Fierce Kingdom

by Gin Phillips

  Moths are circling the spotlights, ecstatic. Falling leaves zig and zag from trees that she can no longer see except for where the highest branches catch the moonlight. There are smaller winged things that are not moths hurling themselves into the glass doors with soft taps. All around her, nothing but blackness, but in this lit-up bubble of space, everything is frantic.

  She stays in the dark for a few more moments, then she runs to the railing and lifts Lincoln to the outside ledge.

  “Hold on,” she says, still keeping a hand on his back.

  She has to let go of him entirely to boost herself over the railing, but his fingers clamp tight around the wood and he is silent, and then she has swung both feet over the side and landed on the deck and the moths are still swooping, oblivious and exalted, and she reaches over the rail, sharp edges biting into her hip bones, and she lifts Lincoln over, his tennis shoes thudding—fwunk fwunk—on the railing, and then he is tucked against her again and she steps under the eaves, in a far corner away from the door, back into the shadows, and she catches her breath.

  6:58 p.m.

  It feels good to stand, spine straight against the brick. She wonders how long she had been sitting—she moves her hand to her purse, patting the side pocket, her body remembering her phone independently of her mind.

  Her phone.

  When she felt it leave her hand, there was nothing but relief, and she has not, really, reconciled herself to the fact that the foreign thing she flung away, the thing that was leading the men to them, is the same thing that let her talk to her husband and have some connection to the world outside.

  Now, whatever might be happening outside the walls, she is no part of it.

  This does not bother her as much as it probably should. The outside world is irrelevant. It is, somehow, clarifying to feel her shirt snagging against the bricks behind her and to feel the pain in her left shoulder where Lincoln’s weight pulls and to know that it is only the two of them, and it has been from the beginning. The phone only gave her the illusion that they were not alone.

  It was surely no different for those poor people in Texas, the ones floating facedown, dead now, and maybe they were gulping lungfuls of water in the same seconds she was listening to gunmen rattle a fence.

  There is no one coming. There is no such thing as the police.

  Everything is sharper now that she knows this.

  There is Paul, of course. He must be terrified. But there is nothing she can do about it. Paul is beyond her control, like almost everything except for which door she will open and which way she will point her feet and how fast or slow she will move. She considers what must come next: the building strikes her as the most dangerous part of their route—if the men are hiding or watching, she and Lincoln will have nowhere to go. There’s no exit other than the main door to the Primate Zone, the same one they ran through on their way to their hiding place, and it was a perfect hiding place, safe, and she is moronic to leave it, negligent, and she should turn around now, but he is nearly shaking from hunger, or possibly from something besides hunger, but she does not have a fix for that—how long has she been standing here, wasting time?—but, yes, to get to the main exit, they’ll have to wander down the narrow hallway with solid walls and glassed-in exhibits all around them, no doors or turnoffs. They’ll be trapped.

  But there is no choice, or, at least, there is none that seems better.

  “Mommy?” he says, more high-pitched than usual.

  Will he only speak in one or two words from now on? Have all the unending questions and inventions and stories dried up for good?

  “It’s all right,” she says as she gathers him to her and steps into the light, moths flashing silver above her head. She takes four long, fast steps and then pushes open the glass door, slipping inside quickly, despising the groaning door as it closes behind her, even though she has kept a hand on it, gentling it.

  The door, finally, is closed. Inside, the silence presses down like humidity. The air is heavy with quiet. From this angle, flattened against the craggy wall—she is finding that she likes having her back against something—she can see only the faux-stone walls and fluorescent lighting along the baseboards and the smooth, shining surface of the floors. The exhibits begin past the first curve of the walkway, and for now it is like standing in the middle of some futuristic cave or an underground bunker. It is both entirely natural and entirely man-made. She sighs at the warmth. It usually seems cold in the building—she is always rubbing her arms while walking through, but now it’s several degrees above the outside temperature.

