“Mass! Look at this haul! Your face is your fortune, Myron.” She ordered two bacon and egg sandwiches and two coffees. “All right, tell me your story. How’d you get here?”
“It is a shameful fact about humanity,” Myron did not say. This is not the “Repunnotunkur” here. Instead he began to talk about Westfield, and Henry Clay High School.
“No, no, Arthur already told me all about that,” Gloria said, unaware that I had made up most of the stuff I told her, to cover up my own ignorance, and may have even gotten Myron’s last name wrong. “What happened—what happened after you fell out of the truck?”
“I woke up in a ditch, and this guy found me. He ran a kind of fraudulent school, where international students would come, and then he’d steal all their money while they just kind of foraged for themselves.”
“Sure, the Featherstone Academy.”
“You know it?”
“Waiter! More coffee! I make it a habit to know people, especially people who are stupid and have money.”
“Okay. I was all banged up, but I rested at the academy for a while. But then this guy Benson—you know Benson?”
“Of
course
I know Benson.”
“Well, he found me there and chased me over to the railroad tracks. Then I jumped on a train. Or kind of in front of a train. And that hurt worse than anything, but it got me away. And I rested up again and found you.”
“First things first.” Gloria was lighting a cigarette and trying to inhale while she talked. “Benson didn’t find you. Benson couldn’t find his shaggy hump with a map and a two-hour head start. Mignon Emanuel found you, and she sent Benson to do her dirty work, a mistake you can bet she won’t make again.”
“Benson works for Mignon Emanuel?”
“No, they both work for Mr. Bigshot. But Benson would listen to Mignon Emanuel. He’s just smart enough to know what he’s not smart enough to do on his own; which is, frankly, smarter than usual.”
“Right, Mr. Bigshot. I guess I knew that.”
“Second things second. You left out how you recovered the second time, after the train. I presume you did not go back to Andre Rodriguez?”
Myron paused a moment. He sampled the coffee, which was still too hot. Some things, he was learning, are hard to talk about. Finally he said, “I read this book once, about these three hunters in the American frontier, and one of them got mauled by a bear. It was a terrible mauling, and he was in real bad shape, and then his wounds get infected, and he gets the fever. His friends can’t get him to move, and there’s nothing they can do for him anyway, so they camp out and wait for him either to get better or die. But the thing is, is it’s Indian country, and every day they wait puts them all into more and more incredible danger. Finally, it looks like the guy—his name was Hugh Glass—”
“(This is a true story, now?)”
“(Yeah, this was a nonfiction book.) It looks like Hugh Glass is going to die any moment, and he’s in a coma and everything. So his two friends can’t wait any longer—they decide to just leave him, assuming he’ll be dead in the morning. And they take all his gear, and his gun and everything, and they book. But the next morning, Glass’s fever breaks. And he realizes that his friends have gone, that they’ve left him alone with no gun and no food, and he
vows revenge!
” Myron was getting into the story. “Glass crawls around till he finds a spring, and he lies in the underbrush, eating all the berries he can reach, and gulping at the spring, until he’s strong enough to sit up; and then he can reach more berries! And bit by bit his strength returns. He’s still ripped to shreds, and his face is mostly off, but his strength returns until he can stagger around, and he happens to come across where some wolves had killed a deer or something, and he comes running out screaming at them, and one look at this guy, and the wolves turn tail and run, so he gets some meat. And he looks so terrifying, like a zombie, that the Indians don’t want to kill him, and he goes walking through the frontier, looking to find the two guys who abandoned him.”
“Did he find them?”
“Yeah, but it took forever, and he forgave them in the end. You know how that goes.”
“Myron, why are you telling me this story?”
“Because after a few miles I fell off the train. And after a while I could think and see again, and I dragged myself to a muddy ditch. And then I dragged myself away from the tracks, in case Benson was looking for me, along the tracks. And I found a barberry bush, and I ate the berries until I could sit up.”
“Too bad they sent Benson, and not a bloodhound, huh?”
“Does a bloodhound work for Mr. Bigshot?”
“No, I was just talking. There is no bloodhound.”
“Oh. Well, it was raining anyway, for a long time. I was just afraid Benson would come by and sense me. How come there’s no bloodhound?”
