Fiction: The Zoo

By C. Hightower

 

The last of the cyanide tablets had been used inside a library at the start of the riots, tossed from the streets and in through windows where they scattered like a child’s dropped marbles. They had been cautioned against wasting bullets, a warning most ceased to head, foolishly exalting in the clear nights, the youngest and most fearful blasting off rounds when it was too quiet, laughing loudly, bellowing like autumn caves, each man on the lunatic drunk of ruination. The party members had the ammunition to spare for the remaining imprisoned, but Ramsey forewarned them against firing. Every last shell would need to be used tonight. The lingering prisoners weren’t disruptive. They were enslaved mostly by hunger. They were students, professors who would not give up the cause, a few childless women. There were no provisions. A sandpaper wind cut at Ramsey’s cheeks. The monoliths in the background stamped and called out maddeningly. The trees were topped like cream sugar cakes. A nation of giraffes rose above their iron bars. 

He watched the snow and ash fall, the flutter of strange moths. He looks at his captives and tilts his head. If you look closely you can see something like mercy in these gestures. Ramsey raises his pistol to a woman with rust colored hair spilling from under a gray cap, pinpricks of contrition move across his jaw. A young man, his large eyes the color of weak coffee reads Voltaire, a cracked spine dividing the book in half. Around him, Ramsey has shot and killed random prisoners. Repentance is the premiere ghost of war. The moving pillars scream, something imminently human and intelligent can be heard in their cries. They bury their dead. They have ingested poison. They know the bones. Ramsey pulls the young man aside and raises his pistol again. Only a small twitch at the side of the left cheek gives him away. Ramsey’s hand trembles as he empties his chamber into an open pocket, round, brass bullets party issued. 

The prisoners’ boots were taken. It was an ugly job that Ramsey insisted on doing himself, while they were still alive. He would check again after to make sure nothing of use was looked over. Too many times a man had been thrown into the pits with his boots still on. It was simpler, the leather mostly free of piss and vomit this way. He collected the worn sheepskin wallets of teachers, men with white, fine hands and tired bodies, their arms still soft. A lector’s erudite presence was still about these prisoners, showing itself as pride in the older men, cunning in the young and consecration in the faces of the women. They were ready for this day, these harmless journalists, academics rounded up in the street last spring. The wallets and useless currency stayed on the ground. Tonight, as the other men slept, Ramsey would examine these belongings, coats with missing buttons, a powder case that had been concealed, pictures, and notebooks lines with hurried, anxious scrawl or a poet’s loopy script. After dark he walked the empty streets to the dumps at the edge of the cities, heaps which were burning before the war and would burn for years after. There he emptied his pockets. Ramsey was strange in practice, ghostlike. Philosophical, but undeniably spooky. He was undemonstrative, silent, like someone gone mute from deep understanding, a scribe from the hidden side of dreams.

He proposed a heretical solution for conserving bullets, simple in design and execution. It would be gauche, but in many ways more composed than gunfire. The past several months had been a mosaic of untidy begging, walled in screams. A few pitiless, deliberate chords struck again. A hapless human melody on endless loop. A high, pitched whine to muddy the animal spirit. A fretwork of prayers rose like starlings then fell heavy to earth like the scattered stones of a burial ground. A constant subliminal hum war. 

Nothing would go to waste, not like at the beginning of the riots when they shot whole magazines into the streets when it was too quiet. Ramsey was still on his own then and had not joined with the party, now he was commanding them. The remaining men were blindfolded on orders from Ramsey. He was known for his cool minded kindness and his cruelties when necessary, and for being the youngest man in the party, only nineteen years old. They shaded each man, doing one at a time for there was only one black cloth, and hit them sharply behind the eyes at the base of the skull where the brain stem sits. When frothy blood from the nose or ears bubbled out, they knew the man was dead and threw him with heavy silence into the shallow pit with the others, men turned like pumpkins at midnight from living, breathing professors, fathers, rebels, to scarecrows stained with black blood and piss. 

