs of a great, tortuous-rooted, ever-spreading tree.

“ Gagoga maga medu, ” she began saying, in a voice more plangent and piercing than her own but hers nonetheless. “ Gagoga maga medu .”

Then the yew began receding rapidly again, and Astrid felt herself phasing into reality. She fell onto her knees. A new physical sensitivity, neither hot nor cold, began coursing up and down her limbs. It didn’t hurt, but it forced her to hold her arms out. It was like unripened electricity, budding from the soil and the leaves, and bleeding green from her palms.

“Please,” she said, moaning. “Please.”

Astrid was naked, too. She climbed back to her feet shakily, forcing herself to take slow, halting breaths. Her pale, teacup-size breasts rose and fell visibly as she steadied herself. There were green patches of sticky sap dappling her skin, and it trickled down from her head and shoulders, past her glistening navel, down the smooth curves of the middle of her back, then all along the ogees formed by her narrow waist as they broadened out to ample, potent hips. An accidental coronet of holly and ivy ringed her sopping head, and she held a craggy yew stick like a staff. All those in the square who glimpsed her saw an athletic, tall, beautiful woman, emerging like a kind of green Diana birthed from the trees.

Mason Gage, standing slightly back, was spellbound. “Easy,” he said to her, gingerly edging closer. “It’s OK.”

She herself felt crushing vulnerability and bitter coldness.

“Oh my God,” she cried, stepping toward the embassy, hands in front of her as if she were blind, balancing the yew stave on her shoulder. “Oh mother Mary. Help me, someone. I’m in Flōt second-withdrawal. Someone.” She could not seem to speak above a whisper. She began waving her hands at the man in the navy blazer.

“Jesus,” said Mason.

She wasn’t quite, but she was close.

SULEIMAN HAD NEVER SEEN ANYTHING LIKE THE green woman, but he felt her power and her unruliness keenly, and these things frightened him, and the nudity, well, that created a kind of panic in his brain.

“ Allahu, allahu, allahu !” *he kept repeating.

Suleiman turned toward the glass doors. He saw the gleaming whites and golds of the chancery’s reception area, all pale marble and honey colored. It reminded him of the small, filigreed gilt and ivory jewelry boxes from Oman that one could find in Stone Town on Zanzibar. They were ingenious contraptions made to swallow pieces of sparkling beauty, and they often outshined their contents.

Also in the anteroom, most peculiarly, was a kind of ad hoc bar set upon a table, with fine orbs of Flōt and an arrangement of top-shelf liquors and red-sashed magnums of champagnes, a spread of crackers and brie and Stilton, silver bowls of grapes and figs. He felt ashamed of his disheveled appearance.

Mason stood rapt, watching the naked woman, quite unable to move, rubbing his hands together, partly to dust them off, partly to cope with a rising anxiety. It soon dawned on him that the tree-woman was just Inspector Sullivan, and her twisted face betrayed her own terror, and whatever he thought he saw, must simply not have been real. It couldn’t have been, could it?

He finally trotted toward Astrid, sniffing, trying to regain his prepossession.

“Inspector? Sullivan?”

“Not an inspector anymore.”

Mason put his arm around her paternally, tenderly, but she began to shrug it off.

“My skin — it’s extra-crazy sensitive. That’s not going to help,” she whispered. She looked up into the man’s eyes. He seemed kind and strong, and she began to weep with relief. “I’m a recovering Flōter. It’s second withdrawal. The Death. Do you know what that means? You can’t save me.”

“I don’t know what it means, but I guess it means you are in danger,” he said. “I can help get you warm. I can. ”

“You know,” said Astrid. “If you only did what other primates do for each other, that would be great,” she said. She kissed his cheek. “But thank you, kind sir.”

Suleiman had managed to pull an old Detroit Tigers hoodie from his Ghana Must Go bag, and he and Mason swaddled Astrid in the hoodie, and she accepted this.

“What happened to you?” Mason asked her. “What’s going on?”

She said, “I’m afraid I don’t know. But I. I felt like I–I feel like I am here for a reasons that goes way beyond myself. I’ll say this, too — I’ve had king’s bulletin Opticalls and black-freqs going off in my eyes like nuts in the last ten minutes. We’re. in trouble. In Britain. Something’s going on. a kind of attack.”

Mason motioned toward one of the nearby rank-and-file diplomatic police officers, while nodding toward Suleiman. He said to the officer, “Make sure this gentleman gets his visa — whatever he wants. He saved my life. He’s one of the good guys. Make sure .”

Mason glanced inside; the sight of the table of Flōt and champagne and hors d’oeuvres startled and disturbed him. “What the shit?” It snapped him out of the reverie he felt toward Astrid, which was making her uncomfortable.