The Servals by James Callan
I try to recall the day before, but it blurs with all the others into one. The sun will rise, crawl across the sky and, inevitably, it will fall. I will scour the dating apps and swipe right--always right--hoping that my carpal tunnel is worth it; like all things in nature, sexual selection is cruel. It’s cold today, mist on my breath like Cambodian jungles, and there it is, on cue: the gibbons with their tempestuous music, their primordial sacrament rousing the animal in my heart.
I park my car and emerge--a chef, a butcher, an educator, an entertainer. I don the blood-soaked garb and wield the cleaver, the pooper-scooper. The sun rises and the Gibbons let me know it. Another morning. Another day at the zoo.
Rajah, the Bengal tiger, has a half acre, a small pool, and a golden, reclining Buddha. The mini monkeys have a walk-in closet, an infinitesimal sliver of rainforest, a window with a view of the cafe. The red pandas have tall trees, fresh bamboo, an artificial stream, prayer wheels and flags, devices to direct their devotions. The chimps have a wealth of luxury: their rumpus room with platforms and ropes, the know-how and craft of masturbation. They have each other, too--to groom, fight with, and fuck. They have unsuspecting birds to maim and torture, and a hilltop vista overlooking a metropolitan landscape. The servals? They have nothing. Nothing but a concrete cell. They have each other, I suppose. But that’s a moot point as they absolutely hate one another.
As I enter the serval “domain,” which I am instructed to call it despite the fact that it looks like accommodation for inmates at Auschwitz, I recoil from the assault of ammonia, the pungent fumes from puddles of kitty urine. Kijana, the male, prances towards me, half playful, half predatory. Sometimes he rubs up against my ankles and won’t stop. He drools affectionately, possessively, all over my work boots. Other times, he hisses at me, swats at my leg or foot, growling as he turns to spray me with laser beams of god awful piss. He is the size of a Labrador, but with the look and build of a cheetah; long of leg, servals can jump like Lebron James on the moon. In Kijana’s sad, tiny world, his athleticism gets him nowhere, hitting his head on a mesh wire ceiling that is low enough to require me to stoop.
The female, Princess Jasmine, doesn’t have to worry much about these things. Unlike Kijana, whose stress comes out in frantic pacing, bottled-up angst and bubbling-up boredom, PJ, as I like to call her, hardly sees the light of day, holing herself up in a dark closet that is set up as a sleeping area. For PJ, this is the place to sleep, to eat, to shit and piss, to growl if anyone, human or serval, gets anywhere near her. She is a recluse, a hermit, a cave dweller, and she is angry, scared, and probably would prefer death even if she doesn’t know it, driven by instinct to survive.
Kijana is in one of his lovey moods, so I enter the torture chamber with a measure of confidence. I lower the buckets of dead baby birds and ocean fish and nearly lose a finger. I stumble back and watch Kijana inhale his food, all those half-thawed corpses.
I walk across the concrete floor, dark with urine, and step over three or four bare branches that have been set up to simulate an “environment.” I take the second bucket of small corpses and heave-ho the soggy contents into PJ’s cave. From within, a bout of hissing erupts before the strange, ravenous vocals that follow. Even among the dark abyss of kitty Auschwitz, I have nothing but love for the wonder of cats.
*
Like any other day, I arrive at the familiar sights and sounds, the strong wafts of urine and the antsy pacing of a cat gone mad with ennui. I hear a princess moaning in the dark, a protest against life itself. I tally the tufts of yellow hair that cling to the mesh where a bored serval has rubbed himself raw against a boundary between him and his freedom. I take my accustomed strides to the Black Gate of Mordor, by which I mean the serval “domain.” And very much to my surprise, each door is unlocked. What’s more, each door is open.
I try to recall the day before, but it blurs with all the others into one. Did I, could I, actually have forgotten to lock the doors? It's the only time I have forgotten to bolt the gate, let alone leaving it ajar. It's the only time I fucked up zoo keeping 101. Maybe I did it subconsciously. Maybe I just wanted to free the servals from their dismal lodgings, their infinite stay at a seedy Super 8. Maybe I wanted to get fired, freeing myself from my own inadequate circumstances, my own bleak setup in life. Or maybe it was human error, just one more fuck up that even a chimp could manage to avoid.
But whatever led to me leaving those doors unlocked, leaving them cracked open for two Labrador-sized, African cats to freely roam the urban wilds, in the end it didn’t matter. In the end, they hadn’t left their prison. Hadn’t checked out of Hotel Hell. Did they choose to stay? Or did they just not notice the opportunity to leave?
With mixed feelings I close each door. I lock each barrier. I watch Kijana pace and listen to PJ weep in the dark. I seal up the Black Gates of Mordor.
Then I walk away, free to go.
James Callan is the author of the novels Anthophile (Alien Buddha Press, 2024) and A Transcendental Habit (Queer Space, 2023). His fiction has appeared in Apocalypse Confidential, BULL, Reckon Review, Maudlin House, Mystery Tribune, and elsewhere. He lives on the Kāpiti Coast, Aotearoa New Zealand.
X: @JamesCallanNZ
