Herman went to the protest. He had promised the organizers from the Action League that he would go to the protest. Although he believed that a person should keep his promises, he didn’t go to the protest out of a sense of obligation to the Action League. He didn’t go out of a sense of obligation to the issues, either. At the planning meetings, the organizers spoke about the issues like they were as important as breathing itself, yet if someone had given Herman a snap quiz, he couldn’t have named the issues much less explain why they were important. He had only a vague sense of things. In all of life (not just as it concerned these particular issues, but as it concerned everything that happened) it felt to him like he was kneeling at the edge of a pond and dabbing a finger on the water’s surface; between the ripples that expanded from the point of contact, there were glimpses of a deeper life below the surface, maybe fish and reeds, or a murky bed of rocks. When the water stilled, Herman found himself staring at nothing in particular. It was the same when the organizers finished talking. There were issues, and they had been framed by important sounding words. Now, the words were gone from his head, and the issues with them.
If Herman felt a sense of obligation at all, it was a sense of obligation to Sally. She was devoted to the issues and he was devoted to Sally and that was good enough for him. He wouldn’t call Sally his girlfriend. They did have sex from time to time. To be honest, they had sex all the time. Sally said she liked the way Herman grunted when they fucked. It meant he was passionate. She wanted a man who was passionate. She said she liked the way he rolled off her when he was done and fell asleep snoring. His contentment was sweet. She loved the absolute simplicity of it. She said she didn’t want her relationships to be complicated and, on that score, Herman was perfect.
The Action League had planned to protest in front of a big government building. Herman wasn’t sure what the building was for, but he’d seen it before on newscasts and on postcards they sold at the convenience store where he bought potato chips and fizzy drinks. A bronze statue stood in front of the building. It was a statue of a man in weird-looking clothes. Someone had spray painted funny pink bits between the man’s legs. At the foot of the pedestal, an evening news type person was shoving her microphone into a police officer’s face and asking for his views on the matter. A video camera shifted from the officer’s wobbling moustache to the funny pink bits and back again. Sometimes the hole under the moustache opened and out came words like vandalism, hooligans, and criminal element.
Herman found Sally working at a table the Action League had set up under a tree. She was helping one of the organizers, Robespierre, a lanky man who wore a goatee and a beret. Sally wore a T-shirt made up special for the protest with the words CHANGE FOR HUMANITY on the back and the movement’s logo on the front. Herman remembered an argument at one of the organizing meetings. Somebody didn’t like that they put a logo on the T-shirts. Somebody said it was … Herman couldn’t remember the word he had used. It was a big word. It started with the letter “H” like Herman. Corporations use logos; why should we use something the corporations use? With CHANGE FOR HUMANITY, the idea was that during the protest they would go up to people on the street and ask them to contribute spare coins to the cause. Somebody thought that was clever. But the same guy who used the big “H” word for the logo used it for this, too. He said they weren’t capitalists; other people’s money would only make them dirty.
To either side of the mob, police officers appeared like raindrops before a gathering storm.
As Herman approached the table, Sally looked up from her work and smiled. She was writing magic marker slogans on squares of cardboard and stapling the cardboard to wooden sticks. Herman took one of the signs, something about capitalist meat-eating free-traders, and tucked it under his arm. He still had a burrito to finish. Sally asked what he was doing after the protest. Herman knew what that meant, and his heart raced.
Robespierre directed Herman to a crowd of protesters that, only minutes before, had moved in an organized way round and round like a conveyor belt, but had devolved into an amorphous mass that moved more like an amoeba. Maybe Herman could bring some order to it. Maybe some discipline. Herman prodded a few of the protesters, but they were less interested in discipline than in a young woman who stood on the front steps of the building and ranted through a bullhorn. Although her words were garbled, her message was clear. Her energy told them she would change the world.
To either side of the mob, police officers appeared like raindrops before a gathering storm. These weren’t police officers the way Herman knew police officers, the sort who direct traffic and hand out speeding tickets; they were police officers in dark helmets who carried plexiglass shields and truncheons. The gathering storm grew by fives and sixes until there were almost as many police officers as protesters. In a pause when the girl let her bullhorn slip to her side and the protesters stopped their chanting to draw sips of water from their environmentally friendly bottles, the police officers began to beat their truncheons in time on their shields. They beat then stepped forward, beat then stepped forward, forcing the protesters into an ever-shrinking patch of sidewalk. It reminded Herman of a toothpaste tube, squeezing him out the end. He tried to run the other way but a police officer blocked his path.
