ANIMAL PLANET Part Ten

PART TEN

AND AFTER

1. PUBLIC SERVICE

CHARLIE AND BUSTER were convicted of treason, flight from prosecution, extortion of public confidence, and displaying prematurely anti-authoritarian sentiments without the benefit of acceptable profit motivation. Sentenced to death by a court triumvirate of their peers, they were remanded to the custody of the new Animal Containment Division of the Criminal Court System, where their sentence was eventually commuted to life imprisonment after a last-minute mercy plea by their court-appointed legal representative, Dave the Otter.

“Let’s face it, guys,” Dave told the legal boys upstairs. “You don’t like ’em, I don’t like ’em, but how would it look, frying some cute little penguin on public TV? The way I figure, this is supposed to be a new, more compassionate sort of government, right? So I say we lock the jokers in a big hole in the ground and throw away the key. Fry ’em and we make ’em look bigger than life. But bury ’em in a hole, and we make ’em look punier than metal.”

THE YEARS PASSED quietly and uneventfully in a small wire mesh cell about the size of a refrigerator-freezer. The cell included a porcelain loo, a water dispenser, a transistor radio, and a bunkbed. While time passed them by, they read books and magazines, played round-robin checkers championships with other prisoners on the block, and were hosed down every few days or so by their cordial and well-meaning security guard.

“When Nietzsche made such a big deal out of the eternal recurrence, I wonder if he was talking about popular culture,” Charlie wondered out loud. He was gripping the wire-mesh walls while cold water was fired at him from a long green garden hose. “It used to be that fads came and went. Now they just stay and stay. Do you know kids today are still listening to the Rolling Stones and the Beach Boys, and those phoney old dudes are like in their fifties? Rap music’s still here. Even radio drama. The Ku Klux Klan’ll never leave. Neither will the Democrats, the Republicans, the Hollywood movie industry, I Love Lucy, Frisbees, Play-Doh, The Flat-Earth Society, the Coneheads, James Bond, Mighty Mouse, or the Evil Empire. By insisting on being always new, popular culture constantly ends up being nothing but eternally the same. Freedom is no longer a state of being, man. It’s now a high marketing concept.”

Outside their still-dripping cage, Roy the Gorilla rewound the green garden hose onto the iron spigot and smiled.

“I sure enjoy listening to you say such interesting things, Charlie,” Roy said. “Being your guys’ trustee here at the animal prison has turned out to be a really great job, don’t you think?”

THEIR ONLY VISITOR was Rick the Husky, who arrived every few weeks or so bearing the latest news from home, and a picnic basket packed with Spam sandwiches and coleslaw.

“Wanda’s in Frisco,” he told them as he doled out postprandial smokes, “selling lingerie at this new boutique she opened downtown. Ladies’ lingerie, mostly, but she still manages to sell an occasional animal garment out of the back room. Wanda’s got a Social Security card and a tax accountant, and to hear her go on about it, you’d think she’s now Crown Princess of Arabia. Oh, hadn’t you heard? Now that animals are accepted members of the new global economy, they’re allowed to pay taxes. Pity about health care, though.”

On days when Rick visited, Buster and Charlie would pull up close to the mesh and exchange the latest letters from their friends on the outside. Surprisingly enough, most of the news they received was either downright good, or nowhere near as bad as they expected.

Dear Black Bird and Buster,

Weather stinks. What’s new.

Muk Luk over her dejection. Muk Luk also dating some very curious-looking corporate types who have taken over Dave’s Trading Post. Muk Luk stop trying to make strange, pale gentlemen drunk and seduce them with hand jobs, though. Now she just hammer them over the head with axe handle and drag them home on her sled.

Sometimes Muk Luk feel violence is not the answer. Other times she think maybe these guys deserve it.

Muk Luk think of you both often and hope you write soon.

Love always,

Muk Luk the Eskimo

“I don’t care what I or others may have said about her looks,” Charlie concluded after reading one of Muk Luk’s crayon-scrawled missives. “But that Eskimo chick sure has class.”

Buster tried to write back, but he never managed more than a few shallow, contrived phrases. Very good to hear from you. Or When I think of all the mistakes I’ve made. He knew there was something he still had to tell Muk Luk. He just didn’t happen to know what it was.

OUTSIDE IN THE supposedly real world, animals and men had organized themselves into a whole new scheme of cultural demographics. For the first time in recorded history, animals were being hired as sales representatives, production managers, and executive board members of companies that produced children’s toys, rock and roll music, and liquified petroleum gas. They were permitted to send their children to public schools, shop at local supermarkets, and vote for their own state and federal congressional leaders. Cities were redistricted in order to create new animal-enterprise zones (though admittedly not in the best parts of town) and, not too long after that, even the entertainment industry began to boast full integration of both its work staff and celebrity personnel. After centuries of mindless, foolish, and economically unfeasible divisiveness, the world was finally coming together. Humans and animals alike just had to believe.

