I met another ape in the forest. It was my father, Rotpeter. My mother was there with him, too. My father and mother. I tried to tell them something—to ask for help, supplicate their protection. But no words came out of my mouth. My father and my mother were sitting on the mossy forest floor, grooming each other. Then we heard a sound in the darkness. I knew that it was the Gnome Chompy. Something stirring in the trees. I heard leaves rustling, twigs snapping. Darkness. All primates have three primal fears: snakes, falling backward, and the dark. This was the dark. I knew the Gnome Chompy was somewhere in the darkness of the jungle that yawned all around us. I felt his presence. I heard his breath whistling in and out of his nostrils before I saw him. And then I saw his eyes. Two green bright eyes glowed in the dark behind my parents, over my father’s shoulder. He emerged from the dark. He was a little man—being a gnome—but the Gnome Chompy was a terrifying inversion, reversion, and perversion of everything that was good about Francis the Gnome. His skin was pale yellow, sallow and necrotic. Unlike Francis the Gnome—who loves all animals—the Gnome Chompy hates them. He hates all things living. His large forehead and thickly furrowed brow protrudes over the glistening green stars of his eyes. He smiled and looked right at me as he peeled open his wet mouth to reveal two rows of sharp slimy teeth and a red raw slab of tongue. He licked his teeth. He stood behind my parents, who were facing me. I wanted to call out to them. I wanted to warn them somehow. I wanted to point behind them and scream. But I could not. That was the power of the Gnome Chompy. He had robbed me of the power of speech. It was as if there was cement hardening in my throat. I could not even move my hand to point. The Gnome Chompy had robbed me of all my powers of communication. There was no way I could warn them. I was powerless. I simply had to watch them die and be eaten, just like my father had watched his own mother and father die and be eaten. I watched the Gnome Chompy tear into my father’s neck with his jaws. Then he snapped his teeth into my mother’s throat. He tore open their bellies, he disemboweled them and began slurping up their entrails, eating them alive. They were screaming. I woke up. It was dark. At first I didn’t know where I was. My eyes flitted around the room, aimlessly landing on the things in it, landing on the darkened shapes of clowns floating up to God by their balloons, on the planets of our solar system and the shadows they made, their silhouettes like cutouts from the sheet of moonlight on the opposite wall. My goose lamp was not on. I looked at these things, but failed to register their significances, their places in waking reality, the signifiers and signifieds all ripped apart and made meaningless.
From upstairs, directly above my bed, I heard Mr. Morgan’s parrots flapping and screeching. I did not remember having gone to bed that night. I must have collapsed into sleep from sheer exhaustion right there on the living room floor, beside the fire. Lydia must have scooped me up in her arms and carried me to my bedroom and tucked me into bed.
I climbed out of my bed, ran out of the room, down the dark hallway, and into Lydia’s bedroom. To make sure she was still there, still alive, still mine. I saw the two of them, lying together in Lydia’s bed. Lydia and Tal. The bedsheets were sloppily pulled halfway up over their bodies—but I could tell that they were not wearing clothing of any sort. They were asleep. So deeply, so peacefully asleep that even my crazily bursting into the room had not woken them. I listened to the soft contrapuntal rhythms of their shallow breathing. Tal lay on her side, with her hands folded under the pillow and her legs partially curled in. Lydia lay beside her, with her knees curled into the hollows of Tal’s knees, and her cheek resting on the skin of her shoulder. Lydia’s arm was wrapped around Tal’s body, with her right hand cupped over Tal’s left breast. Lydia was faintly, sweetly, laughing in her