Zollocco: A Novel of Another Universe (6 page)

The forest floor was becoming richly carpeted in bright gold blossoms from the human-plant fray. The people were hacking the forsythia to bits and stuffing the debris into bags. The forsythia boughs reached to rip the masks and goggles from the people. The plants succeeded with one man and viciously jabbed at his face to fill his mouth with stems and pluck out his eyes. The man dove to the ground and buried his face in the mud. Bushes surrounded him lashing at his back with their whip like branches, and twined their branches around his right arm and leg to turn him over. The man rocked as the bushes pulled him, and he wrestled to keep face down in the mud. The bushes stopped lashing his back and twined more branches around his left arm and leg and around his neck. The bushes strained to pull him apart! But the other people hacked the bushes to pieces.

Then, somehow, the forsythia caught sight of me hanging precariously from the limb I clung to. They isolated one of the people from the others, allowing one bush (I shudder when I remember it) to rip and tear at the person as it climbed on top of him to lash at me. The bush, standing on the person's head, managed to scratch the length of my arms. I snapped myself away so hard I nearly fell out of the tree. I could see the person drop his sword in his pain so as to use both his arms to pull the yellow monstrosity from his head. I felt myself becoming dangerously high. I took off my pants and tied myself with them to the limb of the tree just before the drug rendered me unconscious.

What a horrible crime. Those things have stolen Our human and butchered Our herd of forsythia.

CHAPTER THREE:
Zitam

I awoke in a white room. The walls, ceiling, and floor were white. The bed was white. The door was white, with a small barred window set in it at eye level. I got up and looked out of this window. The hallway beyond was painted red--floor, walls, and ceiling. A very skinny iddle-aged woman sat in a red chair. She wore a white lab coat, thick make-up on her dour face, and a black wig. Noticing my movement, she looked up at me.

“
I hate you," said the ugly look in her eyes. One of her eyes was slightly misplaced on its plane, giving her a sinister look. She stood, opened the door to the room I was in and entered it. She asked me questions; none of which I answered because I didn't know the language. I had no way of telling her that I didn't speak any of the languages of her world, assuming of course her world had more than one language. If she was asking me where in the world I had come from, that was something I couldn't answer and couldn't explain. Was I from another world, or was that a hallucination? Had I suffered a nervous breakdown, imagined I was treated like a beast in a cage, and then somehow wandered into a forest? Had the space module I had inhabited actually flown? Or was I delusional and in a mental institution? Memories of flying in the space module seemed so real.

I had gone to bed in my own world one night frightened and worried because the newscasts had reported y world's ozone layer was so severely damaged that it might be beyond repair. Much of the Midwest had turned into a dust bowl, much of the Eastern coast had disappeared under the swollen sea, and entire landmasses such as Florida and Bangladesh simply didn't exist anymore. If the World Bank didn't provide the money for reforesting the Americas soon, I would not have a world to grow old in. I had lain in bed willing with all of my might that I could get out of such a crazy, desolate world. I had awakened in an indoor vegetable garden. Confused and frightened I had walked up and down the isles of plants growing in glass containers of water. A woman in a gray uniform had suddenly come around the corner of the isle I was in. We both froze and stared at each other. She slowly backed up, and then turned and ran away. The next thing I knew, two husky men in similar uniforms were grabbing my arms and pulling me, while a skinny, uniformed, older woman was sticking a needle into my arm. I came to in a filthy, large cage. When I stood up I saw the skinny woman had been watching over me. She picked up a hose and sprayed both me and the cage. The water was freezing. She then held up a towel and one of the gray uniforms. She pointed at them. I nodded and reached my hand through the cage bars to take the towel and uniform. She struck my wrist with the some short, stubby and very hard black object. I was lucky she did not break my wrist. She wadded up the uniform and the towel and stuck them in a net that was affixed to a pole. She barely gave me enough time to get the things out of the net before she jerked it out of my reach. She had stared at me while I had stripped, dried myself and dressed. It was unbearably humiliating. She called out and the two husky guys appeared. She unlocked the cage. The guys grabbed me like they did before and the skinny woman held up the needle threateningly. I didn't put up a fight--I was too scared
-so she didn't inject me again.

I was marched into a room where a bunch of uniformed people were seated at a long conference table. I was paraded around them while they nodded, commented, and looked slyly pleased. I was taken back to the cage by a different way. We stopped for a moment in a hallway. The skinny woman pressed a button on the wall and a doorway slid open. Through it I could see what looked to me like small spaceships. The skinny woman spoke to a man who was climbing out of one of the small space modules. She nodded in my direction, and he looked at me amazed. She then resumed leading me and the burly guys, who had a hold of me, back to the cage. The cage was still damp. I had to sleep on the damp floor.

When I woke again, one of the husky guys was emptying something from a small can into a dish. He shoved this stuff between the bars of the cage. It was gray. He motioned that I should eat it. I tried. It made me instantly ill. I think I spent about three or four days like that, getting sprayed down, getting fed different grades of gray glop.

Then the woman who had seen me in the garden came. I was huddled on the floor feeling sick as a dog when she came. She must have been sorry she had reported me, but of course what else could she have done? But then she did a wonderful thing. I could tell she was terrified, but she unlocked the cage. I wouldn't come out at first, I thought it was a trick, but she looked so frightened and desperate that I finally came out. She led me to the room where the space modules were. She opened up one of the modules, and she motioned for me to get in. I was scared, so I did. She sat down beside me and started pressing buttons and flicking switches. Then she turned to me, smiled, stood up and went to the door. She reached in her pocket, pulled out some knives, and threw them on the floor. She jumped out the door as though I might grab the knives and kill her. She slammed the door shut. I jumped up and tried to get the door open. I couldn't get it open. The module started rumbling like a car whose ignition has been turned on, and the module was moving. I was half out of my mind with fear. I grabbed the knives, stuck them in a net pocket on the wall. I climbed back into the chair and fastened the belts around me. The module traveled for hours. Finally, I could tell by the way my ears felt they might explode with pressure that I was descending. The descent lasted about an hour, and then it bumped to a halt and the door opened of its own.

