The Zookeeper's Lament (A fictional exploration of Harambe the gorilla)

Green foothills unfold to a jungle wreathed in mist. Some part of him knows this is a dream, for the sadness that usually accompanies the recollection of this paradise is absent. In this moment he stands guiltless before the earth mother, a young scientist out to edify himself. Porters strobe like ghost distortions as they cleave the bush, and he understands that in this place he is the only one who’s real. They pass spoors pressed flat by boar and jaguar. He’s seen what a boar can do to a man’s intestines, and whenever he recalls poor Dr. Thenton on his knees, clutching the wet snarl of his innards in both hands, a shiver dances through his bones. 

Days pass like windblown leaves across a flicker-flash of fire, as they trudge into the valley between two peaks. The Black Canyons. A holy place. The porters smoke around heaping bonfires fed by poacher’s snares. They’ve found dozens of the things, engineered to claim the beast that might be no beast at all, if the theory that outlived poor Dr. Thenton is correct. 

The dream landscape blurs and shifts and suddenly a storming dusk surrounds him. The rain falls warm, like piss, like blood. He stands in a clearing of tall grass. Thirty feet ahead he sees its eyes glowing red in the storm. Squatting quietly, as elegant and majestic as it is powerful. Four-hundred kilos and not a gray hair to count upon its bristling black pelt. He knows with sudden clarity that he is a stranger here, removed by a mutation in the frontal lobe. He knows a sacred union has been forever broken. Between him and the land. Between him and—

The porters erupt from both sides and the gorilla rears, beating its chest with a sound like rolled carpets slapping marble. Its leg is injured. The steel garrote of a snare thrashes at its side, dragging through the grass as it turns small circles to ward off its pursuers. It knows, he thinks, as red-feathered darts sprout from the gorilla’s chest. It knows we’re going to take it. The first porter to rush in does so before the tranquilizer has taken effect and he’s thrown seven feet through the air, his leg giving with a wet crack in the gorilla’s grip. The beast jumps and tears the darts from its skin, baring yellow teeth in a growl that for an instant transforms from something dangerous to something like a child’s cry for its mother. 

It is the last feat of this king amid his wild palace. 

It stumbles, then folds to the warm wet earth, tucking its arms beneath it. The whole time watching him across the clearing, now beat and flattened by the hunt. Those red eyes. Burning like galaxies in a void that is cold and empty but for their light. 

***

He rushes up from death cold sleep and reaches out for Shannon, but Shannon’s gone. He turns in bed, the fading dreamsounds of droning insects slowly displaced by the rumble of early morning traffic. There is no one next him because she left two weeks ago. Yes. She left when the reporters wouldn’t stop calling and crowding outside the lobby of their apartment. She left when the death threats started coming by the dozens through the mail. 

“I can’t,” she’d said. “I just … can’t.” 

“Neither can I. But what choice do I have?” 

She’d looked at him the way a child looks at a hobbling bird. “You had a choice.”

“It would have killed him, Shannon.”

“Would it have? Are you certain?” 

And he wasn’t. 

And that hurt worst of all.

He scrapes himself out of bed and eats a simple breakfast. The food tastes like chalk. He’s never taken to cooking. That’s what Shannon did best. No. It’s foolish to think of her; to romance losses by filling their emptiness with memories. Memories are smoke. They hold no substance. He bites into a burnt splint of tofu bacon at his empty table, hating it but knowing he needs to eat. He can no longer eat meat. He can no longer see cages or walls of plexiglass without bursting into tears. 

*** 

The Director of Zoology is waiting for him at the back gate. A private entrance, free from press. 

“Dr. Harold.” They shake hands. He likes this man. Has always liked this man. Yet now he feels nothing, half expects the old doctor to start flickering like the porters in his dream. 

“How are you holding up, David?” 

“I’m still breathing.”  

Dr. Harold squeezes his shoulder. “I heard about Shannon. I’m sorry.”

“Yeah. Well… this was all too much for her.” 

