The Miniature Wife: and Other Stories (20 page)

I don’t know where I am or what the hell is going on, and so there’s no good reason left for pushing forward, but I lash myself to the idea that I still need to find Becky, and with that occupying my mind, I trudge on as best I can. Debris is still raining down on me, and the landscape is still shifting around me and under my feet. I’ll find myself at one moment turning down a corridor in the bunker and the next blocked by a copse of swamp trees. At one point, I come to an intersection—some piece of the warehouse by the looks of it—under heavy fire, and I wait until the shooting stops, and then I make a run for it, but I trip halfway across when the scene shifts first to the swamp and then quickly back to the bunker, and I land hard on my arms and elbows. The wind is knocked out of me, and I huff myself back onto my feet when I see a man standing in front of me, looking back at me, who I’m about to ask for help when I realize it’s me. I’m looking at me, at my reflection, and it’s an unsettling sight. It’s not that I see myself for the first time in a long time and hardly recognize the man in the reflection—created by a windowpane all but completely shattered by shrapnel and the fighting. It’s not like that at all. It’s like I’ve never seen my own self reflected before, like I never knew what I looked like at all, and so who I’m looking at is a stranger.

I lift my hand up to wave to make sure I’m looking at me when the rest of the glass is broken out by Ricky, who is thrown headfirst through it by one of the fucking robots, who then turns its red mechanical eye at me, and then I start to run again.

I don’t remember the last time I took a shower. I don’t remember waking up in the mornings or putting myself down to sleep. I don’t remember the last time I took a drink of water or drank down a beer or ate a good breakfast or ate any goddamn thing or the last time I fucked. A man can’t live without these things, or without most of them, yet here I am, trudging along, first in this bunker and then in the swamps and back to the bunker again.

To me it seems that the basic and necessary parts of my life aren’t being lived, or not by me, or not so I can remember them, and as if I’m pulled out of whatever black hole I reside in only to navigate through these maze-like halls and among the crates of some damn warehouse, through the muck of a swamp that should smell like death but that I can’t recall smelling like anything.

I’ve seen Ricky’s head blown off or his leg torn off or his guts spilled out more times than I can count now, and I’m beginning to hit on an idea about what’s going on here, but it’s an idea just out of reach, or it’s like it’s the idea of an idea, or the idea of an idea of an idea, and the harder I try to suss that idea out, the further away from it I’m pushed, or not pushed, not really that, but more like the idea itself, more and more versions of this same idea, stand in the way of my understanding it. Or it’s like I have a map that leads me to another map that turns out to be the same exact map as before with instructions that will lead me, I know, to another damn map, over and over, again and again. Or it’s like none of those things at all, and I’m just wasting my time trying to figure it all out, and so finally, in the end, what I decide is,
Fuck it
, and I close my eyes and blindly start shooting and blindly start running, and when my Gatling gun runs out of ammo, I toss it aside, and when my semiautomatic and my automatic rifles run out of ammo, I toss them aside, too, and this continues, on and on, I’m tossing shit behind me until, my eyes still shut, my legs still pushing me forward, I have tossed off every weapon in my personal arsenal but my knife.

And through all of this, I have been touched not one single time.

No stray bullets, no robotic arms grabbing at me, no swamp muck splashing my legs as I run, not even a shoulder of bunker wall knocking me off course. I must have run through hell and back, run in the swamps and through the warehouse and up and down one bunker corridor after another, stepped on the various pieces of my comrades in arms, and nothing has touched me, not once, and so I stop and I open my eyes, and I look around me at a world that has gone inside out.

I keep expecting something to come back to me, memories, or a deeper sense of myself, my past, those relationships I’ve had and that I left behind when I joined up with the New Worlds Army to come fight here on Capra II, but for a long time, the oldest memory I could hold on to was the memory of the moment before, and even now, when it seems as if something has shifted inside me and I’m able to hold on to things, I can only really remember back to the beginning of the attack on the bunker and nothing at all before that.

So when I look at what I’m looking at, hoping some mechanism of memory might kick into gear to give me a clue as to what the fuck this thing in front of me is and what the hell I’m supposed to do to get around it, I’m not surprised, though I’m a little disappointed, when nothing inside my ragged brain magically comes to order.

Whatever it is, it stands nearly three stories high, and the high-pitched angry drone of it drowns out every other sound. The longer I look at it, the more details come into focus, and it begins to look like some bastard monster, the likes of which I’ve never seen, and comprising all the monsters this furious planet, Capra II, has seen fit to throw at us. It rises up on the jets of the swamp muck, even though we are clearly in the bunker, and out of its undulating torso sprout robot manacles and the hairy-tufted arms of the bunker beasts. Where there should be a head there’s that stereoscopic stalk, and in the center of that pulses the cold, red eye of a robot.

Any minute now I expect to see Ricky come running past me only to get his damn fool head lasered off by that red eye and then the rest of him shoved into the open, swampy craw of that thing, but it doesn’t happen. There’s no one else around. There’s only it and only me.

I stand in front of it waiting for something to happen because I’m sure as hell not going to be the jackass who makes the first move against this thing, but all it does is pulse and undulate and sway, and after a while I get the sense that we’re two players playing at the same game. That it can wait as long as I can wait, and that nothing will happen for an eternity until one of us makes something happen. I also get the sense—or not even the sense, but the clear and certain knowledge—that on the other side of this is Becky and her fine ass and her commissary uniform and her sweet smile and a life of goodness without reproach. And while I can stand here as solid and still as stone and never risk inevitable death and dismemberment, I know, too, that in this eternity of stillness never will I find true love in the sympathetic heart of a beautiful woman, and when it comes down to it, that’s the only thing I want.

