The Blood of Angels Read online

  It’s often claimed that the human characteristics we perceive in animals are perhaps just our own way of anthropomorphizing animals (forgive me if this term is too long or fancy for the commenter). In other words, we see a reflection of ourselves in animals. We want to see human-like characteristics in animals because we’re looking for reflections of ourselves.

  It’s true that there’s nothing more comical than the trouser-wearing, cigar-smoking chimpanzees in old movies and film clips. A touching caricature that reminds us so much of ourselves, or is supposed to remind us of ourselves, and is funny for the very reason that it doesn’t quite succeed.

  But why do we have this obsession with humanizing animals and yet also have a need to obsessively deny animals’ human-like qualities?

  We think that animals are not sentient beings. Sure, they feel pain and hunger and maybe even sexual passion. But that last-mentioned trait is itself a touchy subject because it could lead to thoughts of love, and love is such an abstract, spiritual thing that an animal couldn’t possibly feel it.

  So let’s start with love.

  What about animals’ love for their offspring, the way they care for, persuade and punish them? Mere preservation of the species, a function of involuntary instinct.

  A pet’s love for its master? A herd animal’s nature, a reflexive submission to the alpha member of the pack.

  The pair-bonding between two individual animals that looks in every way like love? Herd dynamics or maybe just a kind of automatic pheromonal recognition that their genes are compatible and will produce the optimal offspring.

  But abstract, human-like love, real love? Heavens – no, sir! They’re animals!

  And yet anyone who has a pet is ready and willing to tell you how little Fluffy, Lady or Booboo has shown unmistakable grief, jealousy, longing, craftiness, guilt and premeditation.

  But when it comes to farm animals these same signs of intelli gence that we praise in our pets are just as rationally denied.

  This idea of human superiority is just as blind, narrow and primitive as geocentric thought once was in astronomy. It would, perhaps, have been humiliating and degrading to admit that humanity was not at the centre of the universe, so when anyone proposed a sun-centred theory of the solar system they weren’t listened to.

  With the development of tools of observation it became apparent that the paths of the known planets didn’t seem to conform to the assumption that they were revolving around the Earth. But everyone wanted the other celestial bodies to revolve around the Earth because the Earth was, after all, the centre of the universe, and that was that. So they attempted to explain these observations that seemed to refute the dominant concept of the universe, these anomalies, by developing more and more complicated hypotheses about planetary orbits. For some unfathomable reason, for instance, they created a loop in the celestial trajectory called the epicycle. A playful pirouette. Naturally, people were willing to believe this theory more than they did their own eyes. To change the trajectory of their ideas would have been too difficult.

  When we take the many observed behaviours that suggest animal consciousness and emotional life and dismiss them as reflexes or mechanical instincts, attribute them to assorted on-off switches or automatic-impulse responses – a mother animal’s cub dies; the cessation of nursing breaks off hormone response at an unusual phase, causing the mother to behave in a way that we might interpret as grief if we didn’t already know that animals don’t feel grief – we’re invoking that same damn epicycle. It’s at times like these that Occam’s razor has its work cut out for it.

  And not only do people anthropomorphize animals, it also works the other way around. I once read in a book about animal consciousness that dogs caninomorphize people. They assume that people behave like dogs. If a human comes too close to a dog that’s growling over a juicy bone, the dog acts like it thinks the human is interested in stealing the bone, since a bone is a manifestly delicious, sought-after thing. Or a dog that’s used to humans being above it in the hierarchy might show obedience and humility in typical dog fashion by urinating on the floor, which doesn’t necessarily delight the human.

  The commenter brought up pigs and cows. Do pigs and cows porsinomorphize and bovinomorphize people? Do they attach expectations and assumptions to us that are reflections of their own models of behaviour, and, if they do, what do we look like in their eyes?

  Maybe they see us as über-pigs and über-cows, whose cruelties have to be accepted because right now that’s how the universe is organized.

