Night of the Animals(59)
He wiped sweat roughly from his forehead with his arm. He grabbed his bolt cutters from the grass.
He started back to the zoo’s path, feeling its gravity acutely. He kept rubbing his tongue against a bit of loose skin on the inside of his cheek. It wouldn’t stay in place. It was as if every strand and filament in his body were drooping away, post-Flōt. He stopped at one point until he could scrape the tiny piece away; he rolled it against the roof of his mouth, then swallowed it. He began walking again, stiffly, with the short-legged proprioceptive illusion one often felt in withdrawal. At the path, he tried to orientate himself in the way sloshed people do, cocking his head to the side and squinting through one eye. He only vaguely understood the zoo’s layout, but he could sense that the location and vastness of the breach in the fence held possibilities.
The zoo seemed far larger than he had remembered it. Outside, in the park, it had always looked compact, like a secret animal-holding cell set behind a hedge or two. Inside it felt bigger than England. He felt a stab of impatience in his stomach. He started to hurry, in a leaning, stiff-legged manner. He decided he might just as well flit from exhibit to exhibit for a while, “regrouping” before the night’s larger, onerous undertakings.
Again, he heard a voice shouting out, now more distinctly: “Help me!” It was hard to tell if it was a man or a woman. The voice sounded very old, however, and weak. It couldn’t have been Drystan—he knew that much.
Cuthbert thought for a moment of calling back. But what was there to say?
The idea that a human being, the night watchman, for instance, could be standing, terrified, atop a picnic table, begging for help, or trying to find a tree to climb—nothing even close crossed Cuthbert’s mind.
He followed one of the paths and ambled north, past the Bactrian camels. On the path he came upon part of a carcass. It was a hoofed leg, but its thigh and haunch had been shorn away neatly around a bloodied bone. Cuthbert knelt down; he felt he would weep, but didn’t. There was only a stinging rigidity in his throat that soon passed.
He touched the cloven hoof. Its halves reminded him of a tiny pair of beaten ballerina slippers. He rubbed the pastern and, pinching the hock, he turned the leg over. It felt cool and sticky with blood. He pulled his hand away in a jerk. He could not work out what sort of animal the leg belonged to, but he guessed a deer. He thought momentarily of the roe deer he would sometimes see grazing in the lawns of a ruined castle in Dudley the family had sometimes visited on the way to Worcestershire and the Wyre. But they had short, reddish-brown hair, and this animal’s was blond and long, and as soft as a girl’s.
When he stood up, he checked around the ground for any other parts of the unfortunate creature. He did not see anything obvious.
He walked along, using his foot to push aside shrubs that edged the path. He soon came to a place that looked ravaged. There were long smears of red on the pavement, streaking into the grass like the lamb’s blood signs of Passover. In a spray of new grass he spotted something odd. At first, he thought it was a watering jug with a strange pink spout, left by some forgetful gardener. Only when he looked much closer did he see it was an animal head—a goat’s. Its eyes and the sockets around looked vigorously chewed out. The whole muzzle and lips had been removed, giving the skull a teeth-gritting mien.
“Fuck me,” said Cuthbert.
He grabbed the head by a horn—it was surprisingly heavy, as heavy as a four-pack of Flōt orbs. He went back and got the goat’s leg and tucked it under his arm.
He made his way back to the maintenance shed area and the broken-open main fence. Every half dozen yards, he knelt down and daubed the pavement with the carcass remains. A few times, he bashed the head down, splattering bits of blood and brain matter on the walk. He did it calmly and meticulously, like someone trying to get ketchup from a bottle. When he finished marking a spot, he would move on another half dozen meters or so. He used his foot to mush the pieces of goat into the pavement until he could see a distinct mark. When he got to the maintenance shed, he threw the head toward the spot where the fence had been brought down, but it bounced and rolled horribly several yards to the left, its one remaining long ear whipping like a tiny bloody pennant. He was trying to create a system of blood-splattered signposts. He hoped the animals might follow the trail out, like Hansel and Gretel’s trail of bread crumbs. It seemed an astute plan to him, based not in wheat flour, but in gore and death and insanity—things that lasted.
Heading north again, toward the majority of the animal enclosures, including the otters’, Cuthbert felt more buoyant. The blotches of the goat’s blood did not strike him as morbid or gory, but momentous. They marked the beginning of the end of a great threat to Kingdom Animalia.
song of the penguins
SOON CUTHBERT CAME UPON THE LONDON ZOO’S once-famous Penguin Pool, adjacent to the Children’s Zoo. He gazed at the stark DNA-like double-helix of ramps at its center, which many an architecture student in the previous century had observed with an unruffled enchantment. Cuthbert gave a satisfied little chuckle.
“Bostin, that is!” he said.
The birds were not visible.
“Penguin muckers,” he called in his most singsongy Black Country accent. “I’m heeee-earrrrrr. I can help yew-oo . . . escape, eh—from your noyce little clink.”
There was no response. At that moment, the zoo’s relic collection of black-footed African species—their joints arthritic, their instincts to dive and swim cramped by the unnaturally shallow pool, their hatcheries incorrectly placed—were dozing miserably, slightly offstage, in a High Modernist rookery of iceberg-white cement attached to the main pool and facing into it. These “Jackass” penguins, as they were called in their homeland, had lived up until their extinction in the wild on the softest of sands, not on icebergs, and certainly not on reinforced concrete.