The macaques were different. When Cuthbert managed to get to his feet, he gazed at them in their cage, still holding his nose, trying to stanch the blood. The three of them gazed back in silence. Two crouched on the floor of the cage; the other was curled in a motorcycle tire that hung from a chain. They were all a long-tailed species from Vietnam, and they had short, bristly hair the color of tropical honey and bright pink faces. They seemed to be waiting for him or the chimps to make a move.
Buddy told Cuthbert: “Let our friends out, geeza, or we’ll kill you, you cat-fucker.” Cuthbert got to work on the cage with his cutters. When he took his hand away from his face, the blood dribbled again, but less than before. His black jumper camouflaged it a bit. There was a dark, shiny patch across his stomach, and a streak down his leg to his foot. It was as if a hidden rage had burst out of him, messily. Yet he did not mind being told what to do by Buddy—there was a comfort in it, a sense of relief he had heard some of his ex-con acquaintances on the streets of London mention about prison life.
The black-painted caging was the same as the chimps’. Cuthbert snipped methodically, biting his lower lip and squinting.
Meanwhile, Kibali, the last silverback, had come out of his night room and was observing the whole situation from a few meters away. The chimps always made noises when he looked at them during the day. Once, at night, he had seen them with an unlucky rat that had somehow got into their cage. They passed it around, each taking a bite.
As Cuthbert snipped away, the macaques began to stir. One of them with especially large red-gold eyes, just inches away, pranced past him with its little chest puffed out, and scrambled away. The one inside the tire had climbed atop it and started to jerk the chain, causing the tire to sway slightly. They all started to make a kind of clucking-chirpy sound; he could see their pale tongues touching the roofs of their mouths. It was a threat-alert, but to Cuthbert it seemed strictly reproving.
“What are you saying?” asked Cuthbert.
Buddy punched the back of Cuthbert’s thigh, and this time he could feel the pain.
“Do not address our friends, geeza,” said Buddy. “You are human waste.”
Kibali said, “Human. What are you doing? Don’t open that cage.”
“Piss off,” Buddy told the gorilla, leering at him. “Fatty.”
The moment that a square of metal fencing fell away, the chimpanzees trooped into the macaques’ dwelling. What happened next should not have surprised Cuthbert, but the horror of it was unbearable. The chimps seized the big-eyed leader and beat and finally strangled him. The other macaques shot out of the cage and into the darkness. (One of them ended up being attracted by the helium-inflated aerial lens-bots that had been cast into the zoo by autoreporters, and she made a game of popping every single one between her hands.)
Cuthbert backed away, shaking his head. He began to cry out, again, “DRYS-STAN! DRYS-STAN!” Driven into a terrified passivity, he had regressed pathetically to childhood—lost in the Wyre, unable to find his lost brother.
As Cuthbert retreated, he noticed that Buddy was looking at him strangely.
“What is ‘Drys-stan,’ this thing you say?”
Buddy’s lips were pursed and pushed forward and red with blood. Ollie and the other chimps stepped a few feet away from the dead macaque, making openmouthed “play faces,” and hooing again.
“He’s the most beautiful thing in the world,” said Cuthbert.
“He can’t be human,” said Buddy.
Almost instinctively, as though seeking his protection, Cuthbert went to where Kibali, flat-faced and quiet now, sat watching the devious chimps. Kibali scratched his forearm. He seemed unperturbed.
“Help me,” said Cuthbert. Without Drystan here, he thought, who else was there to ask?
Of course, he was speaking out of his hallucination and toward a hallucinated personality he had grafted onto a real gorilla. But a real gorilla really was standing before him, and its name was Kibali. Setting aside all Cuthbert’s delusions, the fact was, whether imagined or not, he had now managed to release four jackals, three wild sand cats, a large leopard, and half a dozen great apes and monkeys.
The gorilla opened and closed his long, dark hands, as if they were stiff. He nodded, and said to Cuthbert: “This is not as bad as it looks. They have slain a spy, I am sure. They had never trusted the macaque, and neither did I—though I am no friend of the chimpanzees. The macaque was a favorite of the keepers and the other humans. He was, as one might suspect, trying to become human.”
Kibali leaned forward and looked into Cuthbert’s face. He continued: “The spy did little ignoble tricks for people. He had no shame. He was always being given treats by the keepers—pound cake and treacle and chocolate milk. He would do his lordly trot—la dee da! He would steal the keepers’ sunglasses, and they would find him, later, wearing them, and they would praise him for this, and give him sweet pasties. We got nothing—slices of green nutra-bread. ‘It’s good for you, Kibali,’ that lot would tell me. The keepers, always, keeping us down, making us more animal than animals.”