“Faith, I don’t know, a bloodhound’s just a kind of dog. There’s just one of us per species.”
“Why is that?”
“That’s just the way it is. You might as well ask why people walk on their feet, and not their hands.”
“If people walked on their hands, wouldn’t they just call hands
feet?
”
“I mean,” Gloria said, lighting a cigarette off the last one, “that this all happened so long ago that no one knows, and if they ever did know, they don’t remember.”
“How old are you?”
“Same age as you, probably. Ten thousand years or so.”
“You don’t know how old you are?”
“Myron, darling, it’s easy to lose count with numbers that big. Also, when I was born I doubt if there were any languages on Earth that could count as high as ten thousand. And who knows for how long I just lived as a gorilla, living among gorillas, not even knowing humans were anything except another thing to run away from, or rip apart?”
“Am I that old, too?”
“Either that or you’re the first one of us to be born since anyone knew to keep track. Which actually isn’t that long ago, so it might not be ridiculous.”
“It isn’t that long?”
“Until two or three thousand years ago, I never left the jungle. Eventually I went exploring, but I was still in Africa, in the lakes region and then the Kalahari. If anything was happening anywhere else in the world, I sure didn’t know about it. The idea that there were a finite number of us, that there were one per species, nobody figured that out until the eighteenth or nineteenth century, probably.”
“Well, why are we? I mean, why are we this way?”
“Why are anyone the way they are, Myron? When I first met humans, I was worshiped as a god. I don’t even remember this part so well. They taught me to speak, but I hated my human form, it was so weak and clumsy. I was already old. My human skin was always old.”
“Why do you live among humans now, then?”
Gloria shrugged. “I like indoor plumbing. I like coffee and cigarettes. I like movies. There are perks.”
“I guess we can’t die?”
“Oh, you can die all right. But you can only get killed by another one of us, and only if he’s in animal form. I could turn right now and tear you to bits, and that would be the end of you. Plenty of us have died—we’ll probably never know how many. Any number of immortal rodents or shrews might have been killed by immortal cats before either even knew they could change. And in the last few hundred years, when we started being able really to travel—there’ve been a lot of deaths in the last few hundred years. Most of the seals got killed by the polar bear, and the polar bear got killed by a rhinoceros, the kind with one horn. And Mr. Bigshot killed her.”
“But that stuff, the claws and the bite, is that the only way to die?”
“I wouldn’t go jumping in any volcanoes to test this, but you do tend to heal fast from any other kind of wound. Have you ever been hurt badly, I mean before the train thing?”
“I once almost choked to death on a piece of ice.”
“And what happened?”
“Well, it was ice. It melted in my throat, and I was fine.”
“That’s a bad example, then.”
“And I’ve been beaten up a lot . . .”
“The point is,” said Gloria, “you’re not in much danger from conventional methods of dying.”
“What about what happened to me before all that? I mean, my accident.”
“Well, that was Mr. Bigshot. That was a lion.”
“Benson said I fought a lion and its mane, but I couldn’t figure out what he meant.”
“No, no, Myron, you fought a lion in Maine.”
“Oh. That’s where they found me, in Maine.”
“Yeah, five years ago Mr. Bigshot, apparently, sensed someone new, an animal he’d never sensed before, but in human form. That was you, whatever you were doing there. He mauled you, but you fell in a river, and, well, Mr. Bigshot hates water. So you floated away toward the sea.”
“I thought lions didn’t hate water, that’s just a myth.”
“Mr. Bigshot hates water. I don’t know anything about other lions.”
“So I floated away, but I didn’t die.”
“No, but you didn’t heal up, either, because your wounds are from lion’s claws. Look.” Gloria pointed a knobby, swollen finger at Myron’s face and traced, one by one, the parallel scars. “It was all the gossip at the time, how Mr. Bigshot found someone new, and killed him.”
“I fought a lion and lost.”
“Everybody who fights the lion loses. Seventy-five years ago he killed the tiger, which no one thought he’d be able to do. But he did it.”
“What was the tiger’s name?”
“You know that he didn’t really have a name. He was a tiger.”
