by John Irving
The gelada baboon didn't see me. Unlike Siggy's evening, on this occasion the baboon was not on guard for anything. So when I waved back to the corner of the complex, Gallen began her business in the brush just outside the trapeze terrace. I listened to her, shaking the bushes and making low, girlish grunts of an inappropriately erotic nature. Perhaps, though, not inappropriate for the old gelada male and his fiery red chest, which suddenly flashed between the dark terrace bars - catching a bit of the blood-lit reflections coming out the Small Mammal House door.
Then I couldn't see the old primate; I could hear him huffing and wrenching down on the trapezes, one by one, which he used to swing himself from one long end of the terrace to the other. Where Gallen must have had some fright, thinking he'd sail right through the bars and get her.
The trapezes tangled and clanged on the wall. The gelada baboon wailed his frustration; he ranted, doglike and crow-like - all sounds of all animals were compressed and made one in this frotting baboon.
And, of course, the zoo joined in. And Gallen slipped out of those bushes; I saw her - just a bit of her nice leg flicking out in the doorway path of blood-purple light from O. Schrutt's research center.
Then there was old O. himself, his scar stretched over his face like a worn-thin spot on a balloon. And when he went bleating past me, flashlight aimed at the gelada baboon's corner, I ducked behind him and ran the other way, into the Small Mammal House. And in lurking fashion, hid myself behind the door of his office room.
Around me, I surveyed: the gaffing-hook thing, the electric prod, the zoo ledger open on the desk.
The binturong was still rarely diseased; the ocelot was still expecting; the giant forest hog still suffered from his ingrown tusk. But there was nothing entered concerning the bandicoot who had been dying - who was either dead or better.
Most likely dead, I thought - as I heard O. Schrutt cursing the gelada baboon, his voice on a pitch with the shriller monkeys, his key loop ringing the terrace bars like a gong.
I took up the electric prod and waited for Schrutt's surly footfall coming down the aisles of the maze.
When O. Schrutt came in his room, I stepped up behind him and snatched his revolver out of the handy open holster, and as he turned round to me, grabbing for the truncheon in his boot, I zapped him with the prod across the bridge of his nose. He fell back, blind for a moment. He threw his flashlight at me; it hit my chest. But before he could go for the truncheon again, I zonked his wet lips with the neat, electric prod. That seemed to buzz him properly; he spun around and tripped himself; he was down, sitting on the floor, his arms wrapped round his head, making a spitting sound - as if he were trying to get that electric fuzz off his gums.
'O. Schrutt,' I said. 'If you open your eyes again, I'll clean out your sockets with this electricity. And shoot off your elbows with your own gun.' And I clicked the safety on and off, just so he'd remember that I really had it.
'Who?' he said, his voice furry.
'O. Schrutt,' I said, in a deeper and older voice than my own - an ancient voice, I attempted. 'At last I've found you, old O. Schrutt,' I droned.
'Who are you?' he said, and went to move his hands off his eyes. I just skittered the prod over his fingertips. He howled; then he held his breath, and I held mine. The room was tomb-still; down the maze, even the small mammals were hushed.
'It's been a long time, O. Schrutt,' I said, in my creaky voice.
'Who?' he said, in a little huff. 'Zeiker?' he said, and pressed his eyes so hard that his blotchy knuckles whitened.
I laughed a low, gritty laugh.
'No, Beinberg?' he said, and I held my breath for him. 'Who are you?' he screamed.
'Your just reward,' I said, with pomp. 'Your final justice.'
'Final?' said old O. Schrutt.
'Stand up,' I said, and he did. I snatched the truncheon out of his boot and lifted his chin up with it. 'Eyes closed, Schrutt,' I said. 'I'll guide you with this beating stick, and see you don't move odd or I'll bash you. In the old fashion,' I added, not knowing what that might be but hoping it might ring bells for him - or have him imagining an old fashion of his own.
'Zeiker!' he said. 'It is Zeiker, isn't it?' But I just poked him through the door and out in the maze. 'Is it Zeiker?' he screamed, and I bopped him lightly on his head.
'Quiet, please,' I said, tapping his ear with the truncheon.
'Zeiker, it's been too many years for this,' he said. I said nothing; I just led him through the aisles, looking for a cage.