Here is the future I see for us. Here is how things are going to go from this moment forward:

Things are going to go south. Between me and whatever that thing is that is between me and Becky, things will definitely go south, but not so far south as to go hopeless. I’m a trained soldier in the New Worlds Army, after all, and resourceful, and strong, and if there’s one thing I know now, it’s this: The love of a good woman will change a man, and the faintly attainable nature of that love will make him capable of implausible, death-defying acts.

Then—big bad beastie dispatched of—I will find my lovely lady, will stumble blindly toward her desk in the commissary, will crash unceremoniously, yet bravely, into the doorway, will slump down but not quite all the way down to the floor, will softly call her name, will close my eyes, will wait for her tentative, gentle touch. When she holds me in her arms and lowers me to the floor, I will open my eyes and look deep into her own and smile a rakish smile. She will say something along the lines of “You came” or “I didn’t think you’d come.” I will open my mouth to say something along the lines of “I could never leave you behind” or “I’ll always come for you,” but before I can say anything, she’ll silence me with the soft pressure of her finger against my lips, and I will pull her down to me and push her finger aside for her lips, which will crush against my own. And in that moment, nothing else will matter in even the slightest way. Then I will pull myself to my feet, buoyed by that kiss and her true love and her sympathetic heart. I will stand and pull her close to me and I will hold her in my arms and we will gaze at the unforgiving landscape laid out before us and I will say, “Let them do their worst,” and we’ll laugh and pull each other closer, and together we will root out what is evil about this place, root it out and cast it aside, and unearth that small something of goodness that must exist in every new planet, and by the power of our love, this tiny rock will flourish.

But even I know what really lies in store for us. Even I know I won’t get that far. Won’t make it five steps before that thing grabs me by my nethers and tears me in two and stuffs me down its craw and seeks out every last one of us and sunders the planet itself, but what do I care? With Becky on the other side of it, what other choice do I have but to close my eyes, throw down my knife, and make my run for it?

Juan Refugio Rocha: A Meritorious Life

R
OCHA, JUAN REFUGIO (b. 1957). Zookeeper, animal trainer. Place of birth: Antigua, Guatemala. Very little is known about the 1979 Fuego del Zoológico Público, only that the grounds caught fire in the early morning of October 18, 1979, that the fire consumed the entire grounds and all its structures by daybreak, and that, in the fire, only four animals perished—one howler monkey, one chimpanzee, and two gorillas, one male and one female. The man who freed the animals from their cages and herded them out of their habitats was Juan Refugio Rocha, a twenty-two-year-old Guatemalan who had been working at the zoo for six months, during which time he had been trying to teach the gorillas to speak.

As a child, Rocha had been adept at communicating with animals through clicks, whistles, taps, nudges, snaps, and squeezes. His father had owned donkeys, which Rocha had cared for and which the family had used to earn money for food and clothing, renting the beasts out as transportation and pack animals. Rocha had trained each animal, and in all his years as keeper of the donkeys, no one was thrown, no packs were lost.

In 1974, Rocha left his parents’ house and moved to Mexico City. From there, he moved to the state of Chihuahua, where he worked intermittently for carnival acts, training dogs and elephants and jungle cats. In the late spring of 1979, he got word of a public zoo in need of a keeper whose duties also involved light veterinarian work. By May, Rocha had taken the position, and in a few days found himself obsessed with the gorillas.

Rocha, having never seen a gorilla before, knew little of their behaviors and nothing about their habitats. Through study of their personalities and through close observation of their physical characteristics, Rocha determined that the zoo owned one male western lowland gorilla and one female western lowland gorilla. He spent his days at the zoo caring for the animals, and the nights he spent in his room or at the library, studying their behavior. He went to great lengths to acquire the bamboo shoots, thistles, wild celery, and tubers that they ate. He constructed a realistic environment similar to the western African lowlands in design and humidity and greenery, and he gave them grasses and branches with which to build nests.

Once the two gorillas were settled, he made his first steps toward establishing a line of communication. Witnesses reported that when Rocha entered the habitat screeching and hooting and clicking to get the animals’ attention, the gorillas began to squawk and let out a high piercing keen. The animals charged at him, running on their hind legs, “like people,” with surprising dexterity and swiftness. They worked as a team, flanking and herding Rocha into a corner, and once he was trapped between the two, they began to kick and punch him in the back and in the head. Three men, groundskeepers who had been standing by to watch the animal trainer, finally managed to pull him out of the habitat, by which time Rocha had suffered a minor concussion and two broken ribs.

Rocha did not give up. Over the next six months, he entered the gorilla habitat no fewer than ten times, and the animals continued to greet him with the same volatility and aggression. The gorillas took the food he offered them, lived in the habitat he created for them, and in that habitat they were peaceful. Once he entered their world, however, as if they had been trained for it, the gorillas circled him, trapped him, ignored him as he spoke, and then beat him. After five or ten minutes, Rocha needed to be pulled from the cage, with a broken arm, broken fingers, broken ribs, badly bruised skin, cuts, contusions, abrasions, or minor concussions.

When the fire started, Rocha was with the gorillas, standing outside their habitat talking to them, as he often did, from a safe distance. He hooted and chirped and howled at them for a full fifteen minutes before leaving to attend to the other animals in the park. By the time help had arrived and the other animals had been freed from their cages and environments, the fire raged out of control, burning until dawn, when the last embers snuffed out and all that was left—the zoo, the howler monkey, the chimp, and the gorillas—was ash.