Nemonymous Night by D. F. Lewis Read Free Book Online Page B

the city. There was a turnstile—just a cover to indicate that this was a place for which you needed admission, as most zoos in other cities would need. No money changed hands and when people had time off from work they came here—all jolly and familified—and entered the place that was hidden by tall grey walls which made them feel they were indeed going to work all over again on their holiday! The turnstile was unimpeded and they emerged into an area around the first enclosure. In the distance could be seen the starts of corridors between lines of cages, the contents of which could not yet be seen, though their hubbub of loud meat could certainly be heard from this auditory vantage point just inside the turnstile. The first enclosure was empty, unlike the other enclosures beyond the cages, which, as visitors who had been here before could attest, were full of living exhibits yet to meet the gaze of greenhorn visitors. Why an empty enclosure was the first exhibit often mystified initial visitors, but this was soon explained as the various themes panned out in interlocking concertinas of myth and logic and as the total exhibition of the zoo revealed itself to the unpaying customers filing past.
    The empty enclosure at the start of the tour—it was discovered—was a symbol of the loneliness of life and the even greater loneliness of death. Yet many claimed it was not a greater loneliness in death: for it was a greater loneliness in life. The paradox was not lost on the gaping citizens as they took their time off in the zoo. Many of them peered into the empty first enclosure, the children bawling in disappointment:
    “Where are the animals, Mummy?”
    “You told me this was a zoo, Daddy!”
    The parents tried to pacify their children by pointing to the corridors of cages where the zoo proper, apparently, would start—or so they promised. Meanwhile, it was their beholden duty to pause here a short time to view the empty enclosure in almost religious calm. Nobody, it was clear, took account of the insects that threaded the loose soil of this enclosure. Nobody realised this was an otherwise empty enclosure for insects. They wanted to see big things in a zoo. Life needed big things in the city.
    Soon after by-passing the first enclosure, most visitors, in awed contemplation, would enter the first corridor of cages—a silence soon broken by the snorts, squeals and snickers of the first set of exhibits. Kept apart hardly at all by the cages, the exhibited could stretch limbs through the bars towards each other—and even uncomfortably close towards the visitors themselves. The latter cowered from the first cage only to find themselves backing towards another cage where something else was putting out feelers.
    The remarkable fact—despite the circumstances—none of these caged creatures were as nightmarish as one might have assumed. Nothing could be nightmarish because this was one hundred per cent not a dream... and only dreams and their like could house nightmares.
    Mike turned towards the others and said: “Quite sweet, aren’t they?”
    Nobody replied. They weren’t so sure, because these initial cages seemed to house versions of the apes, a baby one of which had indeed featured in a dream dreamed by at least one of the party before entering the zoo grounds. Yet here, the apes could be clearly seen for what they were—apes with no potential to grow into man-mountains like Gulliver. That, Mike assumed, was what differentiated dreams from non-dreams. In the former, anything could grow into anything else. In the latter, things stood still ever as themselves. The status quo. They may be monsters in a non-dream, but they couldn’t transmute into worse or different monsters.
    They wandered further into the maze of cages, Mike in the lead. As a hawler, he could see things more clearly than the others, since he had travelled further underground in his consciousness and established fixtures and bases from which all else