Lockdown with Willoughby.
Context: Willougby is a pet chinchilla.
They’re at it again.
I keep my eyes sealed shut this time, gummed by a restless, colourful sleep and they are now slits buried in a blurry sea of grey. Outside, swooping between the relentless mechanical shrieks of the world, the wind howls against the enclosure. Their glass cage rattles, though mine remains still.
I am too warm this morning, but I curl like a shrimp in the darkest spot of home. I try breathing steadily, but I hear them despite this, loud and boisterous in their frenzied need for attention.
I’d been reluctantly taught by Viv, an old wizened albino friend I made up north, that when these creatures want your attention, you give them none of it.
“It makes them happy,” Viv had wheezed, scratching at the matted spot behind her salmon-tinged ears. She was half-blind when I met her. “Attention. And anything that makes them happy makes you a traitor.”
Even then, I had chalked this cynicism up to her upbringing — perhaps she had had to learn lessons beyond the walls I had, back then, known all my life. Perhaps Levin was even bigger than the store I was born in; perhaps she had been forced to sharpen her prejudices with the strength and dignity of a free chin.
But I would never be taught much beyond this admonition: Viv started wilting several days after, and I was the one who found her at the bottom deck one dusty dawn, her ears flat, thin and cold against her head. Small in death.
Her words ring in my ears now every time I wake with the cool sunrise, but lately, they have been drowned out by their yelps — both shrill and grating. There’s two of them now, and it looks like it’s always two these days, and they don’t leave their cage like they usually do. Sometimes the pale one with less head-fur would be alone and he would put on the moving lights on the wall again, playing out stories in a language much too alien for me to catch.
I open my left eye and sneak a peek. This morning, like yesterday morning, the pale one is chasing the short one across the room. He is barking and yipping and she is laughing and screeching, and they have wide faces that brim with what I can only imagine is a wasteful emotion. Merriment? I pity them.
Joy is not as hasty as these simple lives make them out to be. They don’t know the bliss of The Bowl, where the sparkly dust lives, where life begins when I jump in and the delicate powder scratches me deep and raw in spots that my limbs can never reach. I see the ash swirl in moving clouds around me. My aura is formed, a haze of glitz and I put all my dreams into the billowing performance. I spin and spin and spin, because I am a rebel and The Bowl is my revolution. I am my freest then.
This barking, yipping rituals they indulge in, so crude in their pursuit for euphoria — it was like witnessing the chicken scratches of a child’s drawing and forcing out admiration.
And then the shorter one asks, “Do you think she’s wondering what we’re doing?”
And the pale one says, “I don’t think she wonders.”
They both make more loud joyful noises with their mouths and retreat into the dark Room of the Unknown, adjacent to the evening playground with the appetising walls.
I bristle with anger and let it out with a few hops and jumps, but figured that it was not worth the pain of a comeback. Viv had known others who lived with creatures like this, who told her stories, and she warned me how important it was to manage the art of letting go. That was another one of Viv’s great insights. “Learn to pick battles.”
Battles. And locks.
I hop to the ground deck, scuttling along dried up dung, chewed up hay and wood chips that litter the floor. Jaw poised around a broken piece of wood, I start gnawing, shaping my tool.
My product is several days old now. Several weeks ago they had left the cage unlocked. I waited an hour before tentatively pushing it open, sliding out and plopping onto the soft ground. But I was not about to waste this moment — I studied. Took in the surroundings, the systems, mechanisms. I found some good pieces of wood, and even former wood, in the vicinity. Had my fill but I didn’t go overboard. I had to move strategically. I hurried to the playground for a quick run but left quickly. This was a golden moment of discovery, a rare opportunity to go farther, faster.
I walked into the Room of the Unknown.
Here, they slept. I took in their quiet faces, their undisturbed expressions, dead asleep. They had no aura about them. They looked different in hibernation; the shorter one shifted, but made no noise. I wondered if they knew how to dream.
The pale one found me minutes later, and I was taken home, but it was enough. From then on, I observed vigilantly, learning their ways, their patterns and movements, the sounds they make. I know the right buttons to push during playtime to get an oat, and what gets a smack on the wall. I knew, at first through tentative testing, then through habit, then instinct, what made them scowl. What made them speak. And what made them squeal. Happy.
Viv once told me that the traitors among us are the ones that choose this route. That our pride as a tribe came from the many ways we can ignore them, their pleas, their chides as they try to tell us what we can and cannot bite. That our dignity comes not from their unbridled joy, nor from what we do to feed this joy. That it came from the myriad ways we can fashion our loathing against them. To sleep as they coo at us between the bars. To withdraw, to scurry away from their big, warm hands that, again and again, seek affection. To spray our piss in their ears, pierce their skin, draw blood. Viv, and others like her, had been told her whole life that we are not a people who succumb.
But I know now there’s another track. I have seen a world that Viv had not lived to see. The snide comments I can ignore — they can make them all they want. Two or three days of wearing away at this board and I will have a wooden chip forged into the shape of freedom. I have a way out and a chance to live. I am resolute.
And all Viv is is dead.