Where you goin’, son? The man asked. He wore a helmet with the visor down so it sounded like he was talking to Herman from inside a tin can.
I—uh…we.., y’know. Thought I’d check up on my, um, see how my girlfriend’s doin’.
Let’s take a look at that sign of yours.
My girlfriend gave it to me.
The police officer looked at the sign with a thoughtful gaze, or with what Herman took to be a thoughtful gaze. It’s hard to tell a person’s expression through a space-age helmet.
‘Fraid I’m gonna hafta arrest you.
Really? Whaffor?
You was doin’ something unlawful.
Oh. I didn’t really notice.
Robespierre had warned that the police might try something like this. He’d given Herman something special to say that would help him out of the situation, but Herman couldn’t remember what it was.
Resisting arrest. That’s what I’m gonna arrest you for.
There was something fishy about the officer’s announcement but Herman couldn’t say what. He was distracted by his own distorted reflection on the officer’s helmet and by the government building in the background that went all wonky as if the bricks were made of rubber.
The police officers raised their truncheons and brought them down with a great crack. It sounded like watermelons breaking on concrete. Herman’s arresting officer joined in the fun and Herman wondered if maybe the man was under peer pressure to do the same. Herman felt sad for the man. The truncheon against Herman’s head didn’t hurt as much as he’d been led to expect—no more than an average ball peen hammer against the skull, bouncing off the surface and leaving a ringing sound in his ears. Herman had heard ringing like this once before when, as a kid, he went skating without a helmet and fell and hit his head on the ice. Each time the truncheon fell, it fell in slo-mo, like someone had taken all the world’s clocks and dropped them into a saltwater taffy machine. He heard other protesters screaming but the screams came from far away. Maybe from another dimension. A picture of Sally popped into his head. He hoped she was okay. Herman was on the ground now. He didn’t remember falling to the ground but, given the fractured sequence of things, it didn’t surprise him to find himself splayed on his back, arms raised to the sky and warding off blows. Some of the police officers beat the protesters with such energy that they had to pause and catch their breath. It was like a workout; if they didn’t stretch their limbs when it was over, they’d feel stiff the next day.
Herman’s neighbour had a forearm that was obviously broken but Herman expected that he himself would walk away from this with only a few bruises. He had arms that were thick like fence posts. It would take more than truncheons to break them. When the police finally made the arrest, six officers pinned him face down while a seventh zip-tied his arms behind his back. The ordinary arrangements didn’t work because Herman’s wrists were too big for the zip-ties and the police officer couldn’t work out an alternative. The police argued back and forth over his prone body and their chattering reminded him of monkeys in a zoo. Once they rigged something and had it secure around his wrists, they hauled him to his feet and led him to a police van where other protesters sat anxious and bloodied.
Aren’t you gonna read us our rights? one of them called.
If you know you need your rights read, then you know your rights already and you don’t need us to read them.
A police officer slammed the door and they sat hunched and stewing in the dark. On the way over to the holding cell, one of the protesters (detainees, as they were politely called) said he’d read somewhere how the police put an agent provocateur in every van. A second protester told the first one he was full of shit.
Yeah? Well, that’s just the sort of thing an agent provocateur would say.
Fuck you.
Someone elbowed Herman and asked what he thought.
Herman shrugged, though it made no difference in the dark. All he knew was that if he didn’t get to a washroom soon he’d piss himself.
The holding cell was a boring place, overcrowded and stuffy. They talked about the corporate police state, and sex with their girlfriends, and smoking weed, and moves they could do on their skateboards. Their talk was deliberately pointless and tinged with paranoia. One of the guys in the cell warned them against speaking freely about their operations. He used the word operations like they were Allied commandos captured deep behind enemy lines. Whatever they said, their captors would be listening, and their words would be used against them. Herman had read about soldiers who’d been taken prisoner in Java and had bamboo shoots driven under their fingernails. Herman thought he could tolerate most kinds of pain, but he wasn’t sure about bamboo shoots driven under the fingernails.
