You again, Cuthbert? his favorite nurses would say. After your jabs again? Going to hospital used to be a relief for Cuthbert; he had been welcomed at Whittington for a long time, and the staff never minced words: Keep it up, Cuthbert, and you’ll be dead before you’re a hundred. He had been placed in the hospital’s large psychiatric unit seven times for chronic Flōtism, with stays from three days to nine weeks, typically signed off by Dr. Bajwa. He never stayed away from Flōt more than a few hours after his discharges, but he felt a temporary relief—he saw that, in theory at least, it was possible to stop drinking.
And this sense of a reprieve was what he associated with Whittington and felines. He always felt charmed by the hospital’s logo of a black silhouette of a cat standing upon a W. It reminded him of his grandmother and her earthy strength, a power he tried misguidedly to tap by going to the hospital, where decisions, it turned out, were made for you. But he had trusted the Whittington deeply, and now, he was sure, the Red Watch would be all over it, hunting for him.
In the days before Calm Houses and the Red Watch, he’d known friends from the streets or marginal housing who would, every few years, deliberately smash a storefront, or give some stranger a bad lampin’, solely for the privilege of being arrested and sent to the Whittington. Cuthbert especially loved how you could look out many psych ward windows at the Whittington and see, in the distance, the bright beech trees and glowing stonework of Highgate Cemetery, where a few blokes he knew from panhandling and sleeping rough sometimes slept at night in the company of Douglas Adams and Karl Marx, both of whom, one imagines, would sympathize.
CUTHBERT FELT MESMERIZED as the sand cats made themselves, second by second, freer before his eyes. He felt a strong urge to cuddle one, and he stepped closer to Muezza. Unlike the jackals, the cats did not mark their new territory, but there was a pause. The other cats seemed reluctant to part from one another, but at the same time instinctually compelled to do just that, their noses thrusting ahead. They each gradually slipped into tentative stalks, in three different directions. They were solitary at last, but nearly flattened by a flood of need to stalk blood.
What Cuthbert did not perceive was that the sand cats were also enormously preoccupied with Norway rats. These were the “pests” Muezza spoke of. The cats had heard, smelled, and sometimes seen these rodents near their enclosure since their arrival. Now they could perceive them directly, rustling in innumerable shrubs, in service drains, in zoo stores where dingo kibbles and bolts of dehydrated bananas for the monkeys were kept. Aside from human beings, the rats were the most common free animals in the zoo. And now something beautiful was out to devour them.
One of the cats scrammed madly up a very tall plane tree and disappeared. Another was tooling around inside a black plastic bucket that stood near the door of an adjacent maintenance shed.
Muezza rolled onto his back, right in the middle of the path that led, eventually, toward the monkeys. Although Muezza was real, Cuthbert’s hallucinosis enriched the cat’s movements, giving each paw a winged grace and fluidity. The cat, freed by a mentally ill man’s delusions, was still acting a cat, but even more utterly so than the lions; he seemed a being more animate and sentient than anything Cuthbert had seen in the animal world. Cuthbert’s hallucinations were growing more elaborate, and the animals more garrulous and complex: he was imagining versions of the very “souls” that Heaven’s Gate claimed all animals possessed. But whereas the death cult saw these souls as crude, infantile demi-spirits, Cuthbert saw whole, mature psyches. He felt deep wonder before Muezza.
Perhaps this Muezza, he thought, if he couldn’t help find Drystan or the Gulls of Imago or the Christ of Otters, could at least absolve him, somehow, of his lifetime of guilt and shame.
The cat froze for a moment, upside down, and extended his pudgy legs to a startling degree. It was as if he were trying to make himself as long as a leopard.
Cuthbert had never seen a cat so desperate to be larger. Muezza sprung back together, a recoiling bungee cord. Then he did something Cuthbert had never seen a cat do: he ran around and around in a tight circle, around and around, chasing his tail, almost ecstatically, until he fell and rolled and stopped himself. The cat turned his head toward Cuthbert as warmly as a fellow sleeper in bed. Cuthbert saw something very odd; it seemed to him that the cat was smiling at him. The expression didn’t last long—it was not sewn to his muzzle. The cat stood up, shook its golden ears, and gazed at Cuthbert circumspectly.
“Shukran!” said Muezza. “As-salamu alaykum!” The cat trotted up to Cuthbert, and peered into his face with what appeared to him utter sentience. “Whoever is kind to the creatures of God is kind to God also. Whoever imprisons a cat will imprison himself.”