We live in a pretty decent little city. (I’m not going to say where exactly.) You can stop at a red light without getting car-jacked. Drive-by shootings are rare. No snipers on the roofs. Like that. So I didn’t give a second thought to going downtown on a Saturday morning by myself.
I knew the building mentioned in the ad. It was the Fair-field. A loser uncle of mine once had an office there. He chose it because it was in a good location but cheap. In other words, crummy.
The lobby brought back memories. It looked just the way it smelled, like wet dogs and cigars. It took me a while to figure out where to go. There was just one bank of offices on the ground floor, and Room 105 wasn’t in it. I finally found it at the back, by the loading dock, facing the freight elevator.
I said to myself, This can’t be right. But there it was, Room 105.
I said to myself, What am I doing here, anyway? This door’s not going to be unlocked on a Saturday. But it was.
I walked into this huge, empty room. Then I took in a lungful of air and was almost knocked down. It wasn’t wet dogs and cigars this time. It was zoo. I didn’t mind that. I like zoos.
But, as I said, the place was empty. There was one sagging bookcase over at the left and one overstuffed chair over at the right. They looked like leftovers from a garage sale or something.
I said to myself, The guy has moved out.
I looked around again. At the high dirty windows overlooking the alley. At the dusty industrial lights hanging from the ceiling. At the peeling walls the color of pus.
Then I said to myself, Okay, I’ll move in.
I think I meant it. Nobody could possibly want this place, could they? So why shouldn’t I have it? I mean, it already had a chair, didn’t it? I could do without the rest for a while.
There was one feature I hadn’t figured out. The chair was facing a big sheet of dark glass in the middle of the right-hand wall. It reminded me of the kind of window witnesses look through to identify suspects in a police lineup. There had to be a room behind it, because there was a door beside the window.
I went over to have a look. I put my nose up against the glass and used my hands to block out the light, and …
I thought it was a movie.
About ten feet back from the glass there was sitting this great huge fat gorilla, munching on a tree twig. He was staring right back at me, and I suddenly knew it was not a movie.
“Yow,” I said, and jumped back.
I was startled but not exactly scared. It seemed like I should be scared. I mean, I knew I’d be screaming my head off if I was a character in a movie. But the gorilla was just sitting there. I don’t know, maybe I was just too dumb to be scared. All the same, I did look over my shoulder to make sure I had a clear shot at the door.
Then I slanted my eyes in to see if the gorilla was staying put. He was. He wasn’t even quivering, or I would have been out of there.
All right. I had to put all this together.
The teacher had not moved out. I mean, no one could move out of a place and forget to take his gorilla along. So the teacher had not moved out. Maybe he had just stepped out. For lunch or something.
And forgot to lock his door. Or something.
The teacher would soon be back. Probably. Maybe.
I looked around again, still trying to figure out what the deal was here.
The room I was in was not a living space—no bed, no kitchen facilities, no storage space for clothes or anything. So the teacher didn’t live there. But obviously the gorilla lived there, in the room on the other side of the glass.
Why? How come?
Well, what the hell, I guess you can keep a gorilla if you want to.
But why keep a gorilla this particular way?
I looked in again and noticed something I’d missed the first time. It was a poster on the wall behind the gorilla. It said:
WITH MAN GONE, WILL THERE BE HOPE FOR GORILLA?
Well, I said to myself, that’s an interesting question. It didn’t seem like a very hard one, though. Even at age twelve I knew what was going on in the world. The way we were going, gorillas were not going to be around for very much longer. So the answer was yes. With Man gone, there would be hope for Gorilla.