The One and Only Ivan Read online

  Come to think of it, I suppose they have a point. Mostly I think about what is, not what could be.

  I’ve learned not to get my hopes up.

  the loneliest gorilla in the world

  When the Big Top Mall was first built, it smelled of new paint and fresh hay, and humans came to visit from morning till night. They drifted past my domain like logs on a lazy river.

  Lately, a day might go by without a single visitor. Mack says he’s worried. He says I’m not cute anymore. He says, “Ivan, you’ve lost your magic, old guy. You used to be a hit.”

  It’s true that some of my visitors don’t linger the way they used to. They stare through the glass, they cluck their tongues, they frown while I watch my TV.

  “He looks lonely,” they say.

  Not long ago, a little boy stood before my glass, tears streaming down his smooth red cheeks. “He must be the loneliest gorilla in the world,” he said, clutching his mother’s hand.

  At times like that, I wish humans could understand me the way I can understand them.

  It’s not so bad, I wanted to tell the little boy. With enough time, you can get used to almost anything.

  tv

  My visitors are often surprised when they see the TV Mack put in my domain. They seem to find it odd, the sight of a gorilla staring at tiny humans in a box.

  Sometimes I wonder, though: Isn’t the way they stare at me, sitting in my tiny box, just as strange?

  My TV is old. It doesn’t always work, and sometimes days will go by before anyone remembers to turn it on.

  I’ll watch anything, but I’m particularly fond of cartoons, with their bright jungle colors. I especially enjoy it when someone slips on a banana peel.

  Bob, my dog friend, loves TV almost as much as I do. He prefers to watch professional bowling and cat-food commercials.

  Bob and I have seen many romance movies too. In a romance there is much hugging and sometimes face licking.

  I have yet to see a single romance starring a gorilla.

  We also enjoy old Western movies. In a Western, someone always says, “This town ain’t big enough for the both of us, Sheriff.” In a Western, you can tell who the good guys are and who the bad guys are, and the good guys always win.

  Bob says Westerns are nothing like real life.

  the nature show

  I have been in my domain for nine thousand eight hundred and fifty-five days.

  Alone.

  For a while, when I was young and foolish, I thought I was the last gorilla on earth.

  I tried not to dwell on it. Still, it’s hard stay upbeat when you think there are no more of you.

  Then one night, after I watched a movie about men in black hats with guns and feeble-minded horses, a different show came on.

  It was not a cartoon, not a romance, not a Western.

  I saw a lush forest. I heard birds murmuring. The grass moved. The trees rustled.

  Then I saw him. He was bit threadbare and scrawny, and not as good-looking as I am, to be honest. But sure enough, he was a gorilla.

  As suddenly as he’d appeared, the gorilla vanished, and in his place was a scruffy white animal called, I learned, a polar bear, and then a chubby water creature called a manatee, and then another animal, and another.

  All night I sat wondering about the gorilla I’d glimpsed. Where did he live? Would he ever come to visit? If there was a he somewhere, could there be a she as well?

  Or was it just the two of us in all the world, trapped in our own separate boxes?

  stella

  Stella says she is sure I will see another real, live gorilla someday, and I believe her because she is even older than I am and has eyes like black stars and knows more than I will ever know.

  Stella is a mountain. Next to her I am a rock, and Bob is a grain of sand.

  Every night, when the stores close and the moon washes the world with milky light, Stella and I talk.

  We don’t have much in common, but we have enough. We are huge and alone, and we both love yogurt raisins.

  Sometimes Stella tells stories of her childhood, of leafy canopies hidden by mist and the busy songs of flowing water. Unlike me, she recalls every detail of her past.

  Stella loves the moon, with its untroubled smile. I love the feel of the sun on my belly.

  She says, “It is quite a belly, my friend,” and I say, “Thank you, and so is yours.”

  We talk, but not too much. Elephants, like gorillas, do not waste words.

  Stella used to perform in a large and famous circus, and she still does some of those tricks for our show. During one stunt, Stella stands on her hind legs while Snickers jumps on her head.

  It’s hard to stand on your hind legs when you weigh more than forty men.

  If you are a circus elephant and you stand on your hind legs while a dog jumps on your head, you get a treat. If you do not, the claw-stick comes swinging.

  Elephant hide is thick as bark on an ancient tree, but a claw-stick can pierce it like a leaf.

  Once Stella saw a trainer hit a bull elephant with a claw-stick. A bull is like a silverback, noble, contained, calm like a cobra is calm. When the claw-stick caught in the bull’s flesh, he tossed the trainer into the air with his tusk.

  The man flew, Stella said, like an ugly bird. She never saw the bull again.

  stella’s trunk

  Stella’s trunk is a miracle. She can pick up a single peanut with elegant precision, tickle a passing mouse, tap the shoulder of a dozing keeper.

  Her trunk is remarkable, but still it can’t unlatch the door of her tumble-down domain.