Empty was the biggest glasshouse of all, the home of the giant anteaters - missing, off on a Schrutt-sent mission of terror. I found the chute behind the cage rows, opened it and prodded old O. Schrutt inside.
'What are you doing?' he said, feeling his hands along the chute. 'Some of these animals are vicious.'
But I just poked him along until the label on the chute door said: GIANT ANTEATER, PAIR OF. Then there was the problem of cramming Schrutt down into the pitlike cage, where he groveled in the sawdust, covering his eyes and throat. And when nothing attacked him straightaway, he sat up for me so I could lash him all together in a lump - in his thick, multi-buckled ammunition belt. I crossed his arms and feet on his rump, and trussed him up, facedown in the sawdust.
'Keep those eyes shut, Schrutt,' I said.
'I'm sorry, Zeiker,' he moaned. 'Really, that was a terrible time for us all, you know.' And when I didn't answer, he said, 'Please, Zeiker, is it you?'
He was still asking me when I crept back in the chute and locked the door behind me. He could yell all night in there, and as long as the glass frontispiece wasn't slid back, no one would hear him. His cries would be as muffled as his mistreated neighbors'.
Out in the aisle, then, I paused to watch him under infrared. He peered at the blank glass; he must have known I stood there, watching him. His scar pulsed double-time, and for that moment I might have pitied him, but across the aisle I noticed a new sadness. The expectant ocelot was wary of her forced company, the frightened wombat, Vombatus hirsutus - a small bearlike creature with a rodent's sort of nose, or a huge hamster, looking like a toothy bear's runt cub.
First things first, again, I thought. And ran into the doorway aisle of the Small Mammal House.
'Gallen!' I cried, and the zoo responded - thumps and outcries bolder than my own. 'All clear!' I shouted, and the monkeys mimicked. I could almost sense the Big Cats purring.
And when I said, 'The ocelot is a waiting mother,' Gallen was helpful and unwary about the delicate business of separating O. Schrutt's luckless charges. She even paused at O. Schrutt's cage and stared at him awhile - her eyes the closest they could come to hating, a sort of horror-struck glare through the one-way glass. While old O. flopped nervously about in the sawdust, anticipating company.
But Gallen got her caution back, once the mother ocelot was bedded by herself and somewhat relaxed in her crib of straw. 'Graff?' she said. 'Don't you think it's illogical of you to separate these animals now, because they scare or even hurt each other, and then to let them all loose in the same mess, when they're sure to really hurt each other?'
'I said I wasn't going to let them all go,' I told her, and felt a little let down by that reminder to myself.
Perhaps as an added gesture, then - after Gallen had left the Small Mammal House to scout down the paths for me, to see if our disturbance had brought anybody snooping around - I thought I shouldn't leave old O. to himself in the cage. And having no place to put the giant anteaters, any way - having removed them from the cages of ratel and civet, respectively - I allowed O. Schrutt to know, before the chute door was opened, just who was returning home.
The giant anteater measures seven feet from nose to tip of tail; it's sort of two-fifths tail, and two-fifths nose, and one-fifth hair. With no body to speak of.
And O. Schrutt surely knew them by their peculiar grunts - and how they sent their long noses inquiring into the cage, before they allowed me to budge them with a shove down into th
eir rightful home, which was now trespassed in by old O. Schrutt, whom the anteaters regarded distastefully from the other side of the cage. And seeing, I suppose, that Schrutt was without gaff or prod, and had himself trussed up in a lump, they were not afraid of him. In fact, they clawed up a little sawdust and grunted at him; they began to circle him - although the anteater is no meat hunter at all and wouldn't be interested in eating people, preferring bugs - while old O. said, 'No! I didn't mean to come in here. I'll leave you alone. Please don't you feel threatened by me, oh no, sir!' And then whispered, a different pitch, 'Here now, isn't this cosy, sort of? Wouldn't you say so? Oh, I would.' But they shuffled around and around him - now and then a long tongue flying out and testing his cheek, tasting how scared he was.
When I left, he might have been saying, 'Here now, did you have a nice visit with ratel and civet? All for fun, I hope you know - and exercise, which you need. And there's no harm done, now, is there?' But I assured myself that the anteaters wouldn't eat him, or even pound him very severely with their leaden tails; or claw through him, the way they can claw through trunks of trees, or at least thigh-thick roots.
