The Fable of Bing

by Tim Sandlin

  Bing has seen agonizing pain. A giraffe blew his ankle — which most people think of as his knee — when Outie children threw firecrackers over the moat. Agonizing pain is to be avoided.

  “Terror in the house does roar, but pity stands before the door.”

  Bing has heard that sentence often, so he nods, knowingly. He’s learned it is better to falsify understanding than to pursue questions.

  He arches his back, moves up on his toes, and commences to scratch his neck — not gently. This is a vicious, hard scratch that draws blood.

  Dr. Lori crosses the gap between them and catches him by the wrist, freezing him in mid-scratch.

  “Who found and saved you?” she asks.

  Bing stares at the floor drain.

  She tightens her grip on his wrist. “Who raised you from a baby?”

  “You did, Dr. Lori.”

  “Who protects you from Outies? Who knows what is best for you at all times?”

  “Dr. Lori.”

  Dr. Lori releases Bing’s wrist. Her look is one of purest motherly love. Bing is the center of her existence.

  “That is correct,” she says. “Go feed your family.”

  7

  At the time of our story, when the San Diego Wildlife Park is on the cusp of becoming the San Diego Zoo Safari Park — still in Escondido and not San Diego — five bonobos live in a private habitat in the closed part of the zoo. Zoo officials say they are kept off display in order to acclimate the bonobos to Southern California, but the truth is showing bonobos to the public can be awkward. They go through spells of having sex several times an hour — oral, homosexual, missionary, inappropriate incestuous touching. The female orgasm can be long and loud. Bonobos tend to be educational at a level that makes human parents uncomfortable.

  Three females and two males live in the zoo, besides Bing who is in the unique situation as a non-species member of the family. His mother Betty is there. Remember Betty from Zaire? And his brother Kano who should have been Bing had not a human baby been added to the crate leading to misinterpretation of the paper work. There’s also a very young female named Lola and a very old female named Taeyondo. Taeyondo is the oldest bonobo in captivity. She may well be the oldest bonobo on the planet. She is considered wise by the press, although it is hard to pin down what they are basing this on, other than age. Old age doesn’t suppress vanity in bonobos anymore than it does in humans.

  The fifth bonobo is a male named Ubu. You might think that by being the prime candidate for procreation Ubu would rule the enclosure, but, if so, you’re confusing bonobos with chimps. Nature doesn’t work that way for bonobos. For example, two years ago when Ubu tried to steal a watermelon from Taeyondo, she tore his thumb off. The myth that bonobos are a bunch of make-love-not-war hippies was started by hippies.

  When Bing brings the basket of fruit through the back gate into the compound, Ubu paces to and fro along the front fence. He holds out his thumbless hand, palm up, begging. Bing ignores him. Kano charges over and steals a bunch of grapes. The old and young females watch, knowing Betty will kick the crap out of anyone gives her son grief. Only Bing bares his incisors and growls Kano away.

  Bing then tosses bananas, cantaloupe, mango, melons, apples, and grapefruit toward each female who sits like a queen in waiting. As Bing feeds the extended family, he undergoes an interesting transformation. His posture droops — shoulders down, knees bent. His jaw thrusts forward. His lips poof. When he crosses the compound he knuckle walks. His breathing turns to pants and grunts. When Kano charges in for another theft, Bing emits a high-pitched shriek.

  With the basket nearly empty, Bing overhand throws a couple of bruised mangos to Ubu, then he settles into peeling bananas for himself. Maybe it’s the matriarchal thing, opposed to male rule, but bonobos take their time with dinner. They enjoy meals. Bing peels his bananas. Most primates eat the peels.

  Bing squats on his heels and tilts his face to the setting sun as he chews. He thinks about the girl with the wavy hair. The girl burned a sheet of blue paper. Bing wonders why. As a generalization, Bing doesn’t wonder the why of things he sees. The girl has him thinking new thoughts. Bing pictures the cup between her collarbone and throat. In his mind, the cup pulses with the fragileness of a hummingbird’s throat. In reality, he’d been too far away to see any pulse in her collarbone cup. That doesn’t matter. Bing’s vision has replaced reality. It doesn’t take long.