Dr. Harold looks at him, and David sees that same pity for a broken creature pulsing behind his concern. “It’s a hard thing you did. I might have done the same. Many of us might have. You rescued Bonobo. You acclimated him into captivity. You would have known, more than any of us, of what he was capable. You have to—”

“Stop.” he almost shouts it. “Just stop. You’re there. And I’m here.” 

Dr. Harold’s jaw goes slack. After a moment, he nods, looking at the grates under the loading dock where, once upon a time, Bonobo had been delivered into the place he would one day die. “I suppose you’re right.” He nods again. “It’s uncouth of me. I’m sorry. Let’s go, then, shall we?”

They go. 

***

The meeting is long and inglorious. Official chatter. Bureaucracy. Something must be done about the public image of the zoo. Something must be done to show the world how much these animals mean to them. Something must be done. They offer praise and pity. Their well-wishes have all the effect of cotton wrapped around a torture mallet. It’s like a magic trick, he thinks. Watch your life’s work erode in a stream of human babble. 

It occurs to him again that he is the only real person in the room. The rest of them are ghosts, consumed by wan pursuits, hollow dominions. They are fleas upon the back of the Great Earth Mother, claiming blisters as their keeps. 

“…David?” 

David sucks back into his body. Everyone is watching. 

“Are you on board with this?” 

David glances at his hands. They’re trembling. Yes, now he remembers. They want him to apologize to the world. To explain his actions. He is to be the digit they cleave and throw to the predator so that the body might survive. 

“David, it’s important they know from the man who chose a live round instead of a tranquilizer. They need to know your history. They need to see you struggling, as your struggling now. The zoo is not some faceless machine that imprisons, then murders its inmates. The zoo is full of people who love animals. Sometimes more than they love themselves.” 

He’s not really listening. He’s watching the scene over and over: Bonobo growling and circling under the jungle rain, tearing darts from his chest, snapping the porter’s leg with all the ease of a popsicle stick. He’s watching the burning red eyes watch him through the darkness, as shapes press closer through the flattened grass. 

“Sure,” he says, at last. “They’re already threatening to kill me. They know where I live. They know what I look like. We might as well offer them their meal.” 

The faces grow very still and very cautious. Furtive glances pass across the boardroom table. 

“Good,” Dr. Harold says. “That’s good, David.” 

***

The press meeting is tomorrow. He sits up all night with a photo album of him and Bonobo, unable to escape into the dream where none have this has happened yet. Here’s a picture of them holding hands. A picture of the massive gorilla kissing him. One in which both of them wear hats. He cries until his eyes feel packed with glass, wondering if Bonobo’s tribe remembers him, if they sometimes recline and grunt with an image of his face forming behind their eyes. At 2:00AM he goes to the garage to discover his tires have been slashed. 

So he walks. 

It’s eight miles to the zoo. By the time he reaches the back entrance, his hips and knees are pulsing with a steady chain of throbs. But there is purpose in the pain. Something primeval. A natural thing, unencumbered by the slanted perspective of a morally informed thought process. To travel and seek rest. To thirst and seek water. To hunger and seek nourishment. These are the old forgotten truths.  

Did I take that from you, old friend? he wonders. Did you forget? 

He vaults the wall, then makes his way inside. 

***

His keycard still works. That surprises him. He thinks that with all the fire from the publicity, someone in security has missed the memo. But not for long. The press conference will help them remember. He already knows how it will go, sees this as plainly as the foreshadowed betrayal of a great Shakespearean play. They will offer him upon the public altar. Then sever their ties. They will allow him to save them, only to cut him adrift at sea. 

But he is already adrift. He knows. It’s why he’s here, why he can’t sleep. And maybe, he thinks, it’s why Shannon left. Maybe she saw the dislocation already taking place and knew no word or action on her part could ever hope to bring it back. 