Two men in cheap suits arrived with an armed escort. One of them carried a clipboard; the other carried a basket of test tube-shaped specimen bottles. A guard announced that the two men were from the Ministry of Health and would be collecting a swab from the inside of each prisoner’s cheek. One of the detainees shouted that it was a violation of their human rights. The guard motioned his colleagues to enter the cell where they beat the detainee unconscious while yelling how they’d show him for bad-mouthing their human rights record. The men in cheap suits snapped on latex gloves and, kneeling beside the unconscious detainee, one popped open the detainee’s mouth while the other took what looked like an overgrown Q-tip and ran it around the insides of the man’s cheeks. When he was done, he slid the overgrown Q-tip into a tube and sealed it, making sure the code on the tube matched the code on the detainee’s wrist band before he dropped the tube into his basket. Someone made a joke about aliens and anal probes. He was the next to get a crack on the head, and he volunteered his saliva while lying unconscious on the floor. After that, (as they say in the movies) resistance was futile. The men in cheap suits moved with machine-like efficiency from detainee to detainee, swabbing and checking ID codes.
Later in the day, two of the detainees were released. The rest sat twiddling their thumbs and wondering if lottery winners are real people or just models who pose as real people for some government conspiracy. Somebody complained about all the waiting. At first, a guard shouted shut-the-fuck-up but, later, a suit who claimed to be from the Ministry of the Attorney General told them they would be processed in turn but, because there were so many of them, there was a backlog. They would have to be patient.
Sally came for a visit. Robespierre came, too, but they let only one person in, so Robespierre lurked in another room, eating chocolate bars from a vending machine and watching headlines scroll across a fake 24-hour news channel. Sally said she was sorry; it was an awful thing to sit in jail. Herman said it wasn’t so bad. The bed was hard, but Herman could sleep most anywhere. Sometimes, the guards swore at him, but that was no different than on the outside. As for the food…Herman loved the food. It was almost as good as McDonald’s. Sally offered a Bhuddisty platitude about suffering that had nothing to do with anything Herman had just said. She could have been reading from a script. She said everyone at the Action League was pulling for him. In an ideal world, the Action League would pay for his legal representation, but they didn’t have the budget for it. And, really, that wasn’t part of their mission statement. Hopefully, duty counsel would be some young eager beaver social justice type. As Sally rose to leave, she reiterated that everyone at the Action League was pulling for him. Solidarity!
That night, Herman dreamt of sex with Sally. But Herman was detached from the scene, looking down from high above. It turned out that the sex Sally was having she was having with Robespierre. When he woke up, he decided it wasn’t a very good dream.
It was another two days before Herman met with duty counsel. By then, there were only two left in the holding cell. Herman’s final bunk mate was a skinny man who spoke too fast and had a facial tic. It made Herman’s eyes water to look at the man so, when they spoke (which was rarely), Herman stared at the ceiling or at the ends of his running shoes. He was relieved when the guards summoned him to the interview room. The man who waited for him in the interview room was an unkempt middle-aged man. His tie was skewed one way and his hair, the other. He skipped the handshake, motioning Herman to sit on a simple metal chair, and introduced himself as Dirk Muldoon, attorney-at-law. Mr. Muldoon spoke while he riffled through a file folder that lay on the table before him:
Herman—d’you mind if I call you Herman?—good, good. I’ve been assigned—you don’t have your own legal representation, see? So I’ve been assigned—but, if you could afford your own—but I guess you can’t because the court has, you know, assigned me, so here I am, Dirk Muldoon, to represent your interests before the…and the Crown has given me some info which I have…and after its perusal, well, here’s how things lie: now, ordinarily, you’d be walking out that door right now if for no other reason…well, on account of seeing as how they detained you in a holding cell for more than the statutory maximum without formally charging you. It’s a human rights thing, see? They have to let you go because they violated your fundamental human rights. But—
Dirk Muldoon shifted in his chair the way a man shifts in his chair when his underwear is balled in a knot.
You see, um, this is kinda awkward to explain. Crown takes the position this is an exceptional situation and they don’t have to honour your human rights. I have to say, I’ve never encountered anything like this before. Remember how they swabbed the inside of your cheek?
Herman nodded.
Personally, I think it’s bullshit. Probably violates the Charter and all that. But they don’t care. Say it’s important for their law enforcement program. Create a big DNA database. Only, this time, when the results came back, they got something they didn’t expect. Hell, I’m a lawyer, not a medical professional, so I don’t understand a lot of the techno jibber jabber in this here report, which is why I had a friend of mine—more an acquaintance than a friend—a medical bigwig at one of the hospitals—translate this into terms that a layperson (or even you) can understand. What my friend says is that, um—let me find what he wrote; here it is—he says: the results of the DNA test indicate that the subject’s DNA does not belong to the human genome. See what he’s saying?
