He tilted his head, as though listening for the subterranean effects of the gibbon song under the path-stones. He said, “Come now!”
He could not wait for an answer. A profound exhaustion was catching up with him. He wondered whether his liver, or some other major organ, was shutting down, defeating its cheap CoreMods. He had never in his life completed anything important that he had started. The thought riled him. Tonight was going to be different. If nothing else, he would at least like to help the primates have an honest ding-dong with some focking Neuters. He found himself thinking back to his days as an Aston Villa supporter with a firm,* knocking West Brom supporters in the teeth down the pub.
But the Neuters weren’t here for a bit of footy roughness.
It occurred to him again that he himself might not survive the night. The idea was not as disturbing as it should have been, but he knew he was ready to do anything to help the animals. What had he to lose anyway, besides the memory of Drystan? These thoughts, so fatalistic, had the effect of calming him. He took his hand out of his pocket. It was still thrutching about, but a bit less than before. He felt very dizzy, and ready to pass out. Perhaps, he thought, he could get a little kip, just a little.
The old walkway he had entered, which formed the main route between the eastern and western edges of the zoo, and roughly connected the area where Cuthbert had broken into the heart of the zoo, had long, evenly spaced flower troughs placed in its center, creating a kind of boulevard. It was the zoo’s “High Street” and had been in the same location since George IV. Though the stone troughs were empty for some reason, they were newly whitewashed. Each was three meters in length and just broad enough for someone to lie down in. Cuthbert considered this possibility, pausing and setting his knee on one of the rims of a trough, like a diver preparing to jump off a boat. If he was too lucky, he guessed, he would die of hypothermia in the trough, a primate whose time was done. He could be a ghost here, and but for the lack of drink, it didn’t seem a bad place at all, not at all. If he didn’t die, he might just be awakened tomorrow and a pretty woman who worked for Westminster social services would stand above him, offering a place in a doss house and a hot cuppa—perhaps a prawn curry sandwich? Or a banana? Perhaps Drystan would even find him? Cuthbert was tempted, but he resisted. Who would release the beasts, if not he? There were still the otters to let out—he could not forget his old friends, the otters! There were the poor penguins, and Tecton and the mystery of the gulls. And what if he were, as Muezza said, a kind of holy being, a “harbinger,” with a task in the service of all animals? Wasn’t he supposed to be on the lookout for the Shayk of Night? Surely he would resolve these matters, provided he stayed awake (and alive) a bit longer.
He focused his gaze on the monument and walked toward it. He felt frightened of the humanoid figures he had seen before. He thought they could rip his soul from his being at the snap of their fingers.
Perhaps, he thought, I have underestimated them. Maybe they were not merely Applewhite followers, but also demons sent by Satan to capture the Otter Christ. As he got closer to the hexagonal column, he saw it was a cross-bearing memorial of some sort, neatly crafted and built from a fine Portland stone. Six small, old-fashioned incandescent lightbulbs burned under a small, conical stone roof. It was the Lanterne des Morts, inspired by the medieval one at La Souterraine, and placed here after the First World War. The names of a dozen or so men were etched into a bronze plaque, bearing the men’s regiments and their jobs in the zoo (menagerie staff, gardener, zoo librarian, et al), along with a couplet, which Cuthbert read respectfully:
Till the red war gleam like a dim red rose
Lost in the garden of the Sons of Time.
He thought of his grandfather, long ago plowed anonymously under the soil of Worcestershire, and whose place in England was growing over with pink and white campion. He felt an almost practiced bitterness. Where was his grandfather’s shrine then? He remembered his father, boasting that his father-in-law was so tough, he walked away from the gas attack that wiped out his Worcester Regiment, smoking a Woodbine.
Here I am, Cuthbert said to himself—the lost grandson of a lost warrior of the Great War, staring down the face of a new war while belligerents gather apace around me. I have no weapon, he said to himself. I have no Woodbine. I have no regiment. I have no cloak against the coming assault.
“But I have the Wonderments,” he said aloud. “And all the voices of animals.”
last stand of order primata