“Oh, I thought because you have a name—”
“Gloria’s not my name. They just call me Gloria because it’s convenient. Do you think they called me Gloria in Bantu a thousand years ago? How long do you think Benson has been called Benson? The tiger was going by the name Bima, but he might as well have been Shere Khan. Bima wasn’t his name, and Arthur isn’t his name, and Myron isn’t yours. They’re just a tiger, or a binturong, or whatever you are.”
“Yeah, what am I?”
“I guess we could go through every animal I’ve known who isn’t you, and eliminate them. But that might not help, since I couldn’t name every mammal, and there might have been some that died before we knew about them, and there might be some we just don’t know because they’re isolated, or in hiding, or never show up for reasons of their own. And it’s not always easy to tell how many there are supposed to be. I mean, there are supposedly three species of zebra, I saw on the TV, but I’ve only known one immortal zebra. Are the other two dead, or in hiding, or did they never exist, and you only get one zebra? I don’t know.”
“So I could be anything.”
“Well, you couldn’t be a prairie dog, and you couldn’t be a jaguar, and you couldn’t be a hippopotamus, because I know all of those. It’s hard to tell your ethnicity, without a face, but your skin’s too light to be from some places, if you wanted to cross off those possibilities. So there are lots of things you couldn’t be, but there are still lots of things you could be.”
“Okay, just two more questions. Why did Mr. Bigshot want to kill me?”
“Maybe you were talking dirt about his mother. But probably he just wanted to know what you were. When we die we turn back into our true form. Curiosity, you know.”
“Because cats are curious?”
Gloria was obviously beginning to get bored, looking around the room. “Mr. Bigshot is curious. I don’t know about other cats. He’s probably still interested, plus he’s mad about you thwarting him once, or three times now. And he must’ve read about you ripping all your clothes off, at your school. Ripped clothes are a sure sign one of us is around.”
“Arthur changed, but he didn’t rip his clothes.”
“Binturongs are small. I split a seam on the robe I was wearing, and that was a loose robe too big for me. Trust me, mention ripped clothes and all of us know what’s up.”
“How does Mr. Bigshot have people work for him? Is it because he’s the king of the beasts?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, I don’t have a king. I was a queen, once upon a time, but I don’t have a king. Mr. Bigshot has minions because he can beat everyone else up, now that the tiger’s gone. Or else no one wants to try their luck on him. So when he says he’s in charge, he’s in charge until someone comes around who’ll say no.” Gloria stood up. “I’m paying the check, you leave the tip.”
“I don’t have any money.”
Gloria sighed and dropped a dollar on the table. “Well, do you have any other questions?”
“I don’t know, um. Why is this place called Shoreditch? We’re nowhere near the shore.”
“It’s named after some part of London. Okay, it was great to meet you, Myron. I hope I was able to fill in some things for you. Best of luck.”
“Wait, you can’t leave yet.”
“Don’t worry, I’m just going to pay the check.” But she didn’t pay the check; she just left.
The waiter accosted Myron when he tried to go, but he couldn’t bring himself to actually touch the boy, so Myron walked out unhindered. He had a lot to think over, but he was also in a state of panic. His whole plan, since he dragged himself away from the train tracks, had been to go to Shoreditch and ask Gloria what to do next. And now as it turned out, it wasn’t that she didn’t know what to do; she just didn’t seem to care.
Myron ran down the street, looking all around. Not long after he’d been adopted, when Myron was still so very confused and even spoke with a strange accent that some people said sounded Canadian, the Horowitzes had taken him to an amusement park. Already dizzy from the teacups, Myron had wandered away from his new parents in the crowd, and the half-hour before he, or rather a security guard, found them again was filled not so much with terror—terror is so common an emotion among children that a terrifying day is hardly remarkable—as with despair. This, despair, Myron was becoming reacquainted with as he tore through the streets of Shoreditch. Except he was hardly aware, yet, that it was despair he was becoming reacquainted with. He was too terrified.
With just such a complicated mixture of emotions blinding him, Myron knocked over two perverts and a policeman (who was too fat to follow him) and managed to avoid, narrowly, being squashed by a plumber’s van. “Gloria!” he shouted, again and again, and then he stopped, when he remembered that this was not even her name. She had no name, and neither did he.