Herman smiled at duty counsel.
To put it a bit differently, um, the report says you’re, you know, um, you’re not human. Oh sure, you’re hominid. Just look at you. That’s obvious. And you’re closely related to homo sapiens. But there’s enough other genetic material that you qualify as something else, something…Neanderthal, not to put too fine a point on it. It seems you’re a survivor of a species we thought had died out tens of thousands of years ago. All quite exciting, I guess, except the Crown thinks that because you’re not human, technically speaking, human rights don’t apply.
When the guards led Herman back to the holding cell, he found that they had released his cellmate, the skinny man with the facial tic. Herman’s feet fell hollow on the concrete floor. When he dozed, his snoring echoed from the ceiling and woke him. Sometimes he paced. Sometimes he sat cross-legged on the floor. Snippets of his conversation with duty counsel returned to him in the long stretches he passed prone on his back. Immediately, Herman had objected to the finding. He told duty counsel he didn’t feel any different than the people around him, than the guards outside his cell, for instance, or the police officers who had arrested him, or his fellow protesters, or the friends he made when he went to school. He didn’t look any different than these people, with two arms and two legs, and five digits on each of his two feet and five digits on each of his two hands, and blood that ran as red as anyone else’s, and a nose, and ears, and eyes, and…well…genitalia whose size and shape suggested that, if anything, he was superior.
Duty counsel had nodded: yes, there were many ways Herman looked like anyone else.
And what about his brain? He could think. He could reason. He went to school. He learned to read. He followed baseball. He even had a smartphone which he used to keep up with all his social media accounts. How could he be a Neanderthal? Neanderthals were supposed to be stupid. Yet he could do all these things.
Duty counsel shrugged. He was a lawyer; what’d he know about genetics? The man paused to fidget with his papers, line them up in a neat stack. Maybe the reason Herman felt no different was that he was a Neanderthal genius. Human IQ falls across a range, from people who can barely feed themselves to theoretical physicists who spend all their time thinking about string theory and quantum states. Why can’t the same be true of Neanderthal IQ? Maybe there’s overlap. A Neanderthal genius is way smarter than a human moron. Herman’s presence in the human population had gone unnoticed for so long because he was a smart Neanderthal.
A guard prodded duty counsel to move the interview along; their time was almost up. As Dirk Muldoon rose to leave, he pulled a smartphone from his pocket and asked if Herman could pose with him for a selfie. He knew it sounded crass but if he could generate interest on social media sites, it would be good for Herman’s cause. They asked a guard to take the shot, two men with heads pressed together like besties at a bar, the lawyer in a rumpled suit, smooth-faced, spectacles and a comb over, Herman in a blue-grey jumper, unshaven, red-eyed, almost startled, like a creature cornered in the forest.
Herman couldn’t say how much time had passed since his arrest. He sat alone in his cell and time passed on its own terms, like water eddying at the bend of a river. One afternoon, the guards opened his door and told him to gather his things; he was going for a ride. They led him to the back of a police services van where they shoved him inside, handcuffed and dazed. The van trundled through the city streets, not to a courthouse as Herman had expected, but on through the city to the suburbs, and on through the suburbs to wide open spaces beyond the suburbs. The van stopped behind a row of low industrial-looking buildings where the police left Herman in the custody of a man who wore a white overcoat. Herman would have described the locale as nondescript if it weren’t for the pungent odour driven to the open air by two giant fans. They were the kind of fans you see ventilating skyscrapers, they were that big. Herman drew a forearm across his nose. The man smiled and pointed to a metal door between the two big fans; he yelled something, too, but the roar of the fan motors made it impossible to hear. Although the man looked innocuous enough—the sort of man who judged math competitions or shovelled the elderly neighbour’s driveway—nevertheless he carried an electric prod concealed in his overcoat. The man directed Herman to a cell that wasn’t much different than the cell he’d come from, but with one distinction: there was a tire swing in the middle of this cell.
What is this place? Herman asked.
After the man in the white coat overcame his shock that Herman could speak, he explained that they were in the monkey house at the city zoo. They were better equipped here to care for someone like Herman. A jail cell would provide no stimulation, no social interaction with his own kind. A place like this, staffed by licensed veterinarians, would be more humane. Herman passed through the open door and the man in the white overcoat closed it behind him, locking it and wishing Herman well.