“Our day has finally arrived,” Mister Big announced nightly on his nationally syndicated late-night TV talk show, which was currently sponsored by Purina Dog Chow and the Florida Orange Growers Association. “United we shall prevail, work hard, achieve financial progress, and eventually acquire our own glamorous automobiles. Now please, go out there and live your lives to the fullest. And while you’re at it, please purchase many helpings of dog chow and orange juice, because I want you to take good care of yourselves. Never doubt for a moment, my fellow beasties, Mr. Big loves you all!”

OF COURSE THERE were more prisons, but nobody talked too much about them. For example, the new federally funded Animal Containment Division in which Buster and Charlie were currently incarcerated boasted one of the largest prison populations in the free world, nearly fourteen thousand inmates filed away in a beehive of tiny, smelly cells that often lacked proper toilets and sanitary facilities. For the most part, Charlie and Buster’s cell mates were mammals who had been convicted of violent, “victim-intensive” crimes. Armed robberies and car jackings, burglaries and sexual assaults. According to opinion polls, criminal types like Buster and Charlie were selfish, sociopathic personalities who refused to respond to rehabilitation programs–not that there were that many to choose from.

“We either work in the prison laundry,” Buster explained to Rick during one of his visits, “or attend group therapy sessions in the psychiatric ward. I started making this belt out of beads, you know? But then, after a while, I guess I kind of lost interest.”

Rick, who was going slightly gray at the temples, had long ago run out of consolatory advice for his friends. He no longer discussed things like signature drives, or parole hearings, or even Presidential pardons–all of which had proved consistently unrewarding efforts in the past. Usually he just dropped off whatever newspapers and chocolates he had picked up at the Prison Gift Shop, then curled up on the cold concrete outside their cell and fell fast asleep.

“I think you boys better face it,” Dave the Otter graciously informed them one day when he was seeing a new client through lockup. “Your day has come and gone. People outside just don’t care about a couple of washed-up old troublemakers like yourselves. I mean, if I were you, I’d start getting used to prison cuisine, and finish writing my memoirs or something. You just don’t have a whole lot of friends left on the outside, you dig?”

2. MEMORY ECLIPSE

FOR THE FIRST few years or so, Buster contented himself with following his ex-wife Sandy’s blossoming commercial career in the slick magazines. Shortly after the Revolution (or what was popularly referred to by contemporary historians as the Recent Global Restructuring Program), Sandy had distinguished herself as one of the world’s brightest up-and-coming supermodels. She wasn’t as young or leggy as the majority of supermodels who had come before, but in her own way she managed to project a playful, sexy ambivalence that soon made her one of the most familiar faces in the heavily scented pages of magazines such as Animal Cosmo, Animal Esquire, and, of course, the annual swimsuit issue of Animal Sports Illustrated.

“It’s Penguinific!” Sandy’s dialogue bubble exclaimed as she lounged beside convenient swimming pools, or performed hulas on white beaches. “It’s Penguilicious!” “C’est trés Penguifique!” Or: “Why not come up and try a Penguin-brand cigarette sometime, baby?” In most of these ads Sandy was sufficiently undressed to remind Buster of all those aspects of her body he hadn’t stopped thinking about in years.

Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, Charlie and Buster were let into the exercise yard to shoot hoops, pump iron, or walk in aimless circles on the weedy jogging track. On sunny days when the sky was so blue it reminded him of water, Buster couldn’t get Sandy out of his mind, or stop wondering who was making love to her these days, and what his species might be. At times like these, the cold concrete walls leaned into Buster and made him edgy with adrenalin. He had to get out of here. He had to get back to Sandy.

“Charlie?”

“Huh?”

Like Rick, Charlie was growing gray around the temples and lanky around the joints. He had also gone deaf in his left ear, so Buster made sure to speak into his right.

“Do you ever think, you know, about busting out of here?”

Charlie worked a piece of straw from one side of his mouth to the other.

“To be honest, old friend, I don’t guess I do.”

They were sitting on a wooden bench in the exercise yard, watching Roy the Gorilla in the guard tower overhead. Roy was currently peering into the barrel of his rifle, trying to pry forth a chewing gum wrapper he’d dropped down it by accident.

“’Cause this is like the funny thing, Charlie. It just suddenly came to me, like. You’re a bird, Charlie. You could just fly the hell out of here, couldn’t you? Just take wing and like split. I wouldn’t hold it against you, you know. Just ’cause I can’t fly doesn’t mean I’d hold your freedom against you.”

For the first time since Buster had known him, moistness fogged Charlie’s bifocal lenses. He removed and wiped them against the sleeve of his cotton work shirt.

“I know you wouldn’t hold my freedom against me, old pal. You’re not that kind of bird, are you?”

As Charlie explained it to Buster that strange afternoon, flight was not a function of the wings, but an expression of the heart. For years now (as long as he and Buster had known each other, anyway) Charlie had lacked the fundamental psychodynamics that an act like flight required. Belief in oneself. Belief in one’s world. Belief in the abilities of language and body to carry a bird into dimensions it doesn’t know about.

