Night of the Animals Read Free Page B

right?”
    â€œI can imagine that,” said Dr. Bajwa. He was convinced, at this point, that Cuthbert was joking with him—and wasting their time.
    â€œSo, one of the otters said,” Cuthbert had blurted, “ they said, well,they said they want to be let up tha’ cuts, * the ones behind Regent’s, right? You know, with those pretty boats?”
    â€œThey ‘said,’ you say? ‘Said’?”
    Cuthbert glanced down, as if mildly ashamed, and added, “I might say ‘yikkered,’ really—that’s a little more like it, actually.”
    â€œYikkered. Otters. Cuthbert, I—”
    â€œExactly.”
    Doctor and patient sat in a consultation room at the courtyard-facing back of a Victorian office building in north London. A rusty-red and white Afshar rug with boteh leaf designs covered most of the floor. The space smelled of fig leaves and cedar from Dr. Bajwa’s cologne, and were it not all so greatly soothing, Cuthbert might have held back more. A spray of hot green sunlight and a spring breeze trickled through the office’s ancient diamond-mullioned casement windows the doctor always kept ever so slightly open. With one sweet new breeze, Dr. Bajwa’s hope that Cuthbert was winding him up collapsed.
    â€œYou’re hearing animals? In your mind?”
    â€œWhat? No.” He scrutinized his doctor’s face for a moment. “In my ears, doc. In my lug’oles.”
    Soon, the particulars came out. Cuthbert claimed that thousands of animals across London—cats, dogs, rats, garden foxes, lab monkeys, hares, pet gerbils, and of course zoo animals—were trying to speak to him.
    â€œThey don’t let up, doc,” Cuthbert said. “It’s quite difficult—to be on the receiving end, as it were.” He said he tried at these moments to imagine his long-dead grandmother’s kind face, with her wispy-white tendrils of hair sometimes falling in her eyes. She would have gently rued Cuthbert’s whining. You didn’t whine about the Wonderments—and you didn’t talk about them outside the line ofdescent. “And you wouldn’t believe how many cats there are in this city.”
    Dr. Bajwa listened, half shocked, half transfixed, and nodding more out of courtesy than acquiescence.
    â€œThere’s a sort of naffed-off chimpanzee going off on me right now, ” Cuthbert had said that day. His eyes darted around the room, as though observing the black-furred words of an ape pummeling the walls. “E’s warning me to leave him alone!”
    The doctor took a deep breath and nodded his head.
    â€œThat sounds like a very sensible approach,” he said, with a note of certified sternness in his voice.
    Cuthbert puckered his lips and grazed his fingertips across his own forehead. “Could do,” he said. “S’pose.”
    â€œAnd you remember, you’ve got help, Cuthbert. Help for you, help for your body, help for your mind.” Dr. Bajwa spoke in a slow, soft cadence. “You remember all we’ve ever said, how I’m not going to let anything happen to you, right?”
    â€œAr, yam a chum,” slurred Cuthbert.

reaching for the derelict heart
    DR. SARBJINDER BAJWA WAS A MUSCULAR MAN with a broad neck and great tactile power. He preferred solutions to problems that could be applied manually, if not pharmacologically. In his spare weekends, he had, among other feats, learned to pilot one of the new solarcopters, which could be spun through the most theatrical, thousand-foot-high spirals with a simple kneading motion of the hands. On his consultation desk he kept a chromed fifteen-kilo dumbbell he liked to lift between patients. He could be a touch boastful, but he was always warm, too, with long, clement eyes the burned green of cardamom and a precise beard so closely shaven it seemed more a placement mark for a beard than the thing itself. His physical might, well