Before the zoo opened that morning, the pair marched together to Herman’s new cage, Herman in his fresh dress clothes, and the man in the white coat a few paces behind and managing Herman with an animal control collar.
Apart from the tire swing, there was nowhere but the ground for Herman to sit, so he spent most of his waking hours with his legs thrust through the middle of the tire, winding himself clockwise until he could go no further, then unwinding counterclockwise until the spinning nearly made him vomit. Once a day, the man in the white coat hurled a slab of bloody meat onto the dirt floor. Herman asked for utensils and wondered if maybe they might rig up a grill so he could cook his dinner, but the man in the white overcoat said he wasn’t authorized to make those sorts of decisions. Zoo policy held that exhibits aren’t allowed to have implements of any sort and access to fire is verboten. Any change to the policy would have to come from the zoo’s Board of Directors and they didn’t meet for another month. For the time being, Herman would have to make do. Herman wondered about variety in his diet. Vegetables might be nice and would help with his chronic constipation. He would enjoy treats, too: ice cream or rice pudding. The man in the white coat said he would talk to the dietitian but he couldn’t make any promises. To his mind, the request for vegetables was reasonable, but he didn’t think the dietitian would approve of treats, especially if the treats were made from processed foods.
Word leaked out that the city zoo was housing Herman the Neanderthal. It seemed the public was interested in his well being so the Board of Directors decided that, rather than deny the fact, it would seize the rumour as a marketing opportunity. It promoted him as a special exhibit. It developed glossy posters that went up all around the city. It announced the date of a grand opening when their new exhibit, Herman the Neanderthal, would be revealed to the world. This would be a sensation. Revenue-wise, it might top the panda exhibit.
In the week leading up to the grand opening, Herman asked if the zoo could provide him with a jacket and tie so he could look his best on the big day. They took his measurements and came back on the eve of the grand opening with a navy sports blazer, pale blue dress shirt, brown trousers, and a red tie with matching silk puff for a hint of colour. They even provided fresh socks and underwear along with a polished pair of black leather shoes. On the morning of the big day, the man in the white coat opened the cage and ushered in another man in a white coat. This second man had a breast pocket in his white coat where he kept a steel comb and a pair of scissors. He explained that he was a barber and had been sent to make Herman the Neanderthal presentable for the day’s festivities. After a good wash, the barber gave Herman a shave and a haircut, finishing off by clipping his fingernails and trimming his nose hairs. All the while, the first man in the white coat stood by, electric prod at the ready, just in case. Herman apologized for not tipping the barber, explaining that, since he’d been held at the city zoo, he hadn’t been allowed to keep any money of his own which, for the most part, wasn’t a problem because he had nowhere to spend it. The barber seemed unperturbed by this.
When all the details of Herman’s personal grooming had been settled, the man in the white coat fixed a leather collar around his neck. The collar was fastened to the end of a long metal rod. He said it was protocol when transferring a … when making a transfer from one cage to another. Before the zoo opened that morning, the pair marched together to Herman’s new cage, Herman in his fresh dress clothes, and the man in the white coat a few paces behind and managing Herman with an animal control collar.
Attendance at the grand opening was even better than the zoo had anticipated. However, initial results from guest surveys registered disappointment because the exhibit failed to perform as expected. Herman spent most of his time sitting in a chair and reading a book instead of pacing back and forth, beating his chest, and grunting at the guests. After a mid-morning chat with the zoo’s Marketing Director, Herman agreed to pace for fifteen minutes of every half hour, but he refused to grunt because he had developed a sore throat during the previous night and grunting would only aggravate his condition. The Marketing Director brought him a glass of seltzer to gargle and this delighted onlookers. Who knew a Neanderthal could gargle much less hold a glass.
During the mid-afternoon lull, Herman looked up from his book and saw Sally clutching at the bars of his cage. Robespierre stood at her side sporting the same goatee and beret. Sally looked wistfully in and asked Herman how he was managing. Herman answered that they treated him well at the zoo; the only thing that bothered him was that they still didn’t let him cook his own meat. An awkward glance passed between Sally and Robespierre, and Herman realized that he had said something wrong. They were vegan and the mere mention of meat was sometimes enough to make them feel sick to their stomachs.
