that or you’re the first one of us to be born since anyone knew to keep track. Which actually isn’t that long ago, so it might not be ridiculous.”
“It isn’t that long?”
“Until two or three thousand years ago, I never left the jungle. Eventually I went exploring, but I was still in Africa, in the lakes region and then the Kalahari. If anything was happening anywhere else in the world, I sure didn’t know about it. The idea that there were a finite number of us, that there were one per species, nobody figured that out until the eighteenth or nineteenth century, probably.”
“Well, why are we? I mean, why are we this way?”
“Why are anyone the way they are, Myron? When I first met humans, I was worshiped as a god. I don’t even remember this part so well. They taught me to speak, but I hated my human form, it was so weak and clumsy. I was already old. My human skin was always old.”
“Why do you live among humans now, then?”
Gloria shrugged. “I like indoor plumbing. I like coffee and cigarettes. I like movies. There are perks.”
“I guess we can’t die?”
“Oh, you can die all right. But you can only get killed by another one of us, and only if he’s in animal form. I could turn right now and tear you to bits, and that would be the end of you. Plenty of us have died—we’ll probably never know how many. Any number of immortal rodents or shrews might have been killed by immortal cats before either even knew they could change. And in the last few hundred years, when we started being able really to travel—there’ve been a lot of deaths in the last few hundred years. Most of the seals got killed by the polar bear, and the polar bear got killed by a rhinoceros, the kind with one horn. And Mr. Bigshot killed her.”
“But that stuff, the claws and the bite, is that the only way to die?”
“I wouldn’t go jumping in any volcanoes to test this, but you do tend to heal fast from any other kind of wound. Have you ever been hurt badly, I mean before the train thing?”
“I once almost choked to death on a piece of ice.”
“And what happened?”
“Well, it was ice. It melted in my throat, and I was fine.”
“That’s a bad example, then.”
“And I’ve been beaten up a lot . . .”
“The point is,” said Gloria, “you’re not in much danger from conventional methods of dying.”
“What about what happened to me before all that? I mean, my accident.”
“Well, that was Mr. Bigshot. That was a lion.”
“Benson said I fought a lion and its mane, but I couldn’t figure out what he meant.”
“No, no, Myron, you fought a lion in Maine.”
“Oh. That’s where they found me, in Maine.”
“Yeah, five years ago Mr. Bigshot, apparently, sensed someone new, an animal he’d never sensed before, but in human form. That was you, whatever you were doing there. He mauled you, but you fell in a river, and, well, Mr. Bigshot hates water. So you floated away toward the sea.”
“I thought lions didn’t hate water, that’s just a myth.”
“Mr. Bigshot hates water. I don’t know anything about other lions.”
“So I floated away, but I didn’t die.”
“No, but you didn’t heal up, either, because your wounds are from lion’s claws. Look.” Gloria pointed a knobby, swollen finger at Myron’s face and traced, one by one, the parallel scars. “It was all the gossip at the time, how Mr. Bigshot found someone new, and killed him.”
“I fought a lion and lost.”
“Everybody who fights the lion loses. Seventy-five years ago he killed the tiger, which no one thought he’d be able to do. But he did it.”
“What was the tiger’s name?”
“You know that he didn’t really have a name. He was a tiger.”
“Oh, I thought because you have a name—”
“Gloria’s not my name. They just call me Gloria because it’s convenient. Do you think they called me Gloria in Bantu a thousand years ago? How long do you think Benson has been called Benson? The tiger was going by the name Bima, but he might as well have been Shere Khan. Bima wasn’t his name, and Arthur isn’t his name, and Myron isn’t yours. They’re just a tiger, or a binturong, or whatever you are.”
“Yeah, what am I?”
“I guess we could go through every animal I’ve known who isn’t you, and eliminate them. But that might not help, since I couldn’t name every mammal,