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.
The female otter rose upon her haunches, leaned forward toward Cuthbert, and took in the grassy-oily-boozy human scent emanating from him.
Miltsung, she said, in a squeaky mewl, then gagoga, gagoga, gagoga.
Cuthbert didn’t know what gagoga gagoga gagoga was, but it was not Flōt and it wasn’t the Whittington and it wasn’t even the words of Dr. Bajwa; it was something new, he was sure, a guttural alphabet gurgling in his head like water off rocks. It sounded risky, too, and it sounded urgent. Above all, it sounded like “Let us out!”
And it seemed weirdly familiar to him, too, an incantation from long ago. He wondered if his vanished brother would have understood their meaning, or if he and his loss and his return were their meaning.
Gagoga!