Sally explained that, for the longest time, they didn’t know where the police had taken Herman, not until the zoo advertised the grand opening of its new exhibit and pictures of Herman appeared on posters all over the city. Sally motioned for Herman to step closer but a guard intervened, cautioning that interaction with the exhibit was not allowed. Sally and Robespierre withdrew from the cage, huddling together and concealing something from the guard. When they were done, Sally rushed at the cage and tossed a crumpled scrap of paper between the bars. The guard shouted at them and tried to intervene, but he was too slow. Sally had already turned away, and taking up Robespierre’s hand, she had disappeared into the crowd.
Herman flattened the slip of paper and tucked it inside his book so he could surreptitiously examine Sally’s note while pretending to read his novel:
Dear Herman,
We at the Action League is are delighted and relieved to learn that you are safe. But we is are also appalled at your treatment and want to help you. We realize we can’t manage this on our own, so we have joined forces with PETA who have helped us organize a breakout. It’s going down tonight at midnight. Your going to be free!
Sally
Herman was concerned the man in the white coat might discover the note so he tore it into tiny squares and swallowed them one by one when the guard wasn’t looking.
Herman passed the balance of his day alternating between napping and pacing as per his agreement with the Marketing Director. When the zoo closed, some of the bigwigs from the Board of Directors gathered in front of the cage, laughing jovially and congratulating one another on a coup that promised to put the organization in the black. When they had finished patting one another on the back, they turned to Herman and remarked on how well-behaved the exhibit had been. When the first proposal had crossed their desks, they had imagined a slouching hairy creature who flung his own shit and the guests. Certainly nothing so urbane as this. Look at how well it carries itself.
At midnight, three people appeared in front of the cage dressed in black leotards and balaclavas. Herman could tell from their varied shapes that at least one of his rescuers was Sally. They moved with near-military precision. They had all the necessary gear for just such an operation: bolt cutters, night-vision goggles, and lengths of rope slung over the shoulder. While one of the rescuers knelt to pick the lock, Sally asked if Herman had shoes more appropriate for walking over rough terrain. Herman’s only shoes were the black leather pair the Marketing Director had given him for the grand opening; the running shoes he’d been wearing at the time of his arrest had long since worn out. The black leather pair would have to do. At least they were black.
The trio of rescuers led Herman to a stretch of chain link fence beside the zoo’s service entrance where they had cut a hole. The night air was crisp, and when Herman leaned backwards, he saw that the sky was littered with stars. When the operative from PETA saw him gazing into the night sky, he told him there would be plenty of time for that later; right now they needed to hurry across open ground; if they didn’t make it quick, it would be a long time before all four of them ever saw open sky again. Herman followed them up a rise to a gravel road and across the road to a broad field on the far side. They raced, crouching and exposed, until they came to the threshold of a forest. There, they paused to calm their thudding hearts. Herman could see his breath wafting on the night air. He worried that he had scuffed his shoes on the gravel.
The PETA operative pointed to the looming forest and said this is where they parted ways. He tossed a pack of provisions to Herman and told him he would have to hide in the forest. There was a burner cell phone in the pack; if Herman needed anything, he could call and they would arrange a drop point for supplies, medicine, whatever. The three rescuers turned back to the gravel road and left Herman standing at the forest’s edge.
The PETA operative had made it almost to the road when he realized he was alone. Switching on his night-vision goggles, he saw that the girl named Sally had stopped halfway across the field and had turned to watch the creature in the suit, the one they called Herman. The guy named Robespierre had returned to Sally’s side, taking up her arm and tugging it, urging the girl to the road. But Sally stood unmoved. The PETA operative tracked beyond the pair to the creature and saw how it hesitated, almost paralysed. It looked to Sally, then to the forest, looked again to Sally, then again to the forest.
Christ! The PETA operative had seen this sort of thing before. Sure, they could release Herman the Neanderthal from his physical cage, the one he’d occupied at the zoo. But that physical cage was the least constraining thing in his life. The experience of confinement had worked itself under his skin and had become the overwhelming condition of his life. He still lived inside a mental cage. He’d lost all his instincts for survival and would only waste away in the forest as he waited for his keepers to deliver his meals.
He watched as Herman pulled the burner phone from the pack and tossed the pack into the woods. Herman buttoned up his shirt and straightened his tie, then punched the buttons on the phone. With the phone pressed to his ear, he strode across the field at a businesslike clip, past Sally and Robespierre, past the PETA operative, and onto the gravel road where he headed towards the lights of the city.
Sally called after him: Herman, where will you go?
Herman pressed a palm over the phone’s speaker and called back: Dunno. But I sure as shit can’t get UberEats to deliver a burger and fries to a forest.