  Circling Stella’s legs are long-ago scars from the chains she wore as a youth: her bracelets, she calls them. When she worked at the famous circus, Stella had to balance on a pedestal for her most difficult trick. One day, she fell off and injured her foot. When she went lame and lagged behind the other elephants, the circus sold her to Mack.

  Stella’s foot never healed completely. She limps when she walks, and sometimes her foot gets infected when she stands in one place for too long.

  Last winter, Stella’s foot swelled to twice its normal size. She had a fever, and she lay on the damp, cold floor of her domain for five days.

  They were very long days.

  Even now, I’m not sure she’s completely better. She never complains, though, so it’s hard to know.

  At the Big Top Mall, no one bothers with iron shackles. A bristly rope tied to a bolt in the floor is all that’s required.

  “They think I’m too old to cause trouble,” Stella says.

  “Old age,” she says, “is a powerful disguise.”

  a plan

  It’s been two days since anyone’s come to visit. Mack is in a bad mood. He says we are losing money hand over fist. He says he is going to sell the whole lot of us.

  When Thelma, a blue and yellow macaw, demands “Kiss me, big boy” for the third time in ten minutes, Mack throws a soda can at her. Thelma’s wings are clipped so that she can’t fly, but she still can hop. She leaps aside just in the nick of time. “Pucker up!” she says with a shrill whistle.

  Mack stomps to his office and slams the door shut.

  I wonder if my visitors have grown tired of me. Maybe if I learn a trick or two, it will help.

  Humans do seem to enjoy watching me eat. Luckily, I am always hungry. I am a gifted eater.

  A silverback must eat forty-five pounds of food a day if he wants to stay a silverback. Forty-five pounds of fruit and leaves and seeds and stems and bark and vines and rotten wood.

  Also, I enjoy the occasional insect.

  I am going to try to eat more. Maybe then we will get more visitors. Tomorrow I will eat fifty pounds of food. Maybe even fifty-five.

  That should make Mack happy.

  bob

  I explain my plan to Bob.

  “Ivan,” he says, “trust me on this one: The problem is not your appetite.” He hops onto my chest and licks my chin, checking for leftovers.
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  Bob is a stray, which means he does not have a permanent address. He is so speedy, so wily, that mall workers long ago gave up trying to catch him. Bob can sneak into cracks and crevices like a tracked rat. He lives well off the ends of hot dogs he pulls from the trash. For dessert, he laps up spilled lemonade and splattered ice cream cones.

  I’ve tried to share my food with Bob, but he is a picky eater and says he prefers to hunt for himself.

  Bob is tiny, wiry, and fast, like a barking squirrel. He is nut colored and big eared. His tail moves like weeds in the wind, spiraling, dancing.

  Bob’s tail makes me dizzy and confused. It has meanings within meanings, like human words. “I am sad,” it says. “I am happy.” It says, “Beware! I may be tiny, but my teeth are sharp.”

  Gorillas don’t have any use for tails. Our feelings are uncomplicated. Our rumps are unadorned.

  Bob used to have three brothers and two sisters. Humans tossed them out of a truck onto the freeway when they were a few weeks old. Bob rolled into a ditch.

  The others did not.

  His first night on the highway, Bob slept in the icy mud of the ditch. When he woke, he was so cold that his legs would not bend for an hour.

  The next night, Bob slept under some dirty hay near the Big Top Mall garbage bins.

  The following night, Bob found the spot in the corner of my domain where the glass is broken. I dreamed that I’d eaten a furry doughnut, and when I woke in the dark, I discovered a tiny puppy snoring on top of my belly.

  It had been so long since I’d felt the comfort of another’s warmth that I wasn’t sure what to do. Not that I hadn’t had visitors. Mack had been in my domain, of course, and many other keepers. I’d seen my share of rats zip past, and the occasional wayward sparrow had fluttered in through a hole in my ceiling.

  But they never stayed long.

  I didn’t move all night, for fear of waking Bob.

  wild

  Once I asked Bob why he didn’t want a home. Humans, I’d noticed, seem to be irrationally fond of dogs, and I could see why a puppy would be easier to cuddle with than, say, a gorilla.

  “Everywhere is my home,” Bob answered. “I am a wild beast, my friend: untamed and undaunted.”

  I told Bob he could work in the shows like Snickers, the poodle who rides Stella.

  Bob said Snickers sleeps on a pink pillow in Mack’s office. He said she eats foul-smelling meat from a can.

  He made a face. His lips curled, revealing tiny needles of teeth.

  “Poodles,” he said, “are parasites.”

  picasso

  Mack gives me a fresh crayon, a yellow one, and ten pieces of paper. “Time to earn your keep, Picasso,” he mutters.

  I wonder who this Picasso is. Does he have a tire swing like me? Does he ever eat his crayons?

  I know I have lost my magic, so I try my very best. I clutch the crayon and think.

  I scan my domain. What is yellow?

  A banana.

  I draw a banana. The paper tears, but only a little.

