Bill Broun - Night of the Animals

“Let’s all be nice,” he said at one point.

Some of the regular embassy personnel queuing at the table didn’t appear rankled at all and required no abuse — indeed, they politely waited their turns.

Astrid herself felt the allure of the Flōt and the champagne. She was convinced that little of what she saw before her was really happening. Could a drink or two hurt? It would end the anxieties of the Death in an instant, and as she saw it, end this entire phantasmagoria of a night. Couldn’t she just get a sip, a little taste, of some Glenfiddich, and stir in a splash of Flōt, and a bite of cheese, without the downers? She pulled her hair into two thick tails and twisted it into a splayed chignon. The humidity of the chancery had given it waves, and it was as flyaway shiny and distracting as ever.

Marshall Applewhite III glided right in front of Astrid.

“Yes, it’s sooooooo OK,” he said, in a sibilant, not unfriendly voice. “We’re inside you, after all. We know you. We know about your unhappiness and your loneliness. And all those years of having no one but your mother, and now she’s dying of Bruta7, poor dear one, and it’s become so hard to believe in anything in. in this. this dirty world of petty kings and animals running amok and people acting like animals. Go ahead — drink away. It’s liberating, Astrid.”

Applewhite frowned a little. He showed Astrid a purple orb of Flōt and two shot glasses. She put her hand to her mouth, as if guarding it.

Out in the square, she heard a loudspeaker babbling about King Henry’s sins, and the death-groans of neuralpike victims, and the screams of an elephant. She was still without panties or trousers, her muscular legs still dripping with green sticky sap. She felt appallingly exposed but almost beyond embarrassment.

“This corrupt manimal,” said the loudspeaker in a nasally, bloodless tone, “this selfish manimal — this earth-bound manimal — this corrupt manimal — he has — corrupt manimal — he has appealed to Britain’s worst nature. Corrupt manimal. Let Harry9 die. Let him be gone with the rest of earth’s animals. Let him—” and on and on the voice droned. In the distance, Astrid could also just make out a new and alarming sound, both musical and corrosive, like the gold-throated shrieks of hundreds of dragons. Applewhite, too, seemed to hear it, and squinted suspiciously.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, god.”

After a long pause, she said, “But there’s St. Cuthbert.” She began shaking her head, taking a few steps back from Applewhite. “He thinks I’m his brother. Or some kind of forest messiah. He says I’m the Christ of Otters.” She turned away from Applewhite. “Cuthbert’s crazy, but he means something. to me, at least.”

“What’s he to you? He’s a stranger. He’s nothing. He’s a part of your second withdrawal from Flōt. Your unnecessary withdrawal. Your unnecessary ‘struggle’ with your human container.”

“But he’s not. Leave me alone. You don’t care about me. Cuthbert — he’s no stranger. I’ve even an idea that he might be my granddaddy. He shouldn’t be a stranger. Not to anyone in England.”

“But you don’t realize,” said Applewhite, beaming smugly, holding one of the glasses toward Astrid, “that this saint is merely second withdrawal? Don’t you see? There is no Saint Cuthbert. He’s just another city drunk.”

Astrid pulled her hair down again and shook it out.

“I don’t care,” she said. “For all I know, we’re all just the ghosts of one another’s deepest needs. But there is this helpless old Indigent who says he has come to save Britain’s animals, and he may be crazy, but tonight, this first of May, in the reign of King Henry the Ninth, in 2052, in London, England, he is Saint Cuthbert.”

“But you. what about you? What are you to him?”

“I am. I am the Christ of Otters.”

Applewhite grimaced sadly. “Oh, child,” he said, chuckling. “You’ve been, well, between withdrawals for so long — and that’s such a scary thing, I know! — that you’re easily taken in. And that’s OK. We’ll help you. I really, really, really, really think you’re at the Evolutionary Level Above Human. You’re as unanimal as they get. And you’re so special . That’s why you’re not being forced. like the others. see? We know you well, Astrid. I’m sorry, but I have to say this: you’re completely ready to shed your container. You are ready to ascend to our home in the comet. Drink, friend, drink.”

Lifting a filled shot glass in his wrinkled pink hand, Applewhite drank one of them, wincing slightly.

Astrid said, “I will not, cunt.”

“Then you’ve wrecked your self, Astrid,” he said, gasping a bit. “You can stay in your world of giant vaginas and shit. You will die tonight. If the Death doesn’t get you, my Neuters will.”

There was a kind of popping sound, and a flash of red lights, and Applewhite, mysteriously, was gone.

ASTRID ALL AT ONCE FELT VERY DIZZY AND clumsy, and she fell again to her knees, right beside the banquet table of Flōt and champagnes and Stilton and foie gras, still naked from the waist down. And her heart seemed to be struggling to beat, as the gorilla’s was. Had the cultists somehow slipped her the fatal ingredients, too? she wondered. She did not have time to speculate — she soon found that the redoubtable Mason was by her side again.

“Can I help you up?” he asked, his lip quivering a bit.

“No,” she said. “Yes.”

And when with his arm he pulled her to her feet, for a moment her legs straddled his thigh, and a shudder of pleasure hit her, and she nearly pushed Mason back to the floor so that she could take him inside her.

He seemed to scramble for a few moments, as if twisting and weaseling away from her.

“Fuck,” she said. “For some reason. I’m really hot for you. I’m sorry. It’s. ”

He pulled her to her feet, and she spun around. She looked all around herself.

“It’s OK,” he said. “I just — I’m kind of slow, you know? And you’re so. you’re beautiful. But there’s something going on with you.”

“He’s. left?” asked Astrid.

“Who?”

“The creepy cult man, holding the shot glasses.”

“Um, sure,” Mason said, in a way Astrid read as sure, whatever you say .

Astrid leaned hard against Mason, trying to calm herself, to still her body — but a big part of her remained like an unsocketed eye, looking everywhere helplessly, unable to move, stuck upon Mason. She wondered if this helpless nakedness, this abject dependency on the animal warmth of another, was somehow a sign that she had indeed cleared the last hurdle of the second withdrawal, and that a new life could unfold from here. She hated the feeling of need. She longed to be the otter queen again, with legs as big and hard as the trunks of oak trees and a mind as big as the sky.

“You saw him?” asked Astrid.

Mason just smiled at her and said, “We need to get you some trousers.” In his own buttoned-down and overly competent way, he felt oddly liberated, too. The loop d’loopers in matching white had taken the night into realms beyond the diplomatic service. Questions swarmed his mind: Was America also under attack? Had he been drugged? Was he somehow mentally ill? Was he alive? He didn’t see a way that the events of the night would not leave his outlook forever altered. But delusions or not, drugs or not, live or dead — he, for one, wasn’t going to let an obviously suffering woman walk around half-naked in the chancery without getting her some clothes.

He opened Suleiman’s giant bag and dug out a pair of ancient, tattered Phineas and Ferb pajama bottoms. They must have been half a century old. Astrid jumped into them gladly.