  A lump soon forms in Bing’s canvas shorts. Betty comes across the yard to look at it. Lola tries to touch him there, but Betty backhands Lola in the ear. Bing wouldn’t have minded Lola touching him. Sometimes, he thinks having two mothers — bonobo and human — is not that great a deal.

  Betty reaches over and rubs Bing’s scalp with the palm of her hand. Bing reaches out and pinches a tick from Betty’s neck. Betty grunts, appreciatively.

  Bing eats his banana.

  8

  Rosemary Faith lives in a little yellow house built by an architect who takes pride in building tasteful, small homes. His theory — and therefore Rosemary’s theory — is if you have less you’ll need less. People like him call themselves the Small House Movement.

  The house has three rooms plus a bathroom. The floors are blond oak. The furniture is the best you can buy at IKEA. The kitchen is neatly organized and feng shui correct.

  Every night before sleep, Rosemary steeps a pot of tea using clay utensils she bought at an art fair in Solano. The tea is white leaves from a Japanese herbal shop on Venice Beach. While the tea steeps she sits at her kitchen table and deals out, from bottom to top, ten whole grain Wheat Thins in the pattern of a baobab crowned by a single star, although without size perspective it looks as much like a mushroom as a tree. Rosemary thinks of it as baobab, anyway. Then in a certain order that hasn’t varied since she was eleven years old and first read The Little Prince, Rosemary dips the crackers in hot tea and contemplates her day. This night, she has much to consider. The long-awaited other shoe has dropped, so to speak. She has seen a miracle.

  It’s no accident that Rosemary produces shows for a spiritualist radio network. She is drawn to individuals who know what they believe. Rosemary herself is informed when it comes to chi, tao, Durga Puja, and the Arapaho Medicine Wheel. She can speak fluently on Kabbalah. If anyone understands Revelations, it is Rosemary, but, bottom line, she doesn’t believe in Santa Claus and that fact sweeps everything else away with it.

  Rosemary desperately wants to believe Impossible Shit happens. Miracles, synchronicity, transmigration of souls — she would give her life for proof that a person’s stuff goes on before birth or after death.

  The folks she works with at Centered Soul seem to believe. Turk makes too much money off God not to believe in him, and the colorful eccentrics she books on their shows certainly believe, but Rosemary has never been able to push herself though that final window. She’s never witnessed an example of undeniable Impossible Shit, until today.

  She sips her tea — no sugar, one slice of lime — and nibbles her Wheat Thins in the correct order, and tries to reconstruct what she’d seen. Was the groundskeeper, whose name she’s already forgotten, dead? Could he have been almost but not quite dead and when the boy laid him out in the air he came around? He hadn’t coughed up water the way near drowning victims do in the movies. The man had simply gone from not breathing to breathing. Surely that is the sign of a miracle.

  Rosemary stands up and walks around her combination kitchen table/chopping block, clockwise, then she knocks on it twice, as a focusing ritual. Turk is big on focusing rituals. He believes in physical mantras. Rosemary is willing to try whatever works for anyone else. Turk claims to have inner peace, but what he has is confidence that manifests itself as a curtain of serenity.

  Rosemary covers all bases by reciting a prayer taught to her by her Grandma Ellie when she’d been losing her mind in a nursing home. It was the one with the If I should die before I wake line. Rosemary’s grandma tended to shriek that part.

/>   Rosemary walks into her cozy bathroom, loads her water flosser toothbrush with fluoride-free paste, and flips over her two-minute sand timer.

  That gives her two minutes to consider the wild boy. His shirt had writing on it, the logo of a university sports team, but she doesn’t know which one. If he never leaves the park, how does he get clothes? Who buys him deodorant? He’d been wearing a train engineer’s cap that didn’t fall off when he came from above into the pond. As her mind slowly puts him together, like dressing a paper doll, the more she thinks about it the more she thinks his shorts had been inside out. What was that all about? Rejection of consumerism? The kid had not looked like a being given to symbolism. His face had been alight with joy.

  And the sounds he made over the groundskeeper’s either dead or nearly dead body were not from a tradition she knows of, and she can differentiate repetitive chants from Dervish to Zulu to Navajo and most in between, including Catholicism. It had been an animal code, of some sort.