  She listens, and there is nothing. No sound of a heating system, no animals chattering. No wind shaking the skylights. She could make a long list of all the sounds that she might hear and does not.

  Her boy is so quiet.

  She considers letting him walk—he might like to stretch his legs. She would not mind giving her arms a rest. But there is something that seems much safer about holding him. He may weigh her down, but wrapped around her, he cannot be separated from her.

  She listens, and there is nothing.

  “Here we go,” she whispers.

  He doesn’t answer, and she steps forward slowly, measuring the almost-sounds her feet make against the red-brown tile. In two—three—steps she is far enough from the wall that she can no longer touch it, and she feels off-balance, as if she is walking on the deck of a boat. There is too much space around her. But another few steps and her hand lands on the porous surface of another wall as she comes to the first curve in the hallway—there are portraits of extinct animals, dodos and passenger pigeons and Pyrenean ibexes and great auks, and none of them are primates, and the logic of this place escapes her. Her shoulder against the wall and her hands locked under Lincoln, she tilts her head around the bend. She has already ducked back by the time she processes what she has seen.

  There is a monkey sitting on the floor.

  She steps from behind the slab of rock, turning the corner, and there is glass on either side of her: the tiny squirrel monkeys on her right and what should have been the colobus exhibit on her left. But now that exhibit is only a square hole in the wall, exposing ropes and concrete. There is barely any glass at all, except for what is smashed all over the tile floor. No lights are on inside the enclosure, but the hallway fluorescents throw a glare over the rocky ground and the fake creek. She only glances at the landscape, though, because she is focused on the monkey in front of her.

  It is a colobus, of course, black and white, head hanging forward, with its hands—paws—dragging on the glass-covered tile, and because of the angle, it takes her a moment to realize that there is a second colobus lying unmoving on the ground. She can only see its black feet and rump. The rest of it is hidden.

  She watches its feet carefully, and she cannot see the slightest twitch or tremor—the doves her father killed would jerk for long seconds even after their heads were gone—and she is fairly sure it is dead. The other colobus, the living one, is standing so close that its long white fur mixes with the fur of the dead one, and Joan cannot tell where one stops and the other starts.

  She tightens her arms around Lincoln, wishing she knew more about primates.

  The living colobus has not looked in her direction. Its back is hunched over, and its fur is smooth and silky and touchable, and she wonders if people have ever made coats from it.

  Only its fingers move, curling and straightening a few millimeters from the floor. It does not seem to have thumbs.

  She thinks of a time in Mississippi when a possum meandered onto the sidewalk in front of her and she decided to cross the street because she did not like the look of its teeth. And in Honduras, during that unending contract with the coffee cooperative, when she woke to a cow in her bedroom, its wide head dipping toward her mattress, thick tongue swiping into the air. Her uncle caught her baby squirrels when she was small—this was after h
er father had gone, and, of course, her father would probably have shot the squirrels—but they were really her uncle’s pets, not hers. He wouldn’t let her hold them because they would bite, and his thumbs were bloody and scabbed even though they loved him and rode on his shoulder and jingled his earlobes with their tiny claws.

  The colobus is swaying its head slightly side to side, rolling its neck, and she thinks of Stevie Wonder and frightens herself by almost laughing. Her mouth begins the smile before she can stop it, and then she has to work to make the muscles in her cheek do what she tells them to do.

  She wonders if the live colobus dragged the dead one out here. Does it have burial rituals? Does it mourn? Did the dead colobus live for a while after it was shot and try to escape out here and the other unhurt colobus followed it and, really, why wouldn’t all the monkeys run like hell and get as far away as possible when the first shots sprayed around them—why is this one still here? Did it get trapped by the closed doors and come back eventually, or has it been here the whole time, standing watch over the body?

  She and the monkey are both frozen, refusing to acknowledge each other’s presence. It strokes its white beard with one finger, contemplatively, but it never raises its head.

