Night of the Animals by Bill Broun Page B

was a chance to bring back, in some tiny measure, a simple faith in the goodness of the world that his own brother Banee’s overdose and the regime had stolen.
    And was Cuthbert really so far off? Everyone thinks about animals, Dr. Bajwa told himself. He himself greatly admired tigers. He still remembered a story told to him as a child about a Brahmin who spoke to jackals, buffaloes, lions, and even peepal trees. Do not half the books of little ones, he mused, contain talking animals? On any given afternoon, does Hyde Park not contain at least one old man who speaks to his terrier with verbosity, real intimacy, and even erudition?
    â€œYou aren’t,” the doctor was saying to Cuthbert, a few days later, “quite as mentally off as I think you want us all to believe,are you? You’re a Flōter who likes animals. That’s the overview, innit?” He’d sunk into his chummy Bethnal Green tongue.
    Cuthbert smiled dejectedly. “But I’m not ‘on,’ at least not to you, am I?”
    â€œYou just need to stop drinking Flōt. That—and stubbornness—is ninety percent of the problem. Please, man.”
    Dr. Bajwa began coughing uncontrollably, this time with horrifying, papery wheezes and rales. Cuthbert toddered to his feet, trying to force himself to put his arm around this man who was, after all, his only human friend in the universe.
    â€œI’m OK,” Dr. Bajwa protested, clearly not, trying to smile in abject denial. A few tiny dots of blood spattered onto Cuthbert’s forearm. “Come on, man. I’ve just gone for a bloody burton.”

the arrest notice
    IT WAS A WARM, DARK, DRIZZLY AFTERNOON IN late February, a February oddly free of the winter tornadoes that had stalked England in recent years. It was still two months before the comet Urga-Rampos appeared in the Northern Hemisphere and the zoo break-in, and Dr. Bajwa still felt he could (just) manage Cuthbert’s illness. He was leaving his office in the Holloway Road for the day. He noticed the dim purple glow in his peripheral vision that indicated a new Opticall text (flashing purple signified incoming audio calls). There were two Opticalls—one with happy news, and the other devastating.
    He blinked three times, and the texts began to crawl across his eyes as he walked down the pavement, wading through a red and blue sea of the rain spheres people wore.
    First, he learned that the neoplasm in his right lung was, so far, isolated and “eminently treatable.” The fancy Legacy oncologist he’d seen wrote with the tired, all’s-well tone of one who had simply chosen white and blue instead of red and black for their new yacht spinnaker and jib sails. “Long story short: you’re absolutely fine,etc. etc., and I’ll see you next month for a routine follow-up. And there’s a pill, as you must know.” Dr. Bajwa laughed aloud at the news. He had been quite worried.
    A great number of Indigent children dressed in dirty T-shirts and denims, all sopping wet (none ever wore rain spheres), seemed to be jostling around him on the pavement.
    â€œSpare a fiver, sir,” they kept asking.
    As he tried to read the next Opticall, and shove his way toward the Underground entrance, he managed to pull a few pounds from his pocket.
    â€œYou’re a great man,” a little girl with an eye patch told him. She looked thin, with a pasty-gray pallor. “Truly, sir.”
    â€œNo I’m not,” he said, leaning down and scrubbling the girl’s thick black hair. “But I am happy, sweet one.”
    When he opened the other Opticall, his happiness collapsed. As the awful words passed over his corneas, he began, instantly, to weep. It had been years since he had cried, and it strained his body. He crossed his strong arms, trying to stifle the hurt, and keep quiet. The little Indigent girl hugged his legs.
    â€œDon’t cry,” she said.
    His salty tears