  I lean back, and Mack picks up the drawing. “Another day, another scribble,” he says. “One down, nine to go.”

  What else is yellow? I wonder, scanning my domain.

  I draw another banana. And then I draw eight more.

  three visitors

  Three visitors are here: a woman, a boy, a girl.

  I strut across my domain for them. I dangle from my tire swing. I eat three banana peels in a row.

  The boy spits at my window. The girl throws a handful of pebbles.

  Sometimes I’m glad the glass is there.

  my visitors return

  After the show, the spit-pebble children come back.

  I display my impressive teeth. I splash in my filthy pool. I grunt and hoot. I eat and eat and eat some more.

  The children pound their pathetic chests. They toss more pebbles.

  “Slimy chimps,” I mutter. I throw a me-ball at them.

  Sometimes I wish the glass were not there.

  sorry

  I’m sorry I called those children slimy chimps.

  My mother would be ashamed of me.

  julia

  Like the spit-pebble children, Julia is a child, but that, after all, is not her fault.

  While her father, George, cleans the mall each night, Julia sits by my domain. She could sit anywhere she wants: by the carousel, in the empty food court, on the bleachers coated in sawdust. But I am not bragging when I say that she always chooses to sit with me.

  I think it’s because we both love to draw.

  Sara, Julia’s mother, used to help clean the mall. But when she got sick and grew pale and stooped, Sara stopped coming. Every night Julia offers to help George, and every night he says firmly, “Homework, Julia. The floors will just get dirty again.”

  Homework, I have discovered, involves a sharp pencil and thick books and long sighs.

  I enjoy chewing pencils. I am sure I would excel at homework.

  Sometimes Julia dozes off, and sometimes she reads her books, but mostly she draws pictures and talks about her day.

  I don’t know why people talk to me, but they often do. Perhaps it’s because they think I can’t understand them.

  Or perhaps it’s because I can’t talk back.

  Julia likes science and art. She doesn’t like Lila Burpee, who teases her because her clothes are old, and she does like Deshawn Williams, who teases her too, but in a nice way, and she would like to be a famous artist when she grows up.

  Sometimes Julia draws me. I am an elegant fellow in her pictures, with my silver back gleaming like moon on moss. I never look angry, the way I do on the fading billboard by the highway.

  I always look a bit sad, though.

  drawing bob

  I love Julia’s pictures of Bob.

  She draws him flying across the page, a blur of feet and fur. She draws him motionless, peeking out from behind a trash can or the soft hill of my belly. Sometimes in her drawings, Julia gives Bob wings or a lion’s mane. Once she gave him a tortoise shell.

  But the best thing she ever gave him wasn’t a drawing. Julia gave Bob his name.

  For a long time no one knew what to call Bob. Now and then a mall worker would try to approach him with a tidbit. “Here, doggie,” they’d call, holding out a French fry. “Come on, pooch,” they’d say. “How about a little piece of sandwich?”

  But he would always vanish into the shadows before anyone could get too close.

  One afternoon, Julia decided to draw the little dog curled up in the corner of my domain. First she watched him for a long time, chewing on her thumbnail. I could tell she was looking at him the way an artist looks at the world when she’s trying to understand it.

  Finally she grabbed her pencil and set to work. When she was finished, she held up the page.

  There he was, the tiny, big-eared dog. He was smart and cunning, but his gaze was wistful.

  Under the picture were three bold, confident marks, circled in black. I was pretty certain it was a word, even though I couldn’t read it.

  Julia’s father peered over her shoulder. “That’s him exactly,” he said, nodding. He pointed to the circled marks. “I didn’t realize his name was Bob,” he said.

  “Me either,” said Julia. She smiled. “I had to draw him first.”

  bob and julia

  Bob will not let humans touch him. He says their scent upsets his digestion.

  But every now and then I see him sitting at Julia’s feet. Her fingers move gently, just behind his right ear.

  mack

  Usually Mack leaves after the last show, but tonight he is in his office working late. When he’s done, he stops by my domain and stares at me for a long time while he drinks from a brown bottle.

  George joins him, broom in hand, and Mack says the things he always says: “How about that game last night?” and “Business has been slow, but it’ll get better, you’ll see,” and “Don’t forget to empty the trash.
”

  Mack glances over at the picture Julia is drawing. “What’re you making?” he asks.

  “It’s for my mom,” Julia says. “It’s a flying dog.” She holds up her drawing, eyeing it critically. “She likes airplanes. And dogs.”

  “Hmm,” Mack murmurs, sounding unconvinced. He looks at George. “How’s the wife doing, anyway?”

  “About the same,” George says. “She has good days and bad days.”

  “Yeah, don’t we all,” Mack says.

  Mack starts to leave, then pauses. He reaches into his pocket, pulls out a crumpled green bill, and presses it into George’s hand.

  “Here,” Mack says with a shrug. “Buy the kid some more crayons.”

  Mack is already out the door before George can yell “Thanks!”