I was perched on a ledge near the top of the gymnasium with only a cellphone to file my story. Beneath me hostages bound ankle and wrist were stacked like cordwood around the perimeter of the room. In the room’s centre naked women danced with chimpanzees; fat men fornicated with goats; old people dressed as babies stood in clusters bawling. The noise in the gym was deafening.
I was on assignment for a women’s magazine. “Check out the wilderness. See what’s happening in the animal world.”
I interviewed the hostage-taker crouched on the ledge beside me, a skinny young man grinning at the scene below.
“Tell me,” I said. “Just who are these hostages you’ve got stacked down there?”
“The usual bunch,” he said. “The curious. The decadent. The bored.”
“But how are they captured?”
“I charge them admission.”
I filed my story. “Nothing much has changed. Wilderness is still about the tamed yearning to be wild.”
Years later in this same gymnasium three tigers will gnaw on the body of a woman who, not yet dead, wears the face of rapture.
That will be me ...