  After brushing her teeth, Rosemary washes her face carefully and rubs moisturizer into her legs, the backs of her hands, and her throat. A woman’s bedtime ritual is at least as stylized as any voodoo priest.

  She wanders into the bedroom and checks on her sister’s whereabouts on the Droid GPS. A digital photo frame on Rosemary’s nightstand shows Sarah as she’d been, pre-sickness. They had climbed Mount Whitney one summer. The photo up now is of Sarah at the top, with her arms raised like a champion. Her mouth is open in a shout of triumph. Her blond hair blows in the wind and her smile is proud and glorious. Her bare skin glows with life. At that moment, Rosemary had known Sarah would never die.

  Rosemary punches 1 on her speed dial.

  “Good morning.”

  Rosemary doesn’t say, “It’s not morning.” There is no point.

  “Sarah, it’s Rosie. How are you feeling?’

  “I am alive, thank you.”

  “Listen, Sarah, I may have found a way to save you. I’m not completely sure, but we might be able to make you whole again.”

  “That would be pleasant.”

  “I’ve found someone who can help. You need to hang on for a few more days and everything will be okay. I promise, I’m going to find a way. We’ll get out of this.”

  Rosemary waits for Sarah to process the information. She expects questions and she can’t decide how far to push Sarah’s hopes. Her sister needs hope. Without hope there is no call to go on. But false hope would build her up only to smash her down again.

  After thirty seconds of quiet breathing, Sarah’s voice comes back across the phone.

  “Who is this?”

  “Rosie. Rosemary. Your sister.”

  “I don’t know a Rosie or a Rosemary. You must have reached a wrong number.”

  Rosemary’s phone goes dead.

  9

  Dr. Lori removes her glasses and lets them drop to the end of the gold chain hanging around her neck. She thumb-and-index-finger rubs the bridge of her nose, giving herself a shiatzu treatment along the frontal plate. She feels for the edge of the skull, where it meets the nasal cavity. It doesn’t help her headache much. What she needs is a drink followed by bed.

  She rises from the desk and walks down the hall to the bonobo compound. In the daytime, a bevy of vets, cleaning crews, and marketing minions swarm the area, but at night the enclosure is left to Dr. Lori. She guards this privacy with fierce determination, quick to light into anyone who invades her sanctuary.

  As on most — but not all — nights for the last twenty years, Dr. Lori enters the bonobo enclosure and crosses to the sleeping nests. This is against policy. She’s not supposed to approach any primate alone, but Dr. Lori looks at policy as a guideline and a guideline as a suggestion. No one tells her what to do.

  The bonobos are stretched out on their nests — tree limbs and leaves woven across tire bases. Taeyondo sleeps sitting up, like Buddha in repose. Ubu, away from the others, whimpers in his sleep. Bing sleeps on his stomach with his head on Betty’s thigh. Kono’s hand is wrapped around Bing’s ankle.

  As Dr. Lori watches Bing she runs through the same thoughts parents around the globe think while watching their children sleep. First, overpowering love — kids are easy to love when they’re asleep. Then, in roughly this order: anxiety for the future; amazement that this being could exist and be yours; fear of messing the child up; and finally softness.

  Dr. Lori feels a wave of loss for something that isn’t yet lost. The feeling vexes her. Why nostalgia for the present? There must be a term for missing something you have. Bing is right there in front of her. She can see him breathing. His eyes twitch in a dream. He mumbles to someone or something. Dr. Lori feels excluded from his dreams. She feels a penetrating sense of sadness caused by the knowledge that this incredible joy is doomed.

  Dr. Lori touches Bing’s face. He snuggles deeper into Betty. A twinge of jealousy flashes through Dr. Lori, that Bing is more attached to his animal mother than her. Maybe she can do something about that. She’ll think on it later.

  10

  Rosemary Faith haunts the wildlife park. For eight weeks, throughout March and into April, whenever she isn’t producing at Centered Soul, Rosemary drives to Escondido, buys a one-day pass, and walks the paths. She climbs the hill to the tiger overlook almost daily. She circles the Heart of Africa. She weaves her way through the throngs at Thorntree Bazaar, always looking.

