It is a cityscape composed of brutalist polygons and spires, jungle vines, and oddly young asphalt. Sweeping curves abound in the architecture and the streets; the few straight lines intersect bends at acute angles and tangents. Fresh, neat sidewalks band city blocks in uniform gray. Blank glass panes hold back blackness behind street level storefronts and upper storey windows. White crosswalks and lane demarcations seem only months old, yet all feels empty and abandoned. Draperies of unidentifiable foliage make bunting that everywhere celebrates Nature’s apparent reclaiming of this hypermodern space.
This theme continues uninterrupted for blocks. Here and there, down an avenue or between buildings, small parks are revealed, with grasses and brush overgrown and trees clothed in the same vines decorating the otherwise naked brute castings of the city. Above, a bottomless blue-blue sky accented artfully with an occasional cumulus. No breeze; comfortably warm. An ideal day, but for the incongruity of the place.
Time passes like the endless theme-and-variation facades of concrete and glass -- then, a sound of movement. From around a far corner: a young man, bedraggled as through some extended physical abuse, attached via a strange, stretchy, starry, translucent cord to a young male lion with an especially scruffy mane. The man is obviously but futilely attempting to master the lordly cat, tugging agitatedly on its leash -- which appears to be of a piece with the lion’s collar and a loop firmly around the man’s wrist -- and variously castigating, cajoling, cursing, and crying at it. For its part, the lion responds to the man with no more care than it would were a stone at the end of the tie, sniffing about, ambling a bit, looking inquisitively this way or that, only now and then casting the mildest of interests in the direction of the gesticulating primate. Clearly, the young man believes the young lion owes him some due of respect; clearly the lion does not.
If the lion moves in the direction the man wishes him to go, it is coincidental, but that does not stop the man from expressing exasperated relief and reiterating, verbally and gesturally, his intended direction and strutting off thence -- only to be yanked comically off of his feet by a combination of the elastic leash and the imperturbability of his three hundred pound companion. If the man attempts to push or otherwise overpower the beast, he is mostly ignored. However, given enough persistence and enthusiasm, the man’s efforts may be rewarded with a gentle mauling; hence, the man’s tattered mein. Once his Panthera partner gives up this attention and moves on, the hominid has the option of either being dragged by the line at his wrist or pulling himself up and staggering alongside. Typically, it is only a few moments before, bloodied but unbroken, this wisest of species of men renews his entreaties for dominance.
This continues for quite some while.
At a certain point, a distant snuffling, shuffling, and soft growling is detected by the pair. Both stop their torturous tarantella and listen intently. Determining that the noise is coming closer, the two head perpendicular to its anticipated direction and conceal themselves around a corner. In a few moments, a pack of male lions comes into view, half a dozen or so individuals of mixed ages older than the one with the young man. As if a single but chaotic unit, they walk along a sidewalk bordering a park, with a wilded hedge on their left, sauntering confidently and closely, rubbing shoulders and haunches, and shifting position within the group as if in a slow, informal, but highly competitive race. They pass out of sight as they came.
The pack gone, the young man and his pawed partner come out of hiding and resume their queer pas de deux. As the day passes, this pattern repeats: the man and the cat interact, always to the man’s detriment, yet always at his insistence, interrupted only by the intermittent passing of some tightly-traveling half-pride of maned veldtian expats. Once, a younger member of a group is seen wearing the shredded remnant of a sparkling collar-and-leash identical to that binding the man-cat pair. No other living things, that aren’t green anyway, ever appear.
If the man’s and lion’s dynamic seems unsustainable, it is. At a certain afternoon moment on a particular street corner, maximally piqued by the lion’s indifference, the man throws himself at his fellow captive in a last ditch effort to bring the animal into his control, an effort that is, in fact, his last. The great cat concludes that this gnat must simply be swatted and, noting too that he feels a bit peckish, casually but messily at once rids himself of his annoyance and settles his stomach. Thus endeth the youth.
Having mostly decapitated the man as he crushed his windpipe (the simplest way to kill) and supped on his entrails (the easiest to access), the lion gets up to leave his meal and rapidly realizes that, of course, he is not yet quit of his burden and so spends a few crunchy moments gnawing the forearm off of the corpse. Once through the bone and gristle, the lion sits up and looks around, a forlorn hand still dangling, but no longer a bother. He sits facing away from the sun, gazing into the distance, sated, occasionally cleaning the blood from his paws and muzzle, Zen-like in his tranquility.
Eventually, the lion stands, lazily, and turns around. At this moment, he sees you. You have not been aware of yourself prior to meeting his eyes; you have been a bodiless observer, floating, dronelike, drifting in this experience curious but detached. At this moment, you have deep knowledge of your body, with arms and legs and a head, all made of meat. Live meat. Meat that you would very much like to keep alive. And the young, shabby-maned lion, standing passively, sees you and your meat.
