Copyright 1996 PRIVATE ZOO (Conclusion) by Colin Dale On the drive home Frank weighed his options. His hallucinations - no sense in calling them anything else - had him deeply spooked, but, he had to admit, deeply intrigued as well, and he certainly couldn't deny their usefulness, as the encounter with Maxwell had drastically demonstrated. There was now nobody whom Frank didn't see as an animal, but the animal he saw always reflected some aspect of their appearance or their personality. In addition to Christine's legs and Maxwell's argumentativeness, there had also been Mr. Johnson's big nose, represented by a toucan, Mrs. Thomas' fancy clothes - a peacock - and George from the mailroom's all-around stupidity - a dodo, of all things, which had brought Frank another person's mail clutched tightly in its beak. Frank considered the possible causes of his hallucinations and eliminated all but two: he was dreaming or he was going insane. If he was dreaming it wouldn't matter what he did next, but if he was going insane he needed to come up with a course of action. He could do the stereotypical thing and begin screaming nonsense about people turning into animals until the nice men in white showed up to take him away. He rejected that option out of hand. If he was going to become a raving lunatic he had had plenty of opportunity to do it long before now instead of resolutely keeping his cool and trying to act naturally whenever he saw yet another animal. He allowed himself a momentary flash of pride at this. The second option was to voluntarily check himself into an insane asylum - or whatever the politically correct term was these days: 'center for the study and care of certified goofballs'? - but that didn't seem to make much sense either. The staff there would simply assume, not necessarily incorrectly, that he was just having delusions, and besides, it wasn't as if his hallucinations were dangerous, just unsettling. He rejected that option too, but kept it in reserve against his suddenly getting the urge to dress in Edna's underwear and feed her and the kids to the Moulinex. A third option was to do nothing and hope he got better (or, perversely, to do nothing and hope he *didn't* get better). This was the most attractive one so far, and Frank seriously considered doing it. In the end he rejected it in favour of a slightly modified version: he would do nothing except ask for advice. Personal as his problem was, Frank knew he wouldn't be able to avoid sharing it with someone before he went completely bonkers. That left the only problem being who to tell. He ruled out everyone at the office at a sweep. The only person there he trusted was Christine, and he had already tacitly declined her help by not telling her when he had the chance. He couldn't tell his psychiatrist, because he wasn't seeing one, although he certainly would be within a few days should he imprudently tell any one of his friends. That left only his family as potential confidantes. Both parents were already dead, the result of their having waited to have him until well into their forties. Edna's parents were still alive, but Frank hardly fancied the prospect of his mother-in-law hearing about his hallucinations and gleefully citing them as final and clinching proof that he should never have married her precious daughter in the first place, something which would surely happen sooner or later if Frank told Edna. He'd lost touch with his daughter Claudia somewhere in the deep and tangled jungles of adolescence; he hoped to re-establish contact at 21, but for the time being they were living in the same house on completely different worlds. And having eliminated everyone else, Frank found himself stuck with telling... * * * "Dan?" he said, poking his head into the TV room. The lemur playing Nintendo kept its large black eyes fixed on the screen. "What, Dad?" Frank came into the room and sat down beside it on the couch, careful not to sit on its tail, for whatever good that might do. "Can we talk for a minute?" "Can it wait 'til after this game?" Frank, who knew from bitter experience how long his son could make a game of Nintendo last when properly motivated, such as by the prospect of a talk with his father, said, "Can you talk and play at the same time?" "Sure," the lemur shrugged, its short, clawed fingers never pausing in their dance over the control pad. "What do you want to talk about?" He sounded casual enough, but Frank recognised the telltale buildup of tension in Dan's voice, ready to violently deny any and all statements, accusatory or otherwise, that Frank tried to make. He quickly set his son at ease. "A guy at work asked me a