As a couple minutes passed, I went on staring and he went on pretending I wasn’t there. Then I gave up and said, “Tell me this. Why didn’t you ask for help? I know you could have. They don’t evict people overnight.”
He gave no sign that he’d heard me.
“How the hell do we go about getting you out of here?”
He went on looking through me as if I were just another volume of air.
I said, “Look, Ishmael, are you sore at me or something?”
At last he gave me an eye, but it wasn’t a very friendly one. “I didn’t invite you to make yourself my patron,” he said, “so kindly refrain from patronizing me.”
“You want me to mind my own business.”
“In a word, yes.”
I looked around helplessly. “You mean you actually want to stay here?”
Once again Ishmael’s eye turned icy.
“All right, all right,” I told him. “But what about me?”
“What about you?”
“Well, we weren’t finished, were we.”
“No, we weren’t finished.”
“So what are you going to do? Do I just become failure number five, or what?”
He sat blinking at me sullenly for a minute or two. Then he said, “There is no need for you to become failure number five. We can go on as before.”
At this point a family of five strolled up to have a look at the most famous gorilla in the world: mom, dad, two girls, and a toddler comatose in his mother’s arms.
“So we can just go on as before, can we?” I said, and not in a whisper. “That strikes you as feasible, does it?”
The family of visitors suddenly found me much more interesting than “Gargantua,” who, after all, was just sitting there looking morose.
I said, “Well, where shall we begin? Do you remember where we left off?”
Intrigued, the visitors turned to see what response this would evoke from Ishmael. When it came, of course, only I could hear it: “Shut up.”
“Shut up? But I thought we were going to go on just as before.”
With a grunt, he shuffled to the rear of the cage and gave us all a look at his back. After a minute or so the visitors decided I deserved a dirty look; they gave it to me and ambled off to view the mummified body of a man shot to death in the Mojave around the end of the Civil War.
“Let me take you back,” I said.
“No thanks,” he replied, turning around but not coming back up to the front of the cage. “Incredible as it may seem to you, I would rather live this way than on anyone’s largess, even yours.”
“It would only be largess until we worked out something else.”
“Something else being what? Doing stunts on the Tonight show? A nightclub act?”
“Listen. If I can get in touch with the others, maybe we can work out some kind of joint effort.”
“What the devil are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about the people who helped you get this far. You didn’t do it by yourself, did you?”