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As suddenly as he’d appeared, the gorilla vanished, and in his place was a scruffy white animal called, I learned, a polar bear, and then a chubby water creature called a manatee, and then another animal, and another.
All night I sat wondering about the gorilla I’d glimpsed. Where did he live? Would he ever come to visit? If there was a he somewhere, could there be a she as well?
Or was it just the two of us in all the world, trapped in our own separate boxes?
Stella
Stella says she is sure I will see another real, live gorilla someday, and I believe her because she is even older than I and has eyes like black stars and knows more than I will ever know.
Stella is a mountain. Next to her I am a rock, and Bob is a grain of sand.
Every night, when the stores close and the moon washes the world with milky light, Stella and I talk.
We don’t have much in common, but we have enough. We are huge and alone and we both love yogurt raisins.
Sometimes Stella tells stories of her childhood, of leafy canopies hidden by mist and the busy songs of flowing water. Unlike me, she recalls every detail of her past.
Stella loves the moon, with its untroubled smile. I love the feel of the sun on my belly.
She says, “It is quite a belly, my friend,” and I say, “Thank you, and so is yours.”
We talk, but not too much. Elephants, like gorillas, do not waste words.
Stella used to perform in a large and famous circus, and she still does some of those tricks for our show. During one stunt, Stella stands on her hind legs while Snickers jumps on her head.
It’s hard to stand on your hind legs when you weigh more than forty men.
If you are a circus elephant and you stand on your hind legs while a dog jumps on your head, you get a treat. If you do not, the claw-stick comes swinging.
Elephant hide is thick as bark on an ancient tree, but a claw-stick can pierce it like a leaf.
Once Stella saw a trainer hit a bull elephant with a claw-stick. A bull is like a silverback, noble, contained, calm like a cobra is calm. When the claw-stick caught in the bull’s flesh, he tossed the trainer into the air with his tusk.
The man flew, Stella said, like an ugly bird. She never saw the bull again.
Stella’s Trunk
Stella’s trunk is a miracle. She can pick up a single peanut with elegant precision, tickle a passing mouse, tap the shoulder of a dozing keeper.
Her trunk is remarkable, but still it can’t unlatch the door of her tumble-down domain.
Circling Stella’s legs are long-ago scars from the chains she wore as a youth: her bracelets, she calls them. When she worked at the famous circus Stella had to balance on a pedestal for her most difficult trick. One day, she fell off and injured her foot. When she went lame and lagged behind the other elephants, the circus sold her to Mack.
Stella’s foot never healed completely. She limps when she walks, and sometimes her foot gets infected when she stands in one place for too long.
Last winter, Stella’s foot swelled to twice its normal size. She had a fever, and she lay on the damp, cold floor of her domain for five days.
They were very long days.
Even now, I’m not sure she’s completely better. She never complains, though, so it’s hard to know.
At the Big Top Mall, no one bothers with iron shackles. A bristly rope tied to a bolt in the floor is all that’s required.
“They think I’m too old to cause trouble,” Stella says.
“Old age,” she says, “is a powerful disguise.”
A Plan
It’s been two days since anyone’s come to visit. Mack is in a bad mood. He says we are losing money hand over fist. He says he is going to sell the whole lot of us.
When Thelma, a blue and yellow macaw, demands “Kiss me, big boy,” for the third time in ten minutes, Mack throws a soda can at her. Thelma’s wings are clipped so that she can’t fly, but she still can hop. She leaps aside just in the nick of time. “Pucker up!” she says with a shrill whistle.
Mack stomps to his office and slams the door shut.
I wonder if my visitors have grown tired of me. Maybe if I learn a trick or two, it would help.
Humans do seem to enjoy watching me eat. Luckily, I am always hungry. I am a gifted eater.
A silverback must eat forty-five pounds of food a day if he wants to stay a silverback. Forty-five pounds of fruit and leaves and seeds and stems and bark and vines and rotten wood.
Also, I enjoy the occasional insect.
I am going to try to eat more. Maybe then we will get more visitors. Tomorrow I will eat fifty pounds of food. Maybe even fifty-five.
That should make Mack happy.
Bob
I explain my plan to Bob.
“Ivan,” he says, “trust me on this one: the problem is not your appetite.” He hops on to my chest and licks my chin, checking for leftovers.
Bob is a stray, which means he does not have a permanent address. He is so speedy, so wily, that mall workers long ago gave up trying to catch him. Bob can sneak into cracks and crevices like a tracked rat. He lives well off the ends of hot dogs he pulls from the trash. For dessert, he laps up spilled lemonade and splattered ice-cream cones.
I’ve tried to share my food with Bob, but he is a picky eater, and says he prefers to hunt for himself.
