The Troglodyte
Richard Gibney
The rain pelted down mercilessly for hours. My guide, Stak, was leading me through the jungle back towards the village. I’ve never been blessed with a sense of direction, so I was absolutely dependent on this guy, which I don’t like one bit. It’s very humbling to be dependent on a primitive native, but it’s alarming too. I know how to program my VCR, but I wouldn’t last ten minutes in the jungle without this guy. Anyway, the rain was heavy and the air was sticky, as I followed my Gimi companion through the rain forest with my backpack and my $1500 camera under my poncho.
They call themselves the Gimis, and really, that’s what they are. It’s always “Gimme this” and “Gimme that” and “Here you go, you can have these pebbles and a seashell, and I’ll take your sunglasses and your ‘My buddy went to Cuba and all I got was this lousy t-shirt’ t-shirt, and – let’s see – your Paul Simon tape, which I can’t use because I don’t have a hi-fi, but I like the way this little ribbon comes out when you pull on it and you can keep pulling on it for a few minutes and then it stops because there’s none left”. Often, they don’t even ask, they just take what they want. They’re like proto-Marxists or something. And when you try to tell them you’re from a distant state called Minnesota, from a distant country called America, they laugh at you and insist that you’re Neru’s cousin and Nalla is your mother. Nalla passed on long before I arrived here. It took me a while, but I got over it.
Stak had hit a fat flightless bird with a stone from his sling about a half hour before in the rain. Zero visibility. They say he’s the best, and he is. Now we were on our way back to the village with part of the main course. They keep boar in the village. They just go hunting for the heck of it, I guess. To keep their wits about them. Like why I play squash, or at least used to, before I got dragged here by Helen. That was eight months ago. She wanted me to take photos of these people about whom I have since developed mixed feelings. Helen is lying in a hospital in Jakarta working on her bedsores while I stamp through this jungle. About a week earlier she had been lucky enough to come down with a horrific case of food poisoning. She’d been airlifted out of the jungle. She insisted I remain on and record stuff. I have no real interest in these cold societies. None of these guys are about to discover room temperature fusion or whatever. What’s the point in studying them? To learn about ourselves, as we were ten or fifteen or twenty or a hundred thousand years ago, before we invented all the good stuff? I mean it’s not like they’re going anywhere. I think we should leave them alone, for a couple of millennia, and then maybe they’ll come up with something interesting that we haven’t thought of yet.
We were on our way back to the village. I was hungry; we’d been gone long enough, and breakfast for me is a cup of black coffee and my multi-vitamins. We passed by an awesome cliff face we hadn’t passed before. The ground sloped downwards into the cliff and there was this big hole in the cliff face at ground level. As we approached, it became clear that it was a cave. So I said to Stak, I told him, Hey, hold on there, I have to change my film, and this cave provides me with the ideal shelter to do so, in so many words. I tottered down the slope into the cave, ignoring my good buddy’s vehement protests. I took off my poncho, opened the bag and pulled out my flashlight. I turned on the beam and suddenly I could see these paintings all over. On the walls, all these eyes of animals, looking back at me. Snakes, monkeys, birds, boar, even a couple of horses, all staring back at me, hundreds of them, all of them really beautiful and as clear and as lifelike as photos. Nothing like the one-dimensional things you’d get in Lascaux. These were like eighteenth and nineteenth and twentieth century paintings by Europeans. They showed depth. Real dimension. I got around to changing the film eventually and turned on the flash and took some shots of the walls before I left the cave. Stak, it seemed, was gone. And in hindsight, I don’t blame him.
This thing emerged from the trees and into the clearing where the cave was. He was naked save for all the hair, and he was hairy. Hair all over. Mr Pubes. Except for his upper face. And I just froze. Not out of fear or surprise or anything, out of…I don’t know what. Out of coming face to face with the missing link, I guess. Out of seeing natural history appear before my eyes. And the thing was carrying a branch of some kind of palm tree in his hands. He bounded towards me (he was bigger than me), and he stood before me, staring. Not just into my eyes, but at my whole face, starting with my forehead, then my eyes, ears, nose, lips, chin, neck. Taking everything in. And then he did it again. And again. I started doing the same to him, trying to reciprocate, if you like. He had a heavy brow, prominent like your typical caveman. And his eyes were dark, dark brown and quite small. At least they were small compared to the rest of him. His nose was big and flat, like a human nose, but more animal. I couldn’t see his ears for all the hair, and I could hardly see his lips under the beard, but then he opened his mouth and I saw these really bad teeth, one of the front ones missing, and I swear to God, this growl, this noise came from the very back of his throat, and I swear to God, he said:
“Ugh.”
