Night of the Animals(10)

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.

And he began to doubt, freshly, as he often did, whether he possessed the so-called Wonderments or not. It was easy to believe that Drystan had got them. “If I’d really got them,” he ruminated, “I wouldn’t have ended up a sot who can’t put down the bottle, would I?”

“Is that yow, trying to gab?” he asked the otters. “Or just my brain, like Baj says?”

It was right before a feeding, so they were frisky. One of the otters, a big female, as if responding to his query, regarded Cuthbert specially, standing still while another female and her whelps smashed up against her. The big female was in a delicate state of “almost pregnancy,” filled with implanted sperm. Embryos would begin to gestate in a month or two. Meanwhile, the whelps kept trying to bite the other mother’s neck. They wanted to nurse.

The otter habitat seemed too small, Cuthbert thought. It seemed little more than a couple of store-bought aquaria set into a mortar-and-rock faux riverbank. The otters’ hair was a rich sludge color, yet iridescent, too, smoothed back by the force of a thousand dives, with light sloping off at all angles. Cuthbert had only seen such a fascinating creature once before. The female was like all the muddy moisture of England gathered into one supermuscular cat shape. She was a Sufi creature, he thought to himself, reaching back to his cannabis and acid-addled days of bad dabbling in sophomoric esoterica which began years ago at university. Neither wholly of earth nor of water, neither entirely real nor imagined, the otter occupied an eerie in-betweenness, one of the Sufi dimensions between the Absolute of the Absolute and Cuthbert’s ugly life.

“’Ello, muckers,” he had said. “Am I safe now, am I? Do you remember me? From back in the owd days? With Drystan and what?”

He felt a sudden stab of longing for Drystan.

“Are one of you Drystan? Are you?”

No spoken word, per se, emanated from them, but Cuthbert was emotionally and mentally overwhelmed with a sense of being singled out for otterspaeke. He still felt unsure if it was the Wonderments at work, but he felt Drystan’s minty presence.

“Dryst,” he whispered. “Please.”

His rare bout of semisobriety had intensified the experience tenfold, too. He looked into the big female otter’s eyes, colored as brown-black as a river bottom. A craving seemed to concentrate in her. Or was it his craving? Who could know? There was, in any case, a desperate need in her dark eyes, from which these words emerged:

Gagoga gagoga gagoga

Miltsung miltsung miltsung

Any passing observer on the zoo’s path would have noticed little more than a fat-tummied ogler of otters hunched over the display’s barricade. But inside Cuthbert the worlds of nature, history, supernature, and memory had all burst and commingled.