I crawled out of the module. I was in the forest. There was a little basin of bubbly water in the ground nearby. I crawled over to it and threw up in it. This is all to say that other than "hello", "eat this", and "stand up so I can spray you, ",I hadn't learned any of the language--and the phrases other than “hello” were questionable. I was in captivity again, and the days dragged on interminably. At least the conditions of my imprisonment were not inhumanly cruel like they had been on the spaceship. This was not to say that I didn't feel penned in and mistreated. I was angry almost all of the time, and I did not observe the best of manners. It was assumed that I was a wild animal since I couldn't understand my captors' words. They insisted on feeding me on the floor. I lost a lot of weight because I kept throwing my food and water at my harridan captor. I learned to alternate throwing my food at one meal, and my water at the next. This way I had somethingto eat at least half the time. They tried to put me on a leash, and my reaction proved to them that I was a wild animal. I was so infuriated with them for being so obtuse in thinking I was some wild beast, and I was so frustrated I couldn't speak to them that I decided if they wanted me to be an animal they would get an animal. I trained them to respect me when I growled and barred my teeth at them.

I also practiced escaping from my cell. It had a combination lock, and whenever I was taken out, I made sure to set the combination before being put back in. Sometimes the slamming of door jarred the combination and so I wouldn't be able to get out, but usually the door shut on the combination to open it, and all I had to do was open the door. As an animal, no one cared that I played with the dial of the combination. My captors saw it kept me calm and were happy to have a moments' respite from observing me nervously. Whenever I escaped, I located all the closets in the building I was in and spent the nights experimenting with the things I found, dressing in the strange clothes.

By day I slept. What use was it to go around escorted, wearing a gruesome uniform? My captors were mystified by my daylight sleepiness. Even though my arrival in this world was so inexplicable, I realized that I couldn't let these people define who I was, what I was, or where I was from. If I didn't trust myself, if I let someone else determine the nature of my being, then I would be lost to myself. I was already lost to my world. That was bad enough. How bizarre it was that these people did not accept my common humanity with them, nor did they accept the differences between us while the forest I had lived in had. I was letting my flights of fancy carry me away. A forest could not really perceive personality and consciousness when it did not have these qualities, no matter how much it seemed it did. A scary thought nagged at me. This world was so different from my own; maybe the forest did have self-awareness. Could I be making the same mistaken assumption about the forest that the people were of me?

I must find out as much as I could about this world I now inhabited, so I covertly kept an eye on my captors' habits. I saw that my captors always ate together in a lovely wood-paneled dining room. The food they ate smelled wonderful. I added raiding the pantry to my nightly rounds. I kept it a secret that I was learning their language. Its syntax was very close to English. I started to sneak out of my cell at riskier times to spy on the people, to learn their customs, and to pick up their language so that some day I could escape.

After a time I realized I was at a university and was considered a kind of lab animal. Visiting professors would come, and each of them spoke a different language. Yet all of the resident students and faculty understood the visiting professors. New students would come speaking different languages and though they did not understand the others, the others understood them. How could my captors understand so many different languages? By my count they knew thirty-five or thirty-six at least. When a new faculty member arrived at the campus between meals, he was given a fine meal, which he ate alone in the dining room. If someone happened to be free, then they would keep the professor company, and sometimes share the meal. It seemed the etiquette to share food with whomever joined you at the table, so the professor always shared the meal with whoever sat down to keep him company. I came up with a great idea. I saw a new professor arrive when I was being given my daily walk. After I was returned to my cell, I sneaked out of it and raided the clothes closet of the woman whose clothes I liked best, and of course, whose clothes fitted me. Then I entered the dining room where the professor sat. I smiled and took my seat. Sure enough, he asked me to join him.

"Thank you," I said. So far so good.

The professor then began to chat, gesturing every so often to a small black case he had set on the table. I ate and smiled. Soon he began to suspect something was amiss. He started asking me questions.

"Sure," I answered to each and every question. The professor called in my captors, irate at my behavior. The looks on their faces, especially the harridan's, were hilarious. The lab animal was dining with the eminent professor. They were furious and explained to him that I had sneaked out of my cell. The professor was delighted by the trick I had played. This professor saw to it that my language instruction commenced. It turned out he was a music instructor the school had been trying to woo to the campus for a very long time, and so they were at pains to please him. The faculty agreed to the experiment of seeing if I could learn to speak. I was put under the tutelage of a very kind, friendly, able woman named Sunbreeze. She eventually cleared up the mystery of how they could speak so many different languages -- they didn't, they actually spoke only one, which was divided into dialects. Pushing her stiff sun bleached hair back, she set about charting the hierarchy of the language on a sheet of paper.

"Different planets, different cultures, different occupations, each has its own dialect. These dialects build upon themselves in such a way that they culminate in a language that is universal. The universal dialect is called Leekimbee, and anyone who can speak it can speak all of the other dialects, because Leekimbee is made up of all of the other dialects. Very few people bother to learn Leekimbee because of the vastness of its vocabulary, the confusing abundance of irregularities in its grammar, and the seeming chaotic flexibility of its syntax."