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  USER NAME: Seppo Kuusinen

  You still haven’t answered my question about where to draw the line with animal rights. Should animals be allowed to kill each other? Should a person try to prevent a fox from hunting rabbits? Is it all right to keep pets? Dogs, cats? What about dairy cows or bee-keeping? Should ducks be kept for their eggs? Should we eat shellfish? Can we kill an animal that is a threat to humans? A tiger, a wolf or a fly? A tick, a bacteria, a microbe? Furs are forbidden, but what about wool sweaters and leather shoes? Can we kill insects? Surely I can swat a mosquito if it sits down to feed on my arm?

  DAY NINE

  I take a step closer and feel a swaying in my head, my feet moving in small, wary steps now, like when you don’t know if you’re dreaming or awake or somewhere in between and you’re waiting for your toes to touch the sheets or the blanket and reassure you that you’re in bed, safely under the covers, and you can open your eyes and find some anchor in reality, some indication that your eyes have opened on to the familiar knotty boards in the ceiling, the paper lampshade, round and planet-like.

  This must be a dream. All I have to do is open my eyes. I try to pry my eyelids open, but they won’t open any more than they already are, wide open and staring, taking in something that shouldn’t be there.

  There’s a landscape in the attic. The wall that should be a wall isn’t a wall. It’s a hole, an opening, and there’s a landscape in it, like a picture.

  It’s as if I’m looking out of a window, except that I have to remind myself that the wall with the opening in it is an internal wall. Even if, for whatever reason, someone had sneaked in during the night and picked up an axe or a chainsaw and made an opening in the wall there is no landscape on the other side of this wall. It’s not a wall to the outside.

  I ought to be seeing the junk room through the wall, a dim space filled with junk, an old tin half full of window-frame paint, the pitchfork with no handle and the old kitchen stool, the bent fish-trap, the paint-splattered overalls hanging from a nail and a dozen bricks.

  But instead of the room beyond the wall I see a rolling, sun-drenched, open meadow dotted with willow bushes, and far off at the edge of the woods a streak of blue sky above the moss-covered boulders. And flowers. A field of flowers. A dazzling riot of magenta, yellow and red among the green, almost too bright to look at.

  The opening is roughly circular, perhaps a metre and a half across. It stretches from the edge of the sloped ceiling down to the floor. The doorway next to it that leads to the junk room is empty and dark.

  I was just here. I came to fetch the overalls that I’m wearing from the nail on the other side of the wall not twenty minutes ago. But now everything’s changed.

  There’s a window that isn’t a window.

  And if it were a window, there would be light falling on to the floor of the loft, the light would slant down and cast a puddle of light on the floor, revealing the grain of the wood, the edges of the floorboards, but the hayloft is just as dark as it was when I climbed up. There’s just this landscape, like a projected image. But it’s three-dimensional and alive. I can see the wind rocking the stems of the flowers in the meadow, aspen leaves fluttering at the edge of the clearing.

  I take another step, and there’s nothing in my head. My brain can’t process it. Although I’m standing right in front of the opening the light doesn’t fall on me or on my feet or my bee suit, but
when I stretch out my hand through the opening and into the landscape my hand and arm turn gold in the rays of sunlight, and I feel a gentle, warm wind like an enormous animal breathing somewhere far away.

  I pull my hand back inside like I’ve touched a hot stove. It’s so strange and yet so familiar at the same time, the feel of a sigh of wind on my skin here in this dusty grey building, this forgotten air.

  I lift my hand again and touch the edge of the opening. I don’t know where this sense of certainty comes from, but I’m absolutely sure that it hasn’t been made with tools. My fingers feel the place where the beams are cut away. Up to a certain point it feels like wood, rough and fibrous, but then the edge of the opening changes to something so smooth that my sense of touch can’t distinguish where the hole ends and the outer air begins.

  I warily poke my head and shoulders out to the other side, and I can smell it – sun-warmed earth, the succulent aroma of the meadow, spruce pitch from the woods, the wind brushing my cheek with careless fingers.