“I wasn’t walking to keep you company,” Charlie confessed that night after lights out. “I was walking because I couldn’t do any better. I guess I should’ve told you, but it’s a difficult thing to admit. That you’re a bird with wings, but you can’t fly. Especially when flying’s just about the only thing you ever knew how to do in the first place.”

At that point, Charlie began to cry. Buster put one wing stiffly across Charlie’s shoulder, feeling discomfited and meager. The sobs poured out of Charlie like rhetoric used to. His body shook and his shoulders heaved.

“Don’t fall apart on me, Charlie, okay?”

Buster couldn’t prevent himself from shedding a few wet, peremptory tears of his own. Suddenly he realized the incredible closeness of the walls encircling them. He could hear animals in neighboring cells, whimpering with pain, fear, and terrible remorse.

“I don’t know what I’ll do if you fall apart on me, Charlie. We’ll figure something out, okay? One of these days, I promise. We’ll get out of here and I’ll look after you, okay?”

WITHIN DAYS OF Charlie’s confession, Buster began to wonder about the true animal order of things.

If flight was an ability of the heart, then why, Buster asked himself, couldn’t anyone with enough heart in him fly? Even a penguin, say. Even a middle-aged, lonely penguin who had taken a few wrong turns in his life, and had suffered his share of hard knocks.

For the following eighteen months, Buster spent nearly every available moment in the exercise yard training his heart for lift off. He would stand staring straight up into the sky, beating his nubby wings against his sides with a steady, undeterrable persistence, forcing his mind to look far beyond the cold, dull realities of this public institution. The concrete spaces. The aluminum-tasting water fountain. The sludgy food and rusty communal showers. Buster would untether his mind until it drifted away into the rhythm of his own flapping, steadily flapping white-and-black wings. And in his heart, he would fly. He would lift himself into the blue sky and fly away from all the thick, meaningless reality he didn’t want to know about anymore.

“I’m a good penguin,” he whispered in ritual self-affirmation. “I’m a strong penguin. I’m a penguin who has fought for noble causes and dreamed noble dreams. I have heart enough. I have spirit enough. I have wings enough and more. I’m coming home to you, Sandy. I’m flying over these prison walls and coming home.”

BUSTER RETURNED TO his cell after every failed launch attempt with a renewed modesty that was almost eloquent. Charlie, who had taken up oil painting, didn’t even look up when Buster was let in by Roy and his jangly bundle of keys. He just continued mixing pigments and applying them to his pale canvases.

There are some things, he thought, a bird needs to work out for himself.

“That’s nice, Charlie,” Buster always said, gesturing vacantly at the spattered easel. Then Buster lay back on his cot and stared at the ceiling, wondering about the sky beyond, and how much longer it might take him to get there. Meanwhile, hanging from all the available wall space, Charlie’s paintings depicted high aeronautic views of mountains, rivers, valleys, and oceans. Sometimes they even displayed the lumpish Animal Planet in all its splendor, pear shaped and spinning softly in a universe bathed with light. There was something about Charlie’s global visions that projected a soft, inner radiance Buster didn’t want to look at. Charlie had been there, the paintings affirmed. To places Buster could only dream about.

“Thanks, Buster,” Charlie said. He cocked his head and examined his latest work in progress from a slightly different perspective. “I don’t mind this one too much myself.”

They might not exchange another word or glance for the entire week. Every day they woke up, read newspapers, ate food out of stained plastic bowls, and went back to sleep.

Years passed.

The Animal Planet continued to spin.

THEN ONE DAY in early spring, Roy the Gorilla brought them the good news. It was Roy’s last official function before his impending retirement, and he was really going to miss all his good friends behind bars here at the prison. For his many years of dedicated service, Roy had received a free canteen lunch, a minimal State pension, and a Swatch. Buster and Charlie were sick and tired of being shown the Swatch, though, so Roy was happy about this new information he could share.

“Look, guys, you’re getting paroled! Doesn’t that news make you guys really happy or what?”

Neither Charlie nor Buster sat up from their bunks.

“Maybe we don’t want to go,” Charlie said.

Roy removed his hat, and from the hat a crumpled ball of paper. He opened the ball of paper and tried to shake it into some sort of official-looking shape.

“Look right here, Charlie. Just read that. We the Government of the United States of Animals, do hereby forthwith with all our hearts, do hereby tell Buster and Charlie that they can go home.”

Roy was running his finger across the lines of smudged laser printing as if he could really read them.

“Come on, you guys! Cheer up, will you! It’s Liberation Day and you’ve been forgiven for all your bad deeds! Isn’t that what you’ve always wanted? To be free?”

WHEN THEY STEPPED outside into the prison parking lot, they stood stiffly for a while, blinking at the bright white sun. Each of them had been issued a new suit of clothes, a gray cloth knapsack, and a cold tomato-and-cheese sandwich. And waiting for them at the curb was none other than Dave the Otter in a long luxury stretch limo with dark reflective windows.

“Come on, guys. Get in, will you? I haven’t got all day.”