I could have left him with the Chinese fishing cat, I thought. And if you're not a good O. Schrutt, I will.
Then I walked out of the Small Mammal House, going over again in my mind just what few animals I would select as safe. But I saw Gallen looking rather frightened outside the door, and when I entered the real night again, I heard the din the zoo was making. The Big Cats sputtering like barges on the Danube, the monkeys reeling, thumping loud against the bars, the birds all calling their praise of me; and over it all, in a low-voiced monotone, the Famous Asiatic Black Bear.
All of them greeted me as I stepped out in the zoo I now had total charge of. All of them. Every different, frotting one of them - awaiting Hannes Graff's decision.
My Reunion with the Real and Unreasonable World
'GRAFF,' GALLEN SAID, 'someone's sure to hear all this.' And I wondered if perhaps there were loud nights in the zoo, anyway; if the conditioned suburb folk of Hietzing wouldn't just roll over and mildly complain: the animals are having a restless night. But I couldn't convince myself that there ever was a clamor like this. They were stomping, shaking the bars and bellowing delirious. And my frotting fellow-primates were the worst.
I'd left the infrared on because I didn't want anyone sleeping now; they had to be ready; and I wanted O. Schrutt kept in the dark, you might say. So I stayed a moment in the pathway of purple light from the Small Mammal House and I tried to read the key labels off the keyring. Finding the Monkey Complex key, I skirted the outside terrace, where shriveled and savage faces poked through the bars, ushering me inside with wails. I didn't dare an overhead light, thinking some passer-by outside the zoo might notice something different and report. I went from cage to cage with O. Schrutt's flashlight, glimpsing the rows and rows of black, leathery hands clutching the bars. I was being careful; I read the names of animals.
Monkeys: howler, lion-tailed, proboscis, rhesus, spider, squirrel and woolly - all small ones, so I let them out.
Then the snarling baboons: smiling, snowy-haired hamadryases, and the dog-faced geladas; my red-chested male, now forgetting his grievances. And the chacma baboons, the biggest; and perhaps I shouldn't have let out that old hundred-twenty-pound male.
Then gibbons, a whole horde. And chimpanzees, all six - one potbellied, who shoved the others and bit a spider monkey's tail. But I passed over, ashamed, the male, two-hundred-pound orangutan, and the quarter-ton lowland gorilla from the Gulf of Guinea. They couldn't believe it; they let me get almost to the door before they cried out, enraged and very envious. The orangutan tore his swinging tire off the rope and crammed it through the bars, squishing it up as thin as a bicycle tube. The lowland gorilla folded his tin water dish, as neatly as an envelope.
And the primates I released were not quiet, the frotting ingrates. I could hear my primates smashing ashtrays off the tables in the Biergarten.
'Graff,' said Gallen, 'you've got to calm them down or get us out.'
'These antelope types are safe enough,' I said, 'and they might distract the monkeys.' So I bolted for the pens - stretching from the Monkey Complex to the Australian's Little Colony - turning loose the aoudad, the anoa and the addax; letting go the gerenuk, the gemsbok and the gaur. I should have thought twice about the frotting gaur - tallest of wild oxen of the world - but I just read the name and didn't see him lurking in the dark. This bull stood six-foot-four at the shoulders, and I thought the gaur was a sort of diminutive goat. When he thundered out the fence gate past me, Gallen screamed, 'What's that, Graff?' And it tore by her smashing down hedges, frightened blind. 'What was it, Graff?' said Gallen, pinned down alongside the waiting zebras. 'You promised, Graff!' she cried.
'My mistake!' I cried. 'You let out those zebras now!' While I promptly loosed the sleek impala and the knobby Siberian ibex; all the Australians, and selected others.
But the zoo wasn't getting any quieter. The elephants blatted their brassy notes - resounding in the ponds of squabbling birds.
What harm would an elephant do? I thought. Just one, of course. And I could pick a docile one, certainly.
So I was off, scattering a conspiracy of gibbons cowering by the house for Big Loud Cats, and by the mysteriously silent hippohouse, where the hippo, I could only guess, was underwater and oblivious to this activity. Just as well, for sure, I thought - with his great plant-reeking mouth.