As man by man was brought out, each seemed calmer than the last. The soldiers fitted each man with the blood, warm cloth about the eyes and the hands were bound. More than one man was permitted to make the sign of the cross before his wrists were tied, some in the Roman style, others in the Greek Orthodox fashion. Some cried out to the Lord as if He were only another shadow, as if the footprints in the snow alongside his own belonged not to his captors, but to Jesus Christ himself. Anyone who requested a last word, Ramsey would let cross himself a final time and speak into the world one last plea for salvation. He had never known there were so many poets who spoke with Mother Mary. The snow on the hilltop was an inkblot test, a meaningless mural of blood and scattered brains. Ramsey is familiar with humility, his face burns in dishonor. “There was no other way. There was no other way.” He repeats inside his mind until the words are only letters strung together in space without meaning, a newspaper read in a dream, a map seen in a mirror…. 

A young revolutionary had forgotten the resistance, had forgotten his friends, his writing. As the iron cloth encircled his tired and heavy lids, the rough rope dug into his flesh, he was thinking instead of a story he heard once at the beginning of the war, when it was further from home. In the story, the party was poisoning a village well. A man who was lost happened to overhear. Rather than take him deeper into the woods to shoot him, they gave the man the choice of being shot on the spot or jumping down the well. If he could not jump one of the men offered to push or throw him in.

The young man had not seen a gun at the top of the hill. His last thoughts were not of revolution or freedom, but of falling. Knowing that death or freedom awaited, the young radical was in a fugue state, focused inward on the smell of deep, earthen things, minerals, groundwater. A cellar filled with wine, mescaline, ancient brandy, a living blackness that consumes like blank ants covering a corpse. The moon at the bottom of the well is the circled rim of a child’s nighttime cup, cool, medicinal well water. This was his last good and sound vision, his last eager dream before the smack of what sounded to the young man like a genuine, solid wooden baseball bat. 

The city had been sanctioned. No supplies in over a year. The party members were burning books and documents in great, comic piles, flames licking around the edge of a gun metal sky, the deserted buildings mutely watching. They were almost finished here. The sun was a minor light in the sky now, a cold star. 

Ramsey had hoped that the zoo would be quiet. A large lizard falls from the overhang in the terrarium, like him he had an amphibian mind, worried only about food and drink. He threw meat full of poison in for them himself. He drew in harder from his newly rolled cigarette, rich, blond tobacco, watching the animals pacing, always in motion. He had come to the zoo every night for a few weeks. The animals slept through the night, before they were nearly starving... now they made even circles inside the cages, still unruffled, expecting more and better food to come soon. 

The birds in the aviary sat dumbly, the parquets bringing brightly colored masks to their chests, drawing up legs and tucking in wings close to their bodies. Ramsey held out a peach pit to a small parrot that shook his dozy, solemn head to accept, turning it over and over in his beak. Ramsey meets eyes with a large, pure white macaw. He examines the young man and the young man examines the bird, older and larger than the others. He moves toward the bird which opens and closes his blank eyes a few times. Ramsey opens the door to the aviary and fires into the air. The parrots startle and fly up and out of their enclosure. Their bodies blot out the sun with orange, red, and blue. The big cats and wolves would be first. 

The little birds flew up and out. At the center of the zoo was a deep stillness, like a room full of people silenced at once. Behind the dead air was something sensed rather than heard, like a bird feels shadow, something so familiar you don’t listen to it any longer like the sound of mindless cicadas. Screams from the monkey cage ring out as if they cannot bear a moments silence, each one screaming out in their strange languages. Nature takes the path of least resistance, obtuse and showing no favoritism. 

This city was once a stopover for tourists trekking through Europe, just a stop on the way to Kathmandu, presided over by a wrought iron summit, the Eiffel Tower was made up of so much ugly steel now. The conversations were what gave Paris its beauty. Without them the spirit of the place had flattened to the dimensions of a postage stamp.

 

 

 

 

 

C. Hightower would be nothing without her steady hands. She serves as essays editor for Apocalypse Confidential.