When Buster and Charlie climbed onto the plush, air-conditioned leather upholstery, they found hot meals awaiting them on stainless-steel serving trays, chilled champagne in a bucket, and caviar spread thickly on soda crackers and toast.

“Drink up, guys,” Dave the Otter said dully, pulling out of the parking lot onto a long, ugly industrial road. Wearing a natty blue chauffeur uniform, Dave obviously resented this latest downturn in his professional career. “You guys are being made an example of for the entire animal population. Which means you don’t never have to go back to prison again no more.”

As they were escorted through the endless suburbs and industrial parks of a major American city, Buster and Charlie saw entire city blocks filled with gray, nondescript warehouses and munitions factories. They saw shy, anxious children filing through metal detectors into weedy public school yards and cinema-plexes. They saw bankrupt shopping malls, dead housing tracts composed almost entirely of stucco, and billboards on every horizon, proclaiming that everything in the world was the BIGGEST, BEST, MOST BEAUTIFUL, and MOST PERFECT.

“Look at all the roads leading everywhere,” Charlie said, gazing out at the same old world amazed. “Roads leading to other cities and countries. Roads leading to other roads.”

There was traffic. And there were enormous eighteen-wheelers filled with produce and gadgets. And there was pollution. And there were homeless animals camped out in ruined buildings and parking lots. And there were tracts of identical houses and shopping centers and specialty stores classified according to race, gender, class, and species. Mousey Mansions. Dog Plaza Drive-in. Cat-o-Nine-Cocktails. And of course the ever-popular Pachyderm Putt-Putt Miniature Golf Course. In the last ten years or so, the world hadn’t changed at all. But that didn’t mean it would ever stop growing.

As they approached the city center, the buildings around them grew taller, but not much better looking. Pretty soon Dave the Otter was driving them down a long concrete ramp into the bowels of a gigantic, shadowy parking garage, and escorting them into a dark, graffiti-scrawled service elevator.

“Step right in, ladies and germs,” Dave said. “Next stop is where the big boys live.”

Dave punched the button for the 120th floor–EXPRESS.

And with a subterranean whoosh, the elevator began its long ascent.

“I’M AFRAID YOU’RE yesterday’s news, Charlie.” Bunny Fairchild was racing her stationary Exercycle down the middle of the wide, cleanly furnished penthouse apartment. Since the last time Buster and Charlie saw her, Bunny had developed bigger breasts, higher cheekbones, cuter nostrils, and a weirdly shiny complexion, as if someone had gone over her entire face with a belt sander. While her good legs pumped steadily at the Exercycle, she ate spoonfuls of Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia and chain-smoked a posh-looking brand of low-nicotine filter cigarettes. “Your day’s come and gone, Charlie, and I hope that doesn’t sound cruel or anything. But we were always straight with one another. Charlie. That’s probably why we learned to respect each other so much.”

Charlie couldn’t remember if he’d been here before. The wide panoramic windows, though, seemed strangely familiar.

“You’re an honest woman, Bunny.” There wasn’t a trace of irony in Charlie’s voice, which caused Buster, vaguely discombobulated by the altitude, to look over. “You always tell people where they stand, and I think that’s an admirable quality in any creature. Human or otherwise.”

Bunny, however, had not brought Charlie here to discuss terms. She had brought him here to gloat.

“We don’t want you back, Charlie. You had your chance and blew it. We just want you to know there’re no hard feelings, at least not on this side of the fence, anyway. So once the ceremony’s over, you guys are on your own; please don’t call or write, okay? Oh, and by the way, are you sure you guys wouldn’t like a beer or something? Or hey, there’s always plenty of ice cream.”

“YOU WERE A flash in the pan, Charlie,” Bunny continued later after her shower. She was wearing a flimsy silk kimono and drying her short, dyed-blond hair with a green terry-cloth towel. “But our friend Mr. Big has what I call staying power. He came and went, Charlie, but then he came and went again. And then he came and went again, and again, and again, and again. One week the newspapers and magazines are oohing and ahhing about how wonderful and magnetic Mr. Big is. The next week they’re yelling and bitching about what an egomaniacal, talentless phony he’s become. This guy’s already had more comebacks than Madonna, Sylvester Stallone, and Elvis put together. And I’m not just talking about the first Elvis, Charlie. I’m talking about both of them.”

Charlie and Buster were sitting on the sofa, sharing a bottle of gaseous mineral water. While Bunny rattled on, they couldn’t help gazing around themselves at all the framed portraits of former Worldco executives adorning the walls. According to their brooding, fabulous portraits, these men once strode the world like colossi. They had conquered nations, landed on the moon, defeated Communism, and made America more free.

“Which, of course, is exactly where I came in, Charlie.” Bunny’s voice was at once intrepid and soporific, so that every so often Buster and Charlie found themselves missing an entire train of thought. “Do you know that before I came along, Worldco used to waste an entire factory manufacturing one piece of merchandise for one demographic consumer group? They’d manufacture, say, rotary blenders for humans, and that was that. But now, ever since the brainstorm of good old moi, Worldco has adapted that same factory to produce numerous cost-and-material-related products for a variety of different consumer groups. Such as rotary blenders for rabbits. And rotary blenders for dogs. Rotary blenders for cats, mice, squirrels, left-handed pigs, and even diabetic-prone hamsters and minx. It’s called diversification, Charlie. And you can’t even imagine the sort of profit development it’s creating for our good old friends at Worldco.”

