Night of the Animals(18)
“Right, mate,” said Baj.
AS BAJ LEFT ST. CLEMENTS, the injustice of his dismissal from research hit him anew. When he passed through the gate, he turned around to see the old NHS sign bolted to a brick pillar. He glanced around to make sure no one was watching. If he wasn’t careful, he’d end up struck off the medical register—or much worse, perhaps in St. Clements himself, guffawing at nothing, and planted beneath a Nexar hood.
He pulled out his old-fashioned fountain pen and wrote on the sign: “Fuck Harry.” He coughed, and a few pink flecks of faintly bloody spittle landed on the sign. Then he walked away, trying not to look rushed, until breaking into a trot.
“It’s going . . . to get worse . . . and then . . . it’s going to get better,” he said to himself, jogging along, gasping for air in gulps.
THE NEXT TIME Cuthbert came to see him, the doctor observed that, as Cuthbert saw it, the animals were vying for control over him, and the animals wanted out of their cages. He was in full, Flōt-induced hallucinosis. Walking into the consult room, he showed Ingall’s Sign markedly, taking long strides and leaning forward excessively.
“I’ve no say in matters anymore, doc,” he said.
“If you don’t stop the Flōt,” he told Cuthbert, “it is indeed over. And you can’t go around saying you hear animals anymore, my friend. You can’t.”
Cuthbert had looked down at the Afshar rug with its paisley patterns. “The Flōt is one thing,” he said, “but the animals, with all due respect, doctor, I could never just tell them to hush up. It’s not just withdrawal. Even when I drink the Flōt, the voices come on.”
“That’s not a good symptom, Cuthbert. It’s called hallucinosis. It will only grow worse if you don’t stop.”
“But their message is for everyone—for me, for you, for England, for the world. There might just be a little white pony what knows yow, Baj.”
With that, Baj at long last lost his patience. All his professional restraint seemed to fly off like a flock of irritable starlings rousted from a tremendous, withering tree.
“Cuthbert! For f*ck’s sake!” he bellowed. “Can’t you bloody see, you fool? It’s the Flōt. The Flōt! It’s standard first-Flōt-withdrawal syndrome. There are no f*cking animals. There are no voices. You are delusional, my friend. It’s Flōt withdrawal.”
The doctor was almost weeping now, standing up from his seat, and the spectacle appalled Cuthbert, who lurched up and backed away, toward the door of the office, doddering on his old legs, his dry lips moving but nothing coming out.
“No. Stay!” cried Baj as Cuthbert opened the door. “You’ve got to listen to me. I don’t want to lose you, my friend. The Red Watch will be after you, you know? They’ll beat the bloody f*ck out of you and drag you half-dead before an EquiPoise P-Lev, and it’s St. Clements after that. Please, Cuthbert. Please. Let’s try the hospital—just one last time! Just one—”
But before he could finish the phrase, Cuthbert was gone.
pentecost in the trees
THUS IT CAME TO PASS THAT, ON THE LAST DAY OF April of 2052, as an enormous comet began to smear streaks of light above the Northern Hemisphere, the aged Cuthbert found himself stuck in the zoo’s boundary foliage beside a floaty green blob of trouble.
For the six previous months, Baj had tried to protect him from the Watch and from EquiPoise, but the doctor had been no match for Cuthbert’s drug addiction (nor for talking otters), and now Cuthbert had a case of Flōt withdrawal shakes in his muscles, a bizarre plan in his head, and an arboreal phantasm beside him. He seemed, to all appearances, beyond human aid.
The yew creature, a kind of botanical steam, was soaking into his very skin, and Cuthbert felt himself breathing in sweet fogs tessellated with long green leaves. There was still fear, but the sense of shock had passed. His pulse puttered in his ears. There was a minted, pennyroyal scent and a whiff of roses, and a wildness and warmth, like an unexpected kiss from a dodgy stranger. He’d encountered, over the years, many figments in the tumbling-down experience of Flōt withdrawal, but none that felt so intimate or so peculiar.
The closeness came with strange timing. The Red Watch was now quite actively looking for him. In the last weeks, Cuthbert had more or less abandoned his IB flat to avoid detention and gone back to his old habits of sleeping rough, panhandling, and thievery. His dole payments, of course, had stopped, as had his meetings with Baj, whose perceptions of the old man’s perils had been, after all, quite accurate. Cuthbert had rarely felt so vulnerable and lonely.
But not alone. As the yew tree covered him with its sparkling emerald plasmas, Cuthbert sensed that the being (him, her, it?) knew him deeply—too deeply. He wanted to crawl away, into his grotto, but his sore limbs wouldn’t budge from their integuments of age and exhaustion.
“Wha . . . what do you want?” Cuthbert asked it, his teeth a’chatter. “You want me to get caught? It ain’t even dark yet, is it?” His heart began palpitating oddly—flipping over, trotting, bursting into double beats. It felt like a broken propeller in his chest. His lips and hands went numb. If he could just reach his grotto, he thought, he would get his Flōt, and all would be OK.
“You do not need to do this, Cuthbert,” the being said, in a nearly melodious whistle, a sound like the breeze being inhaled by all the trees around him through mouths the size of flute holes. “You will never be the same if you do.”