He could not breathe. He tried to pull the air in, but nothing came from the effort. He felt dizzy.
Mason held Kibali in his arms now, cuddling the big, sad beast against him while Suleiman, in turn, placed his hand on Mason’s shoulder. Mason had held dying bucks he’d shot like this before in Pendleton County. He would tell them the same words: “It’s OK, fella, it’s OK.”
At that moment, Astrid felt sure that she saw the golden eagle atop the embassy awaken, too, tearing the bolts from its talons like annoying thorns. The steel bird of prey flew down to the four animals huddled in the square, and hovered above them. It was an America-within-an-America, an animal core and inner spark like Omotoso’s Yoruba ori, a guardian disguised as art, that would never fit into any death cult’s plans.
Under the shadow of the eagle, Kibali spoke to Mason, too, for he also had listened very hard to animals his whole life, and at last he could hear their words now, at least for this night.
Kibali said, “I say to you both, ‘Gagoga maga medu.’ That is the life-phrase by which the survivors of today will know one another. I give it to you from the animal world. It’s the voice against the rushing-in of death. It means, ‘I want to live.’”
Then the gorilla, his eyesight dimming, his heart trilling to a stop, looked up at Astrid, who, in his eyes, seemed to be floating above him, and he said to her, in the stalwart gorilla tongue, “Gagoga maga medu, Astrid. Live! Live, sweet messiah! You are almost past the Death. And you are the last holder of the Wonderments on Earth. You are the princess of the wild, the Otter Christ of England. You will save our country, and you will save our world. But the cost of avoiding pain and grief is annihilation, I assure you. Just as you cannot trap an animal and expect it to survive, you must not go back to Flōt. You must keep imagining the green world, and you must walk toward it—and we will be by your side, on the road of happy destiny. Help the stranger, in the zoo. That poor crazy man who thinks you’re his brother. He may or may not be your grandfather, Astrid. Why does it matter? The fact is, he can be.”
“I hear you,” said Astrid. A fresh set of king’s bulletins and orange-freqs eeped in her eyes, but she dismissed them all without reading.
“If I could only gouge out my eyes,” she seethed. “Bugger!”
The golden wings of the eagle covered them all like a feathery shield, kicking up a cloud of dust around the square, hiding the creatures under its wings—three Homo sapiens and the Gorilla gorilla—and keeping them safe. They were pulling together, Astrid saw, as though circling the proverbial wagons, but soon the Heaven’s Gaters would find them and drug them and force them into the soul-swallowing machine. They must leave or perish, she suspected.
Suleiman, unsurprised but heartbroken, felt sure now that he would not make it to any new country. These American immigration demons, as he decided to think of them, had them surrounded. The only dim hope he felt was the Shayk of Night.
Apparently immune to the Neuters’ silver stunners and to bullets and mob-hurled projectiles, the black leopard had grown frantic and exceedingly lethal, screaming in leopard language, ripping the pale demons to pieces like so many rotten white peaches.
Under the beating eagle’s feathers, Astrid felt herself kissing Kibali’s forehead as he lay there, struggling for breath.
“You wake up,” she said, her licorice-colored hair falling onto and tickling his face. “Wake up.” Such was the fantastical tenor of her swirling brain in second withdrawal, she had to wonder: was she really talking to a gorilla, or to herself. “Please!”
Kibali’s own last thought was of his dead mother, named Long Stander, the matriarch of his father’s troop in the verdant hills of eastern Congo. He saw leaves in her hair, felt her pulling him closer to her, there under the ayous trees. As he expired, he heard her singing her burly ape lullabies with a might beyond the human heart.
releasing the spirits of animals past
AND NOW THE EMBASSY’S “EAGLE” WAS PULLING Astrid deeper under its wings, and dragging Mason and Suleiman upward, too, as the Shayk of Night battled on in the square. Astrid felt herself rising into the sky, and she wondered if this journey, this spiriting away by an eagle, would finally—finally—be the end of second withdrawal.
Saved by an eagle. That’s how good fantasies always end, she mused darkly. Perfect.
But it wasn’t an eagle. The creature had doors, and the doors had sprung open, and human arms had emerged to yank her inside.