Charlie, however, wasn’t trying to imagine how many different types of rotary blenders the Worldco Corporation was capable of distributing on the world market simultaneously. Instead, he was gazing up at the large, looming portrait of Worldco’s current President, which hung on the west wall among crushed-velour draperies and fresh flowers in vases. During the past decade of hard, angry living, Stan Garfield had burned out his heart, liver, kidneys, lungs, urinary tract, the works. Now, according to this recent portrait, only his head remained, rigged up to a digital computer console on wheels. Oddly enough, Stan Garfield had never looked better. Or, for that matter, happier.

Charlie felt Buster give him another sharp nudge in the ribs. He looked up at Bunny, who was looking directly at him.

“Sorry if I’m boring you, Charlie. God forbid you might learn anything while you’re here.”

“God forbid,” Charlie said softly.

Then Bunny escorted them both into the adjoining quarters to see how much was left of Mr. Big.

MR. BIG SPENT most of his time these days soaking in a large whirlpool, his gnarly limbs stretched out over the sides like collapsed banners, a tall glass of brandy awaiting his pleasure on a footstool near the toilet. Mr. Big’s bathroom was littered with amber plastic vials, skin conditioners, and name-brand cosmetics. When Mr. Big wasn’t imbibing all sorts of legally prescribed pharmaceuticals, he was ordering chocolate malteds and deep-fried peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches from his valet. Sitting in the steamy tub, his pupils dilated with the latest rage in barbiturates, Mr. Big wore a really expensive toupee that sat damply on his head like a shy companion.

“Animals must unite!” Mr. Big proclaimed weakly the moment Charlie and Buster entered the room. He tried to sit up in the tub, flailing his limbs loosely. Then, with a short squeak of porcelain and a splash. Mr. Big collapsed back into his former torpor.

The engine of the whirlpool continued to drone underneath the floor.

THE CEREMONY HELD later that afternoon was perfunctorily efficient, like just about everything Bunny Fairchild organized these days. After a cursory briefing, Charlie and Buster were led to a stage in the middle of the Functions Room, where they were situated at a long wooden dais aside Mr. Big and a generic corporate VP type.

“Charlie? Hi, I’m Jack O’Malley, Worldco’s current Vice President in Charge of Marketing. We’re sorry Stan couldn’t be here personally, you know, but he was scheduled for one of his lube jobs and, well, things just don’t always work out the way we’d like them to, do they? Before everything gets started, though, I just wanted to introduce myself, and say I was a big fan of yours way back there in the beginning. Before your career fizzled, of course.”

“Nice to meet you, Jack.”

Mr. Big, meanwhile, was so stoned he had to be propped against the dais and sedated with horse tranquilizers. He was wearing his customary black cape and a shiny chrome codpiece.

“I forgive you!” he blared every so often. “Be free and be happy! Mr. Big loves you all!”

“Not yet, honey,” Bunny whispered, adjusting Mr. Big’s cape over one shoulder. “Wait for the cameras, okay?”

At this point the large double doors were pulled open to admit a hoard of contrite newspeople, who kept obligingly within the assigned perimeters of a red velvet rope. Then, at Bunny’s signal, they snapped a blizzard of carefully orchestrated photo ops, and were permitted to venture a series of brief, prescheduled questions.

“What will you do now, Charlie?”

“Where will you go?”

“Did you ever expect it would end like this, Charlie?”

“What did you think about while you were in prison? Did you ever feel any regrets?”

“Will you go back on the college lecture circuit?”

“Or will you just retire and rest on your laurels?”

Charlie smiled blankly at the cameras. Since Charlie’s imprisonment, an entire new generation of reporters had taken over the reins from their forefathers. Yet, surprising enough, they didn’t look or sound one bit different.

“We’re going away,” Charlie responded, refusing to elaborate any further. “Buster and I just want to say thanks for all your attention, but we’ll be going away now, and we won’t be coming back.”

Bunny escorted Mr. Big to the front of the stage and gave him a hard pinch in the rump.

“Now, honey.”

“You’re forgiven!” Mr. Big brayed.

The necessary documents were signed and formally displayed to the cameras.

“Mr. Big pardons you for all your crimes! And now you can be free!”

3. OUT OF TOWN

NEEDLESS TO SAY, Buster and Charlie didn’t feel very free when the stretch limo deposited them later that afternoon at a downtown bus stop.

“Don’t take any wooden nickels!” Dave the Otter called out over his shoulder, and squealed off into the hot, smoggy traffic. “Boob brains!”

It was almost a half hour before the next city bus arrived, packed with animal peons armed to the gills with shivs, bagged lunches, and bad breath.

“I feel a little nauseous, Charlie,” Buster said. “I can’t tell if it’s from that circus back there or from all this damn carbon monoxide.”