hypothetical question," he began, reciting the dialogue that he'd worked out in the car, "and I'd like to run it by you. It's kind of a game, and I want to see if you come up with a different answer than I did." "Shoot," said Dan, the relief visible even on his furry white face. He always enjoyed games, as his current preoccupation with blasting evil-looking robots to fragments was once again demonstrating. "Suppose," said Frank, "that a person, wherever he went, saw animals being substituted for people. What do you think he should do?" Dan thought for a few seconds, then said, "I give up. What should he do?" "No, no!" Frank said impatiently. "It's not a puzzle with one right answer, you're supposed to think about what you would do!" "So what would *you* do?" Dan asked. "I don't know!" Frank replied exasperatedly. "That's why I'm asking you!" He realized, an instant too late to stop himself, that he had just completely given himself away. He held his breath, but Dan, as Frank had hoped, was too young and too wrapped up in his Nintendo to realize it. "Well," the lemur said, thoughtfully wrinkling its brow in the middle of blowing up four robots one after the other in less than a second, "I guess it would depend on what kind of animals people were turning into. Can you give me a few examples?" Well, Frank reasoned, in for a penny, in for a mile, or however that went. "The guy at work said that the animal each person turned into would reflect some part of his or her appearance or personality, so I guess if I was seeing people as animals then my secretary might look like a deer, or Mrs. Henderson next door might look like a pit bull." She'd certainly made a scary one. Frank had been half-afraid that she was going to bite him when he'd gotten out of his car. Dan laughed. "She already looks like a pit bull! Tell me some more, Dad! What would Mom look like?" "An elephant." "I can see that one, too! What about Claudia?" "She's an armadillo. I mean she would be an armadillo," he hastily corrected himself. "I don't get that one," Dan frowned. "I think it's because of all that gel she puts in her hair to make it bigger. It makes it look like armor plating." The lemur laughed so hard that it almost let a killer robot scuttle out of harm's way before sending it to join its brethren. "It's true! That's so true!" it guffawed. "Tell me what I look like, Dad! What animal am I?" "A lemur." "What's that?" Frank looked his son up and down. "A lower primate about the size of a large cat. It has forward-facing eyes and grasping hands, like all primates, and white fur all over its body except on its legs, which are black, and its tail, which is striped." "I don't get it. Why is that a good animal for me?" Frank shrugged. "Lemurs are arboreal and nocturnal, and you like climbing trees and staying up past your bedtime." "Do not!" Dan said automatically. "I was just teasing," Frank said with a reassuring squeeze of his son's shoulder. "Now it's your turn. If someone really was seeing animals instead of people, what should he do to make it stop?" "'Make it stop'?" Dan repeated, aghast. "What do you mean, 'make it stop'? Seeing people as animals would be just too cool for words! If I could do that, I'd be the luckiest guy in the world!" And that, thought Frank, was that. * * * After he'd tucked his lemur in for the night - exactly fifteen minutes past its bedtime - kissed his armadillo goodnight and climbed into bed beside his elephant, Frank lay awake reflecting upon what had certainly been the most unusual day of his life, and one that had emphatically broken his record-challenging six-hundred-straight boring day streak. He wondered how he would adapt to his new lifestyle. He was lucky, at least, that people's voices remained the same when they changed into animals; he would unquestionably have had a lot more trouble coping with a world where people spoke to him in animal hoots, growls, and whistles. As it was, he would have to rely on identifying people solely from their voices, but he'd always fancied he'd been rather good at that anyway. Yes, he was going to get along just fine, thank you. No problems at all. He suddenly laughed out loud, nearly waking Edna in the process. She turned onto her side, narrowly missing braining Frank with one of her tusks. 'No problems' indeed! He really was going insane! Ah, well, if he was going to lose his mind, he could think of worse ways to do it than turning the entire world into his own personal menagerie. , he thought, . And trying not to think about how disappointed he would be if that happened, Frank Davis closed his eyes and let his wife's quiet trumpeting lull him to sleep. END