Kim Robinson - Fifty Degrees Below

“It takes like weird mutant bad scientist stuff.”

“I see. And whoah, how come that one blew up?”

“I’m attacking him with an invisible character.”

“Is he good?”

“Well, he’s hard to see.”

Charlie cackled at this. Nick glanced over and said, “Dad, quit drinking my hot chocolate.”

“I thought you were done with it. I only took three sips.”

“You took four sips.”

“Don’t keep Frank waiting around, go get ready.”

At the zoo they first attended a workshop devoted to learning how to knap rocks into blades and arrowheads. Frank had noticed this on the FONZ website and had of course been very interested, and Nick was up for anything. So they sat on the ground with a ranger of about twenty-five, who reminded Frank of Robin. This young man wandered around the group, crouching to show each cluster how to hit the cores with the breaker stones so that they would flake properly. With every good knap he yelled “Yeah!” or “Good one!”

It was clearly the same process that had created Frank’s Acheulian hand axe, although their modern results were less shapely, and of course the newly cracked stone looked raw compared to the patina that burnished the old axe’s broken surfaces. No matter — it was a joy to try it, satisfying in the same way that looking into a fire was. It was one of those things you knew how to do the first time you tried it.

Frank was happily knapping away a protrusion on the end of a core, enjoying the clacks and chinks and the smell of sparks and rock dust in sunlight, when he and Nick both smashed their hands at the same time. Nick’s chin trembled and Frank growled as he clutched his throbbing thumb. “Oh man. My nail is going to be purple, dang it! What about yours?”

“Forefinger,” Nick said. “Middle knuckle.”

“Big owee.”

“Yep. Ow, ow —kun chok sum!”

“Kun chok sum? Is that Khembali?”

“Yes, it’s a Tibetan curse.”

“What’s it mean?”

“Means, three jewels!”

“Three jewels?”

“Heavy eh? They have worse ones of course.”

“Kun chok sum!”

The ranger came over grinning. “That, gentlemen, is what we call the granite kiss. Anyone in need of a Band-Aid?”

Frank and Nick declined.

“You can see how old the expression ‘caught between a rock and a hard place’ must be. They’ve found knapped tools like these a million and a half years old.”

“I hope it doesn’t hurt that long,” Nick said.

After they were done they put their new stone tools in their daypacks and went over to look at the gibbons and siamangs.

All the feral primates had either died or been returned to the zoo. This morning Bert and May and their surviving kids were the family out in the triangular gibbon enclosure. They only let out one family at a time, to avoid fights. Frank and Nick joined the small crowd at the railing to observe. The people around them were mostly young parents with toddlers. “Mon-key! Mon-key!”

Bert and May were relaxing in the sun as they had so many times before, on a small platform just outside the tunnel to their inside room — a kind of porch, in effect, with a metal basket hanging over it where food was placed. Nothing in the sight of them suggested that they had spent much of the previous year running wild in Rock Creek Park. May was grooming Bert’s back, intent, absorbed, dextrous. Bert seemed zoned out. Never did they meet the gaze of their human observers. Bert shifted to get the back of his head under her fingers, and she immediately obliged, parting his hair and closely inspecting his scalp. Then something caused him to give her a light slap, and she caught his hand and tugged at it. She let go and climbed the fence to intercept one of their kids, and suddenly those two were playing tag. When they passed Bert he cuffed at them, so they turned around and gang-tackled him. When he had disentangled himself from the fray he swung up the fence to the south corner of the enclosure, where it was possible to reach through and pull leaves from a tree. He munched a leaf, fended off one of the passing kids with an expert backhand.

It seemed to Frank that they were restless. It wasn’t obvious; at first glance they appeared languid, because any time they were not moving they tended to melt into their positions, even if they were hanging from the fence. So they looked mellow — especially when sprawled on the ground, arm flung overhead, idly grooming partner or kid — a life of leisure!

But after watching for a while it became evident that every ten minutes they were doing something else. Racing around the fence, eating, grooming, rocking; eventually it became apparent that they never did anything for more than a few minutes at a time.

Now the younger son caught fire and raced around the top of the fence, then cast himself into space in a seemingly suicidal leap; but he crashed into the canvas loop that crossed the cage just above the tops of the ground shrubs, hitting it with both arms and thus breaking his fall sufficiently to avoid broken bones. Clearly it was a leap he had made hundreds of times before, after which it was his habit to run over and bushwhack his dad.

Wrestling on the grass. Did Bert remember wrestling his elder son on that same spot? Did the younger son remember his brother? Their faces, even as they tussled, were thoughtful and grave. They seemed lost in their thoughts. They looked like animals who had seen a lot. This may have just been an accident of physiognomy. The look of the species.

Some teenagers came by and hooted inexpertly, hoping to set the animals off “They only do that at dawn,” Nick reminded Frank; despite that, they joined the youths’ effort. The gibbons did not. The teenagers looked a bit surprised at Frank’s expertise. Oooooooooooop! Oop oop ooooop!

Now Bert and May rested on their porch in the sun. Bert sat looking at the empty food basket, one long-fingered thumbless hand idly grooming May’s stomach. She lay flat on her back, looking bored. From time to time she batted Bert’s hand. It looked like the stereotypical dynamic, male groping female who can’t be bothered. But when May got up she suddenly bent and shoved her butt at Bert’s face. He looked for a second, leaned in and licked her; pulled back; smacked his lips like a wine taster. No doubt he could tell exactly where she was in her cycle.

The humans above watched without comment. After a while Nick suggested checking out their tigers, and Frank agreed.

Walking down the path to the big cat island, the image of May grooming Bert stuck in Frank’s mind. White-cheeked gibbons were monogamous. Several primate species were, though far more were not. Bert and May had been a couple for over twenty years, more than half their lives; Bert was thirty-six, May thirty-two. They knew each other.

When a human couple first met, they presented a facade of themselves to the other, a performance of the part of themselves they thought made the best impression. If both fell in love, they entered into a space of mutual regard, affection, lust; they fell in love; it swept them off their feet, yes, so that they walked on air, yes.

But if the couple then moved in together, they quickly saw more than just the performance that up to that point was all they knew. At this point they either both stayed in love, or one did while one didn’t, or they both fell out of love. Because reciprocity was so integral to the feeling, mostly one could say that they either stayed in love or they fell out of it. In fact, Frank wondered, could it even be called lave if it were one-sided, or was that just some kind of need, or a fear of being alone, so that the one “still in love” had actually fallen out of love also, into denial of one sort or another. Frank had done that himself No, true love was a reciprocal thing; one-way love, if it existed at all, was some other emotion, like saintliness or generosity or devotion or goodness or pity or ostentation or virtue or need or fear. Reciprocal love was different from those. So when you fell in love with someone else’s presentation, it was a huge risk, because it was a matter of chance whether on getting to know one another you both would stay in love with the more various characters who now emerged from behind the mask.