Inside the House of Pachyderms, the elephants were swaying, lifting their leg chains and thudding their trunks against each other's sides. I selected an old, large and chewed-eared African, and set my key in his shackles. He was so nice; I had to lead him by his trunk, out the Pachyderm House door, through which he barely fitted and where his presence scattered those conniving gibbons. But apparently, the elephant was a little deaf and had appeared so docile inside because he hadn't heard the rumpus. Because, outside, he jerked his trunk out of my hand and moved off at a steady, sideways trot, gathering speed, crushing shrubs and flattening down the iron rails along the paths.
I thought: Please don't let Gallen see him, God. And heard more ashtrays crash in whatever game the scheming monkeys played at the Biergarten.
Then I passed the tall, screened ruins where the giant birds of prey were perched, and thought: Not you. You'll eat the smaller monkeys. And for a second, thought: Which would at least keep them quiet.
But I went on back to the Small Mammal House, to collect my thoughts and see how old O. was doing with the anteaters. I met Gallen on the steps; she crouched in the purple light.
'I saw an elephant, Graff,' she said. 'I want to leave right now.'
'Just one elephant,' I said, dashing inside to spy O. Schrutt rumpled in a corner, his eyes watering with sawdust. The giant anteaters sat happily in the center of the glass-house, spiraling their tongues around their long snouts, calmly watching over old O.
This will never do, I thought - O. Schrutt must be kept on his toes. And I crawled back in the chute again, enticing and prodding the anteaters out of there - telling Schrutt, before I opened the chute door, that if I saw his eyes looking at me, I'd bring in the Chinese fishing cat.
Of course, I didn't. I exchanged the anteaters for the ratel - a surly, snarling badgerlike oval of hair and claws, with a long memory concerning Schrutt, I was sure. But the ratel was too small, I knew, to ever initiate a full-scale assault on old O. - even in the lumped and trussed condition.
I just popped open the chute door and called down to Schrutt, 'Here's little ratel!' And nudged the fat snarler inside. I watched them from the glass front; they respected each other from opposite corners, before the ratel grasped the situation Schrutt was in and boldly began a strutting show of himself, across the center of the cage.
But when I began lifting glass fronts elsewhere in the maze - releasing small and reasonable animals - I had to contend with Gallen again.
'You're not going to do a thing t
o that mother ocelot,' she said.
'Of course I won't,' I said, displaying my common sense for her to see - turning loose the casual sloth and the dour wombat, but passing by the lean, low, liver-colored jaguarundi. And letting go the zippy coati-mundi.
Of course, the anteaters were a nuisance - just blocking traffic in the aisle where they sat, watching the ratel and old O. Schrutt.
Gallen said, 'Please, Graff. Can't we leave now?'
And I said, 'We've got to muster them together, at one gate or another.' Then I turned the mongoose loose, of which Gallen disapproved, and freed the reluctant slow loris and the ring-tailed lemur, feeling more reasonable every minute.
Just to show you how reasonable I was, I did not free the poor binturong - the bearcat of Borneo - not wanting other animals to catch his rare disease.
And I gave a silent bow to the empty glass house of the bandicoot, already escaped this world.
But when I shook off nagging Gallen and emerged on the steps outside again, I was greeted by those animals, I hadn't selected. And they weren't cheering me now. They were tyrannical; they raged their envy. Forever present gibbons were sitting at the step bottom, shrugging shoulders and spitting. When I reached the path, they chattered accusations. They threw stones at me; I threw some back. I swung at one gibbon with the keyring, but he danced to the path rail and flung himself into the brush. Then I was assaulted with weed clods, sticks and general earth.
'You're free to go!' I screamed. 'Why don't you? Don't ask for too much!' And responding to my voice was what sounded like the utter demolishment of the Biergarten. I pelted down there, through a crunchy dust of littered ashtrays. This was a primate sort of destruction, for sure; a vandalism of a shocking, human type. They had shattered the onetime funhouse mirror; chunks of it lay all over the Biergarten terrace. I kept looking down at my puzzlework reflection, looming over myself.
'Just one more and that does me,' I said. And moved to the reeking cage of the Rare Spectacled Bears, who were hiding behind their drinking-and-dunking pool when I opened their cage. I had to shout at them to make them come out. They came shoulder to shoulder across the floor, heads lowered like whipped dogs. They turned circles through the destroyed Biergarten, running too close together and butting themselves into umbrellas and hissing monkeys.