“Hold on just a little longer,” Charlie replied. “I’m getting us out of here, okay?”

THEY WENT DIRECTLY to the Worldco Animal Transit Authority, where Charlie purchased two tickets on the next bus out of town. They had just enough money left over from their prison grant to buy a six-pack of cold beer.

“It’s all pretty horrible, isn’t it, Charlie? What a bunch of awful people run the world these days. And look what they’ve done to the planet, Charlie. Look what they’ve done to themselves. I finally understand, Charlie, I really do. I understand why you can’t fly anymore. How could you ever believe in anything ever again? I know I couldn’t, Charlie. I couldn’t believe in anything.”

Buster slept on the slow bus ride through miles of honking traffic, over swaybacked bridges, and across potholed interstates. When he awoke it was nearly morning, and Charlie was sitting up finishing a warm can of Schlitz.

“Don’t go back to sleep,” Charlie told him. “We’re almost there.”

THEY DISEMBARKED INTO a cold pale morning filled with faintly glistening stars. Out here, the country was only half ravaged by technology. One large, furrowed valley had been thoroughly exhausted by strip-mining equipment. An old chemical refinery had recently been shut down by the EPA. What little true landscape that remained contained only the wilted promise of a few green trees and a dead, grayish river.

However, there was one grassy mountain that technology hadn’t gotten to yet. It was high and it was steep. Charlie began climbing it right away.

“Sometimes anger’s enough,” he said, plodding steadily up the mossy path, kicking soda cans and candy wrappers out of his way like St. Patrick clearing Ireland of serpents. “Because you know what’s worse, don’t you? Boredom, Buster. Sheer unadulterated mindless soulless rush-hour-traffic-type boredom, for chrissakes. When a body’s bored, Buster, the blood stops circulating. You don’t breathe right, or oxygenate properly. So being righteously pissed of every so often may not always be good for your state of mind, but sometimes it wakes you up. It makes you do something besides sit around feeling sorry for yourself all day.”

Charlie was already out of breath, but Buster, well conditioned by his years of prison calisthenics, had no trouble keeping up.

“Perspective is something of a lie,” Charlie said later when they’d reached the summit. They were sitting in the shade of a large brown rock, looking at the wide landscape below. “From this height, things look almost continuous, don’t they, Buster? They don’t look like someone’s just finished murdering the soil with petro-chemicals, or chasing all the animal residents into polluted cities and lousy jobs. You can’t even see most of the strip-mining scars from up here, can you, Buster? That’s what perspective means, I often think. Getting so far away from things you can’t see them clearly anymore.”

Buster, however, was not entirely convinced.

“Maybe it just means you’re looking at something bigger than the damage, Charlie. Maybe, when you get up high like this, you’re looking at the whole planet, and how incredible it is, and how vast and amazing it’ll always be. Isn’t that what you always used to say, Charlie? That whole beautiful blue-and-green planet we belong to. That we’ll always be part of it, and that it’ll always be part of us, too.”

When Charlie didn’t respond, Buster thought he was digesting what Buster had said. After another moment, though, Buster realized he’d been speaking directly into Charlie’s bad ear.

Then, quite abruptly, Charlie stood and dusted himself off.

“You know what the biggest lie of all time is, Buster? That we live our lives alone. That’s what the corporate world wants us to think, because they want to figure human nature in terms of the good old competitive economy. Human beings who are always alone will try to rip each other off, and never organize, and never care about anything but how much money they make, or how much they own. But when you come right down to it, Buster, I’ve spent so much time with you, I don’t see how we can ever be apart. Because I’ll always find myself talking to you, pal, even when you’re not around. And I’ll always hear your voice talking back to me.”

Then, without once looking back, Charlie started jogging down the hill. Perhaps he didn’t want Buster to see the tears in his eyes. Or perhaps he didn’t want to spoil his intense concentration.

Buster, meanwhile, felt a little rush of adrenaline.

“You can do it, Charlie,” he whispered out loud, even before he knew what was happening. “I know it, Charlie. You can really do it.”

Charlie had begun trotting awkwardly on his black, spindly legs, shaking his weak wings open, stumbling on stones and dead roots and things. He looked about as graceful as a cardboard box being dragged over the ground by a rope.

“You can do it, Charlie,” Buster said out loud. He was getting to his feet. He was feeling the cool breeze on his face.

“What’s that?” Charlie called out over his shoulder. “I can’t hear you, Buster!”

Charlie was starting to work his prison-stiffened wings up and down, up and down. They seemed asynchronous, as if each was responding to a different, unrelated hemisphere of Charlie’s brain. He was slipping and sliding down the flinty hillside. He didn’t even seem to be picking up speed.

“I realized something, Charlie, back when I was trying it, you know?” Buster was shouting into the wind. “Sometimes it’s not the heart that tells the mind what it can do! Sometimes it’s the body that tells the heart what it must!”

Charlie’s wings were completely unfurled to reveal gray, patchy bits of frazzled feathers.