Bob is tiny, wiry and fast, like a barking squirrel. He is nut coloured and big eared. His tail moves like weeds in the wind, spiralling, dancing.
Bob’s tail makes me dizzy and confused. It has meanings within meanings, like human words. “I am sad,” it says. “I am happy.” It says, “Beware! I may be tiny, but my teeth are sharp.”
Gorillas don’t have any use for tails. Our feelings are uncomplicated. Our rumps are unadorned.
Bob used to have three brothers and two sisters. Humans tossed them out of a truck on to the freeway when they were a few weeks old. Bob rolled into a ditch.
The others did not.
His first night on the highway, Bob slept in the icy mud of the ditch. When he woke, he was so cold that his legs would not bend for an hour.
The next night, Bob slept under some dirty hay near the Big Top Mall garbage bins.
The following night, Bob found the spot in the corner of my domain where the glass is broken. I dreamed that I’d eaten a furry doughnut, and when I woke in the dark, I discovered a tiny puppy snoring on top of my belly.
It had been so long since I’d felt the comfort of another’s warmth that I wasn’t sure what to do. Not that I hadn’t had visitors. Mack had been in my domain, of course, and many other keepers. I’d seen my share of rats zip past, and the occasional wayward sparrow had fluttered in through a hole in my ceiling.
But they never stayed long.
I didn’t move all night, for fear of waking Bob.
Wild
Once I asked Bob why he didn’t want a home. Humans, I’d noticed, seem to be irrationally fond of dogs, and I could see why a puppy would be easier to cuddle with than, say, a gorilla.
“Everywhere is my home,” Bob answered. “I am a wild beast, my friend: untamed and undaunted.”
I told Bob he could work in the shows like Snickers, the poodle who rides Stella.
Bob said Snickers sleeps on a pink pillow in Mack’s office. He said she eats foul-smelling meat from a can.
He made a face. His lips curled, revealing tiny needles of teeth.
“Poodles,” he said, “are parasites.”
Picasso
Mack gives me a fresh crayon, a yellow one, and ten pieces of paper. “Time to earn your keep, Picasso,” he mutters.
I wonder who this Picasso is. Did he have a tyre swing like me? Did he ever eat his crayons?
I know I have lost my magic, so I try my very best. I clutch the crayon and think.
I scan my domain. What is yellow?
A banana.
I draw a banana. The paper tears, but only a little.
I lean back, and Mack picks up the drawing. “Another day, another scribble,” he says. “One down, nine to go.”
What else is yellow? I wonder, scanning my domain.
I draw another banana. And then I draw eight more.
Three Visitors
Three visitors are here: a woman, a boy, a girl.
I strut across my domain for them. I dangle from my tyre swing. I eat three banana peels in a row.
The boy spits at my window. The girl throws a handful of pebbles.
Sometimes I’m glad the glass is there.
My Visitors Return
After the show, the spit-pebble children come back.
I display my impressive teeth. I splash in my filthy pool. I grunt and hoot. I eat and eat and eat some more.
The children pound their pathetic chests. They toss more pebbles.
“Slimy chimps,” I mutter. I throw a me-ball at them.
Sometimes I wish the glass were not there.
Sorry
I’m sorry I called those children slimy chimps.
My mother would be ashamed of me.
Julia
Like the spit-pebble children, Julia is a child, but that, after all, is not her fault.
While her father, George, cleans the mall each night, Julia sits by my domain. She could sit anywhere she wants: by the carousel, in the empty food court, on the bleachers coated in sawdust. But I am not bragging when I say that she always chooses to sit with me.
I think it’s because we both love to draw.
Sara, Julia’s mother, used to help clean the mall. But when she got sick and grew pale and stooped, Sara stopped coming. Every night Julia offers to help George, and every night he says firmly, “Homework, Julia. The floors will just get dirty again.”
Homework, I have discovered, involves a sharp pencil and thick books and long sighs.
I enjoy chewing pencils. I am sure I would excel at homework.
Sometimes Julia dozes off, and sometimes she reads her books, but mostly she draws pictures and talks about her day.
I don’t know why people talk to me, but they often do. Perhaps it’s because they think I can’t understand them.
Or perhaps it’s because I can’t talk back.
Julia likes science and art. She doesn’t like Lila Burpee, who teases her because her clothes are old, and she does like Deshawn Williams, who teases her too, but in a nice way, and she would like to be a famous artist when she grows up.
Sometimes Julia draws me. I am an elegant fellow in her pictures, with my silver back gleaming like moon on moss. I never look angry, the way I do on the fading billboard by the highway.
I always look a bit sad, though.
Drawing Bob