Looking into my eyes, he seemed kind of angry, and you know what they say about eye contact being confrontational. So I slowly lowered my eyes and looked down at his feet. These big, hirsute, feet. I was stooping submissively, and these beads of water were rolling off the hairs on his feet, trickling down from his legs. And I watched the beads roll all the way down, and they disappeared through the gaps in his toes. Pretty normal looking toes. Big and hairy, but not abnormal. I started to think about his family, if there was a whole family of these creatures living here. Then I started thinking about my own family; I keep this photo of my father when he was a young man in my back pocket. He looked just like me when he was young. Identical. My father was a fool, a missionary who had tried to convert Amazon natives to Christianity. He’d died because they didn’t take to his inability to adapt to their culture. The people who had gone looking for him after his disappearance found his hacked up body in the jungle. That was more than ten years ago now. I had to give some blood to confirm that it was him they had found. And I thought to myself, fool that my father was, I hadn’t looked at his photo for a long time and I felt a little ashamed. It was only about then that it occurred to me that maybe I should take a photo of my own, a photo of the creature. Any photographer worth his salt would’ve had his camera out immediately. Most of them would’ve been real scared too. Me, I hadn’t even thought about the camera, and really, there was no fear. No fear at all. But I may have been in shock because I wasn’t thinking straight just then, that’s for sure.
So the creature moved on. He took a pretty clinical side step to my left so as to avoid me, and moved on into his cave. He disappeared into the darkness of his house. Then the rain, which had been really heavy, was abruptly reduced to a five-second piddling trickle before ceasing altogether. That happened quite a bit. It was intimidating, the exactness of it all. Nature doesn’t usually work like that. Nature’s messy most of the time, it’s chaotic, it’s not as accurate as an electric shower, and really, it shouldn’t be. Then, of course, the stone-splitting sun emerged, and most of the sky was blue, and all this heat meant I had to take off my hooded poncho and I was left standing there in vest and jeans and Stak appeared from behind a tree and waited patiently while I folded my clothes and strapped them onto my backpack. We continued on our way, Stak reproaching me the whole journey, most of which I couldn’t understand. If Helen had been there, she’d’ve acted as translator, but me, I wasn’t bothered learning their language.
It was evening when we got back to the village. Everyone was gathered round the one hut. Himbu, one of the elders who’d been sick a long time, had died while we were gone. They’d bury him in the morning. Stak extended his condolences as you do, as did I, in my own way. Then he started to chatter to some of the men, the group Helen called the patriciate. And he was just babbling, prattling on, while I tried to talk to one of the women about the caveman. But her attention was diverted, she started listening to Stak, who’d started this intense rant, pointing at me accusingly from time to time…and then he was questioned by the men, interrogated. They were really grilling him, like a couple of detectives from a cop show, and it all came back to me. Each question they asked, he’d respond and point at me. And when I asked what was going on, people would just ignore me or move away, still listening to Stak. Finally, it was all over, and I asked what was going on. They all told me condescendingly not to worry about it. “Isha” was the word they used, which means “nothing”.
I asked about the caveman and they wouldn’t discuss it. It was like taboo or something to them. I persisted, and finally one of the elders, Tok, slapped me hard across the face. They were quite a physical group of people and I’d learned not to take that kind of thing to heart. But I got the message. I was famished, but it’d take an hour or two for dinner, so I ate a bit of fruit while we waited. After a dinner of boar, beans, and bird, all was forgiven. We were friends again.
