The skinny intern looked at the giggling ebu gogo and said, “I have to agree. It’s as if we have suddenly found ourselves in a gamelit version of Pokémon.”
The interns went back to trying to capture ebu gogo with the casting net, and the ebu gogo continued to treat it as a game, and to run around playfully in order to avoid the net whenever the interns cast it. Gradually though, the interns began to get better at capturing ebu gogo as their skill improved, and whenever they caught one, they brought it back to the tree where the first one was still tied, and tied it there as well. As they went, the interns came up with a scoring system in which the different varieties of ebu gogo, spotted, striped, all orange, etc. were worth different amounts of points, so that the three could compete with one another.
Shortly after they went off together, Dr. Stern said to Clare, “Just so we are on the same page, I have no intention to participate in capturing an ebu gogo. If we see one, which is not likely, we will observe it in its natural habitat. If we do not see an ebu gogo, which is more likely, we will just walk around a bit and then come back, but either way we will return empty handed.”
But after a very short time walking, they came across a large group of male ebu gogo performing summersaults, cartwheels, and other acrobatics. Dr. Stern and Clare immediately began to observe them.
When Dr. Stern leaned forward to get a closer look at an ebu gogo, another ebu gogo snuck up behind him and took his pith helmet. Dr. Stern chased the ebu gogo around trying to get his helmet back, slipped on a patch of mud, and landed in a mud puddle with a huge splash.
Clare laughed uproariously. Dr. Stern said, “It’s not funny.”
Still laughing Clare said, “Oh yes it is.”
Dr. Stern got up, wiped the mud from his face and shook it from his hands. The ebu gogo danced around him teasingly holding his pith helmet out for him to take. But when Dr. Stern lunged after the ebu gogo and grabbed at his helmet, the ebu gogo pulled it away so that he missed. Clare laughed and laughed with tears streaming down her cheeks. Finally, Dr. Stern grabbed the ebu gogo, lifted it off the ground, and pried his pith helmet out of its little hands.
But now that he had captured the ebu gogo, it wouldn’t leave his side, so he had no choice but to bring it back to the tree to which, thanks to the interns, who had by now achieved expert level at capturing ebu gogo, there were now almost twenty male ebu gogo tethered, jumping around playfully, seemingly oblivious that they were captive.
Jack went off to search for ebu gogo alone and after some aimless rambling, wandered into a field of ebu gogo. He looked around at all the ebu gogo frolicking playfully in the flowers and grass, and his face lit up like Imelda Marcos in a shoe store. He picked an ebu gogo up at random by the nape of its neck and looked at its groin. It had a little penis and little tiny balls. Jack threw it back to the ground in disgust. He looked at another ebu gogo’s groin, and another’s, and another’s, but they were all male, so he threw them back to the ground in disgust. He did this until he got tired and sank to the ground with a frustrated look on his face.
An ebu gogo approached Jack excitedly, and jumped around playfully trying to get Jack’s attention. Jack picked the ebu gogo up and dug his pocketknife into its heart. The ebu gogo reacted by laughing as if it was being tickled. When the ebu gogo finally stopped laughing, because it was dead, Jack skinned it with his knife. Jack wrapped the ebu gogo skin in plastic and stuffed it in his backpack. He stuck his knife into another ebu gogo and began to skin it alive. The ebu gogo laughed as if it was being tickled until it died.
In another part of the jungle Lewis, who had always been proud of his anatomical drawings, sat cross legged, as he sketched ebu gogo in their natural habitat with charcoal. An ebu gogo looked over his shoulder, curiously watching his hand move over the paper, and then grabbed Lewis’s charcoal and paper. Lewis lunged after the ebu gogo to get his charcoal and paper back, but the ebu gogo avoided him by hopping and skipping, and playfully held the charcoal and paper just out of Lewis’s grasp. Then, the ebu gogo scribbled all over Lewis’s drawing with the charcoal. Lewis shouted, “God damn it!”
The ebu gogo all jumped up and down in joy and tried to imitate him, but it came across more as, “Gahdamma! Gahdamma!”
Lewis’s jaw dropped open and he gazed at the ebu gogo in amazed wonder. He took a notepad out of his pocket and wrote, “Note: The ebu gogo can talk.”
Chapter 17
Martin was in a cavern surrounded by angry female ebu gogo. They shouted things at him in the ebu gogo language like, “How could you,” “You don’t love us anymore,” “Fuck off,” “Get out of here,” “Leave us alone,” and “Traitor to the ebu gogo!”
Martin, with tears streaming down his cheeks said, “I do love you. I do. Don’t you see? That is why I went into the pit with the human women. I did it because I was upset by Lua’s death. That proves that I love you.”
An ebu gogo shoved a spear into Martin’s hand and said, “What will prove that you love us is if you kill those humans.”
Martin recoiled. “But I couldn’t.”
“Then you still consider yourself human and not ebu gogo?”
The ebu gogo that was speaking had breasts that hung only to her belly button, making them unusually small by ebu gogo standards. Martin did not like her as much as the others. He said, “Of course I consider myself human. I am a human.”
As if on signal the ebu gogo parted, and two ebu gogo approached Martin, holding a baby in their arms. It took two of them to hold the baby, because the baby was too big for just one of them to carry. They brought the baby over to Martin. Awestruck, he reached out his hands and took it. It was his son.
Tears came to Martin’s eyes once again as he looked down at the boy. Before his had been tears of remorse. Now he cried tears of joy. The child was the size of a regular human baby, but it was covered in a fine downy orange fur, which Martin thought would one day turn into the thick fur that covers the ebu gogo body. Its face was halfway between a human being’s and an ebu gogo’s. Its nose was not as flat and broad as theirs, its forehead didn’t slope back at the extreme angle that theirs did, but protruded like Martin’s, and while the ebu gogo were completely without chins, the child had a very little, if not very prominent, chin. The infant was definitely a human-ebu gogo hybrid, and to Martin, he looked beautiful. Crying, Martin said, “My own son. My flesh and blood. I will name him First, because he is the first of his kind. No, that’s stupid. I think I will go with Bob. That’s a nice, simple name.”
The ebu gogo that had spoken before said, “You are still connected to your humanity, through those women. So in order to sever your last tie to humanity and join us completely, you must kill them.”
Martin said, “I have a better idea. What if instead of killing the human women, we make them into ebu gogo?”
“What do you mean? Explain yourself.”
“Well, before she died Lua said to me that there are male ebu gogo that live on the surface, separate from the women. You want to create a new breed of ebu gogo that is half human. What if we mate the human women with the ebu gogo males? Then, because the human women are so much larger than the ebu gogo, they won’t have to die when the baby is born, and could produce even more offspring. Then, the human women will become my sisters, and I won’t be attracted to them anymore because one cannot be attracted to one’s own sister.”
The ebu gogo all burst into laughter. It was a loud, high pitched sound that rang for minutes before subsiding. Another ebu gogo that had breasts that hung almost to her knees, as an ebu gogo’s breasts should, said, “We laugh at your ignorance. The male ebu gogo are incapable of having sex with us because of their small penises. Those human women, because of their enormous size, would require even larger penises to penetrate them than we do.”