David opens the locker where the rifle is stored. Were it a human he’d killed, this rifle would be in an evidence locker. But it isn’t. The human lived. The ape died. And that’s the great pain of it all. The great travesty. He understands now, more than ever, that a world of creatures must carve a creature to behold, a creature to depose, a creature to conquer. And when they parade its corpse as a great sadness or a great victory, it is only in the service of deflecting their eyes from the creature in themselves. 

He takes the rifle and looks up at the blinking camera. 

“I’m sorry,” he says, wondering for whom that’s meant.

***

He sits in the empty gorilla exhibit, his feet submerged in the water, the rifle laid flat across his knees. Twenty foot walls tower on all sides. From down here he sees the world of difference from the warm jungle air of his dreams. He sees the folly of human convention. That this could even remotely resemble that is an absurdity. It makes him angry. It makes him ashamed.  

He looks at the wall near the rushing water to his left. Concrete, lined with calcite and algae that should have been scrubbed more often. He spots a rust-colored sheen near the grassy rise. Squints and sees drip patterns running darker and thicker onto the concrete wall beneath.  

Blood. 

He’s looking at blood.  

***

The boy is being dragged, the spectators screaming, Bonobo jerking his head left and right at the caterwauls above. David sees the thick line of hackles bunching along Bonobo’s spine and shoulders, the rapid dilation of his nostrils. All of this through the scope of a rifle loaded with a rapid-dispensation tranquilizer. The biggest in stock. Thirty seconds to lights out. And an inner thunder, urging him: How much damage can he do in thirty seconds?

The child could be torn apart. The child could be paralyzed. The child could be knocked unconscious and drown.

He unslings the rifle. “I’m going in there.”

“No!” The lead zookeeper beside him shakes his head so hard spittle flies from his lips. “You’ll scare him. He’ll do something!” 

“He knows me! I have to!” 

“You can’t! There’s no time, David. We have to shoot.”

And as if from the heavens, the mother’s voice pierces through the crowd. “Kill it! KILL IT! My baby! MY BAAAAABBBY!”

The lead zookeeper shoves another, heavier rifle into his chest. He’s sweating and his voice trembles as he speaks. “It’s your choice. But if the child dies, and word gets out that we stood up here balking, we’ll never work in this country again.” 

He thinks of Shannon, of her luxuries, how she hardly believes he could survive in the jungles of Africa for three years, as he’d done before they met. And it’s this—this painful urge for comfort—that curls his hand around the stock. 

He turns aims and calls in a firm, resonant voice. “BONOBO!” 

The Gorilla looks up. 

Right into his eyes. 

***

The gunshot rings in his memory. He’s crying again. He wants to be back in the jungle. He wants to dream so powerfully that he can call out to the porters before they close. He wants to let Bonobo take his chances with the snare, telling himself if he was smart enough to dismantle it in the first place, he might also be smart enough to free his leg of the garrote before infection spreads. But he can’t. The linear projection that is time only flows one way, only piles in one direction. And all that weight of seconds and years is crushing him. 

He can’t breathe. 

He closes his eyes and smells the jungle heat as he slides the barrel into his mouth. The sudden sensation of musky fur against his skin is so powerful that gooseflesh ripples across his arms. The calloused texture of Bonobo’s hand interlaces with his. It’s not a rifle he’s holding. He sees that now. The bullet has sucked back into the barrel and ripped time backwards, and Bonobo is holding him. He wants only for David to squeeze his hand. All will be better if he squeezes.

I’m sorry, he thinks. So sorry. 

He squeezes and jerks and sees two red eyes in the darkness. Burning like galaxies in a void that is cold and empty but for their light.  

   

***



[NOTE FROM AUTHOR: The story of Harambe and Isiah Gregg breaks my heart from all angles. The overwhelming sense I have is that nature exists beyond morality. That those tales of right and wrong, good and evil, have no place in the fields and jungles and tundras. Parents and children make mistakes. Gorillas are sometimes placed into captivity, or else poached for meat or trophies or eastern supplements. Guns exist. These things are facts. Still, my heart breaks. So this is my attempt to prod the pieces. I shat this out over the last three hours. I hope you enjoy it. Comments are appreciated.]