  While more or less two million people pass through the park in a year, only a handful haunt the place. The regulars — the every day visitors — stand out to each other, like an urban coffee clique. At least, they stand out to Rosemary who is paying attention. Some of the regulars seem to move in a fog.

  Such as: A dapper gentleman — no other words fit him — maybe seventy. He uses an umbrella as a cane and parks himself on the same bench in front of the lowland gorillas. He chews gum and stares at the huge beasts who themselves rarely move either. It is as if the gentleman and the gorillas are playing a game of whoever-blinks-loses.

  A woman in Dacron with twin toddlers. These three barely make it through the entrance gate before plopping onto the rocks at the flamingos. The woman and both kids drink 64-ounce Big Gulps. They eat snacks all day. The kids run wild while the woman ignores them, although Rosemary can’t decide where her attention lies instead. She wears earphones and carries an MP3 player in a holster on her belt.

  Two women in Sundance shorts and ironed Cabela safari shirts power walk the lower circle every afternoon at six. Neither so much as glances at the animals. They both have devices on their upper arms for measuring bodily functions. Once early in her quest, Rosemary found herself caught in their path. She braced for a collision or at least a scathing remark, but instead the women shot around her on either side, like a raging river bypassing a rock.

  A mixture of haunters meander the park aimlessly, like Rosemary. She imagines they too are searching, although she can’t imagine what they are searching for. Inner peace, maybe. Or lost love. Some appear to be schizophrenics, but that may just be head set cell phone use. She hopes they aren’t searching for the same thing she is. That would be depressing. Rosemary is realistic enough to see herself as grasping at a straw, and if everyone else walking aimlessly day by day is as pitiful as Rosemary feels she is, then she might as well give up and scream.

  One afternoon in April, a young man breaks the unspoken barrier between regulars. He tries to pick Rosemary up.

  It happens at the shoebill lagoon where she is scanning the treetops on the other side. The trees are filled with large birds. There may be something else among the leaves, but it’s hard to say.

  The boy steps up next to Rosemary and says, “I’ve seen you before.”

  Rosemary glances at him. Young, nervous, bad skin. Squashable as a bug. “Is that so?”

  He takes this as encouragement. “You come every day. I didn’t see you Friday. I looked but if you was here, I missed it.”

  She is a bit impressed he’s kept track. Had the
kid said were instead of was, she might have been tempted to take him seriously. “I had to work overtime Friday.”

  The kid gathers all the courage he has in him. “Would you care to accompany me for an ice cream. I’ll buy.”

  “I am sorry, but I’m kind of in a hurry.”

  “In a hurry for what? You don’t look in a hurry.”

  “Don’t force me to be rude to you.”

  Now the kid is hurt. He pouts. “I’m not forcing you to do anything. I just asked if you’d care to go for ice cream. I even offered to pay. I don’t see how that makes you be rude against your will.”

  The kid has a point. Rosemary turns from her search to bring the full brunt of her attention to the boy. “You are skipping school.”

  He doesn’t speak, but his face blushes.

  “I’ll bet twenty dollars your mother thinks you are in high school but you sneak off here every day instead. You hide your books somewhere and walk around all day and at three o’clock you pick them up and go home and tell Mama what a good day you had in algebra.”

  The boy flushes the color of sliced beets on a salad bar. “I was only trying to be nice.”

  “Yeah, well, you failed miserably. Now go off and let me do what I need to do here.”

  11

  Rosemary Faith sits perched on a bench in Chandler’s Garden when Bing appears at her elbow. Chandler’s is a quiet, out of the way garden surrounded by yet apart from the exhibits. Because there are no wild animals, few visitors loiter along its paths. The garden is filled with herbs, mostly, and a few flowers. The herbs grow behind stake-mounted cards explaining what each plant is and what part of the world is its home.

  Rosemary sits on the bench, her palms aligned, one on each thigh. She is pretending her mind is a deep well and, one by one, she is dropping coins into the well. Fifty-cent pieces. She waits for each coin to plink into the water, causing first a nipple splash and then concentric circles of waves. The coin turns slowly over as it sinks to the bottom of the well. When one half dollar settles to the bottom, she drops another.