“What’s that, Buster? I can’t hear you, pal! I’m trying to fly!”

And at that precise moment, Buster saw Charlie for who he really was, and for who he would always be. A foolish, partially deaf, prematurely aged creature who refused to be realistic about the world. Who was running down a green knobby hill flapping his foolish, baggy wings at the wind–imagining he could fly when he could hardly even run properly anymore.

And at the moment Buster knew it was impossible, he also knew how very possible it was.

Charlie’s entire body gave a little lift, as if it were being tugged upward by an invisible string.

Then he came down again and his legs buckled, spraying rocks in every direction, his tail feathers skidding him upright long enough to keep him running some more.

He was flapping harder. He was gathering momentum. And then again he was lifting off the ground, lifting off the hard descent of the hill. He was wobbling higher, gradually higher, over the trees, flying, flying, he was flying, he was flying.

“Keep going, Charlie!” Buster screamed. He was jumping up and down on the green hill. He knew anyone could do anything they ever wanted to because he had lived to see the impossible happen.

A bird flying with its own two wings! Who ever would have believed it?

“I can’t hear you, Buster! I’m flying! I’m afraid to come down!”

“Don’t come down, Charlie! Keep going! Keep flying! I can take care of myself!”

“What’s that, Buster? I have to keep flying! I can’t come down!”

Charlie was beginning to diminish into the horizon, the bright white sunlight swallowing him into a sort of ethereal foam. “Take care of yourself, Buster! Don’t let the bastards get you down!”

Charlie’s words were swallowed by the wide sky. And so was Charlie’s black, wavering body. So small. So amazing. So high.

“I’m coming with you, Charlie!” Buster couldn’t restrain himself another moment. He was flapping his nubby wings against his sides, running down the flinty hill as fast as he could. And then, before he knew it, he could feel it too. He was lifting off. He was flying–

–and fell tumbling down the flinty hill, head over heels, crashing to a stop on a smooth, grassy ledge.

The blue sky was empty except for a few clouds. Buster wasn’t certain, but he thought he could hear Charlie’s voice one last time.

“I’m really flying, man! I really am!”

At which point Charlie’s voice disappeared forever from Buster’s life.

WITHIN THE NEXT forty-five minutes, Buster was out on the highway, hitching a ride south.

“Don’t get too many penguins in these parts.” The man driving the truck was none other than Zack Marmaduke, the surly, alcoholic sailor who had given Buster and Charlie so much grief during their brief tenure as Merchant Marines. “Hey, don’t I know you from somewhere, guy?”

It turned out that in the last dozen years or so, Zack had seen his share of hard luck, and was trying to put as much of it behind him as possible.

“I know I was an asshole,” Zack confessed over coffee at a roadside diner. “I was just so pissed off at everything, you know? I felt so stupid, and I was always broke, and of course I was boozing constantly back then, so things didn’t get any better. I did a lot of things in those days I’m ashamed of. I’m sorry if I ever caused you and your friends any trouble.”

For a while Zack had been a human supremacist. For a while after that he went to prison for beating his wife. He had worked as a barker for a topless night club, peddled cocaine to Hollywood executives, and smuggled guns to CIA-sponsored terrorists in Central America. As Zack unreeled his list of bad credits, Buster felt a little awed by him. He was amazed at how much self-degradation one puny animal life could admit to and yet still prevail.

“So then I’d get so angry, you know, and I’d drink some more, and I’d get angrier, and suddenly it was all her fault, you know, everything about my life, everything I had ever done wrong. It was her fault and I wanted to kill her, you know? And I’d knock her around, and I’d hit her, and I knew it was wrong but that just made me madder. So I hit her again. And again. I used to hate her so much, man. I used to get so angry at the sort of person she’d let me become.”

They ordered more coffee, and Buster tried to ignore a tabloid on the newsrack beside the counter. He thought he recognized a picture of Sandy on the cover. But this was neither the time nor the place to talk about her.

“From that day forward, all I wanted to do was die. And when you get down to it, pal, dying just isn’t a very acceptable choice now, is it? So then I wanted to believe in God, because maybe He could make my life bearable, and show me a way out of this horrible creature I’d become. I wanted to apologize to somebody, you know? Somebody in authority. Somebody who could relieve me of the awful responsibility I felt for being myself. So I went to prison services, and I watched the PTL Club on TV, and I read the Bible, and you know what I found in all those places, man? I just found, I don’t know, all this anger. Butcher the heathens, they kept saying. Destroy the evil. Put the criminals behind bars. Hate the blacks. Hate the poor. Hate the Jews. Hate someone, anyone but yourself, man. And let me tell you, I was tempted. I’d been down that road before. I don’t know, man, maybe it was me. Maybe I’m just an angry guy or something, and they had something important to tell me, but I wouldn’t listen. Anyway, I gave up on God, and with a lot more time under my belt, I gave up on hate, too. I quit drinking, got a job, and now I just get by one day at a time, as they say.... Oh, well, what the hell time is it, anyway? Midnight? Jesus. I got to get this rig into Dallas by tomorrow, man. Maybe we should get going, you think?”