  The glass makes all the difference. A dog or a cat—a domesticated thing—is totally different. A wild animal in front of you, not a pet but a real animal, is every impulse all at once. You believe it is sweet and affectionate, and this can be true, but it will also make you bleed without remorse. Scabbed thumbs and dear dangling earlobes. You cannot know a wild thing.

  She cannot stay here frozen indefinitely. She could turn around and go the other way, but it would take much longer to wind through the orangutans and the giant otters and several other animals she cannot recall. She would have to go back across the lighted deck, and she would much rather go forward.

  “Mommy?” Lincoln says, his head still pressed against her.

  “Mmm-hmm?”

  “What is that monkey doing?”

  “Just thinking, I guess.”

  “Do monkeys think?” he asks, and she thinks that, yes, it has been good for them to get moving, because at least the change in scenery—wild animals lurking in hallways—has made him less catatonic.

  “Yes,” she says.

  “Do they bite?”

  It is, she acknowledges, the more relevant question.

  “I don’t think so.” That is not true. “Not unless you scare them.”

  “Like bumblebees?”

  “Sort of like that.”

  As she speaks, the colobus lifts its arm over its head, and the sudden movement sends her scuttling backward. It opens its mouth, yawning, and its canines are long and vampire sharp. But it only picks at its fur.

  She decides to move slowly and steadily, nonthreateningly. First, though, she glances down at the shards of glass on the floor by her feet, and she squats down and slides her fingers carefully around the biggest piece, almost a perfect triangle. There is a sting in her palm, and she knows she’s cut herself, but she stands back up, thighs screaming, and shifts her grip on the glass. She likes that it’s too sharp.

  She stares at the monkey, at its closed mouth filled with teeth. Once when they were watching some horrible news story, her uncle said it worried him that if he walked in on a burglar pointing a gun at someone he loved—and if he had a gun in his own hand—he wasn’t sure he could make himself pull the trigger. He wondered if that made him a bad man, that he might let someone hurt her just because he couldn’t bear the thought of killing another human being.

  If someone were trying to hurt Lincoln, she could splatter brains on concrete.

  If this monkey comes toward them, she will aim for its eyes. She will slit its throat.

  She moves to the right, pressing herself against the squirrel monkey exhibit. She watches the colobus the whole time, and at one point it almost glances toward her, a turn of its head that makes her sure that it is aware of her movements, but it never actually lays eyes on her. She inches along sideways—her palm damp with blood—and eventually she is past both colobuses, and she looks back and the live monkey is still sitting there, mixing its fur with that of the dead.

  The path turns. She passes the gibbons and the tamarins, and there is a wet patch on the floor, dark like spilled soda, and then the lemurs are straight ahead. All the other glass windows are intact. The habitats beyond are dark, although each with a dim round light at the ceiling, moonlike.

  She reaches the entrance door more quickly than she expects, and she keeps to the side of it and does her best to study the view outside. The spider monkeys’ outdoor playpen fills up the space to either side of the door, so she can see only a narrow tunnel of sidewalk and sky and then—barely visible—the edge of the playground and two empty green benches.

  She bends down, setting her jagged piece of glass on the floor. She does not want to slice herself more than she already has, and glass will not be any help against men with guns.

  “Are we at the food machine yet?” asks Lincoln from her shoulder.

  “Almost,” she says, and she pushes open the door. The air outside is somehow colder than she remembers from only a few minutes before. But she likes the feel of it on her skin. She prefers the outdoors, the openness, the lack of walls, even though she is aware that she was thinking just the opposite not long ago. But looking up at the sky—clouds have rolled in, thin and spread like pulled cotton—the height and breadth of it makes her chest loosen.

