She was over the barrier in seconds. At that very moment, when her feet touched zoo-soil, Astrid felt herself beginning to awaken to a world half-created. It had been the most frenziedly un-Astrid thing she’d done in her life. For her to enter the zoo this way—it was a step off a cliff. And she hadn’t thought it through, at least not like a human being. She thought of her heavy Encyclopedia of Mammals tome back home on her bed, and its chapter called “The Wild Mind”—animals did think, it claimed, but it wasn’t like Winnie-the-Pooh, and it wasn’t like the shark in Jaws, and it wasn’t what the white-haired Brian Cox said on Wonders of Life. It was deeper and stranger, and yet it was not amoral.
The prospect of a drink of Flōt now revolted her. As she ran through a few shrubs, toward the big cats zone, her mouth seemed to water, but it wasn’t Flōt she desired. Oh, Jesus, thank, Jesus, she said to herself. She wondered if she was a “thinking animal” somehow now. Whatever it was, it drove her forward. Could she read the jackal mind, communicate with chimpanzees, night-ride the elephant soul? She thought, This is crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy. But it felt like some new plane, one she would have to walk through and to crisscross to find Cuthbert Handley. It was astral and psychokinetic, a place of tangling dimension-strings covered with fur and reptile scales and timespace flowing with blood. Yet she retained a sneaking inkling that a much simpler explanation existed, for everyone and everything she had encountered in this night were uncannily familiar. In one sense, the zoo’s interiors were all her own. Nothing truly had surprised her.
seven
close encounter at the lanterne des morts
“MUEZZA? BARMY CAT? GONE THEN?”
Cuthbert felt a visceral sadness now, his thoughts like skinless pink tubes snaking around his tummy. He also needed to relieve himself. Why did the cat have to go? Muezza was, apart from Baj, the closest thing he’d known to a friend in many years. He spotted the Green Line again, patchy and worn, and he trudged on, but then he started banging his knees together like a boy trying not to pee; he wanted to find a quiet little corner. He was no longer quite spiring. The soft, uplifting fogs of Flōt were wearing thin, and he could feel a stinging sensation in his penis. Recently, he had begun to piss in his trousers. It was a relatively new inclination, and common among older Flōters, and it contained more than a seed of childish rebellion, but it horrified him. He said to himself, ’twas time to put the mockers on the habit, wasn’t it?
Up until about four years ago, he could still enter an Indigent pub—that (just barely) worked. He used to favor the White Lion of Mortimer, in Stroud Green Road. It was a famous dive, insalubrious and half its seats ripped out to pack ’em in, but he felt comfortable there. Everybody would be spending their dole and eating algae-flavored Discos and cultured-lamb kebabs brought in from the Kurdish joint across the street. Cuthbert even had a few mates at the White Lion, for a time.
But he got too comfortable, as he saw it now. He began to think he was Drystan again, and started, as Drystan, telling “lies” about his brief time at UCL. He grew garrulous. He boasted about how one day he had “dressed down moi tutor, Mr. Fusspot Daniels” over the parts of mitochondria, which was almost the exact opposite of what had happened with Cuthbert. He fussed about petty matters, such as whether he received fresh serviettes with every Flōt orb. He fell behind on his tab payments. Finally, one late afternoon, he wet his pants on a pub stool. He’d simply been too unmotivated to get up and go to the gents’. The barmaid, a Polish Indigent with silky red hair, had started punching his arm. “Damn you,” she said. He could still hear her low, succulent voice. “You are too fucking weird for the pub.” But what he remembered best was how good it had felt to be touched with feeling. It had been years.
He didn’t dare go into pubs now, even if they were generally safe from the Red Watch.
THE NIGHT WAS CLEAR AND COOL, and the stars had diminished with the light pollution he was kicking up. Apart from an aching bladder, he was beginning to feel a bit calmer, even with early Flōt withdrawal daggering and dragging down his insides and the growing presences surrounding the zoo. Perhaps he would just ramble for half an hour and go home, and be nothing more than another Indigent tooling about Regent’s Park at night. There would be no jackals, no otters, no unctuous cats, no mellifluous monkeys. He would forget the torn-down fence, the goat’s head, the Neuters and Luciferians. He would block out his father’s beatings. He would twist out from the strangling yokes of the Wonderments—and he would even put otters behind him.
But he would never get away from the loss of Drystan—not in his long lifetime, and not in another ninety years.