I woke the following morning to the sounds of beating drums. They do these cross-gender plays, usually in the evening, where the women play warriors and the men play women. When I got up, they were performing a play. I came out to watch. Stak was dressed in these furs, a coat I’d never seen before in the other plays. And one of the women, Lyesa, was sitting center stage, cross-legged, holding my $1500 camera up to her face (which alarmed me, coz I hadn’t given it), looking into it, one eye shut like she was looking through a telescope. I was a little perturbed that she had appropriated my camera without permission. Stak was stalking her, approaching slowly from behind, in a lumbering, troglodytic manner. Eventually and quite suddenly he grabbed her. They started struggling, the audience started cheering, and in the end Lyesa was overcome and carried away by Stak. I figured it was some kind of a wake for Himbu; the message was that death conquers us all, or something along those lines.
I retrieved my camera and after breakfast, half a dozen men headed off to start digging the grave in the cemetery a couple of miles into the forest. The women busied themselves weaving together these canes, making a litter for Himbu’s body. Two hours later, we all left the village. Himbu’s cold, lifeless carcass was carried by the pallbearers, and really, it was quite like a western funeral. We arrived at the graveyard, which was a clearing a few hours into the jungle, and the seven gravediggers stood waiting around the hole they’d made, their prochronistic metal shovels lying on the grass nearby. The litter was placed at the side of the grave. A chant was taken up, a quaint little dirge, and a few minutes passed before Himbu’s body was rolled into the hole by three men. It landed face down with a thump, and there was absolute silence for a minute, a silence of shock more than anything else, and then it was broken by these maniacal wails from Himbu’s wife and the other women tried to comfort her but to no avail. It took ten minutes for her to finally close her mouth, out of exhaustion. It was then that everyone scattered out of the clearing. They were gone like it was instinct, they just disappeared out of sight. Forty people just gone. Like something out of a nature show. And I looked around and who’s bounding towards me from the other direction only my friend the caveman. He was smiling, so I smiled back at him and removed the lens cap from my camera. I squeezed off three or four shots as he approached the grave. He looked into it. I kept shooting. Close-ups of his face, body-shots, his torso, his legs. He bent over and picked up one of the spades, leapt over the grave and brought the tool cracking into my skull with a dull ding. I dropped the camera and kind of teetered over onto the lush grass, this intense scream in my ear, and I didn’t know if it was Mr. Pubes or my ear screaming at me. I was still conscious and watching as he brought the shovel up over his head, towering above me like a giant ‘A’ and the spade whirred downwards and struck me full force in the forehead.
I awoke and it was completely dark. I could just about breathe. My eyes couldn’t open … it was like they’d been glued shut somehow and there was a terrible, awful ringing in one ear…I don’t know how I had managed to sleep through that. I took my time and pulled my eyes open, When I rubbed my knuckles into them, all this dried blood came away on my hands. It was dark, but I could see well enough; I could see the light in the distance…I don’t know how far away it was but it was light… there was grass out there, and I figured I was in some kind of tunnel, and for a minute, I thought it was maybe the Tunnel, you know, the one they talk about. And I realized that the blood on my face, it must have come from me, so I put my hand to my forehead and I felt this gaping, open wound in my skull, this big crack and I think I touched…I think I actually touched my brain and that’s when I must’ve passed out.
When I came to again, I was groggily conscious of a more immediate light source causing a kind of glittering effect on the ceiling above me. Flickering, indiscriminate shadows…and I shifted my head slowly, and saw that I was in the cave with all those beautiful paintings and there…there he was. The Caveman. Sitting cross-legged at the fire he’d built…his shovel leaned against the wall. There was a glass jar not of his making with water in it (I think it was water) and what looked like an easel and two small piles of powder, one red, one yellow, lying in the dirt. And there he was, sitting cross-legged at the fireside grunting…holding…holding my fifteen hundred dollar camera in his hands, looking into the fire through my fifteen hundred dollar camera. And I turned my head away weakly…I could feel myself getting weak again, having only the energy to vomit, and I turned my head away from him and I saw the litter, the makeshift stretcher stretched out beside me and my eyes moved upwards from the dirty floor to the wall, and I hadn’t noticed it before, but just as I felt myself losing consciousness again I was almost sure…I could just make out my father’s picture perfect portrait as a young man looking back at me from among the murals…Or maybe it was a painting of me.
Richard Gibney is an award-winning short fiction writer and editor based in Dublin, Ireland. His work has most recently featured in SweetyCat Press's ZOOAnthology and on Tuxtail Publishing's website.