  I look down. I’m a few metres above the ground, about as high up as the hayloft is. Below me spreads high grass dotted with saplings and willows. A little further off are thickets of aspen and birch then dense spruce.

  I push my upper body through the opening, all the while keeping the fingers of one hand hooked over the wall on the inside, anchored in the still darkness and reality of the loft. I bend over to look at the place where the other side of the wall should be, and I see – although the bright sunlight has momentarily dazzled my vision – the landscape continuing behind me, open and unobstructed, as if the upper half of my body craning out of the opening were half a person, floating in the air.

  Nothing in the landscape that stretches in front of me and behind me looks like Hopevale. From where I’m standing, at this angle, I should be able to see my cottage on the rise a couple of hundred metres away, and further off the light-grey concrete complex of Hopevale Meats, but none of that is visible. There are trees everywhere.

  I breathe in air so pure, so fragrant, so saturated with sap and moisture and so free of exhaust fumes that it doesn’t feel real. And there’s something else strange about it. My ears ache with silence. I don’t hear the bellows of the bull calves at Hopevale or the rush of cars from the busy road a kilometre off. Just the rustle of the wind in aspen trees, snatches of birdsong and the faint, high-pitched hum of insects buzzing among the flowers.

  Feeling light-headed I pull myself back into the dark, familiar, wood-scented hayloft and rub my fists into eyes, still stinging from the brightness. Immediately I hear all the encroaching sounds that belong there – the traffic on the road, the cattle and abattoir, a carpet of noise that I’m normally not even aware of because it’s so familiar.

  The opening is still there in front of me. It glows with the colours of late summer, the wind stirring its flora, yet I’m within four walls, under a roof, in a dusty room bounded by stacked and tightly packed logs.

  I’m going mad.

  This is post-traumatic stress. Hallucinations. Visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile hallucinations.

  *

  I forget about the bricks. I retreat to the trapdoor and descend the ladder. I wish I could turn my back on what I’ve seen, but there’s only one way to go down a ladder, and, although I don’t want to, I can still see the glow of the landscape through the non-existent opening for a moment longer before my head drops below the hayloft and my feet touch the bark and wood chips that cover the barn floor. There’s a fragrance of drying firewood.

  I glance up. Nothing but darkness through the hatch.

  *

  When I get to the house I take off my work shoes and bee suit, hang them up in the front room and get into the shower. I listen to the clicking of the boiler and turn the shower off while I’m soaping to conserve the hot water. I dry myself, take some clean underwear out of the drawer, put on my corduroy jeans and flannel shirt, walk to the cupboard and take out a bottle of whisky.

  It just feels like the only right thing to do. I pour two fingers in a glass and look at it, turning the glass in my hand then toss the whisky down my throat with one quick gesture. It’s just as nasty and burning as it should be, flowing down my throat like I’m disinfecting myself, right down to the kidneys.

  I pour another shot and drink it.

  The brain. It’s an amazing machine.

  What I saw must somehow have something to do with what happened nine days ago. I had just found the dead queen and watched the news. The world almond harvest had fallen by 80 per cent because of the disappearance of the bees in the USA.

  So I was thinking about almonds. My mind was weaving together loose associations – almonds, Christmas pudding, Christmas – then I saw the flash of blue lights from the direction of Hopevale, distant noises, shouts, and only then did I realize that a moment earlier I had heard something that I’d thought was on the audio track of the news broadcast. Sharps bangs: one, two, three …

  That must be the reason for it. It must all be to do with Eero.

  EERO THE ANIMAL’S BLOG

  PONDERINGS ON OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH ANIMALS

  TO ESTEEMED COMMENTER SEPPO KUUSINEN

  You run into this hierarchical problem all the time in discussions of animal rights (as well as that most tired of arguments, whether or not plants shouldn’t also be counted among sentient beings, of course).