He begins walking toward you. It’s strange how you can sense the early evening air, the post-afternoon cool coming on, and how the shadows seem unexpectedly high up the city’s vine-draped facades, as this adolescent carnivore, whom you’ve just watched amiably devour one of your species, ambles in your direction, eyes locked to yours, a still-cooling hand at the end of its tether trailing blood on the blacktop as he goes.
How do you react? Do you run? Do you think it through? Like, “Okay, he’s just eaten his fill, it seems unlikely that he’s coming to eat me, but do I want to test that hypothesis just now? Maybe I’m supposed to slip the leash onto my wrist and follow the lion, attempting to tame him until I annoy him enough to eat me? What the hell?” Prudently, you opt to bolt.
The lion, in your wake, stops in surprise at your flight and watches your rapidly shrinking silhouette disappear into a distant doorway. After several moments, hearing nothing, you peek timidly from around its edge and see the lion waiting, standing in the empty street, looking mildly bewildered. After a few moments, you both hear the familiar snuffle-shuffle-rumble of a pack of adult lions coming down a street behind the recently fed-and-freed feline. Suppressing your still-raging breath as best you can in order to avoid detection from the approaching pride, you cringe back into the doorway, but your new friend turns and looks in the group’s direction. After a moment’s pause, he walks toward the sound; as the pack comes into view, they spy him and stop and wait for him, then greet him with licks and head-butts when he meets them. One of the younger members picks up the still attached severed hand and, with a quick jerk, frees it from its band, sending the leash to jiggle briefly about like an epileptic tentacle, as he munches the body part snackily. The group walks on with its new addition, leaving the street empty again and your heart yet unquieted, as you wait, blind in the doorway, for silence to return.
However, it does not. Before time enough for the pack’s soft sounds of danger to fade, you hear in another direction a chuffing and pumping and grinding, as of an immense engine powering a monstrous machine across asphalt. You hide in your shallow city-cave as the mechanical mishmosh gets louder and closer, but your desire to see another human soon outmatches your fear of the departing lions and you poke an eye into view of the street: no maneaters in sight. Warily, you reveal more of yourself in order to see further, then step onto the sidewalk and begin watchfully walking in the direction of the sound.
From behind a building a few blocks up on the left emerges a sphere several storeys tall. Longitudinally striped in dirty red and white like some circus helium balloon, it gropingly jounces into view. However, it is not floating: it rides on a truck of heavy tires, partially obscured by its striped bloats. Into the intersection, the vast, Gilliamesque machine rumbles to the right and heads down your way. Startlingly, you abandon all heed and find yourself careening toward it, hollering for help and waving your arms in a frenzy. The balloon treads on slowly toward you, as yet indicating no awareness of your presence.
Racing up the street as if chased by lions, with the machine still unacknowledging of you or your need, you come to a stop several yards before it. Awed by this colossal, gaudy, banded-bubble-on-wheels, you stand slackjawed as it juggers toward you, wondering if you are about to be crushed. Then, abruptly, with a sharp venting of steam, it stops, the balloon wobbling ominously forward and back, and, with another steamy hiss, the balloon releases its gaseous contents and, supported by a towering circular-shower-curtain-like rack, parts to reveal a behemoth, red-painted, steampunk engine. Cartoonish mechanical arms leap out from nowhere, one of which sweeps you up and stands you on a flat spot on the front of the vehicle, while others fly about with mysterious tasks. A jointed spray-arm erupts from near the apex of the machine and deposits a foamy circumference on the pavement; somehow, you understand this to be lion repellent which, while effective, also dissipates quickly and benignly.
Amidst this Seussian flurry of activity, you notice a figure ricocheting about the giant apparatus: about five feet in height, shaped roughly like a squat tromba marina, with a pair of two-fingered tentacles for arms and a head like a Handycam, it is vaguely translucent and filled with star-like lights like the leash you saw between the young man and lion. As it caroms around, you realize that this being, whoever it is, is the root and power behind all you have seen. It acknowledges your presence only with a few passing glances, and makes no sound, but its movements are joyful, buoyant, efficient; you sense that you have become a part of some grand project. In any case, you seem to be at the mercy of this evidently advanced being and to have little choice but to wait and see if you can understand what is going on.
In a flash, you see an arm appear bearing a young male lion and another carrying a sparkly leash, while a third grabs you and places you back onto the street, along with the lion, just outside the fading foam ring, and the second slaps the leash onto both of you. As quickly as they materialized, the arms disappear and the starry being bounces out of sight; the hulking red machine begins chugging again, pivoting, reversing direction, and sweeping the slowly reinflating balloon back around itself, leaving you and your lion looking confusedly at each other and at the new umbilical joining you, in the midst of the macadam and the surrounding grays and greens of the vine-festooned concrete canyon.
As if placed in your mind as a parting missive, you -- and, presumably, the lion -- suddenly understand what is happening:
You are part of a child’s impassioned experiment to help lions and humans “get along.” There have been many iterations of this experiment before you. It is the child’s sincerest wish that you and this lion should succeed where other pairs have not. [You feel a deep, joy-filled, well-wish from the child-being you saw on the giant balloon machine.]