AS IF BUSTER didn’t feel awkward enough letting Zack pay the tab, he also had to bum another two bits for the tabloid.

“I owe you,” Buster said, folding the paper under his wing.

“Oh forget it,” Zack said. “Anyway, considering how things work out in this crazy world, maybe I actually owe you one. You think that’s possible, huh?”

That night they drove nearly six hundred miles without stopping, listening to country music and watching the dark, moonlit agricultural fields swoop by on either side. According to the National Enquirer, Sandy the Penguin had pulled a Marlene Dietrich and refused to grow old in front of cameras. Despite a record-breaking contract offer from the Sears Mature Woman line of cosmetics, Sandy had converted all her savings into blue diamonds and disappeared into the frozen Antarctic without leaving so much as a forwarding address. She still had family out there, she frequently explained in public interviews. And some things, she explained just as often, are more important than money.

In the morning Zack pulled into a roadside truckstop, where enormous eighteen-wheelers sat slumbering in the thin dawn like gentle pachyderms. Only a few miles from the Gulf, Zack had decided to sleep through the rush-hour traffic and get a fresh start after breakfast. While Zack snored away in a bed cabin behind the seats, Buster quietly rolled up his spare clothes in the tabloid newspaper and climbed down from the truck.

Out here the sun was gigantic and white, and in the silver streak of sky between sun and mountains, Buster thought he saw a black bird flying west, into the morning. Not performing cartwheels or anything fancy, just flying intrepidly onward, to places where day led into night, and night led into day again.

“There should be a sign, Charlie,” Buster said, as he walked down the long whizzing highway to the sea. “And that sign should be posted on the edge of our planet, so it’s the first thing anybody sees when they get here. And that sign should say this:”

WELCOME TO ANIMAL PLANET,

WHATEVER TYPE OF ANIMAL YOU ARE.

PLEASE TRY TO GET ALONG WITH EVERYBODY

WHILE YOU’RE HERE.

IT’S THE ONLY PLANET WE’VE GOT.

Then, swinging his bundle over one shoulder, Buster carried on down the highway, ignoring the honks and jeers of passing motorists and wondering how long the clean blue sky would last.

He could already smell the ocean from here.

And he could hardly wait.

Afterword to the Revised Edition, May 2015

Animal Planet gave me more pleasure to write and read than any of my other books. It developed from a series of animal adventures that began with “Dazzle”–composed in a sublet Chadwell Heath bedsit in 1985–and carried through “The Parakeet and the Cat” a few years later. Then, in 1992, I took a long afternoon walk through the London Zoo, and heard the voice of Scaramangus speak to me from one of the enclosures. The idea of an animal who was enamored of his significance as a highly-regarded inmate got me started, but it was the voice of Charlie–a solitary rabble-rouser who couldn’t decide between saving his fellow animals, or abandoning them to their stupid complacency–that blessed me with the spontaneous joyful daily pleasure of developing my third novel over the next few years. Everywhere I went in 1992 through 1994, I was surrounded by the voices of the Animal Planet. And many of those voices were ours.

When noticed or mentioned at all, Animal Planet is usually described as a “satire,” but I have never understood why. For me, fiction takes place in the world around us, and “satire” strikes me as a form of commentary on that world, presuming to exist in a position of relative advantage. But if fiction gives me anything–as writer or reader–it is never a sense of advantage; rather it makes the real world around me even realer, and transforms the fictional possibilities we imagine for ourselves every day into one continuous remarkable space. It gives me pleasure; it makes me laugh; it moves me; it makes me sad. And Animal Planet does all those things for me every time I read it. Especially in its closing chapters–which I consider to be some of the best fiction I have ever done.

It was a strange and not very unfamiliar world for a writer (and his characters) to live through back in the early nineties. The “rapprochement” between east and west was being figured in terms of exchange rates and profit motives. America was exporting democracy throughout the world with guns and bombs. The planet was being eaten to death by a race of beings so stupid that they didn’t know how good they already had it. The culture industry kept providing nothing but shit and movie stars and sales data. The divisions of social life became a simple demarcation between those who were imprisoned and those who weren’t. And it became increasingly hard to imagine anybody doing a decent job for decent pay–or a politician who gave a damn. I know for a fact I have grown a little wiser since that perilous time; I wish I could say the same for our world.

Shortly after Animal Planet was published, it suffered the same fate it posed for its characters. The book went out of print within a few months–even while a nature-loving documentary cable TV station was turning itself into the only Animal Planet anybody knew. And Hollywood did what Hollywood does best–it decided against a Disney adaptation of my novel because they thought it might make them look “anti-zoo” (I kid you not.) Within the next few years, family movies such as Madagascar and The Wild made it possible for people to laugh safely at ideas of imprisonment, animal-derogation and crappy wages, as if they were bright happy colors on a movie screen. Ah, history. You couldn’t make it up.

I hope this novel will make at least a few modern readers as happy as it has made me over the past two decades.

Scott Bradfield

London May 2015