CLAUDE CLICHÉ WOKE up trying to breathe underwater. And since it is widely acknowledged that breathing underwater doesn’t work particularly well unless you’re a fish or other marine animal, he was basically drowning and started automatically flailing his arms and legs. And then just like that, he managed to inhale some air after all and discovered that he had gotten his head above water. And that he was sitting in a bathtub. There were trees around him. Tall tree trunks with vines dangling between them. The trunks disappeared up into a very green, very dense canopy of leaves way above him. He was in a jungle, of that there was little doubt.
But how in the world had he gotten here, in a bathtub of all things? Cliché furrowed his brow and struggled to remember. He tried to remember who he was, where he came from, and what had been happening before he woke up in this bathtub with a frightful headache.
And do you think he could remember anything? Him, a man with a spider—that may or may not have been a seven-legged Peruvian sucking spider—in his ear and possibly even further in?
Well, here’s the answer:
He remembered everything. Absolutely everything.
He remembered, for example, that his name was Claude Cliché, that he was a barometer, and that he owned a lot of stuff. Among other things, he owned a whole heap of money, the patent for a suspender clip, a village full of hippos, a castle called Margarine, and a baroness named Juliette. He remembered that he had been sitting in the Hôtel Frainche-Fraille in the room of that stupid inventor Juliette thought she was in love with. And he remembered quite clearly the little redhaired boy who was dressed like Napoléon, and the girl who claimed she was Joan of Arc. Yup, they had tricked him! Their reward for that would be a lot of small change and a trip to the bottom of the Seine.
Cliché stood up and climbed out of the bathtub. He wasn’t the least bit scared. Not at all! He was the King of Paris, wasn’t he? No matter how far into this jungle he might be, it was only a question of time until he was back home again. And then he would start hunting!
He started walking toward a clearing in the trees.
As he approached, he heard some sounds, like buzzing and clicking.
Could it be ticking tigers, hiccupping hyenas, or rattlesnakes?
Or the clicking of crocodile jaws clacking together?
Ha! It didn’t scare him. Cliché marched straight ahead, bending the branches aside.
And there, right in front of him, were the creatures making the buzzing and clicking sounds.
Buzzz-click! Buzzz-click!
Claude started laughing out loud.
It was a huge group of Japanese tourists standing behind some bars that obviously formed some kind of cage. The Japanese tourists were taking pictures with little cameras. Buzzz-click! How comical! When they caught sight of Claude, they were suddenly scared and started talking to each other in a strange, staccato-sounding language.
“Boo!” Claude yelled at them, because he liked it when people were afraid of him. And now he was in high spirits, because behind the people, above the trees, he could see skyscrapers. And where there were skyscrapers, the nearest airport couldn’t be far away.
“This isn’t over, Doctor Proctor …,” he mumbled to himself, rubbing his hands together. But just then he discovered to his astonishment that the cage in front of him continued around to his right and to his left. Which meant that he—and not the Japanese photographers—was in the cage. Hm. Whatever, same difference! Now it was just a matter of finding the door out of this darned cage.
“Hey, where’s the door?” Cliché yelled, but the people on the outside of the bars just stared at him. Or rather they actually weren’t staring at him. They were staring over him, he thought. And they’d stopped taking buzzz-click! pictures with their cameras. In the silence that resulted, Cliché heard a familiar sound: snoring. But not the snoring of hippopotamuses. Something that must be even bigger. And just then it suddenly got overcast.
Cliché just had time to look up, just had time to think, just had time to understand how his story was going to end. When it did.
The ground shook and clouds of dust rose up as the enormous, snoring creature—and Claude Cliché for that matter—hit the ground. The cage shook so the iron sign on the outside came off, fell down, and rolled sideways down an asphalt path in the Tokyo Zoo.
Then it was quiet again. The only thing you could hear was the ringing of the iron sign which had stopped rolling and tipped over with a clanging sound, right in front of the feet of a little girl who had just walked up holding her father’s hand. And since the sign landed with the words up and the little girl had just learned how to read, she read it, faltering only a little, out loud to her father:
“Cong …”
“Congolese …”
“Good,” said her father.
“Congolese Tse-Tse …”
“You’re doing great!” her father encouraged.
“Congolese Tse-Tse Elephant!”
“Did you hear that!” the father exclaimed to the other observers, who were still looking on in terror. “My daughter is only four years old and she can read! My child is a genius!”
“Golly,” said one of the tourists.
Someone raised a camera:
Buzzz-click!