again his eyes were still and his expression pensive. “Look at me, kiddo.”
“What?”
“Watch that tone. Mind telling me why you had to come here?”
You pulled in a ragged, snot-filled breath and wiped your eyes. “I’m trying to find Beth.”
“Your fair lady-love? Stands about yea-high with one of the ten greatest smiles in the history of history itself? The gal you’ve been in love with your whole life but who doesn’t really share your feelings? Or if she does, she’s too scared to act on them. That Beth?
“She was here earlier. She told me about Mabel, the poor old girl. Not that you’ll understand or even believe me, but I wept when I heard the news. Mabel was one of the good ones, and there are so very few of them left in the world as the days go by.”
You stumbled to your feet. “Where did she go?” You pointed to the right. “Did she go down there? Down those stairs? Is that why I can’t find her?”
Whitey stretched one leg forward, bent the other back at the knee, and leaned low. “If I say ‘yes,’ you’re going to go down there, aren’t you?” He shook his head in the slight, subtle, human manner, then gave a disapproving whistle. “I don’t know, kiddo. I was serious when I said you don’t want to do that. You have to be pretty desperate to get this far, but down there… once you hit the bottom of those stairs, there’s no coming back as you once were.”
You slammed a fist against the bars. “ Goddammit, Whitey! For once in your miserable life would you give someone a straight answer?”
He smiled at “miserable,” then bent even closer. “How very interesting that you chose that word. Tell me: do you have any idea what it’s like to be one of the forgotten, the discarded, the unloved or the damaged? Can you even for a second imagine how it feels to reach a point in your life where the only promise a new day brings is one of more loneliness? And don’t you dare piss and moan to me about the pain of puberty or adolescent angst-those are hangnails compared to what I’m talking about.
“Think about this: a child is born retarded or deformed and knows only the mockery of other children and the embarrassment of its parents; a woman who’s worked for years, worked without complaint or much thought for herself, who’s struggled and sacrificed to build a good home for her family in the hopes they’ll love her as much as she loves them, this woman is rewarded with what?-the disrespect of her children and bruises inflicted on her by a husband whose own life hasn’t gone exactly as he’d planned, so he has to take his aggravation out on someone. Do you think that makes her feel like her life’s labors have been worthwhile?
“Consider people like you, people who grew up in this town, people in their twenties and thirties who were born into this best of all possible worlds to find only poverty, abuse, or sickness waiting to greet them; they grow up afraid, cold, hungry, full of resentment and despair because from the moment of their first breath everything was already ruined for them-what reason do they have to hope for anything? They wander around with no real sense of purpose, going from job to job, place to place, person to person, nothing and no one lasting for very long, so once again they’re left with only their thoughts and a gnawing emptiness and a heart that was born broken. Where can they go to feel wanted?
“And then there are the old farts like me, bone-bags who eventually become a burden to their families and a joke of what they once were or dreamed they’d become. We are asked to pack the whole of our life’s remaining acquisitions into a single bag or box, along with a dusty photo album or two, then are driven to a colorless room and left to sit and stare at a television that gets lousy reception, or old pictures on the wall that some bozo thinks will make us feel all warm and fuzzy and not remind us that we’ve outlived our friends, our usefulness, even the place we once held in our childrens’ lives… so there we remain, sitting, staring, wishing for a visitor or someplace to go, just some little variation in the routine that’s slowly depressing us to death. But there’s never any variation, so our bodies continue to deteriorate and our skin turns into tissue paper as we fill our noses and lungs with the smell of approaching oblivion. Are any of us with our sadnesses, our deformities, our bruises, broken hearts, declining health, the whole index of personal miseries-are we somehow undeserving of consideration? A five-minute call once a week, a kind word or affectionate smile, an understanding touch? What effort does that take? When exactly were we deemed unworthy? Who decided this?”
He was getting more and more agitated as he spoke, shifting his weight from leg to leg, stamping his hooves against the floor or kicking them against the bars, continually shaking his head as if to break apart the thoughts and scatter the pieces from his head, chuffing and snorting to disgorge the bitter taste of the words in his mouth.
Up and down the corridor, the occupants of the various cages began to stir and move toward their barred doors. Their voices and growls and peeps wove a soft, murmuring cloth of sound that spread out between the cages like a picnic blanket over green summer grass.
“Well, guess what, kiddo,” said Whitey. “There is a place for us. A way to be loved. A way home. Not just us, not just people, but any living thing whose existence becomes intolerable. Are you paying attention? There may be a quiz later.”
The music was being turned up in small increments. Whitey craned his horse’s neck up and to the side. “Almost time.”
“For what?”
A smile. “You’ll see soon enough.”
There was a loud buzz, followed by an ever louder metallic click.
“Whitey, what’s going-”
“-wait for it. It’ll come around again in a minute or two.” He winked. “A pro knows when ‘Places’ is being called.” Then he cleared his throat again and said, a bit too loudly: “Shall I tell him?”
The murmuring blanket whispered agreement. Whitey cantered around his cage, his head thrown back. “Yes, yes, yes! ” He stopped, shook himself from head to hooves, then clopped to the bars. “Human beings running the show, kiddo, was a mistake. Got that? Wasn’t supposed to happen like this.
“See, way back when before there was a ‘when’ to go back to, when the world was new, there were only the animals, but they weren’t animals as we know them now, nuh-uh: they were capable of abstract thought and speech and all the other qualities we now call ‘anthropomorphic.’ And they were happy, and they gave thanks to their creator-the First Animal, the one from which they all sprang into being.
“But creating the world and the galaxy around it and the universe around the galaxy and all that snazzy razzamatazz, well… it wears out A Divine Being. It’s anybody’s guess what specific whatchamacallit El Heffe was in the process of creating when He screwed the pooch-that’s just one those Great Mysteries that we have to live with, but, again, I digress.
“What happened was: God blinked. Can’t really blame Him, He’d been working without a break for six days and you can only stare at something for so long before you can’t see it anymore… so He blinked, looked away for a moment, and just left this new thing He’d been working on laying around, unfinished.
“During the Big Blink, as I like to call it, certain cells in this whosee-whatsit super-dingus mutated while others fused together, creating metazoans and- whammo! -the DNA dominoes fell into sequence and the double helix did its ninth configuration dance and by the time the Almighty Anybody checked back, an amusing accident called evolution had taken place: here stood Man, effulgent and curious and all starkers, scratching his ass and looking for a good place to build the first mall.
“So He let Man hang around for a while to see what would happen, and of course it didn’t work out, but by the point in the show where the whole Forty Days and Forty Nights production number was to go on, Man had convinced the animals that they couldn’t survive without him. Know how he did that? He whipped, beat, humiliated, starved, and worked them until they were so weary and sad they stopped using speech and abstract thought. With each new generation, they’d become more silent and simple-minded and had no choice but to depend on Man. So God wrote a reprise called Noah-not just because He didn’t much cotton to the idea of expunging this interesting accident called Man, but because, by then, the ‘beasts of the field’ were too stupid to know it was time to pair up and save their collective hide.”
Another loud buzz, followed by another click. Whitey craned his neck once more, shaking off foam. “Shit, I got all caught up in things and lost track-was that the second or third time?”
“Second.”
“Okay, got one more to go.”
Every synapse in your brain was firing at you to get the fuck out of there but you couldn’t; you had to hear the rest of this-if for no other reason than because he still might tell you where Beth had gone.
