Chapter Four

And woke to a burst of light.

“Mr. Nilsson,” said the girl, opening the cage, ropes of fur now piled on her head and tied with a bit of pink root.

I climbed out, stretched. “Actually, I am Beep,” I said clearly.

“I adore pain-o,” she said. “I act like I don’t, but.”

We were in a pink atmosphere, many objects, many straight lines, the interior, I slowly gathered, of one of the you-men dwellings, boxes within boxes. I scanned every object and spatial relationship, could find nowhere to shit that would not seem hostile. And I smelled like pretend roses—in the Home Tree I’d be pummeled for it by aunts and uncles both. But this was not the Home Tree, and I was on a quest. Yes, and already feeling strongly that this goer child was part of it.

Still.

I gave a speech, formal: “I’m on a quest to spread my genetic material beyond my Home Tree, but more than that to reach the lost troupe that live over the hills and mountains in the far trees where the sun rises. You yourself, big as you are, are probably not more than a season away from adulthood and that sort of consideration, genetic material and all that, but you’ll know whereof I speak—else why hide me from the male, correct? You protect my quest, and so you are a quester as well. Further, I want to see the mountain that smokes. You laugh, you grin. We have our legends, I’m sure you, yours.”

“Oh, precious monkey, quiet,” she said. And lifted me up out of the cage by my armpits and brought me to her face and pressed her mouth on my cheek with a smack. Would she eat me? No, no, calm please, Beep. Every instinct to scramch out her eyes and leap from her grasp and do what? I could not see an opening in the pink foliage and sheer pink walls.

“Precious, precious monkey,” she said.

“I must shit,” I said, and wriggled from her grasp. She was so nonhostile I almost felt badly about it, leapt up to a crystal disk on the underside of the pink ceiling of the artificial cave. Cave, I suddenly realized—it was just a cave. The howlers used such places, deep hollows in cliffsides, not so dry as this one. What mysteries!

“I know I can’t keep you,” she said.

“Keep me?”

A commotion.

“Shh, shh,” she said, this Inga. “My mom’s home.”

Light behind the great pink leaves hanging. I swung down to them, soft as baby fur, those leaves, and made of chemicals, that particular smell, and swung again to pull them aside, and the light grew brighter, an exit! But no—the view, clear as water, was hard as rock, more crystal? Like the stuff the whitefurfaces would knock on when they went begging in the grower yards? Ice, they called it, ancient lore. Out there a large creature had rolled in, made of what monkeys call clink, but the humans call meddle, all the meddle sounds, and a grown female goer, mouth red with blood, chest engorged in some way, belly flat as a crocodile rock, paying no attention to the sky—any eagle could nab her—climbed out and started pulling unknowns out of the meddle roller, and then a you-men infant, hunk of all-too-familiar beach rubbish wrapped around its waist.

Inga snapped the luxuriant pink leaves back in place, cut off the sunlight, said, “I know, you want outzide.”

“It’s just that I have to shit.”

“But don’t you think we’re going to be friends?”

I did think so. I leapt straight beside her and upon her and took her enormous hands, squeezed the slender, long fingers. She pulled me in tight, closed her wrapping around me.

I admit I protested. Her mother’s mouth, covered in blood!

“Quiet, quiet,” Inga said.

She cracked open a pink plane, a dar she called it, and there was another space, this one more a sandy color, and carrying me hidden at her throat she ran us outzide, as she called it, back into monkey world, I called it, all green, all green, all blessed green. She put me on a pile of stones lined up so very straight, and I was free again, had always been, leapt to the nearest tree (a bitterbeanpod tree, not the ones to eat), and watching overhead for birds, for snakes, found a high branch, crouched and shat.

She laughed! I knew it was a laugh by the energy of it, a burble, a calling of waters. “You poooped!” she cried.

Yes, call it what you will, and then I peed, dampening my hands and feet against the pretend rose smell. Oh, that made her laugh.

“Come back visit,” she said.

“On a quest,” I said, thinking ruefully of pineapple.

She raced to the blank wall, opened a slit somehow that was a dar, and disappeared inzide the boxes that were her dwelling. Once again I was alone. I didn’t want to carry on, but put the sun to my back, leapt to a high branch, then the next tree, and continued.