  It’s true that many of the people who are ready to defend the right of mammals to live in a way appropriate to their species don’t feel a similar empathy for birds or squid, although examples of both species’ highly developed problem-solving abilities are well-documented. They just aren’t one of us. Even a whale, which lives in a different element than we do, feels closer to us than a parrot or a magpie for many people.

  But what about insects?

  Is it all right to kill an insect? Or, rather, is it all right to poison those dreadful little plant-nibbling, disease-spreading creatures and stop them from disturbing our otherwise blissful lives?

  I’ve never been able to fathom why the world is so insectophobic. It feels as if the common assumption is that if it weren’t for insects (and arthropods like spiders, which many people mistakenly identify as insects) life would be more comfortable and less scary in every way. There would be no disease, no vermin, no armies of ants marching across the floor of the summer cabin. No pests, which nowadays refers to anything smaller than a squirrel. And the presence of these pests in humans’ territory is a horror; mothers scream when they see something moving in the flour bag, fathers curse when they find a lively ecosystem in the walls of the sauna, and they grab a can of poison, even if the creature is a harmless silverfish crawling across the bathroom floor. Even an innocuous fruit fly is the trigger for a killing spree.

  I’ve examined this reaction. For people today, when other forms of life come on to our turf uninvited it means losing the illusion of having control of our lives. A bedbug, for instance, lives on blood. It doesn’t need dirty, unkempt habitations to reproduce, and yet, when a bedbug appears in a home, it’s a very shameful thing.

  I’m not particularly fond of the whine of mosquitoes on a summer’s evening, but their existence happens to be inextricably linked to the fact that there is a bird singing in the tree. Every kind of insect is tirelessly toiling on our behalf, tilling and aerating the soil, aiding the decomposition of waste, cleaning the water we swim in.

  And what about bees and other pollinating insects? It was the bees who 130 million years ago renewed the entire ecosphere when they provided flowering plants with a new way to guarantee reproduction. Even now there are about 20,000 species of plants that are dependent on bees. Cultivated bees, that is. If you include wild bees, there are 130,000 species of flowering plants that couldn’t survive without them.

  By the way, did you know that of all the genomically mapped insects bees are the ones that most resemble humans?

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  USER NAME: Seppo Kuusin
en

  Well, hell, bees must be mammals then at the very least. Right?

  DAY NINE

  I put the glass of whisky on the counter with a clunk. I go into the hallway and shove my feet into my plastic slip-ons. I grab the bee suit and put it under my arm to feel like I’m doing something real, something purposeful. I’ll take it back to the junk room right now, right this minute. The new one’s fixed with glue along the seam, and I’m sure it’ll be dry and ready to use by tomorrow.

  I march back to the barn for this supposedly important task, although I’m really going for quite another reason.

  I’m going to get to the bottom of this. I want to know if I’ve gone mad.

  I open the barn door and breathe deep and taste the whisky in my mouth. I already feel a slight pull under my temples. I look at the ladder and the dark open trapdoor in the ceiling. I climb warily up a couple of steps, the overalls hanging empty under my arm like a limp body, fragrant with honey. I toss it through the hatch on to the hayloft floor to free up my hands then go up myself, my head buzzing.

  And when my upper body is through the door I’m greeted by familiar, dense, safe darkness.

  Nothing else.

  I climb up the last steps of the ladder and brush the bits of dirt from the ladder off the palms of my hands. I stand in the lightless, noiseless loft. The wall between the loft and the junk room is there, like any other wall, grey logs, the only break in it the familiar door to the next room, radiating dark.

  I take a deep breath, filled with relief but also with a vague disappointment. For a moment I must have been struck by a baseless hope; if the illusion were still there then maybe all the rest of it was an illusion – the lights of the police cars, the banging noises …

  But it was just a beautiful hallucination, an inexplicable creation of my unconscious mind, an unbidden attempt by one part of my brain to help another part, whatever lobe it is that’s writhing under a pain that’s almost unbearable.