Houston Zoo experience sparked ‘Night of the Animals’
Friend with mental illness helped author shape dystopian novel
Cuthbert Handley peers into the otter habitat at the London Zoo. In his thick accent, the 90-year-old man begins talking to the slick, frisky creatures. “Is that yow, trying to gab?”
Soon, one of them talks back.
“Gagoga gagoga gagoga.”
But before he has time to ponder what it means, Cuthbert is apprehended by a member of Britain’s Red Watch, who knocks him to his knees. A crowd gathers. The old man gets thrown out of the zoo, suspected of being an indigent (which he is) and a cult member (which he isn’t). On his way out, he glances back at the otters: “Goodbye, you good creatures.”
“He would see them again, he thought — somehow — and he would see them go free.” By the end of the summer, Cuthbert vows, he will return and set free all the animals in the London Zoo.
This scene is the heart of Bill Broun’s “Night of the Animals.” It’s a weird, mystical and troubling story, one that punctures the wall separating reality and hallucination. And it’s one that was inspired by an experience at the Houston Zoo.
In fact, though it’s set in London, Houston is “kind of a ghost throughout the novel,” Broun said. The author lived here for several years in the ’90s before his girlfriend — now his wife — won a Marshall Scholarship and the couple moved to England. Broun lives and teaches in Pennsylvania now, but his debut novel, 14 years in the making, contains pieces of his time in Houston and London.
The action takes place in 2052, in a high-tech, dystopian world. The tyranny of King Henry IX (that’s Prince Harry, to us) has erased the middle class, and England has become a surveillance state thanks to Wikinous, a communications system embedded in human tissue. Meanwhile, the suicide cult Heaven’s Gate has gained followers worldwide; regularly now, thousands of people at a time commit mass suicide, killing the world’s animals along with themselves.
Enter Cuthbert, the 90-year-old indigent.
When he was a child in the 1960s, Cuthbert’s grandmother told him he had “the Wonderments,” a mystical ability to communicate with animals. Cuthbert is also hopelessly addicted to Flot, a liquid hallucinogen, and spends most days in a haze of illusions and imaginings. And since his brother Drystan died in childhood, he has heard voices — voices of the animals, he believes, that speak to him from behind the zoo’s walls and promise to reunite him with Drystan.
Now, as he fears the suicide cult will get to the zoo animals, too, Cuthbert decides to risk his life to set them free.
The book is “a modernday saint story,” Broun said, but “it’s not supposed to be magical; I don’t like the term ‘magical realism.’ ”
The “big spark” for “Night of the Animals” came when Broun lived in Houston — the mid-’90s, when he lived in Montrose while working on an MFA in creative writing at the University of Houston.
“I came to have a number of friendships with men who were schizophrenic, who had been diagnosed with some sort of pretty profound mental illness,” he said. “Many were on the streets or had been, or had a kind of in-between housing situation. They’d kind of bounce around from shelters to halfway houses to group homes, things like that.”
One of these men became a good friend, and on an outing together to the Houston Zoo, Broun came around a corner and discovered his friend talking to the howler monkeys, whispering “sweet nothings” through the wires of their enclosure.
“He was talking to them with such sincerity and tenderness, and it just blew my mind at that moment.”
In “Night of the Animals,” Broun took that image several steps further, to a darker place. He was inspired by real stories of people flinging themselves into animal exhibits, including 27-year-old Ben Silcock, who, in 1992, was mauled by lions when he jumped into their enclosure at the London Zoo. Silcock’s father told reporters that his son believed he “could establish some kind of mystical contact” with the animals.
Broun has seen similar stories pop up regularly.
In 2012, a man who jumped into the Bronx Zoo’s tiger den explained that he wanted to become “one with the tiger.” At the Chengdu Zoo in China two years ago, a man decided to sacrifice himself to the tigers, jumping into their enclosure and offering his own body as food. (He survived, as did the animals.) And just this year, a man in Santiago, Chile, attempted suicide by climbing a fence and approaching two zoo tigers, who were shot to save the man’s life.
“It’s very weird how consistent it is,” Broun said. He wanted to get inside the head of someone who feels such a connection with animals.
Did Cuthbert’s brother truly transform into the Christ of Otters? Can Cuthbert really save the animals by setting them free? Are creatures actu- ally talking to him at all? The truth is elusive, but the results of Cuthbert’s night at the zoo are not: “Setting aside all Cuthbert’s delusions, the fact was, whether imagined or not, he had now managed to release four jackals, three wild sand cats, a large leopard, and half a dozen great apes and monkeys.”
Broun, who has previously focused on short stories, spent 14 years writing his debut novel. “It became a sort of spiritual quest for me, it really did,” he said.
And in this future, dystopian world Broun has created, the animals are on a spiritual quest as well. A sand cat named Muezza tries to explain forgiveness to Cuthbert: “What you fail to understand, perhaps because you are too English, is that all are welcome on the Green Path,” Muezza tells him. “We say, ‘Come, come, whoever you are, no matter how many times you’ve broken your vows.’ The blessing of the otters — oh, you will see. It never ends.”
And neither does the strangeness of this story, which lingers long after the final page.