  The door closes, nearly catching on her hip, and she is slow to move, because when she steps forward, they will be in a spotlight—another damn spotlight—but she boosts Lincoln higher on her hip and then sprints to get free of the light. Once they are past the spider monkey cages, she slows down, safely in the shadows again. Although there are light poles dotting the pathways and more strings of lights looping, for now they are in a pocket of darkness at the edge of the playground.

  The moon is blurred behind a cloud. The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas, she remembers from a poem her uncle used to read to her, and Goodnight room goodnight moon goodnight nobody, and once, when they were first married, she and Paul stood on the porch and saw an orange moon hanging so low and huge it was like something nuclear, something painted by Dalí, and they walked out, not even locking the door behind them, and followed the moon through the neighborhood for miles, getting closer and closer, holding hands, running sometimes, and they would round the corner and it would be almost reachable, and then all at once it was back in the sky, its normal size and color, and they walked back home like they’d shared a dream.

  Not far away, the light streams down from the light poles, cones of brightness spreading across the concrete. It is a patchwork of light and dark. The shadows are tropical around her at the edge of the playground: tufts of pampas grass. Fences made of wooden poles and ropes. Banana leaves, waving.

  She takes stock of the play structures, all fiberglass and metal. There is a fake mountain that Lincoln likes to climb, and its outline is like a giant cactus. The African drums are in a line, empty and silent. The wooden masks rest on poles, black and gold and openmouthed, slightly demonic, and one of them has a tongue that looks like a penis, although she cannot see it from this distance. There is nothing here she has not seen countless times before, although rarely at night and rarely without crowds. There are no broken bodies and no pools of blood. If it were not for the grieving monkey and the shattered glass she can still feel crunching slightly under her sandals, embedded, she could tell herself that she has imagined the past few hours.

  She stays still, listening, always listening. Waiting for any shadows to separate themselves and turn into men. There are wind chimes nearby, and they are playing a tune as if a fairy might appear at any moment. The wind picks up the echoes, twisting them around, and the sweet song comes at her from all directions.

&
nbsp; She finds herself almost swaying to the chimes, and it strikes her that she is still tense but that the fear has been pushed back ever since she heard the men singing at her. She wonders at her calmness—no, that is not quite right, she is not calm, but she is focused and without the fast breaths she remembers from those early moments, when it felt as if she might break into pieces, and she thinks maybe it is not possible to maintain that level of fright indefinitely.

  There is a rock near her feet covered in green moss, nearly luminous. Her hand is barely bleeding anymore.

  She freezes at a movement to her left, something bigger than a swaying branch or a flapping bug. But when she turns, it is only a lone African painted dog moving through the shadows of his sad exhibit. The dog is too scrawny, all legs and ribs—it is prowling, pacing, back and forth along the fencing of its cage. Usually there are two of them in there, but she can only see the one. He looks hungry and desperate, like he is planning an escape.

  She imagines finding some latch on his fence.

  The moon has come from behind the cloud. The landscape around her is whitewashed, eerie, and she moves past the playground, keeping to the edges of the path, anywhere there are shadows. There are enough trees that she can stay under the branches, close to the trunks, stopping often. They pass the tall fence that hides the rhinoceros, and the prowling dog is out of sight. The elephant exhibit is up ahead; the thatched roof of the Savannah Snack Bar is coming into sight, and past the far wall of the building there will be the snack machines. They are close.

  She scans the path ahead of them. A sippy cup. It is there on the concrete, spilling a wet puddle. She steps around it, speeding up to cross a patch of lit ground, landing safely against the bamboo fencing of the elephant habitat, back in the dark.

  She does not let herself look back at the abandoned cup.

  She does not let herself think again of the woman or the baby, and she does not let herself think about the woman who scanned their membership card today and told Lincoln she liked his curls or of the grandmother and the little girls who had been only a minute or so ahead of them on the way out—had she seen a shape wearing the woman’s navy blue dress? Had the little legs she’d seen been wearing pink tights?—or of the older boy in glasses who had picked up Thor when Lincoln dropped him on the sidewalk.